I sat down with writer Akil Vicks (who runs the Substack on one) to dissect a pervasive dynamic in our current political discourse: the meta-narrative that it’s always the left’s fault, that every extreme position on the right is justified as a reaction to an overstep by the left.
We’re not two camps. We’re a spectrum, from the deepest blue through many shades of purple to the deepest red.
One place the media-left lost people wasn’t just around specific movements like Me Too. It was losing people who value social stability and cohesion alongside progress. When the public conversation sounds like we’re always chasing a utopian state where no one ever offends anyone, many people who still hold fundamentally liberal values feel pushed out.
There’s nothing wrong with the pioneering edge of the left exploring new ideas. Every movement needs that frontier. But a functioning political coalition also needs practical messaging: compromise, incremental progress, and clear labeling of which ideas are exploratory versus broadly expected norms.
Without that distinction, a lot of people in the blue-purple middle start to feel like they no longer have a place.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. It's a nice distillation of the tension we tried to unpack with Akil Vicks.
The meta-narrative isn’t just about people fabricating offense; it lands because, as you articulate, it finds fertile ground when the progressive edge fails to draw a clear line between exploratory ideas and practical messaging. It validates the caricature that the left is obsessed with chasing an unachievable utopian state.
Practical compromise and a sense of shared stability are treated as radical these days. This is why we need to keep having conversations like this.
But you (I at least) don’t hear the left acknowledging that. Even your guest, as thoughtful as he was, was rationalizing the “once-had-been-left” group as people caught up in the me too movement, basically saying they were chauvinistic at best, but maybe even perpetrators.
We’re not two camps. We’re a spectrum, from the deepest blue through many shades of purple to the deepest red.
One place the media-left lost people wasn’t just around specific movements like Me Too. It was losing people who value social stability and cohesion alongside progress. When the public conversation sounds like we’re always chasing a utopian state where no one ever offends anyone, many people who still hold fundamentally liberal values feel pushed out.
There’s nothing wrong with the pioneering edge of the left exploring new ideas. Every movement needs that frontier. But a functioning political coalition also needs practical messaging: compromise, incremental progress, and clear labeling of which ideas are exploratory versus broadly expected norms.
Without that distinction, a lot of people in the blue-purple middle start to feel like they no longer have a place.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. It's a nice distillation of the tension we tried to unpack with Akil Vicks.
The meta-narrative isn’t just about people fabricating offense; it lands because, as you articulate, it finds fertile ground when the progressive edge fails to draw a clear line between exploratory ideas and practical messaging. It validates the caricature that the left is obsessed with chasing an unachievable utopian state.
Practical compromise and a sense of shared stability are treated as radical these days. This is why we need to keep having conversations like this.
But you (I at least) don’t hear the left acknowledging that. Even your guest, as thoughtful as he was, was rationalizing the “once-had-been-left” group as people caught up in the me too movement, basically saying they were chauvinistic at best, but maybe even perpetrators.