I'm Not As Optimistic As Michael Schellenberger

But I am not so arrogant that I believe I have a perfect grasp of those realities, and I look to Schellenberger as one of my teachers on many matters. He tends to be more farsighted than I, and he is frankly just smarter in most respects. More than once I have scratched my head and wondered, "Why on Earth would he say THAT?," only to come around to his analysis after some deep thought and time. 

It's humbling. 

Still, I don't always disagree with him, and usually it is because I am more cynical than he. Despite his ability to see into some of the darker aspects of life in the 21st century, he retains a sunny optimism that I have lost in my 62 years. 

Yesterday, I described the now-overwhelming body of evidence that the Left, and not the Right, radicalized.

Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Political Psychology Lab found that the Left had grown over ten times more extreme than the Right on core issues from 1988 to… pic.twitter.com/79484JtVug

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) August 26, 2026

Yesterday, I described the now-overwhelming body of evidence that the Left, and not the Right, radicalized. 

Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Political Psychology Lab found that the Left had grown over ten times more extreme than the Right on core issues from 1988 to 2024. 

That data is backed up by Gallup and Pew data showing a similarly dramatic asymmetric shift on the issues. 

I noted that the people who radicalized the most were the college-educated, with postgraduates swinging left after 2010, while every less-educated bloc in America drifted right.

And yet many and often most progressives cling to clearly false beliefs. 

They believe Anthony Fauci is a hero of science despite overwhelming evidence that Fauci promoted destructive school closures and universal vaccination against the best scientific evidence. 

Progressives believe ICE is as bad as the Gestapo, or nearly so, a comparison that Democratic lawmakers made repeatedly. 

They believe police kill unarmed black men by the hundreds or thousands every year out of racial bias, even though the Harvard economist Roland Fryer first found no racial difference in police shootings a decade ago, and newer benchmarking against crime rates and a 2023 review of more recent data have come to the same conclusion. 

The Left still believes Trump and Republicans are fascists and came within hours of overthrowing the government on January 6. Progressives believe climate change threatens life on Earth. 

They support “gender affirming” surgeries on adolescents, even though a 2024 study of more than 90 million patient records found that adults who underwent such surgery attempted suicide at 12 times the rate of other emergency room patients and at nearly five times the rate of matched patients who had undergone tubal ligations or vasectomies...

In a subscriber-only post (sorry, but Michael has to make a living too), Schellenberger argues that at some point in the future liberals will wake up and realize with horror that they were on the wrong side of many of the most pressing social issues of the day. 

Ah, I wish that were so, but I don't share his optimism that most of these people will learn their lesson. They believe now that they are morally superior to people who disagree with them, and they will do so on their deathbeds. 

Michael is right, I believe, that many liberals will evolve away from their most damaging opinions, although long, long after they have lost the public relations battle. It's even happening before our eyes, at least occasionally. 

Some on the Left are snapping out of it. The Atlantic, a liberal magazine, published an essay titled “The Liberal Misinformation Bubble About Youth Gender Medicine” last year. Last month, Michael Powell wrote for the same magazine that harm reduction policies had created a “zombie apocalypse,” resulting in 862,000 Americans dying of drug overdoses between 2014 and 2024, more than twice the toll of the previous decade. Two weeks ago, The Atlantic ran a cover story, “Confessions of a Token Black Professor,” in which Tyler Austin Harper described in detail the paranoid anti-white racism of progressive university administrators and professors. Jonathan Chait warnedin The Atlantic in July that the Democratic Socialists of America had become the very thing it was founded to oppose. After Democrats lost men under 30 in 2024, a group of Democratic strategists launched a two-year, $20 million project that promised a “shift from a moralising tone.” In December, the European Commission dropped the EU’s 2035 ban on new combustion-engine cars, its biggest retreat from its green policies in years, and the Left allowed it without mass protest. In Britain, then-Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a national statutory inquiry into grooming gangs after months of resisting one.

I, too, have noticed this trend and occasionally celebrated it. But it gives me little hope that liberals are learning their lesson, which is to avoid living in the liberal bubble. 

As a group, they are not realizing that the bubble is filled with toxic, often intoxicating air that is poisoning their minds. What they are doing is following the herd, and the herd never wakes up to the fact that they were fundamentally wrong and backed evil when it counted. 

Schellenberger sees that liberals love living in that bubble, and cling to the shared opinions far longer than any rational person could possibly do so. He doesn't deny this at all. 

In fact, many progressives have doubled down on dogma. Gallup recorded a record 59% of Democrats identifying as liberal in 2025, up from 55% in 2024, and found that 66% of Democrats view socialism positively, against 42% for capitalism. One-third of Democrats now identify as democratic socialists. Jonathan Rauch of The Atlantic, who says he had resisted calling Trump a fascist, wrote a January essay headlined, “Yes, It’s Fascism,” despite the reality that Trump has obeyed Supreme Court orders and not dissolved Congress and started ruling as a dictator. Five House candidates backed by the Democratic Socialists of America won primaries in Democratic districts this summer, and the DSA’s updated platform calls for abolishing ICE, the Senate, prisons, and borders. The Gestapo comparison, which Tim Walz introduced in a May 2025 commencement speech, had spread across the party’s congressional delegation by January 2026. House Judiciary Democrats released two reports and a fact sheet on “the evidentiary record of the insurrection” for the fifth anniversary, describing the riot as an “attempted coup.”

Many, if not most, of the beliefs that progressives hold have been repeatedly debunked and shown to cause harm, including by liberal academics and journalists. And yet they, including a disproportionate number of college-educated professionals who believe themselves to be uniquely informed and educated about science, continue to hold false beliefs and debunked dogmas. Why is that?

Where I differ from Schellenberger is not whether many or most liberals will change their minds on many of the most extreme positions they have parroted; I think most of them will. 

It's his confidence that they will realize that they have been the "baddies" who have caused all the damage that made them change their minds. I don't believe that at all. 

Instead, they will, post facto, construct reasons for why they were right to act as they did, even though what they did has turned out to be damaging. They will discount the damage without denying some happened, and they will justify it by blaming "MAGA" or some other malefactor who really made them do it. 

In the new horror film “Obsession,” the spell over its victim, Nikki, occasionally breaks, and she becomes horrified by whatever it is she has been doing. In one of those moments, Nikki’s eyes widen, she says, “What the f----?” and she falls backward off the bed, at which point she slips back into her trance. Nikki’s reaction is so terrifying that it serves as one of the film’s great jump scares.

Something similar is likely to happen to a growing number of progressives as they snap out of the trance and see what they are implicated in, including the destruction of friendships and careers; the sterilization of adolescents suffering a psychiatric disorder; the demoralization of the police and the legitimation of grievance that increased black homicides; the enabling of drug dealers to kill mentally ill addicts with fentanyl; a crisis of illiteracy brought on by progressive education, the teachers unions, and school closures; the covering up of rape gangs in Britain; the destruction of universities; the spreading of anxiety disorders over climate change; and much more.

Of course, many, if not most, progressives will deny what happened, or deny their role in it, as many already have. MS NOW’s Joe Scarborough will likely continue to compare ICE agents to “shock troops.” CNN will still file its Capitol riot coverage under the heading “January 6 insurrection” with a “Timeline of the coup.” House Democrats will likely continue to insist that there was no Covid origins cover-up. LGBT groups will continue to claim that children benefit from puberty blockers, hormones, and surgeries.

But the evidence that those things happened, and are still happening, will eventually catch up to the wider society, as it always has. The Inquisition condemned Galileo in 1633 before the Church accepted heliocentrism over the following two centuries. For over two decades in the mid-19th century, doctors did not believe that washing hands in chlorinated lime prevented the spread of disease, ostracizing the colleague who discovered it, before coming around. Walter Freeman kept performing and promoting lobotomies for two decades after a pioneer of the procedure declared its end in 1952, and his own 1971 follow-up of 707 schizophrenics found 73% still hospitalized or in “a state of idle dependency.” In many major paradigm shifts, the liberal mainstream of society rejected the evidence for years before coming around.

Research shows that the “backfire effect” may be seriously overstated. In 1952, most of the Chicago UFO cultists quietly left the group after the catastrophe and salvation didn’t arrive. When two other scientists tested 52 issues on more than 10,100 subjects they found no correction capable of triggering backfire. In fact, corrections generally moved people modestly toward the facts. Since then, Nyhan has acknowledged that the durability of misperceptions comes less from backfire than from the linkage between false claims and group identity.

“Obsession” may serve as a parable. One online theory proposes that Nikki snapped out of her trance every time she caught a glimpse of herself in a mirror, and that the entranced part of her tried to avoid them. That’s where many progressives appear to be now: avoiding a look in the mirror. But eventually, there will be enough people holding up mirrors that a growing number of people on the Left will have no choice other than to see the consequences of their disastrous policies and beliefs reflected back at them.

Far from being horrified, I believe they will preen about how they cared so much about doing the right thing that they just went a bit overboard. 

Sure, saying that vaccine dissenters should be thrown into camps was a bit overboard, but they just wanted to save lives, unlike those selfish dissenters who wanted grandma dead! Sure, chopping off kids' genitals was not the best way to solve gender dysphoria, but the opponents wanted these kids to commit suicide. 

They will point to their intentions, as if good intentions excuse ignoring facts and doing evil. Most of these people will have no self-realization or growth. 

Obviously, some people have already woken up, seen the evil, and want to repair the damage. Courageous people exist, and I applaud them. Having been wrong is not, in itself, unforgivable. We all get it wrong sometimes, even on big issues. 

But refusing to look in the mirror and acknowledge the damage is unforgivable, at least to the extent that we should never trust these people again to make serious decisions. Being unwilling to learn or celebrating your worst moments as examples of virtue disqualifies you from being taken seriously. 

Perhaps I am just too cynical, and Michael is right. I hope he is, and a few years from now I will have another Aha! moment. 

But I am skeptical.