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?
Fortunately I've never identified as being a lib. Country with a socialist tradition and all that. I have certainly been lib-minded though and education cut through that (read theory).
It wasn't until occupy that I realised that a campaign to get liberals to stop identifying with the word was necessary. It was at that time I really started to learn about US politics and discovered the lack of an american left, but here I was looking at a crowd of people that absolutely should not have been calling themselves liberals but they didn't really understand why, or weren't ready for it.
Either way that's changed now. The key task is making sure the next wave of kids becomes socialist, and then the next wave. They can be soft left if they want it doesn't matter. They'll harden up into the left proper when class war thrusts itself on them.
How many more waves of kids do you think there will be until the west turns into Nazi Germany v2.0?