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Liberals who were formerly far-left (communist, anarchist, etc.), what led to you coming to liberalism?
A few questions to follow up:
- What led to changing your mind?
- How has this shift shaped your view of contemporary American politics?
- What was the impact to your social circle or community?
- What lessons do you think being a leftist taught you, or in what ways has it shaped you that you are appreciative of?
I was a leftist when I was very young and under the impression that the world came to be through injustice and chaos and so needed to be reorganized more justly, but then as I read more I came to realize that the world is shaped by millions of mundane economic phenomena, which themselves spring from our fundamental and diverse psychologies (and pathologies) and the very nature of our existence and what we want out of it. So I've now come to the dead center.
I think liberalism fundamentally assumes infinite complexity that cannot be fully comprehended by a single observer (like a monarch or a central planner) and so, by enshrining market economics and individual property rights and autonomy, allows human systems to self-organize according to local information.
But then there is the matter of regional or global information that is needed for organization but which cannot be so readily ascertained or gathered organically, which then requires some sort of central coordination (like a central bank, regulatory agencies, etc.)
That's just a high level overview. I'm extremely skeptical of extremist, purist views. I've come to view the world as a series of interlocking problems that require the implementation of economic tools from across the ideological spectrum — all of which have trade-offs.
I mean, if you're talking modern industrialized societies, that is undebatable fact. Anybody saying otherwise is burying their histories under the rug.
It might have been micro-injustice and not macro-injustice, but the vast majority of civilization is founded upon slavery.
I mean…you don’t need the industrialization qualifier. Modern morality is quite a bit different from historical reality for most of recorded time. There hasn’t been some past utopia we ruined.
That last sentence (chef's kiss)
I always argue that injustice — or rather, indifference to or absence of justice, ajustice — is the default state of life, of existence. From cellular organisms consuming and animals hunting each other to black holes consuming stars, existence is violence.
It is an accidental evolutionary history that our brains evolved to become sufficiently intelligent to build increasingly complex economic systems and societies. Those unequal societies supported an elite leisurely intellectual class to could ponder and eventually invent the concept of justice, individual liberty, and human rights. It's taken a long time for our biology to finally evolve to a point where we can even begin to free ourselves from that biology and transcend the existential mandate of violence.
I think the point is that while this is true, the world is and always has been full of injustice and suffering, focusing on that as the most important thing of all without trying to understand the incredible complexity of how and why often leads to paralysis and hyperfocus on unviable theoretical solutions instead of real world actionable policies.
I've found that liberals very much tend to ignore the 'how and why' as much as possible, especially when presented with even a passing huff of pushback from the conservatives.
I think the vast majority of "unviable" solutions are considered as such because the masses are stuck in the fishbowl of neoliberal economics, such that even modest proposals that go against that grain tend to be declared impossible pipe dreams.
The real problem with liberals is that they won't draw a line in the sand the way the left or the right will. There is a reverance for 'the marketplace of ideas' and an unwillingness to acknowledge that many of those ideas are rotten and belong in the wastebin.
My answers (for the record, I am not interested in debating my rationale at least in this particular post):
Countless things, but among many, an over-reliance on armchair philosophizing rather than a strong connection to empirical evidence to inform policy. Too much armchair world building (and everyone has their own mutually exclusive world building project) and not enough connection to the real world. It turns out the societies the far-left want either are terrible or are extremely prone to failure when actually realized, perhaps due in part to the aforementioned issue.
I care more about the preservation of democracy and of liberal institutions. During the transition, I noticed the importance of being involved in local (city/county) politics as a primary aim of engagement, as changes at this level have the biggest material impact on how things go for you and those you care about. Also, you very much can make a dent in how things go locally. Finally, I left this anecdote in a previous comment:
So thanks to those who contributed to that post.
There wasn't much impact. Years ago, I eventually quit keeping up with the constant fracturing and infighting. My community had shifted even before the pandemic.
To prioritize issues that actually affect people materially (e.g., don't waste time complaining about ballrooms or performing arts centers.) I appreciate the focus some leftists have on actually getting out there and doing the work; this is something liberals do too, but I admire the effort many leftists put into grassroots organizing.
I'm curious how much crypto-communist praxis may have been behind the rise of Trump (see: Zizek endorsing him in 2016 and the semi-serious MAGA Communist movement). Probably not that much, but probably not a completely insignificant amount.
Not the target of this post so I obviously won't answer the questions, but I'm intrigued by the questions (I think they're well thought out!) and interested in the replies. Excited to see whether DemSocs get characterized as liberals or far left in this environment lol. Or both, ig.
Democratic socialism is itself vague in what its contents are, but if one finds it meaningful to preserve liberal institutions (e.g., elections, the constitution, etc.) and aren't advocating for a communist government or an abolition of the government or something similarly extreme (not stating these in particular were ever my views, but they are common among leftists), then they wouldn't be considered far-left for the purposes of this post at least as I intended it, but I'm happy to hear any perspective that one thinks meets the prompt.
I think most democratic socialists would contend that establishing a communist government and maintaining institutions and democracy aren't at odds with each other. But then that's why other leftists give them shit lol.
DemSoc’s are just SocDem’s with the words flipped and a penchant for posturing.
see this is exactly the discourse I was waiting for
Yeah... I kinda get that impression. I'm kind of more of a social Democrat myself, but the DSA's platform has always been confusing to me. They call themselves socialists, but then I see members like AOC and Rashida Tallib explicitly NOT advocating for the abolition of private property, and instead have platforms that pretty closely align to my viewpoints, and I'm like... in what world are you a socialist?
Is the DSA just misnamed? Or are they really socialists that just use social democracy as a useful cover for their more left wing views and are just sort of pretending until they feel comfortable enough to abolish private capital? In the first scenario, it's just mostly confusing. In the second, it makes it harder to advocate for social programs without centrists thinking you're a secret tankie who wants the government to take their house.
I read about this but since forgotten. I know the original texts that Marx and Engels wrote became distorted through Leninism and then sort of just fell apart after that. The OG social democrats were the same, they said “we can bring socialism through electoralism.” But because social Democrat became an outdated term but was revived through Democratic Socialism because of Bernie Sanders (who is not a DSA member) people who otherwise would call themselves social democrats now call themselves Democratic Socialists.
According the Engel’s The Principals of Communism the only way true communism can come to fruition is by multiple revolutions happening concurrently in the major powers (back then it was Germany and some other countries I can’t recall but notably was before the U.S. was a super power). Because communism can’t exist in one country because communism is antithetical to concepts like countries.
Social Democracy then is counterintuitive to this revolutionary ideal. Because if you give people healthcare and whatnot they won’t want to revolt. That being said I don’t think the conditions for revolution have existed for decades.
The thing that bothers me about Marxism is that Marx and Engles are so venerated that their writings become biblical, and "the revolution" becomes a goal in it of itself. The ultimate good is the establishment of a communist state, regardless of if it actually helps people or not.
Ultimately, if you have a system where people are content enough to not revolt because they have healthcare and social services and strong communities that they're happy in, I generally view that as a good thing. M/L views it as a bad thing because it lessens the chances of a bloody revolution.
It seems to have lost the forest for the trees a bit there.
I think a major issue is that later writings are much harder to find, in part because of the mainstream burial of Marxism.
It's as if we cut off teaching math at basic multiplication.
Towards a New Socialism lays out a much better foundation.
Marx and Engels aren’t the “original texts.” Socialism predates Marx and Marxism. Historically it encompassed a lot more political tendencies than it does today, including things like welfare capitalism and Georgism, which would be pretty firmly in the mainstream of liberal politics now.
The main reason Marx became such a foundational text is because he was popular with a circle of intellectuals who all liked to hang out near one coffee shop in Vienna in the interwar period. And that specific strain would end up being pushed as part of the propaganda to advance the imperial interests of the USSR in contrast to the liberal democratic propaganda used to advance the interests of the West. This would wind up forcing a lot of political tendencies that straddled the lines to choose sides in a way didn’t have to before.
But it’s not like much of what’s in Marx when he talks about a potentially more just society is alien to the Liberal tradition. You can read half of that stuff in the works of Voltaire or Thomas Paine. The main thing that specifically differentiates Marx from the others is the evolutionary theory of social progress towards a stateless communist utopia. Liberal theories generally tended to be much more skeptical of having a final stage society where all internal contradictions are synthesized away. Enlightenment liberalism generally assumed political regimes were cyclical. Hence the term “revolution,” literally a turning of the wheel. Eventually the wheel comes back around again! Hence quotes like “the tree of liberty bust occasionally be watered with the blood of tyrants and patriots.” The cycle doesn’t end!
That’s where the political theories around separation of powers and representative democracy comes from. Because we acknowledge that the transitions are cyclical and thermostatic it becomes imperative to create political institutions that can persist through these pendulum swings. By lowering the stakes of political action you can have some of the transformative, creative-destruction of periodically revolutionary change without needing to (for example) murder every Catholic you can find only to have them come back and murder all the Protestants 20 years later.
Would be interesting to the see the reverse thread get made too (liberals who become far-left) to see the perspectives the other way around.
I don't think I could put in a good enough starter post myself unfortunately.
I myself would find such a post interesting as well. I can answer this to some degree, though it requires some reflection about the motivations of my much younger self.
I was a young person learning about politics and rightfully disillusioned with the state of things; as a society we seem to do nothing about climate change or we see liberal politicians not making the kind of progress we want on extremely serious issues. I rejected a kind of nominal, default liberalism for a position that's been thought-out. The visions of various post-scarcity utopias, the end of the conditions that give rise to reactionary backlash, and the countless papers written on political theory are the kind of thing to salivate over compared to the drab, awful state of things.
This eventually led to complete disengagement. At one point I didn't even vote when Trump was on the ballot. I cared little about the dissolution of liberal institutions or democracy. Maybe there were some accelerationist leanings at times. These were mistakes I'm now deeply ashamed of, but I don't blame myself too much.
I gained a huge circle of friends who cared about the same things I cared about and would read philosophy and theory regularly with me. Of course, infighting and fragmentation ran rampant, as different armchair ideas on utopian futures or tactics divided people.
Does anyone actually identify as a liberal?
The only two camps I can think of are
People on the moderate left who don't know what a liberal actually is because they never looked into where these terms come from and what they actually mean, and identity as a liberal because they support strong social programs, equity, and a government that tries to reduce income inequality without knowing that those are leftist or progressive views or
People who identify as "classical liberals" who are basically what we would call libertarians in the US, but without the mad-max-world private rolling militia flavor of extreme anarcho capitalists.
Only one of those are actually liberals, and it's not the one that right wingers mean when they call someone a liberal.
Your points are well taken, but in fairness to the masses, if you go to the wikipedia page on the history of liberalism literally the first sentence is "[l]iberalism, the belief in freedom, equality, democracy and human rights...", so it's not totally nuts for people to see that and think "that's me!".
Yeah, true, but understanding the historical context of those statements is pretty fundemental.
The alternative to liberalism when liberalism was new was monarchs with an entrenched aristocracy, so the idea that just because you were born a peasant, you didn't have to stay a peasant, and that you had some set of rights as a human that the king shouldn't be allowed to violate was pretty radical. That's sort of a baseline belief that most people have nowadays, so it's no longer much of a differentiator.
Equating anyone who supports "a government with strong social programs" with leftism is doing the exact kind of weird conflation of everything left of far right that US conservatives constantly do. It betrays a lack of familiarity with leftism and especially with global politics. Insisting that classical liberalism is the only accurate use of the word liberal is ignoring huge worldwide trends like social liberalism, which is just as often if not more often what is referenced when calling someone a "liberal" than classical liberalism. Insisting that social liberals are automatically leftists to the same extent as a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist or an anarchocommunist is just ridiculous, and the right wing in the US only gets away with it because of how absolutely skewed the Overton window has been in the US for ages. Using "liberal" for the center to center-left social liberals is extremely common both among leftists in general and in politics outside the US, and though "liberal" is also sometimes used for classical liberals, "neoliberal" is the term people more often apply to that group in these discussions when they're not being called "libertarians" (especially from a leftist perspective).
I will concede that liberalism's history as a term for so many different political philosophies makes it confusing af (though I think its usage among leftists is so consistent that OP's title is not unclear at all). I suppose this is why when naming its four major political factions, Disco Elysium used "ultraliberal" for neoliberals and referred to social liberals as "moralists".
Strong social programs is a left leaning policy. That doesn't mean everyone that supports them is a leftist, because the terms left and right exist on a spectrum, they're not a binary choice.
Liberalism by today's standard in the western world is generally a centrist position, so you have social liberals as the left leaning wing and classical liberals as the right leaning wing. The absolute center in the US would be the current status quo (or at least what it was before Trump took office). That means that when people identify as a liberal in the US, they're really calling themselves a centrist. That's not generally what people who call themselves a liberal in the US mean though.
They're calling themselves a liberal to distinguish themselves from the right. They tend towards leftist views, namely using political power to dismantle and keep dismantled hierarchies they view as unjust, which is a, or even the key differentiator of left wing politics.
Thats contrasted with what the actual definition of what a liberal is, which is to use markets to dismantle those hierarchies.
So social liberals, or social democrats aren't leftists, but they tend towards the left.
Liberalism is a lot less muddy in places that aren't the US because of this weird liberal=leftist thing we have going on here.
And not to be prescriptivist, but words mean things, and when the US uses a political definition that means something entirely different from the rest of the world, it makes it extremely difficult to have a conversation online because people are operating under fundementaly different definitions of words.
I don't live in the US, and I am not insisting on a US-centric definition here. In fact, I am doing the opposite. A huge part of the comment you replied to is me complaining that "liberal" is broadly applied in certain ways outside the US and that lumping together liberals with leftists, whether they're left-leaning liberals or not, is playing into the way the US right wing uses the word.
Using liberal in the way it's broadly used in this post, to refer to centrists (including both neoliberals and social liberals) in contrast with leftists, is done worldwide (in English, at least--I obviously can't speak to the versions of this political terminology used in other languages). Using "liberal" to refer to centrist ideologies of both the center left and center right is common. It is entirely in keeping with the way the rest of the world uses the word "liberal" to use it to describe those who support electoral politics and a welfare state, in contrast to those further left who believe that a revolution is necessary and advocate for a much larger-scale restructuring of society (this is an oversimplification of all sides but just to get the gist across).
The comment I responded to was like "no one actually identifies as a liberal" and essentially does the same US-centric lumping together of everything left of center and refuses to engage with the fact that, yes, identifying as liberal is not all that uncommon outside the US either, and the word is not exclusively applied to classical liberals outside the US either. Especially given that this post contrasts liberals and leftists, it's foolish to insist on a definition of liberal that doesn't really match how the word is used worldwide and excludes how leftists worldwide, including in major works of communist political philosophy, use the word "liberal".
I apologize, because I was coming at it from a very US centric point of view, and also injecting a lot of nuance going on in my own head into a very glossed over statement.
What I should have said, was that very few people in the US identify as liberal and mean what they want it to mean. Yes, they identify as liberal, and they are liberal , but they call themselves liberal to distinguish from Republicans, however, moderate conservatives in the US are what the world would classify as liberals. They believe in free markets, personal liberty, civil rights, and strong private property.
The way it's used by both Republicans, and self identified liberals, however, is to distinguish themselves from "conservative" Republicans, which isn't accurate. There's a lot of overlap with Republican views and liberalism. A really huge chunk of Republicans would fit under the liberal umbrella, but that's not the way the term is used here, likely as a result of us having a political system that ensures only two parties can be viable at a time. So despite a big chunk of Republicans believing in free markets, private property, individual liberty, representation, and so on; you know, liberalism; never in a million years would they identify as liberal, nor would people in the US who identify as liberal identity them that way either.
I largely agree with what you say in this comment, though I think the proportion of Republicans who can be called liberal on an international scale has shrunk significantly, as the party has been very rapidly becoming more and more unapologetically fascist.
Maybe that's because the status quo and centrism in general doesn't have many anchors? Right wing and left wing theory often has the air of religious text but where would liberalism go, what would it become over time, if the left and the right didn't exist? Without the pressure of radicalism, the core tension within liberalism--individual liberty vs. social equality--would become the new left/right axis.
To me liberalism feels like Jerry in Rick & Morty. Jerry is often the only sane and consistent character. Jerry is often correct and appeals to rationality. He just wants a predictable environment where he can exist.
Being a centrist in the USSR has a lot of similarities between being a centrist in 1980s Canada but there are also many differences--so what distinguishes social liberals when morals are relative?
I think you're underrating the similarly ideological underpinnings of liberalism because they're the cultural hegemony. Centrists disagree on plenty of things on the left-right axis amongst themselves, so presumably in the absence of far right or far left politics they would simply disagree on these things.
Yes, I actually identify as a liberal.
...and in Canada, the biggest tent party holds the name, so it takes on a different meaning up here.
Something like: "I'm the ultimate thief of good policy and it's a dice roll on whether I'll be good at implementing it, but damn, I'm good at keeping the family together".
I was more of a LARPer initially, but once I actually “read theory” I was disconnected. A lot of it read like religious text. There used to be a subreddit with “left communists” that I frequented briefly and it taught me a lot about how off putting a lot of the online leftist crowd is.
Just generally, I decided I didn’t actually believe in those things and didn’t want to associate myself with those people. I do think the more informed you are the more moderate you tend to be.
Not much. Though I just roll my eyes whenever the typical “both parties are the same” and “if we let a far right winger win a far leftist will eventually win” that gets trotted out like clockwork every four years.
I’m still a progressive in the primary and a Democrat in the general type of guy.
I had built an online community during the pandemic and I decided just to abandon it. Nothing in my real life changed, though I’m less insufferable to be around now.
I suppose as a whole that era kind of made me disinterested in politics all around. I used to be much more involved and even planned a career in it at some point. I’ve since regressed and basically solely care about movies (as is evident by my post history).
So I suppose it refocused me into stuff that puts me in a less doomed mindset.
I find it really interesting how moving away from extreme political ideas can make a person both more interested in politics, because they move from theorizing and LARPing to caring about actionable real life policies, and less interested in politics, because they want to reduce things in their life that induce or strengthen an "everything is fucked" mindset that seems to be necessary for both far left and far right ideologies. I very much empathize with both, and both can effectively reduce doomerism in my experience.
I mean in a way it is a form of nihilism. And you can go either way with it, and I decidedly went in a more selfish direction.
What led to changing your mind?
I gained an increased appreciation of incrementalism. I decided that trying to decide how society ought to be organized was a pointless exercise, because I was ignoring the obvious fact that lots of people in society wanted totally different things than I did and would never want to go along with any plan I came up with, no matter how good it might be. Engaging with the political landscape as it is seemed like a more relevant way for me to understand contemporary politics.
-How has this shift shaped your view of contemporary American politics?
I have come to think of most forms of public engagement as a waste of time. Most people who are into politics have zero interest in changing their minds on anything, and getting into arguments about that stuff will most likely push people away from your positions rather than drawing them in. I have come to think that the most effective way to effect positive change in the world is to just be kind and try not to introduce unneeded stress into peoples lives.
-What was the impact to your social circle or community?
Little to none
-What lessons do you think being a leftist taught you, or in what ways has it shaped you that you are appreciative of?
"Leftist" thought helped introduce me to the idea that there are multiple completely different lenses or narratives by which you can view society, and not everyone is looking at the world the same way you are.
It feels crazy to me that this question makes sense. When I was young and even a bit older, it was obvious that communism was over and it would never come back. We would just have to wait for the generation that was thoroughly brainwashed to die of old age.
Then suddenly it just came back. I guess it's not a coincidence at all that it seems like nazism is doing the same. They're feeding each other, and cupping the actual cause of stability: centrism.
Or was this centrism's diabolical plot all along??
Just an offhand, "drive-by" quip. One of the things that always weighed against truly communist/socialist ideas/ideals, for me, was the quote from Frank Zappa -->
Slightly more esoteric, but in recent years, I find myself thinking that this argument works pretty well against Capitalism, too.
Maybe we should have a separate pejorative word for these rent-seeking, late-stage capitalism behaviors; like the distinction between socialism and communism
I blame the use of 'property' to refer to the ownership of economic generators. It really conflates the whole issue needlessly.
Exploitation is exploitation, and it turns out it doesn't really matter if the economy is socialist or capitalist if the governance is authoritarian.
Ironically the material abundance of modern society has created a class of people who actually don’t like owning stuff and, in fact, find owning stuff to be anxiety inducing.
Hence they express their affluence in the form of conspicuous non-consumption. Holdong onto half broken junk, out-of-fashion clothes, spare parts, and surplus items because they might come in handy some day is a habit borne of privation. If you’re actually post scarcity you’d end up appreciating the convenience of just using things and then dropping them instead of needing to be responsible for their care and maintenance.
If resources are abounding you can have faith you can always get another if and when you need it. Renting is freedom! And you pay for it by surrendering the chance to build equity.