There is a principle so basic it once passed for common sense, and so unfashionable now it sounds radical to say out loud: people are responsible for their actions, even when injustice occurs. Responsibility is not the same thing as blame. Acknowledging agency does not excuse abuse of power. Acceptance is not approval. These distinctions used to be the grammar of adult life. Today they are treated as betrayals.
I’m writing this as an independent. Not a Republican, not a Democrat, and not interested in tribal loyalty where principles are concerned. I used to be on the left. I began voting Democrat in the early 1990s, back when being liberal meant something closer to skepticism of power, commitment to civil liberties, and a shared belief that adults could disagree without declaring one another immoral. If you stayed where that version of liberalism was, you are now treated as eccentric at best, or functionally right-wing by today’s extremes.
I have always held a mix of values. Fiscal responsibility. Smaller government where possible. The idea that a society has obligations to its citizens but also limits. Legal immigration that is robust, humane, and aligned with what a country needs and what newcomers can contribute. None of this used to be controversial. It was simply how adults talked about tradeoffs. Today, these positions are treated as heresies depending on who is saying them and who they apply to.
That is why I’m calling out the left now. Not because I’ve joined the right, and not because I’m interested in partisan revenge, but because the left has abandoned the very principles that once gave it moral credibility. This is a wake-up call from someone who used to stand inside the tent and now refuses to pretend the tent isn’t on fire.
I’ve spent years around systems built on accountability—systems that begin not with outrage but with inventory. The first move is acceptance: seeing things for precisely what they are before trying to change them. Acceptance doesn’t mean endorsing reality; it means acknowledging it. Without that step, every attempt at reform collapses into fantasy. You can’t fix what you refuse to see.
That insight applies far beyond recovery programs. It applies to civic life. It applies to protest. It applies to political violence. And it applies—urgently—to the left’s refusal to reckon with its own extremes.
We used to argue about fundamentals on shared ground. We disagreed on policy but agreed on principles: legality matters; violence is wrong; consequences exist; rhetoric has limits. Today that shared ground has eroded. Personality has replaced principle. Identity has replaced standards. Emotion has replaced judgment. Loyalty has replaced truth. Disagreement is no longer “I think you’re wrong”; it’s “you are evil.” That’s not politics. That’s excommunication.
Consider how the country talks about political violence. January 6 was wrong. It was illegal. People who broke the law deserved punishment proportional to their actions. I believed that then and I believe it now. I was furious watching the Capitol attacked, and I oppose blanket pardons or commutations that erase accountability. Responsibility matters, or it doesn’t.
But responsibility cannot be selectively applied. During the summer of 2020, cities burned. Windows were smashed. Businesses were destroyed. People were injured. Illegality was laundered through intention and renamed “mostly peaceful.” On the right, January 6 was reframed as patriotism. On the left, riots were reframed as justice. Both moves are dishonest for the same reason: they erase agency. They turn adults into props and consequences into oppression.
Here is the distinction we must recover if we want to prevent more harm: moral innocence and causal contribution are not the same thing. A person can be wronged and still have participated in the chain of events that led to their injury or death. Saying that does not justify violence. It does not excuse misconduct by authorities. It does not make tragedy acceptable. It makes it intelligible. Without intelligibility, there is no prevention—only repetition.
Protest is a good example. Protest can be legitimate. It can be necessary. But it is not magic. When protests become illegal, confrontational, and volatile—especially around armed authorities—risk accumulates. That doesn’t mean protesters deserve harm. It means harm becomes possible. Adults can hold both truths at once. A movement that cannot is not serious.
A useful comparison is one people reflexively resist because they confuse explanation with endorsement. A woman should be able to walk naked through any town without being assaulted, harassed, or harmed. That is a moral absolute. But the fact that she should be safe does not mean she will be. A serious adult understands the difference between what ought to be true and what is predictably true. Choosing to ignore that distinction does not make the world more just—it makes harm more likely. Acknowledging risk is not blaming the victim; it is recognizing reality. Refusing to recognize risk does not protect anyone—it only guarantees repetition.
This is where the left has broken itself. It treats acceptance as cruelty and fantasy as compassion. It insists that righteous intent confers immunity from risk. It collapses explanation into justification and calls anyone who resists that collapse a traitor. The result is a politics of adolescence—big feelings, zero limits, and no inventory.
Protest culture reveals another failure: coalition discipline. I will not march with people who tolerate open calls for violence or erasure. Full stop. A movement reveals its values not by its stated goals, but by what it allows in its ranks. If eliminationist rhetoric is waved away as “misunderstood,” moral authority evaporates. Silence in the face of explicit hatred is not nuance; it is complicity.
This is not an argument about foreign policy minutiae. It is an argument about boundaries. A left that cannot draw bright moral lines will be captured by its worst elements. And right now, too many leaders are afraid to enforce those lines because they fear being labeled by the loudest, least serious people in the room.
Fear is the accelerant. People on the left see dysfunction and stay silent because they don’t want to be called names. Labels replace argument. Ostracism replaces debate. That is how movements radicalize themselves. Internal criticism becomes taboo, and without internal criticism there is no course correction.
You can see the pathology everywhere: absolutist slogans detached from context; ritualized outrage without consequence; moral signaling without risk; social media feeds that oscillate between rage, vanity, branding, and certainty without any hierarchy of seriousness. It is incoherent. And incoherent people cannot sustain coherent ethics.
The left likes to call itself progressive. But progress requires discipline, tradeoffs, and reality-testing. A movement that rejects those things is not progressive; it is regressive and destabilizing. Progress is not shouting louder. It is building systems that work in the world as it is, not the world as we wish it to be.
This refusal to test reality shows up even in debates that should be straightforward. Take vaccines. A serious society allows adults to weigh risk, benefit, and context. An unserious one replaces judgment with slogans. You can accept science without worshipping it. You can reject conspiracy without submitting to coercion. Nuance is not denial; it is responsibility. Extremism on both sides tries to erase that middle because it requires thinking.
The same erasure drives the left’s obsession with symbolic protest over practical outcomes. “No kings” marches staged as theater rather than strategy. Maximal language about dictatorship in a country where critics livestream denunciations and collect awards for it. Words lose meaning when they have no cost, and when words lose meaning, escalation follows.
There is also a deeper problem the left refuses to face: guilt as a political technology. Unprocessed guilt makes people easy to co-opt. Guilt seeks absolution, not truth. It turns moral seriousness into performative penance and replaces agency with projection. The result is a coalition unified by opposition rather than principles—an alliance that cannot govern because it cannot agree on limits.
This is especially corrosive when identity replaces individual agency. Reducing people to categories flattens humanity and undermines dignity. Treating disagreement as harm guarantees polarization. And when fellow citizens are recast as “them” while abstract causes become “us,” civic life fractures.
As a Jew by lineage who does not practice a religion, I’ve watched with alarm as identity-driven politics turns Jews into symbols—stand-ins for power, continuity, or grievance—regardless of belief or behavior. This isn’t new, but it is being normalized in spaces that claim moral superiority. A left that excuses or minimizes hatred in its own ranks forfeits the right to lecture anyone else.
None of this is a defense of the right. The extreme right exists and is dangerous. It should be confronted and constrained. But the question before the left is not whether the right is bad. It is whether the left can govern itself. At the moment, it cannot.
This brings me back to the radical principle. Acceptance. Inventory. Agency. Consequence. The serenity to accept what we cannot change, the courage to change what we can, and the wisdom to know the difference. You don’t need God to grasp this. You don’t need a program. You already know it. The problem is refusal—refusal to admit fault, refusal to draw lines, refusal to grow up.
People like to say “common sense,” but common sense isn’t common. Maybe we should just call it sense. Sense says intent does not cancel consequence. Sense says movements must police themselves. Sense says violence is wrong whether it wears red hats or righteous slogans. Sense says if you place yourself into volatility, risk increases, and pretending otherwise is magical thinking.
A serious society insists on these truths even when they are uncomfortable. An unserious one performs outrage and calls it justice. The left is at a crossroads. It can continue to indulge its most extreme voices, excuse lawlessness as virtue, and silence internal critics—or it can reclaim principles and demand adulthood from itself.
If the left does not reject its own extremists, it will lose its moral authority, its voters, and eventually its ability to govern—not because of the right, but because of its refusal to discipline itself. Parties do not deserve loyalty when they abandon principles. People do.
I am not asking the left to become conservative. I am asking it to become adult. To put principles before personalities. To accept reality before trying to change it. To stop confusing chaos with courage. To remember that progress without responsibility is not progress at all.
That is the radical principle. And until we recover it, we will keep mistaking noise for movement and outrage for justice, while the world, indifferent to our slogans, continues to enforce consequences.
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