If you aren’t checking in regularly with Tablet, you are missing one of the best magazines in this country. Today it features an essay by Liel Leibovitz, about how the insanity of the Left drove him — a lifelong progressive — out of the Left. He begins by talking about how all his life he was an unconflicted partisan of the Left. These were the Good People. These were his people. More:

I embraced my people, and my people embraced me. They gave me everything I had always imagined I wanted: a Ph.D. from an Ivy League university; a professorship at NYU, complete with a roomy office overlooking Washington Square Park; book deals; columns in smart little publications; invitations to the sort of soirees where you could find yourself seated next to Salman Rushdie or Susan Sontag or any number of the men and women you grew up reading and admiring. The list goes on. Life was good. I was grateful.

But then Leibovitz experienced The Turn:

You may be among the increasing numbers of people going through The Turn right now. Having lived through the turmoil of the last half decade—through the years of MAGA and antifa and rampant identity politics and, most dramatically, the global turmoil caused by COVID-19—more and more of us feel absolutely and irreparably politically homeless. Instinctively, we looked to the Democratic Party, the only home we and our parents and their parents before them had ever known or seriously considered. But what we saw there—and in the newspapers we used to read, and in the schools whose admission letters once made us so proud—was terrifying. However we tried to explain what was happening on “the left,” it was hard to convince ourselves that it was right, or that it was something we still truly believed in. That is what The Turn is about.

You might be living through The Turn if you ever found yourself feeling like free speech should stay free even if it offended some group or individual but now can’t admit it at dinner with friends because you are afraid of being thought a bigot. You are living through The Turn if you have questions about public health policies—including the effects of lockdowns and school closures on the poor and most vulnerable in our society—but can’t ask them out loud because you know you’ll be labeled an anti-vaxxer. You are living through The Turn if you think that burning down towns and looting stores isn’t the best way to promote social justice, but feel you can’t say so because you know you’ll be called a white supremacist. You are living through The Turn if you seethed watching a terrorist organization attack the world’s only Jewish state, but seethed silently because your colleagues were all on Twitter and Facebook sharing celebrity memes about ending Israeli apartheid while having little interest in American kids dying on the streets because of failed policies. If you’ve felt yourself unable to speak your mind, if you have a queasy feeling that your friends might disown you if you shared your most intimately held concerns, if you are feeling a bit breathless and a bit hopeless and entirely unsure what on earth is going on, I am sorry to inform you that The Turn is upon you.

The Turn hit me just a beat before it did you, so I know just how awful it feels. It’s been years now, but I still remember the time a dear friend and mentor took me to lunch and warned me, sternly and without any of the warmth you’d extend to someone you truly loved, to watch what I said about Israel. I still remember how confusing and painful it felt to know that my beliefs—beliefs, mind you, that, until very recently, were so obvious and banal and widely held on the left that they were hardly considered beliefs at all—now labeled me an outcast. The Turn brings with it the sort of pain most of us don’t feel as adults; you’d have to go all the way back to junior high, maybe, to recall a stabbing sensation quite as deep and confounding as watching your friends all turn on you and decide that you’re not worthy of their affection any more. It’s the kind of primal rejection that is devastating precisely because it forces you to rethink everything, not only your convictions about the world but also your idea of yourself, your values, and your priorities. We all want to be embraced. We all want the men and women we consider most swell to approve of us and confirm that we, too, are good and great. We all want the love and the laurels; The Turn takes both away.

Read it all. 

It doesn’t sound like Leibovitz became a conservative. He just became anti-woke. I get it.

To be fair, there are some nuts on the Right who would disfellowship you because you are insufficiently pro-Trump. But in general, you don’t have to worry about that sort of thing when you are in conservative circles. I’m generalizing, but right-wing people tend to think left-wingers are foolish; left-wingers tend to think that right-wing people are evil.

Don’t believe me? Look:

Add to the “why is everything liberal?” files. 41% of college Democrats wouldn’t shop at a business of the other side, 37% wouldn’t be friends with them, numbers for Republicans are 7% and 5%! Bad news if you dislike woke institutions, get used to it. https://t.co/rvGzSvKSZx pic.twitter.com/XrChVVPziH

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) December 8, 2021

As longtime readers know, one of my oldest friends — a friend of forty years — severed our friendship earlier this year after she read a letter I wrote to the editor of the local paper supporting Sen. Bill Cassidy’s support for the second Trump impeachment (the one over his actions on January 6). She is a left-wing radical. After reading that letter, she said we could no longer be friends. I reminded her that I supported impeachment, and our Senator who voted for impeachment. Yes, she said, but you said that Donald Trump did some good things in office, and that is intolerable.

I realized then that this woman, a dear friend whom I love, would easily be Madame Defarge, quietly knitting and planning on the people who need to be dealt with in the event of a revolution. Who can do this? Who can end a human relationship of forty years over a slight deviation in political belief? (In fact, we hold very different political beliefs, but she was ghosting me because I thought that Trump, though deserving impeachment over January 6, had done some good things.)

I do not understand people like that. But I do understand that they exist, and that they hold a disproportionate amount of power in this country. One more quote from Leibovitz: