also, it all depends on what you mean as "liberal". this guy says it at great length AND really well

excerpt

[...] the right’s grip on state houses is tighter than before. One of the most significant actual wins on election night was Proposition 22 in solid-blue California. Tech-capital finally put internal differences aside and successfully ensconced not the “future of work” of a million conference marquees, but work’s miserable present for desperate millions. Seth Harris, an Obama alumnus, wrote the foundations for the proposition back in 2015, arguing that tech platforms had created a new category of “independent worker” who fall outside labor laws like minimum wage or overtime and should “rarely, if ever, qualify for unemployment insurance benefits.”  Harris is already included in Biden’s transition team; the law serves as a model for national policy. This is just one aspect of the grim reality of what an American “national unity” government promises.   

Except for this last point, it’s all small potatoes. The presidential election was not a “repudiation” of “Trumpism” nor a landslide. The favorite talking points of 2016— “most votes ever!” and “look at that popular vote margin!”—remain as flat as they were before. It’s almost always the most votes ever; population does, well, increase. And, many will be shocked to learn, the U.S. constitution is acutely antimajoritarian. The U.S. constitution is functioning precisely as revered “founding fathers” like James Madison and Alexander Hamilton hoped: steadily shutting the door on possibilities outside of a narrow, narrow stream; setting up the building blocks for permanent minority rule. I’m laughing in the face of casualty and sorrow, for the first time I’m thinking past tomorrow.

Despite, as I’ve argued elsewhere, the now unavoidable need for radical, institutional transformation, a gander at the alternative models doesn’t give much cause for celebration: much more representative systems in say, the United Kingdom or even its baby settler-colony in Israel seem perfectly capable of producing similar politics. In many ways, the election itself tells us little at all. Once again, the polls were wrong: the “blue wave” failed to materialize; “Never Trump Republicans” were revealed to be the myth they always were; Trump increased his support among Republicans and overall. On the national, electoral plane, the United States slides into a recognizable pattern found in many places the world over. There’s the virulent, neofascist far-right. Or, there is a “national unity” government of the center-right incapable of much but policing their left and emulating their right.  

This is one of the reasons the debate around Trump’s “fascism” is so tiresome. People seem to want a cookie-cutter, Hollywood version or an exact historical carbon copy to finally answer the question [....]

love this line

In post-Soviet Russia, you are forced to drink optimism, but in Capitalist America, optimism drinks you.