WHAT IT MEANS TO WRITE FOR THE POLITICALLY HOMELESS

In 2015, I was a progressive. I supported Bernie Sanders, believed I knew which side of history I stood on, and assumed the people standing next to me shared my values. Then I started talking to them.

What I discovered — slowly, then all at once — was that the 'left' I had imagined and the 'left' that actually existed were not the same thing. I had always known about right-wing antisemitism. That was the kind I grew up hearing about, the kind with a face and a name and a historical record that required no explanation. What I had not accounted for was the other kind. The kind that arrives wrapped in the language of inclusion. The kind that reserves its most sophisticated moral frameworks for deciding which Jews deserve solidarity and which ones deserve contempt.

That was when I first encountered "the horseshoe theory" — the idea that the far left and the far right, when bent far enough, both curve toward each other and meet. And that was when I understood something about myself I hadn't needed to articulate before: I was a Jewish Zionist American. Not a Progressive White American. Those were not the same identity, and pretending otherwise was no longer available to me.

I didn't become a conservative. I became untethered.

I suspect a lot of people reading this know the feeling, even if the specific entry point was different. Maybe it was watching the response to October 7th on your college campus or in your social media feed. Maybe it was something smaller — a conversation at a dinner party, a thread that revealed what someone actually thought when they believed only allies were listening. The specific moment may vary, but the feeling is the same.

You look left and see a politics that has decided you are a Zionist oppressor. You look right and see a politics that was never yours to begin with. And you are told by both sides that your discomfort is the problem — that if you just chose correctly, everything would resolve.

This is the condition I have come to think of as political homelessness. And it is, right now, one of the most alienating experiences in American cultural life.

I spent the last several years writing a novel about it. The Empathizer is a dystopian satire set in 2063, structured around Poe's Masque of the Red Death and Carroll's Alice in Wonderland — a diptych in which a classical liberal narrator and his Jewish partner are persecuted, first by an authoritarian progressive state, then by an authoritarian conservative one. The book is not a both-sides-are-fine shrug. It is not South Park libertarianism, where the joke is that caring about anything is stupid.

It is an argument. Specifically: that ideological extremism follows predictable patterns regardless of which direction it comes from. That it always requires an enemy. That it always finds a category of people who don't fully count as human. And that Jews — across centuries and across ideologies — have been history's most reliable indicator of where that machinery is headed.

Most political art right now picks a side. This is not surprising — artists live in communities, communities have orthodoxies, and the path of least resistance is to aim your critique at the other tribe. What gets produced is an endless supply of work that flatters one audience while antagonizing another, and calls this courage.

What is rarer is work that refuses to. Not because it doesn't care, but because it cares about both simultaneously, and refuses to let either side off the hook. That refusal is harder to make and harder to receive. Progressive literary circles will not love the first half of my book. Conservative media will not love the second half. I wrote it for the people who can hold both critiques at once — and who are, right now, hungry for art that sees them.

The politically homeless may eventually land in the center — not because they have no convictions, but because their convictions no longer map onto either available extreme. Classical liberals. Heterodox thinkers. Jews who watched their supposed allies perform moral acrobatics both before and after October 7th. People who didn't leave their principles, but watched both parties leave them. People who believe in free expression, institutional integrity, and the rule of law — and who find those commitments treated as naïve by both tribes simultaneously.

That audience is real, and it is large, and more writers in American cultural life should speak directly to it.

If your political vision requires a category of people who don't deserve full humanity, you are building cruelty into the foundation.

If this criticism makes people uncomfortable (regardless of which side they're on), that discomfort is the point. The politically homeless already know it. They've felt it from both directions.

I wrote a book for them.