Judgment Is All We Have

What the polarized reaction to the “Twitter Files” tells us about the nature of politics

Kanye West's Twitter account displayed on a phone screen. (Photo illustration by Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

If you’d like to hear more about the themes of this post, I hope you’ll listen to my hour-long conversation with Eli Lake on his podcast, which was posted on Friday. It was a lively and illuminating discussion.

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An alternative title for today’s post might be: “What ‘centrism’ means to me.” The occasion is a tweet of mine from Saturday afternoon that’s gone viral—and provoked furious anger on both the right and the center-left.

Damon Linker @DamonLinker

The "Twitter Files" have done more than anything in a while to make me feel like a homeless centrist. My TL is filled w people on the left dismissing/mocking the revelations & people on the right making it out to be an insidious, tyrannical plot. Both are partisan distortions.

From “Liberal” to “Centrist”

When I broke from the right in early 2005 and began writing a book critical of the theologically inflected conservatives I had worked with at First Things for the preceding 3-1/2 years, I stopped calling myself a conservative and embraced the label “liberal.” (Not “classical liberal.” Not “neoliberal.” And certainly not “progressive liberal.” Just “liberal.”) That lasted for a while, but by the time my second book appeared, in 2010, I was already aiming to situate myself “betwixt and between” the various parties and factions in American politics—sharply critical of the right, but also critical of many on the left for going too far in the other direction. (In one chapter of that second book, I took aim at the strident illiberalism of the so-called “New Atheists” of the time.)

I still consider myself a liberal rightly understood, but there’s been a lot of ideological turbulence and shifting labels in our politics over the intervening dozen years. At some point between what struck me during the second term of the Obama administration as progressive overreaching on culture-war issues and the aftermath of Donald Trump’s shocking victory over Hillary Clinton in late 2016, I’d begun calling myself a “centrist.” I did so in full awareness that the label would provoke ire among “resistance” liberals on the left no less than among Trumpy populists on the right.

Some of the anger and dismissal was understandable. Most critics assume a centrist is someone who listens to whatever the two parties are saying at any given time and positions himself equidistant from each ideological pole. That makes centrism a vacuous position lacking any independent content. It merely floats along, repositioning itself in response to the actions of the real political players. If the right moves further right and the left stays constant, for example, then the centrist will move right to accommodate, baptizing this new, more rightward stance the political center and lambasting the left for its increasing extremism.

But this has never been what I mean in calling myself a centrist.

Thinking Without a Bannister

What I mean by the term is that I try my best at all times to think for myself, apart from the settled or evolving consensus among the most partisan members of each political faction in our politics. Those who follow my writing know that I consider the right a much bigger threat than the left at our present moment. That’s why I launched a Substack devoted to understanding and criticizing the right. It’s also why I’ve voted exclusively for Democrats for the past 18 years.

But that doesn’t mean I think the left is correct about everything, either in terms of political tactics or when it comes to what would be best for the country. I think the left is right about some things and wrong about others, and yes, I could say something similar about the right.

Many partisans sneer at my principled refusal to just join up exclusively with one team or the other and use my talents to help it achieve its aims, which is what many writers and intellectuals do in their careers. But I’m not interested. I follow Hannah Arendt in preferring to think without a banister. If, in the end, that makes me too unreliable to contribute to a political project, so be it. I’d rather be true to my own judgment, which is all any of us have to guide us.

How to Judge

Why did he administration of George W. Bush choose to invade Iraq, depose the tyrannical government of Saddam Hussein, and attempt (haplessly) to transform the country into a democracy? The answer is that senior figures in the administration, responsible for protecting the United States and its allies in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, judged Hussein to be a grave enough threat that he couldn’t be permitted to remain in power.

I disagreed with this judgment at the time. It struck me as hubristic and paranoid, and lacking a foundation in the facts. But the president and his team, along with nearly all Republicans and a good number of Democrats as well, disagreed. They judged the situation differently.

I feel vindicated by how things unfolded, just as plenty of people who came down on the other side at the time have come around to accepting that they got things wrong—and some others continue to insist the Bush administration made the right call, despite everything we saw over the following decade and more in the region.

My point in bringing up this example isn’t to provoke yet another round of arguments about the Iraq War. It’s to highlight that everyone involved on every side of these arguments, then and ever since, is relying on their judgment about the situation. Was Saddam Hussein an unacceptable threat? Was he a nuisance who could be deterred? Was he a threat, but one more manageable than a years-long occupation that ends up collapsing into a civil war that kills countless thousands of Iraqis? Whatever your view of the policy choices made and not made, you end up where you are based on how you judge the situation.

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that every single person gazes dispassionately upon a series of facts at any given moment and renders an independent judgment. Far from it. Ideologies exist, in part, to render such independent thinking superfluous. As the sociologist Daniel Bell put it in a line I used as one of the epigraphs of my first book: “Ideology makes it unnecessary for people to confront individual issues on their individual merits. One simply turns to the ideological vending machine, and out comes the prepared formulas.”

That’s what I was noting in my viral and polarizing tweet about the “Twitter Files” controversy. In my own judgment, reactions to the revelations on each side of the partisan divide get some things right and some things wrong, with the errors of each side following from unexamined ideological commitments that encourage the dismissal of worthwhile considerations associated with ideological opponents.

The “Twitter Files” Conflagration