Politics these days have become so divided and divisive that it’s become the norm to view the other side of the aisle as “the enemy”. People are being told to “pick a side” and that there’s no room for middle ground. We here at Phetasy believe that there are a lot more people in the middle than politicians and the media would have us believe.
We’re collecting stories from the ever growing number of people who are finding themselves Politically Homeless and posting them here on Substack. If you have moved from conservative to liberal, or liberal to conservative, if you feel you’ve stayed in the same place and your party has swerved drastically away from you, if you had a moment that awakened you to the insanity and hypocrisy on both sides, if you keep your mouth shut anytime a political topic comes up because you’re afraid your opinion will cause you to lose friends or your job, you’re not as alone as you might think.
Our goal is to shine a light on people’s earnest, individual experiences and show them they’re not alone.
Some letters have been edited for clarity and brevity. If you’re politically homeless and would like to share your story, please email us at iampoliticallyhomeless@gmail.com. All submissions will remain anonymous.
Letter 83:
December 20, 2024
It's hard to overstate how pivotal 2020 turned out to be. The consequences of hasty, disingenuous COVID lockdowns in March 2020 have reverberated outward in space and time. “Public health” officials, politicians, and corporations pathologized face-to-face connection, and hordes of people followed suit. The full ramifications remain unclear, but—I think—will be massive.
Meanwhile, the mentally decrepit Biden replaced the morally decrepit Trump. The claim that Biden represented a return to normalcy has not withstood the test of even a few years. He’s taking a beating in the battleground of public opinion for everything from inflation and the porous southern border to Ukraine and Israel. But I digress: 2020 delivered on the kind of historic change that 2000 failed to deliver.
I absorbed these developments from a series of rented apartments in which I worked remotely—one of the fortunate ones. Through various screens (i.e., magical glass gateways), I watched ostensibly authoritative institutions and individuals, one after another, bluster through incompetence, ignorance, and possibly malevolence re COVID, passing the buck and talking down to the public. The depth of their deception combined with Biden’s obvious degeneration, among other things, stand out as significant contributing factors that explain how and why I changed.
To say I went from liberal to conservative is an oversimplification in about every possible way, but it’s close enough, and I don’t want to bore you. The interesting bit is that I’m a small part of the snowballing of a political realignment that’s been happening in some form since the Great Recession. 2024 will reveal much of what remains unclear to me, particularly about the strength of America’s populist political movement(s) (e.g., Trump, RFK Jr., Vivek Ramaswamy) relative to the establishment’s stopping power (e.g., the Biden-Obama-Clinton coalition and arguably Ron DeSantis). Time will tell.
Sincerely,
Experiencing Political Homelessness
Some letters have been edited for clarity and brevity. If you'd like to share your story, email us at iampoliticallyhomeless@gmail.com. All submissions will remain anonymous.
To say I went from Liberal to Conservative is Oversimplification