I would say this was a post I never thought I'd write...but that would be a lie. I think I've known this day was coming for a long time now, I just didn't want to admit it to myself. I've been a liberal my entire adult life, but with every passing year I find less and less on the left that represents me, or my beliefs.
I've been telling myself since maybe 2012 that the problems on the left were just a minority of crazies...everybody has some crazies, there's crazies on the right too. But year by year, issue by issue, I've watched the rot spread higher up and further out. The climate...which I still believe to be a legitimate issue...has become an excuse for pushing everything from socialism to veganism, everything BUT an actual will to take megacorp megapolluters to task. Abortion has somehow become a feminist merit badge, with the "cluster of cells" argument being applied to viable fetuses that could be delivered alive...even to hear that Northam wacko tell it, to babies that have already been born. Gun control has somehow become a demand for the retroactive confiscation of property people already own. Nevermind the second amendment, what happened to the FOURTH?
I've watched my party go insane, the extremism that started with identity politics and a well-meaning desire not to partake in bigotry has spread to every issue the left has a stake in, and from weird internet blogs and fringe university departments to the highest levels of government. Maybe it's always been that way and I've just slowly woken up to it, but I really feel like it's gotten worse. I can remember a time when I could turn on the television and watch a STORY, an original idea, maybe influenced in some way by the beliefs of the writer but not just 24/7 spewing their hatred of some sitting politician. Now it's nothing but virtue signalling, race and gender grievance porn, and orange man bad. Sure, an election is topical, you expect it to be reflected in pop culture, but FFS it's been FOUR YEARS, GET OVER IT!
I hoped they'd learn. I hoped they'd nominate someone reasonable, someone who'd turn the Democratic party back into a big tent, a party for workers, for average Joes...and it looked like maybe that was happening, candidates running on identity politics were flopping left and right, even with blue voters. But no, they formed fucking Joe Biden Voltron and gave us a guy who has no clear positions or even complete sentences besides promising to appoint people based on their genitals and skin color. A guy who's clearly laying the groundwork to step aside for whatever diversity hire he picks as VP.
And I still might have voted for him. Lesser evil, right? It took a double-whammy of a global pandemic and the most glaring hypocrisy I've ever seen to give me the moral courage to admit to myself openly what some part of me had known for a long time: that Donald Trump is not the "greater evil", he's the guy actually fighting for me. Sure, he might have all the tact of a spiked baseball bat, but he's SANE, and he sees the same problems I do, and he's DOING something about them. And if I were called a Manchurian candidate for years with no evidence, impeached for total nonsense, and treated like Hitler every day by the same press that praises a mayor literally threatening to round up Jews, I'd probably be in a bad mood too.
While the media sold us the biblical apocalypse and governors locked us all in our houses, Trump said this thing wasn't as bad as we were hearing. And yet again he was right, every time we test for antibodies we find the mortality rate is about 1/10th of what they claim. We're all in a lockdown that's doing nothing, to conserve hospital resources that aren't being overwhelmed, for a virus we're not allowed to name based on its place of origin, according to a media, and a party, who are relentlessly pushing for us to forgive and jump right back into bed with the people who unleashed it! The goalposts keep moving, governors seem more concerned with reminding protesters they're in charge than saving their economies, and I'm becoming increasingly convinced the whole thing is being used to get people used to depending on government checks! The idea of five, six figure numbers of our people dying is...horrific, it'll never not be horrific, but those deaths...are unavoidable. There's no containing this, there's no stopping it from running its course through the population, we're too big a country, and it was here months before China even admitted it existed. Herd immunity is the only way past this...that number of people WILL die, we can't stop it, it can happen faster or slower depending on what we do but it'll happen. And if medical resources aren't overwhelmed, there's no reason to keep slowing it at the cost of destroying our economy and trampling our rights...people die of poverty too, people die of losing their physical and mental health due to long term isolation too. Those deaths we CAN prevent. And I see which politician is trying to prevent them.
And while all of this goes on, Joe Biden gets accused of actually doing the pussy-grabbing Trump was vilified for speaking of hypothetically. I dismissed it at first, an obvious political stunt from a Sanders supporter, but the evidence is mounting...there's markedly MORE reason to believe Biden did what he's accused of than that Kavanaugh did. I believe both men, and all people accused of serious misdeeds in the court of public opinion, should be given the benefit of the doubt absent hard proof of their guilt, but when it was Kavanaugh, all women must be instantly believed and even the accusation was disqualifying. And now that it's Biden, she's a liar and a Russian operative (just like Trump, Tulsi, Bernie, Stein, and random online Star Wars critics), and it doesn't matter if he did it, he's still better because he's not the orange man. I've never seen a more blatant, more glaring instance of bad faith in my life, and kudos to you guys, you all fucking predicted it.
So I apologize for unburdening years of frustration in this wall of text, but I get it now, I finally fucking see it. This ex-Democrat is voting for TRUMP, and I am here to MAGA!
I've had this passing thought as well. I'm not old enough to really know or understand what it might have been like during the days of conservative cultural authoritarianism, but I can only figure that those days are a lot of the reason the left views us they way they currently do.
My optimism as far as the pendulum begining to swing right again is actually coming from these lockdowns.
At some point, even those who have been hypnotized to the highest degree of fear will begin to miss and desire their old lives back. And this is all assuming that individual stays on payroll comfortably throughout the whole ordeal. In the other case, you can virtually guarantee someone who has been put out of work will have jumped ship from the left.
The partisan nature of the lockdown policies I believe will ultimately be the undoing of the left
I am over 65 and I have never seen any cultural conservative authoritarianism. Keep in mind that the apartheid jack boots were Democrats. The South used to be highly Democrat.
The 80s, I think… The age of “greed is good“ evil business types, and Tipper Gore asserting that Judas Priest makes people kill themselves. (“Think of the children!“)
Not saying it’s equivalent to the current shit show, but that era created the impression of conservative cultural authoritarianism.
The left today remains deluded that they are still fighting that bogeyman.
Just FYI, Tipper Gore was/is the wife of DEM VP Al Gore, and that was in the 90s.
Also, remember that most of what you read about politics and culture was written by the MSM, and they were as left-leaning and Republican-hating back then as today -- just not so obvious about it.
Source: Middleagepede who remembers all of the 1980s.
That's the thing, though. People always make the mistake of thinking that capitalism and greed is never a liberal trait, when the truth is anything but. Quit exclusively associating money and greed with conservatives, that's a leftist mind trick that's been played on us all. Who is Disney, Rothschilds, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Amazon. Every "NGO" that pushes for climate taxes and expensive mandatory vaccines. There was obviously a different set of major companies in the 80s, but to think that there weren't copious amounts of liberals in their ranks, especially by that time, the true start of the Age of Aquarius hippies getting into CEO positions and making money off proto-wokeness is absurd.
Also.... Where do you think the cultural creep even started? Conservatives (or at least Christian ones, since that's what this country used to be in the vast majority) have had every right to fight and rail against it, since the dawn of the whole entertainment industry and beyond. It's only, again, a leftist trick to call this concern at over-sexualization and the degrading and demoralizing of the human spirit via negative influences evil. A leftist trick that they use to this very day, to propagate news stories of only the most controlling and misinformed wackos on the conservative side. Instead of realizing that yeah, the slippery slope is real, and it didn't just happen the past ten years. It just got slipperier.
If you want to attempt to argue conservative cultural authoritarianism, try at least the 50's, perhaps early 60's. And even then that wasn't a horrible time for entertainment. If anything it was — once again —Democrats being the obvious authoritarians and not wanting to relinquish control of Black people's lives.
Fuck, even the word "authoritarian" is a bit of a leftist boondoggle when I think about it. Is authority truly negative? What happened to respecting your elders, respecting those who have more experience? Tl;dr, don't fall for their mind games.
Tipper Gore? Al Gore's ex-wife?
It was "D&D will turn you into a satanist and we have to censor Harry Potter". I remember it well, it was no different than "vidya titties will turn you into a misogynist" is now. There are still wannabes like the Groypers who think we should ban porn because it's a Jewish plot against our manhood, but thankfully they seem to be a fringe and the guys with the pornstar-fucking President are pro-tits.
But I remember Patricia Pulling, Jack Thompson, CHICK TRACTS. Right wing moral guardians were the kind I grew up hating. If Anita Sarkeesian had been born 20 years earlier, she probably would have been religious right instead of SJW. Some people just seem to be born with an impulse to control, to forbid whatever makes them personally uncomfortable to others, and they work backwards to create a political justification for that impulse, wrapped in whatever the popular, powerful politics of the time are so they can bully people into submitting to them.
Always beware of such people. They will take over your movement and rot it to madness and death from the inside if they can, just like they did to mine.
Very thoughtful response, thank you for your insight from the other side!
I hope I can contribute in that way. Sadly I live somewhere where my actual vote for Trump won't do a damn thing. But maybe my experience on the other side can be a strategic resource.
Honestly your original post is probably the best post I've ever read on this site. I'm in a similar situation, LA doesn't give a damn if I vote Trump.
I've always been a-political myself, but grew up with a very Liberal mother and of course the LA culture has always been as left as you can go.
And despite all that, it's nice to hear people on this site who will at the very least admit that there are tenets of Liberalism that are well-meaning in the beginning. Its just that now, and possibly for quite a while (haven't been paying attention so much until recently), that well-meaning intention has spiraled into the realization of thought-crimes and wrong-think.
In my opinion, your experience on the other side is a strategic resource, but not necessarily for 'attacking the left' so to speak, but better served as a reference point for more passionate conservatives to understand what it may be like as a Liberal who is becoming alienated from their party, but might not be willing to swallow the Redpill in entirety if that makes sense.