Dawns

     I can’t imagine a reason that you “should” know Evan Barker. She’s worked in left-liberal / progressive political circles for some time. That involvement recently soured on her, with unfortunate consequences.

     You see, Miss Barker committed a faux pas. She said something that made her friends and acquaintances – all left-liberal Democrats – doubt her fidelity to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful. Here’s the nub of it, in her own words:

     When I decided to go to the DNC in 2024, I wasn’t entirely sure if I was ready to move on from politics completely, or if I’d find myself re-inspired. After I got home, I went to a dinner party in San Francisco, and when a friend asked me how the DNC was, excited to hear about it, I decided to say how I really felt about the party, finally unafraid to do so. “I’m not sure if I’ll be voting for Kamala. I hated the DNC.” I watched as a familiar expression of moral superiority began to spread across her face. “You’re saying that from a place of privilege” she chided me.
     A lot of people have asked me what the exact moment was at the DNC that made me realize I wasn’t on board with the party I’d worked for nearly half of my life. The truth is, it was everything. The crowd that mindlessly chanted “joy”, the vasectomy van offering free tacos, the coronation of a candidate with zero policies or platform available, and the final straw: Oprah Winfrey. Her tone deaf lecturing turned me off so much, I left the building, getting an uber straight to my hotel, where I booked a flight home a day early, not even staying for Kamala’s acceptance speech.
     I left the dinner party early too, heading straight home, where I made a selfie video airing my true thoughts. On August 24th, 2024, I hit upload, announcing to my meager following of sixty people, many of whom were former colleagues and friends in politics, that I wouldn’t vote for Kamala Harris.

     Please read it all. It’s both eye-opening and heartbreaking.

     Miss Barker frames her decision in terms that we’ve heard from former Democrats before this: the party has “lost touch;” it’s “left its base;” and so forth. That treats the Democrat Party a bit too kindly, but it’s understandable: it also exculpates Miss Barker for her protracted association with the party. But as a certain writer I quote far too often wrote in a similar case:

     But it occurred to [Ransom] that this was possibly the first occasion in his whole life in which Weston had ever acknowledged himself in the wrong, and that even the false dawn of humility, which is still ninety-nine per cent of arrogance, ought not to be rebuffed—or not by him.

     [C. S. Lewis, Perelandra]

     So let’s be kind.

     The title of Miss Barker’s piece is most significant: “One Year Ago Today I Ruined My Life.” Ruined her life? Really? But what happened?

     In the past year, nearly all of my old political friends have stopped speaking to me. One of them said: “fascism doesn’t look good on you”, another said “why couldn’t you have waited until after the election?” The social ostracism has trickled out into my non political life, too. I’ve lost friends I’ve known for fifteen years. My toddler stopped getting invited to birthday parties. He was rejected from preschool. We even had to move to a new town.

     Those are all unpleasant and unjust consequences of her decision to disaffiliate herself from the Democrats. But properly regarded, they actually strengthen her case for having done so. A party whose members treat a departing member in such a fashion is diseased. It doesn’t represent anything that could be defended with reason and evidence. It’s a specimen of what Eric Hoffer called “a compact and unified church” – and outside that church there is no salvation.

     Miss Barker will surely reflect on that in time. So should we in the Right, for it shows us a pitfall we must avoid. Any of our fellows who announces that he’s moving to the Left should be treated courteously, however much we may deplore his decision. Political positions are not faiths, and political realignments are not some kind of secular apostasy.