An account of a political identity crisis

Lots of people talk about the problems with modern progressivism, but they’re very easily dismissed because they are almost all white men of the chattering class.1 I have the, ahem, privilege and the burden of seeing what men can’t see, and further from within the fabricated identity of ‘brown woman’.

I left the fold, and now I’m unmoored. There are many women like me, but we struggle to find each other.

I am no longer a warden of critical social justice ideology, but my first deeply held identities were feminist and Democrat (in the wake of the invasion of Iraq). However, the present manifestation of feminism and left politics leaves me disillusioned with both, and I have seen them take a fundamentally conservative turn in orientation while claiming to fight for social justice.

Many commentators discuss ‘wokeness’ without being able to deal with the underlying feminine dynamics that create and uphold the discourse on race and gender.

In principle, identity shouldn’t matter in the evaluation of ideas. They should be judged on their merits, as should individuals. Just because a society fails to live up to its ideals, those ideals aren’t evil themselves, and this has gotten lost in what passes for conversations these days.

In a world increasingly focused on maximalist interpretations of everything, I try here to inject critique and reasoned assessment of the prevailing beliefs we have imbibed in bourgeois society. Political extremes now control culture and our interpretations thereof, and this is especially true for women.

As an adolescent growing up in a conservative culture at home and in the world (Florida), liberalism became synonymous with the self-determination I craved. But I realized over time that the prevailing interpretation of liberal principles as they currently manifest our institutions is authoritarian, and it bothers me greatly. So, here we are. Life is not a binary between conservatism and liberalism. As far as we can discern through the scientific method, the truth is not partisan, even though both extremes of the ideological spectrum would like to believe so. I promise to deliver some uncomfortable truths.