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My Turn vs. Liel Leibovitz
I bumped into links to Leibovitz’ The Turn in a couple of trusted sources, so I took a few minutes to click through this morning. I found it interesting and laudable, but ultimately unsatisfying. Liel notes “If you’ve lived through it yourself, you know that The Turn doesn’t happen overnight,…” Indeed, I think Liel’s Turn is yet incomplete.
Liel describes his youth in a Democrat bubble: warm and friendly and comfortably self-righteous. Followed by college reinforcement and professional success in the elite Democrat walled garden. He has finally grown “tall” enough to glimpse the terrain beyond the wall, and is struggling with the cognitive dissonance that produces. He ascribes his current philosophical differences with Democrats to changes in the Democratic Party and concludes that the political terms “left” and “right” have no long-term meaning.
Liel very clearly sees that in the modern Democratic Party, one must proclaim the ever-shifting line of the day to avoid cancellation. He shows no awareness that this is not true on the “right.” (Trump certainly tries to cancel various RINOs, but is nowhere as effective as the coalition of tech, media, and blue government.) Here on Ricochet, like in the bulk of the right and center-right, we still argue with our apostates. Instead of silencing them.
I went through such a Turn, too. My youth was also in a Blue State bubble. I bathed in a warm sea of assurance that Republicans were creepy, heartless, greedy creatures of darkest evil, while Democrats were creatures of light and goodness and wonder. Oh, and journalism was nobility incarnate and utterly trustworthy. But I was occupied with other interests, and my parents weren’t obviously political, so the background “radiation” permeated my young brain and molded my attitudes.
My Turn started in the middle of my time in college, sparked by labor unrest in my hometown. And by “unrest,” I mean a politically motivated strike complete with violence against scabs, violence, and threats of violence against salaried employees and their families, biased behavior of unionized local police (so bad the state police took over the picket lines), absurd lawsuits and legal shenanigans, and media coverage that bore only the slightest resemblance to reality. A reality known only to locals and participants and their families. That forced me to look over my own bubble’s wall, with result similar to Liel’s: cognitive dissonance. Unlike Liel, I wasn’t so ensconced in the elite world for this to produce emotional discomfort or any panic. Simply confusion over the contradictions. I was also studying engineering, which forces acknowledgment of reality. Not paying attention to reality as an engineer leads to very public failures, if not very public disasters.
By the end of my time in college, I labeled myself a political independent. Republicans were still creepy, but I now knew Democrats were at least equally creepy. I resolved to study candidates closely and match their rhetoric and platforms and prior actions against my own independent moral criteria. As a history buff (military history especially), I found myself looking at the past for help understanding how the parties’ principles developed, and informed their platforms, and impacted candidates. After a few years, I realized I’d been voting for Republican candidates. Every time. Not that the candidates were all that I wished, but represented fundamentally moral philosophies and policies. As Liel has described, Democrats use our basest desires and tribal behaviors to foment class conflict, material envy, and identity-based hatreds.
I discovered that politicians, as a group, are not very reliable. (I know, you’re shocked!) Repeated examples of Republican hypocrisy bruited about by the media reinforced this, along will much less-publicized cases of Democrat hypocrisy. More dings against the media. (Along the way, I lost all respect for Walter Cronkite after comparing what I knew about the Vietnam war against his portrayal of it. No TV talking head has earned much respect since.)
I finally learned, all philosophy and religion and policies and platforms in gestalt, that my proper political label is “conservative.” I concluded that social versus financial conservatism is a false dichotomy–you can’t be philosophically consistent in one without the other.
If Liel is honest enough to not backslide, I think his position will evolve further. Some things I expect him to eventually face:
- Free speech has been anathema among the media left for decades. For the true left believers in the media, the Narrative must rule, and contrary information suppressed. Ridiculed if not suppressed. Much of what makes a modern leftist comfortable in their bubble is knowing so much that simply isn’t so. I figured this out in the mid-1990s.
- The Democratic Party has not fundamentally changed. It has always been the party of Slavery, Division, Racism, Envy, Coercion, and Tyranny (leadership by Elites). Its history of racism and promotion of greed has also made it the party of Death and the party of Theft. The political label “left” still works.
- The Republican Party has not fundamentally changed. It has always been the party of personal Liberty, Equality, Morality, Responsibility, and Consent of the Governed. The Republican Party is still the party of Lincoln. The political label “right” still works.
- Decent human beings personally do good for those around them. Agitating to force others to do good on your behalf is not a decent thing to do. Getting government to do it doesn’t change that. Forcing others to work anything on your behalf has a name. Humanity calls it Slavery. Comparisons of charitable giving between the political left and the political right are damning to the former.
- Equal Justice requires criminal conduct by the left to be punished as harshly as criminal conduct by the right.
- A Free Society is rare in history. The bottom of societies probably yearn to be free, but it doesn’t happen automatically. The structures that perpetuate a free society are fragile without firm, moral support.
- The nuclear family supports all societies–its destruction leads to the fall.
I wish Liel well, and would welcome him here at Ricochet. It might even speed his conversion.
Published in Politics
This is an obvious truth. The plantation mindset is a alive and well in the Democrat Elites.
And as ever, the GOP makes a pig’s breakfast when it is in control of Congress, included corrupt deals with Democrats. Always has, always will, I am afraid. It has been Republican Presidents who have moved the bar, right back to the first one.
This last bit is the most important and often overlooked on the right by those of libertarian bent. The family is the fundamental building block of the nation.
You could buy him a gift subscription.
Help me out here: I’m having trouble with cause and effect. Are individuals becoming more narcissistic or egocentric because cultural forces are destroying commitment to traditional family values and is this then leading these individuals to support more collectivism and force in government or is it some reverse form of this where each increment of increase in government power and use of force to inculcate and shape the individual behavior. If I didn’t have family I might never even have a detectable emotional response to any event.
Humans are naturally narcissistic and egocentric. That hasn’t changed and isn’t going to change in the foreseeable future. The “evolution” of humanity is farcical. The family is the primary mechanism that trains us to cooperate with others.
The core of the left-right dispute is pretty simple: Philosophies on the left are predicated on humans being born good, and born equally capable. If only society would allow that goodness to dominiate, we’d all happily contribute to the common good. Philosophies on the right are predicated on the natural brokenness of humans, and naturally differences between individuals. Society is needed to redirect the evil, recognize merit, and help each person pursue their potential.
A blogger, still writing today, who started styling herself “Neo-Neocon” in 2005 wrote a long series of posts, “A mind is a difficult thing to change,” on her own journey from left to right. She explored, through her own experience, how it is that some people change political identity and others do not.
Yes. And the next most serious differences are that the Right opposes abortion and the destruction of the innocent, but believes in the necessity of deadly force for guilty; while the Left proposes death to the innocent and opposes capital punishment and deadly force to be used in self-defense.
And the next is that the Right says that society can never be perfected but a Heaven awaits humanity afterwards, and the Left believes that there is no heaven but that it can be sculpted here on earth.
These are fundamental differences in world views that so-called science and advance of social psychology can never remove.
That is a fabulous series of essays. Neo is linked by the Instapundit fairly often, so I’ve been on her site. But never encountered those essays. Highly recommended, and perfect for this topic.
He could look around 30 days for free during the month of December.
You nailed it!
Ay, there’s the rub. So many of them do — backslide, that is. I feel there should be a “how many neocons does it take to change a lightbulb” joke in there somewhere. If one comes to mind I’ll post it.
Edit: Got it.
I think that’s the problem. Leftists can learn any one of several specific individual lessons about Constitutional rights or big-government or entrenched bureaucrats, etc., but they’ll never lose their belief that people are basically good, that morals are human constructs, that humans and society are more or less perfectible — and that it is right for those who know and care to control others for their own good, or believe in making only your fair share, or believing that the government is rightly the highest source of authority on earth, and that some life is expendable.
That’s what started it for me, although I never saw any union violence up close until later. In high school, I read reports about various strikes in the news. Even with the liberal filter, it was obvious where the aggression came from. Every deeper look into the matter solidified that impression. Articles in American Heritage about historical labor disputes. Stories in The Nation and Utne Reader that treated the violence as an unfortunate but inevitable result of capitalist excesses. Mother Jones (Yes, I was in that deep) actually celebrated the carnage; an advocacy of violence that just appeared hypocritical. My police science professors relating personal anecdotes about union savagery. I came to the conclusion that unions were thuggish. I dropped my subscriptions to The Nation and Mother Jones, started reading National Review. And gradually realized that it just wasn’t unions. All Demoncratic institutions are thuggish.
I would chip in.
Well… I never made the Turn. I grew up in a “blue” family where my mom – and I am sure an awful lot of other moms – cried whenever video footage of JFK came on TV.
Yet I knew that “truth” was somewhere else. All my life: I was the rebel who liked Reagan, who liked the military, who wanted a family that pushed hard work and making money, and… And, hey, welcome Mr. got everything including an Ivy League PhD, but you and your ilk pre-Turn were generally WRONG all those years and now that you intellectually dishonest commie pinko hippies are closing in on End State, you’re saying “oh!?”
I don’t trust ‘em. This is another chance for them to go underground until the time is right again. Like maybe after NYC is rebuilt.
I won’t condemn those who change their minds from left to right in such terms. Before they Turn, they really do breeze through life in their political-media-elite friend group bubbles, with few if any contradictory facts making it past the censors. Internet blogs and alternative news are a beachhead into the media monolith that has censored for and guided the narrative for decades. It is no accident that the political left is doing everything in its power to co-opt the technology oligarchs. Co-opting oligarchs is traditional on the left, anyways. (I reject Godwin’s law, fwiw. It is a means to protect the political left from embarrassingly accurate comparisons.)
Anyways, I applaud your young sensibility. You just might be smarter than most.
Our minds don’t change much after early adulthood, but understanding can grow and change. We have to make sane Democrats understand power and bureaucracy. Democrats seem to believe that the dynamics they deal with locally are the same or similar in national politics. That belief is the fundamental error everywhere always. The ongoing Washington insanity is an opportunity to get Democrat’s attention. Of course when I say Democrat I don’t mean a Washington bureaucrat, politician, lobbyist or anyone who exercises their primary income earning life in Washington. These people may be honorable and intelligent, but they cannot have understanding of thousands of cities and millions of issues across the 50 states, and they quickly learned that fact so local issues are irrelevant to them. French and Japanese both gear their educational systems overwhelmingly toward picking the best bureaucrats and moving the best of them upward. It’s simple, top down government doesn’t work . Indeed, government must be used only for things that can’t be done in any other way because government doesn’t work well. This obvious reality is why our founders limited national government to Defense and foreign policy. Their understandings allowed the US to create the modern world and why the top town of everywhere else, throughout all of history, couldn’t.
Non-public goods only cause problems. Don’t ever talk to a Democrat without keeping this in mind. The problem is people don’t even know what those words mean. Same thing with the Fed pushing the economy around. If you forget those fundamentals, the left always has an edge.
Theoretically, Social Security and Medicare are a good idea but we have never run them right or transparently.
Central planning with the tax code and the IRS add no value to society. It’s totally stupid. It should be a flat tax and one deduction for procreating more W-2 slaves instead of criminals.
I don’t see how that could be absent Luke’s “There is good in him, I can feel it.” Perhaps you could explain how taking resources from someone under threat of force is good? Or if you’ve done so already gimme a link?
If you don’t force everybody into a retirement annuity system, then what happens?
Excellent. Now…in the interest of being fair and balanced…do Noonan.
Some save anyhow, some don’t need to, some depend on their family, some depend upon churches, some end their days in jail, some will be like the widow of Zarepath (1 Ki. 17:12). Sort of like life up until about 150 years ago.
Oh.
Somewhere in that period following the Civil War, America began to lose sight of the need and purpose of safeguards the founders had carefully placed within our constitutional framework and embodied in the 9th and 10th Amendments to the Constitution. This neglect and abandonment of the principles of Federalism opened the way for an excess of cooperation between the corporate sector and the federal government and transformed the country to the path taken towards elite-driven collectivism and away from “we the people”. We now face the end game.
The Turning is transitory.
Bwa ha ha ha! I somehow missed that one. Nope, I am incapable of fairly assessing Noonan.
A firm ballast assessment of newlin is that she’s full of herself because she was a speech writer for Ronald Reagan. Dear God how long can one milk that?
Compare that to the utter humility of Peter Robinson. He is one of the political people I have the most respect for as a human being who’s out there.
I also came upon Liel Leibovitz’ piece “The Turn” recently, referred by Common Sense with Bari Weiss, a very impressive centrist Substack e-mail subscription with free content aplenty. (It also sent me to Your Local Epidemiologist (YLE) a free Substack written by Dr. Katelyn Jetelina, which dispatches newsworthy variant/vaccine updates every week.)
I sympathize with Leibovitz’ political journey in the general direction of right thinking. He accurately describes the pervasive leftward lean of the Upper West Side back in the day. To emerge from that, turn right, then write about it takes not only brains but also a kind of interpersonal courage.
Centrists like Leibovitz and Weiss surely outnumber followers of the 96% of Senate Democrats who distance themselves from the mainstream with their every vote. Moderates were numerous enough to elect a former NYPD Captain as Mayor of New York. Come 2022 I expect serious changes in policing there, followed by gradual easing of Democrats away from crime in the streets, propaganda in the schools, and other ideas likely to lose them (unrigged) elections.
Rather than wishing for a turn further right from disaffected Democrats, my hope for the talky ones would be to continue directing fire at the hard left and reclaim the pragmatic party of Truman, JFK, and Bill Clinton. Our country will be safer if/when that Party returns to its center, and cancels it’s own ticket to totalitarianism. Socialists and communists have always felt most authentic and pure in microniche fringe parties with names like Socialist, Progressive, Socialist Worker, Peace & Freedom, Green, Socialist Labor, Communist, and Progressive Labor. Let them go Make Deviationism Great Again!
Yes, I am. At least that’s what I’ve always known… if only…
So, other than issues with my dad, these “Turners” do not deserve the spotlight; they have not been rehabilitated and the damage they caused as our intellectual betters cannot be forgotten. Have these miscreants get to the back of the line, unlearn Zinn, do some real work – instead of running things (in the wrong direction) – and don’t let them “in” until they come crawling back on their knees, through flaming mud. Like Naomi Wolf…
Strongly disagree. Many, many lefties simply have never had their bubble broken. If you hold that against them, they will conclude the evils of right wingers are true, and go back to the left. Then we really will lose to the totalitarians.