Why and How I'm Left

An Egalitarian Liberal tells you what's what about (his own) leftwing politics

The words “left” and “right” get thrown around constantly in political discourse, often without much thought to what they actually mean or where they came from. Everyone seems to feel instinctively, that they’re on one side or the other, or perhaps somewhere in the muddled middle. But few can articulate why these terms exist, what they’ve historically represented, or how their meanings have evolved over centuries. I certainly couldn’t for most of my life.

I was just a California progressive who knew I was on the left because, well, that’s where the “good” and “cool” people were. The right was somewhere over on the other side, vaguely mean and oppositional, standing athwart history yelling “stop” or whatever, like some old dude said before I was even born. I barely knew and didn’t really much care.

It wasn’t until my late twenties and early thirties that I began to actually interrogate what these labels meant, both socioculturally in general and for me in particular. What I discovered was that my political orientation—which had felt conflicted and adrift for years—was actually far more coherent than I’d realized. I am indeed, just definitionally, on the political left, the liberal left. Not because I reflexively adopt every progressive cause or bit of economic populism, but because my core commitment to egalitarianism places me squarely within the left’s historical tradition of challenging hierarchy and expanding, plus defending, equal treatment under law.

This article is about that journey. Showing where left and right came from, how they evolved, and why understanding these terms properly reveals that being left-wing isn’t just about economic socialism or cultural progressivism, and being right-wing isn’t just about capitalism (whether we’re using the real definition or the “economics but bad stuff” caricature that naive socialists and communists throw around). The prospective leftie must assess whether their position on the political spectrum is to be pegged to all of their views en toto: one’s relationship to hierarchy, to change, to equality, to tradition, to power itself.

Origins and Evolution — From Monarchy to Markets

The terms “left” and “right” in politics are not metaphorical constructs or vague cultural associations. They began as literal, physical descriptions. During the French Revolution of 1789, members of the National Assembly seated themselves based on their political allegiances. Those who supported the revolution—who wanted to limit or abolish the king’s authority—sat to the president’s left. Those who supported the monarchy and traditional aristocratic privilege sat to the right.

In France, where the terms originated, the left became known as “the party of movement” and the right as “the party of order.” The left challenged existing hierarchies and pushed for change. The right defended established institutions and resisted rapid transformation. This basic dynamic has remained remarkably consistent for over two centuries.

What’s crucial to understand is that the original left-right divide was not about economics in the way we think of it today. It wasn’t socialism versus capitalism. It was about republicanism versus divine and absolute royal rule, democracy versus aristocracy, merit-based opportunity versus inherited privilege. The early leftists—the revolutionaries, the republicans, the anti-monarchists—included the rising bourgeois class, the merchants who wanted free enterprise and property rights without aristocratic interference.

In other words, the original capitalists, the liberals, were the leftists of their day.

Let that sink in for a moment, because it’s vital to understanding how these terms have evolved and why modern political discourse is often so confused. The early advocates of free markets, private property, and individual economic liberty were radicals challenging an entrenched feudal order. They were leftists precisely because they wanted to dismantle hereditary hierarchy and replace it with systems based on merit, effort, and voluntary exchange rather than bloodline and title.

But here’s where things get interesting. As the 19th century progressed, capitalism won. The aristocracies lost most of their power. The bourgeoisie became the new establishment. Industrialization created vast wealth and equally vast working-class populations. And when capitalism became the status quo—when it became the thing being defended rather than the thing challenging the old order—it was recontextualized as something supposedly rightward on the political spectrum.

This is the evergreen pattern. What starts as a radical left position, if successful, eventually becomes the norm, and eventually something the latest crop of conservative rightists will defend. The right is fundamentally reactive and oppositional, defined by its resistance to whatever the left is currently pushing. Political scientist Corey Robin, in his book The Reactionary Mind, argues that tracing conservatism back to Edmund Burke’s reaction against the French Revolution reveals that “the right is fundamentally inspired by a hostility to emancipating the lower orders,” with conservatives united by “the impulse to defend power and privilege against movements demanding freedom and equality.”

Meanwhile, the left fractured into competing factions. With monarchy defeated and capitalism ascendant, new leftist movements emerged to challenge the new status quo. Socialism, Marxism, anarchism, and syndicalism all rose to prominence in the 19th and early 20th centuries, each offering different visions of how to address the perceived inequalities of industrial capitalism. The pattern of one conservative movement versus a broad swathe of competing leftist factions became firmly established, and it’s a pattern that’s continued to this day.

It is important to realize that capitalism itself is neither inherently left nor right. It’s a system of economic organization involving private ownership of capital, market exchange, and profit motive. In the 1700s and early 1800s, advocating for capitalism meant challenging aristocratic monopolies and demanding economic freedom for commoners—a leftist position. By the late 1800s and 1900s, defending capitalism meant protecting an established system from socialist critique, which made it at times seem like a rightist position. The economic right defends the status quo, the economic left wants revolutionary upheaval. The systems didn’t change, but the political contexts certainly did.

A Social Turn and Contemporary Battle Lines

If the 19th century was about economics shifting the left-right divide, then the 20th, especially the mid of the latter century, was about social issues exploding it into something far more complex, and far more emotionally charged. The 1960s and 1970s brought an unprecedented wave of social movements, each demanding the extension of equal rights and equal treatment to groups that had been systematically excluded or oppressed.

The civil rights movement challenged racial caste systems. Second-wave feminism challenged patriarchal norms, even the nature of sexuality itself. Feminists went from suffragettes fighting for the vote to students of Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem, demanded women’s equality in work, politics, and personal autonomy (including sexual freedom, see below).

The gay rights movement, catalyzed by Stonewall in 1969, demanded recognition and legal protection for LGB people. Anti-colonial movements across the Global South challenged Western imperialism. The sexual revolution questioned traditional moral codes around sexuality and relationships. Drug liberalization movements pushed back against prohibition and the war on drugs.

All of these movements shared the same essential liberal spirit. They were challenging existing hierarchies and demanding that egalitarian principles be extended to new domains and new populations. They were, in other words, fundamentally leftist projects. Parties of movement seeking to overturn established orders that kept some groups down in the name of tradition, order, or duty.

The right’s response was predictably reactive. Conservatism, which had spent the 19th and early 20th centuries defending economic hierarchies, now pivoted to defending entrenched social stratification as well. Traditional gender roles, conventional sexual propriety, racial segregation, colonial dominance, punitative rather rehabilitive justice, the war on drugs, et cetera. These all became conservative positions precisely because the left was challenging them.

This is where we arrive at the contemporary left-right divide. We can sum up the current battle lines as…

The Left: Attempting to fix society via challenging ideas. Characterized by a commitment to egalitarianism (extending equal moral worth, equal rights, and equal opportunity to all people), tolerance for difference, social pluralism, and a sense of noblesse oblige toward the disadvantaged (especially economically). Often upending norms, hierarchies, or even whole governments in pursuit of these goals.

The Right: Opposition to the left, specifically resistance to rapid liberalism or progressivism and social change. Characterized by emphasis on individual responsibility, defense of traditional institutions and values, and a kind of insularity that favors ingroup loyalty over universal rights. Not always conservative in the sense of opposing all change, but almost always defined by opposition to whatever the left is currently doing.

The social issues that emerged in the 1960s-70s didn’t replace the economic axis; they enriched and complicated it. This matters because it means you’re not simply left or right by virtue of being insufficiently right or left, respectively. Your position has to be understood holistically, pegged to all of your views in aggregate: economic, social, cultural, and philosophical.

Liberals vs. Progressives: A Crucial Distinction

I need to pause here to address something I only learned this decade: liberals and progressives are not the same thing. At all. For most of my life, I used these terms interchangeably, the way most Americans do. The Democratic Party was “liberal.” Liberal meant “left-wing.” Progressive was just a fancier, more modern-sounding version of the same thing.

I was completely wrong.

Liberals are best understood as the increasingly centrist-coded leftists of yore. They’re the inheritors of classical liberalism, the tradition of Locke, Mill, and the Enlightenment thinkers who championed individual rights, limited government, free markets, and secular pluralism. Liberals still get held up by some as left-wing, and historically they are, but it’s almost anachronistic when people describe them as hard left or far left in the contemporary landscape. Modern liberals occupy a moderate-left (mod-left) position: they support capitalism, usually with regulations and social programs; they recognize and value universal human rights, including economic rights like property and contract; and they hold the lines on secularism, pluralism, democratic institutions, and incremental reform.

Progressives, by contrast, are the relatively new kids on the block. Tho their name comes from the Progressive movement of the early 20th century, the current 21st century version functions quite differently and has different commitments. It’s hard to say exactly when the new progressives explicitly emerged. Maybe it was the 1960s New Left. Maybe it was the shift toward identity politics in the 1990s and 2000s. But regardless, astute observers and students of political history see that it’s clear these progressives are a different movement with different foundational beliefs from liberals.

Progressives are the leftist vanguard who prioritize being down with the cause, whatever that cause is at any given moment. Often this means the Omnicause, an amorphous blob of a political project that ropes together everything from identity politics to socialism to green/climate activism to weird ultra-pacifist sentiments and anti-capitalist rhetoric. Where liberals see markets as tools that need regulation, progressives often see them as inherently exploitative. Where liberals champion free speech as a foundational right, progressives increasingly treat it as a tool that empowers the powerful and needs to be curtailed. Where liberals support pluralism and tolerance, progressives demand ideological conformity around an ever-expanding set of shibboleths.

The confusion between these terms has caused endless problems in American political discourse. When conservatives attack “liberals,” they’re often actually attacking progressives. When progressives claim to be “liberal,” they’re often appropriating a label that doesn’t fit their actual commitments. And when I tell someone that I’m on the left but not a progressive, people get confused because they think those terms are necessarily synonymous.

Yet they’re not. I’m a liberal in the tradition sense, a liberal egalitarian who believes in markets, rights, pluralism, and reform. I am not a progressive who wants to abridge people’s human rights by overthrowing capitalism, nor silence dissenting speech with the power of the government, nor organize society around group-based grievances. Understanding this distinction was crucial to understanding where I actually fit in the political landscape.

My Journey — A California Kid Grows Up

I was born into this landscape as a son of two California leftists in the late 1980s. My parents weren’t radicals. They were lower middle-class normies, college-educated, spiritual moreso than traditionally religious. The kind of people who voted Democratic Party, recycled paper & cans, and thought diversity of all kinds was good. I absorbed their politics through osmosis, the way children do. The left was where the smart, kind, reasonable people were. The right was where the...well, the other people were.

This was the Clinton era into the Bush era, roughly where I came of age. I coasted through adolescence and young adulthood with barely any interrogation of my inherited political orientation. Sure, I was skeptical of some things, but mostly comfortable on what was the increasingly ascendant progressive left. I thought the Iraq War was stupid, I believed marijuana was just a plant (tho I never smoked myself). I was never religious, so the culture war stuff around abortion and gay marriage seemed obviously settled in favor of equality. I was vaguely annoyed by political correctness without really understanding what it was or why it mattered.

But fundamentally I was a knee-jerk progressive. By the time of the Obama era, I was locked into the Democratic Party and all that this entailed. I was, in a word, naive. Politically illiterate whilst somehow still somewhat opinionated. I was also the kind of cringey kneejerk prog who lectured guys to stop “gay” to mean “dumb.” A defensible position, sure, but still annoying. (I’ve found a better way to make this point since.)

Pre-2010s: Standard Knee-Jerk California Progressive

This lasted through my twenties. Obama was president. Things seemed okay, if occasionally frustrating. I held a few vaguely contradictory positions within a politics that was simply defined by whatever the Democrats supported. All because I’d never been forced to think it all through on my own.

Early 2010s: Semi-Awake (Not Woke)

Something started shifting in the early 2010s, tho I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at the time. I was noticing contradictions in my inherited progressive framework, ones I couldn’t resolve. Why were my fellow lefties so hostile to free speech when we’d spent decades defending it? Why did every discussion about race or gender seem to devolve into bizarre essentialist claims about identity groups, claims that sounded suspiciously like the old bigotries we were supposedly fighting against? Why did “social justice” increasingly feel like the opposite of justice—more like social revenge, collective guilt, hierarchies inverted rather than abolished?

I started asking questions. Too many questions, as it turned out. I was never Woke, in either the original black activist sense or the later arch-progressive/SJW sense that term would come to denote. But I wasn’t anti-woke either, not really. I was just...conflicted and confused. Disillusioned. Looking around at what the left had become and thinking “wait, is this what we’re doing now?”

I was temperamentally a leftist tho. I cared about equality, I hated unfairness, I wanted people to have opportunities regardless of their background, believed in the power of government to punish bad actors and lift up the downtrodden. But I was too free-thinking to go along with group-think. And increasingly, the causes of progressivism seemed compromised, hijacked by people who didn’t actually believe in equality at all but rather in a kind of inverted caste system where yesterday’s oppressed became tomorrow’s sacred cow and yesterday’s privileged became tomorrow’s scapegoats.

Obama’s failures crystallized some of this. Not just his policy failures, but the way he represented a kind of polite, respectable elite that made all the right noises about progress whilst maintaining the exact power structures that progressives claimed to oppose. (I’ll be writing about ol’ Barry in more detail at a later date.)

I was getting very uncomfortable with it all. The way the establishment left let bad actors get away with murder as long as they were respectable, as long as they said the right things, as long as they had the right credentials. Meanwhile, anyone boorish or crude or outside the Overton Window got excommunicated, regardless of whether they were actually harmful.

2015-2019: “Politically Homeless”

By 2015, I had no idea where I belonged. Trump’s candidacy was a useful litmus test for people like me and people around me. I found him personally repellent and intellectually vapid, but I also oddly clarifying. His biggest sin seemed to be that he was crass and unrepentantly so, not that he was substantially more corrupt or authoritarian than the respectable establishment (tho he would definitely become both). He was a vehicle that undermined pernicious status quo assumptions, a bull in the china shop of polite society. I couldn’t support him, but I understood why people did, and that understanding alienated me from much of the left.

I started consuming content from what would become known as the Intellectual Dark Web: people like Sam Harris, Jordan Peterson, the Weinstein brothers, and others who were asking heterodox questions and refusing to bow to progressive orthodoxy. I would’ve identified as part of the “sane side” or “rational left” during these years, if I’d had to choose a label. But mostly I just felt homeless. The left had gone crazy with identity politics and cancel culture. The right was coalescing around a grotesque reality TV star with authoritarian tendencies. Neither seemed remotely palatable.

2019-2022: Classical Liberalism (European Sense)

In 2019, I (re)discovered classical liberalism. The philosophy of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, of individual rights and limited government and free markets. The intellectual tradition that had animated the anti-monarchist left of the 18th and 19th centuries before it got conscripted into right-wing economics in the 20th. The classical leftists that cared about freedom but weren’t doctrinaire about telling others how to live or which groups were better than others.

This felt like coming home. Here was a coherent framework that valued both liberty and fairness. That opposed authoritarianism from both left and right. That believed in merit-based opportunity and formal equality rather than group-based outcomes and substantive equity. That recognized markets as tools for prosperity whilst also recognizing they needed rules and guardrails. That defended free speech, free association, free enterprise, free thought.

For the first time in years, I had a label I could defend: I was a classical liberal.

2023-Now: Egalitarianism and Liberalism in Equal Measure

But classical liberalism, whilst true, still felt incomplete. It told me what I believed about economics and government and individual rights, but it didn’t fully capture the moral core of my politics. I kept returning to questions of fairness, of equality, of how to organize society so that people are judged on their merits rather than their identities or backgrounds.

Then, in the early 2020s, I discovered that egalitarianism was not just a word but an actual political philosophy, a family of movements and theories stretching back centuries. This was my “aha” moment. The reckoning where everything clicked into place. I suspect discovering egalitarianism was for me what discovering Marxism is for people on the far left, or what discovering anarcho-capitalism is for people on the far right; that moment when you find the framework that makes sense of all your inchoate beliefs and gives you a vocabulary to defend them. (And it’s not lost on me that for many people, “egalitarian” is wrongly understood as just code for Marxism, whether the economic or cultural variety.)

I am an egalitarian liberal. My core commitments are liberty, freedom, fairness, and equality. I want people to be free to pursue their own conception of the good life, and I want the rules of society to be fair. For it remember that people have equal moral worth, to respect their inherent equal rights under law, and to provide them with equal opportunity to succeed based on merit rather than just on identity or socioeconomic class. A just society.

What I Actually Believe (and Why It’s Left-Wing)

Let me be explicit about my positions, because this is where theory meets practice…

Economic: I’m a capitalist who believes in mixed economies. Free enterprise, yes, but balanced with government interventions and regulations where markets fail. Social safety nets to catch people when they fall. Progressive taxation to fund public goods. Public option in healthcare, extensive reforms as needed, and strong public education. Robust support for non-governmental organizations and charities to fill gaps. I oppose both laissez-faire fundamentalism and central planning. I think markets are excellent tools for generating prosperity and innovation, but they need guardrails to ensure they serve human flourishing rather than just accumulation.

Whether my preferred fiscal policies make me a centrist in the economic sphere no longer much matters to me. I will always hold the line that capitalism works, that economic rights are human rights, and that anyone who disagrees is an economically illiterate and likely a potential authoritarian. The power of markets, private property, and so on can still be channeled toward just ends. But stripping these away from the public never can, and anyone who refuses to acknowledge that fact is my enemy, whether they’re a leftist or right-winger.

Social: I’m firmly on the left here. I believe in formal equality, that people have equal moral worth and deserve equal treatment under law regardless of race, sex, sexuality, religious or gender identities, or any other marker. I oppose racism in all its forms, including the newer forms directed at Asians, Jews, and yes, even “whites” (tho I insist race is a fictitious and socialized construct that we should ultimately move beyond). I oppose sexism, including misandry. I oppose homophobia. I oppose classism, whether punching up, down, or laterally. (I find few groups more bigoted or classist than Marxists btw.)

I support drug decriminalization, especially bringing marijuana regulations in line with alcohol. I support sexual and reproductive freedom. I’m thoroughly a pragmatist on immigration, seeing that a grand bargain between left and right is vital to streamline the American visa system, secure the border, deport criminals, and do one final amnesty for pro-social families. I’m a secularist who opposes theocracy whilst respecting personal, non-governmental religious practice. I oppose imperialism and colonialism, both the historical versions and any contemporary echoes.

These aren’t just random positions. They all flow from a core commitment to dismantling unjust structures and ensuring people are treated fairly based on their actions and merits rather than their identities or family backgrounds. I’ve been increasingly disgusted by people who sane-wash rank bigotry, be is sexist misandry or racist antisemitism and the like, as some form of leftist praxis. I reject identity politics as a distraction, not unlike many economic leftists did before me (and before the Omnicause). We need an uplift that works for the majority of people, not a revanchist politics of grievance based on immutable characteristics and sins of the past (sins which, let’s be real, were largely addressed by law before most of us were even born).

Philosophical: I oppose authoritarianism in all forms. I oppose communism and Marxism because they concentrate power in the state and have tens of millions of deaths attached to them. I oppose fascism and Nazism for the same reasons. Any ideology that requires massive coercion, that denies individual liberty, that creates new hierarchies whilst claiming to destroy old ones. I’m against it. Death tolls in the dozens of millions are also far too disqualifying to handwave. We’d never put up with a Neo-Fascist saying “not real fascism” about the genocides of WW2, but we pretend this move is permissible if someone’s a commie? Ridiculous and morally bankrupt.

I believe in free speech, free thought, free enterprise, free association. I believe in limited government balanced with enough state capacity to prevent private tyranny. I believe in rule of law, due process, procedural justice. I support the scientific method, and rationality, whilst recognizing their limits and that neither is a monolith or form of received wisdom in itself. I believe in reform over revolution, in gradual improvement over radical rupture.

Why I’m Not Leaving the Left

Now let me address the skeptics and would-be come-ons from those in other political movements or ideologies.

To my conservative friends and decent opponents on the right: I understand why you might think my economic moderation and my opposition to far-left excesses make me one of yours. But I’m not. I’m on the left because I believe the fundamental leftist project—challenging unjust hierarchies and extending equal treatment—is correct and necessary.

I can respect your commitment to tradition and Western society. I understand why you may emphasize individual responsibility, ingroup loyalty, and the idea of the nuclear family. I can see merit some of these things. I certainly don’t think you are necessarily doomed to be my enemies. But you are not my people.

Some of you defend hierarchies that benefit select groups at others’ expense. When you ignore structural barriers that limit opportunity, that’s in direct conflict with formal equality, with the principled egalitarianism I champion. When you say that history, and the respect-cum-reverence for it, matters more than sober and critical analysis of who are and how far we’ve come from the bad old days, you lose me.

Oh, and whilst this definitely doesn’t apply to all of you, I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out the extremism of the far/alt right explicitly and unequivocally. To the extent that some on the right have been flirting with its own strains of radicalism, it’s incumbent on y’ll to clean your damned house. Zero tolerance for racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism, fascism, and the rest. The right has respectable aspects, but also basement dwelling trolls that must be vanquished and exiled from civil discourse.

I value conservatism as a force for prudence and caution. Burke and Chesterton were right—no pun intended—in arguing that we shouldn’t tear down institutions we don’t understand, that we should value accumulated wisdom, that rapid change can be destructive. But conservatism becomes pernicious when it moves from “let’s be careful” to “let’s preserve injustice because it’s traditional.” The fight against monarchy was right. The fight against slavery was right. The fight for women’s suffrage was right. The fight for civil rights was right. All of these were leftist causes that conservatives opposed in their time.

I will work with you where our values align. On free speech, on opposing authoritarianism, on valuing markets and innovation, on resisting the worst excesses of the contemporary left. But don’t mistake tactical alliance for ideological alignment. I’m trying to make the world more fair. You’re trying to keep it stable. Sometimes those goals overlap, but they’re not the same.

To the extremists on the far left whom I reject: You’ve lost the plot. You claim to fight for “equity” or social justice, but you’ve embraced a new caste system where people are judged by their group identity rather than their individual character. You claim to oppose hierarchy, but you’re just trying to invert it, putting yesterday’s “oppressed” on top and yesterday’s “privileged” on bottom.

This isn’t egalitarianism. It’s not justice. It’s revenge dressed up in academic jargon and moral righteousness. When you embrace equity over equality, you’re abandoning the very principle that made the left’s historical victories legitimate. When you dismiss free speech as a tool of the powerful, you’re rejecting the mechanism that has allowed every marginalized group to demand recognition. When you insist that racism against “whites” or Asians is a necessary evil, that open season on Jews or “Zionists” is permissible, or sexism against men doesn’t count, you’re creating exactly the kind of arbitrary exceptions to universal principles that egalitarians should oppose. You’re wrong, and I think deep down many of you know it.

I will oppose you as vigorously as I oppose the far right, because you’re poisoning the well. You’re making people think that equality means “giving advantages to some groups,” that opposing fascism or Nazism is just a pretext for engaging in authoritarianism or political violence but leftishly. You’ve corrupted “anti-racism,” making it mean “being racist toward different people,” and increasingly made people think that “progress” means “tearing everything down.” You’re driving decent people into the arms of the right by making the left look insane.

Formal equality—equal treatment under law, equal opportunity, judging people by their merits and character—is the correct principle. It was correct when we fought against monarchy. It was correct when we fought against Jim Crow. It remains correct now. Your substantive equality, your equity, your group-based outcomes—these are distractions at best and new injustices at worst. Stop it, get some help.

To everyone else, the persuadable middle, the centrists, the homeless, the undefined: I hope I’ve shown you what the left should be. Not a revolutionary vanguard seeking to tear down civilization. Not a guilt-ridden exercise in collective self-flagellation. Not a new caste system with inverted hierarchies.

The left should be the party of reform, of gradual improvement, of extending fairness and opportunity to more people. We should seek to make society the best version of itself, bolstering systems that work (like markets, like science, like democratic institutions) whilst reforming those that fail (like criminal justice, like healthcare access, like educational inequality).

We don’t need to radically transform society. We need to refine it, to perfect it, to make its stated principles match its actual practices. “All men are created equal” was a revolutionary statement in 1776. It’s still not fully realized in 2025. That’s the work. Not tearing down, but building up. Not destroying hierarchies of merit, but dismantling hierarchies of privilege. Not equality of outcomes, but equality of opportunity and treatment.

I won’t demand that you pick a side. Too many others do that already. I merely suggest that perhaps you reconsider whether the left is as radical as you’ve been told. The far left might be, I grant, but the moderate left (mod left), where I call home, is still viable. And I’ll never stop fighting for it, every day.

Conclusion

The left, at its best, has always been about one thing: extending the circle of who counts as fully human, fully equal, fully deserving of dignity and opportunity. From challenging monarchy to challenging racism, from demanding women’s suffrage to demanding gay marriage, from opposing colonialism to supporting legal immigration, the through-line is clear. We expand the circle. We break the caste systems. We insist that people be judged on their merits and character rather than their accidents of birth.

I am on the left because I believe in this project. Not perfectly executed, not without mistakes, not blind to the excesses and failures of the contemporary (far) left. But the core is valuable, and deeply valid. The principle is sound. People do have equal moral worth. Equal rights are real, and not to be abridged in pursuit of order or (false) utopia. People should have equal opportunity to flourish based on what they do, not just how they were born.

I don’t seek to radically change society. I seek to help it become what it claims to be: a place where people are judged by their character and abilities. Where hard work and talent can lead to success regardless of background, where the rules are fair and consistently applied, where freedom and equality reinforce rather than contradict each other. Because we are morally equal, because we have inherent human rights, because formal equality and social safety work better than the alternatives.

This is the coherent position I’ve come to understand for myself, one with deep historical roots. The original leftists wanted to dismantle monarchy and create merit-based systems. They wanted free markets without aristocratic monopolies. They wanted individual rights protected from persecution or oppression. That project is unfinished. We still have castes to dismantle, fairness to (re-)institute, and opportunities to expand for the broader populace.

That’s the left I believe in. That’s the left I’ll defend. Not with revolutionary fervor or utopian promises, but with steady commitment to incremental progress, to making things better bit by bit, to extending the circle of equality one person, one policy, one reform at a time. Plenty are there already, and I hope more join me.

The work continues. The cause endures. The left, properly understood, is not about tearing down but building up, not about destroying but perfecting, not about revolution but reform. I’m in it for the long haul. And I’m confident that this vision—of liberty paired with fairness, of markets paired with safety nets, of equality of opportunity over equity of outcome—will prove more durable and more just than any alternative.

That’s why I’m left. That’s how I’m left. And that’s the way I’ll stay.