Michelle Goldberg asks today why so many progressives have been moving to the right recently. Among the famous—Russell Brand, Matt Taibbi, Naomi Wolf—I think she gets it right: They suffered some kind of indignity from lefties and then turned on them.
For the great masses, though, I think the answer is simpler: They haven't. In fact, according to two reliable pollsters the number of people who identify as liberals has gone up over the past two decades:
Conservative ID, by contrast, has stayed steady this entire time.
But there's more to it, I think. The plain fact is that being a liberal is hard. You have to care about poor people and homeless people and Palestinians and trans people and the environment and Black people and the disabled and Hispanics and the neurodivergent and fast food workers and animals and undocumented immigrants and indigenous people and plastic straws and public transit and mass incarceration and DEI and white privilege and child workers and wage theft and lead pipes and educational equality and systemic racism and bullying and climate change and screen time and maternal mortality and social justice and fat phobia and antisemitic tropes and voter suppression and bank fees and racial stereotyping and income inequality and safe spaces and unconscious bias and football concussions and Black Lives Matter and eugenics and atoning for the past and food deserts and gender affirming care and neoliberalism and health equity and flying and the unbanked and restorative justice and toxic masculinity and biodiversity and colonialism and intersectionality and the global south and malaria and sexual harassment and microaggressions and dolphin-safe tuna and power relations and factory farming and stereotype threat and Davos and cultural appropriation and habitat loss and #OscarsSoWhite and gender identity and pronouns and whale hunting and police brutality and prosecutorial misconduct and Twitter and ableism and deeply problematic and heteronormativity and colony collapse and forever chemicals and body shaming and white saviors and mansplaining and gentrification and hate speech and plastic water bottles and the Bechdel test.
It's pretty exhausting caring about all this stuff all the time, and I'm not even counting issues that everyone cares about, like abortion or gun control. If you get overloaded by it all—and especially if you find some of these items sort of ridiculous to begin with—it's pretty easy to drift right, even if you don't go full MAGA.
I can't believe in a discussion about Taibbi, Wolf, etc. the word "grifter" hasn't appeared until now. That's what they are, end of discussion (Russell Brand is a criminal hoping to motivate the cultists to help him).
This, yeah.
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Yes yes, learning and keeping up with society is so hard, why should I bother when it comes to human rights and common decency?
Also, listing a few famous examples isn't proof of something, that's cherry picking.
It's an age old trope where a privileged person who is protected from the worst of society is all too willing to compromise away issues that are near and dear to the out groups like treating gays fairly, allowing women equal rights and so many other things. It shouldn't be exhausting to exercise empathy should it?
This is lazy...at least with respect to Taibbi. His 'turn to the right' merely reflects that he thinks that liberals have become far to cozy with the idea of government instigated censorship under the banner of 'disinformation'. One need not agree with this position to realize that it doesn't make you 'right wing'. For Christ sake it is impossible to look at Taibbi's collective writings and conclude that he is even remotely right wing. Moreover, the Goldberg piece is stunning in its failure to consider the possibility that some of the supposed turning to the right might reflect some of the policy/agenda issues she passes off as anodyne, like the dismantling of capitalism and the nuclear family. The former couldn't happen without some form of totalitarianism and the latter simplify flies in the face of any serious research on the topic. It is this kind of blinkered viewpoint that led Goldberg (and Gladwell) to to get spanked in the Munk debate...they simply assume that everyone who is 'progressive' shares their perspective on what does and does not constitute progress (hence blithely describing themselves as progressives). Moreover, it is not as though even the flakey individuals she mentions are going to vote Republican or are avid Trump supporters. Is it really impossible to suggest, for example, that active collaboration between government agencies and social media companies is unacceptable without being labelled a MAGA enthusiast? I think Mcwhorter may have it right...this is religion not reason.
I remember just 4 years ago when many 'centrist' internet and media champions declared that it was impossible to consider Donald Trump right wing. Similar to your blind assertion, we were told to ignore what he was doing at the moment , ignore which groups he was targetting and consider his full body of work (not his actual full body of work, just the parts thay serve the argument).
There is deep irony found in your comment on the "the dismantling of capitalism and the nuclear family" and later the assertion that"this is religion not reason."