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?
Occupy was a big part of my awakening as well. I was like "hey this giant movement is surely going to be reflected in the government because we have accountable representatives, right?"
....
"Right?"
The fact that I could have kept pissing into the wind until I ran out of piss was very illuminating. I'm drunk so I think this makes sense. Like they just ran out the clock on the social movement same as they did to BLM in the past few years. It was around 2009 I started to read Lenin.
Another big moment for me, and it's really silly, but it was when Obama bragged about increasing USA oil production. "That was me, people!" I had seen the photos of the tarsands and it looked like fucking Mordor, it looked like hell on earth. "That was me, people!" Imagine bragging about being the harbinger of the Death of All Things because on the smallest scale it allowed you to rhetorically "own" a handful of reactionaries, aka the worst people on earth who deserve neither time or attention. It wasn't the straw that broke the camel's back but it was definitely the straw that kept this camel from ever going back.
Then came the election of Trump and I was re-reading Lenin and yes, it was the same Deutsche-Bank in his treatise as the one that was being impugned for laundering dirty Trump money. The same fucking bank. Whoever let it survive WWII deserved to be imprisoned alongside Hess and bulldozed with the ruins.
Another moment from the past few years was when it was after a nice dinner with my parents and my dad and I started to talk about politics and I was discussing how globalism etc means local boycotts are meaningless and because of the shifted power dynamics, absent larger scale strikes, there is no 'consumerist' solution available, and if it did work in the past it no longer works. He brought up the "lettuce strike" and how it changed some things. Broke my heart. I quietly asked him when that was and he said "oh, the 1970s." Oh cool, something 50 years ago worked so I need to content myself with slowing obliteration rather than avoiding it. And both my (older gen boomer) parents wonder why I am reluctant to have kids. Dad, my dear dad, you were born in 53. Shut the fuck up. Kent State changed shit in your lifetime and a score of dead elementary children won't change a thing in mine... "Four dead in Ohio" rings really fucking hollow when you compare it to kids so mangled they had to do DNA testing to verify the tiny corpses. I'm sorry if I went bleak but it its a big part of why I became a leftist even before this shit. I was tired, so tired, three decades of being tired.