I’m currently reading a history of neo-liberalism, Masters of the Universe: Hayek, Friedman and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics by Daniel Stedman Jones. It’s turning out to be quite interesting. Here is a quote from Hayek:

The virtues these people possessed – in a higher degree than most other people, excepting only a few of the smaller nations, like the Swiss and the Dutch – were independence and self-reliance, individual initiative and local responsibility, the successful reliance on voluntary activity, non-interference with one’s neighbour and tolerance of the different and the queer, respect for custom and tradition, and a healthy suspicion of power and authority. Almost all the traditions and institutions in which democratic moral genius had found its most characteristic expression, and which in turn have moulded the national character and the whole moral climate of England and America, are those which the progress of collectivism and its inherently centralistic tendencies are progressively destroying.

As an individualist and a supporter of democracy who lately has been feeling very uncomfortable with the concessions that liberals have been making to their radical leftists allies lately, I find this statement very appealing. It is a shame that the supporter of this view, in order to implement their economic agenda, made an alliance with the cultural reactionaries. (I was going to call them conservatives, but they don’t want to slow down the rate of change as much as they are reacting against changes that have already occurred and would like to implement a program to bring about a cultural purity that never existed.) As an atheist and a great many other things that these advocates of cultural purification would see stamped out of existence, I am almost forced to side with the far left. It is quite frustrating for me because I entirely agree with the anti-totalitarian point Hayek is making and I can easily see the authoritarian impulses on the left.

There is a great irony that the direct political heirs to Hayek have aligned themselves with Christian reactionaries who are also clearly authoritarian.

I sometimes find myself wondering if the anti-totalitarian left and the anti-totalitarian right can find enough common ground to cooperate because the far left has been going in a direction that I may not be able to keep company with them any more.

The mob justice on social media has been of particular concern to me.

I don’t have my fingertips on the pulse of the public. I couldn’t sell a box of soap, let alone a candidate like he or she was a box of soap. Consequently, I usually avoid horse race discussions, dissecting campaigns and treatises about messaging. Still, I keep seeing article after article about how Secretary Clinton is struggling, so I thought I throw in my two cents.

Several months ago, I said to my mother that I felt Clinton was the only Democrat who could lose. My opinion hasn’t changed.

Just about every talking head out there who’s tried to make sense of Donald Trump’s lead in the GOP primary race had mentioned the dissatisfaction that voters have with the power elite in Washington. Just this morning I read:

Washington isn’t broken. It is a well-oiled machine that works for the well-connected and responds to the well-heeled. This corrupt nexus of favoritism and cronyism tends to leave hardworking Americans behind.

This was immediately followed by what is becoming the ubiquitous reference to Howard Beale, also used at a touchstone the day before by Daniel Henniger in The Wall Street Journal. However the comparison is a poor one. The movie Network, one of my favorites, is not about politics but about television news ceasing to be journalism and becoming entertainment. However, the anchorman’s on air rant which made the movie such a popular reference reminds me how much worse the general state of the country was back in the nineteen seventies.

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s worth. Banks are going bust. Shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be.

For all our problems, in the United States of America is far better than 1975. Our most pressing problem is ISIS, and that’s overseas. Sure, there are problems, but they don’t seem as insoluble as they did forty years ago. Still, although the problems don’t look insurmountable, it looks as if no one is going to take them on. A couple of days ago, on the website The Hill, Brent Budowsky wrote:

There is in this consultant industrial complex a Washington-based tier of operatives who move back and forth between working for Obama, profiting from anti-populist corporate business that would normally be associated with Republicans and most recently working for Clinton.

This cronyism is something everyone sees. Perhaps the people in positions of power feel entitled to be there. However, it doesn’t appear to be sustainable. That is the concern. We are not in an especially bad place at the very moment, but people are apprehensive that we are about to head in a very wrong direction.

I am not particularly concerned about whether or not Clinton can win the Democratic Nomination. My concern is that she wins it and loses to someone like Donald Trump.

Clinton has been forced down the throats of rank and file Democrats in the party by the higher-ups with the promise that she can win. For well over twenty years the Democratic Party has neglected its down ticket races. It has no “bench” because it hasn’t cultivated the state level and local level politicians that eventually feed into the national level. The Democratic Party has indeed become a “consultant industrial complex.” We need a change of leadership in the party.

So, it seems I’m now a “social conservative.”

I spent my early years in an environment dominated by reformed Jews who leaned left and who saw advocating for civil rights and social justice to be part of a long and noble tradition. My family then moved to a town that was known for its large middle-class black population, high average level of education and its active artistic community. In high school, many of my friends proudly declared themselves to be “radicals, not liberals.” I had my hair dyed pink and posed nude for aspiring photographers. I accompanied a friend to the Chelsea Piers and snuck into midnight drag shows in the West Village.

The opinion of my teachers and the guidance councilor at my high school was that I leaned left even in this overwhelmingly leftward leaning environment and they all highly recommended that I go to one of those small, liberal arts colleges known for breeding radicals.

But it seems I’m a social conservative.

At fourteen, I told my high school friends I was bisexual and groped and fondled some of the girls. In college, I had a relationship with a radical lesbian separatist feminist who wore a black leather jacket, rode a motorcycle and fixed cars. A few years later, I nearly managed to cohabit with a man while having a girlfriend on the side. Might have worked if they hadn’t gotten jealous.

This is the behavior of a social conservative.

I’ve been a highly vocal supporter of the right to abortion and contraception since ninth grade.

I take an uncompromising stance on women’s bodily autonomy. “No” means no, and saying “yes” isn’t only for boys.

During the late eighties, when racial tensions rocked New York City, I found myself rethinking much of my politics. Different minority groups were in conflict with one another with dueling claims to being “the oppressed.” As I’ve recounted before, the way of viewing the world that I had been taught left me unable to make sense of this. At this point, many of my acquaintances and one of my close friends had become anarchists. At the same time, my boyfriend received an anonymous gift subscription to The National Review, the conservative magazine founded by William F. Buckley. I became disheartened by the willingness of the left to subordinate the truth to propaganda, the degree to which they actively discouraged me from reading sources they of which they didn’t approve. Despite being warned against it, I read the forbidden magazine. I agreed with next to nothing in it. Despite the fears of my friends, reading conservative ideas didn’t make me automatically agree with those ideas. Still, the left was failing me intellectually and I spent several years trying to make sense of my own politics.

Though I lived in Brooklyn, much of my free time was spent in the East Village and on the Lower East Side. One of my anarchist friends kept trying to get me involved in the “occupation” of Tompkins Square Park. She knew of the political questions I’d been asking myself and thought if I could see what she saw in the encampment I would find myself drawn to anarchism.

As luck would have it, although I’d barely spend anytime there at all, I would be there when the riot broke out. A week or two later I’d be with that same friend at a bar in the East Village. With a few other anarchists, she told her war stories. It was all a lie. I’d been right there with her. I listened to these self-aggrandizing accounts and felt disgusted with them all.

In the meantime, I’d been reading more of older liberal thinkers. Years earlier, I’d been kept from embracing the Marxist position of many of my friends due to a copy of The Wealth of Nations I’d picked up without any real reason in a used bookstore. Now, I read Hume and reread John Stuart Mill. I also became interested in the origin of liberalism and the ideas of John Locke.

It is important to note that while I was growing up, leftism and liberalism were still seen as two distinct ideologies. Nowadays, the term “liberalism” is used to indicate a wide array of positions, some contradictory, on the left.

It is important to understand that engaging with a thinker’s ideas does not mean that one accepts all of his or her ideas or that one accepts them uncritically. However, the ideas of long dead liberals pointed a way out of the intellectual bind in which I had found myself.

This major reworking of my ideas in my early twenties has served me well in the decades since. I’m having a hard time articulating my ideas because I’ve rarely spoken to anyone about them, and I’ve never had a chance to talk to anyone who was especially knowledgeable who didn’t simply want to tell me how to think. I’m nearly fifty. I’ve read a fair amount and been intellectually engaged, at least in a passive sense. I may not be particularly articulate, but I know enough to not want to be instructed in what to think.

I’ve not had reason to alter my ideas significantly since, although there have been minor adjustments and addenda. One of the most influential thinkers on my ideas in the decades since, for instance, was Amartya Sen. So, while there has been a development of my ideas, there hasn’t been significant movement along the left-right axis. Despite this, as the political center in the United States moved to the right under Reagan and Bush, followed by a movement of the left towards the center under Clinton and then the rightward edge further to the right under the younger Bush, I found myself much further to the left vis-à-vis the prevailing political discourse than I had been when I first developed my ideas.

Furthermore, the language had changed. Partly, I think this came about because successful political action requires alliances. The rise of conservatism during, and immediately preceding, the Reagan years caused liberals and people further to the left to make common cause with one another. Shared opposition to the rising conservative movement concealed underlying ideological differences. For instance, I, as a liberal, might support LGBT issues due to my belief in individual liberty, while a leftist might support LGBT issues because they are an historically oppressed group. Our immediate goals are the same, but our reasoning is very different. To a conservative, we are both “liberal” opponents.

Adding to the confusion, in the nineties people on the left decided to resurrect the word “progressive.” Essentially, pollsters had been finding that many Americans were reluctant to identify themselves as “liberals.” Many people on the left felt that conservatives had been successful in their efforts to demonize the word and they wanted to flee the label. Since the left was often portrayed by conservatives as anti-American, to resurrect their reputation in the eyes of the American public, activists on the left reached for the long disused word “progressive” with its echos of the “Progressive Era” in American politics. I was not originally fond of this since I believe that changing language without changing the substance yields poor results. However, in recent years, I’ve come to use it myself to describe the area where leftist and liberal goals overlap.

The past couple of years have been very disorienting for me. Much as the rightward edge of the political spectrum moved far to the right during the 2008 presidential campaign, the leftward edge seems to be moving far to the left. Suddenly, after years of being somewhere to the left of center, I’m a “social conservative.” My ideas have not changed, but other people’s have.

The other day, on the website Politico, in what I thought was a rather puffed up celebration of “a landmark year for civil rights”, I read the following:

For many Americans, these milestones have been cause for rejoicing. For many others, they have occasioned alarm—and could incite further backlash, whether in the name of social conservatism, religious liberty or claims of color-blindness.

In the realm of ideas, one of the greatest achievements is to have your idea become so accepted that it goes uncontested. This year, we have seen several forces on the left push the idea of race as the defining aspect of an individual’s identity from the realm of debate to a place of unassailable acceptance. To think that an individual is defined by more than their race is now an idea that is beyond the pale to the left. By insisting that “color-blindness” remains an ideal I put myself in the company of the owners of Hobby Lobby.

The University of California system held seminars this year ostensibly to teach professors how to avoid racist and sexist statements. According to a Daily Beast article, an example of a “racist” statement is “There is only one race, the human race.” Under the guise of not giving offense, the university is forcing professors to tacitly affirm particular a particular philosophical and political idea, an idea that I would argue is still up for discussion.

I just finished reading Kenan Malik’s discussion of Michael Ignatieff’s biography of Isaiah Berlin.

For many, the two dominant themes in Berlin’s philosophy seemed horribly at odds with each other. How was it possible to have a commitment to individual liberty and also be sympathetic to the idea that individuals should aspire to a group identity? For Berlin, however, such contradictions were inevitable because contradiction was the very essence of the human condition.

Reading this drove home the point that it is ridiculous to pretend that this is a settled question. This emphasis on group rights as opposed to individual rights is a rejection of liberalism and it is a political question.

Recently, in The Atlantic, Conor Freidersdorf wrote:

But if adherents of colorblindness are vulnerable to ignoring or underestimating race as a factor, the academic left is vulnerable to fetishizing it and missing some of the ways in which race is a pernicious construct that robs people of their individuality. Ensconced in campus bubbles, the academic left also underestimates how divisive it can be to put anything other than individualism at the center of identity.

Then, after reflecting on the appearance of white nationalists at rallies supporting Donald Trump, he goes on to say:

Even the most naive iteration of colorblindness looks damned good next to the subset of people who’ve interrogated their whiteness and then embraced white supremacy or separatism. The academic left casts all proponents of color-blindness as naive. Perhaps they’re correct that the ideal of colorblindness alone will never bring about an America where anti-black racism is no more prevalent than anti-Irish racism is today. But isn’t it more naive to imagine that masses of white people will identify more strongly with their racial tribe and then sacrifice the interests of that tribe?

There is no precedent for such a trajectory.

I’m going to repeat that last sentence –

There is no precedent for such a trajectory.

Well, I’ve been rambling for some time now and I’ve gotten tired and I need to wrap this up without reaching any clear conclusion. All I can say is that I find myself disoriented by being grouped with social conservatives and people who claim that foisting their religious beliefs on others is inherent in a free practice of their religion. One of the reasons that the far left radicals have found it useful to masquerade as liberals is because there is not enough popular support for their beliefs.

Earlier this evening, I saw a headline that gave me some food for thought. “America Strikes Back: Tea Party to Gather with Trump, Cruz, Palin, Duck Dynasty, More on Capitol Hill Against Iran Deal.” This appeared on the website Breitbart. After reading about Palin’s supportive comments about Donald Trump, it was not surprising to see her name, his and the Tea Party in the same headline. Although I should have expected it, the appearance of “Duck Dynasty” seemed discordant. It makes me feel that this “rally” is more about tribal identification than about foreign policy.

One of the most influential books on my thinking was Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. Although it is not exactly related, that book really hammered home for me how innate many of our social behaviors are and how that can influence our politics, economic order and other aspects of our society. When talking about politics, it is so easy to get caught up in discussions of policy or ideology and forget how much of it is purely social. As in the behavior of “virtue signalling”, out social behavior is often ostensibly about something else.

In recent months, the rise of mob justice on social media has caused me to distance myself from some people on the left who believe that the end justifies the means and can’t see that “Mob Justice Isn’t Justice at All.”

Since human behavior is malleable, it is always treacherous to talk about our innate impulses. Still, anyone who has survived grammar school knows that much of our beliefs, and even more of what we profess, is shaped by our social group. For instance, I sometime catch myself, not lying, but shading the truth to appear agreeable. I find myself saying that I’m “not religious” rather than that I’m “an atheist” if it think I’m talking to someone who might find the word atheist too shocking.

Nowadays, many people are getting their news, not from  newspapers, or even television or primarily news websites, but from social media like Twitter and Facebook. Even on websites, comments can add a social dimension to reading and thinking about a news event, an action which used to be principally private. When we did talk to our friends and colleagues about a news item, it was often hours after we first heard about it, giving us a chance to develop a preliminary opinion.

This year, I have felt very alienated from the positions held by people on the left. However, when I read articles on more conservative sites, I am left with the distinct impression that I could never be a conservative because, as a bisexual, formerly promiscuous, not quite white, urban dwelling, Burgundy swilling,television abstaining, atheist, I am not one of their tribe. It may not be that the Democratic and Republican tents are getting smaller, but they may be getting more tribal, less associated with political positions and more associated with sub-cultures and identities.

This led me to a bit of cogitation earlier about how some of our democratic rituals may have evolved as they did partly as a way to circumvent exactly this sort of behavior and allow us to be, at least for a time, a little bit more like a “rational actor,” although one could argue that as social animals there is nothing irrational about our socially motivated behavior.

We will see if in the face of social media our political institutions need to adjust.