Ask Me Anything—Dec. '22
I answer questions about why I don’t fear the left as much as the right, what it takes to be an intellectual, and whether I’m prepared to be a radical about anything at all
This is my second “Ask Me Anything” feature. The first was in August, but they’re going to start coming more frequently than every three months. Once a month sounds about right.
Paying subscribers, in addition to enjoying the privilege of leaving comments on and receiving audio recordings of every post, get to pose the questions. If you’d like the chance the ask me something for our next AMA feature, please … become a paying subscriber! Now, onto the questions.
Miguelitro
What development or series of developments in the U.S. would convince you that the threat to traditional Enlightenment-based liberalism is greater from the Postmodernist Progressive Left than the MAGA America First Far Right? The reason I ask is that our political institutions seems under siege from the Right, while our cultural ones are from the Progressive Left. But if politics follows culture... I am terrified of both movements.
Good question. Before I launched “Eyes on the Right,” I pondered making the venture truly “centrist” in the sense that I would try to focus on the left and right equally, as I attempted to do in my column at The Week. In the end, I decided against it, because I really do think the right poses the more potent political danger and intellectual challenge to the liberal order. (I also think there are plenty of smart people criticizing “wokeness” and I wasn’t sure what I’d have to offer by way of analysis and critique would add much. I’m more confident I have something to add when it comes to the understanding and criticizing the anti-liberal right.)
Look, woke stuff really annoys me. But it’s not only primarily a cultural phenomenon. It’s also primarily a high- and middle-brow cultural phenomenon. I care an enormous amount about good music, serious film, theater, literary fiction, poetry, the visual arts, scholarship, etc. So when I see elite cultural institutions get consumed by a kind of moral mania, thereby undermining their role of preserving the greatest works of the past and disseminating the best work in the present, it worries and angers me. It matters.
But does it matter as much as the country electing a demagogue-charlatan who’s unfit in a million ways for the office of the presidency? Does it compare to the danger posed by that president attempting to remain in office despite losing an election and inciting his supporters to storm the national legislature in an effort to disrupt the certification of the election? Or the danger of that president’s party remaining loyal to him and his most fervent supporters even after they behave so recklessly? Not even close.
The one possible exception to this way of looking at things is the Biden administration’s support for allowing minors who believe themselves to be transgender to take puberty-blockers and/or undergo other radical medical interventions without very strict psychological assessment and oversight. European countries are moving the other way on this, and I think we’re making a terrible mistake in following the lead of activists who may not be advocating what’s best for these kids in the long run—with potentially devastating consequences on their lives and well being. So on this issue I think Democrats are making a terrible policy mistake that they will come to regret, and that Americans of all political stripes need to call it out. But even this doesn’t come close to the systemic danger posed by the most extreme forms of Trumpian populism.
Russell Arben Fox
Writes In Medias Res
As a possible complement to your many defenses of avoiding extremes, is there any extreme political crusade or ideological aspiration throughout American history that you think (or hope) you would have embraced? Abolitionism, perhaps?
Several years ago, a close friend of mine who’s a strict libertarian asserted during one of our many testy but good-natured arguments about principle and policy that I would have been a royalist in 1776. I think he might be right about that. Not because I’m a closet monarchist, but because I find it hard to imagine myself supporting a revolution.
In the great debate about whether tyranny or anarchy are worse, I say anarchy. That doesn’t mean I think living under a dictator would be good. It would be atrocious in comparison to a life of political freedom. Too much authority is bad. But it is marginally better than too little authority, let alone none. (Listen to the opening segment in my recent appearance on Andrew Sullivan’s Dishcast to hear us explore the possible biographical-psychological sources of this outlook.)
That doesn’t directly touch on the issue of abolition, since the actual abolitionists didn’t cause our country’s Civil War. That’s because they were too marginal and perceived as too extreme in their day. I’m honest enough to admit that I would have been unlikely to associate with that kind of crowd had I lived in the decades leading up to 1861.
Why? Because, as the reflections above make clear, I’m a temperamental conservative (which is very different than the ideological conservatives of various stripes we have running around our country today). I love justice, but I also fear it—because calls to achieve it in our imperfect world often lead to disorder, backlash, violence, and other forms of human misery, which are themselves forms of injustice.
It’s easy in hindsight to say, “Of course I would stand with the abolitionists.” But if you’d asked me in 1858 if I wanted to abolish slavery in the U.S. at the price of a slaughter of 600,000 men, I am quite certain I would have said, “no way.” And I suspect nearly every American living at the time who wasn’t a slave would have said the same thing. (Will this answer be controversial? I suspect it might!)
LGbrooklyn
I often find myself wondering what effect or influence the "high" philosophical thinkers on the American Right at this time have on the average right-wing citizen. How does the public relate to such people as Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, or Sohrab Ahmari (and others)—and if there is not much of a relationship or knowledge of these thinkers, what does the right-wing look like in its variations between the "high' versions and the "vernacular" versions?
Hardly anyone in the United States—left, right, or center—has heard of Deneen, Vermeule, or Ahmari, let alone read them. They write for audiences far more literate than most Americans. They exercise influence by being read by those literate audiences, some of whose views are (presumably) changed in the process of reading. Some of the members of those audiences are popularizers—TV and talk-radio hosts and producers, magazine and newspaper editors and writers, staffers working for politicians, think-tank fellows, wealthy donors to political campaigns, and so forth. These people speak to and influence bigger audiences. If they can be persuaded that something in elite conservative books is worth thinking about, chances are the ideas will end up disseminated widely. In general, that’s how the sociological process of ideological influence works.
Philip
Why did you convert to Catholicism? How has your faith informed your political opinions?
This is a topic I’ve addressed a few times in the past, the first time in an interview from seven years ago, amusingly titled, “Just Another Atheist Jewish Catholic.” I’ve since left the church entirely (you can read about that here), but there’s little I would change in what I said back in 2015. It’s a long and very fun interview, if you’re interested in reading more about my intellectual interests and background. But if you want to zero in on the Catholic question specifically, you can find the core of that discussed in this part of the conversation. I just re-read it, and it really is a fun read. Check it out—and make the good folks at Patheos wonder why this old interview is generating a flood of traffic.
Michelle B Togut
To piggyback on the previous question, what led you back to secular Judaism, and how do your religious and philosophical views coincide?
Here again, I have written on the topic. Here’s something I wrote on returning to secular Judaism. As for the second question, that’s a complicated one. But that 2015 interview as a whole does a better job of laying out my views than I could hope to do in this Q&A format.
Prairy
I see the current political struggles in the U.S. as an age-old fight between The Great Society and the neoliberalism of Ronald Reagan (begun by Jimmy Carter). The Cold War costs to the U.S. have brought us a hollowed-out Rust Belt, rural regions, and working class. What I do not understand in the Red vs. Blue fight are the views of the right about this. On the one hand, they call for "America First" but on the other they repudiate the idea of democratic socialism, i.e., a strong government focused only on its people and not the needs of democracies elsewhere. To me, this disconnect seems that it might be fostered by, for lack of a better phrase, “the elites” in the right wing. Are there forces behind the scene working to keep it this way?
In a parliamentary system, there are often many parties, with each representing ideologically coherent policy positions. After an election is held, a government has to be formed. Unless one of those parties has won a majority, two or more of them need to put a governing coalition together. These will often be ideologically fraught, with negotiations focusing on which of the parties will hold which government ministries.
In our first-past-the-post/plurality system with just two viable parties, the coalition formation takes place within parties, prior to elections. The Democrats range from Michael Bloomberg-style technocratic-liberal centrism to Bernie Sanders-style democratic socialism on the left. The Republicans range from Larry Hogan’s moderate blue-state business-friendly managerialism to the right-wing populist-conspiratorial bullshit-mongering of Trump and his acolytes and would-be mimics.
The parties are coalitions of competing and sometimes contradictory factions, in other words. And what the parties agree and disagree about changes over time. At the moment, the GOP is divided between wealthy donors and upper-income voters who want to see taxes cut—and other voters who want to see the Republicans become a “workers’ party” that puts “America First.” The former priority was in some ways the core of the party during the Reagan and Bush 41 years. The latter has come to the fore since Donald Trump took over in 2016. Yet Trump’s primary legislative success as president was passing a huge corporate tax cut, showing that the party’s priorities remain … in flux.
I don’t really think this is an example of anyone pulling strings behind the scenes. It’s just that our parties are big, confused, lumbering things shot through with contradictions, and the character of the contradictions evolve over time. At the moment, the GOP is divided on several issues—on taxes and spending, on foreign policy, on trade, and so forth. (It used to be divided on immigration, but the nativists pretty much won that fight.) I hope that helps.
mel ladi
Here’s a question about your job as a pundit and intellectual. I always thought that somebody was an intellectual through acclaim of others, not as a self-identification or a job description. Could you speak more about how you construct a job description for that aspect of what you do, what the benchmarks/hallmarks are, and how I can thus recognize other current intellectuals?
My readers sure do ask big, broad questions! I love it! It fits perfectly with my penchant for big, broad, sweeping takes.
And actually, I see that as one part of what makes someone an intellectual. An academic or a scholar is a specialist in one area of knowledge, whereas an intellectual is a “specialist in generalizations.” That’s a line from one of my intellectual heroes, the sociologist Daniel Bell, and I love it because it’s so delightfully paradoxical. An intellectual is someone who isn’t necessarily a specialist in anything but who reads widely in many subjects and grasps enough of the important aspects of specialized knowledge to render illuminating generalizations about lots of topics.
Another way to put it is to say that an intellectual is a bit of a dilettante or an amateur. I know a little bit about a lot of subjects, and I use that little bit of knowledge to try and understand what’s going on around me in an informed way. But I’m not a specialist in anything—not even the intellectual history and political theory I studied in graduate school, because I finished my studies 24 years ago and haven’t kept up with the latest scholarship.
Lots of other intellectuals (especially ones who modify the term with “public”) think the distinguishing mark of being one is political engagement or commitment (usually on the left). But I don’t think that’s true at all. In fact, I sometimes respond to those people by declaring that, in fact, I’m a private intellectual, in the sense that I read and think and write for the sake of my own personal understanding of the world, and then I share it with others. (I remain forever amazed that anyone cares what I think about anything.) That is, I invert the eleventh of Karl Marx’s Theses on Feuerbach: Rather than endeavoring to change the world, the point should be to understand it. (How can you know how the world can or should be changed until you understand how it works and fits together?)
As for the question of how to know if someone’s an intellectual, you can decide that based on whether you feel like reading them helps you to make greater sense of the world. Of course, conspiracists also “help” people “make greater sense of the world” by connecting dots that, in fact, have nothing much to do with each other. But that just points to another element of what makes someone an intellectual (as I define it): An intellectual is someone who’s skeptical in an even-handed way about reigning opinion, including about one’s own political and moral commitments. See my old post about Glenn Greenwald for more on what can happen when skepticism isn’t applied in an even-handed way.
Donny from Queens
Could it be that loneliness is driving a lot of our political turbulence? It seems like much support for troublemakers like Marjorie Taylor Greene come from areas of the country where community has been vanishing. Churches have also become hotbeds of radicalization in rural areas.
The short answer is: Yes, do think loneliness could well be a big part of the answer. I doubt I could do better job of elaborating on the topic than I did in this old column of mine, which got a fair amount of attention when it appeared. (I’ve never liked the headline, though.)
Ged Erwin
I would love to get your opinion on what you think Ben Shapiro is up to. He seems to want to be both a conservative intellectual and a purveyor of sensationalist clickbait. And he seems to get a pass from most of the responsible conservative media.
Ben Shapiro interacts with and retweets me from time to time on Twitter. I suspect if you asked him, he’d say I’m one of the few sane and honest liberals around. Because of that, I don’t want to be mean to him here. But I will say that my view of him is precisely the one you sketch in your question. He’s obviously very smart, and the kind of conservatism (in policy terms) that he pushes is continuous with the Reagan-Bush 43 era. That’s not my thing these days, but it once was, and I respect smart people who advocate for those views, even today.
But in style, Shapiro is very much a child of Breitbart—and he appears not to recognize how corrosive that approach to engaging in politics ends up being for the very things he cares most about. If you spend all your days treating the opposition as evil and highlighting only the worst, most ridiculous arguments they make, you’re going to produce an audience that thinks the opposition is evil, stupid, and a threat to the country. And that might get members of this audience to elect someone who views the opposition with so much contempt that acting to overturn an election seems preferable to letting that opposition take power.
So I’d say Shapiro should spend some time re-watching episodes of the old William F. Buckley, Jr. Firing Line and remind himself of a better way—a way that seeks to elevate one’s own side rather than merely denigrate and demonize the other side. (Though it’s also true that this “better way” would probably generate considerably less revenue for The Daily Wire.)
Great column and thanks for taking my question. So by your definition of intellectual, I am aware of several intellectual writers who aren’t expert in any area but do indeed send me hotfoot down rabbit holes on subjects and issues I’ve never studied before. So their writing and their illumination on subjects does help make sense of complexities.
Second, thank you for being brave on the subject of transgenderism and children. It has been the cause du jour on the progressive left and it makes me queasy. I think the activists are denying the level of (someone called it) social contagion involved. It’s cool now to be non-binary and transgender just as it was to be Goth or any other number of other fads children explore when they’re young. That’s what being young is for, exploration and play-acting. And youthful dramatic emotions are more the norm so I’m sure these kids are expressing themselves with passion on the subject.
But now, there is encouragement to hop to medical intervention, and to keep information from supposedly non-affirming parents. I’m not quibbling here about the choices of legal adults but we used to recognize that there are areas in which the young brain is not yet developed enough to make certain choices, such as smoking and drinking.
Progressives argue that we’re really talking about a handful of children and even then most do not go on a life of medicalization. They argue that gender-affirming care reduces self-harm and saves lives. Are we so sure.
Sorry for the vent.
I just have to commend you for the intellectual humility you consistently bring to the table. I've only recently started following your writing, but I find the way you tackle hard issues and wrestle with your own assumptions to be so refreshing. Keep up the good work!