Dear Democrats, I Tried To Warn You
New data fully corroborates my viral political meme in granular detail.
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About the Author
Dr. Colin Wright is the CEO/Editor-in-Chief of Reality’s Last Stand, an evolutionary biology PhD, and Manhattan Institute Fellow. His writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Times, the New York Post, Newsweek, City Journal, Quillette, Queer Majority, and other major news outlets and peer-reviewed journals.
In August 2021, I sat in my bed reflecting on the shifting political landscape in America. I had always considered myself part of the Left but found myself increasingly alienated and baffled by the positions many self-proclaimed progressives were adopting. Instead of championing free speech, they disparaged it as a threat to democracy and minorities. Rather than valuing character and merit over skin color, they promoted racist “equity” initiatives that prioritize race over the individual. And instead of upholding science and truth, they embraced absurd pseudoscience about the biology of sex for political purposes.
Ronald Reagan’s famous quote, “I didn’t leave the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party left me,” resonated deeply with me. This sentiment seemed pervasive among those criticizing what was being called the “regressive left,” now often termed “wokeness.” I thought there must be a way to visually represent this feeling of political estrangement from the Left. I opened PowerPoint and started experimenting.
As I doodled, my thoughts and feelings begin to take visual shape. The illustration depicted the political ground shifting beneath my feet, with the Left becoming increasingly extreme and pulling the political “center” to the left. This made my views appear to shift rightward, even though my views had not changed at all. It was an illusion of sorts, and it perfectly captured my feelings. On August 6, 2021, I tweeted it with the caption, “My political journey in a nutshell.”
It went “viral” by normal Twitter standards, amassing a couple thousand retweets. I posted it several more times over the next few months. Then, on April 28, 2022, while I was out for a walk, I checked my Twitter notifications and was shocked by what I saw:
Elon Musk, the most-followed account on Twitter, had shared my meme. It exploded in popularity, amassing hundreds of thousands of retweets and over a million likes. The comments were overwhelmingly positive, with the majority conveying how perfectly it summed up their own feelings and experiences. And the commentary didn’t stay on Twitter. That day at the gym, I saw my meme featured on the news. The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro discussed it on his show. CNN’s Michael Smerconish ran a lengthy segment about it and encouraged viewers to create their own stick figure political political spectrum drawings. It was everywhere.
I even appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight to discuss the meme. Conversely, left-wing pundits expressed their disapproval through angry tweets and op-eds attempting to debunk it. The Washington Post’s Greg Sargent called it a “silly chart” that has been “brutally debunked.” His colleague Philip Bump described it as “simply wrong” and an “obvious exaggeration.” NBC News published an article calling it a “very bad meme” that “shows how out of touch he is with political reality.”
This confusion, whether genuine or performative, from the left prompted me to write an explanation of what I believe the meme depicts and my reasons for creating it. I sent it to the Wall Street Journal, and they published it. The heart of my essay is as follows:
I created the cartoon to help sort out my feelings of increasing political alienation from the left. I’m a lifelong Democrat. I turned 18 in 2003 and have never voted for a Republican. But over the past decade, and especially the past five years, I’ve watched my party distance itself from the values and principles I hold dear.
People on the left once viewed free speech as sacrosanct and championed speaking truth to power. Now they disparage open expression as a danger to democracy and minorities. The aspiration of judging individuals by the content of their character rather than by the color of their skin has given way to identity politics and “equity” initiatives that prioritize group interests over individual rights. Women’s rights, previously understood as relating to their oppression on the basis of sex, is now viewed by the left through the lens of gender identity, which gives priority to men who declare themselves to be women. Today’s progressive can’t even tell you what a woman is. The right may be inconsistent in its support of free speech, individual rights and women’s rights, but the left is consistent in its opposition to all three.
I concluded my essay with a warning—one that the Democrats should have taken seriously but evidently did not.
I hope many on the left will resist the urge to debunk or dismiss my cartoon and instead use it as an opportunity to understand why so many people feel it describes their experience. Something has happened over the past decade to make many liberals feel politically homeless, and a lack of curiosity about why is a recipe for not only political failure but social strife.
Needless to say, Democrats did not heed my warning, and their incuriousness about the reasons behind the meme’s virality led to the “political failure” I predicted, with Donald Trump securing a landslide victory for the Republicans, running on the exact issues I outlined in my article.
Yesterday, Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch reported on data from the US General Social Survey, which indicated that although my “graphic was mocked at the time…recent events”—i.e., the election—“suggest it may have a grain of truth to it.” Far from containing just a “grain of truth,” the data seem to fully corroborate my meme in granular detail.
Burn-Murdoch notes, “The data shows Democrats taking a sharp turn leftward on social issues over the past decade. This has distanced them from the median voter, just as Wright’s cartoon depicted...This suggests that Trump’s election radicalised the left, not the right."
If the similarities between the above graphs and my political meme are not immediately obvious, below is the figure reoriented and superimposed on my meme to match the years. In fact, it appears that the only inaccuracy in my meme stems from my underestimating the left’s ideological extremism!
Burn-Murdoch concludes: “Whether or not progressives are ready to accept it, the evidence all points in one direction. America’s moderate voters have not deserted the Democrats; the party has pushed them away.”
Democrats: I told you so; but you refused to listen. And instead of facing reality, many of you are now fleeing to Bluesky to ratchet the seals on your echo chamber a few notches tighter. Do you truly believe that will assist you in understanding the average American voter?
It won’t.
Here’s a final warning: If you do not fully reject woke ideology and return to common sense, you will continue to lose—and you will deserve to lose.
“My Political Journey” posters are now available!
I have printed a new limited run of high quality 11”x17” posters for the holiday season. They make a great gift for the politically homeless! Currently only available for customers in the US and Canada.
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What I see so many on the left doing is coming up with ALL KINDS of stupid arguments to avoid dealing with the Diseased Donkey in the room. One excuse they come up with is "it's all the right-wing media, which is all-powerful and pervasive". This is completely idiotic, because a lot of people do not listen to Fox News or other right-wing outlets. Plus this ignores the obvious fact that NBC, ABC, CBS, and NPR/PBS are even MORE pervasive and just as biased on the left side of the political spectrum. NPR/PBS is particularly annoying since it touts it's lack of bias, but the bias is so obvious and blatant. For instance, Laura Barron-Lopez, who cover immigration, has parents who are illegals, and she NEVER brings in anti-illegal sources. They quote pro-illegal groups (Migration Policy Institute) and never anti-illegals groups (Center for Immigration Studies). You never hear anything about the costs of unlimited immigration or about the impact on American society of having the largest proportion of non-native residents today in US history. Nor do they ever discuss the impact on US workers.
I have a coffee cup with your cartoon on it. I make a point of using it, prominently, when my predictably Progressive friends and relatives visit.