Americans don’t like extremists

In the left or right flavor

Thanks to James Lindsay for the updated diagram

I previously wrote about how the left and right have been infected with the same disease in a different wrapper. My friend Sean sent me a recent story on what the latest is with the woke right and wanted me to talk about this topic again, so let’s try and help America once more.

An important caveat up front: I don't actually think the woke right is meaningfully conservative. On the contrary, they are spiritually leftist (note: leftists aren’t actually liberal either, don’t let the word fool you). The obsession with racial identity, desire for more government power, struggle sessions, hatred of Jews, etc are the same impulses that drove the woke left. The wrapper is different, but the operating system is remarkably similar.

Before we talk more about the woke right, it’s important to talk about the far or woke left briefly to see the behavior pattern (see the diagram above for examples of what both groups have in common). The DSA (which is, of course, not representative of all Dems, so I still don’t understand why they let them in their party) is terminally woke and will pretend to moderate, but is simply biding their time. AOC just went on record saying “woke 1 was crazy” but then immediately pivoted back to her woke ways by rallying to the defense of a 9/11 truther/antisemite (see the Venn digram above). She’s of course still woke, as are many aspiring politicians who seem to not even like the country they live in. But the average American is not woke, and honestly tired of when left does things like calling everything they don’t like “racist” or everyone they disagree with “fascist” etc. Many leftists genuinely view the world like this:

Americans hate that the left does this, and also it obscures the fact that most centrists and conservatives are reasonable, and it’s actually a projection from leftists that everyone else is a zealot

Seeing the left act like this, one would hope that the right would see it’s a bad idea. Unfortunately on the other side of the horseshoe, there are also extremists, and this brings us to some stories you may have read about the woke right. See this recent story from Noah on the topic that Sean linked us. I saw others but I’m not going to link them, because they also did the above chart which is not discourse or dialog I think is appropriate or helpful. Still, the people I saw covering this topic otherwise disagree on an enormous amount, yet they broadly agree that this fringe of the right is real, exists within conservative politics, and should be confronted, lest the right suffers from a similar pathology as the left. Again, the main thing to take away is the woke right isn’t a competing conservative philosophy, it’s simply leftist identity politics just with some preference differences. In the Republican stronghold of Florida, woke right candidate James Fishback received 10.48% of the vote in the 2026 Republican primary for Florida governor. This is still concerningly high, but it’s still way different from the DSA candidates who are actually winning elections in NYC, Seattle and other places where there’s a strong, highly educated (read: indoctrinated) population. It’s notable if the left doesn’t stop doing its own identity politics, this stuff isn’t going to go away on the right.

If you actually look at where voters have moved, most of the craziness has gone left, with a lesser % on the right in recent years. There’s many charts that look just like this, and the issue that actually triggered today’s discussion was immigration which is in this data (more on that in a minute).

It’s notable that, on the whole most independents and Republicans have stayed about the same, and far more Democrats have moved far left and become extremists.

But normal Americans hate all of it. They don’t want politicians on either side obsessed with racial identity. They don’t want any form of socialism, although if they feel like the government can’t help but spend infinite money on citizens, it should probably go to Americans. They want leaders who don’t think the West is “oppressive or evil.” They want lower taxes and less government control. They don’t want everyone obsessed over race all the time, something the left did to us in the 2010s you can see documented here (everything was trending fine before, the identity politics stuff is what started breaking our country). They want us to build, love capitalism and the state mostly leaving them alone.

Still, in super leftist places, many citizens are already indoctrinated and the socialists could easily continue to win. They’ll then suffer the same pain San Francisco did before recently sobering up and moving to the center (no one reads history, so people have to repeat mistakes). It’s all just terrible policy as Seattle is going through now, and ends up being a war on builders as we’ve talked about before and others have documented. I’ve been happier in Texas, a place that actually builds every day than I was when I left California (but always root for our California friends to sober up, and hold no ill feelings towards them). Bless America for having 50 states (50 experiments) where if your state becomes too socialist you are free to move, there’s no walls holding you in …yet.

As for national elections, the country will go with whatever party is most successful at jettisoning the crazies, or they feel is less insane. I wrote about this in 2024, but many liberal friends still can’t understand why they lost last time, because think they were saner. Religions have a hard time seeing perspective. If the right did in fact adopt at the party level, at scale, a different flavor of woke I think they’ll be sealing their own fate too. The fact that it’s losing locally shows how unpopular it is.

The discussion that people are mad about this week is immigration, which we should always be having a national debate about. The appropriate amount is obviously not 0 but it’s also not infinite, borders are important for every country and they should be enforced (without this, we don’t even have a country). Obama in 2006 was correct on this topic, and I think sane Democrats and Republicans would agree with what’s said here, but for years you weren’t even allowed to opine on this topic without being pro infinite immigration (and called all sorts of names if you disagreed). Those days are over, so we should be able to go back to proper discourse and find a middle ground.

To wrap, I’m once again asking everyone to simply be normal. And America will ultimately at the national level vote for whichever side is more normal. If you want your party to win, plead with them to eject the crazy people. And yes, as The Atlantic notes, we should judge politicians by the company they keep.