Liberals are not responsible for the right going off the deep end

I lean libertarian and watched it all happen. MAGA went crazy because they wanted to.

My recent post sparked discussion about moderate liberals who “bit their tongue” on the left’s excesses under Biden. Several commenters argued that by failing to push back on these excesses, these people lent credence to conservative efforts to paint the whole party as radically woke, which paved the way for MAGA’s…imprecise rhetoric. Their comments echo a broader trend I’ve noticed in recent weeks: center-right people deflecting blame for Trump’s chaos to the liberal establishment he railed against.

This theory does not match my experience, factually. And even if it were causally true, it is a revealing double standard to blame the left’s miscalculation for the right’s intentional behavior, but never the right’s behavior for the left’s miscalculation. This post elaborates on both points.

(Note that I focus here on the left’s discourse, not the economic policies Democrats have pursued these past decades. But if you’re interested in the second thing, I’ve engaged with that argument too - see below)

The recent conversation started from a passage in my DEI post:

“…in my left-leaning circles,¹ most of us never bought everything the radicals were selling. The reasons we bit our tongue, these past years, were more that we didn’t want to be associated with the weakest and ugliest arguments on the planet.”

To this,

Láthspell

replied. An excerpt:

“…the quote above is the reason I consider people like you to hold a large share of responsibility for the current mess. In biting your tongues, you didn't defend against those arguments, you abandoned the field to them. You created a world where anyone who didn't buy into the whole DEI/woke thing had no sane allies to turn to - the only ones who would stand by them if they dared say anything were the opposing radicals.

And the biggest problem is that your group had (and to a significant extent still have) close to a monopoly on sophisticated arguments…You could have given the masses who never took Philosophy 101 the words that they couldn't find on their own. Given them a template to follow, a way to argue against the overreach without going overboard in the other direction. You didn't. You left them with no response to "if you don't agree with [insert talking-point here], you're literally a Nazi".

If you know anything about human nature, it should have been obvious where that was going to lead: "those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable".”

In a separate thread,

John BC

seemed to agree:

“The problem is that Democrats who know better seldom publicly push back on the fifth bad idea for fear of the fringier elements of their coalition. This enables the right wing propaganda machine to portray it as the position of mainstream Democrats. Until a Democrat with guts comes forward to call BS on BS, we’ll never overcome this problem.”

And Richard Hanania did the same thing in his note about Scott Alexander’s takedown of Ted Cruz’s bogus “Woke Science” database, writing:

“Injecting woke into science has polarized conservatives against all research, especially when it uses boilerplate that the old regime was expecting. So few liberals pushed back on this and they’re still not reckoning with it, which would be low hanging fruit, though they can’t pull it off for some reason.”

But these arguments get it backward. MAGA did not radicalize because reasonable people stopped quibbling with the left. Reasonable people stopped quibbling with the left because MAGA radicalized, which made those quibbles into small potatoes by comparison.

Also, the reason MAGA radicalized was surely not from a dearth of intelligent, principled alternatives available to them. It’s more accurate to say they had little interest in the project of elevated discussion, so they repeatedly rejected those alternatives in favor of the emotions they wanted to feel.

I’m confident about this because I used to passionately believe the opposite thing, until reality made a fool of me.

The choice I witnessed

From 2009 to 2019 or so, I didn’t bite my tongue about anything. For that whole decade—which wound up being the decisive decade for MAGA radicalization—I was that annoying libertarian on your Facebook feed who was notoriously vocal about politics.² I wrote two blogs and commented on plenty more. And I tried very hard, for embarrassingly long, to articulate intelligent, principled alternatives to both right- and left-wing orthodoxies: just what these comments imagine the anti-woke sought.

DEI issues were no exception. I wrote an op-ed in my high school newspaper criticizing affirmative action. I wrote others in my college newspaper pushing back on cancel culture and sticking up for radical free speech. I debated the campus feminists in 2014, despite being a feminist myself. And the Facebook comment wars…hoo boy. All told, probably thousands of pages. I spent more ink writing nuanced criticisms of both sides than almost anyone alive.

Obviously, I’m just one person. But I definitely wasn’t alone. There was a big liberty movement at the time that kind of relished attacking both sides. For a brief moment, around 2014, it even seemed like Republicans might care about libertarian principles too. They were talking about drug policy, criminal justice reform, civil asset forfeiture, and ending forever wars. Rand Paul, a frontrunner, led filibusters against drone strikes. He even reached out to HBCUs. The Tea Party was still a thing, and it claimed to care about small government.

But then Donald Trump came along, and we found out what they actually cared about.

Turned out, most Republicans (and maybe half of libertarians) didn’t really take to our lofty principles. What fired them up was crass nativism. They said they valued small government, but they cheered bigger government on immigration, crime, abortion, trade, torture, drone strikes, and war crimes. They said they valued the constitution, but loved the guy who ran roughshod over it. They said they valued liberty; but the particular liberty they seemed to care most about was the social permission to be cruel and callous without being made to feel bad about it. (Does that sound familiar?)

The left were not paragons of rational consistency either. But what happened with Trumpers was a whole different level. It wasn’t just that they picked bad or hypocritical policies: they picked their own facts. Any time you tried to reason with them, they devolved into trolling or whataboutism. Dozens of times in 2016, I had the surreal experience of trying to talk libertarian dudes into small government positions, and watching their brains completely turn off. Watching the thread revert to the culture war. Watching their real priorities reveal themselves. They proved me wrong, and progressives right, about what animated most of that movement.

In fairness, it wasn’t all conservatives. Some became Never Trumpers or independents. They proved that was possible. They provided “a template to follow.” It’s just that most conservatives didn’t want to follow it. Hifalutin idealism, striving for moral consistency—that wasn’t their thing. They were more drawn to a victim mentality, and got a rush from the candidate who told them what they wanted to hear.

The effect of this trend was demoralizing…and eye-opening. It reoriented me. It did not change my policy beliefs, and I kept criticizing the left’s bad arguments too. Even during the peak of BLM crazy, I remember sharing this meme, for example. Heck, this January I wrote four posts criticizing progressive or Democratic ideas. I never truly stopped calling out both sides.

But over time, my callouts got less symmetrical. In 2012, both sides were about equally reachable by fair-minded argument, so there was space for above-the-fray critiques in each direction. In 2018, they were not, so there was not. That’s why “both-sides” became a punchline. People could see the sides were different: in their values, their actions, and their capacity for good-faith exchange. By 2022? After Trump tried to steal an election, and a third of the country believed whatever he said? It wasn’t even close.

That’s the backstory to my “bit our tongue” comment. Insofar as I stopped nitpicking with the left on culture war issues like a slanted DEI training, it was largely as a reaction to Trump's attempted coup, and to the stark imbalance that confirmed about which side of this culture war threatened egregious harm. Insofar as I got burnt out talking to the right, it was from a recognition of its futility. You can't reason people out of a position that they never reasoned themselves into.

That’s why it’s so frustrating to see the same pattern repeat itself.

Anti-woke as an expression of misplaced priorities

Every politically active person has limited time, bandwidth, and discursive capital. We can only write so many Tweets, Substacks, op-eds, or what have you. We can only pick so many fights.

The fights we choose reflect our priorities and emotional hangups.³ Ultimately, they express our character. They tell the world: of all the problems, these are the ones that most matter to me.

Because wokeness is an overbroad term describing some good things and some bad things, it is sometimes reasonable to be anti-woke. But there is a massive difference between being anti-woke technically—as one of many political positions, mentioned only when it comes up in conversation—and being anti-woke as your predominant political identity. The first thing depends on context; the second is gross, dumb, and inherently tribal.

We could argue all day about what portion of woke was good or rotten, which would be tough to settle because of how stretchy the term is. But if X is the percent of ideas often called “woke” that are truly bad and dangerous, I think most level-headed people understand three things:

1. 1 - X was substantial

2. X was much less popular with actual lawmakers that it was on universities or social media

3. X never threatened anywhere near the amount of harm to our country that is posed Donald Trump’s deeply illiberal and anti-intellectual political movement—a movement the loudest anti-woke people tend to support.

Given those realities, labeling yourself anti-woke hints at moral judgment clouded by festering resentment. It hints at shallow, selfish priorities that elevate your freedom from social censure over others’ freedom from violence, hardship, or tyranny. It confuses mean Tweets with mean governance, based on which one you personally might be subjected to.⁴ To slightly oversimplify, one side has had the following problem for the past decade:

More performative expressions of empathy than reason should ideally dictate, which sometimes spilled over into an obnoxious, chilling, unforgiving but nonviolent cancel culture driven mostly by free association.⁵

While the other side had this problem:

A corrupt, authoritarian, egomaniacal strongman, fueled by spite and nativist mood response politics, who is transparently at war with liberal democracy, the constitution, intellectualism, ethics, truth itself, and anything else that might stand athwart his desire to transform our proud system of checks and balances into an imperial cult of personality, wherein cruelty is celebrated and loyalty to his ego is the only law.

To this libertarian, that choice was clear. But the anti-woke crowd chose differently. So at this point, I am straight out of patience with those “independents” who downplayed Trump’s threat for three straight elections, and now try to gulp and tiptoe around how destructive and embarrassing his administration is by blaming the people who warned them.⁶ The left erred, there’s no disputing that. But it erred in the course of its frantic struggle to convey truths now apparent through your thick, whiny, whatabouting skulls, so it’s not you who gets to say “I told you so” now.

It’s been maddening, this past month, to watch liberal anti-woke people just now discover who their fellow travelers are. See this precious series of articles describing disappointment that some—some!—in the anti-woke movement might not be consistent liberals after all. Or

The Free Press

writing wow, gee, now that our tippy top priority of defeating wokeness is achieved, I do seem to notice an awful lot of monstrous tweets from our side, which were totally not there these past few years…

Maybe, if they’d squinted really hard, they might have noticed a little sooner that the things their bedfellows called “woke” were not just cancel culture and pronouns in too many bios. They were rather things like acknowledging that Trump lost the 2020 election, or vague association with an ill-defined “establishment” that included all credible experts, media outlets, judges, prosecutors, or officials who stood against Trump. You know, things that amounted to actual defense of liberalism against its actual threats.

Anti-woke was to 2024 what small government was to 2016: some superficially reasonable ideas, acting as fig leaf for darker and dopier sentiments. Like the Tea Party back then, the most vocally anti-woke people were never looking for “sane allies” to turn to. By and large, they wanted someone to validate the feelings they already held: the more strident, the better. The less nuanced, the better. The shorter the words, the better.⁷

The double standard

For all those reasons, I don’t think it would have helped for people like me to call out the left more aggressively these past few years. We tried that already. The people drawn to anti-wokeness might have been hyped up by it, but they wouldn’t have warmed to our moderate ideas instead. That wouldn’t have scratched their itch.

But a second point is as important: even if it would have helped, we shouldn’t have to do that. That’s not our job. We are not the internet police.

Maybe it’s fair to expect college-educated people to articulate more sophisticated arguments. But to hold us accountable for the bad arguments of anyone on our side of the aisle, simply because we failed to correct them? That creates a preposterous double standard in how much energy, patience, courage, self-awareness, strategic thinking, and resistance to peer pressure you expect the two tribes to exhibit.

To illustrate, let’s revisit that Ted Cruz database Hanania was talking about.

Cruz released a database that claimed to reveal $2 billion worth of federal grants funding “woke science” under Biden. Scott Alexander picked 100 of these grants at random and found that only 40% could be plausibly called woke, even under a generous definition that included lots of important research. And the database as a whole was of course a cherry-picked subset of all federal grants, such that the 40% amounted to just 2-3% of federally funded science in the Biden era.

Just before the election, I had a brief debate with one of my smarter conservative friends via text message. I argued that MAGA is fundamentally at war with the truth, expertise, or reasoned argument as a whole, habitually dismissing all inconvenient facts (ex: on vaccines) with a tribal signifier. He replied, in part, by defending this: “I think our elite institutions have been so corrupted by wokeness that they are no longer producing legitimate experts.”

This is a frequent claim on the right these days, used to dismiss any evidence that doesn’t suit their narrative. It resurfaced in the comments of my DEI post, for example. The revelation that actually, the amount of science you could plausibly call woke was less than 3% of the total is a damning indictment of the MAGA worldview and the ridiculous mental gymnastics they do to preserve it.⁸

Yet Hanania’s takeaway from this article was to write:

“Injecting woke into science has polarized conservatives against all research, especially when it uses boilerplate that the old regime was expecting. So few liberals pushed back on this and they’re still not reckoning with it, which would be low hanging fruit, though they can’t pull it off for some reason.”

What a standard! When Red Team says science is so woke we can ignore it, and Blue Team says it’s not, and a careful review of the evidence suggests that it’s 3% woke…which side needs a reckoning?⁹

The reason the left “can’t pull it off” is because they were overwhelmingly right. To expect them to push back on their own team for being 3% wrong, instead of pushing back on conservatives for being 97% wrong, is to strip conservatives of all agency and accountability while demanding progressives perpetually self-flaggelate. It is to confuse Republicans’ flimsy pretense of an argument, transparently motivated by cultural grievances, with something the other side has to legitimize.

What actually polarized conservatives against research was the persistent experience of it not being on their side. It was the fact that informed, educated people had a better grasp on the research than they did, and those people tended to lean left.¹⁰ Research was a tool the other tribe could make better use of than they could. So conservatives had a choice: learn—get a PhD themselves and figure out what the hell they’re talking about—or call the other tribe nerds and pretend the science was biased. It sure ain’t my fault they chose as they did.

Reasonable people are not responsible for fixing their own beliefs, the left’s beliefs, and the right’s beliefs all at once. It’s hard enough, in this chaotic information environment, to reflect and grow in our own beliefs without having to handhold half the country through their journeys. And as my own experience testifies, trying to handhold them rarely works anyway.

1. My circles are left-leaning because I met my current friend circle at a policy graduate program. Also, in my view, the left-right political spectrum is no longer defined by economic issues in the US. It’s defined more closely by social issues like immigration, crime or abortion—issues on which Democrats favor smaller government. Today, consistent libertarians are on net left-leaning.

2. I’m less annoying now (a low bar) but technically still libertarian. That said, I prefer softer labels like liberal-tarian to avoid association with what the movement’s become. Sadly, the “Libertarian” Party has recently been taken over by arch-conservative entryists who’ve behaved in abhorrent, authoritarian ways I want absolutely nothing to do with. This genuinely was not always the case; but I can no longer dismiss the mainstream perception of actually existing libertarians without being guilty of no-true-Scotsmen, and “progressive libertarian, but not the awful kind” is too clunky to work as a label.

3. At least, over a large enough sample.

4. Anti-woke is overbroad too, of course. Sometimes it’s a fig-leaf for white supremacists; other times, it’s a big tent with normal people fed up with the left’s BS. I can chat with that second group just fine. But insofar as that group is voting based on their anti-woke sentiment, they’re still revealing misplaced priorities. In conflating federal policy with internet vibes, they fail to keep wokeness in proportion to the scale of its threat.

5. Importantly, the government had very little involvement with this culture outside occasional DEI trainings and 2-3 cases of true stories being briefly, accidentally, but wrongly taken down as misinformation.

6. “We warned you to stop crying wolf!”, they say. Yeah—except it turns out there was a wolf, so the criers were right, while the warners were dressing it up as a sheep.

7. Not to beat up on Lathspell, but to observe that left-leaning people have “close to a monopoly on sophisticated arguments”—that "the people with the talent, education and vocabulary" all lean left—is to all but concede this point.

8. Similarly, Alexander cites people in his feed justifying the dismantling of USAID by arguing that liberals had “so carefully sunk their tentacles into everything that it would be impossible to sort the woke garbage from the genuinely important programs.” This is completely backward. Conservatives muddied the difference between woke garbage and genuinely important or credible things, across every institution in the country that they wanted to destroy or take over. There is no underlying ideology here about what makes a program “genuinely important” except it’s avowed loyalty to their ingroup. That’s what populism is.

9. Of course, even the 3% figure is just granting, for the sake of argument, that all “woke” science is actually bad. It’s not, as Alexander’s post made clear.

10. This is not a coincidence, and calling attention to it is not the haymaker argument against academic bias that the right imagines it to be. It’s a hint that in the age of Trump, the truth itself has a left-leaning bias.