A Cycle Considered
Activists at Boston’s 2026 May Day Rally. Photo by a Mass 50501 volunteer.
Let me tell you a story. It may sound like a few stories, but I fear it’s really the same story, just told a few times over.
I grew up in a conservative household. I enrolled as a Republican as soon as I turned 18, and voted for George W. Bush that year. Then 9/11 happened, and the way our country’s leadership responded set off red flags in my mind. I had long been slow to trust authority figures, and I found myself drifting further and further apart ideologically from my family, church, and party. I watched as the GOP sold itself out, eagerly, to a rightward drift; a movement adding more and more authoritarianism, I would dare even say fascism, into the party. It took until I had some distance, when I was out of the party and looking over it with a wider lens, to learn that the process I’d seen happening up close had begun years before I had my voter registration, maybe even before I was born.
It is important to understand that when I joined the Libertarian Party, it wasn’t a party with a united vision. The libertarian ideology—not the party, but the philosophy—is essentially that a given government should have the minimum amount of power needed to accomplish its essential purpose. But it doesn’t provide any concrete definition on the essential purpose of any given government, or the minimum amount of power necessary to accomplish that; individual libertarians are left to debate that among themselves. And we did so, with no standard accepted answers across the board.
I operated within the party on an understanding that the United States federal government had the essential purpose to preserve liberty—that is, freedom bound by the responsibility to maintain the freedoms of others. This understanding of liberty means that my freedoms end where they infringe upon yours; my freedom of religion hits its limit where I try to dictate how you practice your religion, my freedom of speech ends where I try to tell you what you can say. My freedom to accumulate wealth ends where I must make others poor in order to do so. That sort of thing. The minimum power needed to do so, then, is that which punishes those who would wield their own personal power to hold others down. A libertarian with my view on these questions would, as I do, endorse things like a universal basic income paid for out of a 100% marginal tax rate (that is, a maximum income limit—a very high one, could be in the millions, why not—above which taxes would functionally turn higher incomes into investments in the community rather than increases in one’s own bank account), as it makes everyone that little bit more free.
Objectivism is a different philosophy, popularized by Ayn Rand. It offers a different set of answers to those questions: that all governments exist fundamentally to protect enterprise, and that the minimum power to achieve this is to let the free market reign supreme and use the power of government as the cudgel of the rich and those deemed visionary. During my time in the Libertarian Party, the Objectivists accumulated enough power that now, many think that ideology is what it means to be a libertarian.
What drove both of my prior experiences is the fact that conservative thought is, at its core, self-aggrandizing. It will always view itself in absolutist terms, and sacrifice anything it thinks it must to maintain what it has deemed acceptable. This is the conservation at the heart of conservatism: that there is something already in place that must be protected, and that we stand as the guardians of it. As a Christian teacher, I am reminded that the Bible tells leaders to “guard the good deposit” and calls the church itself “a pillar and buttress of the truth,” serving this sense of the church as guardians of truth in a world chasing after lies and false promises (2 Timothy 1:14 and 1 Timothy 3:15, ESV). More secular conservative images often center around protecting capitalism as an American institution, or the Constitution as an absolute and unalterable foundation for our national identity, or that the processes of our nation are sacred and to disrupt them is an affront to some unnamed higher power.
The point is that these things are concrete and absolute and old, and we must guard them against anything new or alien seeking to alter them in any way, even if that means destroying the perceived interloper. The more stuff one holds as absolute in this way, and the more rigid one feels about them, the more conservative one’s mindset is. And for those of us raised in an environment steeped in this mindset, where every little thing is a battleground, where every part of life is a place where we have the Godless masses trying to invade and cut down all that is good and holy in this world, it is easy to stop thinking in terms of whether or not a fight is worth having. It is easy to become someone who simply sorts people into Allies and Enemies.
This is not, on its own, necessarily always a bad thing. I even hold to at least one of the above examples (and others I have not listed)! There are people in Mass 50501 at least, and I assume nationally, who come out of conservative backgrounds specifically because we see the cause of saving America from fascism as worth making sacrifices and taking risks to pursue, and our backgrounds made us especially willing to take that step. Having mostly been in conservative circles all my life, I can say the fear has always been that there are forces trying to destroy the United States and we must protect it from them; we were just always told that threat was coming from the left, and those of us now in 50501 have reason to question that claim. Liberal thought, obviously, is willing to make sacrifices when necessary, but there is an eagerness for it in the conservative mind, a hunger; those of us raised awash in a conservative environment learn to wait for the opportunity to prove ourselves true protectors of the Good and Just by destroying something wretched.
It is not that the rich are conservative. It’s that the mindset that allows you to crush enough people to accumulate such vast resources, the ideology that allows you to use every resource at your disposal to bend the rules in your favor, the personality that puts yourself outside accountability because you were just doing what you deserved and whatever happened to the people in your way was fitting for them—that plant is easier to grow from conservative soil. And as people in these political parties seek favor from the rich, as they seek money and resources and opportunities for greater influence, the price they pay is a pull further and further to the right. And they sacrifice more and more people in the process, narrowing their focus more and more on following their wealthy benefactors and their money ever further to the right, throwing more and more people under the bus in pursuit of personal gain.
Right now, the Democratic Party is following the same playbook. I’m watching them do the same thing I watched the Republicans do twenty years ago and the Libertarians do right after them. Multiple Democratic elected officials praised Lindsay Graham in the wake of his death, though he actively made America worse and caused pain and suffering around the world. They refuse to stand up for transgender people and are half-hearted, at best, when they bother to speak out about atrocities being carried out against immigrants or people of color who are being branded as immigrants without justification. They ignore the cries of the people against the horrors happening in Gaza and Ukraine and other genocides around the world. It’s unclear if the party leaders in Congress are willfully sacrificing the people of the United States for their own gain, or if they are simply unaware of the political trend they are a part of, the footsteps they are following here in the US and overseas with the UK’s Labour Party now actively shutting transgender people out of public life.
Either way, I am encouraged by the fact that there is resistance strong enough to have caught the attention of the establishment Democrats. With the rise of democratic socialist candidates knocking incumbents out of primary elections, the party is taking notice. This is the kind of push we need! The rightward drift only works because it is to the benefit of the party to sell out to the greedy, the selfish, those who benefit their allies by crushing everything they can. But if we the people make it clear that this tactic will fail our elected officials, if we make it clear that our support is for those who will put the people first, who will work to help lift others up; if we put pressure on them to shift left, and use our networks to cut off support for those who refuse that shift, and primary every Congressperson who doesn’t get the memo, we can force change.
We cannot allow the Democratic Party to fall to the rich the same way other parties have fallen before them. Hold their feet to the fire. Continue showing up at offices and making demands. Continue calling. And for every politician who won’t be swayed by us, oust them with a progressive candidate. Fill the halls of Congress with elected officials who will put people, and not their own wallets, first.
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