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.