So, I've been reading some of my old stuff, and comparing it with my new stuff, and I have to admit, I have changed a bit since 2020. I've spent a lot of time doing a lot of ideological spring cleaning between election cycles where I "took out the trash" so to speak and this has caused me to shed a lot of beliefs that no longer serve me. It has also put me at odds with a lot of the modern left. As such, I would like to discuss some of these shifts more directly.
The economic elephant in the room
So yeah, for all of the political advocacy I talk about, I primarily talk about economics. And to some extent, I've always been more liberal than leftist. Just because I'm unsatisfied with the current state of liberalism in the US, does not mean I'm a leftist. This tension started forming in 2019 as the Bernie camp started going after the Yang gang because Yang wasn't a "socialist" and that UBI was a neoliberal plan to destroy welfare apparently, but it didn't stop that election cycle. And over time, I've soured a bit on the left.
The fact was, Bernie was just the best person for the job at the time. He was a vehicle for some good ideas I had like medicare for all and free college. He wasn't perfect, and there were times where I just didn't see eye to eye with him.
And as Yang entered the political scene, and had ideas more representative of what my ideals were, I started feeling a conflicting loyalty to "the left." Sure, we both want expansive universal public services, but our visions of it differ widely. I recognized that there were some differences here as early as 2019, but as I investigated the issues more deeply in 2021, and really sat down and thought "if I were to create the perfect economic vision, given the obvious fiscal limitations of how much we can tax and spend, what would my ideal vision look like?" And...I went hard in the Yang direction.
The fact is, UBI, Medicare for all, Green new deal, these are all nice ideas in their own right, but we can't afford all 3. UBI is $4 trillion a year, with over $3 trillion in new spending, Medicare for all is $4 trillion a year with $1.75-2.4 trillion in new spending. Green new deal is $1.5-3 trillion a year. We can't afford all of these. When I looked at Bernie and yang's respective political visions, I understood that the maximum amount we could expand the size of government was in the ballpark of $5-6 trillion. At which point around 50% of our GDP would be controlled by the government., and we would be taxing people at roughly nordic levels.
The mainstream Bernie left is largely hostile to UBI as a concept. They claim support for it if done properly, but want it done on top of their other things, and those other things are expensive. Quite frankly, their versions of UBI they would find acceptable won't work, and they'd very quickly abandon the idea to push other ideas like a job guarantee (probably as part of the green new deal) instead.
I've never been big on the job guarantee aspect of the green new deal. If we're gonna spend on climate, I'd rather spend on climate and leave it at that. I don't wanna create millions of jobs for the sake of giving people a paycheck when I can instead just give people a paycheck. And honestly? I feel like the left exaggerates the climate emergency in order to push for their green new deal, which is just a 21st century reimagining of either a new deal or socialist country style jobs program. Honestly, that seems kind of dystopian to me, relative to UBI, and given how more moderate versions of climate deals like Biden's Build Back Better and Yang's 2020 climate plan seem more aligned with what I'd want out of a climate plan, I'd rather endorse them.
Now this leaves the other big elephant in the room, and that is medicare for all. i LOVE the idea of medicare for all. But I also recognize that it would be extremely expensive. And I have done some calculations where it looks like it would compromise my primary goal, UBI. And if I had to scale down medicare for all, or UBI, I'd rather do medicare for all.
Now, I have designed full scale medicare for all plans based on bernie and warren's 2020 plans, but I'm not really confident I could comfortably fund them on top of a UBI, and given my UBI is $4 trillion a year, I looked into alternatives to medicare for all and have found public option plans I could live with, like medicare extra for all and its congressional bill equivalent, the medicare for america act of 2019. The fact is, an aggressive public option that auto enrolls people and charges them based on their ability to pay is probably better than full on medicare for all. It leaves private options for all who want them, but also gives people a public option, and leaves no one uninsured in practice. This plan is also akin to what Kamala Harris was promoting when she promoted her pseudo medicare for all plan. It was basically a version of this. So, I found a cheaper middle ground, I kinda like it, I also like medicare for all, but to be honest, my heart isnt set on medicare for all like it once was and while much like Yang I support the idea of it, I'm more mixed these days on the actual idea.
After all, I studied universal healthcare plans overseas and many of the best systems actually did use mixtures of public and private plans. You don't always NEED single payer or NHS style system to get some results, and sometimes those issues lead to sub optimal outcomes like longer wait times or that nasty euthanasia business canada was caught doing to save public funds. Also, given the nature of abortion in the US, I could see the right using a universal healthcare system to make abortion de facto illegal in the US just by refusing to cover such services.
So....is that really the way? I don't know.
Either way, this has caused my own vision to diverge a bit from the left's and put me more in line with that weird politically homeless camp of being left of most craplibs but to the right of most leftists.
It also has made me less opposed to presidents like Biden, who have been pushing for stuff like build back better, and who does, in theory, support a public option with universal opt in, although has done very little on it.
The fact, as I'm forced to compromise my own vision somewhat for fiscal reasons and prioritize my causes and choose my battles, I become a bit more open to more moderate progressive ideas on subjects like healthcare and the climate.
I still support bernie primarily on other things. Like housing, he's better. Free college and student debt forgiveness, he's better than Biden.
But I could...live with Biden at this point, honestly, if he had a progressive congress who was willing to back up his plans and get things done.
Meanwhile...if anything, I kinda view the left more as a competitor of my ideas. If Bernie had his way and we spent trillions on healthcare and a jobs program, we might not be able to pass UBI down the line. In the past, I always figured if Bernie accomplished his vision, people would realize that we could do better than this and back UBI, but given the nature of competing political ideologies, I've come to realize that leftists in the Bernie vein are more "frenemies" than anything. I can work with me, until we stab each other in the back. And MAN, they'll stab you in the back.
To be fair, I'm not cool with Biden or the centrist factions either. A lot of them don't want UBI and we kinda had to drag Biden kicking and screaming to be as left as he actually is being. As I noted through 2021, I'm kind of politically homeless, both opposed to both the centrist camp and the left for different reasons. I just don't have a political tribe to belong to any more. And if anything I'm just working with whatever faction, centrist or left, pushes things in the direction I find acceptable. But that doesn't mean I like either of them.
Speaking of the left...
I know the centrists have been complaining about this all along, but the far left's purity testing is a bit ridiculous. You can agree with them on 90% of things and they'll rip you for the other 10%. Quite frankly, in some ways, while I have kinda left the far left tribe as I've built up my own political ideology, the left kinda left me first. I know, a cliche Ronald Reagan type saying, but it's true. In 2016, when I supported Bernie, I did it because I thought if we got some of that nordic type stuff in the US, it would improve things. I didn't sign up for whatever the left has become since then. At some point, after screaming about socialism enough and purity testing me, and people I liked to death over silly issues that shouldn't be that big of a deal, I just ended up losing whatever love I had for those guys. And again, I'm starting to realize I just never adopted the extreme ideologies (like socialism, postmodernism, and associated lenses) that a lot of them are pushing. And that I am more liberal than leftist.
This does not mean, however, that I'm aligned with the centrist camp of the democratic party. While the left left is pushing into stuff like democratic socialism and the like, a lot of what we call "third way" democrats or "neoliberals" are WAAAAY too moderate for me. Might as well just be sane conservatives at this point. I still mean that.
The fact is, there's a lot of ideological ground between clinton style third way dems and literal socialists. Social liberalism a la FDR, social democracy a la the nordic model. My own unique blend of social libertarianism that kinda overlaps with those things, but goes in its own direction. I guess when I really lay it out, these shifts have been self evident for a while, and maybe I'm spending too much effort trying to justify every little shift I've ever made in my life since starting this blog, and given I always say that I havent changed, things have changed around me, I have to admit that while that is true mostly, I have changed but a little.
The foreign policy problem
For most of my life, it's been pretty easy to be anti war or anti interventionist, as I've written lately, the moral arc of US interventions in recent decades have soured a lot of Americans' views on the US as a force for good in the world, and the complex geopolitical nature of warfare has caused me, and many others, many of whom are not leftists, to be less interventionist in the world. THe fact is, the US seems to mess up much of what it touches, especially as the third world/global south and especially the middle east goes, and I've been more reluctant to want to commit troops and resources to warfare for the sake of so called "regime change". We seem to mess up whatever we touch. And I still stand by this.
HOWEVER, in recent years, we've been moving on from the war on terror toward new conflicts. Russia invaded Ukraine and it seems like the left felt very divided on it. To me, it seemed obvious, this was a bad scenario we've been wanting to avoid since the 1940s, an aggressive russia invading Europe. And while we can't intervene directly (nor would I want to), I see nothing wrong with supporting Ukraine and helping them fight Russia. Nothing about this strategy is new. Russia backed the Vietcong in Vietnam against us. And we backed the mujahideen against Russia in Afghanistan. When we're dealing with a foreign power like russia stampeding into countries like Ukraine, protecting them isnt imperialism, it's ANTI imperialism. And the left seems to have missed the memo on that one.
And of course, Israel. I don't know how you can support Palestine given how Hamas has acted. You realize Hamas is the Palestinian government, right? They're a terrorist group...in charge of Palestine. And they're radical, genocidal, and barbaric.
I'm not even saying that Israel is this perfect moral country that never does wrong. No, criticize Israel for their settlements, and criticize their far right government when they overstep their boundaries. I'm not saying that we should give them a free pass on anything. But COME ON, when one side is morally grey and the other is as black as black gets, the morally grey faction is basically the "good" one. But because the left is fixated on their weird postmodernist "anti colonialism" bias in which they just categorically view israel as the bad guys and palestine as the oppressed, I feel like they went off the deep end. And the more "the left" tries to claim to speak for me in saying that this is an issue that is uniting them against the Biden administration and democrats, that's a hard no from me, dawg.
I might criticize the democratic party harshly on economics, but on foreign policy, I actually LIKE them. And they represent the compromise between the war happy conservatives and the crazy anti war left with its deranged anti american worldview.
Social issues
So....critical theory. I get it. I understand the lens. There is some validity to the idea that "underprivileged" groups like racial minorities, women, LGBTQ+, have it worse in society on a statistical level.
However, unlike most of the modern left, I'm not OBSESSED with this fact. The modern left is OBSESSED with race, gender, and sexuality. And I'm...not.
And the more those guys push their obnoxious morality purity on the issue and try to bully me, the more likely I am to just say "you know what, screw you guys, i'm going home."
Honestly, when I came over to the left, I understood that due to the coalitional nature of politics, that I would be sharing the left with some strange bedfellows. People who I dont always see eye to eye with, but I can respect them as long as they respect me in return.
The social justice left is NOT this ally. They are even more obnoxious with the moral purity than the far left (when these guys dont overlap with the far left). And that's actually quite a feat. The fact is, much like the far left on economics, I've come to realize that these guys are "frenemies". We largely agree on things, but because we dont agree for the right reasons, they stab me in the back. Seriously, even on takes I agree with these people on, I'm just like OMFG SHUT THE F UP! Like abortion. Me: everyone should have a right to reproductive rights and bodily autonomy. Feminists: IF YOU'RE A MAN YOU CANT HAVE AN OPINION ON ABORTION. Gay and trans issues. Me: "Whatever, it's cool". SJWs: "if you dont wanna have sex with a trans woman youre transphobic. Also birthing person. Also when you call us out on this we'll just deny it and gaslight you." It's like...will you just shut up, man! Oh wait, that's gendered language. *slaps own wrist*.
Like really. I'm a passive ally on these issues, drawn to left wing positions primarily out of libertarian principles. I'm not in with this obnoxious cult of caring or virtue signalling. Nor will I abandon issues I deem a higher value to me in order to support democratic candidates because OMG black and trans people or something. No.
The fact is, I'm not big on the cult of caring crap. And while I'd say I'm more left than right on most issues, I'm just so fed up with "the left" socially that I've just rebranded myself to a centrist in order to avoid the weird pitfalls of both the SJWs, while also avoiding the actual right.
I'm actually pretty progressive. Just a low key older progressive with a different ideology than the modern postmodernist zeitgeist.
How this plays into 2024 for me
Honestly, while the left gets more shrill and purity testy on every front, the less enthused I get over leftism or leftist candidates and the more I ironically start liking Biden in comparison. Because Biden has been a relatively progressive president who has exceeded my expectations, and honestly, I blame most of him not getting things done on congress and sell outs like Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema over Biden himself. I'm not saying Biden is perfect, and I'm not saying we shouldnt go further left. But my "further left" is basically UBI, public option, and ALL student debt forgiveness/4 year free college.
Meanwhile, the left is like, if you dont want full on single payer (and ONLY single payer) and a full green new deal youre a traitor and sellout. Also UBI of is of the devil or something.
The fact is, I end up, after a while, not really liking either option.
And then once you factor in the fact that Biden's stances on social and foreign policy views tends to align closely with mine while the left attacks me over well, everything, I'm not very much liking the left.
Again, my ideal candidate or platform is between these two factions. Biden is too moderate, and the left is too extreme.
And while I kinda sorta like Marianne Williamson and Cornel west, eh....Biden is kinda inoffensive to me at this point himself.
And honestly, I'm starting to care more about beating the GOP than the exact vision the left takes right now.
In the general, I plan on definitely supporting Biden.
IN the primary, I'm kinda mixed, as my metrics showed. Yes, Williamson is superior to Biden. But she also has cringey foreign policy views and just seems to lack the right temperament to be president. Idk, do I follow my heart on economic policy, or look at the big picture. If I prioritize only economics, Williamson is an upgrade to Biden, but if I factor in the big picture of foreign policy, social policy, and strategy vs the GOP and their assaults on democracy, our liberties, and our safety nets, idk, Biden is kinda...the guy to support right now.
I'll make a position next year in time for the primaries. But I'm not really feeling either option very strongly right now. Like, the left wing option does not enthuse me a ton over Biden. For every position I like better, there's a position I like worse. I kinda feel like it's a wash, as is shown by the metrics I did.
Now, Cenk Uygur. Cenk I like. I would vote for him in a heartbeat. He's progressive, but he's not STUPID progressive. And sure, he ain't a UBI supporter either, but he's running this pragmatic middle ground playbook of trying to pass popular progressive positions majorities of the country support, without going too far like the far left does into alienating people.
In an ideal world, I would see him as the best candidate right now.
Unfortunately, despite whatever legal challenge he wishes to bring about immigrants running for president, I don't see him succeeding and as such the one good option for me just isn't even eligible.
Honestly, I just kinda hate 2024 in general. Biden is too moderate, the left is too extreme. And Cenk isn't eligible. Otherwise I think I'd just endorse Cenk at this point.
Ugh, like most of the country, I think this is a "Biden it is, I guess..." year...
Hope to see the left in a better position in 2028.
Conclusion
Honestly, a lot of this might sound redundant. I just wanted to explain a lot of the actual moderate shifts I've taken over the years. While most of this is just me figuring out what I actually stand for as I navigate this post 2016 political battlefield and all of the factions involves, and in a lot of ways, it's more about me just realizing who I really am more than me shifting hard on positions.
Still, this process has shifted me a bit on various political positions, and it has done so in a relatively moderate direction. In some ways I AM "leaving the left". but only the hard and crazy left.
All in all, I'm still this "left of liberal right of socialist" type person who is more extreme than the centrist faction of the democratic party, but I'm also finding myself falling out with the actual left, as well as their anti war and SJW counterparts. The fact is, their philosophy is too extreme and would take me places I cannot go, and given this has caused me to take a deep look at myself, I have moderated a bit in recent years.
Still, I would agree with 90% of what I had previously written, and most of these differences have happened in the nuance of things, rather than in major shifts to my actual value system. My core value system since 2012 is still the same, I just have more advanced and nuanced takes on things that have caused me to reject some of my more cringey opinions at times.
I'd say the only MAJOR shift I've had in recent years is that of shifting from single payer to a public option, and even then, I only did it because the alternative would've meant compromising or abandoning UBI instead.
Again, bernie and yang's ideologies are different, we need to prioritize progressive goals and i simply prioritize different than the left. This might mean I have to leave the hard left and pursue my own path between the centrists and the left, but so be it. If this is what I have to do, then I'll do it.
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