The Left Must Exorcise Its Own Authoritarian Demons, Too

Because we can't wrest democracy back from only one side. We have to kill all the cancer.

Image by Alejandro Lizardo on Public Domain Pictures

(Audio here)

Democracy is no longer ‘precarious’ in the Ignited States of Trumpistan, but swirling down a golden toilet. One might argue that rather than critiquing the excesses of liberalism, I should instead turn my attentions to Messolooni, currently heaping up a veritable guerra lampo of gross abuses of power.

But the left’s own excesses are what’s also brought us to this place—we, the other arm of the ambidextrous authoritarian monster.

“This is how liberty dies, with thunderous applause,” comments Senator Padmé Amidala in Revenge of the Sith.

I’m clearly no MAGA Trumpanzee; I love liberty, and I continue prodding my fellow liberals and my not-so-fellow illiberals on their own lack of commitment to it, to the great annoyance of those who still wish to pretend they had nothing to do with this fine kettle of fish.

Those applauding now are the far right. Those applauding until January 20th were the far left.

We, and they too, are more like them than we know. And now that our side is out of government power, we have to take inventory of our failings, as they say in AA, and make amends, because we can’t fix them without restoring our own abandoned moral credibility.

Who are ‘them’?

Too many progressives, liberals, and social justice junkies don’t understand who ‘they’, the problem Americans, are. They’re neither ‘the left’ nor ‘the right’, neither Democrat nor Republican, neither red nor blue: They are, as I’ve discussed before, liberty lovers vs authoritarians.

I criticize not just the woke illiberals, but the ‘nice’ liberals, the ‘good’ liberals, and the true progressives unfortunately clinging to clearly flawed policies and values, ‘buggy whips’ they should have abandoned decades ago.

If You Still Hold The Same Beliefs Thirty Or Forty Years Ago—Why?

Conservatives are much less united behind the Trumpocalypse than the left realizes; the Republican Party has been bleeding the disenchanted for years. As I see from The Bulwark articles I get, written by conservative disenchanteds, their gloomy assessments of Trump almost entirely mirror mine and my fellow liberals. Many moderates and disenchanteds don’t speak up because the guerra lampo of hate and danger from our respective authoritarian masters is brutal, online and off.

But we are their heretics, their hidden ticking liberty bombs. We agitate for what they don’t dare, by doing and saying what they dare not.

We get to know and befriend moderates of whichever side isn’t ours, and develop a respect for their opinions, and are more inclined to listen to them when they say something we disagree with. It’s what’s been missing from the national conversation for decades. We don’t listen; we don’t share a beer with people who don’t go to our church, raise their kids the same way, own guns, vote for who we voted for, or have a distaste for abortion.

I critique my own tribe more than the other, even as I feel like all of us liberty-lovers need to circle the wagons. I take on liberals because too many won’t listen to anyone they fashcast as ‘right-wing’. You don’t subscribe to Holy Trans Dogma? You don’t think Israel is pure evil? You dare to criticize the less-than-angelic George Floyd? Defriend. I speak to the liberals who haven’t yet given their brains over to the social justice cult. Thanks for sticking around!

If you think our side could never do what Trump is doing now, I offer Exhibit A: Venezuela, headed by the now-late Hugo Chavez, who dismantled democracy, one brick at a time. Going after political enemies? Check. Shutting down oppositional broadcasters? Check. Watching the swiftness with which the guardrails are broken; knowing the motherfucker in power doesn’t give a rat’s patoot about you or your problems; politicizing everything, blurring the lines between state, government and society to make it all about him. Check. Check. Check. Check.

Chavez wasn’t a right-winger, as many might assume, but a credentialed left-winger: A socialist, a nationalizer of key industries, proponent of welfare programs to eradicate poverty and inequality. You know who loved him? The working class and the marginalized.

Sound familiar, mis amigos liberales?

It’s the Authoritarians, silly.

We purple liberty lovers unite to fight against the Pol Potbellies and Pinheadchets who now battle for control of America. It’s great to see citizens fighting back against the brutal masked ICE Gestapo, while knowing those same ‘warriors’ may well be the far-left authoritarians who simply want their power back. Who, if they’re taking notes, will bring us Woke Trump one day and perpetuate, rather than end, the current horror.

Yes, I DO believe our side is every bit as authoritarian as theirs. It just hasn’t matured and emerged from its chrysalis like Sil in Species. Yet.

And the little blockheads shall lead them

What I never imagined is that my fellow liberals would turn ‘progressive’ into a dirty word, smelling of bad milk and broccoli in the garbage. My increasingly-estranging compatriots embraced a cancel culture censorship for public statements that were often offensive, ill-considered, or downright stupid, but not illegal.

Our Regressive Left is what’s compelled us to lose our minds over opinions, but turn away and whistle in the dark when a black man kills a white woman for no reason or the wrong President brings about a ceasefire we’ve been demanding for two years.

Lackadaisical liberalism and true progressivism found itself hijacked by our dumbasses—the Regressive Left, who devolved into the ‘woke’ with too much unchecked, unquestioned ‘tolerance’ and ‘inclusivity’ and a serious distaste for open inquiry. They opened the door to our very worst elements the same way Republican small-tentism led to Trump’s MAGAtry. Both sides’ regressives are motivated by the same nihilism, all-purpose bigotry, itch to manage, fear of critical thinking, the desire to tear it all down, and to remake society to fit their own twisted utopia, by violence if necessary. Authoritarians must control everything, especially education, because freethinkers and intellectuals wonk it all up by asking too many questions. Regressives possess their own built-in seeds of social destruction, showering the faithful with a wide chrysanthemum of stupidity: Christian fundamentalism on the right, encompassing the most dogmatic and bass-ackwards elements of religiosity, and the left’s fetishization of moral weakness and group identity, leading to much the same sort of hate and bigotry as we see now with Jew hatred parity.

Once the left embraced exclusionary diversity, Trumpist authoritarianism, rooted in one man’s own mad desire to seek revenge on anyone who ever crossed him, cracked like a whip against anyone to the left of J.D. Vance, boosted mightily by understandably pissed-off once-reasonable conservatives who’ve been silenced for too long.

This was explored and explained beautifully in a recent Free Press article, What Shakespeare Understands About Trump’s Thirst For Revenge. The author observes that while the left watches in horror as Trump turns around their own recent ideological actions and takes them three steps further, Democratic presidents exhibit their own authoritarian streak, on occasion, although less, so far, than Republican administrations. But. The actions are identical: Jawboning political opponents; pressuring private companies to suppress free speech (Biden with Google/YouTube and Facebook); the bipartisan love affair with book bans and compelling universities to comply with a political agenda (Obama’s extremist #MeToo-driven dictates).

Just because Democratic administrations haven’t lately been ‘just as bad’ doesn’t mean they’re not ambitious. Remember, the Democrats, formerly the ‘white man’s party’, once fought a civil war to preserve slavery.

Truth is, we each have our own little Dr. Evil living within. That itch to rule over others because we know what’s best, it seems, is ingrained into the human soul. Unless we consciously fight our own Little Caesar, we ask not whether authoritarianism sucks, but which we prefer.

The devil you know

2025’s censorship handover is a prime example of how badly we need to clean up our own mess.

It’s so, so, so hard not to roll my eyes at the liberal multitudes suddenly getting woke to censorship, now that the right is in charge of it.

Our Joseph Goebbelsism is that one must be the right kind of liberal, and most importantly, liberal enough, in order to be taken seriously.

Progressives hobbled and crippled themselves by yanking the reins on diversity of opinion. Now they whine while the tables turn on them.

The ‘Peace Protesters’ Who Won’t Give Peace A Chance - The Free Press

If the left, and especially the Democrats, don’t exorcise their own authoritarian demons quickly, when they return to power, as they eventually will, they may be as bad as or worse than the Trumpocalypse. Or they might never return, because voters might decide, fuck it, the devil you know, until there are no more elections.

At the moment, hand-wringing born-again democracy mavens, the ‘fat generals’ of The Resistance, can’t rally together to strategically wrest democracy back from the tinputt dictator who is destroying the country. Who will one day subjugate even his own airheaded fanboys and fangirls, cheering for their own liberation from financial security and freedom, and for their own destruction.

We truly have met the enemy and he is us

Liberal, conservative, and libertarian liberty lovers need each other.

We who value the original vision of the Founding Fathers need to unite together to fight bi-divisional reality denial, whether it’s transmania or vaccine phobia, the Intifada or de-gunning the least violent citizens. Trump may babble like a maniac about having ended wars between countries who are at peace or flooding Los Angeles with non-existent water, and almost everything he attempts is done in the worst way imaginable, but he couldn’t have done it without our help.

He’s primarily an ambassador for right-wing lunacy with a visceral rejection of all true liberals should hold dear: Reality, truth, skepticism, evidence-based policy-making and common sense.

For all the talk about what a malignant psychopath Donald Trump is, it takes one to know one. They voted for him, but we gave Trump the power to behave much like ourselves.

We can remain in denial and pretend we want to fix America’s problems, or we can just sit back and wait for ICE’s stormtroopers to claim us.

We’re no longer red and blue. We’re not Republican or Democrat. We are the liberty lovers, who fight all authoritarians, regardless of which flags they fly.

It’s up to us.

When I’m not trying to get Canadians to pay attention to the creeping left-wing authoritarianism in this country, I help women and others reclaim their power at Grow Some Labia.