Thursday’s essay on a double standard (Stop Walking on Eggshells, Patriots) inspires today’s essay. There is an asymmetry in our political culture that I can’t ignore (nor should you), and I confess that I was not immune to its power. I have reflected on this before, in other essays and posts (which I will reference as the essay unfolds, but here’s an example: A Critique of My Younger Self), but I have more to say. It was a significant moment, or more accurately, a series of moments, in my life, and I think others may find value in my experience.
Imagine someone learning that a colleague voted for Kamala Harris and exclaiming, “Oh my God, you voted for Kamala Harris? What’s wrong with you? Don’t you know she’s a communist?” I can imagine the sentence grammatically, but I have never heard it uttered with moral panic. Now contrast that with the reaction I have personally witnessed when someone says they voted for Donald Trump: “Oh my God, you voted for Donald Trump? He’s a fascist. How could you vote for that man?”
The asymmetry extends beyond private conversation. It is difficult to imagine someone calling an employer to report that an employee voted for Kamala Harris and suggesting this reflects poorly on the company. It is much easier to imagine—because it has happened—someone contacting an employer to say, “Do you know your employee supports Donald Trump? Not a good look for your firm.”
This double standard works because of what I would call a “terrain of assumptions” (see The Manufactured Perception of Moral High Ground). Supporting the Democratic Party is widely treated in the world of higher education, which is where I dwell, and even beyond that cloistered environment, as morally neutral at worst and morally commendable at best. Supporting Donald Trump and populist Republicans, by contrast, is often treated as prima facie immoral and dangerous. The moral verdict precedes the argument.
When Kamala Harris lost, the narrative was not that Americans rejected Democratic politics so much as that she lacked charisma, was thrown into the role, or that voters were not prepared to elect a black woman. Her loss was thrown back onto those who opposed her. But when Donald Trump won, the lament was that millions of Americans were willing to vote for a fascist or a racist—labels routinely deployed and only lately softened for political expediency (the midterm elections are looming, and the economy is booming). The assumption was not that voters made a prudential judgment; it was that their votes revealed a moral defect.
This environment affected me more than I care to admit. But I know many others are in the position I was once in, and so I share my shame to help them with theirs.
In 2016, I voted for Jill Stein. I said publicly that the “lesser of two evils” argument did not persuade me in that election; I believed Hillary Clinton would be worse than Trump, yet I could not vote for the businessman from Queens. So I endorsed Stein and voted Green. When Clinton lost, I received grief—not for voting for Trump, but for failing to vote for Clinton. The logic was simple: if you did not vote for Hillary, you effectively voted for Trump. That’s the function of the lesser of two evils argument.
At a university full of progressive Democrats (this is true across higher education and even K-12), I felt the pressure. I worried about my job, my reputation, and my standing among colleagues. So in 2020, after the backlash of 2016, I announced that I would not disclose my vote. Only my wife and a close friend would know.
Everyone knew anyway. If they read this essay and want to be snarky and say I’m not telling the world anything they don’t already know, that’s fine. I know that will give them a sense of satisfaction at my expense. But confession is not really the point of this essay. The point of this essay is to share the shame I feel for not publicly endorsing Trump in 2020—and regret for not voting for him in 2016—and why it appears that I moved from left to right. I know this is a cliché, but the left left me (see my November 2020 essay, How to Find Your Way Out of the Left—or How to Help Left Find Its Way Back There).
So determined was I to signal my 2020 vote without opening declaring it, I even borrowed a line from Glenn Loury of Brown University, who said on his podcast that if he told certain people he was voting for Joe Biden, they would have reason not to believe him (see Warmongering, It Can’t Happen Here, and Lying to Pollsters). I used that clever formulation to soothe my timidity. It gave intellectual cover to what was, at bottom, fear of the consequences of what would happen if I openly supported Trump. (Obviously, Loury was feeling it, too. At least then.)
I regret not openly declaring my support for Donald Trump in 2020, but that earlier failure in 2016 revealed something more troubling: I had been caught in what I can only characterize as a progressive vortex. At the time, I believed I was thinking independently. In reality, I was operating within a constrained moral universe whose boundaries I had not fully examined. I read posts I made in 2016-2017 and cringe (more on that in a moment).
My eventual break from the delusional side of American politics came gradually—through engagement with other thoughts, travel to Europe to see for myself the wreckage left by the 2015 migration crisis (Observations from Sweden; The Immigration Situation), the migrant crisis in my own country, the manufactured resistance to it, and the upheavals of COVID-19 (too many essays on these topics to list here). I began to reconsider not only policies but the moral narratives attached to them.
The pandemic, in particular, forced me to reevaluate claims about authoritarianism. If Trump were truly a fascist, I thought, the COVID crisis would have provided an unparalleled opportunity to consolidate power. Instead, many of the most sweeping mandates—lockdowns, vaccine passports, extended emergency authorities—were championed elsewhere, often by those who most loudly warned of fascism. Trump wanted to keep the country open, only to be told by his advisors to shut down the booming economy his policies had delivered.
I have been thinking a great deal about how to establish a timeline of my intellectual and political development. I write about these themes often, but when I sat down to write today’s essay, I thought this would be a good moment to bring together previous reflections.
I was born in 1962. My father was a Church of Christ preacher, so I grew up steeped in Protestant Christian ethics. He was a liberal Democrat in the mold of John F. Kennedy—but also aligned with the progressive legacy of Franklin D. Roosevelt and its continuation with Lyndon B. Johnson. That combination—religious seriousness and New Deal liberalism—formed the moral atmosphere of my childhood. It also set down a core belief system that, in the end, allowed me to escape the progressive vortex.
Growing up in Tennessee added another layer of complexity. Southern politics in the decades after the Civil Rights Act cannot be reduced to an easy formulation about “party flips.” My extended family was, for the most part, New Deal Democrats who have remained Democrats. As should be obvious, the New Deal Democrats in the South were not ideologically aligned with the segregationists who eventually migrated to the Republican Party after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
However, the idea that the parties simply switched ideologies wholesale is more propaganda than history (see History as Ideology: The Myth that the Democrats Became the Party of Lincoln; Republicanism and the Meaning of Small Government). The Democrats who gravitated to the Republican Party were always skeptical of centralized power and culturally Southern, which was out of step with urban progressivism. At the same time, the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, which over the decades purged liberalism from its ideology, dragged those who remained loyal to the party into corporate statism. And, to some extent, it dragged me along with this.
My early political reflex was simple: Democrats good, Republicans bad. I voted accordingly. I voted for Bill Clintonin 1992. It felt natural, almost tribal.
But things began to shift in the mid-1990s when I entered graduate school. During my master’s program in 1994–95, I took a course on theories of development and underdevelopment. That was my serious introduction to Marxist political economy. Later, in my PhD program, I studied under scholars deeply influenced by Marxism, critical theory, and radical critiques of globalization. I found Marx compelling, particularly on the analytical side—class, capital flows, the dynamics of international political economy, the power of transnational corporations.
I was always critical of postmodernism in the abstract; it struck me as philosophically absurd. Yet I did not fully grasp how deeply postmodern currents had fused with neo-Marxist critical theory in the rise of what later became critical race theory and queer theory. In fact, in my dissertation, I attempted to synthesize a Marxist class analysis with critical race theory. It was an ambitious project—too ambitious. My advisor encouraged me to publish it, though it would have required multiple volumes. But almost as soon as I completed it, I began to doubt whether the theoretical synthesis at its core was truly viable.
In 2000, as noted earlier, I was hired into a university environment where progressive Democratic orthodoxy was dominant. The social pressure to conform was real. Humans are social animals, and I was not immune to the tribal pull. However, with the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, I began to rethink my politics. However, even before that, cracks had begun to appear. In 1996, I refused to vote for Clinton again, largely because of NAFTA, the WTO, and the broader globalization agenda. At the time, I also opposed welfare reform and the 1994 crime bill—positions I have since reconsidered. But the globalization problem stuck.
I voted for John Kerry in 2004, but that was the last time I reflexively supported a Democratic presidential candidate. I did not vote for Barack Obama, nor for Hillary Clinton. By then, something deeper was shifting.
After 9/11, I began listening closely to the New Atheists, especially Christopher Hitchens. I had been a lifelong atheist, assuming I simply lacked whatever “gene” made belief possible. Hitchens’ fierce critique of religion—particularly Islam—resonated with me. He supported the Iraq War not because he had become a neoconservative (albeit those who felt betrayed by him attempted to portray him as such), but because he saw radical Islam as a totalitarian political system. That reframed the global struggle for me. It forced me to reconsider simplistic narratives about Western power and victimhood.
Over time, I experienced moments in the classroom—epistemological shocks, really—that made me question assumptions I had long held (see Freedom, Control, and the Lessons of Openness in Teaching: A Personal Reflection). By 2016–2017, I felt divided against myself. It was as if half my brain was trying to defend progressive orthodoxies about race and gender, while the other half recognized deep philosophical contradictions in standpoints rooted in the very postmodernism I had always criticized.
During this period, I encountered the arguments of Jordan Peterson and the broader critique of “cultural Marxism.” Initially, I tried to defend the academic traditions I had been trained in by writing a long critique of the Peterson interpretation. But as I dug more deeply into the intellectual history—especially the Marcusean turn in critical theory—I began to see that the synthesis I had once attempted was not merely unstable; it was conceptually incoherent. It was, in fact, no neo-Marxist at all, but neo-Hegelian.
The turning point came around the 2018 migrant crisis and the intensifying immigration debates during the presidency of Donald Trump, noted earlier. I found myself agreeing with Trump on immigration and acknowledging the strength of the economy at the time. Research by scholars like Roland Fryer on policing further unsettled my assumptions about systemic racism (see The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police-Civilian Encounters; The Far Podcast: The Myth of Systemic Racism in Lethal Police Officer-Civilian Encounters). Once I began publicly reconsidering race, I knew I would have to revisit gender as well (too many essays to note here, but there are several embedded links in this essay, Misogyny Resurgent: Atavistic Expressions of a Neoreligion). And when I did, that framework too began to collapse.
Looking back at Facebook posts I wrote in 2016 and 2017, I read them and wonder, “How could I have believed that?” During the controversy over including men in women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics, a student reminded me of one such post (I hint at it here: The Ubiquity of Fallacious Reasoning on the Progressive Left; see also In His Terminal Liminality, an Algerian Boxer Becomes the Optimal Neoreligious Fetish). Revisiting it was embarrassing. In fact, I did not even recognize it as my own writing. When I mock others for holding views I once held myself, I ridicule my former self.
As the race framework fell, then the gender framework, before them assumptions about immigration and Islam, something older resurfaced. The classical liberalism embedded in my upbringing—combined with Christian ethical formation (I remain an atheist) and my training in critical political economy—reasserted itself. I began to see that liberalism in the Democratic Party had irretrievably faded, leaving behind a monolithic progressivism rooted in utilitarianism, intertwined with corporate globalization and statism (see Epistemic Foundations, Deontological Liberalism, and the Grounding of Rights; Moral Authority Without Foundations: Progressivism, Utilitarianism, and the Eclipse of Argument). Since many of my colleagues, family, and friends remain committed to the Party, my abandonment of those politics was unsettling to them. For me, it was liberating.
I did not so much become something new as recover something older: a classical liberal sensibility informed by Christian morality and sharpened by a serious critique of global corporate power. The seeds had been planted decades earlier. It just took time—and no small amount of intellectual struggle—for them to grow.
Reflecting on this always brings me back to the work of Antonio Gramsci and his idea of cultural hegemony (see Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks). Gramsci argued that ruling classes maintain power not merely by coercion but by shaping what counts as common sense. They construct a social logic that appears natural and inevitable. Under such conditions, dissent does not feel merely wrong; it feels immoral. The double standard I noted at the outset tells us who is in a position to manufacture the new common sense.
That is the terrain of assumptions I inhabited. Ordinarily, people love their country and want what they believe is best for it. Yet within the hegemonic frame, supporting Trump was recoded as evidence of racism or authoritarian longing. The moral script was prewritten. And even someone who prided himself on independent thinking—someone like me—was not immune to that script.
One can only deprogram oneself if there remains some rational core capable of recognizing contradiction. If that core is absent, correction must come from outside. I am grateful that I retained the requisite independence of thought to reconsider without intervention. I attribute this to my early socialization in a Christian ethics rooted in deontological liberalism and my admiration for the Founding Fathers.
But the shame remains. Here is the confession piece. I am ashamed that I shrank from openly stating my political convictions in 2020. And I am ashamed that in 2016 I was, if only partially, captured by a framework I now reject. Those vulnerabilities taught me something essential: none of us is beyond the reach of social pressure, especially when it is dressed up as moral certainty.
I want to connect my experience to the importance of challenging beliefs asserted with scientific certainty. This has general applicability. Following the Hungarian philosopher of science Imre Lakatos, I understand scientific work as often proceeding through research programs. At the center of such a program sits a “hard core” of theoretical commitments that researchers are reluctant to abandon—the negative heuristic tells scientists not to give up this core too quickly.
Around that core sits a “protective belt” of auxiliary hypotheses and adjustments that can be modified when evidence appears to contradict predictions. Sometimes these adjustments are legitimate refinements in response to new evidence; other times, they become rationalizations that protect a theory even as it loses explanatory power. (I expound on Lakotas’ view here: Postmodernism, Nihilism, and Deception—and the Dialectical Antidote.)
My reflections on my experience in Europe in 2018—which was the beginning of the end of presence on woke progressive terrain—fit well with this framework. I was in the midst of trying to reconcile my classical liberal commitments with the progressive orientation dominant in contemporary sociology, while also drafting a critique of what I saw as exaggerated claims about cultural Marxism coming from the populist or alt-right milieu. During my research travels in Scandinavia—particularly while observing social tensions surrounding migration—I encountered facts and experiences that sometimes seemed to align with claims I had initially dismissed. In effect, I found myself adjusting the “protective belt” around my own theoretical and political commitments to preserve my original argument.
At some point, though, I recognized that these adjustments were becoming strained. Instead of merely refining my position, I was rationalizing away inconvenient evidence, and this realization forced a deeper reconsideration of my assumptions.
An essay I was writing at the time—the first after stepping down as chair of my department to turn over the reins of administrative power to a younger colleague—stalled because the intellectual shift was happening in real time; the argument I began with no longer fully reflected what I was coming to think. So I abandoned it. Perhaps I will finally post it with commentary. Seen in retrospect, this moment of tension could serve as a critical reflection—one that documents not just a political or theoretical position, but the internal process of transformation itself. We shall see.
Properly understood, exceptions don’t automatically destroy generalizations; they force us to refine them. Finding a black swan doesn’t show that generalization is useless—it shows that the rule must be reformulated. But when exceptions pile up, the problem may lie not in the data but in the core assumptions. My experience illustrates precisely that moment when refinement gives way to reconsideration—a deeply Lakatosian turning point in intellectual life.
Since then, I have endeavored in my writing to expose that double standard—to show others how easily one can be pulled into the progressive vortex spinning on the terrain of assumptions, a whirlwind they mistake for common sense. My aim is not merely partisan. It’s moral. People should not be deterred from saying what they believe is true or voting as they judge best because they fear being smeared with labels whose meanings are rarely examined.
freedom and reason 