I know it's a gradual process for most people, but I assume most of you had a decisive moment of "yeah I am no longer a liberal, fuck liberals."
I'll share mine.
Occupy Wall Street. Yeah, I was idealistic enough to really believe in that movement, and more than that, in the idea that it was going somewhere, that there would be a Civil Rights Act style moment of legislative change that would make things seem (emphasis seem) sane again since post-9/11 madness. Again, like I said, liberal at that point.
Then I saw how many useless liberals nodded along to "too big to fail." I saw all the useless liberal comedians and other opinion leaders call for absolutely nothing but spectator smugness. I saw some of the key organizers sell out entirely to the suits, one in particular outright joining Google and then calling for Google's CEO to become an enlightened dictator for life of the United States.
Then I read this.
https://thebaffler.com/latest/mouthbreathing-machiavellis
I finally understood at a gut level how conveniently and easily liberals could become cryptofascists, a term that I didn't even know at the time. I started to see and understand how capitalism under pressure much prefers fascism to even a slight reduction in the rate of the rich becoming richer, no matter what. I learned that the Democratic Party, when it is not being paid opposition, really doesn't stand for anything different than the GOP at a material level except more performative inclusiveness in the corporate police state.
I stopped calling myself a liberal. You can call me a liberal especially if I have a bad take, but at least I stopped identifying with the label intentionally.
What's your story?
I considered myself left but really only had liberals as an example of what left was. I've always held leftest views, but I kept them mostly to myself because liberals treat you like an extremist if you dared to be left of Obama.
After Trump won I became more and more annoyed with the way liberals treated the right with kid gloves. They just came across as wanting to lose. Like Adam Curtis said (paraphrasing)- "It's like they're afraid of power. You weren't allowed to have power"
Then I discovered breadtube and later the Chapotraphouse podcast and was like "holy shit, finally, people with teeth" then I learnt that liberals weren't left and it lead me to investigate more into what leftism actually is and it was like a light went off and everything in the world finally made sense.
These days I roll my eyes at breadtube and chapo but they were a helpful stepping stone to breaking through that fog that liberalism puts up.
Really feel the "people with teeth." Listening to liberals was like punching in a dream. Seeing anyone even just a touch to the left of that was like having trained in 100 gs. It truly hit different.
I had stepping stones like Wonkette and Jacobin. :cringe:
Salon and RawStory
:cringe:
Not all of us have the luck to run into Teen Vogue first. :mao-clap: