I spent most of my adulthood as a conservative. Free markets, personal responsibility, limited government — it all made sense to me. Then I realized conservatism couldn’t see gay people. Then, later, trans people. Couldn’t account for them, couldn’t make room for them, treated them like they didn’t exist or were a problem to be managed. I had gay and trans people in my life whom I loved.
I drifted leftward. And the Left did see gay and trans people. But it had its own rigid orthodoxies, its own list of acceptable thoughts, its own ways of demonizing people who didn’t fully buy in. Different rules, same game.
Ideology gravitates toward villains — billionaires, government, corporations, elites, the woke — and constructs a narrative where those villains explain what’s wrong, proposing solutions that confirm the story rather than fix anything.
People can’t afford homes. That’s reality for millions of Americans, including most of my adult children. The left blames greedy developers and landlords while the right blames overregulation. Both are partly right. Both miss that decades of zoning decisions, segregation policy, and constrained supply created a system that doesn’t work — a problem that requires examining what’s broken rather than who to blame.
Or consider care for transgender children. There are real kids here, real families, real medical decisions with long-term consequences and science so early we won’t know what’s right for years. The right has turned those kids into a culture war prop, pushing blanket bans that leave no room to consider individual circumstances. The left has made the questions themselves toxic — ask about protocols or long-term outcomes and you’re transphobic. It suppresses legitimate caution, harming children who need it most. Both sides are harming children. Not hypothetically. Right now. Because neither can afford to ask what actually helps without threatening the narrative.
Ideology isn’t worthless. It’s how injustice gets named — the civil rights movement needed moral clarity before anyone had worked out the policy. Ideology creates the will to act. But there’s a difference between ideology as a spark and ideology as a lens you press against everything you see. When it becomes the lens, it stops revealing the world and starts replacing it. You’re no longer asking what’s true or what works — you’re asking what fits. The young adult trying to stay housed, and the queer kid trying to find their way — they pay the price.
I know how hard it is to see past it. I’ve been wrong about big things twice now, and I’ll probably be wrong again. Ideology is comfortable because it protects you from that feeling. Reality doesn’t.
Your ideology sucks. Mine did too. That’s not an insult — it’s the beginning of wisdom.
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