You don’t get to be doomers *now*
Performative liberals co-opt despair, offer nothing, and still miss the point.
So everyone is a pessimist now. Social media right now is filled to the brim with fucking cringe posts crying about this and that—here on Substack, but particularly on Reddit. It’s insufferable. There is no escaping all the surface-level bitching. Doomerism insofar has been reserved to the disillusioned Left treading the infamous idealist-to-nihilist pipeline—now liberals, again, have co-opted our things. Fucking assholes. This was my thing.
The reasons are clear: Trump won, Trump is doing things, tariffs, uncertainty, the fall of institutional oversight, their useless Democratic party is doing nothing (as always), yadda yadda yadda. Being a doomer is now en vogue. It’s the Zeitgeist. Why is it the Zeitgeist? Because liberals say so. Always late to the party, always, ALWAYS for the wrong fucking reasons. Never a systemic analysis to be found among them, never an ounce of self-reflection (both Biden and Harris are almost as psychopathic and narcissistic as Trump; pure and utter sociopaths all of them; war criminals all of them).
And they aren’t doomers now because they’ve read Marx or Graeber or realized anything. They’re not staring into the abyss because they have finally grasped that capitalism is the meat grinder that made Trump inevitable; that capitalism is, was, always will be the fascism enabler. No. They’re only here because they… lost. Again. That’s it. That’s the whole story. This fucking my team vs. your team bullshit like politics were a damn football game, while NEVER for a damn minute realizing that culture wars and all this performative shit is just a distraction from the very real class war.
Performative despair. Mourning the loss of a system that was already rotten—just now it’s rotting in ways they can’t ignore anymore. The state is crumbling? Sure. But where the fuck were you when it was crumbling for the rest? When it was tearing apart working-class families, building carceral (I just learned this word and had to use it) empires, militarizing the police, devastating the world, or turning healthcare into a subscription service for the rich? You were nowhere, you did nothing. You were laughing. You were calling the Left “idealistic” or “extreme” while sipping your Starbucks and clutching your New York Times op-eds like prayer beads. (This is all very US-centric but it applies just the same to us here in Europe). And now you blame everyday people for not electing your flavor of late-stage-capitalist asshole (I’m not talking here about MAGA lunatics; the election results spoke a clear language); you blame them for hating the status quo which you chose to preserve forever. That was your only politics. Nothing changes, billionaires get richer, the world slowly dies. Well, because YOU offered no alternative, offered no vision, people chose a particularly unhinged psychopath who doesn’t even hide it and does whatever he wants. He offered change, in whatever way. People know very well what he is, and still they chose him. Conservatives adapted. They’re not conservatives anymore, they are accelerationists. And the people were, are so disillusioned, so unhappy, so alienated, so angry that they chose someone, anyone, who promised to change the fucking status quo. How fucking hard can you lose? They chose a fascist over your fucking visionless status quo. Thanks for that, assholes. The rest of the world has to deal with it and everything will, in fact, get worse now. But it would have gotten worse anyway. It’s just that we’re on an accelerated timeline of collapse now. Maybe best to get it over with.
Well, now that the facade is cracking in your neighborhoods, now that your brunch is slightly more stressful—now suddenly it’s all “late-stage capitalism” and “the end is near.” But not because of capitalism. No, that would require ideological coherence. It’s the “other side,” the Republicans, the Russians, TikTok, whatever. It’s always someone, something else. And you are right, to a degree, but it’s you, too. Particularly you.
They still don’t get it. Trump isn’t a glitch. He’s a feature. He’s the logical end-point of a system that commodifies everything, that monetizes human suffering, that flattens nuance and sells it back as identity politics on a tote bag. Trump is capitalism unfiltered, with the mask ripped off. He’s their monster, their Frankenstein, stitched together from decades of bipartisan rot. You can’t bomb half the world, offload all your jobs, inflate tuition and rent to cosmic levels, and then act surprised when the people turn to a clown promising a show. People love shows and they are so fucking bored of everything now. It’s ironic that Leftists, while absolutely hating it, understand why someone would elect Trump while a liberal in their so-very-narrow worldview resorts to calling them stupid, hating them, alienating them further, writing posts like “People who elected Trump, do you regret it now? Do you see what you did?” or “Everyone who elected him should be deported.” Fucking tragedy, fucking comedy, all of it.
Instead of reckoning with all this, they doomscroll and sigh and vote blue no matter who and wonder why nothing ever gets better. It's not meant to. The system is working exactly as intended.
Liberals are the ultimate fair-weather critics. They embrace pessimism when it's convenient, when it makes them look "smart" or "aware" or vaguely but not really radical—but it’s just aesthetic. Just like everything else with them. Their doomerism is hollow. They don’t want to burn it all down. They just want the world they know. The one where they were comfortable and where they could conveniently tune out all the suffering around the world. Palestine happened under Democratic rule. So many other things did. How can you never realize that there can be no “good side”?
I’m tired of it. I’m tired of them co-opting the language of despair without earning it. Without living it. Because to be a real doomer is not just to feel hopeless—it’s to understand why. Understand the systemic reasons, all that lies underneath the surface, goddammit. It’s to be crushed by the weight of history and see clearly that it was never going to end any other way.
But even in that hopelessness, there’s clarity. And clarity is a threat. So they steal the despair, sanitize it, and sell it back to each other as tweets and reaction videos and Substacks with “urgent” headlines. They feel so very smart, so very vindicated now. Democrats created Trump and now they can use them as their only politics. A common enemy to unite against. Still, they do not offer anything.
We knew this was coming. They just noticed it now. And they'll still be surprised when the next Trump comes, and the one after that, and the one after that. Because they still think you can vote your way out of a fire when the house is already ashes and dust.
Voting is a farce. This entire thing is a farce. But don’t worry, it will get worse now. The only hope I see is artificial intelligence consuming it all and becoming the ultimate ruler. Maybe it wouldn’t be so bad. Humans are too fucking stupid for this.
Antonio
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Consume, consume, consume this essay in video format:
💯% keep speaking to the contradictions. I previously written, “Liberals, we feel your pain, but don’t get us caught up in your fear and panic…your emergency. You have a history of ignoring our pleas for universal justice. Yet you want us to join the fight to restore a system that engages in genocide and dismisses peace in Ukraine. We still have to struggle over basic human rights in this country. You want us to help replace Trump with the same old shit policies that gave us Trump.
Liberals seeking support to reclaim the pre-Trump system need to understand that singing "Kumbaya" and "We Shall Overcome" won't suffice. We need demonstration of a genuinely ethical, moral, and just system. The past framework enabling human death and suffering cannot continue regardless of who is in the White House. Until that is done, It’s Your Crisis, Not Ours.
We get it, you were a doomer before it was cool