My Sales Pitch
Every principle contemporary progressivism claims to defend sounds good on the label.
Free speech, for everyone. Not just the people you agree with.
Bodily autonomy, yours to keep. Government stays out of the exam room.
Tolerance, extended to people who don’t pray, love, or vote the way you do.
Colorblindness. Judged by character, not skin.
Equal protection under the law. No exceptions. No fine print.
None of that is fake. It’s the actual inheritance. Civil rights. Marriage equality. The whole modern liberal project rests on four words.
The principle is universal.
The Fine Print
Universal principles don’t come with an asterisk. Modern progressive politics keeps adding one anyway.
Here’s the test, in one sentence: a principle isn’t universal if its application changes depending on who benefits from it.
Watch for the pattern. A principle holds. Right up until it collides with what the tribe wants that particular week. Then it gets suspended quietly, rebranded as nuance, and everyone moves on like nothing happened.
That’s not necessarily conscious hypocrisy. It’s something more revealing: a principle that becomes negotiable the moment tribal loyalty gets involved. You can believe every word of it and still fold the second your side needs you to.
You can test it. Every time.
A principle isn’t universal if its application changes depending on who benefits from it.
The Experiment
Here’s the experiment.
I’ll describe a real policy using nothing but liberal values. Reducing mandatory minimum sentences. Prioritizing rehabilitation over pure punishment. Reforming federal sentencing rules that contributed to lengthy sentences and substantial racial disparities in incarceration.
Presented that way, it would sound familiar to anyone who has spent years hearing progressive arguments about criminal justice reform.
That policy already happened. It’s called the First Step Act. Congress passed it with bipartisan majorities in December 2018, and Donald Trump signed it into law.
Did your reaction change when you got to that last sentence? For a lot of people, it does. Not because the policy changed. Because the name attached to it did.
And here’s the uncomfortable part. I don’t need you to agree with the First Step Act. You can think it went too far, not far enough, or was badly designed. That’s not the test.
The test is whether your evaluation changed because the policy changed, or because the person attached to it did.
That’s tribalism in miniature. Not “the left is hypocritical.“ Something closer to: can you recognize a good principle when the person holding it is someone you’ve already decided to hate?
And before anyone on the right starts enjoying this too much, you’re not exempt. Conservatives run the same experiment with different principles. Limited government, until their guy controls it. Free markets, until their favorite industry needs protection. Fiscal restraint, until their favorite program needs funding. Free speech, until someone burns a flag.
The costume changes. The mechanism doesn’t.
This piece is about the left’s version, because these are the principles the left claims to own.
The Test
That question is the one running underneath every example in this piece. Not “is this a good principle.“ The principles sound good in the abstract: free speech, bodily autonomy, equal protection, and actually listening to minority communities.
The harder test: would you still hold this position if your own side lost by it?
Now watch for the same tell.
Ask The People You Claim To Speak For
In 2020, “defund the police“ became the loudest sentence in American politics, routinely presented as though it reflected what Black communities broadly wanted.
A month after George Floyd’s death, Gallup asked Black Americans directly. Eighty one percent wanted the same police presence in their neighborhood, or more. Just twenty two percent supported abolishing departments outright. By March 2021, only twenty eight percent of Black respondents backed “defund“ as a slogan. The polling showed a striking disconnect between the slogan and the preferences of many of the Black Americans being invoked in its defense. The people supposedly at the center of the conversation weren’t necessarily the people determining the conversation.
Same mechanism, different issue. The Washington Post’s 2016 survey of Native Americans found nine in ten weren’t offended by the Redskins name, a result that held across age, income, party, even a majority of self-identified liberals. A follow-up Berkeley study in 2020 complicated the picture: 49% of respondents called the name offensive, with that number rising sharply among people who strongly identified as Native American or were heavily engaged in tribal culture. It didn’t erase the Post finding. It showed the answer depends considerably on who you ask and how you ask.
Which makes the question harder, not easier. Who gets to decide which voices count when the people supposedly being represented disagree?
Your Body, Except When It Isn’t
“My body, my choice“ is a founding liberal sentence. It survived the pandemic with a very large asterisk.
Vaccine mandates for employment. Passports for entry. Terminations for noncompliance. A fair critic will point out these aren’t identical: abortion involves the government compelling or prohibiting a private medical choice, while a mandate regulates conduct because infectious disease creates risk for other people. That’s a real distinction, not a dodge.
But whatever the public health case, and there was a real one, the pandemic exposed something the slogan had conveniently left unspecified: bodily autonomy wasn’t treated as absolute the moment one person’s medical decision created consequences for someone else.
So was “my body, my choice“ a universal principle, or a principle with an invisible externality clause, one nobody bothered to define in advance, including how large the externality had to be before the principle stopped applying? I remember being called racist for suggesting that this came from a chinese laboratory because Donald Trump made the claim. As it turns out…we still don't know exactly how SARS-CoV-2 entered humans, but the strongest published scientific evidence currently favors zoonotic spillover, but is unable to rule out the aboratory-associated accident in China because critical evidence has never been made available by China or U.S. intelligence. Shaming somebody because they do not want to put something in their body that couldn't even prevent disease transmission, when we had less information than now, seems a little aggressive to be called liberal principle.
Tolerance With A Selective Memory
Criticize Sharia-derived law. Forced marriage. The treatment of women or gay people under religious authority. You’ll get called Islamophobic in the same sentence structure reserved for actual bigots. Is it islamophobic to state that these citizens of these countries, especially women, are not treated with dignity? Did we reach a point, that I missed, where facts can be bigotry?
Make the identical critique about Christian fundamentalism and you’re just doing journalism. Make up your minds. What happensled to calling out intolerance wherever we see it? Can someone actually be so tolerant that they tolerate intolerance? I say no… so does the dictionary.
Here’s the harder question underneath that double standard: what happens when the fear of appearing prejudiced gets powerful enough that institutions stop investigating people who actually deserve investigation?
Rotherham, England is the answer, and it’s documented by the government’s own inquiry, not by commentary about it. The 2014 Jay Report, commissioned by Rotherham’s own council, found that at least fourteen hundred children were sexually exploited in the town between 1997 and 2013. It also found that council staff and police were slow to pursue the cases, in part out of fear that acting on the perpetrators’ ethnicity would get them labeled racist. That’s not my inference. It’s the inquiry’s own finding.
Sensitivity to race and ethnicity became one of the factors that distorted the institutional response. Whatever the intention, the result was catastrophic: adults became more concerned with navigating the politics of the conversation than protecting children.
Any moral framework can become dangerous when the fear of appearing prejudiced overrides impartial investigation. That’s not an indictment of tolerance. It’s what happens when tolerance stops being a principle and starts being a performance.
From Colorblind To Color-Coded
For generations, Martin Luther King asking to be judged by the content of his character, not the color of his skin, was one of liberalism’s most powerful moral arguments.
Somewhere along the way, frameworks built around concepts like inherited racial guilt started treating race as the primary, unavoidable lens a person gets read through, and ancestry as something the living owe an apology for.
If a fair response says colorblindness never solved racial inequality on its own, so a framework accounting for structural effects replaced it. Fine. Then name the limiting principle. Tell me What new purity test actually solves.. When does recognizing historical inequality stop being a justification for treating people differently today, and who decides when that day arrives?
That’s not colorblindness evolving. That’s colorblindness getting overturned by the exact thing it was built to replace, without anyone agreeing on where the replacement ends… it's not progressive if It doesn't solve anything..
Say The Quiet Part About Free Speech
CBS announced in July 2025 that The Late Show with Stephen Colbert would end, with its final episode airing in May 2026. Jimmy Kimmel was suspended by ABC in September 2025 after comments about the killing of Charlie Kirk, then reinstated six days later, after FCC Chairman Brendan Carr had publicly warned the network to “do this the easy way or the hard way.“ Both are matters of public record.
Both moments drew loud defenses of free expression, from commentators and institutions that had also, in other years, supported restrictions on certain kinds of speech labeled misinformation.
That instinct, defend the comedian, is a real principle worth having. But nobody agreeable needs their speech protected. By definition, it’s the disagreeable, provocative, uncomfortable speech that needs the protection.
The First Amendment isn’t a loyalty program. A movement that reaches for it only when its own side is the one getting silenced isn’t defending free speech.
It’s defending its team, and calling it a principle.
The First Amendment isn’t a loyalty program.
The Gesture Costs Nothing
Land acknowledgments read a sentence naming the tribe whose land an event now sits on, then proceed with the event. Nothing gets returned. Nobody’s water rights get restored. The acknowledgment is the whole transaction.
DEI deserves a more honest hearing than that comparison gives it. Black and Hispanic workers report valuing workplace diversity more than white workers do, and the polling doesn’t support a “minorities don’t actually want this“ argument. That critique would be wrong.
The sharper critique is priority, not popularity. If an institution has a limited budget, how much of it should go to representation and internal culture, versus wages, training, and the economic security of those same workers as their jobs change under automation? That’s a real tradeoff, not a distraction, and DEI programs rarely get asked to answer it.
A seat at the table stops mattering the day the table gets automated.
A seat at the table stops mattering the day the table gets automated.
The Excommunication
The furthest this goes: family members going “no contact“ over a vote.
A relative supported a candidate in 2016. Forgivable, nobody knew yet what was coming. The same relative supports the same candidate again, and the relationship ends.
Disagreement isn’t the same thing as abuse, and voting differently isn’t automatically a moral violation. There are relationships worth ending over real conduct. A vote, on its own, usually isn’t that.
When political disagreement alone becomes grounds for cutting someone out of your life, persuasion has been replaced by purification. Liberalism used to be the philosophy that believed people could still be reasoned with.
The fine print has become: tolerance for everyone, except the person who violates the tribe’s political consensus.
Purification doesn’t reason with anybody. It just removes them.
Left Or Right
None of this means liberalism’s underlying values are wrong.
Free speech is worth defending.
Bodily autonomy is worth defending.
Equal protection is worth defending.
Listening to marginalized people is worth defending.
Tolerance is worth defending.
The same test already ran on the right, a few pages back. The costume changes. The mechanism doesn’t.
That’s precisely why the fine print matters. A universal principle isn’t universal when it comes with a party affiliation.
The test is brutally simple. A conviction that requires the right person to hold it isn’t a conviction. It’s an endorsement.
Would you still believe it if your political enemy proposed it?
Would you still believe it if your political enemy benefited from it?
If yes, you might have a principle. If no, you have a loyalty test.
And if the person expressing an idea can determine whether you believe the idea is true, you aren’t evaluating the idea anymore. You’re evaluating the person.
Check whether the people a movement claims to speak for were actually in the room when the position got decided. Sometimes they aren’t even in the room when the movement decides what they supposedly need.
That’s the fine print nobody puts on the label.
