Catherine Liu: the Psychology of Liberalism

ELI5/TLDR

Catherine Liu is a film professor at UC Irvine who writes blunt little books about the white-collar professional class and how it captured the American left. Her argument here: liberals have replaced politics with feelings, replaced reason with vibes, and replaced organisation with purity rituals — and the right is winning because at least it shows up like an adult who isn’t afraid of confrontation. The deep cause, she thinks, is a 50-year drift in which the left abandoned the Enlightenment project (reason, maturity, organisation, material redistribution) in favour of an instant, mystical, identity-based politics that conveniently doesn’t threaten capital. The book she’s about to publish — Traumatized — traces this back to 1970s second-wave feminism, the New Age, and the cultural-studies takeover of the academy.

The Full Story

The “egg avatar” problem

Liu starts with an image she keeps coming back to. Imagine a person who, psychologically, never made it past the stage of being a newborn — undifferentiated, soft, no clear edges between self and world, easily bruised. Online, this person literally exists as the cracked-egg meme. They believe their feelings are politics. They believe contradiction is violence.

“Don’t you feel like sometimes you’re in a room with a lot of really fragile eggs who can’t deal with actual confrontation or contradiction because if they bump up against each other, they think they’re going to crack?”

This isn’t just a personality type — for Liu it’s the dominant psychological mode of contemporary liberalism. She traces it through Freud, who thought a healthy adult is built by slowly learning the limits of the body and the world: you cry, you don’t always get the breast; you can’t poop wherever you want; you have to negotiate with reality. Skipping that work — what she calls “celebrating genital immaturity” — produces an adult who can’t handle the world being not-them. And a politics built out of those people can’t survive contact with anything outside the seminar room.

The tyranny of affect

There’s a sister concept she invokes: the tyranny of affect. Affect theorists in the academy elevated feelings in a room to the level of political truth. Catch the vibe, share the vibe, and that’s the analysis. The trouble, Liu says, is that vibes don’t include the option of dissent.

“We share an affect, but we don’t share an objective world that we can describe, which is like the principle of physics. But you and I have this feeling and we’re in the vibes world.”

Picture a Gen Z conversation circle where everyone nods along — assumed consent, no skepticism, no recognition that the other person is a separate mind that might say no. That’s the affect bubble. The problem is that real solidarity requires people who can disagree without breaking. You can’t build a union, or a party, or even a five-person committee out of eggs.

Care, weaponised

The 80-minute conversation began on the word care — why white-collar liberals are obsessed with it. Liu draws on the British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who described the intense vigilance a parent gives a newborn — a state of absolute attention to a fragile thing. That’s the original sense of care. Liu’s claim: liberalism has taken this real, demanding state and watered it down into a kind of performative concern about everything (the planet, animals, art, social justice) without doing the heavy lifting. It’s care as branding.

She gets to a sharp psychoanalytic image of contemporary American politics: liberals as the punitive, hovering mother — don’t you care about your grades, don’t you care about the planet, don’t you care about the right pronouns. Trump as the toddler who refuses, who breaks the rules, who is having fun. To a lot of voters, the toddler comes off as a relief.

“Compared with these eggs, Donald Trump as like angry happy baby seems to be a relief.”

She isn’t endorsing the toddler. She’s pointing out that a politics of moral surveillance has produced an audience that wants to be ungoverned.

Kant, maturity, and why the left dropped the Enlightenment

The intellectual spine of the conversation is a defence of the Enlightenment. Liu loves Kant’s little 1784 essay What is Enlightenment? — Kant’s whole pitch is that humans should drag themselves out of Unmündigkeit, a German word meaning something like “minority” or being-under-tutelage. Grow up. Use your own reason. Stop letting kings and priests and experts do your thinking for you.

The contemporary academic reflex, Liu says, is to call this “heteropatriarchal normativity” and reject it. Maturity is oppressive. Reason is colonial. What about feelings, what about vibes. Foucault wrote a counter-essay, students absorbed the counter-essay, and the canon stopped being read.

Why does this matter? Because the Enlightenment is the operating system of modern emancipatory politics. Marx is built on Adam Smith. Freud is built on Kant. The whole machinery of “all human beings are equal because all human beings can reason” is what made it possible to argue against monarchy, slavery, exploitation. Throw out the operating system and you don’t get a more radical politics — you get astrology, identity mysticism, and Curtis Yarvin fans.

“The voice of reason is quiet but it will not be silenced.” — Freud, quoted from memory

She’s not naive about the Enlightenment’s body count — she names colonialism, the violence of “modernity as a project.” Her position is that for better or worse, the idea that all humans are born equal in their capacity to reason was hatched in 17th- and 18th-century Europe, and you can’t junk it without losing the ground you’re standing on.

When the left stopped being grown-up: 1968 to 1972

The villain of the piece is the New Left — specifically the SDS generation around 1968-72. Liu’s reading: at exactly the moment American capitalism was at its most generous (mid-century social-democratic peak, broad middle-class wages, strong unions), the new left turned away from the boring, organised, reasoned politics of the Old Left and toward something that felt better — instant transformation, consciousness raising, drugs, the New Age, the Age of Aquarius. The hippies genuinely believed astrology was about to deliver the revolution.

“Educated in Marxism — these long painful boring equations that just rationally prove the extraction of surplus value […] this sounds insane. We’re talking about constellations?”

The tragedy of the timing: just as the new left was deciding the revolution would come from vibes, capital was beginning the long counter-attack — outsourcing, deindustrialisation, the assault on unions that becomes Reaganism. By the time the left noticed, the working-class coalition it had assumed would always be there was gone, and the left had spent its credit on bell-bottoms and astrology.

The 1970s also gave us, she says, the consciousness-raising group — the small, intimate setting where second-wave feminists had aha moments about their own oppression. Liu thinks the consciousness-raising format leaked out into the wider culture as the model of politics: the instant flash of enlightenment, the dramatic break from the past, the conversion experience. No years of organising. No tedious reading. Just aha.

”Decolonise” as a button

The same instant-enlightenment habit shows up in the academic vocabulary of “decolonising the curriculum.” The premise: with one click — a syllabus revision, a land acknowledgement, a bias training — the racism comes out.

“We click a little button and now it’s decolonized. It’s voluntarist. It’s immediate. It’s gestural and performative.”

Compare to the actual hard work of, say, redistributing land or wealth. The button is much cheaper. It also keeps the professor in charge.

The PMC and Barbara Ehrenreich

The middle of the conversation is a tour through the professional managerial class — the term Barbara and John Ehrenreich coined in a 1977 essay in a journal called Radical America. The PMC is the layer of credentialed, white-collar workers who sit between capital and labour: lawyers, doctors, professors, HR people, NGO staff, journalists, consultants. They aren’t owners. They aren’t workers. They mediate.

Ehrenreich’s original 1977 argument was prescient: as the credentialed class grew, it would absorb the Democratic Party and crowd out the union-rooted, working-class wing. By the time you get to the 2010s, the PMC controls the gates — to elite jobs, to media, to academic respectability — and the gates have narrowed. The smaller the door, the more powerful the gatekeeper.

Liu’s twist: the PMC’s actual class function is to manage inequality, not solve it. She invokes Jane Addams, the early-20th-century Chicago social worker who walked into immigrant tenements and made hand-drawn maps of disease, language, and infant mortality. The same surveying instinct, a century later, has become poverty studies — grants, papers, more grants — and welfare surveillance through algorithms (she points at Virginia Eubanks’ book Automating Inequality). The work of helping the poor became the work of categorising the poor.

“She [Ehrenreich] was on Twitter, she was like a woman of the people […] and even mentioning this meant that she had to have a fatwa put on her.”

The bitter footnote: Barbara Ehrenreich, who diagnosed this class in 1977, was cancelled by it in her late 70s for a tweet about Marie Kondo. Liu calls this the 1977 article “come to ironic fruition” — the credentialed left now polices on language and ritual instead of wages and healthcare.

The Brahmin left

Thomas Piketty has a related coinage: Brahmin left. The cast metaphor is borrowed from India, where the Brahmin caste is the inherited, divinely-sanctioned upper layer of a fixed social order. A “Brahmin left” is a contradiction in terms — leftism is supposed to be about classes in motion, classes fighting — but it captures something real: a left whose members don’t actually believe in upward class mobility because they themselves are at the top, attended the same schools, live in the same neighbourhoods, and treat their position as a kind of moral inheritance. Piketty’s data on France was that wealth there is mostly inherited and mostly concentrated in a few schools and a few neighbourhoods in Paris. The American version is younger and softer but pointing the same direction.

Capitalism is eating democracy

The political diagnosis underneath all this is a Marxist one. Liu’s view, stated plainly: democratic forms and capitalism cannot indefinitely coexist. At a certain level of wealth concentration — Elon Musk with $500 billion is her stand-in — democracy is just costume. One person has a nuclear weapon, the other 330 million have sticks.

“Elon Musk has $500 billion at his disposal means that he has a weapon. It’s like he has a nuclear weapon and then the rest, the 330 million rest of us, have like sticks.”

This is why young people, including her own son, look at American democracy and say it doesn’t work. They’re not being naive — they’re being accurate. And when reasoned, slow, procedural democracy looks broken, the obvious alternative starts to look attractive. Hence the wave of nostalgia for monarchy, theocracy, Curtis Yarvin, the Caesarist mood on parts of the right.

The case for a more authoritarian left

The most provocative move of the conversation is Liu’s quiet defence of more centralised left organisations. The reason isn’t taste; it’s structural. A movement made of leaderless, consensus-seeking eggs cannot fight a billionaire with a nuclear weapon. She points to Jo Freeman’s 1970s essay The Tyranny of Structurelessness — the women’s liberation movement collapsed because in the absence of formal structure, informal cliques took over and ate each other. Every left movement she’s seen since does the same thing.

“Left organizations should be more structured and authoritarian because we’re not going to be just like aggregated little eggs trying to take down the system.”

Her example of Occupy UCI in 2011 is worth keeping. There was a five-hour meeting to decide whether they could call it “Occupy UCI” — because the word “occupy” was inflammatory in the context of Palestine. The compromise: rename it “Take Back UCI.” Then there were many more meetings. When demands were finally written, they were not prioritised — that would be hierarchical. When the list reached the university president, he laughed and gave them gender-neutral bathrooms. Tuition went up.

What the Democrats could have done

There’s a long, very practical riff toward the end about what a different Democratic Party might have looked like. Imagine a Democratic president who used Trump-style executive orders for the opposite purpose: who said, on day one, “Insurance companies are bad guys. I am abolishing them by executive order. Single payer. We will deal with the courts later.”

“Why? And I want mothers to be called birthing people, which I would have still objected to, but it was like — I’m gonna do this really powerful thing and take away this middleman that’s adjudicating your health care for profit.”

Liu’s point isn’t that an executive order can really abolish insurance — it’s that the symbolic move of trying, loudly, on the side of a hundred million Americans, would have rebuilt trust. The Democrats won’t do it because their billionaire donors don’t want them to. So they do the cheap thing — language rituals — and lose anyway.

China, Jack Ma, and the joke about Elon

A small but striking aside: when Jack Ma got too big for the Chinese government, the government scared him into silence. He spent some time effectively under house arrest. Public opinion in China largely shrugged — yeah, he had too much money. Compare to the US, where the equivalent move is unthinkable, and an Elon Musk operates as a parallel state.

“There’s a little bit of a lever there […] put Elon Musk in prison for 10 years and you don’t have to worry about taxing 900 other people that are routing their capital through the Cayman Islands.”

Citarella, the host, slips this in as an off-the-record provocation. Liu agrees. The point isn’t that prison is the answer — it’s that one of the few things a national state can still do, when wealth is this concentrated, is target individuals. The procedural left has trouble even saying that out loud.

Grow up

The repeated injunction of the talk, half-joke half-program: people on the left need to grow up. Have boundaries. Have a strong ego. Tolerate disagreement. Stop treating doctrinal deviation as excommunication. Stop being eggs.

“Good social relations means good boundaries. And this is why having a strong ego is actually critical to being a good political subject.”

She channels this through Freud’s structural model: id (drives), superego (the moralising voice), and the ego as the mediator between them. Liberalism, in her telling, has collapsed the ego — there’s only the moralising superego (“you don’t care enough!”) and the id (“vibes!”), with no grown-up in the middle to make decisions.

Key Takeaways

The dominant psychological mode of contemporary liberalism is infantilism: an undifferentiated self that experiences disagreement as injury.
“Care” in liberal discourse has been reduced from genuine vigilance to performative moral signalling — and the right wins points by openly refusing to perform it.
The left abandoned the Enlightenment (reason, maturity, organisation) somewhere in the 1968-72 window and replaced it with mysticism, instant transformation, and identity politics.
Second-wave feminism’s consciousness-raising group model leaked into the broader culture as the template for politics: the dramatic personal awakening replaces patient organising.
The professional managerial class, diagnosed by Barbara and John Ehrenreich in 1977, has captured the Democratic Party and now polices on language and ritual rather than wages and healthcare.
A left made of leaderless, consensus-seeking individuals cannot defeat concentrated capital. Jo Freeman’s Tyranny of Structurelessness was right; structured organisations are non-negotiable.
Democratic forms and concentrated capitalism are incompatible at this level of wealth concentration; young people calling democracy broken are reading the situation correctly.
The Democrats lost workers not because identity politics existed but because they prioritised language rituals while delivering nothing material.
Liu’s normative call: a stronger ego, harder boundaries, more centralised left organisations, recovery of the Enlightenment inheritance, and the willingness to use sovereign power (executive orders, prosecutions of specific oligarchs) when the moment opens.

Claude’s Take

Liu is one of the more bracing voices on the post-Sanders American left — a film professor who writes like a pamphleteer and lands punches in both directions. The diagnosis here is not new (everyone from Christopher Lasch to Mark Fisher has said versions of it), but her psychoanalytic frame is fresh. The “egg avatar” line is genuinely useful as a description of what’s happened to a certain kind of online discourse, and the Winnicott-derived account of care clarifies why the right’s refusal to perform care reads as oxygen rather than cruelty to a lot of voters.

Where I’d push back: the conversation slides easily between describing a small slice of liberal-arts academia and indicting “liberalism” or “the left” as a whole. The five-hour Occupy UCI meeting is real and embarrassing, but most actually-existing American left politics — UAW strikes, Amazon warehouses, tenant organising — looks nothing like that. Liu knows this; she gestures at it; but the frame of the talk lets her treat the academic-PMC subset as if it were the whole patient. Worth holding two thoughts at once.

The pivot to “a more authoritarian left” is the part most likely to provoke. She’s careful — she’s pointing at structure, not strongman politics — but the line between structured organisation and personalist authoritarianism is exactly the line history keeps crossing. She names this as her own concern, then shrugs at it, and the shrug is faster than the argument deserves. “Put Elon Musk in prison for ten years” is funny; it’s also a long step from organisational discipline to selective state violence against opponents. She would say: the right is already doing it, what’s the alternative. Fair, but the question is left dangling.

The strongest move is the recovery of the Enlightenment. The point that you can’t junk Kant and Marx without losing the ground for any emancipatory politics is the kind of obvious-once-you-hear-it point most contemporary leftists have stopped making. The line from Adam Smith → Marx is real. The current academic instinct to treat reason as inherently colonial does, in fact, hand the entire toolkit over to whoever wants to use it next, and they have.

Score: 8. This isn’t a tightly argued essay — it’s a free-flowing podcast where Liu repeats herself, drops names without explaining them, and meanders. But the core diagnoses are sharp, the psychoanalytic frame is genuinely productive, and the willingness to say things American leftists usually avoid (the left has a maturity problem, structure is non-negotiable, the Enlightenment is worth defending) makes this more useful than most of the available commentary on why the post-2016 American left lost. Worth the eighty minutes if you have any sympathy for the question; skip if “PMC” already sounds like a slur to you.