How the GOP Won Over a Liberal Canadian

As the night wore on, the source of my unease became unmistakable: I couldn’t bring myself to sign up for today’s prevailing liberal movement, which has taken over, both in my homeland of Canada and in the U.S., the left-leaning parties I aligned with since my youth. It’s a movement I call the “new left.”

During the Covid-19 pandemic, the new left championed policies that jettisoned our most fundamental civil liberties. Whether the measures “slowed the spread” was beside the point: They threatened the foundational principles of liberal democracy and deserved public scrutiny. The new left was in no mood for scrutiny, though. Anyone who questioned its pandemic policies was branded a sociopath and a troglodyte.

Long before Covid, the American Civil Liberties Union understood the hazards of creating an emergency state. “The threat of a new pandemic will never subside,” the ACLU wrote in a 2008 white paper on pandemic preparedness. “If we allow the fear associated with a potential outbreak to justify the suspension of liberties in the name of public health, we risk not only undermining our fundamental rights, but alienating the very communities and individuals that are in need of help and thereby fomenting the spread of disease.”

Thirteen years later, in a remarkable about-face, the ACLU positioned universal vaccine mandates as necessary to civil rights: “By inoculating people from the disease’s worst effects, the vaccines offer the promise of restoring to all of us our most basic liberties.” The message comes straight from the new left’s playbook: Your rights aren’t inalienable, they’re conditional on jumping through government-dictated hoops.

My wariness with the new left goes beyond its Covid policies. For the past decade, I’ve witnessed the movement’s increasingly rigid ideology, which seeks not to understand dissent but to muzzle it. Examples abound. In early 2021, law professor

Jason Kilborn

was barred from his University of Illinois Chicago campus for citing slurs in an exam question about a race- and sex-discrimination lawsuit—even though he expurgated the offending words with blank space after the initial letters. A few months later, Reuters data scientist

Zac Kriegman

was fired for questioning whether police shootings fall along racial lines.

The new left holds that “words are violence”—that people have no more right to say nasty things than to give someone a black eye.

Suzanne Nossel,

author of the book “Dare to Speak,” takes exception to this stance. Recognizing that the harms of free speech “must not mean equating speech with violence,” she writes. “Doing so legitimizes violent reactions to speech, and can convert reasoned debates into physical altercations.”

The best response to a bad argument is a better argument. Think Mr. Kriegman’s argument is flawed? Fine, do the research to prove it. Write an op-ed that counters his claims. Don’t fire a data scientist for analyzing data, which stifles intellectual honesty and innovation.

I still care about many traditionally leftist ideals, from a livable minimum wage to universal healthcare. But my heart has started to put less weight on these and more on the fundamental freedoms the new left treats as disposable. The movement has exposed its deeply authoritarian stripes, which constitute a graver threat to the free world than anything the right is throwing my way.

The heart doesn’t compete with our rational thoughts, it reveals them. And what my heart told me on Election Day was that the new left had betrayed the values that meant everything to me. By the end of Tuesday evening, I was rooting for the red.

Ms. Bauer is a medical journalist.