When I was growing up, first under Bush and then under Obama, my mother used a familiar refrain to explain how politics works from a liberal perspective: two steps forward and one step back. Politics, in the idiom of Martin Luther King Jr.’s arc towards progress, is a tug-of-war between those who wish to stay put and those who want to move forward. In this utopian vision of politics, the progressives will always win, because each two steps will define the new status quo on which the conservative will plant his feet and tug.

This vision of politics is outdated, and it’s time we ditch our “liberal” and “conservative” labels and search for something new.

In a recent opinion piece, Ari Shtein ’29 offered a vision of history in which the reactionary revolutionary is something new in the west, something which originated in the Thermidorian Reaction and which was comprehensively defeated afterwards. In this framing of history, to be reactionary is laughable and incoherent. Shtein calls the current American Right a “conservative movement with revolutionary aspirations,” but here he — and all of us — miss the point.

Our binary conception of politics — the left against the right, liberals against conservatives, Democrats against Republicans — has naturally led us to think about politics as a simple blue/red binary. Thus does it become easy to make Shtein’s mistake, believing that this binary politics represents some abstract victory of progress in the Anglophone world.

This mistake is dangerous: it allows us to think that reactionism is illogical or discredited or antiquated. It lets us apply “neo” prefixes to political philosophies as if history follows a prewritten script. Most dangerously, it allows us to hide in the normalcy of pre-2016 politics and reject our current moment as an aberration, to reject today’s revolutionaries as intellectually weak.

But if we are to counter the reactionaries and revolutionaries of today, we have to start by listening to what they’re saying and acknowledging that their ideologies are internally coherent. In my four years in — and most recently as the Chairman of — the Independent Party of the Yale Political Union, I’ve sought out and listened to people from every corner of the political field, including classmates who identify with the MAGA movement. While I usually disagree with their moral premises, they’re not crazy, and the conclusions at which they have arrived are rational in their worldviews.

To understand the reactionary right, we have to trace its origins. The traditional framing of conservatism has been about upholding the status quo. But throughout recent decades, the status quo has itself meant change. To return to the tug-of-war metaphor, the game itself became the status quo, a slow but consistent march Left. History had been set on Eduard Bernstein’s path towards achieving Marx’s end state of socialism without ever needing the revolution.

And so the liberal became conservative. To promote progress meant to uphold the institutional status quo, to push change but not too quickly, to make gains and then work to consolidate them. After all, even Marjorie Taylor Greene would never dare touch ObamaCare, the repealing of which was once the top priority for conservatives.

If liberals are conservatives, then what does the far Left do? It hates all status quos, so it rejects, as mainstream Marxists have always done, the slow progress of the liberal.

But what of yesterday’s conservatives? To this there are two answers. The first is that many are politically homeless. The “classical liberals” of the last decade or two who were already beginning to reclaim that l-word find themselves alone in the tug-of-war. It is no surprise that Romney did not seek reelection when he voted to convict Trump in the impeachment trial.

The second answer is that many have abandoned the game of tug-of-war entirely. If the conservative can never win, why keep playing? Those who swap the rope for the MAGA hat are Shtein’s revolutionaries, the extremists in a topsy-turvy political alignment. Working in this frame of reference, the MAGA revolution is rational. Though I disagree with their conclusions, the Right cannot be dismissed as simply reactionary. Their ideas are internally logical and must be awarded the intellectual weight necessary for us to challenge them.

I am a liberal, which I suppose now makes me conservative. I like the university and its role in society, and I liked the safe, predictable politics before 2016. But to save liberalism and to revive boring politics requires listening to those who say “this isn’t working,” both on the left and the right. Though they may be reactionaries and revolutionaries, they are no longer fringe and their thoughts have power.

What I’m saying isn’t new. Four years at Yale spent seeking out voices across the political spectrum has given me the vocabulary to express political ideologies I hadn’t even known existed. But most of us are still operating in the familiar bubble of tug-of-war party politics, peeking through our hands until the scary radicals go away.

It’s time we face reality and start to understand what the other sides are saying.

BEN ROSENTHAL is a senior in Morse College studying History and Ancient Egyptian. He can be reached at benjamin.rosenthal@yale.edu.