By Kat Rosenfield
Thursday, October 27, 2022
One of my longtime survival strategies as a career
freelance writer is a policy of saying yes to everything. This includes paid
work, of course, but it also includes lunch invitations, since the only thing I
love more than writing is eating. (These are also, incidentally, the only two
things in the world that I am any good at.) My policy goes like this: If you
invite me to lunch, I will come. Embedded in my policy is a second, equally
important policy of asking no further questions about the purpose of the lunch,
lest I accidentally trigger a series of events leading to the withdrawal of the
invitation, which would be tragic.
This is how I came to be sitting across the table
from National Review editor
Rich Lowry at one of the nicer restaurants on Main Street in a small town in
New England on a sunny afternoon in May. In keeping with my policy, I hadn’t
asked what I was doing there — but he also hadn’t told me, and after nearly an
hour, it was starting to get weird. The food was eaten, the plates were
cleared, and we had covered all the obvious topics: our shared interest in
writing fiction, our families, our respective trajectories out of New York City
and into the suburbs. And then, finally, the penny dropped.
“I was hoping to talk to you about writing for National
Review,” Rich said, apologetically. “But apparently you’re . . . a liberal?”
This was not the first time this had happened to me. The
first and best (or perhaps worst) time someone mistook me for a conservative, I
was interviewing live with a gravelly-voiced drive-time radio host whom I
hadn’t bothered to google and who had evidently been similarly lax about
googling me.
“How about these libs,” he said, conspiratorially. (The
noise I made in response was somewhere between “nervous laugh” and “strangled
cat.”)
It happened at the Edgar Awards, where I was a Best Novel
nominee for my 2021 thriller, No One Will Miss Her. A fellow
attendee smiled and said, “It’s just so great that a conservative like you was
nominated,” prompting my husband to snort so violently that he nearly choked on
his beer.
And of course, it happens online — and particularly in
the darker corners of what is known as “bluecheck Twitter,” where those who
mistake me for a member of the political Right are not conservatives but fellow
lefties, writers and lawyers and academics. There, the allegations of
conservatism aren’t a fun case of mistaken identity; there, they’re delivered
with an accusatory snarl.
***
To explain why people keep mistaking me for a
conservative, I need to first explain what kind of liberal I am and always have
been: the free-speech and bleeding-heart variety. As a kid born in the early
1980s — now a Millennial in early middle age — I understood conservatives
through the lens of the culture wars long before I knew anything about
politics, which is to say (with apologies to my audience) that I saw them as
the uptight control freaks trying to ruin everyone’s good time.
Ah, yes, conservatives: the ones who wanted to ban,
scold, and censor all the fun out of everything. They were humorless,
heartless, joyless, sexless — except for their bizarre obsession with policing
what kind of sex everyone else was having in the privacy of his own home.
Conservatism was Rudy Giuliani trying to shut down an art exhibit at the
Brooklyn Museum on the grounds that it was “sick stuff.” It was Dan Quayle
giving a campaign speech that condemned Murphy Brown, a fictional character,
for having a fictional baby out of wedlock. It was some lemon-faced chaperone
patrolling the dance floor at homecoming to make sure nobody’s hands were
migrating buttward. It was my eighth-grade homeroom teacher, Mrs. Teitelbaum,
calling my parents at home to report that she’d seen me doodling “satyric
symbols” in the margins of my notebook.
“Satyric?” my mother said, her brow furrowed with
confusion. “Like, half man, half goat?”
There was a long pause, a series of faint squawks from
the other end of the phone. “Oh, you mean satanic,” she said, and put Mrs.
Teitelbaum on hold so that she could shriek with laughter.
Here I will acknowledge that it was a different time; the
“satanic panic” (a frenzy I now understand to have been as much a product of
breathless corporate media coverage and the hubris of certain medical
professionals as it was of the religious Right) was only barely behind us.
Teen-pregnancy rates were skyrocketing; half of all marriages ended in divorce;
violent video games were transforming the entertainment landscape and stoking
fears of copycat crimes. If conservatives were anxious about the culture and
their place in it, they certainly had their reasons. But to me, a teenager,
their anxieties seemed ridiculous, and meddlesome, rooted in a wholly
inappropriate yearning to control what was going on in other people’s bodies,
bedrooms, and minds.
Of course, ridiculous and meddlesome are not the same as
evil — and here, even early on, I diverged from the more strident members of my
own political tribe. I had friends who didn’t share my politics, whose
existence made it impossible to write off all conservatives as stupid and evil;
these people, whom I loved, were clearly neither. I also had friends who did
share my politics but whose existence was nevertheless a valuable cautionary
tale about what a self-sabotaging trap it was to make “The personal is
political” not just a rallying cry in specific moments, for specific movements,
but a whole-life philosophy.
So, yes, I was a liberal. I just wasn’t the type of
liberal for whom other people’s politics were a deal-breaker or even
necessarily all that interesting. When in 2006 I met the man who would become
my husband, the fact that he’d voted for George W. Bush was less concerning to
me than another affiliation, infinitely more horrifying and far less
defensible: He was a Red Sox fan.
***
In hindsight, the breakdown of the liberal–conservative,
Left–Right binary happened like the famous quote from Hemingway about
bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. By the time Barack Obama was elected
president in 2008, the culture wars that animated my young adulthood had been
roundly won by the Left.
Britney Spears, once the poster child for conservative
purity politics and virginity pledges, had engaged in a three-way lesbian kiss
on stage at the MTV Video Music Awards, gotten married and divorced twice over,
and was fading into obscurity on the back side of a highly publicized nervous
breakdown. The few conservatives still in the fight — over violent video games,
high-school sex education, or the worrisome sexual proclivities of people on TV
— seemed ridiculous as well as ancient, on the verge of obsolescence, like
animatronic characters at Disney World still mouthing their lines from the
1980s through a decades-old patina of rust and grime. When Rush Limbaugh went
on a three-day rant over the Affordable Care Act’s birth-control mandate,
shouting about the “slut” who “wants to be paid to have sex,” it was less
outrageous than pathetic, a front-lines dispatch from a battle long since
lost.
From my vantage point — I was by now working as an
entertainment journalist at MTV News — this massive cultural shift was best
observed alongside the rise of a remarkable new age of television. Creators
were reimagining storytelling on the small screen, while redefining the limits
of what was considered appropriate to beam into the average American living
room on a Sunday night. A show such as Breaking Bad, which debuted
in 2008, not only reflected the evolving culture but also revealed from the
first just how much had already changed. Here was a story that, had it been
released just ten years before, would have surely raised conservative hackles
for its violence, its glorification of drugs and crime, its foul language up to
and including one uncensored use of the f-bomb per season. (The f-bomb! On
basic cable!)
But when Breaking Bad came under fire
for being a poor moral influence as it neared the end of its five-year run, it
wasn’t because of foul language or graphic violence. The outrage was about
toxic masculinity, male privilege, and “mediocre white men.” It was about the
misogyny directed at Walter White’s long-suffering wife, Skyler, a topic on
which actress Anna Gunn penned a New York Times op-ed in which
she concluded that the venomous reactions to her character were symptomatic of
a culture still permeated by deep-seated sexism: “Because Skyler didn’t conform
to a comfortable ideal of the archetypical female, she had become a kind of
Rorschach test for society, a measure of our attitudes toward gender.” It was
about the show’s being too white, except for its villains. This was also — to
use a buzzword — problematic.
The trajectory of cultural juggernauts such as Breaking
Bad was an illustration of the gradual. The sudden, on the other hand,
was a series of jolts. There was one in 2015, when the horrific massacre
of Charlie Hebdo staffers was met with suggestions from
left-wing journalists that perhaps the violence was not undeserved, given the
magazine’s penchant for “punching down.” There was another in 2017, when folks
swept up by the momentum of the #MeToo movement suddenly began to argue that
due process was not just overrated but wholly unnecessary. There was the 2020
Covid-era meltdown over “misinformation,” culminating in the bizarre spectacle
of a bunch of free-speech, free-love, Woodstock-era hippies demanding the
censorship of podcaster Joe Rogan, one of the country’s most successful self-made
content creators.
And the new moral authoritarians, the ones bizarrely
preoccupied with the proclivities of fictional characters, the ones clamoring
to get their grubby hands on the censor’s pen? They weren’t conservatives — or
at least not the kind I’d grown up with. This scolding, shaming, and censoring
was coming from inside the house.
***
This is a theory I’ve had for some time, but it
crystallized in the writing of this piece: In our current era, politics no
longer have anything to do with policy. Nor are they about principles, or
values, or a vision for the future of the country. They’re about tribalism, and
aesthetics, and vibes. They’re about lockstep solidarity with your chosen team,
to which you must demonstrate your loyalty through fierce and unwavering
conformity. And most of all, they’re about hating the right people.
Politics in 2022 are defined not by whom you vote for,
but by whom you wish to harm.
Consider this representative moment from the Covidian
culture wars, the aforementioned weeks-long controversy that began when
musician Neil Young attempted to muscle Joe Rogan off the Spotify streaming
service. Rogan, a one-time reality-television personality whose podcast was
bought in 2020 by Spotify in a $200 million deal, had sparked backlash for interviewing
guests who made skeptical comments about the Covid vaccine. Young blasted Rogan
for “spreading fake information about vaccines” and issued an ultimatum.
Spotify, he said, could have “Rogan or Young. Not both.”
Spotify took Young at his word — his music was removed
from the service within weeks — but the controversy, fueled by intense
politicization of all things Covid-related, had ballooned by then into
something bigger. Mainstream-media commentators argued in earnest that Rogan
must be censored in the name of public health; Spotify quietly disappeared some
episodes of the Joe Rogan Experience from its back catalogue
while appending warnings to others; even the Biden White House weighed in, with
then–press secretary Jen Psaki saying, “This disclaimer, it’s a positive step,
but we want every platform to be doing more to be calling out mis- and
disinformation, while also uplifting accurate information.”
Amid the kerfuffle over Rogan — which had begun to take
the shape of a proxy war over independent media and free speech in times of
national emergency — a list began to circulate online of all the guests Rogan
had ever hosted, divided by perceived political affiliation. This list, created
by journalist Matthew Sheffield of the Young Turks, attempted to undercut
notions of Rogan as an equal-opportunity information-seeker by asserting that
he “overwhelmingly” favored “right-wingers” as guests. Entries in Sheffield’s
“right-wing” column outnumbered those in the left column by nearly four to one.
But as multiple commenters (including me) began to note, a plurality of these
so-called right-wingers were proponents of drug legalization, same-sex
marriage, gun control, and other progressive policies. Many if not most were
not just Biden supporters but longtime Democratic voters, dating back 20 years
or more. One of them, Tulsi Gabbard, had been a vice chairwoman of the
Democratic National Committee and then a Dem presidential hopeful in 2020.
(This was before Gabbard’s recent announcement that she was leaving the
Democratic Party, calling it an “elitist cabal.”)
In addition to their longtime progressive politics, many
of these curiously categorized “right-wingers” had one other thing in common:
In recent years, they had been critical of the Left for its censorial,
carceral, and otherwise authoritarian tendencies.
As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown noted, “the
whole thing makes no sense — except as an exercise in labeling anyone out of
step with progressive orthodoxy in any way at all as a right-winger.”
But of course this exercise is increasingly the preferred
— and perhaps only — means for sorting people into various political boxes. And
on that front, the whole thing makes perfect sense: This with-us-or-against-us
ethos is how I, a woman who has voted Democrat straight down the ticket in
every election for the past 20 years, found myself suddenly accused of apostasy
by the Left at the same time that I began receiving invitations from
right-wingers to appear on Gutfeld!
I said yes to those invitations, too, of course. I even
had a good time!
But this is why conservatives so often mistake me for one
of their own: not because I argue for right-wing policies or from a right-wing
perspective, but because progressives are often extremely, publicly mad at me
for refusing to parrot the latest catechism and for criticizing the progressive
dogmas that either violate my principles or make no sense. I look like a friend
of the Right only because the Left wants to make me their enemy — and because I
can’t bring myself to do the requisite dance, or make the requisite apologies,
that might get me back in the Left’s good graces.
On that front, I am not alone. There’s a loose but
growing coalition of lefties out there, artists and writers and academics and
professionals, who’ve drawn sympathetic attention from conservatives after
being publicly shamed out of the progressive clubhouse (that is, by the type of
progressive who thinks there is a clubhouse, which is of
course part of the problem). It’s remarkably easy these days to be named an
apostate on the left. Maybe you were critical of the looting and rioting that
devastated cities in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by police in 2020. Maybe
you were skeptical of this or that viral outrage: Covington Catholic, or Jussie
Smollett, or the alleged racial abuse at a BYU volleyball game that neither
eyewitness testimony nor video evidence could corroborate. Maybe you were too
loud about the continued need for due process in the middle of #MeToo. Maybe
you wouldn’t stop asking uncomfortable questions about the proven value of
certain divisive brands of diversity training, or transgender surgeries for
kids, or — come the pandemic — masking. Maybe you kept defending the right to
free speech and creative expression after these things had been deemed
“right-wing values” by your fellow liberals.
This is a fraught moment for those of us who aren’t
reflexive team players, who struggle with reading the room, who remain
committed to certain values on principle even when they’ve become politically inexpedient.
The present climate leaves virtually no room for a person to dissent and yet
remain in good standing. Attorney Lara Bazelon — whose commitment to
due-process protections in Title IX cases puts her not just at odds with her
left-wing peers but also, in a shocking turn, on the same side as the Trump
administration — described the challenges of heterodoxy on an episode of Glenn
Loury’s podcast in October 2022. “I have a tribe and they have a position, and
I don’t agree with it,” Bazelon said, looking bewildered. “Why is it so
poisonous and toxic and canceling-inducing to be able to say that basic thing?”
It’s also important to note that this isn’t happening
only on the left. Many conservatives told me as much themselves, with a
familiar mix of frustration and incredulity.
But admittedly, as recently as a few weeks ago, I still
thought that the left-wing manifestation was something else, something worse.
It was in the toxic high school–ness of it all, the way that people gleefully
coalesced around a new target each day, as if their confidence in their own
righteousness relied on the perpetual presence of a scapegoat to kick. The
intolerance seemed particularly intense among the type of highly educated
liberals who dominate the media sphere, who police the boundaries of their
extremely online in-group with the same terrifying energy as the most
Machiavellian high-school mean girl. When various polls were released in the
aftermath of the 2016 election as to the willingness of various American voters
to date across party lines, it did not surprise me at all to learn that
liberals were far more likely to say they wouldn’t.
After hearing stories from conservatives who have been
shunned, shamed, and estranged from loved ones over their lack of support for
Donald Trump, I no longer imagine that this brutal breed of politics is unique
to progressives. I think it just seems worse to me because the Left has always
been my home — and a home where (as those ubiquitous, insufferable lawn signs
say) we believed certain things, and behaved in certain ways. We were not
censors. We were not scolds. We were not in the business of trying to shut down
artists or meddle in people’s sex lives or deny health care to people whose
lifestyle choices we disliked. That sort of vicious sanctimony, the
boot-stamping-on-a-human-face-forever sense of self-righteousness, was what the
Left stood as a bulwark against . . . until it didn’t.
On this front, the erosion of free speech in the creative
and intellectual spaces that belong to the Left feels like a particular loss.
It’s devastating to see the worlds of journalism, academia, publishing, and
comedy all in such thrall to (or fear of) a culture that sees creative work as
activism first and art second, a culture that demands conformity to progressive
pieties and is always on the hunt for heretics. It’s also alarming to realize
that virtually all of America’s cultural products are now being made in
environments where admitting that you voted for Trump — a democratically
elected president who was supported by roughly half the country — would be not
just unusual but akin to professional suicide.
This sort of homogeneity is bad for art, and it’s also
not good for people, for building community, for coexisting peacefully in a
society sustained by social trust. And it’s not lost on me that expressing
these thoughts publicly, especially in the pages of National Review, will no doubt prompt a fresh round of allegations
that I’m some kind of faker, a double agent, a wolf in sheep’s clothing. This,
too, is part of the way we do politics now: Even if something is true, we’re
told, you shouldn’t say it lest it provide ammunition to the other side.
Within the past five years, this toxic variation of the
no-true-Scotsman fallacy has become pervasive. In the span of just 20 years,
we’ve gone from “The truth has a liberal bias” to “The truth is a right-wing
talking point.” People who question the orthodoxy are no longer seen as
gadflies but as traitors, and they’re summarily ejected from the club by some
self-appointed arbiter of Who Is And Is Not Liberal. Commentator Bill Maher was
the subject of one such defenestration this spring: “He prides himself on just
asking questions (a lot of which sound suspiciously like GOP talking points),”
wrote Molly Jong-Fast in an Atlantic article with the
not-so-subtle title “Bill Maher Isn’t a Liberal Anymore.”
Maher’s suspiciously Republican-sounding questions in
this case centered on whether the explosion of the number of people under 25
who identify as LGBT+ could be explained in part by social contagion, a
psychological phenomenon that has lately been explored by such hateful
right-wing outfits as Reuters, the New York Times, and (wait for
it) the Atlantic. But Maher was guilty of broaching an
uncomfortable truth too early — which is to say, before the powers that be
stepped in to declare that Now It Can Be Said.
***
The title of this essay is “Why I Keep Getting
Mistaken for a Conservative,” and it’s not lost on me that it would be an
excellent setup for a tidily dramatic ending in which I suddenly realize that
wait, no, the mistake was mine, and finally I see that I’ve been a conservative
all along. But despite the occasional flirtation (or lunch) with members of the
center-Right, and despite the lucrative career potential of a right-wing pivot,
I shan’t be coming out of the closet or putting on a “Team GOP” jersey today. I
still believe in liberal principles such as free speech, high social trust, and
a government that provides a robust safety net for people in need while leaving
the rest of us to live and let live. I support same-sex marriage, universal
health care, police and prison reform, and an end to the destructive and
foolhardy wars on drugs and terror — and while we’re abolishing things, I
wouldn’t mind getting rid of the sex-offender registry and capital punishment,
too. Like most people, I’ve seen some of my policy preferences evolve over the
years (living through Covid has given me some pause about socialized medicine,
for instance), but my values remain the same.
On the other hand, those values also still include
sitting down for lunch and conversation with anyone who asks — not just because
I love eating (although, man, do I love eating), but because I like people and
find them interesting, even when we come from different worlds, or perhaps
especially then. To be clear, I don’t think this makes me special; if anything,
it makes me normal. Those of us who live in political bubbles, who work in
political fields, who spend all day online obsessively refreshing Twitter and
consuming news straight from the hose — we’re the weird ones, and it behooves
us to remember how weird we are, irrespective of which side we’re on. Outside
of my professional sphere, I could probably guess with 85 percent accuracy how
any one of my friends voted, but I also wouldn’t do this, because it’s not the
most important thing. Really, it’s not even in the top ten.
And within that sphere, where political affiliation
resembles a team sport, a religious faith, and a recreational witch hunt, I
remain more interested in watching the game than playing it. The work I love
best is about analysis, not prescription; it’s about trying to understand what
is and why, not what ought to be. And yes, granted, when talking about what the
progressive Left is up to, sometimes I feel as if I’m standing inside a
crumbling building that used to be my home, narrating the slow collapse of the
walls as they rot and buckle around me. There’s also a sense that when the
house is rebuilt, it might be elsewhere, on different foundations, so that all
of us “suspicious” question-asking types are left standing outside.
But the way things are going, the folks who’ve been
pushed out of the club will soon vastly outnumber those still in it. And if
words such as “liberal” and “conservative” and “left” and “right” are
increasingly meaningless tribal signifiers rather than statements of policy or
principle, if all they convey is who you’re against rather than what you stand
for, then maybe it’s in our best interest not to keep clinging to them. What
are we without these labels? A tribe of the tribeless, unaffiliated and
unfettered, with no choice but to get to know one another as individuals. This
doesn’t sound so bad. Let’s have lunch.
