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While middle-class women over 30 are hardly the most oppressed group in American society, we are uniquely burdened with one thing: making movements uncool. And we’re very good at it. As soon as a political movement, or even just a brand (remember Stanley cups?) becomes associated with us, it becomes irredeemably cringe. If something exists, we can make it lame.

The other day, I was reading Matthew Yglesias’ Slow Boring and came across this article, which touches on the political vibe shift since the 2000s. Back then, it was cool and countercultural to be a liberal. Yglesias specifically invokes the (at the time) edgy anti-Republican lyrics of the band Green Day, and all the ways young people gave the middle finger to the conservative establishment, led at the time by George W. Bush.

I was a teenager in the 2000s. Bush’s presidency encompassed my teen years. I remember this time very well. Everyone in my school believed that we were in danger of being drafted in the Iraq War, thanks to forwarded viral emails—the original TikTok—about a draft that would somehow also cover Canada, so we couldn’t hide there if we wanted to dodge it. One kid at my school had a plan to join the army voluntarily, win a Purple Heart somehow, and assassinate Bush during the Purple Heart ceremony. When I was 14, I dated one of that kid’s friends: a 16-year-old named Tony who saw himself as a bad-boy rebel. He was a militant liberal, often railing against the “religious hicks” who lived in his rural Pennsylvania hometown (we went to boarding school, and he was there on a scholarship). He was obsessed with Michael Moore, and when his parents bought him the DVD of Bowling for Columbine, he licked the box lasciviously in the backseat of their car while they drove us to get lunch. He told me he wanted to buy a pair of skinny jeans (verboten at the time) because it would “scare Republican church ladies” who might think he was gay. He was Italian, raised Catholic, and hated all forms of religion. He made many (very unfunny) sexual priest jokes. One might call him an example of an early “Reddit atheist.” He was eventually expelled from our school for selling weed.

Anyway, I’m sure that Tony had some legitimate political beliefs. Two of the things he talked about as evidence of his anti-church-lady identity were his support for gay marriage and marijuana legalization—two things I’m sure he had genuine reasons to support. I don’t think Tony became a liberal to shock people. But it’s interesting that you don’t really see boys like Tony anymore. A few sweaty “liberal zoomer” TikTokkers aside, you don’t see teenagers listening to Ezra Klein, or even watching The Daily Show, to showcase their edginess—and Michael Moore is now relegated to making data-free election predictions on MSNBC, for the eyes of your boomer aunt.

As Yglesias has pointed out before, liberals are seen as The Establishment these days, which partly explains why it’s no longer cool to be a liberal. But I’m going to add something else to the conversation: a great deal of political vibe shifts, especially among young people, are about … how do I say this nicely … being mad at Mommy.

While some middle-aged moms have always voted red, and others blue, there is usually a prototypical “suburban lady” (usually, though not always, a white lady) who teenagers try to shock, and she embodies the least cool politics. In the 2010s, she was Karen. In the 2000s, she didn’t have a name, but we all knew her type. She was a “fundie,” or religious fundamentalist. She was racist and homophobic. She said dumb things like “It’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” She was fiercely, and stupidly, patriotic. She was anti-intellectual, uptight, and scoldy.

She’s now a liberal.

Don’t get me wrong—I’m not saying liberals are the “real fascists” or that conservatives have actually become chill and open. But from both the left and the right, there is a common enemy in the New Karen—the Lib Mom. Once you see her, you can’t unsee her. She’s the “wine mommy,” or alternatively, she’s the insufferable girlboss “DEI hire” whose job it is to report people to HR for not having pronouns in their email signature. She doesn’t care about the plight of poor people because she’s too upset about female celebrities being shamed for armpit stubble. She’s the lady who wears a Handmaid’s Tale costume to vote.

There were many things you could do to shock the 2000s right-wing version of this woman. You could call God the “flying spaghetti monster.” You could say anything anti-American, or at one point, simply refer to French fries by their name. This archetype stuck because she was so easy to shock. Today, it’s not shocking to be an atheist. It’s not even shocking to criticize America or Americans—Trump himself has repeatedly called the U.S. a “failing country,” to raucous applause. All the edgy “Satanists” of the 2000s are now heckin’ wholesome Redditors who say things like “You can’t be punk rock if you don’t wear a mask!”

The edginess of the 2000s is not the edginess of the 2020s. Now, the easiest way to rebel against the prototypical Uptight Mom is to become more religious, not less religious, and to become the most dogmatic, extreme member of your new religion. You could also trigger her by turning against social progress and feminism—if you’re a girl you might loudly declare that all you want in life is to have 10 babies and make your husband sandwiches and that the “girlboss narrative was a lie.”

When I think about the 2000s, it’s really unfathomable to imagine a student being cool and rebellious by being a Republican. That would have been painfully dorky. There was one girl in my school who was rumored to be a Republican, and overwhelmingly, people just assumed she was influenced by her parents. I’m sure if I had been raised in a less liberal area, Republican kids wouldn’t have been as unusual. But a few decades after Alex P. Keaton finished his TV run, the idea of a kid becoming right-wing against the wishes of their parents was unheard of.

Today, the liberal mom everyone is trying to shock is up against two different types of people who blame her for society’s downfall: those on the right, and those on the far left. Everyone is mad at Mommy, and nobody wants to eat their broccoli!

That’s not to say that people are holding their political beliefs entirely to get back at their moms, or even a prototypical Mom. But the liberal mom being the center of everyone’s grievances means that being a liberal simply isn’t cool anymore. Even I have to admit that I simply don’t consume a lot of liberal political content because it is simply too annoying. I stopped watching The Daily Show ages ago, and I’ve never once been able to sit through an episode of Full Frontal with Samantha Bee. The actual annoying content doesn’t always come from middle-aged women, but that’s the point— it’s middle-aged-woman-coded now. Nobody even wore a pink pussy hat after the 2024 election, but people still use the term “pink pussy hat resist lib” to refer to … this type of woman. The mocking moniker “Drumpf” was coined by John Oliver, but I can’t help but feel like it just seems like something your dorky aunt would say.

And that’s exactly what I’m talking about—women in my demographic or older can somehow taint anything with lameness. When I think of this woman—not that specific woman, but this type of woman—I’m reminded of this meme, which I started seeing everywhere in the 2010s:

(A woman in a cartoon meme says to a sad face wearing a propeller beanie "time for your behave in school drugs")

Granted, this meme came from the left, not the right. Revulsion toward the Lib Mom is hardly exclusive to the right. But I found it a bit strange that the lack of universal health care was being pinned on annoying liberal women specifically. Let’s just assume (and it’s a big, stupid assumption) that if Bernie Sanders had been elected president in 2016, he would have successfully rung in an era of perfect Democratic Socialism and we’d all have universal health care. You could argue that Hillary Clinton prevented this outcome, and I suppose a good portion of the people who liked Hillary Clinton were liberal women. But surely, Clinton couldn’t have stolen the primary from Sanders without the help of many powerful people—and most of those people were probably men! If Bernie had won the presidency, more men in Congress would have blocked his actions than women. Most “Bernie bros” intellectually know this to be true. But the meme that sticks—and to this day, the jokes that stick—are about annoying (usually white) liberal moms.

Women do not have more institutional power than men. Congress is 71 percent men; 90 percent of the top CEOs are men. But you know who had all the power when you were 5? Mommy. And she’s still the cause of all your problems.

There’s another movement that I believe was also taken down by the idea of a cringe middle-aged mom: QAnon. Granted, you could argue QAnon eventually died because none of their predictions came true, or because elements of it went mainstream, or because their resurrected JFK Jr. was very clearly some short Italian guy in a fedora, but that was the case for a while before it faded into obscurity. My theory is that it went from being a 4chan thing to a Facebook thing. Too many Karens, too many bedazzled American flag T-shirts. Pack it up and shut it down, the middle-aged ladies have arrived!

But in case you’re a liberal reading this, and you feel dismayed at the idea that we are uncool, never fear. While a great deal of politics is annoyingly vibes-based and coolness-oriented, another guarantee of politics is that it’s full of pendulum swings. Liberals are uncool now, but I don’t think we’ll be uncool forever. A big part of being cool is not trying too hard to be cool. There’s something a bit sad about being an edgelord in 2025—like, mommy mommy, please get triggered by me, I’m such a bad boy. Shut up lol.

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