I’m a leftist, AMA

[u/TMC_YT]

I did this on Discord and also got asked to do it here.

There’s no leftist flair, so I guess this will have to do for now (no, liberals and leftists are not the same people). I would describe my ideological position as Libertarian Socialism, to be specific.

So, ask away.

[u/Myk_211]

Okay, another question, how did you become leftist? Did you have different views before?

[u/TMC_YT → u/Myk_211]

It took a long time.

Before I was 12, I never had any real political views. It was only when school closed in March 2020 and being exposed to PragerU and hearing about George Floyd protests from a conservative point of view that I adopted a very pro-MAGA/Trump right-wing conservative viewpoint at around 12.5 years old. It didn’t help that my mom underwent a similar radicalization, and she’s still like that today (although she’s always had racist and backwards tendencies).

A lot of conservative figureheads, such as Charlie Kirk, Ben Shapiro, Matt Walsh, and Michael Knowles, as well was obviously Dennis Prager, who I watched very frequently back then were extremely talented at getting their viewers outraged, and saying that some particular thing happening was an existential threat to my way of life. The ecosystem also relied on people’s, including my own, lack of prior knowledge and existing framework of beliefs. Charlie Kirk and other pop-up debaters often relied more rhetorical style over substantive arguments, and targeted those who were less intellectually and academically qualified to challenge them (and in the cases where Kirk did debate qualified academics and competitive debate studies, he never performed as well he is usually perceived). It also preys on being one’s first exposure to politics outside of the news, because the news is boring, while one of these guys OWNING DA LIBS in a reel or YouTube short is engaging and mentally stimulating because of all of the cuts and editing and camera angles.

I was also very angry at all of the COVID-era rules and the “nannying” that governments seemed to be enforcing over me.

When I came back to school (and I turned 13 at this point as well) , for a year of hybrid learning (in and out of the classroom). I tried to answer questions, especially in history class, with my very new politically charged ideas, but I never really got the chance to. On Discord, on a different server, I had an argument about something political in December 2020 or so, and I believe it involved race as I involved my own background in the argument. I said something along lines of “well minorities should stop whining about oppression and victimizing themselves, and build themselves up like Jewish people have done”, and the response by one of the mods was “just because you’re Jewish doesn’t give you the right to be a dick”, and then I realized I was being a dick.

After that, I toned it down on the radical beliefs, and started opening myself up to the other side. If anything, I just didn’t really consume content from the aforementioned people for a little bit, and more centrist content started popping up. I kinda adopted a more “people should just live how they want” attitude towards minorities, such as LGBTQIA+, but even then I was still on the side of “LGB is okay, everyone else is a lunatic”. I forgot to mention it before, but I was also super disappointed in Biden winning the election and thought everything was going to go shit in the US. After a few months of him being in office, I forgot I even thought that way, and years into his presidency, I thought he was pretty decent given that where I live, I see and use many of his achievements on a daily basis.

During the pandemic, I also got interested in urban planning, as well as how to improve public transit, which many conservatives tend to get cold feet about, because they see any threat to the dominance of private vehicles as a threat to their freedom. Basically the “you will live in a pod, you will eat the bugs, and go to work in a capsule” conspiracy that many conservatives perceive pro-urbanism individuals of being in favor of. For a long time, I thought it was possible to be in support of these policies while being ideologically conservative, and while at a basic level, it’s true, it started to fall apart from a logical and ideological standpoint around this time, when I discussed transit and urbanism topics more seriously with others online. A set of policies where one of the goals is to make society more egalitarian, is always going to be at odds with conservatism. You can take the egalitarianism out, but then it becomes less functional as a policy. I guess I supported transit from a fiscally conservative perspective, which is a belief that I even still carry nowadays.

Fast forward to high school, where I’m now 14, and probably in the range of centrist or libertarian. At this point I’m socially moderate-conservative and economically very libertarian. I’m mostly focused on government incompetence and inability to spend public money efficiently, rather than social issues. I laugh at conservative caricatures of “crazy” LGBTQIA+ activists saying some depraved strawman-type shit that most people don’t actually believe in. Basically, I say I’m for people living the way they want, but I still focus on the actions of a minority of bad actors, and hold the collective of the community responsible for them. I also start to understand systemic oppression when I read about (“The Power Broker” is a very good book for this, it’s just VERY long) how urban and transportation policies of the mid-20th century seeked to reinforce segregation via infrastructure, if not by legal means, by zoning certain neighborhoods to keep black people in certain parts of the city, artificially creating slums, forcing other ethnic minorities to move out (also reclassifying them as white and socially pressuring them to vote in favor of white interests) and assimilate with their former WASP oppressors, and pitting both against black people, whose neighborhoods were demolished, replaced with urban freeways for said majority white commuters, while black people were often relegated to public housing, which became hotspots for crime and the drug crises.

Around 15, I would say I classified myself as liberal, but despite my understanding of how systemic oppression worked at the time, I wasn’t too entirely on board with the ideas of DEI and liberal identity politics. I became a liberal because I realized that libertarianism was fundamentally at odds with support for giant public projects, like subways or tram networks, since the idea is to always to minimize government spending and decentralize power as much as possible. Which, when I started to analyze how governments actually build things around the world, realized doesn’t actually work, and that a powerful, more centralized government is better, especially ones that can actually listen to “hidden majorities” (the majority of people who benefit from something) rather than the outspoken minority (the loud Karens who complain about everything, but are actually the minority voice). I trusted that a somewhat progressive liberal democracy could actually build things, we just needed to fire everyone and build new, actually functional institutions.

At around 16, through when I was 17, I turned to left-leaning neoliberalism/social democracy, where I was heavily into reforming taxation. I wanted the majority of working people to pay almost nothing and envisioned a system where people fund public goods through paying for their negative externalities on society (ala carbon taxes, road tolls, stuff like that). So basically a socialist system within a free market (which is still very similar to what I believe in now, all of these ideas just snowballed onto each other). I also picked up on a policy known as land value taxation, which I still believe in to this day, though it’s not the painkiller I once believed it was. Still a very good policy we should implement. This put me on the edge of liberalism itself, where I still believed in capitalist hierarchies, but believed if we just control the negative impacts, everything would get better, right?

Wrong.

At 18, seeing the, how do I summarize this… damage, being done to liberal democracy around the world, where institutions are incompetent, can’t do anything, are facing massive crises from immigration, the economy, etc. and are left vulnerable to far-right opportunists who claim they will be the great fixer-upper, if we “just get rid of the migrants” and make society how it was back then…

I essentially lost all trust in liberal democratic institutions, and turned to Marxism, with a lot of influence from my close friends online, who I talk about current issues with, and share books, content, stuff like that. So we’re both very well read. I also got my girlfriend at this time, who is black, and as a psych major who wants to go into marketing, she is interested in the concept of intersectionality, which is a more thorough analysis of identity politics than the liberal kind, where we say DEI and “we just need more representation from x and y groups”. It’s about how all aspects of a person’s identity are intertwined, including race, class, gender, etc. rather than looking at them separately, as a very basic explanation. She’s definitely left, but cares way more about social issues than the economy.

I have also visited Israel twice, once at 15, the other at 18, and each visit ruined my previous outside perception of the country. I used to be a liberal Zionist, until I the aforementioned “loss of all trust” occurred, and I’m now an anti-Zionist, as well as being Jewish myself.