It's fine to be politically homeless
You don't need to join the other team
The concept of being politically homeless is an odd one; why should politics ever be your home?
Surely the natural choice to be your home is your home, the place you live and the friends and family who orbit around it. And to the extent that politics does provides you with a home, it should be on an institutional basis, in the way a club’s former player leads corporate hospitality on match days, as a loyalty to particular structures and people rather than to any set of ideas; Kenny Dalglish is a ‘Liverpool man’ whether the team are good or bad. Making ideas your home means committing to them regardless of your personal changes or experiences, even those dissonant experiences which undermine them; to make politics your home restricts the possibility of you ever moving house.
I say this because evidently many feel the need to belong to one political side or another. They can’t just leave the left; they have to go to the right. It does tend to be that way too, travelling from the progressive sphere to the conservative one; over the last years many people have written articles on leaving the left – and I don’t blame them, by the way. The left has become a cramped, paranoid little political space, capable of finding heretics but not converts, uninterested in engaging in pluralism or even able to fathom why people would see a pluralism as a virtue at all – why would you if you’re right about everything?
To the extent the left hosts debate, it’s within the narrow confines of left-internal argument, where people read ‘sound’ authors and repeat their arguments to each other in order to attain social credit and to determine what is to be no longer enjoyed; the modern ‘social justice’ left combines a stiff and unworldly racial hierarchy with blind spots on antisemitism and misandry and, overall, absolutely no fun at all.
So I don’t blame anyone for giving up on it. But that’s different from seeing it as a civillization’s great enemy, or that it’s essential to defeat the radical left more than any other idiot tendency of the modern world. And there are your Matt Taibbis, your Dave Rubins, your Erich Weinsteins – people making careers out of presenting the left as the real bad guys now, which in my view does considerable disservice to the other bad guys. In reality the left are like the third bad guy, the kind of bad guys who get killed at the end of the second act before the confrontation with the big boss (in this case, as in many a Bond movie, a paranoid and balding Russian).