Were You Radicalized Or Did You Find Clarity?
When someone moves toward Marxism, toward communism, toward any politics that challenges the fundamental logic of capitalism, the question that follows them is almost always "what radicalized you?" It sounds like curiosity. It isn't. It is a diagnostic. It presupposes that something went wrong, that a rational person departed from a reasonable baseline and ended up somewhere extreme. The question carries its verdict before you answer. I want to challenge the question itself, because in my case, and I suspect in many others, the more honest answer is that nothing radicalized me. I found clarity. I was never radicalized. I voted for most of my political life on ethics, morals, and principles rather than knowledge, at least to 2016 because the knowledge had been kept from me, or I was too busy enjoying life to research. I was a Reagan Baby, raised in an environment where Marxism was treated as taboo and communism as self-evidently evil, presented not as a position to argue a...
