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?
It took me a long ass time, I was a pretty big :LIB: circa 2006, marched against the Iraq War in 2005, was too young to march in the one in 2003 in the lead up to the war. Supported OWS, went to the one in my city.
It was honestly the Obama administration radicalized me. The way they handled the bailouts, didn't put up a fight and let all the CEOs get their bonuses while their companies went to shit, Snowden revealing that Obama was taking what the Bush administration started, and expanding it, I was looking for alternatives to explain why all this keeps happening. I still felt that maybe Bernie could turn it around in 2016. I went and voted for Hillary because I live in a swing state, but I didn't like her. On election night I didn't freak out, because she ran a shit campaign and it wasn't that surprising to me. After that I started listening to Chapo and the rest is history.