How is the liberal movement going? Given the declarations of enthusiasm emanating from the mainstream media, the breathless insistence that “our democracy has been restored” following the inauguration of our latest president, one would imagine, quite well. Yet the pervasive narratives currently emerging in liberal discourse present a different picture, of a constituency so untethered from any coherent theoretical mooring that their present state can only be a product of pure ideology at work. We may well ask, what is it that liberals want?

Now that the liberals have succeeded in usurping Donald Trump, we can ask what their agenda is next, since they have already recaptured the “soul of America” with this act alone. It is all but assured that no major legislation will be passed without Republican support during Biden’s first term in office, bringing into question what all the ruckus was about regarding how important it was for Democrats to have won the Georgia Senate elections to ensure a majority in the Senate. But even though nothing will happen, and Democrats will be able to conveniently blame the Republicans for their own failure to do anything, despite the filibuster rules being within the Democrats’ control to change, the Democratic base still has demands, and we would be wise to listen to what they have to say.

Given the liberal response to the Jan. 6 storming of the Capitol, it is quite clear what liberals want. They loudly advocated for police brutality to be more uniformly administered, arguing that since the police repressed Black Lives Matter protests, they should also repress the Capitol storming in similar brutal fashion. Important to note here is that the demand was not to stop enacting police brutality on racial minorities, but that the racial discrepancy should be alleviated, by applying the same repression uniformly to all groups. This was from the same crowd who was calling for the police to be abolished just months ago, but they clearly learned the wrong lessons from the Black Lives Matter movement (the correct lesson being that police brutality is wrong and should stop, not that it would only be fair to also do it to white people).

Another liberal demand was to label the Capitol stormers “terrorists” and to do more to combat this new wave of domestic terrorism, which means granting the FBI more power to repress people. Once again, the demand being not that finding mentally ill Muslim-Americans and entrapping them is wrong, but that these same techniques should be applied even more widely, and that the FBI should start treating everyone the way they treat Muslim-Americans.

Oppression for all! This is the apparent liberal demand. Meanwhile, all of the supposed concerns of the liberal movement during the Trump administration, first and foremost the concern over the “kids in cages” near the border, have conveniently dissipated now that we are under President Biden’s administration. Will anyone follow up on the status of immigrants in detention facilities now? Suffice to note that Obama deported multitudes more people than Trump did, and that merely reversing some of Trump’s most abhorrent oversteps will not be merely enough to even approach a humane immigration policy (which would obviously entail immediate citizenship for all), but the liberal fixation on rhetoric alone seems to obscure this fact. And it seems that the discourse has already moved on from any of these concerns.

For those who seem to agree with what liberals publicly espouse (anti-racism, anti-sexism, etc.), yet are disillusioned by the current liberal movement, who clearly do not actually believe in what they claim to, suffice to say that the Communist movement is the only movement where the true tenets of liberalism (Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité) are actually embodied. For all those who sincerely believe in all of the valid critiques of Trump, all of those critiques will still hold true for Biden, so the only option is to move left.