Ask Me Anything—June 2023

I answer questions about how to save the country, what we should do if it can't be saved, what worries me most about the Democrats, whether RFK, Jr has a point, and how I manage to keep faith

Brain Gear Mechanism: Digital generated image of multi-colored gear wheels connected together in shape of brain on grey background. (Getty Images/Stock by Andriy Onufriyenko)

Some Brief Announcements: I will be taking some time off over the next two weeks. The week of June 26, I will be writing just one post, for Friday; the following week (July 3), I will write twice, with both posts coming after Independence Day. I’ll also be taking a full week off in mid-August, but more about that to come. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy today’s AMA post, with questions posed by paying subscribers. Lastly, sorry but there will be no audio version of today’s post. I spent 31 minutes recording one, and some kind of tech glitch led me to lose it. I don’t have the time (or vocal power) to do it all over. Apologies for that. Next week, I’ll figure out a way to ensure that doesn’t happen again.¹

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Joel Mathis
You say a Trump pardon won't save us. I agree! But ... what will save us? Anything? Or are we doomed to breakdown and decline?

Benjamin, J
What could drive Americans back together after what seems like decades of us being driven apart?

Hell if I know. Next….

Just kidding. Sort of. I really don’t see my role as coming up with plans for systemic solutions to our problems. I see myself as laying out and exploring those problems, to increase understanding so that other peoples’ efforts to solve them have a higher chance of success than they otherwise would.

With that in mind, I would say that I don’t think our most fundamental problem is that one of our two parties wants to establish one-party authoritarian rule. Our most fundamental problem is that we disagree very deeply about what kind of country we should be, and that disagreement is also very narrow, meaning that which direction we will go is maximally unsettled. Put in slightly different terms, something close to half of the country really wants it to be one thing and really doesn’t want it to be the other, and the other half of the country takes the reverse position just as strongly. And because each position is held by roughly half of the country, every election feels extremely high stakes. And because of those stakes, each party aims to win in a landslide that will finally settle the matter, locking the other party out of power for the foreseeable future.

That is, each side wants the power to rule without having to concede a thing to the other. We no longer take to heart Aristotle’s definition of citizenship as the art of ruling and being ruled in turn.

Without such a commitment, politics (the contest over which party or faction will rule and which will be ruled until the next contest) breaks down. As far as I’m concerned, the primary thing that has made the right more dangerous than the left through this period is that, thanks to Donald Trump and voters most devoted to him, the right now actively indulges in fantasies, delusions, and conspiratorial thinking that convince it that it’s more popular than it really is, that the left has rigged the system in its favor, and that these acts of cheating by the left require truth-defying acts of rule-bending and rule-breaking in order for the right to prevail.

That is how the right gets to nascent authoritarianism. But note that it gets there in response to the country’s prior dividedness combined with the narrowness of the division. What’s the solution? Either the country becomes less divided, or the division becomes less narrow. We either need the parties to become less ideologically polarized, or we need one party or the other to win the landslide it’s always clamoring for but always fails to effectuate. How do we make either of those things happen? I’m afraid I’m back to where I started: Hell if I know.

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John Murphy
I am politically center-right on social issues and center to center-left on economics. I was a lukewarm Republican leaner until Trump and am now politically homeless. My question is: I've seen all these graphs on Twitter that show there are a lot of voters similar to me, and yet we have been chronically underserved by a Republican Party that has been committed to economic libertarianism and a Democratic Party in the grip of unyielding cultural progressives. In your view, what is our best path to maximize our political influence?

This is a question related in interesting ways to my answer to the previous questions. In some ways, I think the question is just a way of redescribing what often gets talked about in terms of “the realignment” we seem to be groping toward but have yet to achieve. Will the GOP truly abandon its plutocratic economic agenda and become a true “workers party” that combines social conservatism with a defense of using an activist government improve the lives of working-class Americans? Or will the Democrats double down on its ambitions to use government to improve the lives of working-class Americans while moderating considerably on social and cultural issues?

Neither has really happened (yet?) because our elections are decided by pretty narrow margins, which leads each party to be very skittish about alienating a faction of its electoral coalition. Republicans are afraid of pissing off libertarian donors and small-business owners who want low taxes and fewer regulations. And Democrats are afraid of pissing off college-educated professionals who want ever-more-expansive demonstrations of social progressivism. Jettisoning either would mean that party potentially losing a lot of voters without knowing it would pick up an equal number or more new ones. That’s our problem. We just don’t know yet if we will ever accomplish such a realignment, or when.

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Kevin Donohue
I have a few worries about Democrats maintaining their electoral coalition. For example, African-American men have been drifting right, and I fear the RFK/Marianne Williamson-weirdo coalition will attract marginal supporters, like Ralph Nader did in 2000. How worried should Democrats be about these weaknesses, and what can they do to minimize the harm of these trends to their coalition?

This follows nicely on the heels of the last question. I think Democrats have plenty to be worried about, though RFK/Williamson only deserve to be considered one of them if one or the other wins the primaries or runs as a third-party candidate in the general election. The former isn’t going to happen, but the latter would indeed run a risk of replaying the Nader phenomenon.

In your comment about black voters, you touch on something that worries me far more. The Democrats are becoming a party of college graduates, while the GOP is becoming a party of those who never attend or don’t graduate college. The former tend to make more money and live in places with higher population densities (urban and inner-ring suburban areas) than the latter. The problem for the Democrats is that less than half of the country graduates from college, and the things those voters care about in terms of social and cultural issues clash with what non-college graduates want. There’s also the structural problem that our system gives a boost to rural voters, so if such voters overwhelmingly support one party, that party (the GOP) will win political power somewhat out of proportion to its aggregate support in the population.

That’s what most concerns me about the Democratic Party’s prospects going forward.

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Eric
I’ve kept half an eye on the “intellectual right” of Patrick Deneen, Adrian Vermeule, and some of the writers associated with the Claremont Institute in an effort to understand the “other side,” but I’m starting to think they aren’t worth wasting any of my valuable attention on. As a left-ish person I have found their arguments unpersuasive, but now I think they are deluded. As someone with a better grasp on conservative philosophy, do you have an opinion on whether they should be taken seriously?

Well, I think it’s worth keeping an eye on all of those people. How can you know? Because I write a newsletter titled “Eyes on the Right.” I can’t guarantee anyone else will find doing so worthwhile purely in intellectual terms. I tend to agree that Deneen, Vermeule, and many of the people at the Claremont Institute are unpersuasive and delusional. But I nonetheless think it’s important to observe what it is about the contemporary United States that leads them to recoil. The act of recoiling is an old reflex on the right, and watching it happen up close, and seeing what counter-moves it inspires, can be very useful and illuminating. I’m constantly picking up on repeated patterns across authors and decades or centuries.

I’d also say that I follow Matthew Sitman and Sam Adler-Bell at the “Know Your Enemy” podcast in thinking there’s much value is keeping tabs on precisely what it is the right is giving itself permission to do in reaction to the things it detests about the present. That’s a big focus of my critical review of Deneen’s new book: I think he’s giving his readers permission to run riot in the streets in order to bring down liberal democracy in America. That’s important to know.

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Scott
Is there a film that you personally regard as a masterpiece while also finding it virtually unwatchable?

Now there’s a question I wasn’t expecting. I suppose watchability is usually an important factor for me in determining whether a film is a masterpiece, or even good. So there aren’t a lot of movies competing for this honor. But there is one. I consider Melancholia (2011, written and directed by Lars von Trier) a great work of art, and yes, a masterpiece of film. But I also find it extremely difficult to sit through. So much so that the last time I watched it—about a year ago, with my college-age son—I became physically ill. I didn’t vomit, but I was seriously nauseated for much of the movie’s 130-minute runtime. That intense physical response faded pretty quickly after the movie ended, but I remained in a psychological funk for a couple of days afterwards.

Two previous viewings were less upsetting, but the film has always affected me powerfully. I don’t expect to watch the film often, but I do hope to muster the motivation to see it again someday. Not all great art makes us feel good. Sometimes it brings us to the darkest depths—and Melancholia does that for me.  

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Janinsanfran
You wrote recently about right-wingers’ perception that federal law enforcement had turned into a gang out to take down patriots. Have you no cultural memory that this was how, justifiably, the left thought about J Edgar Hoover’s FBI chasing commies under beds and defaming Martin Luther King, Jr? Neither is acceptable. For most of its history the FBI has been a right-wing instrument. Today, MAGA want their secret police back….

Battered by Discourse LLC
What do you think about the DoJ/FBI decision to conduct a classic bottom-up organized crime investigation of January 6th? It has been suggested that both DoJ and FBI top officials prevented agents from pursuing evidence implicating a top-down plan emanating from the White House. It has also been suggested the reason for this choice was to restore confidence in the non-partisan nature of the departments. Is restoration of confidence a reasonable or even possible outcome? Or are Chris Wray and Merrick Garland simply misguided appeasers?

I do have cultural memory of what you describe, Janinsanfran. But I’m unsure what lesson you think I should be taking from this history. The right thinks the FBI has switched from being anti-left to being anti-right. But is this true? Or did the FBI have good reason to be maximally suspicious of Donald Trump—and far more so than it did to be suspicious of MLK and other left-wing writers and activists during the 1960s? The fact that, as Battered by Discourse LLC points out, the DoJ and FBI under Biden appear to have slow-walked and perhaps even outright resisted conducting a top-down investigation of Trump’s role in organizing the insurrectionary events of January 6 would seem to lend at least some credence to the claim that federal law enforcement is hesitant to go after Trump, or at least (overly) contrite about having done so pretty aggressively while he was president.

All of this, I should point out, is separate from the question of whether Republicans are interested in wanting the FBI to be less hostile to the right than in wanting it to revert to being far more hostile to the left. Aside from Trump promising, in his flamboyantly corrupt way, to indict Joe Biden after he leaves office in an act of retribution, I don’t see much evidence of this. But I might just be missing it.

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Voice of AmreriCast
How do you keep faith?

Faith in what? God? Liberal democracy? I’m unsure what you mean. But regardless, I think the answer is: I mostly don’t. I get up in the morning. I derive joy and pleasure from thinking and writing, and I’m lucky enough to have found a way to make a decent-enough living doing that. I also love living in a country with political freedom, and I want my children to grow up in a country where that freedom is secure. So I spend my days mostly thinking about those who don’t like freedom, or who define it differently enough that what they want is contrary to what I do. I try to make sense of them and their motives in order to further my own and my readers’ understanding. And that really is it. “Faith” has nothing to do with it. Certainly not in religious and moral senses. I’ve gone through phases in my life when that kind of faith mattered a lot to me, but it doesn’t any more. In fact, I think American politics has too much fervent faith and piety. I’d much prefer to inject the polity with a dose of liberality and practical wisdom/prudence instead.

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Stephen Dause
What worries me most about stopping Trump from becoming president again is those who agree he shouldn't be president but won't commit to voting for Democrats. How big of a problem do you think this is? What is a good argument to convince someone who greatly dislikes both options to nevertheless vote for Biden in ‘24?

The first step is gaining clarity about whether the GOP nominee is Trump, DeSantis, or someone else. I’ve made the argument that Trump is a greater threat to the country (and the world) than DeSantis. I stand by that. If DeSantis manages to overtake Trump for the nomination, I think a case for Biden aimed at a wavering Republican voter can still be made, but I won’t bother constructing it here. Come back and ask me a year from now if it ends up mattering.

As for Trump, the case is quite simple: Don’t let the Republicans succeed in making you hate and fear Biden more than you (rightly) hate Trump. (Don’t succumb to negative partisanship, in other words.) Maybe you disagree with Biden about a lot of things, but he and his team will be responsible stewards of the body politic. They are competent. Biden isn’t a lunatic. Anything his administration does can be rolled back the next time a less-than-crazy Republican wins the White House. The country dodged a bullet the last time Trump was in charge. We would be foolish to take that gamble a second time.

That’s pretty persuasive to me at least.

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Tony
Do you think RFK, Jr supporters have a point that we’ve spent too much money on Iraq, Afghanistan, COVID-19, Ukraine, etc? Wouldn’t we be better off spending those dollars on our own people?

We did spend too much money on COVID relief. The evidence for that is inflation, though inflation was caused by other things as well. (Otherwise we wouldn’t see rising prices in parts of the world that spent less during the pandemic.) But as for the rest, I think it was a mixed bag. I strongly opposed the Iraq War and came to favor withdrawal from Afghanistan, but the expense wasn’t the main reason. And I also strongly support sending aid to Ukraine.

If you think we should be spending money on something to improve things at home, make the case. We can always cut somewhere else, raise taxes, or run (even) higher deficits to pay for it. It’s not like we would have thrown extra money at our domestic problems without fighting about it if we weren’t waging wars around the world over the last two decades.

So I think this is kind of a false dilemma. We shouldn’t fight expensive wars if they are stupid (don’t advance our interests), and we should fight expensive wars if they are smart (do advance our interests). That’s obviously an overly simplistic way to put it, but I think it gets at an important truth, especially for a country as wealthy and powerful as we are.   

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Donny from Queens
I’m extremely disappointed that conservative evangelicals keep doubling and trebling down on Trumpism. You used to work with folks in that world until you broke from the right. Were they always like this or has radicalization made them this way?

No one predicted evangelicals would go from piously denouncing Bill Clinton’s moral failings to swooning for a thrice-divorced, porn-star-screwing real-estate mogul from Manhattan. I’ve written a lot about why this happened. I think it’s a function of the religious right losing power and leverage during the Obama administration and Trump’s promise to serve as its strongman-bodyguard in return for votes, like a mob boss running a protection racket. It turned out this was a transaction that benefitted both sides quite nicely.

But evangelicals being evangelicals, they couldn’t just leave it as a Machiavellian maneuver. They had to concoct a whole theodicy to make it sound theologically admirable, with Trump serving as God’s vessel in the world to achieve his own ends, like King David or something. It’s just absurd. Though I don’t talk that way about it much, because I don’t like using my (modest) platform to hurl insults at people. But hey, this is just an AMA, and you asked. So that’s my view.    

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MarkS
You often call the Republicans “illiberal,” and more recently, “anti-liberal.” Can you please define these terms as you understand them? 

I’d say to be “illiberal” is to display an illiberal sensibility, which means to fail to conform to the ancient virtue of liberality, which means generosity of spirit, openness, tolerance, and spiritual and intellectual modesty. I wrote lots of columns for The Week from early 2014 until around the time of the 2016 general election calling out progressives for illiberalism, especially when it came to using anti-discrimination law to force private (often religious) citizens who held more traditional moral views to affirm the goodness of same-sex marriage.

Think of the “Masterpiece Cakeshop” Supreme Court case. I do not think a bakery should be forced to produce a cake for a gay wedding. That makes me a “conservative” on these cultural issues, but for liberal reasons. I want a society in which secular liberals live alongside Orthodox Jews, observant Muslims, the Amish, Latter-day Saints, and yes, conservative Protestants and Catholics—but that is only possible if the latter religious/conservative groups are given the space to dissent from certain changes in the culture. I still hold these view, but I don’t write about them that much now because I think that since 2016, Republicans have stopped upholding my kind of liberalism in response to these acts by the left and instead embraced an alternative form of illiberalism backed up by state power on the rationale that turnabout is fair play.

And that can very easily bleed over into outright anti-liberalism, which I’d define as placing hatred of liberalism at the core of one’s political convictions, making it the orienting lodestar of political engagement. Because liberalism can mean everything from the political philosophy of the Federalists who wrote and urged ratification of the U.S. Constitution to the governing ideology of the Democratic Party since the New Deal, confusion and slipperiness abounds in using the term. Some right-wing intellectuals, like Patrick Deneen, have begun to argue that America’s problems all flow from liberalism in the broadest sense going all the way back to John Locke and other theorists who influenced people like Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Then there are Ron DeSantis’ efforts to use state power in Florida to force private companies to endorse a certain moral line. Think of this as anti-anti-discrimination law. My objection to it is the same as my objection to progressive overreach in applying anti-discrimination law with regard to gay marriage.

I don’t think everything DeSantis has done in Florida over the last few years can be described this way, but a good bit of it can. I talked about an example in my Looking Left post about sex and gender: the progressive effort to make it illegal in blue states for parents to block their children’s efforts to initiate medically facilitated gender transitioning is anti-liberal, but so is the conservative effort to make it illegal in red states for parents to permit their children to initiate medically facilitated gender transitioning. The fully liberal position is to allow parents, their children, and medical professionals to make these decisions for themselves, without state interference.  

At anti-liberalism’s greatest extreme, you get Trump’s willingness to shred the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power in order to keep himself in office. No one on the left has done anything like this. That makes the Trumpian right a much bigger threat than anything happening on the left.

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Marshall Auerback
In your ideal political world, who would you like to see as the two presidential candidates for the Democrats and Republicans in 2024?

Ideal? That would be FDR (D) running against Abraham Lincoln (R).

Oh, you mean ideal in the sense of the best options on hand in the political world right now, regardless of the willingness to run and ability to win?

On the Democratic side, I like Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, and Colorado Governor Jared Polis. If those three are the future of the Democratic Party, we’re going to be okay. On the other hand, if the future of the Democratic Party is California Governor Gavin Newsom, we’re screwed. I can’t stand him. He’s the Democratic DeSantis—a guy who practices the kind of politics you get in a one-party state.  

On the Republican side, … jeez that’s a tough one. (If it wasn’t a tough one, there wouldn’t be as much need for my Substack!) But I guess if I needed to cough up a couple of names, I’d say Georgia Governor Brian Kemp and Ohio Governor Mike DeWine. Both of them say what they need to in order to remain popular in an increasingly radical, populist party. But they don’t indulge in populist flattery of grassroots bigotry and rabblerousing. I especially admire Kemp’s refusal to bow down before Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election, and DeWine’s steady governance through the pandemic.

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Russell Arben Fox
So let's say the worst comes to pass—truly, the worst. Trump wins the nomination, loses the presidency, denies that he lost, and calls for a general violent uprising against the illegitimate Biden regime, resulting in massive unrest and widespread acts of terrorism. Or, Trump wins the nomination, wins the Electoral College vote, but decisively loses the popular vote, and various blue states, probably led by California, promise widespread nullification of any actions by a president they consider to be illegitimate, and general violence between agents of the national government and different state governments, to say nothing of massive acts of vigilantism and reprisals, follow. In that case, what would you do? Specifically, what would the Linkers of Philadelphia do, and what would you recommend others do?

This makes a nice bookend to this AMA post with the opening questions about how to save the country. What would I do if it can’t be saved and it goes completely to shit? Probably not much. I live just outside of Philadelphia—in deep-blue America, but not in the national or state capital. I’m sure we’d see some violence here, as we did during the late spring and summer of 2020. But the unrest would be one-sided. There aren’t enough “red” Americans here for direct clashes, unless people drove in from the rural parts of the state, looking for trouble. I doubt people would do that given how outnumbered they’d be.

Basically, I think we’d be dealing with a return to the urban violence we saw three years ago, only worse. How much worse? I’d have to see before I decided what to do. So I guess my answer is: Not much. I don’t have a survivalist bone in my body. I’m not stocking canned goods. I’m not dreaming of moving abroad. This is my home. I’m going to ride it on down into the gutter. Thankfully our country is still so empty that there will be plenty of room for moving away from the worst of it, whatever “it” is, if doing so comes to seem reasonable. Though, in my case, I doubt that will ever mean moving to an isolated cabin somewhere. And of course, in the worst-case scenario, there’s always Canada.

1. If you submitted a question for this feature, I hope you read my comment on the call for questions, which I posted on Tuesday late afternoon. If not, here it is:

It's 6pm, Eastern US time, and I already have 25 questions here. That's definitely more than I can answer by Friday. I answered 18 last time, including a few that I folded into single answers, and that made for a really long post. I will probably pick around 15 of these and ask the rest of you to please resubmit your questions the next time. I would also ask you to please try and keep the question as concise as you can, preferably to just a few sentences in a single paragraph. Longer than that and you're probably asking multiple complicated questions, which cries out for an almost post-length reply. In choosing which 15 or so of these to respond to this time, I will skip over the longest ones, hoping the subscribers posting those questions will come back next time with something a little more focused. Remember that it's always possible to follow up with another, related question the next time. (There definitely seems to be enough demand to justify me running this feature once a month. So you won't have long to wait.) Thanks for being here!