What Being A Liberal Used To Mean

Reflections from a liberal who remembers

Lefty friends keep asking me if — or telling me that — I’m a conservative now. But I’m just a liberal who remembers what they’ve forgotten. I remember what it meant to be a liberal back when I really started to identify as one, back around 2000, during Bush v. Gore, 9/11, the PATRIOT Act, the Iraq War.

Maybe being a liberal meant something different before all that, and maybe it means something entirely different now. Maybe it’s all just “tribal” signifiers, all just flags and symbols. But if it is, the forgetting must help, and that just isn’t what I’m good at.

I remember when conservatives were the science deniers. There was evolution and then there was climate change. In 2000, during the presidential debates, George W. Bush called the recommendations of Al Gore’s economists “fuzzy math.”

Through most of college I retained this image of conservatives, and of liberals as their rationally-minded, empirically-driven opposites. So I laughed and laughed when Stephen Colbert coined the word “truthiness” to capture the way conservatives “felt out” what was true and false.

These days, though, most of the people I see attacking science, and even the very notion of truth, are on the left. And “facts, not feelings” is a…