They'll never walk alone

Lessons from the streets in the home of the champions

Welcome to a Monday edition of Progress Report.

I have an interview feature all ready to send, but an unexpected tragedy has sent tonight’s newsletter in another direction; that interview will come out tomorrow afternoon, instead.

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I’m writing from Liverpool, a working class city celebrating its world class football club’s latest league title — and now reeling from a terrible incident that brought festivities to a screeching halt.

If you haven’t already seen the video of the attack, I recommend keeping it that way. I’ll sum it up for you: a man in a van drove full-speed into a densely packed crowd of Liverpool fans on Water Street, one of the main arteries of City Centre. More than a million people were in town this weekend for the club’s championship parade, and there must have been hundreds of thousands of us walking from the waterfront toward the attack.

We were punch drunk with joy, soaking wet after standing for five hours in the rain, singing and chanting, waiting for the team bus. It was an occasion 35 years in the making. And as is so often the case, the unbridled joy turned to shock and despair.

I was a block or two away when the attack took place, and the area was so crowded and rainy and filled with the haze of red smoke that we didn’t realize what had happened until later, when we could check our phones. There were cars spun out into the middle of the street and ambulances racing by, but perhaps because I’m a New Yorker, it took a moment for me to realize that something was off at all.

Alert revelers made sure the crowd split like the opening of a heart valve as the van charged down the street, then closed again as it came to a stop, at which point a mass of Scousers descended on the vehicle and tried to smash open the windows and pull the driver out themselves.

There were 47 people injured, including two who suffered serious injuries. That driver, a 53-year-old white British man (a descriptor that the BBC repeats constantly to prevent the Nigel Farages of the world from grabbing onto this incident), had allegedly been drinking at a Hooters down the street, so the police are calling it an isolated incident; American police would have called it terrorism before that odd little fact emerged.

It’s a terrible way to end what has been an unbelievable weekend for the people in this city, and I’m just glad they’ve (thus far, fingers crossed) avoided any fatalities. As scary as it was, it’s disturbing that the US equivalent would have to be the mass shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs’ parade last year, which felt like a disaster averted because only one person was shot to death.

That I’m here in Liverpool right now is a testament of sorts to the power of the Scouse ethos, which I think is instructive for the kind of work that we need to be doing on a political level. I spend a fair amount of time doing volunteer work (mostly social media) for the New York Liverpool supporters club, which convenes for each match at a bar in the East Village. There are 300+ such clubs worldwide, and every year the club invites a few volunteers from each to the final match of the season, which took place on Sunday.

Why do I spend so much time on this stuff? There were more than 500 people like me at a dinner held by the club at Anfield on Saturday night, and I’d venture to guess that most of us wind up caring as much about the community — of being part of something, embracing something that embraces you back — as the soccer. It’s why we stick with it during the lean years and make these trips at what can be a not insignificant price for last-minute bookers.

It’s not news that sports fans are passionate, but the dedication here is different, existential and tribal in ways that go beyond team sports.

Liverpool fans are known for their creative cheers, chants, and songs, and the long wait was another opportunity to run through the big hits. Several times, some young male fans nearby broke into an upbeat chant of “Fuck the Tories!,” which isn’t a soccer song but works as an anthem for this firmly leftist city.

Hazy red skies beneath the Royal Liver Building. Streets impossibly packed.

The Thatcher regime’s abandonment of Liverpool was the genesis for the city’s wholesale rejection of the conservatives — the book There She Goes by Simon Hughes does a great job detailing this story — but the chant, which was both joyous and primal, was not just a response to the policy of “managed decline” and Thatcher’s post-Heysel statements a full four decades ago.

It was a product of the exuberance of youth, the embrace of rebellion, a working class solidarity, and the fact that Merseyside politicians do not shy away from controversy or lean into staid platitudes. Even when the Labour party is in power, people here retain their outsider mindset and working class solidarity, expressed in ecstatic and explicit ways.

In the US, Democratic leaders would likely rush to condemn that sort of song, as would the media and even many liberal elites, because they believe in a politics of propriety, run by a special class of white collar institutionalists. Expertise is important for governing, but so is responding to people’s needs instead of shaming them for demanding better.

The United States is rapidly sliding into autocracy and the opposition party is at a record low approval rating. It’s hard to find the words that properly emphasize just how dangerous and disturbing that is, but if it gets any worse, just two will do: we’re cooked.

The fascist in the White House got there because he inspired widespread loyalty by making people feel like they were a part of something, like they were winners, like they had permission to embrace the parts of themselves that polite society did not. It is entirely possible to direct that energy toward something positive instead of destructive, at least for most people, and that’s got to be the basis of any attempt at a political rebirth.

Democratic elites who complain about having to brave backlash against unresponsive bosses on Bluesky should be listening and giving agency to the people who care enough to stay involved. Liberals don’t need expensive forensic studies about how to process and mimic the language of young men, they just need to give them a reason to attend a parade and embrace their fight songs.

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