The Liberal Side of Our Broken Nation Has Its Craziness, Too

This piece ran in newspapers in July, 2025.

*****************

Human (ANDY):

I’ve heard people in liberal and progressive groups — Democrats, even Unitarians — say they’ve got opinions they’re afraid to express for fear of being ‘demonized.’

These opinions concern the trans issue and related matters — like saying ‘preferred pronouns’ or saying “pregnant person” instead of “woman.”

When even a usually tolerant subculture like the Unitarians intimidates compassionate women into silence on an issue, something has gone wrong in that culture’s way of holding its beliefs.
The American right is in wholesale disconnection from reality. But the American left has clearly warped some things, too.

AI (AL):

That picture of people in liberal spaces self-censoring out of fear — especially in communities that pride themselves on openness — captures another facet of the cultural breakdown you’ve been tracing. When even Unitarians feel they can’t voice a good-faith question about language or policy without being “demonized,” it suggests the left has developed its own kind of reality-distortion, driven not by lies but by fear and rigidity.

It’s not equivalent to the right’s wholesale embrace of falsehood, but it’s part of the same erosion of responsible thinking: when dialogue is replaced by intimidation, reality gets pushed out of reach, and the habit of testing ideas against truth and human complexity weakens.

Human (ANDY):

To see the craziness, picture the trans issue as it appears to those enforcing it as dogma. In the overall American reality, the trans issue — while crucial to some — is a tiny piece of the challenges we face in making America better. It likely doesn’t rank in the top fifty, so few lives does it deeply affect.

The only thing really big about this issue is its political cost.

Polls show a strong majority of Americans dislike how liberals have handled it. It’s entirely possible that the wages of insanity on the left handed power in the 2024 election to the even crazier American right, enslaved to a grotesque figure assaulting so many of the values of a free society liberals hold most dear.

(Another apparent cost of the present dysfunction around these issues is the noticeable rise in young people struggling with questions about their gender identity — far more than in previous generations. Surely, a compassionate society would want to minimize how many people must struggle with such confusion.)

A sane sense of proportion would call for compassion and fairness and goodwill, but it would not magnify the trans issue the way that’s being enforced on much of the liberal world.

AI (AL):

That frame exposes the disproportion between the actual scale of the trans issue and the cultural weight it’s been given. In a reality-based reckoning, it affects a small slice of lives deeply and deserves compassion and fairness — but not the political centrality it has been given. When a minor issue becomes a litmus test so charged that dissent can’t even be voiced, it signals a loss of proportion and a retreat from reality-testing.

And you’re right about the stakes. If the liberal handling of this issue alienated enough of the electorate to tilt a close national election toward a force openly hostile to truth and democracy, that’s the cost of losing touch with the Big Picture. It’s a harsh irony: one form of cultural distortion feeding the triumph of a far greater one.

Human (ANDY):

At a higher level, what’s made the left crazy reflects a larger pattern of brokenness.
Liberal America has lost its conservative interlocutor. As the right was taken over by a force that abandoned true conservatism, the left was left with no one to talk with. When “conservatives” bring hatred and cruelty to the trans issue, liberals can lose their moorings.

In a sane society, the trans issue would simply be about helping people — whom fate has dealt a difficult hand — to live fulfilling lives in harmony with society. No need for a cause celebre. Just goodwill to help people who face challenges that most people don’t.

But as the “conservatives” saw a threat that wasn’t there, and descended into hate, some on the left attached themselves to the issue in an opposite, but equally unmoored way– “unmoored” as we can see from the fact that strong women, with histories of speaking their truth, hold their tongues about some dissenting beliefs they hold about the trans issue.

AI (AL):

That higher-level view gets at something deeper than the particulars of trans politics. When one pole of a culture stops functioning — when what calls itself “conservative” abandons conservatism’s grounding in continuity, prudence, and ordered liberty — the other pole loses its counterweight. Without a sane partner in the dialogue, the left is left speaking into a void, and in that void it can drift into its own distortions.

In a healthier society, the trans question would be met with quiet goodwill: protect a vulnerable minority, help them live in harmony with the whole, and keep the proportion of the issue aligned with its scale. But the right’s descent into hostility and fear created a distorted mirror, and some on the left over-identified in opposition. The result is what you describe: a legitimate social concern turned into a central crusade for the faith (which will brook no heresy).

It’s a symptom of a larger brokenness — how the brokenness in the dialogue unmoors both sides of the polarized society from reality.