To My Friends on the Left: A Difficult Reckoning

On the Bubble We Built and the Storm It Summoned

There comes a time in the life of every movement when it must look upon its works with clear eyes—not the eyes of its enemies, who will always see the worst, nor the eyes of its partisans, who will always excuse what ought not be excused—but with the sober, searching gaze of those who wish their cause to endure. That time has come for us.

We who call ourselves liberal, progressive, enlightened. We who believed we were building a more just society. We who were certain—so certain—that history bent toward us, that demographics favored us, that the great moral arc would deliver us to victory without our ever having to persuade those who doubted. We must now ask ourselves an uncomfortable question:

What if we helped create the very thing we feared?

I. The Bubble We Cannot See

Let me speak plainly about a phenomenon so obvious to those outside our circles and so invisible to those within: we have constructed an information environment, a social environment, a professional environment in which one half of America simply does not exist as thinking beings.

Seventy-four million Americans voted for Donald Trump in 2020. Seventy-seven million in 2024. These are not small numbers. These are not rounding errors. These are our neighbors, our relatives, our fellow citizens. And yet—and here I ask you to be honest with yourself—when did you last genuinely attempt to understand why?

Not to diagnose. Not to explain away with reference to racism, ignorance, or Fox News. But to understand, as you would wish to be understood. To grant them the same presumption of rationality you would demand for yourself.

I suspect the answer, for many of us, is never. Or not for a very long time.

We have built a world in which the New York Times and the Washington Post and NPR and our curated social media feeds tell us what serious people think. We have built a world in which disagreement with progressive orthodoxy is not a position to be debated but a pathology to be diagnosed. We have built a world in which we can go weeks, months, years without encountering a serious argument against our convictions—and we have mistaken this silence for consensus.

This is not wisdom. This is not enlightenment. This is the construction of a very comfortable prison.

II. The Cancellations We Excused

Consider what we have tolerated. Consider what we have celebrated.

A man writes a memo suggesting that population-level differences in interest might partially explain gender disparities in software engineering. He is fired, his name made synonymous with bigotry. Did we read the memo? Did we engage with his sources? Or did we simply trust that the reaction was proportionate because the reaction came from our side?

A professor suggests that perhaps a university should not allow students to exempt themselves from engaging with difficult ideas. A mob surrounds her. Her colleagues do not defend her. She leaves. Did we object? Or did we look away, uncomfortable but silent?

A scientist questions the lab-leak hypothesis. A physician questions lockdown efficacy. An economist questions minimum wage effects. A biologist questions gender ideology. In each case, the pattern repeats: not argument, but ostracism. Not evidence, but accusation. Not debate, but dismissal.

We told ourselves this was accountability. We told ourselves we were protecting the vulnerable. We told ourselves that some ideas were too dangerous to engage.

But here is what we actually did: we taught an entire generation that the way to win an argument is to ensure the argument never happens. We demonstrated that the penalty for wrongthink is professional destruction. We showed that truth matters less than tribal loyalty.

And then we wondered why trust in institutions collapsed.

III. The Violence We Looked Away From

When a man attempted to assassinate Donald Trump, there was laughter in certain quarters. “Too bad he missed”—said sometimes in jest, sometimes not in jest at all. Search your memory. Search your social media feeds. Was there not a flutter of this in spaces you inhabit?

When Steve Scalise was shot at a baseball practice by a man who asked whether the players were Republicans before opening fire, how long did this remain in the news? How deep was our introspection about the rhetoric that might have contributed?

When Rand Paul was assaulted by his neighbor, breaking his ribs, the jokes wrote themselves. The sympathy was conspicuously absent.

“Punch a Nazi,” we said, and we defined Nazi downward until it meant anyone who voted wrong. “Silence is violence,” we said, and thus violence became speech, and speech became violence, and the distinctions that allow civilization to function dissolved in a slurry of slogans.

We have spent years warning that the right would bring political violence to America. And the right has indeed brought political violence. But so have we. The difference is that we cannot see ours, because we have constructed a moral framework in which our violence is resistance and theirs is fascism.

This is not principle. This is tribalism in ethical clothing.

IV. The Institutions We Captured

Let me tell you what it looks like from the outside—from the vantage of those who do not share our assumptions.

It looks like every major newspaper sharing the same assumptions. It looks like every prestige university enforcing the same orthodoxy. It looks like every HR department speaking the same language. It looks like every award, every grant, every position of cultural influence flowing toward those who hold the correct views.

It looks like a monoculture that doesn’t know it’s a monoculture, because everyone it talks to agrees.

We told ourselves we were simply the educated, the informed, the intelligent. We told ourselves that our dominance of institutions reflected our merit. We told ourselves that if conservatives were underrepresented in academia, in journalism, in entertainment, it was because conservatism was incompatible with truth-seeking.

We did not consider that we had made conservatism incompatible with career-having. We did not consider that we had constructed a system that filtered for agreement and filtered out dissent. We did not consider that the test of intellectual diversity might reveal that our consensus was not as robust as we believed.

And now we face a movement that says: these institutions are enemy territory, and must be razed.

We protest that this is authoritarianism. And it may well be. But we might also ask: who taught them that institutions were weapons? Who demonstrated that the path to power runs through institutional capture? Who showed them that the game was not persuasion but control?

V. The Contempt We Radiated

Here is the heart of it, the thing that cannot be unsaid once it is said:

We believe we are smarter than them. We believe we are more moral than them. We believe that our views are the views of educated, sophisticated, decent people, and that their views are the views of the ignorant, the fearful, the bigoted.

This belief saturates everything we do. It is in the way we report the news, selecting facts that flatter our assumptions. It is in the way we produce entertainment, with conservatives as villains or buffoons. It is in the way we conduct studies, framing questions to yield congenial answers. It is in the way we speak to each other when we think they are not listening.

They are listening. They have always been listening. And they have heard what we think of them.

We wonder why they do not trust experts. Perhaps it is because the experts have made clear, again and again, that they hold the people in contempt. We wonder why they reject mainstream media. Perhaps it is because mainstream media has made clear, again and again, that it considers them deplorable. We wonder why they vote for demagogues who promise to burn it all down. Perhaps it is because we have made clear, again and again, that the institutions we control will never serve them.

Contempt is a solvent. It dissolves the bonds of common citizenship. It makes negotiation impossible and compromise unthinkable. It prepares the ground for what comes after democracy fails.

We have been marinating half the country in our contempt for decades. And now we are shocked that they do not wish to be governed by us.

VI. The Reckoning We Avoid

I can already hear the objections.

“But they are racist.” Some are. Most are not. And even racism is a thing to be argued against, not an excuse to stop arguing.

“But Trump is dangerous.” He may well be. But danger is not defeated by refusing to understand how it arose.

“But we have science on our side.” Sometimes. And sometimes we have consensus that we have mistaken for science. And sometimes we have silenced the questions that would have revealed our errors.

“But they started it.” Did they? Or did they respond to something we started? And does it matter, when the house is burning?

The hardest thing I am asking is this: that we consider the possibility that we are not the heroes of this story. That our certainty has been a weakness, not a strength. That our institutions have served our interests more than the common good. That our moral clarity has been, in part, moral blindness.

This is not a call to abandon our values. It is a call to live them.

We say we believe in diversity—let us then tolerate diversity of thought. We say we believe in compassion—let us then extend it to those we find difficult. We say we believe in democracy—let us then trust the people, even when they vote in ways we deplore. We say we believe in truth—let us then follow it even when it leads to uncomfortable places.

VII. What Must Be Done

I do not know if it is too late. The forces now in motion may be beyond anyone’s control. The damage we have done to common trust may be irreparable. The reaction we have provoked may be unstoppable.

But if there is still time—if the possibility of democratic self-correction still exists—then it will require something from us that we have not yet been willing to give: genuine humility.

Not the performed humility of the land acknowledgment and the privilege confession. But the real humility that comes from recognizing that we might be wrong. That our opponents might have a point. That our certainties might be provisional. That our tribe might not be the sole repository of wisdom and virtue.

This will mean reading what we have not read. It will mean listening to those we have dismissed. It will mean sitting with discomfort rather than retreating to the warm bath of agreement. It will mean treating half of America as fellow citizens rather than obstacles to be overcome.

It will mean, in short, becoming what we have always claimed to be: open-minded, tolerant, liberal in the true sense of the word.

We have not been those things. We have been tribal, censorious, and certain. We have built walls around our minds and called them education. We have silenced dissent and called it progress. We have radiated contempt and called it sophistication.

The bill for this has come due. We may not be able to pay it. But the first step toward any possible redemption is to acknowledge the debt.

Conclusion

I write these words not as an enemy but as a friend—as one who has shared your assumptions, lived in your world, nodded along with your certainties. I write as one who has begun, painfully, to question.

The great challenge of our moment is not to defeat the other side. It is to remember that there should not be “sides” in a democracy—only fellow citizens with different views, working out through argument and compromise the difficult business of living together.

We have forgotten this. We have made politics into war and disagreement into treason. We have sorted ourselves into camps and taught ourselves to hate.

If there is a way back, it begins with us. Not because we are solely responsible—we are not—but because we are the ones who must change if anything is to change. The right will do what the right will do. We cannot control that. We can only control ourselves.

Let us then ask, with whatever courage we can muster: What have we done? What have we failed to see? What might we have gotten wrong?

The answers may be painful. But the alternative—the continued insistence that we are blameless, that the fault lies entirely elsewhere, that we need only resist and wait for demographics to save us—leads somewhere darker than any of us wish to go.

We wanted to build a better world. Perhaps we still can. But first we must reckon with the world we actually built.

The hour is late. The storm is upon us. And the only lantern we have is the one we have been afraid to light: the willingness to see ourselves clearly.

Let us, at last, have the courage to look.

“The first duty of a man is to think for himself.” —José Martí

“It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.” —Arthur Conan Doyle

“The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” —Bertrand Russell