Like many immigrants, when I immigrated to the U.S. for graduate studies, I was naturally drawn to the left. I saw it as the side that stood firmly against xenophobia and racism, championing values of tolerance and equality. I wasn’t especially political then, but I’ve always believed in a society where opportunity is open to all, where race, gender, or other inherent traits don’t dictate one’s path. For nearly a decade, left-leaning values aligned with my core values of fairness, equality, and freedom. Yet now, I question why I feel increasingly out of place.
In recent years, the left’s commitment to equality has morphed into an almost obsessive focus on equity. While the two terms may seem interchangeable, their meanings are fundamentally different. Equality is about providing everyone with the same opportunities, whereas equity demands the manipulation of outcomes to achieve a perceived balance—often at the expense of individual merit and need. This shift threatens to undermine the foundational principles of fairness and opportunity that should unite us.
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Today, the left’s preoccupation with identity politics, driven by this quest for equity, often deepens divisions rather than fostering unity. Policies designed to promote equity frequently reinforce the very barriers they purport to dismantle, categorizing us by race, sex, sexual orientation, gender, and countless other immutable traits. Genuine problem-solving appears to have taken a back seat to divisive classification, leaving every issue fragmented by identity.
Consider the Supreme Court’s decision to end affirmative action in college admissions, which provided an opportunity to refocus on creating race-neutral, need-based policies that can uplift the truly disadvantaged across all backgrounds. Instead, the left’s response was to double down on racial segmentation, insisting on policies that prioritize race in an effort to artificially engineer a diverse student body, all while sidelining fairness and merit.
Similarly, Vice President Harris’s campaign proposal for fully forgivable loans exclusively for Black entrepreneurs raises troubling questions. While the intention behind such policies is clear—addressing the underrepresentation of Black business owners—the focus on race is not only constitutionally dubious but also risks benefiting well-off individuals in this group while overlooking genuinely struggling entrepreneurs from other backgrounds.
The left has gone so far as to claim that objective standards in education—like getting the right answers in math—are somehow “racist.”
The struggles of Black and Latino students are chalked up to these standards being too “white-centric.” Yet the data show that Asian students, even after adjusting for income, consistently perform well in academics. Instead of addressing real issues like poverty and systemic educational disparities, the focus seems to be on a shallow sense of representation that could end up reinforcing stereotypes rather than dismantling them.
Then there’s the relentless push for gender-neutral language and policies. It’s a high-priority crusade on the left, even though only about 1% of Americans identify as transgender.
The Biden-Harris administration’s recent proposal limiting schools’ ability to prevent biologically male students from competing in women’s sports raises the obvious question: How do we have meaningful women’s sports or sex-segregated spaces if they aren’t separated by biological sex?
It is one thing to create inclusive environments that genuinely welcome everyone; it’s quite another to impose language and policies that disregard the realities faced by most Americans.
For instance, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has criticized those who refuse to use the gender-neutral term “Latinx” in place of “Latino” or “Latina,” even though a Pew Research survey found that only 4% of the Hispanic community identifies with that term.
Another glaring example of pointless language policing is the egregious editing of Roald Dahl’s work, which drew backlash from both fans and prominent authors like Salman Rushdie. In “The Witches,” a mention of women working in grocery stores was altered to women working as scientists, seemingly in a lackluster effort to inspire girls to pursue STEM careers. Similarly, in “James and the Giant Peach,” the innocuous reference to ‘white’ in the phrase “his face white with horror” was rewritten as “his face agog with horror.”
As author James Kirchick put it, leftist policies can sometimes feel like a game of “rock, paper, scissors,” with identity defining one’s place in a bizarre victim hierarchy that makes sense only within this framework of identity politics.
I still believe in the core values the left professes to uphold—freedom, equality, and opportunity. Ironically, I find myself increasingly aligning with those who challenge identity-driven policies that compromise these ideals.
Social conservatives have, by and large, moved past old battles of racial segregation or same-sex marriage. Instead, many on the right champion individual freedom, genuine equality, and policies that do not require sacrificing fairness. Entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, for example, supports an individual’s right to identify freely while opposing policies that encroach on others’ rights, such as racial discrimination in college admissions or allowing biologically male athletes in women’s sports.
This transition isn’t without internal conflict. Certain issues on the right, like environmental policy and the occasional inflammatory rhetoric, still give me pause. Yet, the left’s fixation on identity-driven policies with scant attention to other critical priorities like climate change leaves me without a comfortable place to stand.
As the left continues to prioritize identity over individuality and principle, I suspect many others like me—those who once saw the left as a beacon of hope—will find themselves moving rightward. For me, it’s not about partisan loyalty but principle. And if these principles lead me right, then so be it.
Photo by Vincent M.A. Janssen: https://www.pexels.com/photo/close-up-photo-of-person-wearing-guy-fawkes-mask-2698475/