The Purpose of the Left (and Fences)
Colin Wright’s viral meme has been making the rounds again: three stick figures stand on a timeline marked “2008,” “2012,” and “2021.” The figure on the left sprints further left each year, dragging the “center” with it, while the other two try to stand their ground.
It’s crude, but it captures something many people feel and I can certainly relate to: my views have not changed much, but the political ground moved beneath my feet…
That feeling shows up in the testimonies of once-Democratic voters who now call themselves independent or even right-leaning. It also shows up in the escalation of rhetorical labels like “right-of-center” and morphs into “far-right,” “alt-right,” and “MAGA extremist.” If the Left leaves you behind, like happened to Bari Weiss of the Free Press, they don’t call you a “disaffected liberal” for long. Soon you’ll be pegged as a fascist.
The center completely frays.
To see the shift, rewind to 1992. Watch Bill Clinton’s acceptance speech and listen to the table-stakes values he projects: hard work, family, faith, personal responsibility, patriotism. You don’t have to believe he meant what he said or lived them out himself to notice how comfortably Clinton invoked them—and how normal it all sounded. Those words today are usually coded as “right-wing.”
The reality behind the meme didn’t appear out of thin air. It happened so gradually, and then all at once, you could be forgiven for not noticing before it was too late.
What Even Is the “Left” and “Right”?
In the broad Western tradition, the “left” has meant the party of change and revolution against existing authority and the “right,” the party of tradition, constraint, and continuity. The American Founding complicates this a bit. Our “revolutionaries” ranged from borderline-monarchists to radical libertarians, eventually settling on a constitution that curbed power, divided it, and assumed humans are fallen creatures in need of checks and balances.
Jefferson’s rhetoric sometimes nodded to France, but Madison’s architecture—our separation of powers—anchored us to something more stable. France was a bloody mess.
This matters today because the most radical energies come from the cultural and political left. They are animated by an old revolutionary impulse to overthrow norms, redefine institutions, and dismiss moderate voices as “reactionaries.” There is a very real risk that what they pursue could end in the same mess as the French Revolution. Lord knows they wink wink at it.
Victory and Old Fences
Then there’s the question of victory. On many cultural fronts, the left has won so decisively that it now resembles an immune system with no pathogen to fight. Without clear limits, it turns inward and begins attacking the body politic itself, policing language, historical memory, and motives. Call it political autoimmunity. When everything is oppressive, nothing is legitimate and compromise becomes impossible.
Just look at what’s happening in NYC with the election of Zohran Mamdani. His booster, Hasan Piker, couldn’t stop himself from hailing Zohran’s victory while bemoaning the fall of the Soviet Union… yeah. Weird.
That doesn’t mean the left has no role. A healthy society needs reformers who expose corruption, challenge stale assumptions, and widen the circle of dignity. The problem is when reform hardens into permanent revolution, and the goalposts always move.
The right’s job is to remember why we don’t do that. We try to keep human nature’s worst angels from taking the wheel and smashing through historic fences. The left’s job, at its best, is to remind us when guardrails have become barriers to needed improvements.
There’s a path back to normal. It starts with the left doing something the right cannot do for it: cleaning house. Draw bright moral lines that reject political violence, de-platforming by mob, and the collective punishment of heretics. Make room for dissent without defamation. If that happens, many of the people the meme shows drifting right will return to the middle, because they never really left it.
Until then, some of us will stand where we’ve always stood and let the shifting ground move beneath us.
Stability.
Ordered liberty.
An inherited future.
This is the American center. We have to rebuild and fence it properly before the immune system destroys the host.