I'm gonna be honest, as of late, I feel politically homeless. I have felt this way since about 2015 when the democrats decided to go full centrist and push Hillary and neoliberalism on us, but I don't even fit in on the left any more.
It's quite clear I'm largely not a conservative. I abandoned them for a reason, I have no incentive to go back. My home is somewhere on the left. But at the same time, I don't feel welcome both among democrats and the left.
I don't fit into the democrats for obvious reason. They've completely abandoned the left for this weird suburban centrism thing. They claim to represent the left, claim to be progressive, but they offer the most watered down bullcrap policies possible. They take universal healthcare and turn it into some mediocre public option plan Biden proposes, and you know what? They likely won't even pass that, and we'll just get ACA 2.0 in practice. They dont offer student debt forgiveness full stop, they offer it to a handful of people and then want to knock off a few thousand dollars for others. I mean, they're a joke. They believe in incremental change, which amounts to the most mediocre solutions possible, whereas I want massive solutions. Medicare for all, UBI, free college, etc. Those three policies are what best represent my platform, and I've stood by that since 2015. Not that I'm not open to a green new deal. I just see it as an inferior policy that competes with my preferred ideas. I would actually compromise with the left to get something passed, especially given the threat of climate change. We can always walk it back and replace it with UBI later after the useful parts of the jobs program have run their course.
The problem is this is mocked by the centrists. They think I am "unreasonable" and want purity, when in reality I just want good solutions, not watered down knock off ideas. And since the election, they've become increasingly hostile toward the left and are developing cult like attitudes defending Biden. Just as we just put up with four years of "Hillary got more votes" and Russiagate, now they're framing Biden as "he got the most votes of any president ever!". Yeah? So? That's how population growth works. And while 2020 did get insane turnout regardless, almost as many people actually supported Trump, with Trump easily breaking Obama's 2008 record by four million votes. The fact is, despite that record turnout, Biden grossly underperformed in the polls and barely lost. Both sides had a wave, Biden's just happened to be slightly bigger. And honestly, the election shouldn't have been that close. Of course, democrats just end up becoming insular and mocking Sanders supporters and the like, going on about how great Biden did in the primary (despite the democrats' finger being obviously on the scale, turnout being relatively low, and covid screwing everything up), and how he won in the general. Funny. I didn't see them doing that a few weeks ago when they were too busy CRAPPING THEIR PANTS at the idea of almost losing the election. Ah, the power of propaganda and narratives.
The fact is, I hate the democratic party. I despise it. It doesn't represent me. I mean it supports at best an extremely watered down version of what I'm for, but that's it. We're spoonfed BS and we're told to accept it or go without. We don't have any real control over the party, and the party is openly hostile to us and mocks us. I voted green again for a reason. It shouldn't be this hard to get the semblance of good policy out of a political party. I feel like the party is organized to be hostile to my interests and a firewall against real change.
At the same time, while there are a lot of people who recognize this, I'm starting to not fall in sync with them. I'm gonna be honest, I actually felt at home with the Sanders movement after 2016. They were angry, as were I. They understand the party is hostile to us, and that they don't want our policies. But over time, I feel like this group of people has...radicalized. Like, by 2019, I had some hard decisions to make. I had to decide whether to support Yang, who supported my core ideals almost to a T, or Bernie again. For most of 2019 I was for Yang, but then switched to Bernie around the end of 2019/beginning of 2020 because of Yang backing off of medicare for all over time, and Bernie having a seemingly stronger stance on the climate, which I recognize as an existential threat. Until COVID hit, I was perfectly willing to just let UBI go for now and get behind the green new deal. I wouldn't get everything I wanted out of a Bernie administration, but I'd get most of it and the UBI fight could wait for another day.
But...the Bernie movement became hostile to the Yang movement. Many people within the Bernie movement, between 2016 and 2020, became full on, died in the wool, socialists. I've looked into socialism and I find some ideas with it interesting, like worker cooperatives and democratic control of workplaces, but I largely like a market based system, outside of a few industries with very obvious market failures like healthcare and education. To me, I'm not sold on command economies and never was. I don't want socialized everything. I just want to socialize a few industries under the same logic that we have socialized roads. Some things are better run and more efficient with the government in charge. But that doesn't mean I support some soviet style economy.
The problem is, this causes friction between myself and the hardcore Bernie movement, who have actually gotten obnoxiously purity based, even more so than me. For many of these people, Bernie is the compromise, and while that's true to me too, they mean it in a way of being for full on socialism. I don't honestly believe socialism solves most ills. While ownership of resources is important, I don't see how my life would be a ton better if the government ran literally everything or even if we had market socialism with me working on a worker coop and subject to markets. I recognize flaws in markets, while understanding we can fix those flaws without doing away with them. I have an anti capitalist bend while still supporting some forms of "capitalism" (markets).
That said I start flaunting my Yang and UBI support in front of these guys and they treat me like a neoliberal. They purity test UBI to insane amounts, claiming it would cause inflation and that it would destroy welfare (as if that's a bad thing, welfare to me what the ACA is to Bernie supporters). It's like, dude, I'm trying to help you guys. I wanna give you $1000 a month and free healthcare. But then when you go against Bernie on anything, they suddenly shift the goalposts to some crazy socialist idea of how the economy should work and I don't fit in that group either.
Even worse, a lot of these hardcore Bernie people are so anti democratic party they start parroting a lot of anti science nonsense on COVID and start inadvertantly wrapping back around to agree with Trump, just to spite the democrats. I don't base my views on tribalism but on a core set of ideas that conform to reality as I see it, so I feel like I can recognize democrats are right on COVID stuff while still hating them. But some of them seem to hate the democrats so much they start opposing them no matter how they can, and in the process leaving reality. That bothers me too.
It's like there isn't a place for anti establishment progressives who aren't full on commies any more, or aren't so anti establishment they become full on anti intellectual and start agreeing with Trump. I hate both Trump and Biden. I hate democrats and republicans. I'm on the left but I'm ultimately an independent, and being an independent is hard because you're bound to tick someone off no matter what you say, because your views don't fit into any box of expectations people have from you.
And before you ask, why not just join the Yang Gang? Well, the Yang gang, while less offensive as of late and the closest thing to sanity I can find, are just as bad. It seems like movements like Bernie and Yang end up with the supporters throwing out all reason to form a cult of personality where everything the leader says is right. Yang gang people tend to oppose medicare for all and free college and the like for reasons I find stupid, and their views seem to simply be based on the fact that that's what Yang says. Yang people act like Yang's so smart that we should just defer our opinions to him because he has superior intelligence, and that just isn't true. Yang is a great candidate and someone in politics who I admire and respect, much like Bernie, but his fan base can be just as bad sometimes as the groups I mentioned. People don't understand that their heroes are imperfect and fallible and might not hold all the answers. Another thing that annoys me with the Yang gang is that because of the hostility of the Bernie people I mentioned, these guys have essentially abandoned anti establishment progressivism and have the naive ideas that they can work within the democratic party and the neoliberals and centrists, when I see that as a no go. Much like Bernie, I believe the establishment has it out for Yang, they just act nicer because he's not a threat. But Yang is not going to get very far given the democratic party machine is what it is and the Yang camp tries to be like the opposite of the Bernie camp and try to work with them despite it not working. It's frustrating.
And I'm not even touching the SJW cult again here either. That's another one. I nominally agree with them in core ideology terms but as stated many times on here over the years I find their movement to be extremist and toxic.
I've had the same problem with political ideologies over time. I'm not quite a social democrat as I'm more anti capitalist and anti work, but I'm also not quite a socialist as my support for socialism is nominal at best and as I said I still like some aspects of markets. I'd say I'm closest to left libertarian but given that term's links with anarchism I don't really like it either and in my experience it causes a lot of misunderstandings as people don't see the word "left" there implying a totally different philosophy than right libertartianism. Still given UBI is, at its core, "left libertarian" in the sense that it seeks to free people from wage labor and leave them to be free to do what they want with their lives, it seems to be the best overall fit. Even in left libertarianism my ideas are sometimes tempered by pragmatism though.
I don't know. I feel extremely alone right now politically. I feel like people like me are an extreme minority and we end up getting crapped on by the main camps of the left for some reason. Neoliberals think I'm a commie, commies think I'm a neoliberal, the Bernie camp thinks I'm a traitor but I don't fit in with the Yang gang either. I just want what I want and my views have been fairly stable since, say 2014 or so. Back then I felt like I fit into the party and was optimistic for a progressive future, but now the neolibs are pushing the party realignment along my worst timeline scenario of abandoning the rust belt to win the sun belt, with Trumpism filling in the gap, despite me being completely opposed to that while somewhat understanding it at the same time. The vast majority of anti establishment progressives are becoming increasingly tribalistic and socialist where I don't fit into them either, and I just don't feel I fit in everywhere. It feels tough to be...whatever I am these days. I just felt like I had to say something about it.
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