I’m a Liberal. And Liberals Are Driving Me Crazy.

Opinion | May 2026

Let me get this out of the way upfront: I am not a conservative. I believe in healthcare access, environmental responsibility, social equality, and the idea that government has a role to play in protecting people who need protection. On most of the issues that define the left-right spectrum, I sit comfortably on the left side.

And yet, in recent years, I have found myself increasingly frustrated — not with the right, whose flaws are well-documented and loudly discussed — but with my own side. With liberals. With the movement I nominally belong to, and what it has become in the hands of its loudest, most online, most performatively righteous voices.

This is not a both-sides-are-the-same argument. They are not the same. But the left has developed its own set of intellectual blind spots, its own tribal certainties, its own immunity to inconvenient facts — and pretending otherwise does nobody any favors. If liberalism is going to mean something worth defending, it needs to be honest about what has gone wrong.

Here is my honest attempt at that.

The Free Speech Problem

Liberalism was built on free speech. John Stuart Mill, the philosophical godfather of liberal thought, argued that the free exchange of ideas — including bad ones — was the only reliable mechanism for arriving at truth. The ACLU once defended neo-Nazis’ right to march in Skokie, Illinois, not because it endorsed Nazism, but because it understood that a principle only means something when it’s applied to cases you find uncomfortable.

That liberalism is nearly unrecognizable today.

What has replaced it is a culture in which the range of acceptable opinion has narrowed dramatically, and in which the response to disagreement is increasingly not counter-argument but social destruction. People have lost jobs, careers, and reputations not for doing wrong things, but for saying wrong things — or sometimes for saying right things in the wrong way, or for having said something years ago that has since been reclassified as unacceptable by a committee nobody elected.

Cancel culture is real. Dismissing it as a conservative talking point doesn’t make it go away — it just means liberals aren’t the ones dealing with it honestly. A 2020 survey by the Cato Institute found that 62% of Americans said they self-censor their political views, including 52% of Democrats. When more than half of your own voters are afraid to say what they think, something has gone badly wrong with your movement’s relationship to free expression.

The liberal position used to be: I disagree with what you say, but I will defend your right to say it. The new version, in too many circles, is: I disagree with what you say, and I will do everything in my power to make sure you can never say it again. That is not liberalism. It is a different thing wearing liberalism’s clothes.

Israel-Palestine and the Collapse of Nuance

This is the one that frustrates me most personally, so I will try to be precise.

The conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is one of the most genuinely complex geopolitical situations in the world — a hundred-year collision of competing nationalisms, historical traumas, legitimate grievances on multiple sides, and decisions made by people long dead that living people are still paying for. It demands nuance, historical knowledge, and the intellectual honesty to hold two things in your head at once.

What the liberal mainstream has increasingly offered instead is a morality play. Israel is the oppressor. Palestinians are the oppressed. Anyone who complicates this framing is accused of genocide denial, ethnic cleansing apologia, or worse. University campuses — supposedly the places where complex ideas go to be examined rigorously — have in many cases become places where one side of this argument is not merely unpopular but actively suppressed.

This is a failure of liberal thinking. You can believe that Palestinian civilians deserve protection and that Israeli civilians also deserve protection. You can oppose specific Israeli government policies without denying Israel’s right to exist. You can acknowledge Hamas’s documented atrocities without concluding that every Palestinian is responsible for them. You can hold all of these things simultaneously — and if you can’t, you are not engaging seriously with the conflict. You are performing a position. The proof: Greta Thunberg’s support for Gaza, without any regard for reality. And, of course, the complete silence regarding the massacre in Iran and in other places worldwide.

The liberal movement’s handling of antisemitism has also been, to put it generously, inconsistent. Bigotry directed at almost any other group is taken seriously and acted on quickly. Antisemitism, when it comes dressed in the language of anti-colonialism, has too often been explained away, minimized, or simply ignored. That double standard is not a minor oversight. It is a moral failure.

Climate Change and the Messenger Problem

Climate change is real. The science is unambiguous, the evidence is overwhelming, and the urgency is legitimate. I believe all of this without reservation.

Which is precisely why the way the liberal movement often handles the issue drives me so crazy.

The left has turned climate change into a religion — complete with dogma, heretics, and excommunication. If you accept the science but question the cost-effectiveness of a specific policy, you are a denier. If you suggest that nuclear energy deserves serious consideration as a low-carbon baseload power source, you are accused of shilling for the fossil fuel industry. If you point out that climate activism that shuts down highways, vandalizes museums, or blocks ambulances tends to alienate the very working-class voters whose political support is essential to passing any climate legislation at all — you are told you are tone-policing a crisis.

This is how you lose winnable arguments.

The science of climate change is not the problem. The politics of climate change activism is. A movement that treats every policy question as settled, that responds to genuine economic concerns about energy transition costs with moral lectures, and that elevates the most radical voices as the most authentic ones, is a movement that has confused feeling righteous with being effective.

The people most exposed to the economic costs of rapid energy transition are not the people flying private jets to climate conferences in Davos. They are the coal miner in West Virginia, the truck drivers whose livelihoods depend on diesel, the families in the Midwest whose heating bills doubled. Dismissing their concerns as climate denial — rather than engaging with them as legitimate economic anxieties that require real policy answers — is not moral clarity. It is moral laziness.

You can believe the climate crisis is urgent and still ask whether a given policy is cost-effective. You can demand action and still care whether that action falls disproportionately on people who can least afford it. You can take the science seriously without treating every climate activist’s preferred policy as scientifically mandated.

The climate movement needs more persuaders and fewer prosecutors. The planet cannot afford the difference between a movement that is right and a movement that wins.

Crime, Safety, and the People Who Get Hurt

In 2020, following the murder of George Floyd, “Defund the Police” became the defining slogan of the liberal street. It was, to be charitable, a communications disaster. To be less charitable, it reflected a genuine strand of liberal thought that prioritized ideological purity over the actual safety of the communities it claimed to care about.

Here is the uncomfortable fact: the neighborhoods most harmed by high crime rates are not wealthy liberal neighborhoods. They are poor neighborhoods, disproportionately Black and Hispanic neighborhoods, where residents consistently tell pollsters they want more police presence, not less. A 2020 Gallup poll conducted specifically among Black Americans found that 81% wanted either the same level of police presence in their area or more — not less. The “Defund” movement spoke loudly on behalf of communities that, by and large, had not asked for what was being offered.

Serious criminal justice reform — ending mass incarceration, addressing racial disparities in sentencing, investing in mental health responses to non-violent crises — is a genuinely important cause with broad support. But conflating that cause with a slogan that alienated millions of working-class voters, including many voters of color, was not noble. It was self-indulgent. It felt better than it worked, which is a pattern worth noticing.

Economic Condescension

Liberal economic policy has a real problem, and it is not primarily about tax rates or spending levels. It is about who the movement has come to represent — and who it has left behind.

The Democratic Party in the United States, and center-left parties across the Western world, have undergone a remarkable demographic transformation over the past three decades. They have become the parties of the college-educated professional class increasingly: lawyers, academics, journalists, tech workers, and healthcare administrators. This shift has changed not just who holds power in these parties but how they talk, what they prioritize, and whose concerns they take seriously.

Working-class voters — including many working-class voters of color — have noticed. They have noticed that the liberal economic agenda often speaks fluently about diversity and inclusion in corporate boardrooms while having relatively little to say about the factory that closed, the pension that was cut, or the opioid crisis that devastated their town. They have noticed that the people most loudly advocating for open borders tend to live in neighborhoods where labor market competition from immigration is not personally felt. They have noticed the condescension.

Calling these voters racist or stupid for noticing — which has been a depressingly common liberal response — does not make their observations wrong. It just makes liberalism smaller.

Why This Matters

None of this means conservatism is correct, or that the populist right that has risen to fill the space vacated by a stumbling left is a better alternative. It is not. But movements do not get to coast on the failures of their opponents indefinitely. At some point, they have to be good at their own thing.

Liberalism at its best is a genuinely powerful idea: that reason, evidence, and open debate can improve the human condition; that individuals deserve dignity regardless of who they are; that power should be checked, and that the vulnerable deserve protection. These are ideas worth defending.

But you cannot defend them selectively. You cannot champion free speech only for speech you agree with. You cannot demand nuance on every issue except the ones where nuance is most needed. You cannot claim to speak for working people while governing in the interests of professionals. You cannot apply one standard to antisemitism and a different standard to every other form of bigotry.

I am still a liberal. I believe in what liberalism is supposed to stand for. That is precisely why what it has become in too many places bothers me as much as it does.

The first step toward fixing something is being honest that it’s broken.

This is an opinion piece reflecting the views of the author. AllinAllSpace publishes perspectives from across the political spectrum.