Late last decade, Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson argued Western society had an underdeveloped sense of when the Left goes too far. There was a justifiably heightened awareness around the pathologies of the Right, he argued, such as racial superiority and malignant nationalism. But the matter was less clear when it came to identifying pathology on the radical Left.
“When people make claims of racial superiority, we put them in a box and say, ‘You’re outside of acceptable political discourse,’” he said at Lafayette College. “But where the hell do you cross the line on the Left, exactly? Well, the answer is ‘Who knows?’ And that’s not a very good answer.”
To be sure, the Left’s history is marred by regimes that inflicted immense suffering. And until as recently as the 2024 election, America seemed indifferent to warning signs of the collectivism and anti-traditionalism that fueled atrocities such as the Soviet gulags and Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution.
But this is no longer true. What was once blurry in terms of identifying radical-Left pathology is now a bright red line. And on Nov. 5, a diverse majority of voters repudiated the Left and the Democratic Party for crossing it repeatedly during the Biden presidency.
The line of demarcation that separates the acceptable Left from the pathological Left in the eyes of America, as defined by exit polling and mountains of anecdotal evidence, appears to involve a tendency toward excessive openness. Whereas the pathological Right is defined by an excess of close-mindedness with tendencies toward hyperrigidity and order, the pathological Left eschews commonsense boundaries under the banner of “kindness.” During the Biden administration, this has been especially true regarding issues of immigration, crime, and the contours of a human person.
In many ways, the election results were a cry for clear boundaries after a period of pathological openness. This was especially true regarding the border crisis. In 2023 alone, at least 2 million migrants illegally crossed the southern border into the United States. Americans witnessed an endless stream of chaotic scenes at the border: groups of people making mad dashes through checkpoints and desperately splashing across the Rio Grande. In December of that year, Border Patrol counted more than 300,000 border crossers — enough people to fill Yankee Stadium six times.
How open was the southern border in 2023? So open that the number of immigrants who entered America illegally surpassed the national birth rate.
The Biden administration finally took the issue seriously in 2024, backing a comprehensive immigration reform bill and cracking down on asylum claims. But voters, already miffed by the delayed response and wise to election-year politicking, favored President-elect Donald Trump on the issue throughout the campaign.
For the past decade, Democrats have been more concerned with the perception of cultural openness than with commonsense security and order when it comes to immigration. They would often blame American policy itself for causing mass migration and denounce anyone who questioned open-border policy as xenophobic. And they would go to elaborate lengths to make themselves appear morally superior on the matter. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) staged photos at the border in 2019, in which the Latina leader theatrically bowed with sorrow and wept into her hands, is an extreme but representative example of this behavior.
The voters also drew a bright red line on the topic of crime. Despite official crime statistics trending downward in recent years, though these tallies should be received with a healthy dose of skepticism, the Democratic Party’s line on crime in the Biden era has tended toward pathological openness.
The “defund the police” movement is the obvious example of efforts to dissolve the boundaries of law enforcement. Made in response to the 2020 killing of George Floyd, the movement sought to defund, and in some instances to dissolve, the institution responsible for enforcing the boundaries of criminality.
And it wasn’t just a fringe group of leftists who took this position. Some of the most visible faces in Democratic politics, from Ocasio-Cortez to former New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio to Vice President Kamala Harris, voiced support for the movement. And some of the most prominent Democrats in entertainment followed suit, such as John Legend, Lizzo, and Jane Fonda — all of whom became prominent surrogates for the Harris campaign.
What’s more, prosecutors in blue cities across America increasingly declined to prosecute misdemeanors and pushed for the elimination of cash bail. This created a revolving-door criminal justice system in which criminals were quickly released back into the streets and police officers were less inclined to make arrests.
Indeed, at no other moment in American history were citizens asked to be as open-minded about the contours of criminal justice as during the Biden administration. Though Democrats attempted to distance themselves from these stances, its brand is now defined by them. As veteran political strategist James Carville recently remarked, it will take Democrats years to shake the “stench” from such excesses.
Liberals have also sought to dissolve the traditional and scientific boundaries regarding the nature of the human person. Through a sudden and radical explosion of sexual identities in the Biden era, the Left appeared bent on blurring all distinctions between men and women. People across all walks of life were suddenly expected to rewire their conceptions of gender and sexuality and to memorize a brand-new corresponding vocabulary, often at the threat of punishment at work and banishment from polite society.
For a nation that had been happy to usher in an era of legalized gay marriage, anti-discrimination practices, and mutual acceptance, the shift was disorienting. “Be open or else” was the message many took away.
But America finally drew its bright red line on excessive openness regarding sexuality and the human person when it came to children. These new sexual identities and their new corresponding norms were introduced explicitly into the classroom through social-emotional learning — often by teachers who loudly presented themselves as activists on this front.
Meanwhile, more and more children began identifying as transgender, and mental health statistics, especially among young girls, reached terrifying levels.
These trends were accompanied by mounting evidence that children were not simply being taught new material related to sexuality but were being asked to participate in highly sexualized rituals. Videos of highly sexualized drag queen performances at public schools began to circulate, as well as images of children observing highly sexualized displays at parades and even in dimly lit bars.
In one 2022 event called “Drag Your Kids to Pride” at a bar in Dallas, children were photographed watching a performer dance provocatively in front of a neon sign that said, “It’s not going to lick itself.”
Exit polls from the 2024 race showed that 55% believed the transgender movement had “gone too far.” The Left’s openness on sexual issues had become pathological in their eyes, and so they voted to end the chaos.
The question for the next four years is whether Trump’s efforts to restore order will itself become pathological. America indeed craves order but not excessive close-mindedness. Trump can be sure that voters will clap back just as quickly if he allows the pathological Right to gain a foothold in his administration.
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Peter Laffin is a contributor at the Washington Examiner and a staff writer for the National Catholic Register.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
