This Cruise Ship Is the Perfect Metaphor for Modern Liberalism
Photo by Villa Vee
I know this take may anger some folks, but it’s post-election failure season, and Festivus is right around the corner, so everyone has let the airing of grievances under America’s big tent party commence and it will likely continue through the holiday season. If you are a liberal who is mad at me for this take, you can comfort your rage with my critique of the left where I implore my fellow ideologues to just fucking talk like normal people and get serious about finding ways to stop losing primaries to history’s biggest group of losers.
But also, as a provable electoral plurality within the party, this ain’t our failure. I get that John Fetterman’s PR agent has written another classic in the left-punching “this is everyone but the braindead consultant class’s fault” genre to titillate the Pod Johns and such (his article actually would have been fine if it had an ounce of self-reflection), but this is the greater MSNBC cinematic universe’s mess to clean up (to the Pod Johns’ credit, they are genuinely trying). Us lefties gave liberals a real chance to accomplish their lifelong dream and credibly blame the left for all the party’s failures in 2020, and after one glorious day in Nevada, Barack Obungler and the Democrats begrudgingly decided that geriatric Joe was their guy, sending us down the path to hell we now find ourselves on.
Which brings me to the lib ship. As an internet lefty firebrand, I have been searching for years for the perfect metaphor for the vacuous superficiality of this dominant form of post-LBJ liberalism that doesn’t believe in anything other than the inherent wisdom of the market and its own ego, and less than a week into hanging out on that magical decentralized app Bluesky that I should have been on long ago, it fell right into my lap. Per USA Today:
In the wake of the U.S. presidential election, one cruise company is offering travelers a getaway for the length of one term in office.Residential cruise operator Villa Vie Residences’ Tour La Vie program allows travelers to join a trip around the world for between one and four years. The company’s Villa Vie Odyssey ship aims to circumnavigate the globe every three-and-a-half years, with stops in more than 400 destinations.
In fairness, this is not marketed explicitly to liberals and there is a larger Villa Vie business plan other than this marketing gimmick, as the so-called lib ship that many smart and cool people are calling it now was conceived of before the election. But we all know that after a loss, the well-off Trump voter is likelier to build a sprawling underground bunker with a bunch of III percenters than to vacation in Europe for four years, and the “leave America every time a Republican gets elected” is a well-worn liberal trope by now. Hell, it’s half the reason that Canada exists to the median MSNBC viewer.
The fault line between the Democratic Party’s losing brand of selfish liberalism and the leftism it battles with is solidarity, as leftism tries to adhere to the true universal notion of solidarity, while liberalism has proven over the course of my lifetime that it is very willing to trade vulnerable groups for supposed and unproven electoral expediency. Whether it be Joe freakin’ Biden forcing Barack Obama on to the right side of history on gay marriage or the consultant class’s current enthusiastic posture to throw trans people under the bus after Trump’s victory, Democrats’ base instinct to value compromise itself as a virtue leads them to have no virtues time and time again.
democrats and @podsaveamerica.bsky.social bros who think you only support things when the polls say you should support them would have ended up on the side opposed to civil rights, and that is not acceptable.
— Oliver Willis (@owillis.bsky.social) November 19, 2024 at 10:24 AM
I can’t think of a better symbol for post-LBJ elite liberalism than buying something that the vast majority of America cannot afford in order to virtue signal how much you supposedly care about society as you abandon it altogether right when it needs your solidarity the most. The only thing that would make this more emblematic of this clueless streak of liberalism that lost two elections to Donald Trump is if Bill Maher was captaining this ship.
Unlike a lot of other people getting way out over their skis as votes are still somehow being counted in our definitely not broken democracy, I will not profess to know all the reasons the Democrats lost, but the common refrain that Trump is a “fighter” I think has a big hand in voters’ perception of the party. There is and has been a sizeable disconnect the past few decades between the liberal to outright socialist policies that American voters generally say they support, and their views of the liberal party supposedly administering that policy. The culture of the Democrats is a big part of this, as the insular world of cable news and mainstream media predominantly consumed by well-off liberals alienates everyone who is not already drunk off the establishment Kool-Aid, and the classic “let’s move to Canada” liberal joke is actually quite offensive and insulting to people who can’t afford to do that and are stuck in the hellscape you are tucking your tail beneath your legs and running away from. Anyone who plans to board this cruise ship for four years and thinks they are still allies of the anti-fascist movement in America should do us all a favor and stay on it forever.