Maybe it's natural to feel less at home in the world as we get older. The world keeps changing, after all, and our ability to stay current with the various, persistent changes diminishes gradually and becomes less important.
At 50, I don't relate to much of the youthful culture that I see. That's okay. It's not meant for me, and my alienation from it is natural and to be expected. I am fulfilling the time-honored tradition of each generation faced with the weirdness of the next generation.
What gives me pause, however, is my growing alienation from the world generally -- its politics, values, and basic assumptions. Is that a normal function of getting older? Does every generation eventually start to feel profoundly out of place in the mainstream? Maybe. And maybe others are more accepting of their fate. For me, it is hard to accept it so far, because my alienation feels somewhat sudden and violent. Less like a natural progression and more like a reaction to something ugly and all-consuming.
Has political and social change shifted more significantly in recent years than at other times throughout history? Probably not. I'm sure that the current extremes -- MAGA and Progressivism -- are natural responses to our current civilizational malaise, just as the industrial revolution, nationalism, global wars, technological advances, and social revolutions of the past 200 years yielded huge tears in the fabrics of our societies. But these shifts in 2026 are real. And they are profound.
Our new politics, of course, have evolved over many years, and the extremists on the Left (Progressives) and Right (MAGA) have grown and asserted themselves in symbiosis. Each is the necessary foil for the other, helping each camp define itself in opposition to those other extremists.
I still believe that most Americans don't belong to either camp -- maybe 10% of each side are real believers, maybe I'm undercounting -- but the majority of us who are in the middle (moderates, centrists, critical thinkers, upholders of liberalism, the nuanced, dispassionate, post-post-modernists) lack a brand, community, or political party. Therefore, our influence on the prevailing culture is greatly attenuated. On the other hand, MAGA has seized the federal government and is setting our current political course from the top; and Progressives have seized control of our institutions (academia, media, culture) and claim to have a monopoly on truth and morality as they bully the rest of us into submission.
Where do those of us who reject both sides belong? Where do we go when every piece of news is interpreted only through the lens of one's political tribe, when objective truths are dismissed by both sides? Take this week's crazy news: the US attacked Venezuela, arrested its leader, and pledged to run the country.
MAGA claims that this is about the drug trade (false) and is in response to Maduro's record of corruption, crime, and oppression of his own people (his record is real, our actions have little to do with that). The justifications are generally disingenuous: Trump campaigned on avoiding foreign entanglements and wars; Republicans criticized Obama for military actions not approved by Congress; the drug argument is weak and inconsistent (see Honduras and Mexico); and Maduro did not pose a direct threat to the US. Trump cares about oil, displays of power and regional influence, and continuing to distract Americans from reality in order to sell his brand.
Progressives pretend to care about human rights but certainly never organized against the vast human rights abuses by the socialist government of Venezuela, the Islamist regime of Iran, or any other country in recent memory, other than Democratic Israel. Social justice and human rights, it turns out, only apply when one can relegate "victim" and "oppressor" into familiar camps determined by critical theory and intersectionality: "oppressors" are always white (and especially Jews, the ultimate symbol of Western privilege and power among the haters); "victims" are almost always non-white; and non-whites are never responsible for their own sins, which are always a byproduct of oppression by the first group.
No amount of injustice in Venezuela, Iran, Somalia, Sudan, DRC, or any where else will elicit the attention of Progressives, because there is no Western bogeyman to blame. Their worldview is built on simplistic ideology, false moral binaries, and tribal identity rather than objective facts.
Show me an American, of any age, who can talk about current events without falling into familiar Progressive or MAGA talking points, and I will bow to the possibility of a future that doesn't require hiding in cave and isolating myself from the insanity.
