Hello Lydia! Enjoyed this post. Ruth sent it to me because I went through this from about 2019-2022.
My first disillusioning issue was pediatric transition and other extreme positions on trans issues, in 2018 and 2019. With the trans stuff, it wasn’t just that I disagreed with trans activists on the merits of these issues (which I did), but also that I sensed danger for LGBT rights as a whole. I knew the craziest trans stuff would generate a backlash that wouldn’t leave gay people out of it and unfortunately I was right! I was on a fairly well-known podcast under a pseudonym in 2021 as a “lesbian against child transitions” type story, and posted about my views on Facebook, but otherwise I just had to sit and watch this all happen like a train wreck. It has sucked. I was also called transphobic, lost some friends, etc. And for the record, even though being ACTUALLY transphobic is totally in style now, I am not and have never been anti-trans. I am anti-nonsensical, destructive, and self-defeating political movements.
My second issue was COVID. I realized REAL FAST we were destroying society and fucking up everything with the COVID craziness. I genuinely tried to tell everyone I know lol. Like literally, I talked to everyone about it. Ruth and I spent like two years shouting into a void telling everyone we were making a huge mistake and that we would come to regret the school closures, business closures, and general social unrest that contributed to things like the riots you describe. But it didn’t matter and it was so frustrating.
So I get the Team Blue frustration, been there.
I think at this point my affiliation with Team Blue is simply a matter of understanding that as a married lesbian with kids, it doesn’t matter if I don’t agree with Team Blue on everything — these are the people who want me around and treat me as an equal, so Team Blue world is where I live and work and raise my kids. Also Team Blue is on pretty good behavior at this moment, having been chastened by the election, while Team Red is…authoritarian and scary.
This story helps me better understand some of the Trump supporters I have met through Braver Angels, so thank you for that. You are also much braver than I am in calling out the hypocrisies and problems of Blue Tribe while being very socially connected to it, so thank you for that also.
I continue to be a Blue Triber partly for those social connections but also because I think they are basically decent people who mostly want what I want even if we disagree on how to get there, whereas most of Red Tribe has come to favor the thoughtless destruction of almost everything I love about human civilization. But we need more people speaking up about how we fall short of our own best stater ideals and should do better, and outsider gadfly types are always the best at doing that, so I hope you find a way to keep outsider-gadflying.
Thank you for sharing this. I went through a similar chapter and wrote about it here. https://open.substack.com/pub/jeffgiesea/p/a-letter-to-myself-in-2015. You are not alone in experiencing toxic forces on both sides of the spectrum. I still consider myself center-right, but I’m resisting tribalism.
You were willing to blow up most of your Team Blue social capital to try to inform the public about a matter of public interest that was being suppressed, and didn't end up being captured by Team Red. This suggests that you have any ethics and courage at all, which is enough to make you quite interesting to me. Very few people resist absorption into the drama of Hegelian dialectic while remaining publicly visible: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-drama-of-the-hegelian-dialectic/
The fact that you have a baby is another matter of interest to me, as I have a toddler and an 8 month old. The fact that you had a baby (with someone legitimately interesting even if he himself seems to me to be damned) under circumstances incompatible with what passes for bourgeois respectability these days again suggests real willingness to burn credit with the wicked in order to produce something good and true.
The call for a community of integrity at the end of your post, which seems like it's not delusional about the level of scale that's feasible in the short run, is also to your credit. Here's my agenda, which is related - and you'll see that something like the "Antiversity" is an implied medium-run goal if we reach an appropriate scale: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/levels-of-republicanism/
All this makes me feel that it would be good for my babies to meet your babies, and to explore further exchange and maybe higher-investment collaboration. DM me if you're interested (or if you prefer respond to this comment).
Very much appreciate the struggle you articulate here. We need voices like yours that inhabit the "cracks", the space in between...The political discourse is too often dumbed down and we need containers that support and hold the complexity, the apparent contradictions that we face, that help people stay in conversation with each other, that create space to see the positive intentions that underlie our supposed enemies, even the terrorist. Someone once said, think it was a Quaker organizer, that an enemy is someone whose story we have not yet heard...The truth is, as far as I know, that we're all in this together and the sooner we realize this and speak to one another as if we understood this and create containers that support this realization, the sooner we can unravel the mess we are in...
On the edge of my seat for the entire piece, wow. having lived through this same period with my head down in a confusion and fear in the rural southwest, it's incredible to read what it was like closer in. you describe such Incredible bravery and faith in your pursuit of truth and I think all of us who did less, looking back, can see how we failed each other and our democracy by not asking more questions
I sincerely appreciate this piece. Trying to reconcile two opposing sides when both are committed above all to maintaining opposition? No wonder unaffiliated undogmatic people sat this one out. Of course, in sitting it out, only the hotheaded partisans remain and the polarization worsens. Like you, I believe public discourse held in good faith is possible and also necessary or else whoops it’s civil war and whoops there goes democracy. Maybe unlike you I think the capacity for it is exceedingly rare and perhaps even fixed, related more to temperament, etc., than to reason or choice. Maybe our best chance to have undogmatic reason prevail is to make non-partisan reasonableness its own hotheaded partisan tribe. I’m joking. Thank you. How ever it goes I hope the heterodox among us continue to enter the arena with accounts like yours here, if only because it makes the discourse more interesting.
This was a powerful story, and I really appreciate the closing call for a politics that does not ignore truths out of convenience. Indeed, let's find each other. I'm a lifelong Blue Triber but was horrified by what it became in the 2010s - just never enough to join the Red Tribe, which has now undergone an even more horrific transformation.
I'm gonna respond to the object level info here and the story elements in a separate comment.
Now I know about the MSP riots (and the coordinated suppression of reporting about them; - I asked ChatGPT 4o whether the NYTimes covered them, and it claimed it did, but only gave examples of reporting on "protests" and a retrospective "Why Minneapolis Burned" that focused on the causes but not the events they were causes of, and when I pointed this out, kept insisting that the riots had been covered somewhat with reporting on property damage, and only admitted that this wasn't the same thing when I pointed out this was like covering a war in terms of broken windows. Link: https://chatgpt.com/share/683366f5-60f4-8013-ae2d-6aea0cc77e55 ). Thanks for informing me! This is an important fact about the country I live in that I didn't know, apparently because the only racist I follow on Twitter is Steve Sailer, and he is more interested in the increase in traffic fatalities than in the extended collapse of public order in a major city.
I suspect this sort of information is suppressed because it challenges the illusion that we have many policy options around policing. The George Floyd murder itself showed that the police feel like it's their prerogative to murder randos on camera when it feels appropriate, and it would be unprofessional and uncollegial to interfere with their fellows doing the same. This is difficult to reform incrementally, and empirically what Camden, NJ did consumes a large amount of nonrenewable political capital. The riots seem to demonstrate that the civil order in which we participate is not a mostly voluntary one which delegates some norm enforcement to dedicated professionals, but an order imposed by an occupying army on in many cases a hostile population. No real way to roll that back without a substantial number of people dying in the process of discovering / inventing a new arrangement.
This feels related to what's been going on with the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK. When I ignore all the flimflam, it seems like the situation is that the high lords have been reduced to irrelevance, and the king (both in his personal capacity and his notionally delegated ministers in parliament) is weak and ineffectual, so gangs of marauders are terrorizing the commoners (but for now not directly threatening London).
I don’t trust ChatGPT or other extant LLMs on culture war issues at all, and very little on most other culture and history topics. The sense in which they are good at things is I think mainly visible in prototyping fast (vibe coding) but only as long as you’re able to question and check everything. I find their ability to hallucinate (aka, lie about) so much convincing material to be not worth wading through, a lot of the time. I’m trying to get more familiar with them but it often feels like two steps forward and three steps back when it comes to learning true things from them.
Steve Sailer has a specific project around “human biodiversity” and things that much of Red believes are under-discussed about race. For Red people doing that project, it doesn’t seem to translate practically into either better media construction or the notions of “noblesse oblige” that I saw in some of the better parts of NRx.
Ultimately Red Tribe needs to face that the reason they don’t have their own version of the NYT is a values and capacity problem, not just a structural problem. A lot of Red has a real victim mentality around this, ironically.
Strongly agree about the right-wing victim mentality, which I have written about elsewhere. It's largely about the media though *because of* the fact that the left really has weaponized the mainstream media against them, which is why the mainstream (center-left) media has been discredited. So they really are victims, but it's not healthy to wallow in your victimhood, which is what they are doing. (This is literally the argument that the right was making about the victim culture of the left 20 years ago, btw).
In this case I thought ChatGPT's behavior was interesting because it tends to strongly defend exactly the sorts of blind spots that someone trying to signal loyalty to the institutional center-left would defend, but it's constrained not to derail very effectively or disengage (though it sometimes does disengage anyway and repeat its prior response verbatim when I call it out), so it makes it easier to detect and document those blind spots. So, the information I extracted from ChatGPT in this case was the implied establishment party line.
For apolitical stuff it's a janky but often better-than-Google-or-Wikipedia info source.
What happened to the left starting sround 2015 or so and peaked in 2020 was absolutely bananas and so clearly off the rails even at the time. I respect people who took any kind of stand against it, and I don’t think opposing those extremes locks you into e.g being pro everything Trump is doing today. Ideally we’re going to see more and more ideological currents emerging that are not locked into “wokeism” (or whatever the hell 2020 leftism was) or into Trumpism either
Agree that the left went bananas, but I'd put the date a few years earlier. I think it was a "perfect storm" of the invention of Twitter (2011) and the second Obama administration (2012). The second Obama term was a period of progressive triumphalism, where they got overconfident about what they thought would be a perpetual future of left-wing culture war victory. And the invention of Twitter gave them a powerful new tool to enforce a new cultural orthodoxy.
Thank you for this excellent post, with which I am so much in concert. I too, have gone through something of a political evolution, although I would say it was more from the right towards the left, although not actually ending up on the left, but in some nameless no-mans land. Like you, I also set out, many years ago, to better understand my opponents, out of concern for the deepening polarization and lack of honest media sources that could be trusted by both sides.
My political leanings have always been generally libertarian, which is typically defined as free market but also socially liberal, although most self-identified "libertarians" tend to be much more far right, and place a heavy emphasis on gun rights and religious freedom (for conservative Christians), and on opposing anti-discrimination laws (on freedom of association grounds). Other similarly aligned people call themselves "classical liberal". In the 1990s, I briefly flirted with the Patriot militia movement - the ancestor of todays Oathkeepers and Proud Boys. I ultimately decided I didn't want to associate with actual racists and neo-Nazis, and set out to be more true to the pure libertarian message of individual liberty, whether in personal life or in economic matters, for everyone, regardless of color or any other factor. I'd actually say my core ideology hasn't changed much, primarily comprising a commitment to (a) free market economics, and (b) fundamental principles about freedom of speech religion, the rule of law, and democracy with protections for individual rights. But over time I've interpreted those things differently.
But having a commitment to free markets is of course verboten to "Blue Tribe" - something which I think needs fixing. I've long been motivated by the idea that one side of the political spectrum could be shifted in a more libertarian direction - aligning personal liberties with free markets, instead of having to trade off religious freedom and economic rights in every election. So in a sense, I set out to understand "Blue Tribe" better as an avenue to trying to communicate with them about economics and convince them to shift in a more free market direction. (This has happened to some extent, but very slowly, see Abundance Agenda Democrats, and writers like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein). Along the way I studied Marxism, as well as libertarian economics. I also discovered blogs like Bleeding Heart Libertarians, which aimed to combine ideas about Social Justice with libertarian ideas, and the Niskanen center (check out their great essay 'Black Liberty Matters'). A lot of my evolution was also understanding the "woke" perspective on race relations. (It's not totally without merit!)
I found myself defending progressive left social justice causes against attacks from the right on libertarian message boards. I am approximately in the same place as you that the "Blue Tribe" is right on the merits about social justice issues. The problem is the Blue Tribe is far too eager to utilize the tools of social ostracism to enforce compliance with it's beliefs, and that is not even limited to culture war issues. Ironically, however, one of the principles of libertarian theory, that they've long used to argue against anti-discrimination laws, is that such social tools could be used to suppress racist behavior and speech in the place of formal laws. I.e. we don't need anti-discrimination statutes because we can shame people on social media instead! Of course, many of them hypocritically decided even this was bad when it actually was put into practice. I've actually come around to the point that I think anti-discrimination laws are preferable to attempting to enforce non-racist behavior purely through having everyone police everyone else's speech via social shaming (way less cognitive load!). Anyway, the Blue Tribe takes it way too far to the point that it is more or less enabling toxic personalities to abuse people online and engage in control freak behavior. The toxicity of the social media environment in about the early 2010s is what I personally think is almost directly responsible for the rise of Trump. A toxicity directly created by "woke" social media shaming attempting to enforce an extreme progressive left political orthodoxy. Some of the same tools were utilized, as you note, during the pandemic early years to shut people up about, for instance, the lab leak theory, among other things.
So, I am in agreement that in a lot of ways the mainstream media discredited itself by attempting to use it's position to enforce a political orthodoxy - especially on race and social justice issues. And that goes back way beynd the last few years. But without any information source trusted by both sides, people have spiraled off into their own closed information ecosystems. Right now in the right-wing media ecosphere everyone's worried about people blowing up Teslas, for some reason, I found out. This barely makes the news in the left-wing media ecosphere. I find myself mostly exposed to center-left news, although my years of learning about Blue Tribe means I'm in touch with some radical left types and their theories (if you think NPR is left wing you need to start listening to Pacifica). I'm also exposed to right-wing news sources indirectly though because I still spend most of my time on center-right-libertarian message boards - sometimes arguing against New Right and Neoreactionary people about culture war issues, but now also arguing against them on trade policy and international relations. The election of Trump however was particularly devastating for center-libertarians like myself because about half of the "libertarian" people immediately jumped ship and became Trump supporters. And of course the logic of power makes people seek to justify whatever policies their Tribe supports even if they would have said the opposite six months ago. Point being, I'm now not truly politically aligned with either camp, although I think this has been true since 2016 if not earlier for me personally.
Hello Lydia! Enjoyed this post. Ruth sent it to me because I went through this from about 2019-2022.
My first disillusioning issue was pediatric transition and other extreme positions on trans issues, in 2018 and 2019. With the trans stuff, it wasn’t just that I disagreed with trans activists on the merits of these issues (which I did), but also that I sensed danger for LGBT rights as a whole. I knew the craziest trans stuff would generate a backlash that wouldn’t leave gay people out of it and unfortunately I was right! I was on a fairly well-known podcast under a pseudonym in 2021 as a “lesbian against child transitions” type story, and posted about my views on Facebook, but otherwise I just had to sit and watch this all happen like a train wreck. It has sucked. I was also called transphobic, lost some friends, etc. And for the record, even though being ACTUALLY transphobic is totally in style now, I am not and have never been anti-trans. I am anti-nonsensical, destructive, and self-defeating political movements.
My second issue was COVID. I realized REAL FAST we were destroying society and fucking up everything with the COVID craziness. I genuinely tried to tell everyone I know lol. Like literally, I talked to everyone about it. Ruth and I spent like two years shouting into a void telling everyone we were making a huge mistake and that we would come to regret the school closures, business closures, and general social unrest that contributed to things like the riots you describe. But it didn’t matter and it was so frustrating.
So I get the Team Blue frustration, been there.
I think at this point my affiliation with Team Blue is simply a matter of understanding that as a married lesbian with kids, it doesn’t matter if I don’t agree with Team Blue on everything — these are the people who want me around and treat me as an equal, so Team Blue world is where I live and work and raise my kids. Also Team Blue is on pretty good behavior at this moment, having been chastened by the election, while Team Red is…authoritarian and scary.
This story helps me better understand some of the Trump supporters I have met through Braver Angels, so thank you for that. You are also much braver than I am in calling out the hypocrisies and problems of Blue Tribe while being very socially connected to it, so thank you for that also.
I continue to be a Blue Triber partly for those social connections but also because I think they are basically decent people who mostly want what I want even if we disagree on how to get there, whereas most of Red Tribe has come to favor the thoughtless destruction of almost everything I love about human civilization. But we need more people speaking up about how we fall short of our own best stater ideals and should do better, and outsider gadfly types are always the best at doing that, so I hope you find a way to keep outsider-gadflying.
Thank you for sharing this. I went through a similar chapter and wrote about it here. https://open.substack.com/pub/jeffgiesea/p/a-letter-to-myself-in-2015. You are not alone in experiencing toxic forces on both sides of the spectrum. I still consider myself center-right, but I’m resisting tribalism.
You were willing to blow up most of your Team Blue social capital to try to inform the public about a matter of public interest that was being suppressed, and didn't end up being captured by Team Red. This suggests that you have any ethics and courage at all, which is enough to make you quite interesting to me. Very few people resist absorption into the drama of Hegelian dialectic while remaining publicly visible: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/the-drama-of-the-hegelian-dialectic/
The fact that you have a baby is another matter of interest to me, as I have a toddler and an 8 month old. The fact that you had a baby (with someone legitimately interesting even if he himself seems to me to be damned) under circumstances incompatible with what passes for bourgeois respectability these days again suggests real willingness to burn credit with the wicked in order to produce something good and true.
The call for a community of integrity at the end of your post, which seems like it's not delusional about the level of scale that's feasible in the short run, is also to your credit. Here's my agenda, which is related - and you'll see that something like the "Antiversity" is an implied medium-run goal if we reach an appropriate scale: https://benjaminrosshoffman.com/levels-of-republicanism/
All this makes me feel that it would be good for my babies to meet your babies, and to explore further exchange and maybe higher-investment collaboration. DM me if you're interested (or if you prefer respond to this comment).
Thanks so much for writing this
💙
Very much appreciate the struggle you articulate here. We need voices like yours that inhabit the "cracks", the space in between...The political discourse is too often dumbed down and we need containers that support and hold the complexity, the apparent contradictions that we face, that help people stay in conversation with each other, that create space to see the positive intentions that underlie our supposed enemies, even the terrorist. Someone once said, think it was a Quaker organizer, that an enemy is someone whose story we have not yet heard...The truth is, as far as I know, that we're all in this together and the sooner we realize this and speak to one another as if we understood this and create containers that support this realization, the sooner we can unravel the mess we are in...
On the edge of my seat for the entire piece, wow. having lived through this same period with my head down in a confusion and fear in the rural southwest, it's incredible to read what it was like closer in. you describe such Incredible bravery and faith in your pursuit of truth and I think all of us who did less, looking back, can see how we failed each other and our democracy by not asking more questions
I sincerely appreciate this piece. Trying to reconcile two opposing sides when both are committed above all to maintaining opposition? No wonder unaffiliated undogmatic people sat this one out. Of course, in sitting it out, only the hotheaded partisans remain and the polarization worsens. Like you, I believe public discourse held in good faith is possible and also necessary or else whoops it’s civil war and whoops there goes democracy. Maybe unlike you I think the capacity for it is exceedingly rare and perhaps even fixed, related more to temperament, etc., than to reason or choice. Maybe our best chance to have undogmatic reason prevail is to make non-partisan reasonableness its own hotheaded partisan tribe. I’m joking. Thank you. How ever it goes I hope the heterodox among us continue to enter the arena with accounts like yours here, if only because it makes the discourse more interesting.
This was a powerful story, and I really appreciate the closing call for a politics that does not ignore truths out of convenience. Indeed, let's find each other. I'm a lifelong Blue Triber but was horrified by what it became in the 2010s - just never enough to join the Red Tribe, which has now undergone an even more horrific transformation.
Thanks for reminding me about Rukeyser. I think you will find much to admire in this poem of hers:
St. Roach
For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,
for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,
they showed me by every action to despise your kind;
for that I saw my people making war on you,
I could not tell you apart, one from another,
for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you,
for that all the people I knew met you by
crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling
water on you, they flushed you down,
for that I could not tell one from another
only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.
Not like me.
For that I did not know your poems
And that I do not know any of your sayings
And that I cannot speak or read your language
And that I do not sing your songs
And that I do not teach our children
to eat your food
or know your poems
or sing your songs
But that we say you are filthing our food
But that we know you not at all.
Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time.
You were lighter than the others in color, that was
neither good nor bad.
I was really looking for the first time.
You seemed troubled and witty.
Today I touched one of you for the first time.
You were startled, you ran, you fled away
Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch.
I reach, I touch, I begin to know you.
I'm gonna respond to the object level info here and the story elements in a separate comment.
Now I know about the MSP riots (and the coordinated suppression of reporting about them; - I asked ChatGPT 4o whether the NYTimes covered them, and it claimed it did, but only gave examples of reporting on "protests" and a retrospective "Why Minneapolis Burned" that focused on the causes but not the events they were causes of, and when I pointed this out, kept insisting that the riots had been covered somewhat with reporting on property damage, and only admitted that this wasn't the same thing when I pointed out this was like covering a war in terms of broken windows. Link: https://chatgpt.com/share/683366f5-60f4-8013-ae2d-6aea0cc77e55 ). Thanks for informing me! This is an important fact about the country I live in that I didn't know, apparently because the only racist I follow on Twitter is Steve Sailer, and he is more interested in the increase in traffic fatalities than in the extended collapse of public order in a major city.
I suspect this sort of information is suppressed because it challenges the illusion that we have many policy options around policing. The George Floyd murder itself showed that the police feel like it's their prerogative to murder randos on camera when it feels appropriate, and it would be unprofessional and uncollegial to interfere with their fellows doing the same. This is difficult to reform incrementally, and empirically what Camden, NJ did consumes a large amount of nonrenewable political capital. The riots seem to demonstrate that the civil order in which we participate is not a mostly voluntary one which delegates some norm enforcement to dedicated professionals, but an order imposed by an occupying army on in many cases a hostile population. No real way to roll that back without a substantial number of people dying in the process of discovering / inventing a new arrangement.
This feels related to what's been going on with the Pakistani rape gangs in the UK. When I ignore all the flimflam, it seems like the situation is that the high lords have been reduced to irrelevance, and the king (both in his personal capacity and his notionally delegated ministers in parliament) is weak and ineffectual, so gangs of marauders are terrorizing the commoners (but for now not directly threatening London).
I don’t trust ChatGPT or other extant LLMs on culture war issues at all, and very little on most other culture and history topics. The sense in which they are good at things is I think mainly visible in prototyping fast (vibe coding) but only as long as you’re able to question and check everything. I find their ability to hallucinate (aka, lie about) so much convincing material to be not worth wading through, a lot of the time. I’m trying to get more familiar with them but it often feels like two steps forward and three steps back when it comes to learning true things from them.
Steve Sailer has a specific project around “human biodiversity” and things that much of Red believes are under-discussed about race. For Red people doing that project, it doesn’t seem to translate practically into either better media construction or the notions of “noblesse oblige” that I saw in some of the better parts of NRx.
Ultimately Red Tribe needs to face that the reason they don’t have their own version of the NYT is a values and capacity problem, not just a structural problem. A lot of Red has a real victim mentality around this, ironically.
Strongly agree about the right-wing victim mentality, which I have written about elsewhere. It's largely about the media though *because of* the fact that the left really has weaponized the mainstream media against them, which is why the mainstream (center-left) media has been discredited. So they really are victims, but it's not healthy to wallow in your victimhood, which is what they are doing. (This is literally the argument that the right was making about the victim culture of the left 20 years ago, btw).
In this case I thought ChatGPT's behavior was interesting because it tends to strongly defend exactly the sorts of blind spots that someone trying to signal loyalty to the institutional center-left would defend, but it's constrained not to derail very effectively or disengage (though it sometimes does disengage anyway and repeat its prior response verbatim when I call it out), so it makes it easier to detect and document those blind spots. So, the information I extracted from ChatGPT in this case was the implied establishment party line.
For apolitical stuff it's a janky but often better-than-Google-or-Wikipedia info source.
Thank you for writing your story. It's an important one.
🩵
What happened to the left starting sround 2015 or so and peaked in 2020 was absolutely bananas and so clearly off the rails even at the time. I respect people who took any kind of stand against it, and I don’t think opposing those extremes locks you into e.g being pro everything Trump is doing today. Ideally we’re going to see more and more ideological currents emerging that are not locked into “wokeism” (or whatever the hell 2020 leftism was) or into Trumpism either
Agree that the left went bananas, but I'd put the date a few years earlier. I think it was a "perfect storm" of the invention of Twitter (2011) and the second Obama administration (2012). The second Obama term was a period of progressive triumphalism, where they got overconfident about what they thought would be a perpetual future of left-wing culture war victory. And the invention of Twitter gave them a powerful new tool to enforce a new cultural orthodoxy.
thank you for sharing a fascinating journey
🫶
Thank you for this excellent post, with which I am so much in concert. I too, have gone through something of a political evolution, although I would say it was more from the right towards the left, although not actually ending up on the left, but in some nameless no-mans land. Like you, I also set out, many years ago, to better understand my opponents, out of concern for the deepening polarization and lack of honest media sources that could be trusted by both sides.
My political leanings have always been generally libertarian, which is typically defined as free market but also socially liberal, although most self-identified "libertarians" tend to be much more far right, and place a heavy emphasis on gun rights and religious freedom (for conservative Christians), and on opposing anti-discrimination laws (on freedom of association grounds). Other similarly aligned people call themselves "classical liberal". In the 1990s, I briefly flirted with the Patriot militia movement - the ancestor of todays Oathkeepers and Proud Boys. I ultimately decided I didn't want to associate with actual racists and neo-Nazis, and set out to be more true to the pure libertarian message of individual liberty, whether in personal life or in economic matters, for everyone, regardless of color or any other factor. I'd actually say my core ideology hasn't changed much, primarily comprising a commitment to (a) free market economics, and (b) fundamental principles about freedom of speech religion, the rule of law, and democracy with protections for individual rights. But over time I've interpreted those things differently.
But having a commitment to free markets is of course verboten to "Blue Tribe" - something which I think needs fixing. I've long been motivated by the idea that one side of the political spectrum could be shifted in a more libertarian direction - aligning personal liberties with free markets, instead of having to trade off religious freedom and economic rights in every election. So in a sense, I set out to understand "Blue Tribe" better as an avenue to trying to communicate with them about economics and convince them to shift in a more free market direction. (This has happened to some extent, but very slowly, see Abundance Agenda Democrats, and writers like Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein). Along the way I studied Marxism, as well as libertarian economics. I also discovered blogs like Bleeding Heart Libertarians, which aimed to combine ideas about Social Justice with libertarian ideas, and the Niskanen center (check out their great essay 'Black Liberty Matters'). A lot of my evolution was also understanding the "woke" perspective on race relations. (It's not totally without merit!)
I found myself defending progressive left social justice causes against attacks from the right on libertarian message boards. I am approximately in the same place as you that the "Blue Tribe" is right on the merits about social justice issues. The problem is the Blue Tribe is far too eager to utilize the tools of social ostracism to enforce compliance with it's beliefs, and that is not even limited to culture war issues. Ironically, however, one of the principles of libertarian theory, that they've long used to argue against anti-discrimination laws, is that such social tools could be used to suppress racist behavior and speech in the place of formal laws. I.e. we don't need anti-discrimination statutes because we can shame people on social media instead! Of course, many of them hypocritically decided even this was bad when it actually was put into practice. I've actually come around to the point that I think anti-discrimination laws are preferable to attempting to enforce non-racist behavior purely through having everyone police everyone else's speech via social shaming (way less cognitive load!). Anyway, the Blue Tribe takes it way too far to the point that it is more or less enabling toxic personalities to abuse people online and engage in control freak behavior. The toxicity of the social media environment in about the early 2010s is what I personally think is almost directly responsible for the rise of Trump. A toxicity directly created by "woke" social media shaming attempting to enforce an extreme progressive left political orthodoxy. Some of the same tools were utilized, as you note, during the pandemic early years to shut people up about, for instance, the lab leak theory, among other things.
So, I am in agreement that in a lot of ways the mainstream media discredited itself by attempting to use it's position to enforce a political orthodoxy - especially on race and social justice issues. And that goes back way beynd the last few years. But without any information source trusted by both sides, people have spiraled off into their own closed information ecosystems. Right now in the right-wing media ecosphere everyone's worried about people blowing up Teslas, for some reason, I found out. This barely makes the news in the left-wing media ecosphere. I find myself mostly exposed to center-left news, although my years of learning about Blue Tribe means I'm in touch with some radical left types and their theories (if you think NPR is left wing you need to start listening to Pacifica). I'm also exposed to right-wing news sources indirectly though because I still spend most of my time on center-right-libertarian message boards - sometimes arguing against New Right and Neoreactionary people about culture war issues, but now also arguing against them on trade policy and international relations. The election of Trump however was particularly devastating for center-libertarians like myself because about half of the "libertarian" people immediately jumped ship and became Trump supporters. And of course the logic of power makes people seek to justify whatever policies their Tribe supports even if they would have said the opposite six months ago. Point being, I'm now not truly politically aligned with either camp, although I think this has been true since 2016 if not earlier for me personally.
you jumped into the fire! now you're free. great essay, stoked to read more.