I’m a liberal. Liberals are annoying.

I shouldn’t write this article.

It doesn’t do me any favors with my fellow liberals. And presumably, snarkier versions of this article have been written by conservatives who wish to decry everything wrong with us. I’m not sure I’m helping myself or the discourse.

But… for my own sake and hopefully, for the sake of the movement, I must.

You see, while I consider myself a liberal, I’ve increasingly found myself annoyed by my liberal peers. I wondered if this meant that the adage of becoming more conservative with age was true. Or perhaps I was just updating my beliefs. But when I examined them, I found them to be largely consistent with my priors and mainstream liberalism.

I’ve come to believe that the reason I’m annoyed by liberals is that we’ve become well, annoying. The problem is that the common attitudes and behaviors that now define the left tend to annoy more than just myself, but large parts of the country as well.

Now, you might say that annoyance is a proper political tactic. Protests and political movements are meant to agitate things into change. Some people might say, “If we’re annoying conservatives, we’re doing the right thing”. However, we’re not annoying the powers that be as much as the average American.

Anecdotally, many of my liberal friends have confided to me that they’re tired of associating with things like cancel culture, identity politics, anti-patriotism, and more. It doesn’t help us win elections or affect change. As far as I can tell, most of these themes are only helpful in making each other feel better while making others ignore us.

I want to avoid complaining and name-calling here. Nobody wants to read that. What I want is for someone on the “inside” to hopefully illuminate what outsiders consider the worst parts of our current tactics.

It’s also worth calling out that I don’t think conservatives are free from these sins, and this is not all liberals all of the time. But these are pervasive and prominent enough amongst the left that it’s worth calling out.

And I think calling out our bullshit is important. While liberalism has become accusatory and pessimistic, I hope I can nudge us back toward the kind of proactive and brave politics that were so effective in the past.

So, in descending order of annoyance. Here we go.

Identity Politics

I start here because this is partially where it all started. Like everything on this list, it is well-intentioned. However, we’ve let a well-intentioned idea run amok and it’s turning people against us.

The idea that your identity, your race/gender/sexual orientation is the most important thing about you and imbues certain characteristics, is a belief that both (some) progressives and bigots share.

It is reductionist and generalizing in a way that rightfully annoys most people right of Rachel Maddow. When I was becoming politically conscious, liberals cared predominantly about class. The plight of the working class, power dynamics, exploitation. While class in America can closely align with identity — blacks are typically poorer — it is too dull a knife to accurately divide people for effective policy.

To quote Tiffany Warren, “For example, a poor Southern rural disabled straight white woman may not have much, if anything, in common with a wealthy Northern urban able-bodied gay black woman, but when it comes to gender they are treated as part of the same group.”

Telling a white male coal miner in Kentucky that they’ve never been oppressed because of their race/gender is sure to annoy. As is telling a successful female Korean immigrant that they are oppressed despite their situation.

And look, I think identity is important. I don’t think we can or should be completely “colorblind”, but we’ve taken it too far.

It’s always annoying when people make assumptions about us or put labels on us that we don’t necessarily agree with — but that is exactly what’s happening today.

Cancel Culture

Political power in a democracy is ultimately about one thing — influencing people’s behavior. There are few avenues to enforce people’s behavior, so we seek influence instead. Throughout history, as social animals, there has been one tool more effective than any other at this. Public shaming.

In our tribal past, to be publicly shamed was to at least lose all status, and potentially even be cast out and left to die. To our brains, we avoid public shame like the plague itself.

For the shamers, it was a tool to punish anti-social behavior. If you’re taking from the food stockpiles, you need to be called out so that everyone knows to look out for you, and that you will be shamed out of your selfishness.

This was a tool that was well-wielded during the fight for gay rights during the 2010s. As people fought for more acceptance, it began to shift public opinion. The tide really turned when people called out powerful figures and institutions for not being on board.

Liberals have taken this tool and abused it to the point where it is no longer useful — while annoying everyone else along the way.

A professor who wrote something problematic a decade ago doesn’t need to be cancelled, nor does an athlete who tweeted something offensive as a teenage boy. For those liberals deem disadvantaged, we need to judge them according to their prior circumstances. For everyone else? No mercy.

We have become the boy who cried wolf. And why did the village ignore the boy? Because he became annoying. The moral of that story is that people who exaggerate or lie are eventually ignored when it matters. And it feels like that’s exactly what has happened to liberals. We’ve annoyed our way into irrelevance on discourse on powerful figures.

Doomerism

I feel qualified to write this article because I do spend decent time around conservative friends and family, in addition to my liberal ones. I write this because I (worryingly) started to find myself enjoying time with conservative connections rather than my liberal ones.

I realized the reason for it was because increasingly, my liberal friends were pessimistic and complaining.

“The world is literally burning”, “We live in a capitalistic hellscape”, “There’s no point in having kids”, “We are so fucked”, “America sucks”, etc.

I’m not sure when this trend started, but it is the opposite of endearing. How do you expect anyone to join your cause when you don’t even believe in its power to bring about a better future?

I suspect it has become a type of in-group social signaling. This is how liberals identify and bond with each other, by complaining about how much the world sucks. It shows how much you follow the news, how seriously you take climate change, how much you hate capitalism, etc.

Speaking of the news… this attitude strikes me as reading too much news and not enough history. We have made great progress on the things we claim to care about, but speaking to most liberals, you wouldn’t know it.

Yes, it is frustrating that we don’t have healthcare, better public transportation, or a carbon tax while we do have nearly 1000 billionaires and school shootings. I don’t downplay that.

But look at what we’ve done in the last decade or so!

Gay marriage was enshrined as a right by the Supreme Court, we’ve 200x our solar energy production, CO2 emissions per capita have fallen to WWII levels, we stopped the pandemic with American-made vaccines, child poverty is way down, and we spend more than ever on social programs.

Are things perfect? No. Is there a long way to go? Yes.

Again, there’s a psychological aspect to this. Improvements happen too slowly to notice, and disasters happen too fast to ignore. Yet the catastrophizing and pessimism in the face of consistent progress is simply, you guessed it, annoying.

Victimhood

Similar to doomerism is a sense of victimhood amongst liberals. We’ve taken the catastrophizing of the world and internalized it.

You can see it all over the data. Liberals are consistently more depressed and anxious than their conservative counterparts. Partially because instead of practicing de-catastrophizing as is recommended by mental health experts, we choose to play the victim.

Again, I think there’s something psychological going on. Why do people want to be victims?

A 2020 study by academics at the University of Tel Aviv examined this and landed on the following.

“The study of TIV (tendency toward interpersonal victimhood) is built around four pillars.

• The first pillar is a relentless need for one’s victimhood to be clearly and unequivocally acknowledged by both the offender and the society at large.
• The second is “moral elitism,” the conviction that the victim has the moral high ground, an “immaculate morality,” while “the other” is inherently immoral.
• The third pillar is a lack of empathy, especially an inability to see life from another perspective, with the result that the victim feels entitled to act selfishly in response.
• The fourth pillar is Rumination — a tendency to dwell on the details of an assault on self-esteem.”

In other words, people identify as victims because it a) can cause some people to treat them with deference, b) absolves them of the blame for their circumstances, and c) entitles them to some sort of justice.

I hope by now, you can see how this is annoying to outsiders. First, there’s the self-identifying of victimhood and insistence that others acknowledge it. Then there’s the moral high grounding that liberals are famous for. Lastly, they want to leverage that identity into people fixing a problem for them.

There’s this quote from Chris Rock that I like.

“I’d always end up broken down on the highway. When I stood there trying to flag someone down, nobody stopped. But when I pushed my own car, other drivers would get out and push with me. If you want help, help yourself — people like to see that.”

Too many liberals don’t seem to want to help themselves. They’d rather complain, adopt a victim identity, and hope for someone to bring them justice.

And to be clear, this is for the type of liberals I find myself around. The college-educated, decently well-off, great support network liberal who somehow defines themselves as a victim. There are true victims of our society out there, and they deserve our help. Not the self-identifying ones.

To paraphrase Jill Filipovic, “progressive institutional leaders have specifically taught young progressives that catastrophizing is a good way to get what they want.”

It’s annoying.

Luxury Beliefs & Hypocrisy

Luxury beliefs seem to be a liberal thing.

What are luxury beliefs? A relatively new term, coined by Rob Henderson, can be described as: beliefs that are typically only held by higher classes while inflicting some cost on the lower class. The clearest example I can give is the “defund the police” movement.

Among the people who you will hear say, “defund the police”, poor people and minorities are not likely to be among them. Why? Because they are overwhelmingly the victims of crime, and they still rely on the police for prevention and justice for them. No, “defund the police” is a luxury belief. You can only hold that kind of opinion if you’re wealthy enough to be insulated from most crime.

Another example is family structures. The idea is that all family structures are equal, and thus marriage or a stable household doesn’t really matter. Except, people who say this typically came from stable, traditional households which they benefitted from. Indeed, most people benefit from these kinds of family structures.

Liberals love to claim they care about helping the disadvantaged in our society, but they don’t always support policies that would do so. Meanwhile, they support policies that could be harmful instead.

The hypocrisy doesn’t end there. Don’t get me wrong, hypocrisy belongs to both sides of the aisle, but it is annoying nonetheless.

Liberals support unions. Police unions? Oh, not so much.

Liberals love to claim they “believe in science” when it comes to vaccines and climate change but come ready to debate science when it comes to things like gender, crime, etc.

Likewise, liberals are proud of their opposition to authority while decrying conservative support of authority. Unless that authority is a scientific or governmental authority that supports their views.

Hypocrisy, as I’m sure you’re aware, is annoying.

Slacktivism / Political Hobbyism

A special kind of hypocrisy is the slacktivism that many liberals partake in.

Have you ever heard that saying that goes, “If you don’t vote you don’t get to complain”? If you’re not participating in the solution, you don’t get to complain about the problem. Not that that hasn’t stopped liberals from complaining.

The number of my friends who complain about the lack of response to climate change who happily hop in their cars to get fast food. Or complain about how the waste of billionaires could be used to help people, only to go on lavish vacations instead of donating to direct-giving charities.

There’s a mass delusion amongst people who are interested in politics that when they read an article, retweet research, or discuss goings-on that they’re being politically active.

The harsh truth is that the most politically impactful thing most of us do is vote every couple of years (if that). And it’s debatable how impactful that is.

What most of us are doing is engaging in political hobbyism. We engage with politics like we engage with sports, spectating from afar but not partaking in the game itself. But hobbyism can often feel like activism, which makes us feel like we’re doing something, which makes us feel like we’re free to complain.

Yet this empty attitude of “I care and I’m doing something” has led to another annoyance — moral high grounding.

Many of the liberals in my life are smug about how their beliefs are so much more “right” than conservatives. They’re egalitarian, and thus more moral. They believe in science, so they’re more intelligent. They nonreligious, so they’re more rational.

Maybe the most pertinent example is the infamous “virtue signalling” that happens on social media. I’m sorry to inform you that making your Facebook profile picture yellow and blue in support of Ukraine does not save lives but does make you look like you care.

Beliefs and attitudes only count for so much. If you’re not putting them into action, like registering voters or campaigning for local politicians, you’re not actually better than anyone.

To everyone else, the “holier than thou” and “better person than you” attitude is incredibly annoying. And completely undeserved.

Bring back John Brown

John Brown is one of my favorite Americans of all time. You’ll remember reading about him in grade school as the leader of the raid at Harpers Ferry — attempting to start a nation-wide slave rebellion.

Now, depending on who you ask, he’s either a terrorist or a hero. For my purposes, I want to use him as an example of a liberal (in the classical sense of the term) who wasn’t guilty of any of the above.

John Brown did not engage in any kind of identity politics, in fact, he used his religious belief that all men were created equal in the image of god as his basis for anti-slavery. He “canceled” people, but by calling out (supposed Christian) leaders who were either pro or neutral on slavery, at the risk of alienating himself.

He had righteous anger but displayed no doomerism or victimhood in his attitude. He took a proactive and no-excuses approach to the cause he believed he was put on earth for.

He was the opposite of a slacktivist. He made his life incredibly more difficult and dangerous by remaining committed to his cause. He thought that America had failed on it’s constitutional promise so profoundly that he tried to create a new government. His own sons were killed in some of the battles that he led. No one could call him a hypocrite.

Many historians believe that his actions led to a change in the Republican party that eventually ended in the election of Abraham Lincoln, whose anti-slavery stance led to the Civil War. Which obviously resulted in the end of slavery in America. Not a bad outcome for ol’ John.

Now, I’m not calling for liberals to raid armories (lol could you imagine). But I am calling for a return of his conviction and hands-on approach.

What happened to us? Here’s my take.

The biggest political victory for liberals in the last 20 years has been gay rights. The tactics for that victory look very much like the above.

Identity was a key factor. People who identified as homosexual were being unfairly discriminated against across society. Cancel culture was effective — people who were homophobic started to get called out across society. From boardrooms to bedrooms.

There was slactivism, sure, but from the everyday person telling their friends to stop using “gay” in a negative context to the increase in pride parade participation, the groundswell of support made a big difference.

Liberals took that playbook, amplified it, and started applying it to everything. Suitable or not.

Of course, there have been demographic, cultural, and technological shifts. Young, college-educated Americans are overwhelmingly liberal. Pop culture became increasingly liberal. Social media entered the picture and warped everyone’s brains.

The result is that liberals have convinced themselves that these attitudes are a popular and effective way to get the policy and cultural changes they want.

The reality is that for the people outside of their echo chambers, they have instead turned what should be popular policy into something to be easily sneered at by those to the right of them. We’ve infected good ideas with an annoying attitude, and they are quickly rejected because of it.

My hope is that we can have more self-awareness and return to the more pragmatic, positive-sum attitude that worked before and can work again.