Why Left vs. Right Doesn’t Cover Me Anymore

I keep getting told I have to “pick a side,” but the two sides on offer are obsessed with priorities I don’t share. So instead of pretending to be a team player for a team I don’t actually like, I’ll just say it: neither the contemporary left nor the contemporary right describes what I believe. Not because I’m a bland centrist, but because both have drifted away from a civic, plural, freedom-first idea of America.

You can actually find versions of this concern in writers as different as Alexis de Tocqueville (worried about overgrown central power), Francis Fukuyama (worried that recognition politics can crowd out shared identity), and Mark Lilla (worried that the left fragmented itself). I’m basically in that family of complaints.

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Where the Left Loses Me

Let me start with the left, because there are parts of the left I agree with. I’m for equal protection. I’m for not discriminating by race. I’m for people living how they want without the state or their neighbors harassing them. That’s basic liberalism.

But a lot of modern U.S. progressivism ties those good goals to two things I don’t buy:

1. An ever-expanding welfare/administrative state. It treats “more government” as the automatic answer, even though government and large corporate actors are already deeply entangled. If the state and big business are already in the same bed, I don’t see why I should fatten the state further. Tocqueville warned about this “soft despotism” a long time ago — power that’s not brutal, but is everywhere.

2. A style of identity politics that’s actually divisive. I don’t mean basic anti-discrimination — I support that. I mean the version that builds politics around ranking whose pain matters most. As Nancy Fraser argues, when the “recognize my group” part takes over the “make life fairer for everyone” part, you end up with a politics that talks a lot about dignity but doesn’t do as much about material inequality — and that kind of politics is very easy for powerful people to use as a distraction. That’s the part I object to.

So I can’t sign up for a politics whose starting assumption is: “you are mostly your demographic category.” I’m more interested in: “you are a citizen; let’s build something together.”

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Where the Right Loses Me

But if the left sometimes slices us up, the right — at least the loud, online, post-2016 right — often tries to narrow who counts.

The current conservative media ecosystem has gotten very comfortable with:

• anti-immigrationism,
• nostalgia for a monoculture that never really existed,
• and lately, outright Christian nationalism dressed up as “just defending tradition.”

I can’t do that either.

I’m pro-immigration because this country literally grew by absorbing waves of people. I’m pro-multiculturalism because different origins make the civic project richer, not weaker. And I can’t support any vision of America where belonging is filtered through religion. The First Amendment isn’t an optional accessory; it’s the whole point. If the state starts saying “real Americans believe X,” we’ve already left constitutionalism.

So when commentators start talking about “real” Americans vs. “imported” Americans, or using the flag as a boundary marker instead of a shared symbol, I’m out. That’s not conservatism in the Burkean sense; that’s ethno-emotional politics with Bible verses taped on.

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The Thing I Actually Want

What I want is pretty modest, and somehow now sounds radical:

• A civic basis for belonging. You’re in because you commit to the rules, not because your great-grandparents arrived earlier than someone else’s.

• Wide, slightly uncomfortable coalitions. Politics should be the art of getting 51% of very different people to agree on limited government and equal law.

• Equal dignity without weaponized identity. Yes, we should acknowledge histories of exclusion. No, we should not build the entire political order around a competition for victim status. Francis Fukuyama’s work on identity basically warned that recognition can consume everything else if we’re not careful.

• Openness to newcomers. Immigration should be treated as a recurring act of confidence in the country, not as contamination of some imaginary original population.

What’s funny is that this isn’t some brand-new ideology. It’s very close to older American liberalism and even to older conservative thought: limited government, broad citizenship, public-spiritedness. The left used to talk about workers across races. The right used to talk about civic virtue. Now the left sometimes wants a hyper-therapeutic, bureaucratic state, and the right sometimes wants a religiously flavored, exclusionary state. I want… less state, more “us.”

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A Few People Who Point in This Direction

• Alexis de Tocqueville – warned about centralized power slowly absorbing civil society.

• Mark Lilla – criticized the modern left for getting trapped in identity niches instead of building majorities.

• Francis Fukuyama – showed how the demand for recognition can overpower civic identity if we let it.

• Michael Walzer (in a different key) – argued for membership and justice inside plural communities, not just one hegemonic identity.

I don’t agree with any of them 100%, but they’re all circling the same worry: if we stop building a shared civic “we,” politics becomes tribal and easy to manipulate.

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Why This Matters

Because when the left makes identity the main axis, it fragments people who could actually work together. And when the right makes cultural or religious purity the main axis, it expels people who already want to work together. Both shrink the coalition. I want to grow the coalition.

Call it civic pluralism with a classical-liberal backbone: many kinds of people, one set of rules, limited power at the top.

That’s the spot I’m in. Not left, not right — just trying to keep the door wide and the state small. And hopefully not let the loudest factions convince the rest of us that those are the only two choices.