Happy First Anniversary to Us

Taking stock one year into this effort at understanding our political world

Low angle view of firework display at night. Makoto isa / 500px (Getty Images)

This Substack was born one year ago today—June 1, 2022—under the title “Eyes on the Right.” In mid-March, I relaunched it under a new name (“Notes from the Middleground”) with “Eyes on the Right” now joined by two additional newsletters, “Looking Left” and “Above the Fray.” By my count, I’ve written 136 posts—120 for “Eyes,” and 7 each for the other two. (I’ve also written two posts in the general “Notes from the Middleground” category—plus this post, which will go there as well.) That works out to about 200,000 words of writing. I’m proud of most of them.

I’m also proud of how this little endeavor has grown over the course of the year. We started, of course, from zero. As of May 31, 2023, “Notes from the Middleground” counted a total of a little more than 9,400 subscribers, with about 9 percent of them paying. Those figures aren’t quite as high as I hoped they would be at this point. But it’s strong start, and solid, steady growth continues. I should reach my original goal—the number that would make this venture sustainable over the long term—within the next year or so.

All of that seems worth celebrating.

To mark the occasion, I’m going to give a brief global view of what I’ve written about this year, highlighting some of my favorite posts. (Those who have been here from early on may enjoy the brisk walk down memory lane, while those who’ve come on board more recently might appreciate being pointed in the direction of past posts worth catching up on.) Then I will step back to reflect more broadly and substantively on the work of political analysis I’ve done this past year and hope to continue doing over the next 12 months and beyond.

Five Kinds of Posts

Most of my posts this past year fall into 1 of 5 categories. (I’m not counting the cultural posts I began writing in March for “Above the Fray.” Those belong in a separate category of their own.)

Political Analysis—Usually these kinds of posts start with an observation drawn from a news story or a tweet or a quote from a pundit or politician. My post earlier this week is a good example. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat said something in a roundtable discussion about how conservatism going forward will aim to use political power to win back captured cultural territory. I found this interesting and decided to think through what this would look like in practical terms. Other examples include: the series of posts I did titled “After Roe,” about the aftermath of the Dobbs decision; my look back at Republican platforms to trace the GOP’s rising radicalism on social issues over time; my two-part exploration of “the fascism question”; and my effort to put right-wing populism on the couch in order to highlight its psychological sources. I do a lot of these kinds of posts, and I’m sure I’ll have occasion to do many more in the future.

Philosophical Analysis—These aren’t as common, mostly because they require a lot of preparatory work on my part, but also because I don’t want things to get too densely academic around here, excluding subscribers who haven’t gone to graduate school. That said, I’m quite pleased with many of the posts I’ve done along these lines. That would include my early post about Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis in light of the contemporary rise of the antiliberal right; my two-part essay on Leo Strauss as a teacher of skepticism; my three-part essay (here, here, and here) titled “Philosophy and the Far Right,” along with a substantial follow-up titled “Down the Straussian Rabbit Hole”; and an essay about the crucial importance of judgment in politics and life.  

Critical Profiles of People and Their Ideas—These also take longer to write than some of the other kinds of posts, but the results can be quite valuable. I wrote two of these early on at “Eyes on the Right” (on Glenn Greenwald and Steve Bannon). I ended up having a lot to say about Rod Dreher’s intellectual development in a series of three posts provoked by his deepening radicalism. I was moved to write a pair of posts about Michael Anton by a very personal and dishonest attack he launched against me. Finally and more recently, the good folks over at Persuasion commissioned me to write a pair of lengthy posts about Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin that were cross-posted here. I trust there will be plenty more posts along these lines over the coming months and years. Oh, and I’d also place in this category those occasional autobiographical posts in which I reflect on my own background and assumptions, like the self-revealing essay I wrote about being a conservative liberal.

Op-Ed-Style Argumentative Interventions—These posts come closest to what I would often write in my column at The Week. You know the drill: Advance a thesis that X, Y, or Z is WRONG or A, B, or C is RIGHT; argue for it relentlessly using cogent reasoning and aptly chosen examples/evidence; concede a point or two to opponents, only to dismiss them as causing no significant problem for my argument; then sum up the indisputable correctness of my own position. In case you can’t tell from my tone, I’ve grown a little weary of this kind of writing, though I’ve done a fair amount of it here, and in the New York Times and Persuasion, over the past year. The most recent examples were my posts from May, “Of Course Donald Trump Can Win in 2024” and “Ten Theses for Liberals on Sex and Gender.” (I’m especially happy with the latter post and would appreciate you sharing it widely if you appreciate and agree with its message.)   

News Responses and Horserace Election Coverage—These are by far the easiest posts to write, and often readers find them quite entertaining and informative, especially when I’m commenting on events outside of the United States (as I did about the Italian election last September and the foiling of a coup plot in Germany three months later). So these will always be in the mix here, especially as we crawl toward the next presidential election 18 months from now.

Where We Are, Where We Were, and Where We’re Going

When it comes to assessing the state of our politics, nothing much has changed over the past year. That’s what one would expect when thinking about a long-term and broad-based trend, which is what I understand the rise of right-wing antiliberalism to be.

Those two sentences contain a lot of what’s distinctive about the way I think about our political world. For one thing, I try not to get swept up in short-term enthusiasms or panics. The Democrats did better than expected in the 2022 midterm elections. Good! But that doesn’t mean we’ve turned a corner, entered a new era, or demonstrated that any one political actor or dispensation has been vanquished or rendered unelectable. On the contrary, I’m more impressed that Republicans continue to do as well as they do in our elections when their words and deeds are so repellant to so many Americans. Donald Trump came within 43,000 votes in three states of winning re-election in 2020. The GOP (narrowly) won a majority in the House in 2022. Republicans control many more state houses than Democrats do. And so forth.

Democrats like to say the right has gone mad. It’s terrifying. It’s un-American. It’s racist. It’s morally appalling. It’s anti-democratic. Yet Republicans keep fighting Democrats roughly to a draw in contests for political power. If our electoral outcomes resembled those in the 1930s, with Dems sweeping the presidency along with both houses of Congress by supermajority margins, the GOP’s radicalism would be troubling but less intensely worrying. Such outcomes would show that an overwhelming majority of the country’s voters recognize the extremism and want nothing to do with it.

But that’s not what we’re seeing. Just about half of the country either likes what it’s hearing from the right or fears and despises what it’s hearing from the left even more. All it would take is a rightward shift of a couple of percentage points in election results for the antiliberal Republican Party to take firm control of our politics. A five-point shift, meanwhile, would lock out Democrats from top to bottom across much of the country.

I don’t know how likely that is, but it’s certainly possible, especially if the GOP continues to do better among Americans (across all demographic groups) who haven’t graduated from college.

What can the Democrats do to stop this from happening? I have ideas and preferences, most of them involving the party moderating on cultural issues. (Most of my writing for “Looking Left” has been and will continue to be about the need for such a shift.) But this would only work if the Dems managed to retain their most culturally progressive voters while pivoting to the center, and that is far from certain.

One thing that leads me to doubt it would be successful is that the antiliberal right is in ascendance across the democratic world. And that points to deep, structural causes that go beyond American contingencies. Something about our digitally networked world, along with its distinctive socioeconomic configurations and trends, is encouraging right-wing antiliberalism. We don’t really know what this something is or why it’s having this effect. And until we do, efforts to prevent it will necessarily be uncertain and at best selectively successful.

The best way to defend liberalism under these conditions is to seek greater understanding of its troubles and their sources. And I think we’re most likely to achieve that understanding by keeping our eyes open to the wider world, looking for commonalities, patterns, and discontinuities. For that reason, I hope to do more writing about other countries here over the coming year and beyond.  

At the moment, the evidence from around the world is mixed to distressing. Yes, centrist Emmanuel Macron won re-election in France a couple of months before I launched this Substack, and Jair Bolsonaro was defeated in Brazil last October. But Viktor Orbán easily won re-election in Hungary a little over a year ago, as did Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel late last year, and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey just last weekend. The news across the rest of Europe, meanwhile, is ominous, with the populist right already running Italy and showing increased polling strength in France, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Austria, Bulgaria, Poland, and Romania. (For a rundown, I suggest reading this helpful Twitter thread and subscribing to the Populism Updates account.)

Keeping Busy

All of which means the right-populist era is far from over. That doesn’t mean antiliberalism has the upper hand and is bound to triumph, let alone that it will evolve to take the truly demonic form it did nearly a century ago in Europe. During the mid-1990s, with neoliberal centrism on the rise, far-right politics seemed dead and buried. That fact should discourage complacency about the present but also stave off panic about the future.

The truth is we just don’t know what’s coming. From the perspective of 2043, these could look like the good old days—or we might look back and wonder just what the hell drove so many people so crazy during the 2010s and ’20s. It’s also possible that the world’s democracies will simply have to come to terms with a new normal in which parties of technocratic liberalism face regular electoral opposition from more rabid parties of the populist-nationalist right. That prospect will disturb many, but I can certainly imagine worse possibilities.    

In any event, it seems indisputable that what’s worrying for the world is good for me and this Substack community: There’s plenty of work to do! I’m delighted you’ve chosen to join me in the task. I also hope you’ll stick around and tell your friends about its value. Never forget that I couldn’t be doing it without you.