Liberals vs The Left

If you are of a political mindset that is not aligned with today's Left, please take a moment to look outside the virtual walls of your political compound. Take a gander at how some prominent names are breaking ranks with 'their' tribe, how an increasing number of liberals are disavowing the prevailing currents of leftism.

The substantive nature of this break became clear to me when Bari Weiss, formerly a writer for the New York Times, quit that formerly illustrious broadsheet with a seism-inducing public resignation that decried the decline of journalistic freedom and the concomitant caving to the Twitter-verse. Weiss and a bevy of notables (many, but not all, dedicated liberals) got together to form the Foundation Against Intolerance & Racism. When Matt Taibbi, long a left-leaning gadfly, started scorching 'his' team fo rits intolerance and its censorious ways, I knew something was afoot.

We have, I believe, hit a cultural inflection point a couple weeks ago, when a transgender college athlete (Lia Thomas, formerly Will Thomas) who swam for three years with the men's team at UPenn, set multiple school records as a member of the women's swim team.

*Shattered* school records is, I'd suggest, more appropriate, and to the surprise of absolutely no one with an ounce of intellectual honesty. That an athlete who went through puberty, high school, and into college with male hormones, developing male physiology, musculature, bone structure, cardiovascular capacity, and so on outperformed biologically female athletes only shocks fools, the ignorant, and liars.

Societal acceptance of transgender individuals is a positive cultural step. We should each be granted respect as individuals, without prejudice of any sort.

The matter of trans athletes competing in sports has nothing do with acceptance, however. There is a reason that athletic competitions are divided into men's and women's categories - an irrefutable, undeniable biological reason. The entry of biologically male athletes into women's sports will, without a doubt, destroy those sports.

Again, anyone who claims not to see this is either willfully blind or lying. Alas, it is the liars that have come to dominate the public forum... until this moment.

Abigail Shrier, former attorney and present-day journalist/writer, published a book, Irreversible Damage, last year that decries the madness of putting minor girls through chemical and/or surgical gender reassignment. The book sparked massive backlash and overt rage/hate from the aforementioned liars, of course, but Shrier remains undaunted, as her recent essay makes clear.

The UPenn swimming matter has sparked broad outrage from parents, as well as carefully anonymous commentary that dares to speak the truth we all know but most are afraid to voice. That fear is no joke, either. As Shrier laments,

> any institution that takes our brightest, most capable young people — Princeton graduates! —a nd tells you can only work here if you think like we tell you to and keep your mouth shut, that isn't really Goldman Sachs and it isn't the paper of record. It's the husk of a once-great institution, and it's not worth grasping for. Talk to alums at these institutions: they sound like those living under communist regimes.

A generation has been beaten into silence, excepting only rote regurgitation of pre-approved opinions, by a rage-mob that makes up for its lack of numbers with boundless aggression, infinite hate... and, now, self-destructive overreach. Suburban parents, who've been the core demographic of the Left's political aspirations, are waking up to the realities of woke. They rejected the Left's incorporation of Critical Race Theory into school curricula in a bellwether election in Virginia last month. They are openly revolting against "sit down and shut up" school boards. And they are starting to rebel against the transformation (pun somewhat intended) of women's sports.

We are not talking about conservatives, or Republicans, or others not of the left side of the political spectrum. Those people have been on to the radical Left's nuttiness for a long time. We are talking about people who lean blue, who have spent their lives as party-line Democrats, and/or who proudly embrace the "liberal" label.

There is less and less that is "liberal" about today's Left. The race agitators who advance Critical Race Theory, the 1619 project, "woke," and identity politics actively reject liberalism in both its late-20th-Century and classical incarnations. The idea of acceptance, no matter your race, gender, or ethnicity has been replaced with a cultural thuggery, where individuals don't matter, where certain outcomes are to be coerced, and where your opinion, your liberty, and (of course) your money are theirs to manage as they wish. People who reject the cultural cloistering of social conservatism are now rejecting the devolution of their political team to rank authoritarianism and bigotry.

While there's reason to believe that this may be too little, too late, given that much damage has already been done (to the culture, to academia, to science and technology, to the trust in our institutions public and private), this schism between liberals and leftists should be embraced. I've made it a point to distinguish between the two labels, and we should all do our best to embrace the liberals who are rejecting leftism, even if we disagree with them on some or many issues. Those who believe that we should not be afraid to speak our minds, voice our opinions, and disagree with each other are our ideological allies against the intolerants that are ravaging the culture and the nation.

By one study, forty percent of Americans are self-censoring. Others suggest that as many as two thirds of us hesitate to speak our minds on some subjects. Such self-censorship is several times worse than the McCarthy era, and it's a pressure cooker. It will pop at some point. If, by embracing those who disagree with us but who favor free speech and reject cancel culture, we accelerate the burst, it's more likely to be benign and "recoverable." If we, on the other hand, continue to emphasize differences rather than commonalities, the damage may indeed be irreversible.