People say, "Well, you know, you left the Democratic Party." You know, the party left me. >> You know, people within the DNC say, "I left the Democratic Party, but I feel like the Democratic Party left me." Let's get this straight. It's not me who's changed. It's the left. Hey there, friends, fans, and foes of Dad Saves America. John Pola here and I thought I would take this Friday to talk about well the differences between the left and right and specifically how they're changing and how we should think about it because frankly it's really unsettling times and uh and I think there's a lot of people who see themselves in the center increasingly unsure of where they sit. Now, some of you may have seen this meme uh well four years ago, 2021, showing how essentially the left has continually gone farther left, leaving people that thought of themselves as being on the left in 2008 now seen as on the right. This was put out there in the world by Colin Wright. he recently updated it uh in the aftermath of the responses to Charlie Kirk and I don't think this is an unfair update. So you see now in 2025 um well it's gotten a little more disturbing and just for even more context from Colin I saw a tweet from his girlfriend that captured a sentiment that I I have seen a lot out there. I have seen online and in person in lots of conversations I've had from people who see themselves as having been on the left and frankly have Californians who have moved here to Austin partly because they see themselves as no longer fitting into a culture that they grew up in. My boyfriend Colin Wright and I both grew up in California as liberals who voted Democrat. Colin began speaking out about trans issues in 2018. I followed up when we met in 2021. Since then, we've gained many friends and colleagues in this space. Okay. So far, interesting. For saying that biological sex is real, that gender affirming care, in proper scare quotes, isn't evidence-based, which it is not, and for criticizing things like DEI and other excesses of the left. We and many of our friends have been called anti-LGBT, anti-trans, transphobe, bigot, racist, Nazi, neo-Nazi, fascist, farright, hardright, alt-right, extremist, authoritarian, totalitarian, white supremacist, white nationalist, abbleist, xenophobe, misogynist, colonialist, and members of a hate group. We and our friends have had our motives maligned, our words taken out of context, hit pieces written, and our names included in reports about hate groups and added to watch lists. And I think the most important thing about this is actually this paragraph towards the end. This doesn't just come from trolls. It comes from mainstream journalists, Democratic politicians, prominent activists, and organizations like the Southern Poverty Law Center, GLAD, and the ACLU. And because of these lies, countless other ordinary people wish us harm. And this is something I have observed. It's something that a lot of us have observed, that there is an asymmetry going on when it comes to radical politics on both sides. To the extent there are two sides. And I think I want to get into that deeper. This has pushed a lot of people who used to see themselves as being liberal into the arms of the Republican party and the broader movement of conservatives and right of center people of which I would consider myself a member. There's another meme that kind of like highlights this I think in a way that's useful that in 2024 the Democrats won the election. Elon Tulsi, Donald Trump, and RFK, all former Democrats. They are not alone. This is a common occurrence in recent political times. >> People say, "Well, you know, you left the Democratic Party." You know, the party left me. >> You know, people within the DNC say, "I left the Democratic Party, but I feel like the Democratic Party left me." >> This is not the party of John F. Kennedy. It's not the party of Robert Kennedy. >> Let's get this straight. It's not me who's changed. It's the left who is now made up of a small contingent who've gone mental and a large contingent who refused to call them out for it. >> And this isn't all that new actually. This uh former Democrats who've shifted. It goes all the way back to the Gipper. I was a Democrat most of my life. I became a Republican only not too many years ago. And um I had the pleasure of telling some of those people that are saying the Republican party ought to broaden its base the other day that uh when I switched parties, I didn't do it because the two parties were alike. I did it because they were different. There are big differences in our culture. Those differences do seem to be widening. But the other thing that is shifting is what political types call the Overton window. what is considered acceptable. If you see it as acceptable to kill political opponents, that is a very big shift in the Overton window. Well, what is the Overton window? The Overton window is actually named after this guy, Joseph Overton, who was a policy wonk at the um the Michigan-based free market think tank, the Meno Center, which I've actually done a lot of work with. Um they're a great organization. they are dealing with a lot up there in Michigan past couple years. But um he basically noted that if you wanted to see policy change, if you wanted to see the government shift and the public shift, you had to see your things that you want move within the window of what is considered acceptable, sensible, popular, um broadly accepted. This is the Overton window. things that are outside of it are unthinkable or radical um in either direction. A kind of sidecar idea here is the notion of the median voter and that you know the person in the middle who's not sure which way to go, they end up having outsized power in our politics because however they swing so goes the outcomes of our elections and our public policies. And when it comes to the broader landscape, things have shifted a lot. It's it's hard to think about how much they shifted without looking back. And looking back as a Gen Xer to what I like to call the uh the peak of Western civilization, the 1990s, this was the Democratic president delivering one of many messages that sounded quite a bit like this and quite a bit like a Republican today. Growing up in the South, I learned values. Hard work, family, faith, responsibility, concern for others. It's time to restore the dignity of work in America. That's why I've offered a plan to get this economy moving again and to create good jobs. And we must break the cycle of welfare dependency. We need to provide more education and training and child care and medical services. But then we must insist that when people can work, they must work. I want to end welfare as we know it and restore dignity and self-esteem to every American. >> Now, that wouldn't have sounded crazy in the prior times. In fact, that doesn't sound a whole lot different than Lynden Baines Johnson in the speeches he gave in the aftermath of the Great Society. But today, that sounds like a radical right-wing fascist by our current standards, by our standards of this meme. Let's just go back to the beginning here because think about the things he's saying and how they how they land today in our politics. >> Growing up in the South, I learned values. Hey, I learned values. Now, it is Bill Clinton. So, his values in practice and on a personal level, not great. But he is projecting what he thinks the the majority of the voters um wanted to hear. uh even if he didn't live these things. >> Hard work, family, faith, responsibility. >> Hard work, family, faith, personal responsibility. That was just table stakes. That was table stakes in our politics. This is part of why um for those of us who are a little bit older, and I'm not that old. I'm not yet 50. But for those of us who are on the older side, uh our politics today feel kind of crazy because as we were coming of age, this was considered the left. And there was a shared set of values that were very broadly shared about what is good, what is true, what is beautiful, family, faith, personal responsibility, loving your country, being patriotic. This was stuff that only the fringes rejected and that's no longer true and that is something that I think we're having to grapple with now. Things have gotten very complicated though and I think it's worth going back and looking at where this idea of left and right came from in the first place because the history is really useful and and really telling and it's surprising the ways that it it it sort of manifests then and now. What is left and right? Where did this come from? Why do these directions align the way they do? How did this get popular? Well, it all goes back to the French Revolution. And basically, those sitting on the right of the general assembly were in favor of essentially the status quo, of tradition, of the existing hierarchies, including the role of the clergy, uh, the monarchy. They didn't want radical change. They were traditionalists. They were in power as well in a sense. Seated to the left, the lesser position, you know, seated to the right hand is considered the more honored position were those that wanted radical change, the ones that wanted to see um a more ealitarian society emerge. And I think um this cartoon from the time speaks to that. These are the three estates. The guy on the bottom is the common person and resting at top are the aristocrats and the clerics who are riding the common man to their benefit and his detriment. And so out of that comes the French Revolution. The thing that's so interesting about the French Revolution is that its rallying cry sounds quite American and in fact is inspired in part by the American Revolution because you got to remember the French were actually coming to our aid in our fight against the British and that was liberty, equality, and fraternity. This was the rallying cry of the French Revolution. Liberty, equality, and fraternity. That sounds a lot like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It's not the same. Fraternity is more like solidarity. And that sort of already points us towards an interesting shift. But when you think about what was happening then and how our founding fathers were reacting to it, I think it tells us a lot about sort of the underlying DNA of the left versus the right. So the left wanted radical change and they got it. But before we get to how they got it and how they got it good and hard, how did our founding fathers think about this? Well, on one side were people who were quite concerned. You could call these the early right-wingers, even though they were all radical revolutionaries, having led the revolution against Britain. Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, among others, but these were the most prominent were deeply worried about the French Revolution. They saw it as too egalitarian, too utopian, too violent and too dangerous that it would not end well. And in fact, when you think about the differences between the French Revolution, which was a domestic overthrow of the government itself and an attempt to remake the society, and the American Revolution, which was broadly about throwing off the shackles of a distant power to preserve the existing society and to allow it to continue to flourish. Um, already these aren't the same kind of thing. But on let's say the left at the time were other founding fathers. Founding fathers who I think well frankly I love all these guys. But um in some ways the folks on the left are the ones I identify with even more personally. Namely James Madison the father of the constitution one of the primary authors Thomas Payne the pamphleteer and good old Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson was real big on the French Revolution. He was really excited about this. He thought this was an exciting um transformation of the society of the planet of the powers of the world coming to fruition. Well, how did it turn out? who in this early battle in America of the forces of tradition and structure and hierarchy and preserving those things that work in a kind of conservative sense versus the radical egalitarian revolutionaries who in the case of Jefferson really believed in well frankly a kind of egalitarian agrarian economics and and a very decentralized kind of almost anarctic society as an ideal. This one's pretty easy because the revolution sucked and failed real bad. I mean, you know, the differences between the American Revolution, which gives rise to our country, the longest standing constitutional republic in human history, and the French Revolution are great. So, first of all, this man Robs Pierre, um, well, he, uh, a jackabin, part of the radical left wing of the revolutionaries who ultimately take power, participates in what's known as the reign of terror in which, by some estimates over 20,000 people are executed. So, this is the storming of the Bastile. [Applause] Cheering for your political opponent's execution is not new for the left. That's a lowb blow, but I'm sorry, it's the facts. This is what came of the French Revolution. I want to just sort of run through a quick playbyplay because uh frankly it was fun to revisit this stuff as an adult having not really studied it since high school. So think about this for a minute. This is in only 15 years. Basically from 1789 to92 the revolution begins and the monarchy in France falls. From 1792 to 1794, you have the birth of the first French Republic and the reign of terror in which the Jacabins proceed to murder as many people as they can possibly get their hands on, particularly people in the cultural elite. But the definition of cultural elite here has to get pretty loose to kill up up to 20,000 people in the public square. And of course, even Rob Pierre himself ends up being overthrown and executed in 1794. And not too long after, in 1799, comes the return of Napoleon from his military adventures and his installation as the new emperor. And so that is about as resounding a defeat for the early left in America as far as the betting odds for whether the French Revolution would succeed or fail. And that gives you a sense of the deep roots and the deep problems with radical leftism. Our founding fathers, even the ones that favored the revolution, had certain assumptions about human nature and about the rights of man. They baked them into our founding documents. And while they were in a very real sense radical and revolutionary at the time, at a time of monarchies and empires, they still were actually quite traditional. In fact, they were traditions that go all the way back to the 1600s with the Levelers and carried through into John Lockach and um Montescu and these philosophers mostly Christian that understood that we have rights that those rights don't come from government and that we are also a flawed and fallen creature that you can't have a government of angels. You'll only see that in heaven. And so our founding fathers sought to constrain government and sought to make it something that tried to pit the worst angels of our nature against each other in this separation of powers. So even Thomas Jefferson and especially James Madison who was in favor of the French Revolution but was really the architect of our constitutional order didn't have a French leftist view of the human being. What does this have to do with today? Well, for one thing, that left-wing revolutionary radicalism is expressing itself today in ways that I find very disturbing and I think most Americans and including Colin Wright and his girlfriend do. And that is, as I talked about last week, this extreme difference in comfort with political violence. Now, this Yuggov poll, which again, it'll be interesting to see how these polls play out over time, but the fact that very liberal people are five times more likely to say they think that yes, violence can sometimes be justified in politics. Five times more likely than very conservative people. This points to something deep and profound and I think historically accurate that there is a radicalism that sees violence as being part of the toolkit and that is very difficult to think about today because that points to this meme having truth and and we don't want this. This is bad. This is the path to hell. We want to knock that bottom one off the ladder. We really want to get back to a place where frankly the difference in my opinion the difference between left and right is a little closer to to the 1990s is a little closer to well we all agree the country is good. I'm not sure we can get there but understanding how we got here is important for understanding where we go. Now you might be thinking the jackabins. What's that got to do with today? That's got nothing to do with today. Well, it does because or at least there's an indication that it does because in 2010, a magazine by the name of Jackabin was re was launched in the aftermath of the financial crisis. This is Jacabin magazine, a very far-left socialist magazine and website. And it's interesting that it took this name. It is a recognition of this philosophical lineage. And it also points to the fact that radicalism hasn't been able to be successfully contained by the more moderate parts of our political left. And this is not a new observation. Jordan Peterson about a decade ago was pointing this out. We know that things can go far too far on the right and we know that things can go too far on the left, but we don't know what the markers are for going too far on the left. And I would say that it's ethically incumbent on those who are liberal or left-leaning to identify the markers of pathological um extremism on the left and to distinguish themselves from the people who hold those pathological viewpoints. And I don't see that that's being done. But it is definitely the case that you can go too far on the left. And it's definitely the case that we don't know where to draw the line. And that's a big problem. Why is this? Why has this happened? Why is it that the history going all the way back to the French Revolution of radicalism of complete overthrow of our social order being part of the left hasn't been marginalized in the way that the most extreme versions of traditionalism has or at least has in general. I think some of the reasons for that are about the way basically our history since World War II has been taught to us and talked about. And the people cheering Charlie Kirk, the people in the media calling everyone a Nazi, well, you can kind of understand it cuz it's the only bad guy they've ever been taught about in their entire life. World War II gave us the most natural villain. Um, the storytelling of history could ever have, Adolf Hitler and his horrendous mass murder of Jews and others, but especially Jews. His attempt to take over all of Europe, his designs on the the planet as a whole. Fair enough. Bad guy. His economics isn't exactly on the right. If the right is defined as holding on to western traditions, which would be relatively lazare economics, um his economics was basically on the left. He was essentially a socialist. So that's already kind of weird. And it's also a thing that most people don't seem to know. Our kids never get taught. So yeah, fascism bad. Fascism not really explained. Fascism not understood. Fascism actually simply means bad for a lot of people today. for people who should know better, for people who are in positions that should have a certain amount of historical literacy, like being in the news media. The other bad is that we all get taught is McCarthyism. In fact, there's been movies about it. Um, you know, it's the most celebrated thing, especially, it makes sense, of course, why the media would celebrate movies about McCarthyism because it feels like an attack on them and was an attack on Hollywood. Good evening. >> Any man who protects communists is not fit to wear that uniform. You can't convict people by rumor and hearsay and in your are my children going to be asked who denounce me. Are they going to be judged on what their father was labor? I see a chain reaction that has no end. >> Our next show is going to be about Senator McCarthy. We're going to go right at him. So, McCarthyism was the other great Satan of our culture. Our kids all get taught about the dangers of McCarthyism. It is a term in our vernacular of the country that something is McCarthyite. This is new McCarthyism. This is neoccarthyism. We all hear about McCarthyism. And the problem, of course, is that while Joe McCarthy wasn't exactly in keeping with the First Amendment, number one, he was actually mostly right. that most of the people he targeted were actual communists and were in league with the Soviet Union which was our mortal enemy at the time and that the other Joe Joseph Stalin was an actual global terror murderer the likes of which frankly kind of put Hitler to shame and our kids don't get taught that. So they don't get taught the radical utopian murder factory of the 20th century. They they do a little bit get taught about the Jacaban murder and descent back into totalitarianism that was the French Revolution. But the Bolevik revolution was essentially a replay. Bolsheviks were simply like the jackabins of their time. radicals looking to overthrow the society, believing that their society was fundamentally rotten and installing utopian dictators who quickly just turned into the monsters that you would expect when you have total power. And our kids aren't taught this lesson. And so we have generations that seem to think that the only thing that's bad in the world is Hitler and McCarthy and that everyone bad is a Nazi or far right and there's no such thing as similar and more dastardly extremism on the utopian hope and change left. Vladimir Lenon and Joseph Stalin were in fact the hope and change of their generation and the change wasn't very good. So where does that leave us today? How should we think about the left versus the right today? If the left is about change and about overturning the existing order and the right is fundamentally about traditions and about trying to preserve them, about trying to uphold that which is seen as good. Is there a role for the left today? Well, it's funny because in my conversation this week with Peter Begoian, I raised this question with him because I'm not sure there is or at least not in the current left as it exists. And I think this is why people like Peter and countless others including including Tulsi Gabbard and RFK Jr. and Elon Musk. People who used to see themselves as being on the left or center left now don't see them themselves that way is because the left fundamentally has won. They've won so hard they've got nothing left. They're like an immune system that has conquered all of the disease and now has turned on the body itself. It is a kind of autoimmune disease on our politics. There was this very large survey of Americans done back in 2021 by Pew Research that tried to map out the views of our politics and try to understand what we are right now, what we look like. And I know this is now probably at least a little bit out of date, but what it found was essentially nine fairly distinct and different clusters of belief along the left to right spectrum. And a couple things stood out to me and I we'll put a link to this uh research in the show notes down below and at dadsavesamerica.com. But one was that on the left side of the fence basically of Democrats from far left through to moderate through to dis disaffected there was a lot more shared belief in the need for change. And the question was really just how fast and and to what degree. But it was almost uniformly in favor of bigger government, more intervention, the need for even more programs to try to tilt the scales even more towards people they see as fundamentally disadvantaged. Um, and a belief that we are still living fundamentally in an unfair society. I think that is broadly what the view of the left today is. And on the right was something a little more peculiar and a little less homogeneous. And that was that among the biggest groups was something that identified as the populist right. That that actually looks a little like the left on economics and sees the current economic order as being kind of corrupt and therefore in need of something. In some cases, it may sound a little too much like Elizabeth Warren for my liking, wanting to basically increase government regulation and and attacks on business. But the underlying concern points to where a new left and right could go, and that is that there are a lot of things about our society that are truly fundamentally unfair. that the way our society is operating, it has inequalities in it that are not a function of inherent systemic racism or any of the stuff the current left talks about. They are products of big government itself. That is, I think, the new path forward for anyone that wants to see change happen. And um for those of us that think the current left has become too radical and too fundamentally unproductive, much like our kids have not been taught and we have not been taught about the horrors of communism, about the real nature of our history and we've gotten this very slanted view. We also haven't been taught very much about the way our current government is structured. That we fundamentally do have in a sense a kind of corporatist big government economy. That there are privileges granted to politically connected companies and individuals. That we aren't all being treated equally under the law. The things that united our founders with aspects of the French Revolution were exactly those things. The idea that all men are created equal and that government should protect those god-given rights and should not show any favor or offer any privileges to anyone because of our inherent equality. That is I think the healthy part of the left. That is an impulse that is good. It is born out of the enlightenment. It is born out of the Christian nature of the west. And it is good. Where the left went wrong in history, much like in the French Revolution, is to adopt this toxic brew of utopianism and social planning, which ultimately leads us to bad guys with mustaches like Hitler and Stalin. That is the problem. You can't go from protection of the individual to gigantic government to strong man leadership. that those two things are in congress with each other and that's one of the fundamental things about the modern left that is just broken. It's also the current status quo. We have a society that is shot through with top-down control and the people that currently sit on the left have been in favor of that top- down control which means they aren't really on the left. That means they're actually on the right. And one of the things that's happened in our recent years is that the nature of who is in the parties has shifted to reflect that. So the Democratic Party today is a party of wealthy, college educated, largely white elites. That is what the Democratic Party is. That doesn't sound like the left of the French Revolution. That sounds more like the right. That sounds more like the aristocrats and the current Republican party frankly looks more like the left of the French Revolution. the MAGA movement, the workingclass guys. Look, I mean, when you think about this, when you look at this picture of the three estates in France, the guy on the bottom is a working stiff that voted for Donald Trump. And to top him is the new clerics, which are the media and academic elite and the corporate aristocrats that live in blue states and vote reliably for the Democrats. That's what is so weird about our politics today and why it's so hard to think about left and right in ways that are remotely historically coherent for me. I don't get it. I don't get how to to navigate this. Um I want very substantial change to our society. Does that make me on the right or on the left? If you want very substantial change to our society, are you on the right or on the left? I think these are questions that are increasingly hard to answer. And so, how do we anchor ourselves here? How do we know what good is? How do we know what true is? For a lot of us, it's faith. In fact, I think that's probably the best impulse we've got. But I think whether it is a faith in God or religion or some other value system, it is fundamentally a question of values of what you value. That is the lens through which I think we all ultimately see the world and understand these things. And this brings me to something that's a little less about politics and history and a little more about some of the political adjacent shifts that we've seen recently. There was a poll that NBC put out that showed this matrix. And this matrix to me says a lot about how divided we are as a country and how strange our psychology and culture of our politics has become. So from left to right we have women who voted for Harris, men who voted for Harris, women who voted for Trump, and then men who voted for Trump. And highlighted here are having children and being married. And there's a bunch of other values here on this list of 13 priorities. But it is really striking that the number one ranked priority for men who voted for Trump was having children and it was second to last for women who voted for Harris. That is really really striking. that really points to deep fundamental values differences that are aligning along a leftright spectrum but point to profound disagreement in our society. It's interesting that even among those who voted for Trump, women were far less interested in having children being their top priority than men. It's right in the middle of the pack for the women. What do we do about this? How should we think about this kind of personal values and priorities? Well, one way to look at this and I think this is a useful way is those who want to have children are fundamentally invested in the future in their minds and then when you have your kids in reality. Being invested in the future makes you a lot less interested in radicalism, in the kinds of radical overthrow of the existing order that gave rise to Napoleon and Stalin and Pulp Pot and all the rest of the horrible monsters that have come out of every left-wing revolution. You don't want that for your kids. You don't want your kids going off to war and dying for something stupid. And so that future orientation, that sense of having skin in the game, not just of your own life, but of the society, of the community, that is a very basic motivational force. And I don't know how to think about what it means that this has become partisan. This didn't used to be this way, but it is. It is what it is now. And I think it points to the fact that the revolution of the left has become pathological. As Jordan Peterson said, there has not been a stop, a break against radical pathology. And so the attack on institutions has been an attack on all of them, including the family and children and the future itself. And I don't want us to be a single party state. I don't want my team to win forever. Absolute power corrupts absolutely as Lord Actton said. And so I think a healthy society is always living in tension between on one hand the status quo trying to preserve traditions that work and radical change and trying to create a new world and tear down the things that don't work. That is healthy. That is good. We need that and I fear we don't have it. I'm not sure how we get it back, but this is not a bad place to start. The center, the bounds of the Overton window that I hope we can return to or shift to is one in which most of us, the super majority are on board with having a future and having a future together if we're going to be one country. And that means rejecting those who reject the future and each other, who embrace political violence, who want to see the country as it is in its most basic form destroyed. And there are those on both sides that want that. But the left, for all the reasons I talked about today, have a lot more work to do on this front. And if you want those of us on the reasonable right, whether I'm reasonable or not, I'll leave up to you, to take you seriously or to think you have anything to offer, you have to clean up your house. You have to do it. And we'll be here for it when it comes. But until then, we can't take you all that seriously. But let me know if you take any of this seriously. If this has been helpful, if this trip down history's winding path of left versus right has helped you frame what's going on. Let me know in the comments. Head over to dadsavesamea.com where we'll put links to a bunch of the reading and work I've done today to try to put this together. And of course, have a great weekend. [Music] [Applause]
Comments
Be the first to comment on this video.