A Giving of Intellectual Accounts

Where am I coming from in analyzing the right?

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If my last post was, in part, intended as an illustration of the kind of centrist I’m not, today’s post should be understood as its analytical opposite. My aim this time is to explain the kind of centrist I am. This is necessary, I think, because it’s not always apparent to readers (and listeners) just where I’m coming from in analyzing the right. That sometimes leaves them confused, which bothers me. There may be nothing I prize more in thinking than clarity.

Thinking Politically

I think the primary thing that occasionally trips people up about my writing and thinking is that it differs in one important respect from what’s written these days by most pundits or political analysts. Nearly everyone today writes from a distinct partisan position. Some commentators write as allies of the Democratic Party, others as allies of the Republicans. Still others outflank the Democrats on the left or the Republicans on the right with an eye to dragging the parties further in those respective directions.

As a consequence, what we end up with is less writing about politics than writing as politics. Many pundits and columnists seem to be primarily concerned with advancing the prospects of one party, set of policies, or ideological agenda. Or put in properly contrary terms for our era of negative partisanship: They are primarily concerned with thwarting one party, set of policies, or ideological agenda.

Whichever way you put it, this makes these writers pro bono PR flacks for one or the other of the country’s primary political factions and its ancillary branches throughout the culture. That sounds harsher than I intend it to be. All it really means is that most people who write about partisan politics for a living (or as a hobby) do so as a way of participating in partisan politics.

Not everyone can be described like this. Some pundits are in one way or another “off sides.” This includes those who criticize the GOP from the center left and the Dems from the center right or some blend of both. My colleagues at The Bulwark (where I participate in the weekly “Beg to Differ” podcast) fit into this homeless category, and I fit there, too, at least to some extent. Yet many of those colleagues are relatively recent (post-2016) apostates or refugees from the Republican Party who were quite pleased with the GOP up until that point and would ideally like very much for it to return to its earlier (Reagan to Bush 43) dispensation.

The same isn’t true for me. I ran for the exits much further back in the past (in 2004)—and even before that, I was far from being a fully committed member of the GOP and conservative movement. I was a fellow-traveler who felt a philosophical kinship with certain right-leaning intellectuals due mainly to my Straussian education. But often I didn’t see how Republican policy commitments followed from those nominally conservative philosophical assumptions. Most of the time, I simply played along and presumed they did follow, knowing full well that the presumption was founded on a leap of faith.

Intellectual Independence

So where does that leave me?

Most of the time, standing off by myself, apart from the different competing factions scrambling around on the playground of American politics. Let me explain what I mean by that—and what it implies about my writing.

Politics is a contest over who (which person or group of people) will rule the political community. In making its case for rule—in trying to justify it to the rest of the polity—each faction makes arguments about its vision of the community’s common good. In modern American terms, each party says, “Vote for me/us and together we will make the country X,” with “X” standing for a range ideals—freer, more just, more equal, safer, more prosperous, more … Great Again, and so forth. Whatever “X” is, it conveys what the party, faction, or office-seeker considers most important for the country’s future, with varying degrees of attention paid to precisely how, in policy terms, the country should attempt to get there.

As I noted above, most opinion journalists end up using their talents to advance, thwart, or shape one of these competing visions of the common good.

But that isn’t how I see myself. Since the administration of George W. Bush, I’ve thought the vision of the common good advanced by the Republican Party will harm the country, which means that in comparative terms I vastly prefer the alternative vision advanced by the Democratic Party. Recently, Donald Trump has added another, much more alarming consideration to my rejection of the GOP—namely, flagrant unfitness for office and outright contempt for the constitutional rules of the political game that seek to limit corruption, uphold the rule of law, and allow for the peaceful transfer of power.

I don’t oppose the Republicans because I’m positively committed to using my intellect to advance the Democratic Party’s vision of the common good in all, or even most, respects. I side, for the time being, with the Democrats for purely pragmatic reasons—because I’m convinced that the alternative (the Republicans holding power) would be worse.

This isn’t just an intellectualized form of political commitment or an expression of ideologically based negative partisanship. It’s the exercise of independent judgment. My judgment. A judgment made in my mind on the basis of years of open-ended thinking, drawing on an education in philosophy, history, and personal experience, including the experience of observing and analyzing political events up close day after day, month after month, for years.

Which means that in writing this newsletter, I’m not just standing apart from the various factions on the playground. I’m also doing my best to rise above it—not in the sense that I consider myself better than or superior to those factions, but in the sense that I aspire to see further than they do, and ultimately to attain a modicum of wisdom about what mixture or balance of competing visions will be best for the political community as a whole. (In this my models are Aristotle, Thucydides, and Tocqueville, as I discussed here.)

My Common Good

Foremost in my mind at all times is the question: What do I think is good or bad for American self-government at this specific moment? Like the parties, in other words, I’m focused on the common good—but as I assess and evaluate it. Freedom, justice, equality, safety, prosperity, and yes, even greatness are components of the common good. But so is, on a more fundamental level, stability—a certain base level of civic equanimity that makes possible the sharing of political rule among parts of the polity that disagree strongly with one another over how to order our collective life.  

That’s what is foremost in my mind as I survey the American scene, keeping my eyes focused most intently on the right. Doing it well requires setting aside or bracketing as best I can my own, often intense, instantaneous emotional responses to events in favor of staking out a somewhat ironic and dispassionate position on them. It also requires allowing the teeming, chaotic, turbulent brawl of American democracy to unfold while giving up any serious hope of influencing, controlling, or combatting it—at least initially.

Instead, whether it’s the insurrection of January 6, the question of whether to prosecute Trump, or Joe Biden’s speech about the fate of American democracy, I ask myself: What is happening here? How should I define this event? What is its meaning? What caused it? And what is it likely to cause in turn? Is it good or bad for the country? How good or bad? And if it’s bad, what is likely to prompt something similar, or worse, to happen in the future?

Put in somewhat different terms, one could say that I’m trying to do political philosophy in real time, with understanding taking precedence over acting. I sometimes hope to have a modest influence on those who might act on the political scene. But the pursuit of understanding comes first. That’s what I try to offer here.

What my readers do with the understanding I offer them is ultimately up to them.