How Americans Stopped Arguing About Ideas and Started Joining Political Gangs

A few weeks ago I made what I thought was a fairly harmless observation on a well known biased platform. The kind of platform that debating just leaves many circling the drain and losing brain cells.

Most Americans do not know the difference between a liberal, a progressive, a leftist, a moderate, a neoliberal, a socialist, or a communist. The reaction was immediate.

Some people informed me there was no difference between any of those categories. Others argued the distinctions existed but were meaningless. A few insisted that all of them represented the same thing anyway. One commenter declared moderate Democrats extinct. Another wanted to know why anyone would care. Someone else asked what my end goal was, as though distinguishing between political ideologies required an ulterior motive.

The more responses appeared, the more interesting the discussion became. Not because people disagreed. People disagree about politics every day. What caught my attention was how quickly the conversation moved away from the ideas themselves. Very few people wanted to discuss what separated one political tradition from another. Instead, the discussion became a debate about belonging. The labels appeared and of course the assumptions arrived shortly after. Before long, entire political traditions were being put into a handful of emotional categories.

The liberal became the communist. The progressive became the socialist. Democrats became the leftist and the distinctions disappeared almost immediately.

One comment stayed with me. A man wrote that we are not living in a political science class and therefore nobody cares about labels. Judging by the reactions, many people agreed with him. Honestly, I understood the point.

Most people are not spending their evenings reading political philosophy. They are working jobs, paying their rent, worrying about healthcare, raising children, commuting to work, paying mortgages, and trying to survive an economy that seems determined to charge more for everything than it did yesterday. Politics enters most people’s lives through experience before it enters through theory.

Yet there remains something strange about holding strong opinions regarding categories that nobody wants to define.

Mention communism and someone points to China. Mention China and someone points to the Soviet Union. Mention socialism and someone points to California. The conversation always moves swiftly from label to conclusion without spending much time on definition. Whether modern China resembles classical Marxist theory, state capitalism, authoritarian nationalism, or some combination of all three rarely enters the discussion. The label does most of the work.

The same thing happens elsewhere across the political spectrum. A person can spend years attacking socialism without understanding how it differs from liberalism. Another can spend years criticizing conservatism without distinguishing between a libertarian, a constitutional conservative, a nationalist, a populist, or a neoconservative. The labels remain familiar while the meanings become increasingly vague.

After the first discussion, I made a similar observation about conservatives. Most Americans probably could not distinguish between libertarians, fiscal conservatives, constitutional conservatives, MAGA populists, evangelicals, nationalist Republicans, moderates, and neoconservatives either. However, the reaction was different.

Many of the strongest responses to the first observation came from self-identified conservatives who immediately added liberals, progressives, leftists, neoliberals, Democrats, socialists, and communists into a single category. Yet when distinctions appeared within conservative politics, those distinctions suddenly became easier to recognize. People who had argued that labels were meaningless now had opinions about the differences.

The contradiction appeared over and over and over again. Several people insisted labels did not matter while defending the labels they identified with. Others argued distinctions were meaningless while demanding that distinctions important to them be recognized. A few dismissed the entire conversation before spending considerable time participating in it.

An additional kink emerged when the original discussion concerning liberals, progressives, leftists, neoliberals, socialists, and communists eventually disappeared from the platform. A nearly identical discussion involving conservatives remained active. I have no idea why one stayed and the other vanished. Perhaps it was reported, well it was definitely reported and some moderators out voted against the post. What interested me more than the removal itself was the intensity of the reaction surrounding the first conversation. The experience left me thinking less about political labels and more about how people arrive at politics in the first place.

Most people do not arrive there through books. They arrive through family. Through church . Through neighborhoods. Through work. Through television. Through social media. Through economic frustrations. Through experiences that shape how they see the world long before they encounter political theory. By the time ideological labels enter the conversation, many loyalties have already been formed.

That reality does not make people irrational. It makes them human. But it does help explain why discussions about political ideology often become discussions about identity. The argument may begin with labels, but it rarely stays there for long. Before long, people are talking about who belongs, who does not belong, who can be trusted, who cannot be trusted, and which side represents people like them.

Reading through the responses felt less like reading a discussion about political philosophy and more like watching sports fans explain why their team matters and the other team does not. The details changed from person to person, but the pattern remained remarkably consistent.

What struck me most was not the confusion. It was the indifference. Many people were not arguing that the distinctions were wrong. They were arguing that the distinctions did not matter. That may be the more interesting observation. A society can survive disagreement. A society can survive competing political traditions. What becomes more difficult is maintaining meaningful public discussion when understanding itself begins to feel optional.

The original observation was never really about liberals, conservatives, socialists, communists, progressives, or populists. It was about whether ideas still deserve to be understood before they are embraced or rejected.

Judging from the responses, that question may be more important than the labels themselves.

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and Print Pomona Art Book Fair. And he will charge you 2.5 Million dollars for event photography.

Interestingly enough there are certain cultural rituals that don’t need a marketing department. Las Posadas is one of them. It’s a tradition held together by abuelas, borrowed guitars, paper lanterns, and the collective memory of people who have survived more displacement than most cities are willing to admit. You don’t corporatize a Posada; you just show up, eat a tamal, and try not to sing off-key.

Which is why the sponsorship banner hits with the force of accidental comedy.

Of all things to attach a polished logo to, Athens Services chose this, a reenactment of a couple turned away at every door, a story about refuge and scarcity and community stepping up when institutions don’t. And suddenly, the city’s waste contractor is the presenting sponsor, smiling in the program like a benevolent uncle who never paid rent but always wants credit for the lights staying on.

It’s not offensive.

It’s just… funny.

Funny in that quietly familiar Pomona way, where civic life is so intertwined with contractors, nonprofits, and political nostalgia that contradictions start looking normal. Everyone pretends not to see the seams, but there they are, bright as a corporate neon sign glowing above “Dios te salve María.”

Athens showing up as the presenting sponsor of a Posada feels less like community support and more like a vintage How to Privatize for Dummies book from the 20th century political era, an antiquated, outdated neoliberal austere approach that has consternated anyone paying attention to how power launders itself through culture. It’s the old playbook dusted off for a new audience, hoping no one notices the seams. And if Mary and Joseph tried to make this same journey today, they’d probably have to get past ICE before they ever reached an inn, which somehow makes a corporate sponsor feel less strange than it should.

That’s the thing, the irony isn’t subtle; it’s structural. A tradition born from displacement ends up efficiently underwritten by a company that built its reputation navigating municipal contracts, gatekeeping essential services, and increasing everyone’s trash bill. I’m sure they’d increase Jesus’s bill as well. If they lived in the community.

And maybe that’s the part worth sitting with, not the sponsorship, but what it reveals. Corporate goodwill once relied on these gestures: sponsor a youth program, donate to a school play, host a toy drive, stamp your name on a Posada. It was the public relations equivalent of placing a warm tortilla over a cold truth. But that era is thinning out. People read more carefully now. They ask who benefits. They ask who controls the story.

None of this makes Athens villainous. It just makes the sponsorship oddly nostalgic, like watching someone reenact a political strategy from the 1990s and assume everyone still falls for it. That’s the humor buried in the moment. The city changes, sort of, the community evolves, and the corporate playbook stays stuck in a time capsule.

And because of that, the result is a kind of civic uncanny valley. A cultural tradition rooted in scarcity and hospitality ends up looking like a polished corporate goodwill. A story about seeking shelter gets repurposed as a branding opportunity. A ritual that has survived colonization, migration, displacement, and assimilation somehow ends up as a line item on a quarterly outreach report. Why? Hasn’t Athens already monopolized the trash game in the city?

Meanwhile, the community keeps moving. Families show up. Kids step into their papel wings. Elders hum along to songs older than the city’s zoning map. In the actual celebration, none of this corporate choreography matters. And that’s why it stands out, it isn’t about the Posada at all. It’s about the environment the Posada is asked to exist in.

In a city like Pomona, power doesn’t always show up in ordinances or budgets. Sometimes it eases its way quietly into the footer of a flyer. Many times it shakes hands at the door of a cultural events it has nothing to do with, kind of like a book fair at a local urban farm (I really dislike the word “urban”, it’s so passé) hoping repetition will turn visibility into belonging. Or forgetting about the dramatic increase of the trash bill.

Maybe that’s the real story. Not the trash company. Not the Posada. But the long shadow of a political era that taught corporations to treat culture as an entry point, as long as they brought a check and a tagline.

A Posada doesn’t need a presenting sponsor.

But Pomona has learned to live with juxtapositions, old traditions and new optics, sacred stories and contractor logos, community memory and municipal economics. We laugh at it, analyze it, roll our eyes, and then keep showing up for the parts that matter.

Because we understand culture started underground and culture will always outlast the sponsors.

It always does.

Julian Lucas is a darkroom photographer, writer, and a bookseller, though photography remains his primary language. He is the founder of Mirrored Society Book Shop, publisher of The Pomonan, and creator of Book-Store and PPABF. And yes he will charge you 2.5 Million for event photography.