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.
I used to think the patriotism of my grandfather’s generation was kind of corny if not slightly suffocating. But the identitarian left has sailed right past honest critiques of this country’s mistakes and common care, respect, and responsibility based on both individual self worth and citizenship, to actively hating this country and everything we have in common as an organizing principle. LeBron James putting up a virtual wanted poster for a white police officer trying to save black girl from being stabbed to death, while praising the CCP. Cori Bush choosing the 4th of July to claim black Americans were never freed. One argument I’ve kept at with friends still wedded to DNC politics and most of the current progressive agenda: positive, inclusive patriotism is the best antidote to nihilistic racism; citizenship is the best antidote to tribalism. One (sadly, former) friend angrily implied that criticism of (all forms of) identity politics could only mean a blind or bad faith retreat to total white cultural and political hegemony. (Has he looked around at the demographics and culture of this country since, say 1990?)
His response was: we all have identities! Meaning we should center and privilege every non-white, non-male, etc. identity as the core value, perspective, and interest of every supposedly currently oppressed and once marginalized group. I replied: we all have lots of dimensions and identities, some more or less important depending on context - but we’re all Americans. This led to me being compared to Archie Bunker and told my view is “my country right or wrong”. Close friend of 20+ years who knows very well my actual principles and the work I’ve done to advance people of precisely the groups he implied I’m bigoted against. Comfortably middle to upper middle class couple, both with advanced degrees. His wife isn’t white, but she does have two Ivy League degrees and openly ridicules poor white people. Just an anecdote. But this is someone with whom I used to rarely and only mildly degree about politics. It’s really true that so long as Republicans are a tribal enemy that negative integration can prevent someone like me from truly examining lots of moral and policy issues and priorities from within the Team Democrat bundle that we’re supposed to unquestioningly work to advance.
Archie Bunker! Haha! That’s a good one. Your friend can’t take into consideration anything he actually knows about you as an individual because his ideology won’t allow it. It’s shocking and painful when it happens. You’re left standing there saying, but you know me, right? Knowing you is irrelevant. If you do not say the right things, you must be corrected or called Archie Bunker. When Candace Owens started talking about the “Democratic Plantation” of thought control I figured she was orbiting Jupiter. She’s not. Welcome to the authoritarian left and the desperate need whites within it have to construct a tolerable identity, which is hard to do inside an ideology that says that you are a white privileged oppressor first, foremost, and always. You’d call your mother Archie Bunker to get out from under that kind of pressure, even for a moment. As for casually ridiculing poor whites, that’s typical as well. The journalist Batya Ungar Sargon has done some fantastic work on how the upper-middle class and elites benefit economically from identity politics at the expense of all of the poor. Ridiculing and demonizing the white ones is at the core of how this works.
I love Batya Ungar Sargon. She presents opposition to manipulative identitarian woke corporatism so cogently but also in such a warm, friendly way. It’s harder to dismiss someone like that and easier to want to invite them back. The host of this Substack made a similarly sharp, insightful case, explaining the clear personal and group motives, incentives, and rewards for comfortably middle and upper class whites to both performatively acknowledge and extirpate their white sin (vague upper class guilt for their actual privilege and opportunity hoarding) while giddily projecting and transmitting it onto actually disadvantaged white people who both lack much if any privilege to confront and atone for and crucially who lack the theory and lexicon to signal acknowledgement of their sins and commitment to allyship. Of course the credentialed managerial class professionals so many of whom personally benefited from the financialization of the economy and globalization’s offshoring, outsourcing and embrace of cheap imported undocumented labor, are not sacrificing anything in their phony atonement. They’re preening online and using identity politics as a power play to separate themselves from the scapegoated deplorables and stake claim to permanent status as “good whites”, “who get it”. Have you ever seen an upper middle class white professional or tenured academic say: you know, I really think a queer woman of color should have my job/my kid’s prized admissions slot. Reihan Salam has written about the game already privileged and ambitious, upwardly mobile non-whites play in adopting this same language and posture, both pandering to the true white upper crust and happily, self-servingly weaponizing their own identities to climb the ladder, while claiming to be oppressed and harmed by impoverished white people hundreds of miles away.
In the case of this former friend, I’m not entirely sure what happened re: his own conception and framing of these issues. But I do remember him responding sort in exasperation when I asked what it said that so many working class and working poor people who’d been Democrats their entire lives felt so abandoned, so demeaned they’d done the once unthinkable and begun voting for Republicans. He said something like: well, now our party has people who care about education and the environment and aren’t in denial about science (possible also implying they’d left due to discomfort with tolerance and equality!)
I may have a different perspective than many of friends current and former, because we were a mom and two young kids fleeing an abusive marriage who ended up in “The Golden Ghetto” of a middle class to quite affluent suburb of a Midwestern city, probably at about the bottom 2-5% in income. We qualified for federally-subsidized school lunches and were seemingly virtually the only single parent family in sight. That suburb used to be what we’d now call bright red. Not so right-wing on social and cultural issues, but very chamber of commerce Republican. Summer of last year it was absolutely clotted with Biden signs. And of course BLM signs and countless ones exhorting “Enough!” (Some houses had two or three in the yard to show they were extra, especially on board with the BLM narrative). I’d go jogging there at night following comfortingly nostalgic visits to library, gym, grocery. And virtually the only places I saw Trump signs were in the windows(!) of cramped, homely two or three bedroom houses on mostly treeless lots with carports not garages. Working class blocks at the very edges of the suburb, near where I grew up.
It really clicked for me last year: the holier than thou, competitively posturing, woke affluent professionals in the sprawling houses registered with me, were so palpably recognizable to me as Republicans. They were the past generation’s party realignment embodied. They’re registered Dems now or perhaps independents. They’re got the same lacrosse nets in their front yards, the same girls varsity tennis signs. That friend would probably look at that and call it progress. Of course he grew up in a now lives in a slightly different version of a suburb like that, too. This is his personal, professional, residential milieu. As for all the critical theory he seems to have absorbed and begun to regurgitate, we sure didn’t get it at the competitive, then quite mainstream left of center, giant state university we attended. But his wife, the one with the - correction - one Seven Sisters and one Ivy degree, apparently believes all of it. She grew up in a comfortable enough middle class two-parent family, but for some reason appears to carry a chip on her shoulder that the suburbs she grew up in were those of a Midwestern city and not, say, Vancouver or San Francisco. And yeah, a lot of such places weren’t very diverse a generation or two ago. People didn’t have much global perspective or cultural sensitivity. It’s unquestionably a very good thing that’s changed. But outside of places like Kensington Brooklyn some group is going to be a majority and the rest minorities. But we aren’t Japan or South Korea. We aren’t Poland or Hungary. For some reason she feels a rage at the least advantaged white people and always cruelly punches down.
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. .
True story: I was painting a house in Pittsburg, CA with my good friend, Dirty White Bob, leaning into a baseboard, when the owner of the house walked in and announced, "Boys, I have some terrible news. The president (Reagan) has been shot." I almost fell over and blurted out, without thinking, "That's great, did they get Nancy too?" The look of horror on her face was...what can I say...priceless. She didn't fire us though.
Just curious since you’re in the belly of the beast: what do you all do about Asian Americans? Treat them as white? Is there any nuanced way to wriggle out of accepting them, or just plain racist decision making? I am Asian American, so this overt racism doesn’t surprise me. And you voted Biden? Even in 2020? Oh well...🤦🏻♂️😆
I am a 39-year-old liberal feminist professor. My experience mirrors yours. I find myself seeking intellectual peers to no avail, especially among white women (like myself) who seem so riddled with guilt that they refuse to openly challenge the DEI dogma or Title IX hysteria we are constantly fed by our institutions. Some of my students have open minds, but I mostly notice this among only graduate students who are around my age. The 20somethings only know Trump and the "new" (woke/sensational) New York Times and clickbait on social media. McWhorter is a breath of fresh air, but he's in a unique position to be able to make critical arguments that someone like myself would never dare to utter.
That expression is fantastic. Currently reading through Bernard Ollivier’s travelogues of walking the Silk Road, and he’s in Turkey at the moment. I happily add this to my bank of Turkish cultural knowledge lol
This is especially poignant; on Friday my grandmother and disabled uncle are moving from their home to an assisted living apartment building. It’s a good and necessary move, but all of her belongings won’t be able to come along with them. As I write this, my husband is prepping an area in our living room to receive her piano that she bought in 1962, when my dad was a toddler.
Having moved as much of three-plus generations remaining possessions and memorabilia into a three bedroom apartment following a return home from Brooklyn to help at the end of my mom’s life and in the aftermath, my (probably wildly impractical) advice is: keep everything you possibly can or share among any other family. Living in BK made minimalism necessary, but it’s truly amazing how many wonderful and emotionally treasured but forgotten or unexpected family heirlooms I’ve gradually unearthed. It’s made me even prouder of my family for what they overcame and so grateful for the values they passed along.
Wonderful advice. They’ll be signing an initial 3-month lease, after which we’ll sell their house if they want to stay. While I feel the melancholy that such changes naturally induces, I also am looking forward to going through their things. There are wooden sculptures my grandad bought for her in Hong Kong; there’s a book of my grandpa’s Valentines my great grandma put together for him when he was in grade school (not sure why, but it’s precious); and handmade Christmas ornaments from the 50s. Who knows what else we’ll find.
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.
I too am a classical liberal. I've always been a huge defender of civil liberties & civil rights. I grew up during Jim Crow and the 2nd feminist wave. While I continue to be a feminist I 'm most certainly not in sync with some of the modern day feminists. Like you I see glaring economic inequality and a system being gamed by those at the top. I'm an anti-imperialist and am totally disgusted by our politicians who no longer represent the people nor support our Constitution. Watching my political party (Democrats) turn into these insane, authoritarian censors has been jarring to say the least. I didn't vote for Obama the 2nd time (realized he was a fraud in his 1st term) and didn't vote for Biden or Hillary. These days I have more in common with populist Republicans than Democrats.
Yes—now that “people who menstruate” and “pregnant people” is a thing, and the transgender rate amongst girls is up 4000% because they don’t want to be women but Abigail Shrier is banned/not in my local library while everything anti-racist is—I’ve been thinking about what y’all second wave feminists did for us. I took it for granted that women would always have the rights we were born with. Thank you for what you did, and I hope we can get it back.
Another thing that really bothers me is that even the ACLU has lost it's way. It's heartbreaking. There are so many that have lost their minds beginning with Russiagate, Jan. 6, impeachment and now Covid mandates. I'm no Trump fan but I didn't lose my mind over him and turn into a raving authoritarian. It's really quite creepy right now : (
I call them the Moral Majority Left. LOL They truly remind me of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. They are smug, condescending know-it-all authoritarians who try to force their views onto everyone around them. I've been fighting those kind of people my entire life, no matter which side of the aisle they might be on. LOL
I wasn't terrified of Trump. In fact, aside from his over-the-top theatrics I thought his policies were pretty standard establishment fare. The one thing I did like about him is that because he was not in the club, so to speak, he frequently outed the true nature of the other politicians & media hacks. They would get so upset when he didn't do the normal political speak that most of them use to cover up what is really happening that they ended up letting their own masks slip to go after him. I found that very revealing and greatly entertaining to watch them self immolate just to GET Trump. All those lofty principles they pretended to support went right out the window in plain sight of the entire country. There were many, many aha moments.
That being said, support of Trump let the mask slip on evangelicals. It’s worth noting that the disaffection of so many evangelicals with their peers’ full-throated support of a man who embodied the opposite of all their virtues pushed a large segment of people away from religion and into the new religion of the woke. That’s what happened to me (the cracks and fissures were already there, but Trump was the wedge that split the stone). Fortunately for me I’m something of a questioner anyway, so it didn’t take long to see the Elect (as McWhorter calls them) sliding right into that religion shaped hole for so many people. No thanks. That’s a no from me.
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.
Judging from my friends, I think there are definitely millions, especially those with school age children. I would say about one out of three left-leaning friends have quietly told me they are not happy and consider themselves independent at this point. None of them have registered as such and are still on the Democratic rolls. This election cycle is going to shock a lot of people. I'm not at all gleeful about it, but it is going to shock the left nonetheless.
I like that there is still a lot of viewpoint diversity and divergent stories and paths being described here (so sincerely and thoughtfully). But admittedly I’m especially fascinated by the stories of people like me who not so many years ago were clearly liberal and to the left and virtually or exclusively supported Dems (my unraveling began around 2013 and picked up some speed in 2016, and really gained momentum seeing the insane reaction to Trump and then whom the admin of the supposedly most centrist, unifying Dem actually appoints or nominates to serve his party’s agenda and how he governs).
Speaking of children in school and education, you may have seen Matt Taibbi first installment based on in-depth reporting on the results in Loudon County. One early anecdote relates seeing parents of South and East Asian heritage almost alone among voters in pausing to take GOP sample ballots. The thought was these were regular Dem voters who’d had enough and were at least for now crossing over. It’s not just CRT and the worst DEI-based pedagogy infecting every grade, classroom, and subject. It’s the endless unscientific dishonestly imposed school closings, so burdensome on parents and destructive to kids’ learning. It’s heavy-handed masking and distancing requirements imposed on little kids. And it’s ending merit admissions tests and getting rid of AP and other advanced track classes, especially in STEM, due to “equity”. I don’t happen to have kids of the human variety, but for me, merit tests were the great leveler for a kid from a lower-income single parent family bereft of networks or resources to call upon. AP and other advanced classes were what redeemed the stultifying routines of high school and made classes almost exciting mini-communities based around more challenging work and vibrantly free discussions of challenging ideas.
I read that and see the same playing out here in PA Philly suburbs. Although not in my own top rated district yet. We are a few years behind Louden County. But it’s slowly shifting back to the right. We elected 4 new SB members last month- all Dems- but our margin was way slimmer than even the 2020 presidential election was.
I live in Bucks County, same creeping culture war in the school board. We were essentially "split" with 4 dems, 4 republicans and 1 swing vote. When that member voted against a mask mandate, he received a death threat and resigned. In the next election, the board swung republican 6-3. I hate that we're even thinking in "republican" and "democrat" terms for school boards. Partisan politics in education will end badly no matter who's in charge.
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.
I had a very similar experience with DSA. I was always vaguely socialist but joined officially in 2016 and stuck it out until 2018, mainly because I was still involved in some union stuff with my university. But it just got worse, and worse, and worse with all the empty identity rituals. It's comical. I've got stories...
Yeah, the left has lost its mind so fast, I find myself saying “wait—why was I into this?”
And the answer is: I wanted Medicare-for-All, a higher minimum wage, the eradication of homelessness, better prison conditions, more oversight and accountability for police, paid leave for workers, unions for Uber drivers and Starbucks workers, and so on.
And that still sounds good to me—all of it! I would never have wanted censorship, “identity politics” (a disparaging term that is still a euphemism), an end to law enforcement and immigration control, anti-Asian affirmative action in the high schools and colleges, unhinged activism in elementary school classrooms, etc.
I came for the health insurance, and after I got in the door, I was served “women’s sports are unnecessary, math is racist, and looting is equity.”
In some ways, I’ve “changed” the way that Matt Taibbi, Michael Tracey, and Glenn Greenwald have changed—i.e., not at all.
But on some major issues, I’ll admit I’m shifting.
I read a blogpost recently talking about the “packages of beliefs” that we accept when a group is on our side on the issues that matter most.
In a sense, it’s positive: you benefit from others’ work, and you lend your own voice and time to things that matter to them. Coalition-building requires compromise. The bad part is that you stop making independent judgments.
For most of my life, people who called themselves “liberals, “progressives,” or “leftists” were on my side on the issues that mattered most to me.
But over time, those battles were either decisively won or lost—or progressives evolved away from a position that I still held.
When you no longer share important positions with a political/cultural tribe, you start opening the package and considering each belief individually. The core beliefs of the center, center-left, and left are all pretty alarming to me right now.
And there have been some sharp jolts in the last few years: the Clinton/Sanders primary, Russiagate (obviously a dumb-yet-sinister scam from day one—I can’t believe it worked), the legacy media’s plunge into the gutter, the fast rise of neoracism, the midnight flights of illegal migrants from Texas to Florida, and above all the global response to COVID.
I think the political party template we’ve all operated from needs to be changed. Instead of that, I believe that the template is a world government using all nation state political parties to advance a certain global agenda. It’s always been there, I believe, but the perfect symmetry of almost all governments in their Covid clampdowns on civil liberties was pretty revealing.
They were/are arrogant enough to even brag about “you’ll own nothing and be happy.” I think this slow awakening and awareness of people from all parties is in reaction to this.
Wow, thanks for writing all that. Your experience sounds so similar to my own that I have chills, it is eerie.
I like how you opened with a discussion of the meaninglessness of the "left / center / right" terms. There is literally no topic on which you could guarantee that you share views with every other member of "your team", and yet people get so certain that their team is good and the "the others" are pure evil incarnate. It is blindness of the most intentional and dangerous of sorts.
I will perhaps share some of my own experiences further down.
Please do share. It’s certainly true in my experience that the “team” mentality means you tend to spout talking point rationales, excuses, and evasions, and neglect rigorously investigating issues and policies on their own terms and being fully honest even with yourself about what you truly think about them. When friends who are still really wedded to the whole omnibus Dem platform and various progressive left assumption get a little testy at me perhaps introducing some cognitive dissonance into that comfortably sealed partisan identity, I tell them tongue in cheek that I’m an independent social critic now - and that every worthy party and movement needs and benefits from honest criticism.
It’s too bad we can’t all be IRL friends—a lot of the people in this thread feel eerily, as you put it, like kindred spirits. This whole conversation is an unexpected blast of sanity.
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.
I will add that I would have never guessed five years ago that in 2021 I would be listening to The American Conservative podcast and liking it sometimes and reading people like Patrick Deneen and Michael Lind and liking them, too. I guess because I am open-minded and can hold many ideas in this mind at the same time without exploding that makes me a liberal? These political labels are so confusing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
To be clear I was never a partisan Democrat. I've always distrusted and disliked politicians. But I believed in the civil society part of the left. The alarm bells went off when that part of the left went crazy.
Just speaking for myself, one reason is the presidency of GW Bush - a far worse president and far scarier administration in my view than Donald Trump’s. I tell Dem and progressive friends this all the time and have never heard a persuasive response. I can enumerate the reasons I think this if you like. But after eight years of that it’s easy to get caught up in the need to win the next election. And in order to do that at an activist or staff level and persuade and motivate others you often have to suspend your rational suspicion to a degree and buy into and push a biographical narrative and party platform. Two friends of mine had had Barack Obama as a prof at U Chicago Law and spoke favorably of him. His message of one America, of reconciling across divisions and both honoring and embracing our country’s founding principles and working to extend and redeem them to all of our people resonated strongly. Yes, I was let down in a way as soon as I saw his chosen-by-Citibank crew of Harvard neoliberals appointed to virtually every economic post. I found the “coalition of the ascendent” rhetoric discordant coming from a campaign and administration supposedly inspired to unite. But to take but one major policy issue: for all of the failures and frustrations with the ACA, it’s way too easy to forget just how horrific the private health care system could be prior, due to cruelly expansive and often retroactively applied denials and exclusions due to preexisting conditions; countless employees of private insurers were tasked to go line by through lifetime records looking for inconsistencies and pretexts to drop people when they were in most desperate need of care; there were rigid limits for catastrophic care and lifetime caps on benefits; desperately working poor people and truly vulnerable families couldn’t qualify for Medicaid in most states. I could go on. Banning or changing these rampant cruelties of the system are extremely popular now; they’re widely taken for granted now. But presidents had been trying pass comprehensive reform of health care since at least the 1930s and both Dems and Republicans had failed. That’s not a political or partisan failure; it hurt tens upon tens of millions of Americans. Too much government direct control and that’s ruled out as socialism; too much regulation of the private market and people who had good private insurance and steady means of accessing it complain and disruptions and expenses. That’s not trivial - it’s expensive, even a hardship. But the only way to cover many many more people and ban the worst abuses of the industry - that could even come close to passing Congress - required guaranteeing private insurers customers and profits. Covering more expensive people who aren’t subsidized by good jobs at private employers was very expensive. Ending lifetime caps and limits on catastrophic coverage and the ability to deny or drop anyone at virtually any time for any reason was very expensive. It’s shameful and inexcusable the Obama admin gave away so much especially to Big Pharma - and outright embarrassing Medicare and Medicaid can’t bargain down drug prices. But I sure don’t want to go back to the bad old days before the ACA, flawed as it was. Remember: for several years Republicans made repealing it their central issue and both got hammered politically and failed to convince the public more generally that the benefits of a repeal remotely outweighed the risks. That’s just one major policy example. I think sometimes more right of center independents, fiscal/government libertarians and conservatives see more traditional liberals like me, who are open-minded and who do change our views somewhat based on changing results, cumulative empirical evidence, and sound reasoning, and express exasperation that we didn’t vote your way and share you views however many years ago. One reason is because we don’t - then or even now - share all or most of your views and policy priorities. And that’s fine. Having to agree about virtually everything was never the point. What’s important is we can unite around things like love of country, valuing citizenship, respecting each other as individuals based on our conduct and character, valuing equal opportunity, taking The Bill of Rights seriously, and sharing fundamental rational liberal Enlightenment values. I don’t expect to agree with more conservative fellow citizens about everything, but I expect we can sit down and talk about what we do have in common and work together on that basis. That’s become nearly impossible with much of the cultish, hyper-dogmatic identitarian, authoritarian left.
I think you’re overestimating the decency of the 60s, 70s and 80s. If it weren’t for Obamacare, my mentally unstable brother in law wouldn’t have any kind of health coverage. I count that as a pretty big win.
I'm glad your brother got the care he needed, but we could have done that without Obamacare. We lost our health insurance and my friend had to drop his therapist and medications because he didn't qualify for coverage and his costs jumped 150%. A lot of Dems went to the GOP because of that.
The entire purpose of this thread is to answer the question you raised—and people are (almost without exception) leaving thoughtful, self-aware, interesting replies.
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."
When I was telling my normie friends “we should have an NHS-style health-care system” (I’ve lived in England, and the horror stories about it are BS. Nationalized health care is more important than public schooling), they would say: “that’s unrealistic—it’ll never happen.”
In fact, ANY medium-strength proposal to make life better for people met with affectionate chuckles.
Now many those same people are denouncing “the poison of whiteness” and saying “violence is a legitimate means of political expression” and that “the system, [which system? All of them. The system of systems] cannot be reformed; it must be dismantled.”
People who literally never had a thought about race in their lives before 2021 now tell me (online, where they can be seen) that “race matters, perhaps above all else” and “white logic is a tool of the oppressor.”
What. A. Bunch. Of. Phonies. And. Cowards.
The idea of politely listening to sermons from these people is unacceptable to me.
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.
Hah! Forgot the question. In the last five years, I went from a dissenting Democrat to pulling the lever for Trump. I couldn't see voting for anyone else after the way the left and Democrats acted during his admin. Free speech is too important.
Obama also decided soon after he took office that, as an olive branch to Bush, he wouldn’t prosecute torturers.
You are simply not allowed, as the executive, to decline to prosecute torturers. You are obliged to do it.
I disliked Obama from that moment on—and loathed him after it became clear that he was going to continue the wars and drone murders, and keep Guantanamo Bay open.
Like, say, John Yoo, Obama seems, when he talks, like a thoughtful, well-intentioned, reasonable guy. Like Yoo, he is in fact a moral disgrace.
I’ve asked partisan Dem friends: do you think Merrick Garland sees everything right-wing through the lens of the Oklahoma City bombing? Behind his personally mild-mannered, decorous presentation there’s kind of a low-key progressive authoritarian in there. So many people saw him only as the sympathetic foil to Mitch McConnell’s partisan villainy. I remember some of the criticism of Garland from the more independent activist left at the time of his nomination for the Supreme Court were that he was too deferential to federal law enforcement and generally too pro-big business. But a lot has changed in even just those few years. He seems plenty deferential not only to an in some ways corrupt, partisan, out of control federal law enforcement, but also to the more extremist identitarian ideologues and authoritarians appointed and nominated to many influential political and policy posts within the Biden Administration.
I wonder how much of Justice is actually run by people at the lower levels, and that Garland, much like Mueller, has very little idea of the daily going ons of the country. Not that excuses anything, rather it actually makes the whole thing worse, for no one that clueless should have any say in the running of the country.
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
How about tossing in the Russian collusion, fine people on both sides, and drinking bleach nonsense shouted at us from the Left's complicit legacy media. Are all of the honest classic liberals dead or just silenced? That's what flipped me into an Alt-Middle type of thinker.
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.
I used to think the patriotism of my grandfather’s generation was kind of corny if not slightly suffocating. But the identitarian left has sailed right past honest critiques of this country’s mistakes and common care, respect, and responsibility based on both individual self worth and citizenship, to actively hating this country and everything we have in common as an organizing principle. LeBron James putting up a virtual wanted poster for a white police officer trying to save black girl from being stabbed to death, while praising the CCP. Cori Bush choosing the 4th of July to claim black Americans were never freed. One argument I’ve kept at with friends still wedded to DNC politics and most of the current progressive agenda: positive, inclusive patriotism is the best antidote to nihilistic racism; citizenship is the best antidote to tribalism. One (sadly, former) friend angrily implied that criticism of (all forms of) identity politics could only mean a blind or bad faith retreat to total white cultural and political hegemony. (Has he looked around at the demographics and culture of this country since, say 1990?)
His response was: we all have identities! Meaning we should center and privilege every non-white, non-male, etc. identity as the core value, perspective, and interest of every supposedly currently oppressed and once marginalized group. I replied: we all have lots of dimensions and identities, some more or less important depending on context - but we’re all Americans. This led to me being compared to Archie Bunker and told my view is “my country right or wrong”. Close friend of 20+ years who knows very well my actual principles and the work I’ve done to advance people of precisely the groups he implied I’m bigoted against. Comfortably middle to upper middle class couple, both with advanced degrees. His wife isn’t white, but she does have two Ivy League degrees and openly ridicules poor white people. Just an anecdote. But this is someone with whom I used to rarely and only mildly degree about politics. It’s really true that so long as Republicans are a tribal enemy that negative integration can prevent someone like me from truly examining lots of moral and policy issues and priorities from within the Team Democrat bundle that we’re supposed to unquestioningly work to advance.
Archie Bunker! Haha! That’s a good one. Your friend can’t take into consideration anything he actually knows about you as an individual because his ideology won’t allow it. It’s shocking and painful when it happens. You’re left standing there saying, but you know me, right? Knowing you is irrelevant. If you do not say the right things, you must be corrected or called Archie Bunker. When Candace Owens started talking about the “Democratic Plantation” of thought control I figured she was orbiting Jupiter. She’s not. Welcome to the authoritarian left and the desperate need whites within it have to construct a tolerable identity, which is hard to do inside an ideology that says that you are a white privileged oppressor first, foremost, and always. You’d call your mother Archie Bunker to get out from under that kind of pressure, even for a moment. As for casually ridiculing poor whites, that’s typical as well. The journalist Batya Ungar Sargon has done some fantastic work on how the upper-middle class and elites benefit economically from identity politics at the expense of all of the poor. Ridiculing and demonizing the white ones is at the core of how this works.
I love Batya Ungar Sargon. She presents opposition to manipulative identitarian woke corporatism so cogently but also in such a warm, friendly way. It’s harder to dismiss someone like that and easier to want to invite them back. The host of this Substack made a similarly sharp, insightful case, explaining the clear personal and group motives, incentives, and rewards for comfortably middle and upper class whites to both performatively acknowledge and extirpate their white sin (vague upper class guilt for their actual privilege and opportunity hoarding) while giddily projecting and transmitting it onto actually disadvantaged white people who both lack much if any privilege to confront and atone for and crucially who lack the theory and lexicon to signal acknowledgement of their sins and commitment to allyship. Of course the credentialed managerial class professionals so many of whom personally benefited from the financialization of the economy and globalization’s offshoring, outsourcing and embrace of cheap imported undocumented labor, are not sacrificing anything in their phony atonement. They’re preening online and using identity politics as a power play to separate themselves from the scapegoated deplorables and stake claim to permanent status as “good whites”, “who get it”. Have you ever seen an upper middle class white professional or tenured academic say: you know, I really think a queer woman of color should have my job/my kid’s prized admissions slot. Reihan Salam has written about the game already privileged and ambitious, upwardly mobile non-whites play in adopting this same language and posture, both pandering to the true white upper crust and happily, self-servingly weaponizing their own identities to climb the ladder, while claiming to be oppressed and harmed by impoverished white people hundreds of miles away.
In the case of this former friend, I’m not entirely sure what happened re: his own conception and framing of these issues. But I do remember him responding sort in exasperation when I asked what it said that so many working class and working poor people who’d been Democrats their entire lives felt so abandoned, so demeaned they’d done the once unthinkable and begun voting for Republicans. He said something like: well, now our party has people who care about education and the environment and aren’t in denial about science (possible also implying they’d left due to discomfort with tolerance and equality!)
I may have a different perspective than many of friends current and former, because we were a mom and two young kids fleeing an abusive marriage who ended up in “The Golden Ghetto” of a middle class to quite affluent suburb of a Midwestern city, probably at about the bottom 2-5% in income. We qualified for federally-subsidized school lunches and were seemingly virtually the only single parent family in sight. That suburb used to be what we’d now call bright red. Not so right-wing on social and cultural issues, but very chamber of commerce Republican. Summer of last year it was absolutely clotted with Biden signs. And of course BLM signs and countless ones exhorting “Enough!” (Some houses had two or three in the yard to show they were extra, especially on board with the BLM narrative). I’d go jogging there at night following comfortingly nostalgic visits to library, gym, grocery. And virtually the only places I saw Trump signs were in the windows(!) of cramped, homely two or three bedroom houses on mostly treeless lots with carports not garages. Working class blocks at the very edges of the suburb, near where I grew up.
It really clicked for me last year: the holier than thou, competitively posturing, woke affluent professionals in the sprawling houses registered with me, were so palpably recognizable to me as Republicans. They were the past generation’s party realignment embodied. They’re registered Dems now or perhaps independents. They’re got the same lacrosse nets in their front yards, the same girls varsity tennis signs. That friend would probably look at that and call it progress. Of course he grew up in a now lives in a slightly different version of a suburb like that, too. This is his personal, professional, residential milieu. As for all the critical theory he seems to have absorbed and begun to regurgitate, we sure didn’t get it at the competitive, then quite mainstream left of center, giant state university we attended. But his wife, the one with the - correction - one Seven Sisters and one Ivy degree, apparently believes all of it. She grew up in a comfortable enough middle class two-parent family, but for some reason appears to carry a chip on her shoulder that the suburbs she grew up in were those of a Midwestern city and not, say, Vancouver or San Francisco. And yeah, a lot of such places weren’t very diverse a generation or two ago. People didn’t have much global perspective or cultural sensitivity. It’s unquestionably a very good thing that’s changed. But outside of places like Kensington Brooklyn some group is going to be a majority and the rest minorities. But we aren’t Japan or South Korea. We aren’t Poland or Hungary. For some reason she feels a rage at the least advantaged white people and always cruelly punches down.
The catastrophic effect of contemporary “progressive” culture on art is under-discussed.
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. .
True story: I was painting a house in Pittsburg, CA with my good friend, Dirty White Bob, leaning into a baseboard, when the owner of the house walked in and announced, "Boys, I have some terrible news. The president (Reagan) has been shot." I almost fell over and blurted out, without thinking, "That's great, did they get Nancy too?" The look of horror on her face was...what can I say...priceless. She didn't fire us though.
Just curious since you’re in the belly of the beast: what do you all do about Asian Americans? Treat them as white? Is there any nuanced way to wriggle out of accepting them, or just plain racist decision making? I am Asian American, so this overt racism doesn’t surprise me. And you voted Biden? Even in 2020? Oh well...🤦🏻♂️😆
I am a 39-year-old liberal feminist professor. My experience mirrors yours. I find myself seeking intellectual peers to no avail, especially among white women (like myself) who seem so riddled with guilt that they refuse to openly challenge the DEI dogma or Title IX hysteria we are constantly fed by our institutions. Some of my students have open minds, but I mostly notice this among only graduate students who are around my age. The 20somethings only know Trump and the "new" (woke/sensational) New York Times and clickbait on social media. McWhorter is a breath of fresh air, but he's in a unique position to be able to make critical arguments that someone like myself would never dare to utter.
That expression is fantastic. Currently reading through Bernard Ollivier’s travelogues of walking the Silk Road, and he’s in Turkey at the moment. I happily add this to my bank of Turkish cultural knowledge lol
This is especially poignant; on Friday my grandmother and disabled uncle are moving from their home to an assisted living apartment building. It’s a good and necessary move, but all of her belongings won’t be able to come along with them. As I write this, my husband is prepping an area in our living room to receive her piano that she bought in 1962, when my dad was a toddler.
Having moved as much of three-plus generations remaining possessions and memorabilia into a three bedroom apartment following a return home from Brooklyn to help at the end of my mom’s life and in the aftermath, my (probably wildly impractical) advice is: keep everything you possibly can or share among any other family. Living in BK made minimalism necessary, but it’s truly amazing how many wonderful and emotionally treasured but forgotten or unexpected family heirlooms I’ve gradually unearthed. It’s made me even prouder of my family for what they overcame and so grateful for the values they passed along.
Wonderful advice. They’ll be signing an initial 3-month lease, after which we’ll sell their house if they want to stay. While I feel the melancholy that such changes naturally induces, I also am looking forward to going through their things. There are wooden sculptures my grandad bought for her in Hong Kong; there’s a book of my grandpa’s Valentines my great grandma put together for him when he was in grade school (not sure why, but it’s precious); and handmade Christmas ornaments from the 50s. Who knows what else we’ll find.
Yeah, until they snip it down there and slap on the boobies, they’re still men to me. Otherwise, it’s just cosplaying at women’s expense.
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.
I too am a classical liberal. I've always been a huge defender of civil liberties & civil rights. I grew up during Jim Crow and the 2nd feminist wave. While I continue to be a feminist I 'm most certainly not in sync with some of the modern day feminists. Like you I see glaring economic inequality and a system being gamed by those at the top. I'm an anti-imperialist and am totally disgusted by our politicians who no longer represent the people nor support our Constitution. Watching my political party (Democrats) turn into these insane, authoritarian censors has been jarring to say the least. I didn't vote for Obama the 2nd time (realized he was a fraud in his 1st term) and didn't vote for Biden or Hillary. These days I have more in common with populist Republicans than Democrats.
Yes—now that “people who menstruate” and “pregnant people” is a thing, and the transgender rate amongst girls is up 4000% because they don’t want to be women but Abigail Shrier is banned/not in my local library while everything anti-racist is—I’ve been thinking about what y’all second wave feminists did for us. I took it for granted that women would always have the rights we were born with. Thank you for what you did, and I hope we can get it back.
Another thing that really bothers me is that even the ACLU has lost it's way. It's heartbreaking. There are so many that have lost their minds beginning with Russiagate, Jan. 6, impeachment and now Covid mandates. I'm no Trump fan but I didn't lose my mind over him and turn into a raving authoritarian. It's really quite creepy right now : (
I call them the Moral Majority Left. LOL They truly remind me of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority. They are smug, condescending know-it-all authoritarians who try to force their views onto everyone around them. I've been fighting those kind of people my entire life, no matter which side of the aisle they might be on. LOL
I wasn't terrified of Trump. In fact, aside from his over-the-top theatrics I thought his policies were pretty standard establishment fare. The one thing I did like about him is that because he was not in the club, so to speak, he frequently outed the true nature of the other politicians & media hacks. They would get so upset when he didn't do the normal political speak that most of them use to cover up what is really happening that they ended up letting their own masks slip to go after him. I found that very revealing and greatly entertaining to watch them self immolate just to GET Trump. All those lofty principles they pretended to support went right out the window in plain sight of the entire country. There were many, many aha moments.
That being said, support of Trump let the mask slip on evangelicals. It’s worth noting that the disaffection of so many evangelicals with their peers’ full-throated support of a man who embodied the opposite of all their virtues pushed a large segment of people away from religion and into the new religion of the woke. That’s what happened to me (the cracks and fissures were already there, but Trump was the wedge that split the stone). Fortunately for me I’m something of a questioner anyway, so it didn’t take long to see the Elect (as McWhorter calls them) sliding right into that religion shaped hole for so many people. No thanks. That’s a no from me.
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.
Judging from my friends, I think there are definitely millions, especially those with school age children. I would say about one out of three left-leaning friends have quietly told me they are not happy and consider themselves independent at this point. None of them have registered as such and are still on the Democratic rolls. This election cycle is going to shock a lot of people. I'm not at all gleeful about it, but it is going to shock the left nonetheless.
I like that there is still a lot of viewpoint diversity and divergent stories and paths being described here (so sincerely and thoughtfully). But admittedly I’m especially fascinated by the stories of people like me who not so many years ago were clearly liberal and to the left and virtually or exclusively supported Dems (my unraveling began around 2013 and picked up some speed in 2016, and really gained momentum seeing the insane reaction to Trump and then whom the admin of the supposedly most centrist, unifying Dem actually appoints or nominates to serve his party’s agenda and how he governs).
Speaking of children in school and education, you may have seen Matt Taibbi first installment based on in-depth reporting on the results in Loudon County. One early anecdote relates seeing parents of South and East Asian heritage almost alone among voters in pausing to take GOP sample ballots. The thought was these were regular Dem voters who’d had enough and were at least for now crossing over. It’s not just CRT and the worst DEI-based pedagogy infecting every grade, classroom, and subject. It’s the endless unscientific dishonestly imposed school closings, so burdensome on parents and destructive to kids’ learning. It’s heavy-handed masking and distancing requirements imposed on little kids. And it’s ending merit admissions tests and getting rid of AP and other advanced track classes, especially in STEM, due to “equity”. I don’t happen to have kids of the human variety, but for me, merit tests were the great leveler for a kid from a lower-income single parent family bereft of networks or resources to call upon. AP and other advanced classes were what redeemed the stultifying routines of high school and made classes almost exciting mini-communities based around more challenging work and vibrantly free discussions of challenging ideas.
I read that and see the same playing out here in PA Philly suburbs. Although not in my own top rated district yet. We are a few years behind Louden County. But it’s slowly shifting back to the right. We elected 4 new SB members last month- all Dems- but our margin was way slimmer than even the 2020 presidential election was.
I live in Bucks County, same creeping culture war in the school board. We were essentially "split" with 4 dems, 4 republicans and 1 swing vote. When that member voted against a mask mandate, he received a death threat and resigned. In the next election, the board swung republican 6-3. I hate that we're even thinking in "republican" and "democrat" terms for school boards. Partisan politics in education will end badly no matter who's in charge.
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.
I had a very similar experience with DSA. I was always vaguely socialist but joined officially in 2016 and stuck it out until 2018, mainly because I was still involved in some union stuff with my university. But it just got worse, and worse, and worse with all the empty identity rituals. It's comical. I've got stories...
You have stories, and I want to hear them!
Yeah, the left has lost its mind so fast, I find myself saying “wait—why was I into this?”
And the answer is: I wanted Medicare-for-All, a higher minimum wage, the eradication of homelessness, better prison conditions, more oversight and accountability for police, paid leave for workers, unions for Uber drivers and Starbucks workers, and so on.
And that still sounds good to me—all of it! I would never have wanted censorship, “identity politics” (a disparaging term that is still a euphemism), an end to law enforcement and immigration control, anti-Asian affirmative action in the high schools and colleges, unhinged activism in elementary school classrooms, etc.
I came for the health insurance, and after I got in the door, I was served “women’s sports are unnecessary, math is racist, and looting is equity.”
(Insert Pikachu meme face)
Wow that’s a transformation, though I do get that the Trump vote was maybe the lesser of all evils. I get that, and I’m very pro-Trump.
In some ways, I’ve “changed” the way that Matt Taibbi, Michael Tracey, and Glenn Greenwald have changed—i.e., not at all.
But on some major issues, I’ll admit I’m shifting.
I read a blogpost recently talking about the “packages of beliefs” that we accept when a group is on our side on the issues that matter most.
In a sense, it’s positive: you benefit from others’ work, and you lend your own voice and time to things that matter to them. Coalition-building requires compromise. The bad part is that you stop making independent judgments.
For most of my life, people who called themselves “liberals, “progressives,” or “leftists” were on my side on the issues that mattered most to me.
But over time, those battles were either decisively won or lost—or progressives evolved away from a position that I still held.
When you no longer share important positions with a political/cultural tribe, you start opening the package and considering each belief individually. The core beliefs of the center, center-left, and left are all pretty alarming to me right now.
And there have been some sharp jolts in the last few years: the Clinton/Sanders primary, Russiagate (obviously a dumb-yet-sinister scam from day one—I can’t believe it worked), the legacy media’s plunge into the gutter, the fast rise of neoracism, the midnight flights of illegal migrants from Texas to Florida, and above all the global response to COVID.
I think the political party template we’ve all operated from needs to be changed. Instead of that, I believe that the template is a world government using all nation state political parties to advance a certain global agenda. It’s always been there, I believe, but the perfect symmetry of almost all governments in their Covid clampdowns on civil liberties was pretty revealing.
They were/are arrogant enough to even brag about “you’ll own nothing and be happy.” I think this slow awakening and awareness of people from all parties is in reaction to this.
Wow, thanks for writing all that. Your experience sounds so similar to my own that I have chills, it is eerie.
I like how you opened with a discussion of the meaninglessness of the "left / center / right" terms. There is literally no topic on which you could guarantee that you share views with every other member of "your team", and yet people get so certain that their team is good and the "the others" are pure evil incarnate. It is blindness of the most intentional and dangerous of sorts.
I will perhaps share some of my own experiences further down.
Please do share. It’s certainly true in my experience that the “team” mentality means you tend to spout talking point rationales, excuses, and evasions, and neglect rigorously investigating issues and policies on their own terms and being fully honest even with yourself about what you truly think about them. When friends who are still really wedded to the whole omnibus Dem platform and various progressive left assumption get a little testy at me perhaps introducing some cognitive dissonance into that comfortably sealed partisan identity, I tell them tongue in cheek that I’m an independent social critic now - and that every worthy party and movement needs and benefits from honest criticism.
It’s too bad we can’t all be IRL friends—a lot of the people in this thread feel eerily, as you put it, like kindred spirits. This whole conversation is an unexpected blast of sanity.
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.
I will add that I would have never guessed five years ago that in 2021 I would be listening to The American Conservative podcast and liking it sometimes and reading people like Patrick Deneen and Michael Lind and liking them, too. I guess because I am open-minded and can hold many ideas in this mind at the same time without exploding that makes me a liberal? These political labels are so confusing. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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.
To be clear I was never a partisan Democrat. I've always distrusted and disliked politicians. But I believed in the civil society part of the left. The alarm bells went off when that part of the left went crazy.
Just speaking for myself, one reason is the presidency of GW Bush - a far worse president and far scarier administration in my view than Donald Trump’s. I tell Dem and progressive friends this all the time and have never heard a persuasive response. I can enumerate the reasons I think this if you like. But after eight years of that it’s easy to get caught up in the need to win the next election. And in order to do that at an activist or staff level and persuade and motivate others you often have to suspend your rational suspicion to a degree and buy into and push a biographical narrative and party platform. Two friends of mine had had Barack Obama as a prof at U Chicago Law and spoke favorably of him. His message of one America, of reconciling across divisions and both honoring and embracing our country’s founding principles and working to extend and redeem them to all of our people resonated strongly. Yes, I was let down in a way as soon as I saw his chosen-by-Citibank crew of Harvard neoliberals appointed to virtually every economic post. I found the “coalition of the ascendent” rhetoric discordant coming from a campaign and administration supposedly inspired to unite. But to take but one major policy issue: for all of the failures and frustrations with the ACA, it’s way too easy to forget just how horrific the private health care system could be prior, due to cruelly expansive and often retroactively applied denials and exclusions due to preexisting conditions; countless employees of private insurers were tasked to go line by through lifetime records looking for inconsistencies and pretexts to drop people when they were in most desperate need of care; there were rigid limits for catastrophic care and lifetime caps on benefits; desperately working poor people and truly vulnerable families couldn’t qualify for Medicaid in most states. I could go on. Banning or changing these rampant cruelties of the system are extremely popular now; they’re widely taken for granted now. But presidents had been trying pass comprehensive reform of health care since at least the 1930s and both Dems and Republicans had failed. That’s not a political or partisan failure; it hurt tens upon tens of millions of Americans. Too much government direct control and that’s ruled out as socialism; too much regulation of the private market and people who had good private insurance and steady means of accessing it complain and disruptions and expenses. That’s not trivial - it’s expensive, even a hardship. But the only way to cover many many more people and ban the worst abuses of the industry - that could even come close to passing Congress - required guaranteeing private insurers customers and profits. Covering more expensive people who aren’t subsidized by good jobs at private employers was very expensive. Ending lifetime caps and limits on catastrophic coverage and the ability to deny or drop anyone at virtually any time for any reason was very expensive. It’s shameful and inexcusable the Obama admin gave away so much especially to Big Pharma - and outright embarrassing Medicare and Medicaid can’t bargain down drug prices. But I sure don’t want to go back to the bad old days before the ACA, flawed as it was. Remember: for several years Republicans made repealing it their central issue and both got hammered politically and failed to convince the public more generally that the benefits of a repeal remotely outweighed the risks. That’s just one major policy example. I think sometimes more right of center independents, fiscal/government libertarians and conservatives see more traditional liberals like me, who are open-minded and who do change our views somewhat based on changing results, cumulative empirical evidence, and sound reasoning, and express exasperation that we didn’t vote your way and share you views however many years ago. One reason is because we don’t - then or even now - share all or most of your views and policy priorities. And that’s fine. Having to agree about virtually everything was never the point. What’s important is we can unite around things like love of country, valuing citizenship, respecting each other as individuals based on our conduct and character, valuing equal opportunity, taking The Bill of Rights seriously, and sharing fundamental rational liberal Enlightenment values. I don’t expect to agree with more conservative fellow citizens about everything, but I expect we can sit down and talk about what we do have in common and work together on that basis. That’s become nearly impossible with much of the cultish, hyper-dogmatic identitarian, authoritarian left.
I think you’re overestimating the decency of the 60s, 70s and 80s. If it weren’t for Obamacare, my mentally unstable brother in law wouldn’t have any kind of health coverage. I count that as a pretty big win.
I'm glad your brother got the care he needed, but we could have done that without Obamacare. We lost our health insurance and my friend had to drop his therapist and medications because he didn't qualify for coverage and his costs jumped 150%. A lot of Dems went to the GOP because of that.
The entire purpose of this thread is to answer the question you raised—and people are (almost without exception) leaving thoughtful, self-aware, interesting replies.
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."
When I was telling my normie friends “we should have an NHS-style health-care system” (I’ve lived in England, and the horror stories about it are BS. Nationalized health care is more important than public schooling), they would say: “that’s unrealistic—it’ll never happen.”
In fact, ANY medium-strength proposal to make life better for people met with affectionate chuckles.
Now many those same people are denouncing “the poison of whiteness” and saying “violence is a legitimate means of political expression” and that “the system, [which system? All of them. The system of systems] cannot be reformed; it must be dismantled.”
People who literally never had a thought about race in their lives before 2021 now tell me (online, where they can be seen) that “race matters, perhaps above all else” and “white logic is a tool of the oppressor.”
What. A. Bunch. Of. Phonies. And. Cowards.
The idea of politely listening to sermons from these people is unacceptable to me.
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.
Hah! Forgot the question. In the last five years, I went from a dissenting Democrat to pulling the lever for Trump. I couldn't see voting for anyone else after the way the left and Democrats acted during his admin. Free speech is too important.
Obama also decided soon after he took office that, as an olive branch to Bush, he wouldn’t prosecute torturers.
You are simply not allowed, as the executive, to decline to prosecute torturers. You are obliged to do it.
I disliked Obama from that moment on—and loathed him after it became clear that he was going to continue the wars and drone murders, and keep Guantanamo Bay open.
Like, say, John Yoo, Obama seems, when he talks, like a thoughtful, well-intentioned, reasonable guy. Like Yoo, he is in fact a moral disgrace.
I’ve asked partisan Dem friends: do you think Merrick Garland sees everything right-wing through the lens of the Oklahoma City bombing? Behind his personally mild-mannered, decorous presentation there’s kind of a low-key progressive authoritarian in there. So many people saw him only as the sympathetic foil to Mitch McConnell’s partisan villainy. I remember some of the criticism of Garland from the more independent activist left at the time of his nomination for the Supreme Court were that he was too deferential to federal law enforcement and generally too pro-big business. But a lot has changed in even just those few years. He seems plenty deferential not only to an in some ways corrupt, partisan, out of control federal law enforcement, but also to the more extremist identitarian ideologues and authoritarians appointed and nominated to many influential political and policy posts within the Biden Administration.
I wonder how much of Justice is actually run by people at the lower levels, and that Garland, much like Mueller, has very little idea of the daily going ons of the country. Not that excuses anything, rather it actually makes the whole thing worse, for no one that clueless should have any say in the running of the country.
Sixth!
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
Very similar trajectory.
How about tossing in the Russian collusion, fine people on both sides, and drinking bleach nonsense shouted at us from the Left's complicit legacy media. Are all of the honest classic liberals dead or just silenced? That's what flipped me into an Alt-Middle type of thinker.