Five years ago I described myself as a left libertarian. I voted and volunteered for Bernie. Today I describe myself as a libertarian. The progressive assault on freedom of expression, creativity, beauty, and eros, and the abandonment of classic American virtues such as self-reliance, risk-taking, and pride in country is too much to bear.
Reagan was shot when I was 12. I actually sat in my school cafeteria and prayed that he would die (peacefully, I did add that), even though I was quite worried that God would be angry with me for that kind of ask. So it was a big risk, but I thought I needed to ask anyway. The problem was that Reagan upset the adults around me so much and seemed to be at the center of every conversation about what was wrong with the country. That’s how not-Republican my childhood milieu was.
All my adult life, for 36 years, I’ve been a solid ticket Democratic voter, local, state and federal. Yes, I voted for Biden. But I regret it. My apologies to everyone. And I’m done. At this point I don’t see voting for another Democrat for awhile, maybe ever, even for local parks and rec supervisor. I’ve been mugged by reality and I’m lurching around with a serious concussion and no political party. I’m absolutely still the same person with the same commitments to “classical liberal” values like freedom of speech and enquiry, MLK’s principles, and so forth. I’m a college humanities professor. I thought freedom of enquiry is what we do on campus and in the classroom. But no, it’s not. I’m only finding those values elsewhere, like on this Substack. I voted for my first Republican candidate last year, John James for Michigan senator. Lightning did not strike me. (Yes, I was a bit surprised.) Then I found myself frustrated that he lost.
Now I listen to Bari Weiss and Glenn Loury, read Andrew Sullivan and Thomas Sowell. Yesterday I bought a Jordan Peterson book and made breakfast to The Ben Shapiro Show for God’s sake. What’s happening to me?
I’ll tell you what: my sister cut me off mid-sentence and called me a racist on the phone last month for attempting to tell her about an interview I heard with John McWhorter. Then she called John McWhorter a racist. She’s never actually read or listened to a word he’s ever uttered. She’s not a 19 year old college student high on the ideological righteousness of youth. She’s a 52-year-old white woman with graduate degrees from Duke University who is a highly ranked executive in a major US nonprofit. And yes, for whatever it’s worth, she knows he’s black. (And no, he doesn’t prefer to capitalize it. You see the waters I swim in.)
Many of my academic colleagues have become just as chillingly intolerant and anti-intellectual while believing themselves to be social justice advocates on the right side of history. My University is actively applying political litmus tests during the hiring, tenure and promotion processes. How do I know? Because I sit on the Appointment, Rank andTenure committee and I’ve been on two different hiring committees. What’s happening to students is even worse. This fall I had a first-generation college student whose working class parents immigrated from Mexico (a common demographic for us). She broke down in tears in class because of the bleak future she faces in our “white supremacist country.” Sobbing she said that her parents refuse to believe that she is truly oppressed even though she has learned in college that she is. I’m not making this up. It’s surreal and it’s psychologically abusive. Last year I sat in a required meeting where faculty spoke about the need to prompt “BIPOC” students to retrospectively understand interactions as racist even when the students themselves didn’t experience it that way.
And don’t get me started on gender and women’s sports. Google Lia Thomas at UPenn. That pretty much says it all. And I haven’t even gotten to how shocked I am to discover the deep intellectual and political biases and failures of my own education, which includes a PhD from The University of Michigan. .
I'll try to keep it short and simple (relatively). Age 64 now, and for 45 years have voted straight blue progressive liberal Democrat. hate to admit it, but I used to think Republicans were an alien species. Covid came and provided the Big Reveal: against common sense and evidence, using the virus as a tool to unseat Trump was like Toto pulling back the curtain on the wizard (I wish I could say the benevolent wizard of oz, but this is not the case). My former party, as I now realize, has long been the party of fear-mongering and division, whether it be climate, racism, or covid. Covid, like racism, was always lurking behind every tree in every forest. Either my former party believed this illusion, or they used it to gain power—doesn't matter.
Last May I registered "No Party Preference," and will likely vote for any and all voices who have not supported this darkness, many of whom I admittedly placed in the "basket of deplorables." I'm empowered by having awakened from a woke sleep. Thank you.
I have always described myself as a liberal. I still do, but now I say “classic” because I haven’t changed. I believe free speech is one of our most sacred rights. I believe everyone should be represented, and that everyone’s opinion should be respected. I believe in reducing economic equality. The only time real wages went up is when immigration was curtailed in the twenties, so I believe in borders. Amazon is still not treating it’s lowest paid workers well enough to open them more. I believe strongly in equality. I used to always vote Democratic, but now I consider myself an Independent. I very strongly don’t want to ally myself with the extreme of either party. I’m old enough that I’ll vote for anyone who will take on health care.
Self proclaimed leftist feminist who would have voted for Hillary in 2016 but didn't because the polls closed. Trump man bad syndrome until 2020. I woke up early 2020 and am never turning back. I believed all the MSM BS (embarrassing) until I started to do my own research.
I was an independent who was not very interested in politics but voted democrat out of the vague inherited sense that they were the good guys and the republicans the bad guys. I was always a little contrarian though, but it was directed against the excesses of PCs more than any kind of political view. My political compass test would show me at the center politically and the just a few ticks towards libertarian socially. I was and am free speech absolutist.
The pandemic, the Floyd aftermath and the election changed a lot, though not those basic political identities. I began to see how our perspectives of reality are influenced by what so called credible media sources choose to cover and how they cover it. I began to think that the liberal bias which I had noticed before and attributed to liberals just caring more about afflicting the comfortable as journalists was in fact more serious. I saw a lock-step ideological discipline extending not just from the media but throughout many powerful institutions and companies. What made that worse still was not that that a lot of people had deliberated and come to the same views, but that dissent was punished and censored. I saw of course as we all did corporations banding together to deplatform a democratically elected president. I saw people slandered for talking about cost benefit analysis of lockdowns, or the possible lab origins of the corona virus.
I see a broad movement towards normalizing censorship if not yet by law than by everything but. I am vigorously opposed. I see safetyism rampant, aimed at reducing both physical and psychological harm to as close to zero as possible irrespective of costs or rights. I am vigorously opposed. I see the establishment increasingly demonizing a group of people based on their race - as penance, self flagellation and possible redemption if one's politics are correct, and intolerant contempt if ones politics are wrong. I see this used a political cudgel -- if you have the "wrong" view you must be one of those people for whom open contempt is encouraged. One again, I am vigorously opposed.
I have liberal friends who I would have sworn would be opposed to all of these things who are not be opposed. They simply dismiss them as being conservative concerns, and therefore unwarranted. These friends read the NYT and WaPo exclusively, and believe not only the veracity of their stories, but that the selection of the stories and tone is representative of objective reality.
I just took a political compass test again and am still very close to the center on both axis.
So while my politics have not changed much my priorities have. As Martin Gurri has said, we're in an information explosion and revolution akin to the aftermath of the printing press. We live in increasingly fragment realities that compound with partisanship and make it impossible to find consensus on the most basic things. This fragmentation is exploited for profit, and cynically manipulated for power. I don't know how a country can function without a shared view of reality - it is a prerequisite to a functioning politics.
Same story for me as many here. Five years ago, I was a left-liberal. Now I feel totally disaffected. I'm no longer aligned with Democrats, still largely alienated by Republicans and sick of the greed and corruption of the centrist "neos" (neo-cons and neo-libs). I voted for Obama, then Bernie. In the next election I will be voting for whoever is anti-woke, anti-lockdown and pro-civil-liberty. My guess is that they'll have a red pin on their lapel.
I don’t know why my reply is so long, or how it got so long, or who would want to read this.
The question seems very complicated, maybe because political labels (left, right, center) are almost meaningless to me these days; “left” could mean anything. “Center” could mean something horrible!
Anyway:
1) I started out (high school, college) as a milquetoast Democrat with naive opinions and a million political blind spots—but that was during the 90s, when being politically oblivious/disengaged was cool. In college, I remember arguing vehemently against my friends who were going to vote for Nader. I had a Gore/Lieberman sticker on my car.
2) During the Bush/9/11 years, I started volunteering, and then working as a paid campaign grunt, on Democratic Congressional campaigns, etc. Still a milquetoast liberal, but more energetic.
I was in a permanent political bad mood about the wars in the Middle East—angry 24/7 about Abu Ghraib, mass surveillance, etc. The issues I cared most about were prosecuting torture, ending the wars, and (a distant third) expanding gay rights. I deluded myself into thinking that the Democrats were “good enough” politically.
From ‘02-‘05, it felt like the world was coming to an end and nobody in my social world cared. In some ways, I think that both of these impressions (the impending catastrophe, the widespread indifference) were correct: the world we live in today was created to a significant extent by Reaganomics, the growth of media monopolies, the rise of smartphones and social media, and the mainstreaming of insane conspiracy theories—but also by our horrorshow post-9/11 foreign policy.
3) I was maniacally pro-Obama (did a lot of things—donated, volunteered) in 2008, because I was so offended by the idea of a dynastic Hillary Clinton presidency coming on the heels of a dynastic George W. Bush presidency.
I was also still barely clueless enough to find Obama’s 08 campaign promises and his victory exciting.
4) I was so demoralized by the way Obama and the Democrats governed that in 2010 I became a principled non-voter and opted out of engaging with political theater for a long time.
5) I was slow to pay attention to Bernie after seeing the way Kucinich, Nader, Ron Paul and even zeroes like Howard Dean had been marginalized and ridiculed. My feeling was that a popular movement from the left was doomed, and that progressive figureheads were just controlled resistance.
My students’ enthusiasm for Bernie finally got me to take his campaign seriously. It was painfully obvious that Bernie would have won the nomination and then the presidency in a fair process. I voted for Jill Stein in the general election.
I never thought Clinton was “the lesser of two evils,” and in hindsight (after Russiagate), I feel that I should have affirmatively voted for Trump, rather than supporting a protest candidate with a good platform.
After the Sanders/Clinton primary, I was politically conscious in a different way. Seeing all of that grassroots enthusiasm and genuine possibility crushed by the cynical machine politics of the Clintons and the DNC radicalized me.
I tried to get active with Socialist Alternative and a few other hard-left groups, and was (like a college student would typically do) questioning my blandly liberal assumptions about how society worked or should work.
But these left-wing groups felt too much like cosplay—people wanted to tear everything down, but had no sane proposals about what/how to build. They spoke for the working class, but didn’t understand the working class at all. I felt that gig workers and retail workers needed urgently to be the focus of a labor movement—but the leftists I knew wouldn’t even be able to have a normal conversation with a Hardee’s cashier or a janitor.
I compromised and got active in DSA. Although DSA’s de facto partnership with the Democratic Party was off-putting, the ground-level people in my chapter seemed genuine and nice, and the organization wanted to accomplish things.
A few years ago, it became impossible to ignore the center-left’s shift away from class and towards race.
I wasn’t interested in dividing people up by skin color, or having an endless “conversation” about race. I had gotten along with all kinds of people all my life, had dated people of various races (and racial difference had barely even been discussed in those relationships, one of which lasted 3 years). I hated the way skin color and sexual orientation were being announced and foregrounded at, e.g., DSA meetings.
I was also out of sync with the left w/r/t its strange new “gender” obsession. It seemed narcissistic and morbid to me. I don’t believe that anyone is born in the wrong body.
There was something genocidal (am I exaggerating?) about the trans fever to me; gay and lesbian kids are now being encouraged to literally identify as the opposite sex, and to have surgery; it’s erasure and destruction. I hated pronoun announcements and culty neologisms like “cis” from the beginning.
More and more, I hated the way leftists talked: the language-policing, the vocabulary pruning. I don’t believe that there’s anything wrong with referring to the word “nigger” in appropriate context; nobody extends this taboo to slurs like “chink” or “faggot,” and they’re correct not to do so.
I also noticed again and much more vividly that leftists didn’t just misunderstand and have trouble talking to the working poor; in most cases, leftists seemed to truly hate the non-college-educated poor. I was scolded in an online forum for using the term “blind-sided” (ableist), yet the people scolding me seemed to think that they could organize Amazon pickers and supermarket workers: people who don’t like being called “cis” or “latinx,” who like their sons, brothers, and fathers, and who don’t want to hear about their “privilege.”
The left no longer seems like a legitimate political movement to me. It’s part religion, part scam, part clique—and its racist and divisive ideas and its speech codes seem more dangerous to me than Dick Cheney did.
6) I’m practically a blank slate now.
I voted for Trump in 2020 because it was the only chance I’d been given to record my position on Russiagate.
Woke corporations, the woke academy, cancel culture and the general atmosphere of racism, cultishness, and compelled speech all freak me out. I don’t want to defund the police. I don’t think Republicans are fascists. I’m not part of the new gender religion; it’s subjecting gay kids to surgeries that deform them and will ruin their health. I’m vaccinated, but I’ve never been afraid of COVID; surgical masks, mandates, and passports do not seem harmless to me, and what we’ve been doing to kids is factory-scale child abuse.
I’m more open-minded than I’ve been before. Which long-held “beliefs” were my own, and which ones did I adopt because they were obligatory?
Am I REALLY that concerned about animal rights? (Yes.) Am I SURE that abortion is moral, and should be legal? (No.) Do I REALLY oppose capital punishment in every case? (Yes.) Do I REALLY think open borders are a good idea? (No.)
After rejecting “lesser-evillism” all my life, I’m feeling more and more like a committed lesser-evillist, or some sort of politically homeless Scandinavian-Social-Democrat/Republican hybrid.
Like one of my other favorite Substackers, Freddie DeBoer, I am an antique Marxist and civil libertarian. That really hasn’t changed over the past five years. I appreciated Bernie Sanders’s 2016 pro-labor populism and reluctantly supported him in 2020. I am in academia and have always been annoyed by the unthinking liberalism of the academy, from your garden variety MSNBC-watching resistance libs to your more pernicious gender ideology-pushing rad libs, but I had always more or less tolerated these people. Now, I can’t stand them. I think it’s because DEI ideology has so thoroughly captured the institutions and campuses have become such intellectual monocultures. Lately, I find it much more interesting to talk to social conservatives, libertarians, and radical centrists, though there still are some old school leftists who’ve maintained integrity (like Adolph Reed, Jr.). I come from the Midwestern rust belt, and most people in my family have vague sympathies for unionism and labor but are also somewhat socially conservative and got behind Trump. (The “socially conservative” label is complicated, because my father and one of my aunts are gay and these “social conservatives” have always fully supported my father and aunt. So, I guess they’re socially libertarian? And economically populist? I don’t know – but it does makes sense to me from my experience in academia why they would never vote democrat these days!) Anyway, this is all to say that I feel clearer about what I am and what I think now more than any time in the past five years. It’s a relief, though at times it feels lonely.
Everyday I read lifetime liberals who are finally starting to see the light. Many of them have even written thoughtful responses to your enqueries in this thread.
So, while their change of heart (and yours) are refreshing, I have to wonder - what in God's name took you so long! Have you been blind, deaf, and dumb for the past 20 years? Could you not see that the Democrats circa 2000 to present have nothing in common with Jack Kennedy or any of the decent men and woman of the 60s, 70s, or 80s?
Could you not see the walls of our Blessed Union cracking?
And yet, perhaps it's not too late. Independents like myself along with folks on the Right have failed as we continue our downward spiral. But with your help, honorable people from the Left who truly love our country, we can, together, prevail.
Raised lower-middle-class by old-school, bleeding heart liberal but not particularly partisan-political single mom. Joined the ACLU at eighteen. Actually cried when Bill Clinton paused in accepting nomination to tell listeners from non-traditional or broken homes like his: don’t let anyone tell you belong any less. Was active in College Dems but an issues person, not a party functionary. Was offered VP spot in campus NOW chapter. Would’ve been delegate to 1996 Convention but quotas determined our district had to send a woman. Organized campus debates supporting affirmative action and opposing capital punishment. Was selected for internships at The Nation and Dissent. Spent a dozen weekends doing voter registration and troubleshooting mostly in West Philly for Obama 2012. Did organizing work in NYCHA buildings for a moderate reform DA candidate in Brooklyn. Worked on 2014 NYC Climate campaign. Something like a civil libertarian animal welfare environmentalist and pro-labor transracial solidarity economic populist.
Began to question foci and priorities in Obama’s second term. The increasing emphasis on one or two of three dimensions of identity to the exclusion of anyone who didn’t fit. (Why was My Brother’s Keeper first only for black boys and then also for Hispanic boys with First Nations heritage - but never for boys of Caucasian or Asian heritage? Why were post-election organizers so heavily tasked with normalizing illegal immigration as opposed to building coalitions to help all working poor and impoverished Americans?) Then, the heavy corporate-endorsed tilt, post-Occupy Wall Street toward a slick managerial professional class idenitarianism. The obvious lies and narratives around the killing of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, etc. Why so much focus on ultra-divisive, zero-sum racial conflict, lying about statistics, and stereotyping, scapegoating, and demonizing people en masse simply for being born white, rather than working together for badly needed, common sense criminal justice reform? Why were the once most authoritative papers seemingly trying to stoke racial hysteria conflict? Then Hillary Clinton’s further elevation of narrow identitarian shout outs over unifying rhetoric and policy, culminating in labeling fully half of her opponent’s supporters “deplorables”. The party base had changed radically. So many outspoken Dems were essentially a culturally far-left, self-flatteringly cosmopolitan crew of the globalist managerial class elite. Their patronizing head-patting pandering to lower income nonwhites was risible; their raw open recreational hatred and contempt for “lower whites” was startling in its intensity. Go back a generation in upper middle class mores and many of these people would’ve been almost indistinguishable from more socially moderate, well-off suburban Republicans. I started getting into it with friends who kept using terms like “white trash” or stating flatly “buses are for losers. Their attitude to Bernie Sanders and his supporters was one of dismissive arrogant amusement. After I told one friend I’d simply been unable (from a safely very blue state) to vote for Hillary Clinton, he remarked that people simply “wouldn’t take their medicine”. Populism became conflated with fascism. Every syllable that didn’t jibe with the new progressive lexicon and framing was suddenly “racist” and “offensive”. People who knew the organizing work i’d done for voting rights and criminal justice reform began to strongly hint I was racist for raising objections to the arguments put forth in the latest book club favorites by Kendi and DiAngelo. I perhaps stupidly bothered to politely make the liberal left case against censorship, by highlighting the risks to actually marginalized sources in cozying up to big tech and federal law enforcement agencies in comment within a friend’s echo chamber post - and was immediately accused of defending fascists while being “mansplain-y” - before having comment deleted. The same friend then texted me to inform me I was in denial of my white male privilege and that she might consider being friends with me again in several years, if I sufficiently educate myself.
So yeah: politically homeless. Vegan animal rights activist, old-school civil libertarian, economic populist transracial solidarity liberal (yes, now with a few more empirically-informed centrist views). And there is no room for me in the present Democratic Party or progressive left. I’ve still never voted for a Republican in my life. But the cultural and institutional power of the authoritarian idenitarian left is now so sweeping, I think it’s dangerous to extend it across most of our elected offices and appointed positions. Maybe this sounds a bit hyperbolic, but I spent some time in school studying in depth what happened in The Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the behavior that proceeded it. There’s no guarantee we won’t see some of same extreme dehumanization and violent tribalism if we continue to essentialize identity divisions and push intergenerational collective vengeance as a righteous political program.
Ive always tended to be a liberal, maybe progressive in some cases. Now I share virtually no political overlap with what liberal politics has become. I was a liberal by default regarding race, BLM, empire, climate change, big business, etc., but since Trump Derangement Syndrom and the liberal/dem capture by wokism, vaccinism, big tech censorship, and rigid race and gender rightthink, I have become more conservative. It makes me sad that in a few years a whole swath of people who I thought should "know better" have become scared, manipulated, given up their rational capacities, shrunk into tribalism, and clamoured for the FBI, DOJ, big pharma, big goverment, big tech, etc., to save them. I remember how liberals scorned conservatives for such things after 9/11 with our resulting erosion of civil liberties. Now, because the saviors are biotech, Joe Biden, and "the science", they will assent to whatever new "patriot act" is proposed. Id shed a tear for our collective sitiation, but these last few years have hardened me.
I think we are in a stage of failing civilization that is breeding structural and social psychosis. I fear science and medicine have done irreperable harm to their credibility and I cannot fathom the fallout from that. We are running out of the energy advanced civilization requires, and renewables wont cut it.
Im just glad I live in the country where people have more freedom and capability to turn things around once collapse shifts into higher gear.
My evolution is pretty similar to lots of the commenters here. When I turned 18, I registered Green Party, though I usually voted Democrat. My core values are and always have been civil libertarian and anti-imperialist. I believed during the Bush era that the Democratic Party more or less shared those values, though I harbored no illusions regarding corporate influence over the party. I fell into the lesser of two evils camp, but was pretty critical of Obama for his corporate bailouts and complete failure to rollback the excesses of the War on Terror.
When Trump got elected, I saw him as an existential threat to Democracy. But I also moved abroad right after he won the election and resolved to tune out the drama I knew would unfold, intuitively sensing that I could fall victim to something like TDS. Then I tuned back in when Covid became a big deal and largely subscribed to the MSM/DNC party line at first. Then Floyd and the Great Awokening drama unfolded and I sensed something deeply troubling in the authoritarian and intellectually dishonest rhetoric being employed in the context of that movement. Then I gradually came to realize the liberal establishment had lost its marbles while I was gone, and it has only continued to get worse and worse. This all manifested most markedly around “defund the police” and “Covidianism.” And I further realized that these troubling tendencies had actually been there all along, causing me to reassess a lot of my beliefs about the world.
At this point, I’m a man without a party. I don’t consider myself a full on Libertarian because I believe consolidated corporate power can be just as bad as consolidated government power. I believe in limited government, a primary function of which is antitrust enforcement and protection of individual civil liberties. These views are quite consistent with the beliefs of the now much maligned founding fathers, and receive no expression in current mainstream political discourse. I believe we are slipping into a totalitarian system of government no matter which party is in charge. I’m deeply pessimistic and concerned about where this is all headed. I appreciate the Substack community for keeping me sane and letting me know I’m not the only one out there who feels this way.
I think my views haven't really changed in the past five years; I'm still the same old-school lefite I always was. When it comes to actual issues I'm still leaning left or hard left, but over these last five years "The Left" has completely lost me, and doesn't even feel left-leaning at all. Hell, they aren't even really "political" in the real sense. They're more like a caricature, or satirical performance art. Between the complete over-obsession with gender and race, and the dogmatic orthodoxy, I don't see anything I recognize, politically or socially or otherwise. I have to always identify them as "The Left" with quotation marks included, just to keep their distance from those of us on the actual left.
It's even worse when I see it in so many of my friends. For example, people who HATED Black Bloc during the 2003 anti-Iraq protests are now praising every window-smasher they see, as long as they perceive them to be on the same side. And now there are no questions allowed, no nuance accepted; only the official dogma of the day.
"Because we say so" is not a valid political position, but it's all I see now: "Why? Because we said so, and you are now ostracized as a Bad Person for asking questions."
I was an excited Obama voter. But, in the early days of his presidency, he showed how poor of a man he was. How, you might ask. Putting Hilary Clinton in as SoS. I cannot think of a less competent person, who failed up at every point in her life. Now, I was always a civil liberties Democrat and came from a long line of both Progressive and Civil lib left, but my father was always a Republican, so I got a strong sense of both. I came of age during the Regan years and was always of the opinion that Meese was one of the worst people as AG.
It has become increasingly obvious that the political party with Cultural Power, as the R's did then, and the D's do now, will attempt to push the boundaries of civil liberties, as the feedback loops are all out of wack; in other words, they don't have any ability to listen to the other side culturally, only to their own voices. And this takes the feedback of approx half the county and drowns it out. In the Regan years, we got the religious right, and now we have the religious left.
Oh, and Merrick Garland is tenfold worse than Meese.
Pretty much same progression as what's in your post....1.) far left, 2.) centrist? I support all the same economic proposals as I did before, but I feel a lot of resistance toward the current progressive conversation about race and policing and just the praxis of how we should view people who are to the right of us, 3.) Bernie losing made me really readjust my views, I don't think progressive ideas are less viable because of his loss, but the way we campaign and discuss them should be smarter. His loss is when I started to feel a break from the 'left' (they viewed it as proof that the system was rigged, I thought there were actual lessons to learn) that wad followed by a bunch of little breaks in reality (describing Jan 6 as a coup, misportrayals of the extent of police brutality, etc) that culminated in me feeling like I no longer identify with the online left
Five years ago I described myself as a left libertarian. I voted and volunteered for Bernie. Today I describe myself as a libertarian. The progressive assault on freedom of expression, creativity, beauty, and eros, and the abandonment of classic American virtues such as self-reliance, risk-taking, and pride in country is too much to bear.
Reagan was shot when I was 12. I actually sat in my school cafeteria and prayed that he would die (peacefully, I did add that), even though I was quite worried that God would be angry with me for that kind of ask. So it was a big risk, but I thought I needed to ask anyway. The problem was that Reagan upset the adults around me so much and seemed to be at the center of every conversation about what was wrong with the country. That’s how not-Republican my childhood milieu was.
All my adult life, for 36 years, I’ve been a solid ticket Democratic voter, local, state and federal. Yes, I voted for Biden. But I regret it. My apologies to everyone. And I’m done. At this point I don’t see voting for another Democrat for awhile, maybe ever, even for local parks and rec supervisor. I’ve been mugged by reality and I’m lurching around with a serious concussion and no political party. I’m absolutely still the same person with the same commitments to “classical liberal” values like freedom of speech and enquiry, MLK’s principles, and so forth. I’m a college humanities professor. I thought freedom of enquiry is what we do on campus and in the classroom. But no, it’s not. I’m only finding those values elsewhere, like on this Substack. I voted for my first Republican candidate last year, John James for Michigan senator. Lightning did not strike me. (Yes, I was a bit surprised.) Then I found myself frustrated that he lost.
Now I listen to Bari Weiss and Glenn Loury, read Andrew Sullivan and Thomas Sowell. Yesterday I bought a Jordan Peterson book and made breakfast to The Ben Shapiro Show for God’s sake. What’s happening to me?
I’ll tell you what: my sister cut me off mid-sentence and called me a racist on the phone last month for attempting to tell her about an interview I heard with John McWhorter. Then she called John McWhorter a racist. She’s never actually read or listened to a word he’s ever uttered. She’s not a 19 year old college student high on the ideological righteousness of youth. She’s a 52-year-old white woman with graduate degrees from Duke University who is a highly ranked executive in a major US nonprofit. And yes, for whatever it’s worth, she knows he’s black. (And no, he doesn’t prefer to capitalize it. You see the waters I swim in.)
Many of my academic colleagues have become just as chillingly intolerant and anti-intellectual while believing themselves to be social justice advocates on the right side of history. My University is actively applying political litmus tests during the hiring, tenure and promotion processes. How do I know? Because I sit on the Appointment, Rank andTenure committee and I’ve been on two different hiring committees. What’s happening to students is even worse. This fall I had a first-generation college student whose working class parents immigrated from Mexico (a common demographic for us). She broke down in tears in class because of the bleak future she faces in our “white supremacist country.” Sobbing she said that her parents refuse to believe that she is truly oppressed even though she has learned in college that she is. I’m not making this up. It’s surreal and it’s psychologically abusive. Last year I sat in a required meeting where faculty spoke about the need to prompt “BIPOC” students to retrospectively understand interactions as racist even when the students themselves didn’t experience it that way.
And don’t get me started on gender and women’s sports. Google Lia Thomas at UPenn. That pretty much says it all. And I haven’t even gotten to how shocked I am to discover the deep intellectual and political biases and failures of my own education, which includes a PhD from The University of Michigan. .
I'll try to keep it short and simple (relatively). Age 64 now, and for 45 years have voted straight blue progressive liberal Democrat. hate to admit it, but I used to think Republicans were an alien species. Covid came and provided the Big Reveal: against common sense and evidence, using the virus as a tool to unseat Trump was like Toto pulling back the curtain on the wizard (I wish I could say the benevolent wizard of oz, but this is not the case). My former party, as I now realize, has long been the party of fear-mongering and division, whether it be climate, racism, or covid. Covid, like racism, was always lurking behind every tree in every forest. Either my former party believed this illusion, or they used it to gain power—doesn't matter.
Last May I registered "No Party Preference," and will likely vote for any and all voices who have not supported this darkness, many of whom I admittedly placed in the "basket of deplorables." I'm empowered by having awakened from a woke sleep. Thank you.
I have always described myself as a liberal. I still do, but now I say “classic” because I haven’t changed. I believe free speech is one of our most sacred rights. I believe everyone should be represented, and that everyone’s opinion should be respected. I believe in reducing economic equality. The only time real wages went up is when immigration was curtailed in the twenties, so I believe in borders. Amazon is still not treating it’s lowest paid workers well enough to open them more. I believe strongly in equality. I used to always vote Democratic, but now I consider myself an Independent. I very strongly don’t want to ally myself with the extreme of either party. I’m old enough that I’ll vote for anyone who will take on health care.
Self proclaimed leftist feminist who would have voted for Hillary in 2016 but didn't because the polls closed. Trump man bad syndrome until 2020. I woke up early 2020 and am never turning back. I believed all the MSM BS (embarrassing) until I started to do my own research.
I was an independent who was not very interested in politics but voted democrat out of the vague inherited sense that they were the good guys and the republicans the bad guys. I was always a little contrarian though, but it was directed against the excesses of PCs more than any kind of political view. My political compass test would show me at the center politically and the just a few ticks towards libertarian socially. I was and am free speech absolutist.
The pandemic, the Floyd aftermath and the election changed a lot, though not those basic political identities. I began to see how our perspectives of reality are influenced by what so called credible media sources choose to cover and how they cover it. I began to think that the liberal bias which I had noticed before and attributed to liberals just caring more about afflicting the comfortable as journalists was in fact more serious. I saw a lock-step ideological discipline extending not just from the media but throughout many powerful institutions and companies. What made that worse still was not that that a lot of people had deliberated and come to the same views, but that dissent was punished and censored. I saw of course as we all did corporations banding together to deplatform a democratically elected president. I saw people slandered for talking about cost benefit analysis of lockdowns, or the possible lab origins of the corona virus.
I see a broad movement towards normalizing censorship if not yet by law than by everything but. I am vigorously opposed. I see safetyism rampant, aimed at reducing both physical and psychological harm to as close to zero as possible irrespective of costs or rights. I am vigorously opposed. I see the establishment increasingly demonizing a group of people based on their race - as penance, self flagellation and possible redemption if one's politics are correct, and intolerant contempt if ones politics are wrong. I see this used a political cudgel -- if you have the "wrong" view you must be one of those people for whom open contempt is encouraged. One again, I am vigorously opposed.
I have liberal friends who I would have sworn would be opposed to all of these things who are not be opposed. They simply dismiss them as being conservative concerns, and therefore unwarranted. These friends read the NYT and WaPo exclusively, and believe not only the veracity of their stories, but that the selection of the stories and tone is representative of objective reality.
I just took a political compass test again and am still very close to the center on both axis.
So while my politics have not changed much my priorities have. As Martin Gurri has said, we're in an information explosion and revolution akin to the aftermath of the printing press. We live in increasingly fragment realities that compound with partisanship and make it impossible to find consensus on the most basic things. This fragmentation is exploited for profit, and cynically manipulated for power. I don't know how a country can function without a shared view of reality - it is a prerequisite to a functioning politics.
Same story for me as many here. Five years ago, I was a left-liberal. Now I feel totally disaffected. I'm no longer aligned with Democrats, still largely alienated by Republicans and sick of the greed and corruption of the centrist "neos" (neo-cons and neo-libs). I voted for Obama, then Bernie. In the next election I will be voting for whoever is anti-woke, anti-lockdown and pro-civil-liberty. My guess is that they'll have a red pin on their lapel.
I don’t know why my reply is so long, or how it got so long, or who would want to read this.
The question seems very complicated, maybe because political labels (left, right, center) are almost meaningless to me these days; “left” could mean anything. “Center” could mean something horrible!
Anyway:
1) I started out (high school, college) as a milquetoast Democrat with naive opinions and a million political blind spots—but that was during the 90s, when being politically oblivious/disengaged was cool. In college, I remember arguing vehemently against my friends who were going to vote for Nader. I had a Gore/Lieberman sticker on my car.
2) During the Bush/9/11 years, I started volunteering, and then working as a paid campaign grunt, on Democratic Congressional campaigns, etc. Still a milquetoast liberal, but more energetic.
I was in a permanent political bad mood about the wars in the Middle East—angry 24/7 about Abu Ghraib, mass surveillance, etc. The issues I cared most about were prosecuting torture, ending the wars, and (a distant third) expanding gay rights. I deluded myself into thinking that the Democrats were “good enough” politically.
From ‘02-‘05, it felt like the world was coming to an end and nobody in my social world cared. In some ways, I think that both of these impressions (the impending catastrophe, the widespread indifference) were correct: the world we live in today was created to a significant extent by Reaganomics, the growth of media monopolies, the rise of smartphones and social media, and the mainstreaming of insane conspiracy theories—but also by our horrorshow post-9/11 foreign policy.
3) I was maniacally pro-Obama (did a lot of things—donated, volunteered) in 2008, because I was so offended by the idea of a dynastic Hillary Clinton presidency coming on the heels of a dynastic George W. Bush presidency.
I was also still barely clueless enough to find Obama’s 08 campaign promises and his victory exciting.
4) I was so demoralized by the way Obama and the Democrats governed that in 2010 I became a principled non-voter and opted out of engaging with political theater for a long time.
5) I was slow to pay attention to Bernie after seeing the way Kucinich, Nader, Ron Paul and even zeroes like Howard Dean had been marginalized and ridiculed. My feeling was that a popular movement from the left was doomed, and that progressive figureheads were just controlled resistance.
My students’ enthusiasm for Bernie finally got me to take his campaign seriously. It was painfully obvious that Bernie would have won the nomination and then the presidency in a fair process. I voted for Jill Stein in the general election.
I never thought Clinton was “the lesser of two evils,” and in hindsight (after Russiagate), I feel that I should have affirmatively voted for Trump, rather than supporting a protest candidate with a good platform.
After the Sanders/Clinton primary, I was politically conscious in a different way. Seeing all of that grassroots enthusiasm and genuine possibility crushed by the cynical machine politics of the Clintons and the DNC radicalized me.
I tried to get active with Socialist Alternative and a few other hard-left groups, and was (like a college student would typically do) questioning my blandly liberal assumptions about how society worked or should work.
But these left-wing groups felt too much like cosplay—people wanted to tear everything down, but had no sane proposals about what/how to build. They spoke for the working class, but didn’t understand the working class at all. I felt that gig workers and retail workers needed urgently to be the focus of a labor movement—but the leftists I knew wouldn’t even be able to have a normal conversation with a Hardee’s cashier or a janitor.
I compromised and got active in DSA. Although DSA’s de facto partnership with the Democratic Party was off-putting, the ground-level people in my chapter seemed genuine and nice, and the organization wanted to accomplish things.
A few years ago, it became impossible to ignore the center-left’s shift away from class and towards race.
I wasn’t interested in dividing people up by skin color, or having an endless “conversation” about race. I had gotten along with all kinds of people all my life, had dated people of various races (and racial difference had barely even been discussed in those relationships, one of which lasted 3 years). I hated the way skin color and sexual orientation were being announced and foregrounded at, e.g., DSA meetings.
I was also out of sync with the left w/r/t its strange new “gender” obsession. It seemed narcissistic and morbid to me. I don’t believe that anyone is born in the wrong body.
There was something genocidal (am I exaggerating?) about the trans fever to me; gay and lesbian kids are now being encouraged to literally identify as the opposite sex, and to have surgery; it’s erasure and destruction. I hated pronoun announcements and culty neologisms like “cis” from the beginning.
More and more, I hated the way leftists talked: the language-policing, the vocabulary pruning. I don’t believe that there’s anything wrong with referring to the word “nigger” in appropriate context; nobody extends this taboo to slurs like “chink” or “faggot,” and they’re correct not to do so.
I also noticed again and much more vividly that leftists didn’t just misunderstand and have trouble talking to the working poor; in most cases, leftists seemed to truly hate the non-college-educated poor. I was scolded in an online forum for using the term “blind-sided” (ableist), yet the people scolding me seemed to think that they could organize Amazon pickers and supermarket workers: people who don’t like being called “cis” or “latinx,” who like their sons, brothers, and fathers, and who don’t want to hear about their “privilege.”
The left no longer seems like a legitimate political movement to me. It’s part religion, part scam, part clique—and its racist and divisive ideas and its speech codes seem more dangerous to me than Dick Cheney did.
6) I’m practically a blank slate now.
I voted for Trump in 2020 because it was the only chance I’d been given to record my position on Russiagate.
Woke corporations, the woke academy, cancel culture and the general atmosphere of racism, cultishness, and compelled speech all freak me out. I don’t want to defund the police. I don’t think Republicans are fascists. I’m not part of the new gender religion; it’s subjecting gay kids to surgeries that deform them and will ruin their health. I’m vaccinated, but I’ve never been afraid of COVID; surgical masks, mandates, and passports do not seem harmless to me, and what we’ve been doing to kids is factory-scale child abuse.
I’m more open-minded than I’ve been before. Which long-held “beliefs” were my own, and which ones did I adopt because they were obligatory?
Am I REALLY that concerned about animal rights? (Yes.) Am I SURE that abortion is moral, and should be legal? (No.) Do I REALLY oppose capital punishment in every case? (Yes.) Do I REALLY think open borders are a good idea? (No.)
After rejecting “lesser-evillism” all my life, I’m feeling more and more like a committed lesser-evillist, or some sort of politically homeless Scandinavian-Social-Democrat/Republican hybrid.
Like one of my other favorite Substackers, Freddie DeBoer, I am an antique Marxist and civil libertarian. That really hasn’t changed over the past five years. I appreciated Bernie Sanders’s 2016 pro-labor populism and reluctantly supported him in 2020. I am in academia and have always been annoyed by the unthinking liberalism of the academy, from your garden variety MSNBC-watching resistance libs to your more pernicious gender ideology-pushing rad libs, but I had always more or less tolerated these people. Now, I can’t stand them. I think it’s because DEI ideology has so thoroughly captured the institutions and campuses have become such intellectual monocultures. Lately, I find it much more interesting to talk to social conservatives, libertarians, and radical centrists, though there still are some old school leftists who’ve maintained integrity (like Adolph Reed, Jr.). I come from the Midwestern rust belt, and most people in my family have vague sympathies for unionism and labor but are also somewhat socially conservative and got behind Trump. (The “socially conservative” label is complicated, because my father and one of my aunts are gay and these “social conservatives” have always fully supported my father and aunt. So, I guess they’re socially libertarian? And economically populist? I don’t know – but it does makes sense to me from my experience in academia why they would never vote democrat these days!) Anyway, this is all to say that I feel clearer about what I am and what I think now more than any time in the past five years. It’s a relief, though at times it feels lonely.
Everyday I read lifetime liberals who are finally starting to see the light. Many of them have even written thoughtful responses to your enqueries in this thread.
So, while their change of heart (and yours) are refreshing, I have to wonder - what in God's name took you so long! Have you been blind, deaf, and dumb for the past 20 years? Could you not see that the Democrats circa 2000 to present have nothing in common with Jack Kennedy or any of the decent men and woman of the 60s, 70s, or 80s?
Could you not see the walls of our Blessed Union cracking?
And yet, perhaps it's not too late. Independents like myself along with folks on the Right have failed as we continue our downward spiral. But with your help, honorable people from the Left who truly love our country, we can, together, prevail.
Raised lower-middle-class by old-school, bleeding heart liberal but not particularly partisan-political single mom. Joined the ACLU at eighteen. Actually cried when Bill Clinton paused in accepting nomination to tell listeners from non-traditional or broken homes like his: don’t let anyone tell you belong any less. Was active in College Dems but an issues person, not a party functionary. Was offered VP spot in campus NOW chapter. Would’ve been delegate to 1996 Convention but quotas determined our district had to send a woman. Organized campus debates supporting affirmative action and opposing capital punishment. Was selected for internships at The Nation and Dissent. Spent a dozen weekends doing voter registration and troubleshooting mostly in West Philly for Obama 2012. Did organizing work in NYCHA buildings for a moderate reform DA candidate in Brooklyn. Worked on 2014 NYC Climate campaign. Something like a civil libertarian animal welfare environmentalist and pro-labor transracial solidarity economic populist.
Began to question foci and priorities in Obama’s second term. The increasing emphasis on one or two of three dimensions of identity to the exclusion of anyone who didn’t fit. (Why was My Brother’s Keeper first only for black boys and then also for Hispanic boys with First Nations heritage - but never for boys of Caucasian or Asian heritage? Why were post-election organizers so heavily tasked with normalizing illegal immigration as opposed to building coalitions to help all working poor and impoverished Americans?) Then, the heavy corporate-endorsed tilt, post-Occupy Wall Street toward a slick managerial professional class idenitarianism. The obvious lies and narratives around the killing of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown, etc. Why so much focus on ultra-divisive, zero-sum racial conflict, lying about statistics, and stereotyping, scapegoating, and demonizing people en masse simply for being born white, rather than working together for badly needed, common sense criminal justice reform? Why were the once most authoritative papers seemingly trying to stoke racial hysteria conflict? Then Hillary Clinton’s further elevation of narrow identitarian shout outs over unifying rhetoric and policy, culminating in labeling fully half of her opponent’s supporters “deplorables”. The party base had changed radically. So many outspoken Dems were essentially a culturally far-left, self-flatteringly cosmopolitan crew of the globalist managerial class elite. Their patronizing head-patting pandering to lower income nonwhites was risible; their raw open recreational hatred and contempt for “lower whites” was startling in its intensity. Go back a generation in upper middle class mores and many of these people would’ve been almost indistinguishable from more socially moderate, well-off suburban Republicans. I started getting into it with friends who kept using terms like “white trash” or stating flatly “buses are for losers. Their attitude to Bernie Sanders and his supporters was one of dismissive arrogant amusement. After I told one friend I’d simply been unable (from a safely very blue state) to vote for Hillary Clinton, he remarked that people simply “wouldn’t take their medicine”. Populism became conflated with fascism. Every syllable that didn’t jibe with the new progressive lexicon and framing was suddenly “racist” and “offensive”. People who knew the organizing work i’d done for voting rights and criminal justice reform began to strongly hint I was racist for raising objections to the arguments put forth in the latest book club favorites by Kendi and DiAngelo. I perhaps stupidly bothered to politely make the liberal left case against censorship, by highlighting the risks to actually marginalized sources in cozying up to big tech and federal law enforcement agencies in comment within a friend’s echo chamber post - and was immediately accused of defending fascists while being “mansplain-y” - before having comment deleted. The same friend then texted me to inform me I was in denial of my white male privilege and that she might consider being friends with me again in several years, if I sufficiently educate myself.
So yeah: politically homeless. Vegan animal rights activist, old-school civil libertarian, economic populist transracial solidarity liberal (yes, now with a few more empirically-informed centrist views). And there is no room for me in the present Democratic Party or progressive left. I’ve still never voted for a Republican in my life. But the cultural and institutional power of the authoritarian idenitarian left is now so sweeping, I think it’s dangerous to extend it across most of our elected offices and appointed positions. Maybe this sounds a bit hyperbolic, but I spent some time in school studying in depth what happened in The Former Yugoslavia and Rwanda and the behavior that proceeded it. There’s no guarantee we won’t see some of same extreme dehumanization and violent tribalism if we continue to essentialize identity divisions and push intergenerational collective vengeance as a righteous political program.
Ive always tended to be a liberal, maybe progressive in some cases. Now I share virtually no political overlap with what liberal politics has become. I was a liberal by default regarding race, BLM, empire, climate change, big business, etc., but since Trump Derangement Syndrom and the liberal/dem capture by wokism, vaccinism, big tech censorship, and rigid race and gender rightthink, I have become more conservative. It makes me sad that in a few years a whole swath of people who I thought should "know better" have become scared, manipulated, given up their rational capacities, shrunk into tribalism, and clamoured for the FBI, DOJ, big pharma, big goverment, big tech, etc., to save them. I remember how liberals scorned conservatives for such things after 9/11 with our resulting erosion of civil liberties. Now, because the saviors are biotech, Joe Biden, and "the science", they will assent to whatever new "patriot act" is proposed. Id shed a tear for our collective sitiation, but these last few years have hardened me.
I think we are in a stage of failing civilization that is breeding structural and social psychosis. I fear science and medicine have done irreperable harm to their credibility and I cannot fathom the fallout from that. We are running out of the energy advanced civilization requires, and renewables wont cut it.
Im just glad I live in the country where people have more freedom and capability to turn things around once collapse shifts into higher gear.
My evolution is pretty similar to lots of the commenters here. When I turned 18, I registered Green Party, though I usually voted Democrat. My core values are and always have been civil libertarian and anti-imperialist. I believed during the Bush era that the Democratic Party more or less shared those values, though I harbored no illusions regarding corporate influence over the party. I fell into the lesser of two evils camp, but was pretty critical of Obama for his corporate bailouts and complete failure to rollback the excesses of the War on Terror.
When Trump got elected, I saw him as an existential threat to Democracy. But I also moved abroad right after he won the election and resolved to tune out the drama I knew would unfold, intuitively sensing that I could fall victim to something like TDS. Then I tuned back in when Covid became a big deal and largely subscribed to the MSM/DNC party line at first. Then Floyd and the Great Awokening drama unfolded and I sensed something deeply troubling in the authoritarian and intellectually dishonest rhetoric being employed in the context of that movement. Then I gradually came to realize the liberal establishment had lost its marbles while I was gone, and it has only continued to get worse and worse. This all manifested most markedly around “defund the police” and “Covidianism.” And I further realized that these troubling tendencies had actually been there all along, causing me to reassess a lot of my beliefs about the world.
At this point, I’m a man without a party. I don’t consider myself a full on Libertarian because I believe consolidated corporate power can be just as bad as consolidated government power. I believe in limited government, a primary function of which is antitrust enforcement and protection of individual civil liberties. These views are quite consistent with the beliefs of the now much maligned founding fathers, and receive no expression in current mainstream political discourse. I believe we are slipping into a totalitarian system of government no matter which party is in charge. I’m deeply pessimistic and concerned about where this is all headed. I appreciate the Substack community for keeping me sane and letting me know I’m not the only one out there who feels this way.
I think my views haven't really changed in the past five years; I'm still the same old-school lefite I always was. When it comes to actual issues I'm still leaning left or hard left, but over these last five years "The Left" has completely lost me, and doesn't even feel left-leaning at all. Hell, they aren't even really "political" in the real sense. They're more like a caricature, or satirical performance art. Between the complete over-obsession with gender and race, and the dogmatic orthodoxy, I don't see anything I recognize, politically or socially or otherwise. I have to always identify them as "The Left" with quotation marks included, just to keep their distance from those of us on the actual left.
It's even worse when I see it in so many of my friends. For example, people who HATED Black Bloc during the 2003 anti-Iraq protests are now praising every window-smasher they see, as long as they perceive them to be on the same side. And now there are no questions allowed, no nuance accepted; only the official dogma of the day.
"Because we say so" is not a valid political position, but it's all I see now: "Why? Because we said so, and you are now ostracized as a Bad Person for asking questions."
I was an excited Obama voter. But, in the early days of his presidency, he showed how poor of a man he was. How, you might ask. Putting Hilary Clinton in as SoS. I cannot think of a less competent person, who failed up at every point in her life. Now, I was always a civil liberties Democrat and came from a long line of both Progressive and Civil lib left, but my father was always a Republican, so I got a strong sense of both. I came of age during the Regan years and was always of the opinion that Meese was one of the worst people as AG.
It has become increasingly obvious that the political party with Cultural Power, as the R's did then, and the D's do now, will attempt to push the boundaries of civil liberties, as the feedback loops are all out of wack; in other words, they don't have any ability to listen to the other side culturally, only to their own voices. And this takes the feedback of approx half the county and drowns it out. In the Regan years, we got the religious right, and now we have the religious left.
Oh, and Merrick Garland is tenfold worse than Meese.
Pretty much same progression as what's in your post....1.) far left, 2.) centrist? I support all the same economic proposals as I did before, but I feel a lot of resistance toward the current progressive conversation about race and policing and just the praxis of how we should view people who are to the right of us, 3.) Bernie losing made me really readjust my views, I don't think progressive ideas are less viable because of his loss, but the way we campaign and discuss them should be smarter. His loss is when I started to feel a break from the 'left' (they viewed it as proof that the system was rigged, I thought there were actual lessons to learn) that wad followed by a bunch of little breaks in reality (describing Jan 6 as a coup, misportrayals of the extent of police brutality, etc) that culminated in me feeling like I no longer identify with the online left