American liberalism clearly experienced dramatic changes in the 2010s, and these changes are specific and comprehensible. Liberals in 2010 weren’t the same as liberals in 2020. They just weren’t. They changed in comprehensible and expressible ways. And this absolutely dogged insistence that no such change occurred is one of the weirdest, most obviously dishonest political claims of my lifetime. It’s a record of a political and intellectual tendency defined by its powerlessness and directed by people who think that asking them to defend their ideals is a kind of crime. And, just… why? Why why why? A lot of dedicated people insisted that American liberalism had to evolve, worked hard to force it to evolve, and ultimately achieved remarkable success in doing so. It’s not a surprise, and frankly not interesting, that I personally think that that evolution was mostly disastrous. But so what? Shouldn’t these people be celebrating how liberalism was changed over time, to emphasize race and gender and sexual orientation to an even greater degree than it already did? I just find it bizarre, as well as willfully obtuse, to defend a political project by insisting that it never existed, especially when the evidence of its influence is all around us.
It’s fallout from the crazymaking of Higher Ed, and from the Democratic Party’s takeover by well-off white people who fight for prestige based on virtue-signaling luxury beliefs.
Related:
Something Democrats need to address to win again how exhausting and mean our culture is.
I am staring at Debatecon this weekend. One of the other guests there is conservative @IamSean90. We agree on literally nothing. Text him to set up coffee? BOOM. DONE.
Meanwhile, I have…
— Brianna Wu (@BriannaWu) February 14, 2025