The dream of the 90s is dead-good

What I’m about to write is without rancor, and has no intent to ridicule or belittle. I mean this without value or character judgment.

Many former liberals, or liberals who are waking up to the excess, or—pick the term that won’t offend you, whatever it is—are missing the bigger picture. About what? About the culture and politics change that Trump and half the country are ushering in.

What they miss is that, no, they can’t have “the 90s back.” That’s not going to happen.

See this? It’s dead. You’re not getting it back. You shouldn’t want it back. It’s over.

What I mean by that is people (many of them are my friends, again, I’m not judging or ridiculing, I promise) are upset at their former leftist tribe for “going too far.” What makes them nervous now is the backlash. What about that makes them nervous?

It’s not that they’re worried that, for example, the state of being homosexual itself will become illegal. Or, that women who get abortions at any stage of pregnancy will be put in jail. Yes! Wait-I do acknowledge that some of you are worried about that. I too worry in the abstract that it could go that far, and it’s reasonable to be skeptical of backlash extremes. However, it is not the case that we have to have either 24/7 bootlicking worship of protected classes, or we’ll be killing them in the streets. I’m not going to stop trying to put the woke privilege away out of fear that someone will go too far. I ask you not to do this either. That’s “splitting”-black and white, all-or-nothing, catastrophizing thinking. Splitting is a hallmark of borderline personality thinking, which means it’s also a hallmark of the modern left. To a close approximation, the modern left legitimately has borderline personality disorder. All of us who are in it, or were in it, therefore, have picked up borderline-style thinking, me included.

Now that the extremes are accounted for here, I ask you to bracket them and please direct your attention to something different.

Former leftists are worried about a lot less than these extremes. They’re worried that we won’t make a big deal about black history month anymore. They’re worried that homosexuals won’t get to have their pride month anymore because the trans went too far. Scads of women are worried that they won’t have the “misogyny” excuse anymore for just about everything from their job disappointments to men talking back and telling them they’re being too selfish and emotional, for example.

If this describes you, I ask you to please consider this very seriously: You’re worried about things that, I say as gently as I can, you’re not entitled to, and that you don’t deserve. These things—call it the Universal Liberal Agreement of 1964-2024—are not your birthright.

No. They are not the base indicators of “civilized society.” They are extraordinary deference and accommodations that in and of themselves do harm. They do harm to other people (remember, you, members of protected classes*, are not the only humans who have interests that need servicing. Other people exist.). They do harm to our high-trust society.

And they do harm to you, too. They feel good, I know. It’s really nice and pretty easy when you have a Systemic Oppression excuse for everything, isn’t it? I know it is. I spent decades of my life being that kind of leftist. I was wrong. They limit our agency; they make us dependent, whiny, and narcissistic.

These special deferences came from a specific place and time in our history. I don’t think they were very helpful responses to real discrimination even when they were new, but we could at least understand why they seemed that way when they happened in their historical era.

But it is not 1964. It is 2025.

Part of making America great again in a substantive way for everyone is letting go of special accommodations and U.S.-Civil Rights-Baby Boomer-Late-20th-Century-derived privileges and carve-outs. We don’t need them, and we are not entitled to them.

That’s over. We’re starting to bury these things in the grave that’s been waiting patiently past time.

Yes, you are going to run into some people who go too far. You’re going to run into actual homophobes, actual racists, and (though many fewer than you like to claim) actual misogynists. Yes. Humans are involved, and humans with bad intent are going to take advantage of opportunities.

Yes.

But no. You’re not going to stop this cultural change because you fear that. People like me aren’t going to let you, and if you insist on trying to “keep a lid on it” people like me and you are going to find each other on the other side of enemy lines. I’m only observing what’s going to happen (and I don’t want it to happen), I’m not “making a threat.” That simply is what’s going to happen. I’m not with you if you want to keep your carve outs. I will fight any efforts to re-invigorate these boogeyman concepts.

Again, we can’t have the 90s back. The 90s were nice, but they were not stable. They were only a stopping point on the same spectrum that brought us to woke. We, you and I, remember them as better and more stable than they were because they occurred in our young adulthood. We feel them, and we remember the good times we had.

The times were good, but that doesn’t mean the times were stable.

The dream of the 90s is dead, and it should be dead. What we build now will look different from what we’ve had before.

Clinging to the era of “You can say what you want, but only after you do race/land/sex/sexuality oppression acknowledgments, and only if you frame all of your actions in relation to how they affect minorities” is an example of what Barbara Wegner calls “miswanting.” It’s an eye-opening concept, and I recommend her writing on the topic. It gave me a new perspective.

The Universal Liberal Agreement of 1964-2024 is a pair of training wheels that we’re still riding on at 30 years old. They’re no longer a help, but a handicap. It’s time to grow all the way up.

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*Yes. The entire concept of “protected classes” under law needs to go. All of it. Women. Gays. Blacks. Indians. “Queers.” All of it needs to go. All of it is illegitimate.

If we can’t apply the law equally, then our work needs to be in rooting out that problem and bringing consequences to prosecutors who refuse to take certain crimes seriously because of bias. The answer is not to make minority groups Sacred Castes In Law.

Yes. I’m saying the U.S. Supreme Court doctrine of “heightened scrutiny” for protected classes also needs to be rooted out and repudiated.