I feared liberals, and then I became one. But I’m still evolving, and you can, too.

Who were the libs? What did they want? They were bad, whoever they were. They disrespected Ronald Reagan. They were un-American. And I loved reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, hand on my heart, every morning in the creaky wooden pews of the chapel at my private Christian school.

Fortunately, we didn't know any libs. We were conservatives. The good guys. But I still puzzled over the words privately. What did they mean? It had to be something momentous.

Big questions

Finally I got up the courage to ask my dad while riding in the front seat of his pickup one day, my curiosity winning out over the same heart-pounding sense of shame and secrecy that always surrounded any mention of sex, money, or my teachers’ report-card comments.

He seemed surprised and a little grave, but I was relieved to find out the question was not off-limits. He explained that conservatives respect the past and want to preserve older ways of doing things, while liberals want to change the way things are. I was relieved to finally know this, but like all good questions, mine only led to another, bigger one, even though I didn’t have the guts to articulate it. If the whole problem was just a disagreement over how much to respect the past, what, exactly, made liberals so bad?

Liberal friends

The plot thickened when I discovered, through eavesdropping at home, that the parents of one of my friends were liberals. I was shaken. I wondered where they had gone wrong and what it felt like to be the only liberals around.

As I got a little older, I learned for the first time that it was possible to have a sense of humor about the divide. One Halloween, with our parents’ blessing, my friend and I assembled a pair of small suits and went Trick-or-Treating in sweaty latex masks of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. When some people handing out candy joked that they wouldn’t give any to Bush, it was another revelation: my friend’s parents weren’t unusual after all. Their neighborhood, outside of our church community, was full of people like them.

Well into college, I maintained the tacit sense that liberals, while they might live peacefully among us, were up to no good. By 2004, I still wasn’t plugged into politics enough to follow the election. One of my friends arrived late to class one day in early November, straight from the computer lab. They announced that Kerry had lost, and the class groaned in despair.

I kept quiet. I wasn’t registered to vote. But another four years of Bush? That was a good thing, right? As a kid, I could never have imagined being surrounded by so many liberals—or that they’d be my friends.

A budding independence

But driving around with my sweet Grampa, who listened religiously to Rush Limbaugh, was eroding my faith in conservatives. I particularly remember one rant in which Limbaugh claimed that all environmentalists were “anti-God.”

Why didn’t conservatives, devoted to preserving things, care about protecting our environment? Why were liberals, those agents of disruptive change, the ones trying to save it? I also grew confused by my proudly conservative church community’s stance on gay people. When I got to college, I finally met some. They were actually really nice. What was all the fuss about?

Wary of both parties, I registered to vote as an independent, with a vague sense that I was disappointing my family even though voting was private. But in my home state of Pennsylvania, we have closed primaries—only Republicans or Democrats can vote. I began to pay attention to the presidential campaign of a senator from Illinois. I wanted to vote in the primary. I updated my registration and officially became a Democrat.

Hope and disillusionment

In 2010, I stayed up late to watch the Senate vote on the Affordable Care Act with a deep sense of hope and awe. I had recently tried to buy new health insurance after losing my job, but was immediately turned down because of pre-existing conditions. And the policy wouldn’t even have covered any OBGYN care. I cried in desperation. Later I got health insurance through my husband’s job, and then lost it when we divorced. I was able to get a new policy through the ACA. It’s the reason I’m alive today.

Over the next decade, I learned life as a liberal has choppy waters, and not just because I was at odds with my family. Disillusioned with many aspects of Obama’s presidency, including his slowness to embrace LGBTQ equality, and horrified by the abuses of Trump’s first term, I found myself in leftist spaces where the word liberal was again an insult.

I celebrated when Biden was elected. Last year, I volunteered feverishly for a pro-Harris grassroots campaign while many of my peers sneered at her as not progressive enough and vowed to vote for a third party. They had a point, of course, but the thought of another Trump presidency horrified me—particularly because my lifesaving healthcare would again be at risk, thanks to Republican hatred of the Affordable Care Act. Meanwhile, a family member publicly berated Harris as an extreme leftist, calling her nonsensical, stupid, and a slew of other insults.

Confusion continues

If my own family sees Harris (who is squarely a politician of the modern center-right) as an idiot radical, what do they think of me? I have now protested throughout four presidential administrations, but it never felt as fraught as it does now, and not just because of Trump’s creeping threats against dissent. Peaceful, historic mass protests against Trump draw ire from the far right (who falsely characterize demonstrators as rioters or paid actors) and the far left (who scoff at protests held in cooperation with law enforcement, which many leftists want to abolish).

Somehow, through it all, Trump’s MAGA movement retains the label of “conservatives” while they steamroll the Constitution and our governmental institutions, and have suddenly abandoned their historic devotion to “states’ rights” in favor of an all-powerful executive unhampered by Congress and the courts.

How I mark the Fourth of July

After the 2024 election, a Republican family member told me that they don’t support my politics, but they respect how hard I worked for my candidate.

I wanted to scream. Harris’s speeches could have been given by a Republican before the rise of the Tea Party, which fermented into MAGA, which is so authoritarian that stolid centrists are now deemed leftist radicals. I volunteered for Harris not because of political party or devotion to a candidate, but because I wanted a critical mass of the policies she represented— healthcare access, LGBTQ rights, the separation of powers, voting rights, debt relief—even if she didn’t go far enough. And I feared the open fascism of the alternative.

As I mark the Fourth of July not with picnics or fireworks, but a quiet day to write and contemplate, I am glad at least to know my values. I can celebrate the 249th birthday of the United States not by pledging my allegiance, but by recognizing the way the institutions of a nation can help or harm its citizens. I wish I could tell my childhood self not to worry so much about political labels, and focus on doing what’s right.

At top: The writer in high school—a young conservative. (Photo courtesy of Alaina Johns.)