When heterodoxy goes too far

The governing thrust of “heterodoxy” is a healthy skepticism of mass movements, overly broad virtue-signaling claims, and rigid ideological positions. This orientation, within a center-left and center-right segment of the political spectrum, has proved a necessary check on the Internet-fueled herd consensus that many others have adopted in recent years. During the summer of 2020 and the twin calamities of George Floyd’s death and the coronavirus pandemic, I was drawn to a heterodoxy that was conservative in preserving liberalism’s greatest achievements: tolerance of diverse perspectives and freedom of expression. It felt refreshingly non-aligned, distinct from right-wing reactionary backlash and a real repudiation of dogma. Donald Trump and all he stands for, I thought, are clearly incompatible with such thinking.

But in the four years since Trump and his movement have stepped up their assault on our democracy, I’ve come to wonder if this mindset that refuses, by definition, to pick sides contains a fatal flaw.

No orthodoxy offers adequate solutions to every problem; no ideological team deserves your total loyalty. And yet this election cycle has shown time and time again that a reflex to be independent, to reject gatekeeping, to punch the “elites” – or, more simply, the representatives of the status quo – can also leave people numb to the existential threats that a reasonable consensus. positions were developed to oppose it. Our values ​​can be turned against us. When heterodoxy is elevated above all other priorities, it risks collapsing in on itself.

Until recently, in the heterodox segment of the cultural spectrum, opposition to Trump was the obvious response to his particularly reckless and destabilizing political presence. The number of self-described centrist “Never Trumpers” — starting with the current Trump nominee, who once compared in this magazine to “cultural heroin”—they were legion. But as the race has tightened in recent months, I’ve been struck by a palpable shift in attitude among many liberal and centrist voices — a loosening of vigilance and a softening of Trump.

This is not to be confused with the 180-degree pivot of prominent MAGA converts like Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard and Bill Ackman, as well as writers and journalists like Naomi Wolf—the former Democrats who” we’ve become downright Trump fans What we noticed last summer, when Joe Biden’s campaign self-immolated and Kamala Harris took the nomination, was a more general exhaustion among many heterodox thinkers and a disinclination to to support the alternative to Trump that was now on offer. Harris, many agree, is not an ideal candidate. But given the enormous stakes, I wanted to understand how anyone who was not already bewitched by the MAGA cult could hesitate to support her.

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I contacted two of the most thoughtful heterodox commentators I know in an earnest attempt to take this ambivalence seriously. Kmele Foster and Coleman Hughes are both podcasters with significant followings. Both are “black”, although Hughes is an ardent supporter of colorblindness (he wrote a book this year called The Politics of the End of Races) and Foster (like me) rejects racial categories. They represent, in my opinion, the steel version of heterodox perspectives, and neither, they confirmed to me this week, is going to vote.

Hughes told me when we spoke in September that he sees Trump’s behavior around January 6, 2021 as “disqualifying.” However, he listed two reasons why he could not support Harris. The first had to do with the growing sense that Trump’s threat was simply overblown. “If I truly felt that Trump would end American democracy or run for a third term if he won or started a nuclear war, I would vote for Kamala in a heartbeat,” he said. And indeed, he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because he found Trump’s rhetoric so alarming. “He talked vaguely about registering Muslims in a register. He talked vaguely about using nuclear weapons,” he recalled. “I would have voted for Bugs Bunny over him.”

Despite his fears of Trump’s fascist tendencies, Hughes found the reality of the Trump administration far less dramatic. “He governed much more like a normal Republican,” he said. “In fact, many of his policies would be seen as insufficiently right-wing.” He has learned, he told me, to “cut back” on much of what Trump says: “It’s basically just his business instincts. He literally talks about it in The art of business. You start by saying something crazy and then you go back to a leverage point in negotiations.”

Read: An ethicist reads The art of business

In 2020, Hughes voted for Biden, whom he saw as a moderate liberal and a politician with a track record of getting across the aisle. That’s not at all how he perceives Harris, who he sees as aligned with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders and “deeply destructive to the long-term prosperity of the country.” When it comes to foreign policy, “I haven’t seen a single 10-second clip of her that impresses me analyzing anything going on in the world related to geopolitics, foreign conflicts and so on,” he told me. “I have virtually zero signals of her competence as a manager or director.”

Foster is an entrepreneur (he founded telecommunications and media companies) and a libertarian who rarely, if ever, feels represented by a mainstream politician, though he insists he might vote for a more moderate Democrat. Foster is most concerned with the “excesses of culture warfare” and how “when they become part of the bureaucracy, whether it’s on a college campus or within the federal government, (they) can actually become strangely totalitarian,” he said. I. He believes the left is blind to the fact that it also has “a profound capacity for abuse of power.” He pointed to “gender issues,” the move to defund the police and Trump’s criminal prosecutions, which he said have a “political tinge,” among other examples.

Read: If Trump is guilty, does it matter if the prosecution was political?

People who are worried about Trump’s “disturbing institutions” should have a similar concern about Democrats, Foster said. He brought up the idea by some prominent voices on the left to pack the US Supreme Court with more justices to dilute the conservative majority, which he believes shows an alarming disregard for norms that goes unnoticed because “there is a greater sophistication on the part of the Democrats, which makes it much less obvious that some of the things they’re trying to do are bad.”

He sees little evidence that Harris has spoken out against or countered such trends. On this point, it’s hard to disagree with him. Harris has said very little about what, if anything, she would do to distinguish herself not just from the Biden administration but from reiterating herself, who briefly and unsuccessfully sought the presidency in 2019. Luna past, she couldn’t tell Anderson. Cooper only one concrete mistake she made in her leadership capacity, even though most of the country knows she covered for a president in cognitive decline.

Many of the concerns raised by Hughes and Foster are compelling. And yet, to a disconcerting degree, it all seems meaningless – like debating the temperature of the water and the features and specifications of life rafts while our proverbial ship is sinking. Both Hughes and Foster were signatories of Harper’s letter of 2020, a bipartisan statement against creeping illiberalism. (I was one of the letter’s writers.) It was often misrepresented by its critics as an anti-revival document, but it began with an explicit condemnation of Donald Trump, “who poses a real threat to democracy.” As Mark Lilla, one of the other writers of the letter, notate recently in The New York Review of Booksthis election is not ultimately about change or politics, or even about blocking Trump; “it is more fundamentally about maintaining our liberal democratic political institutions.”

If we can’t pull that off, with whatever flawed custodian we’ve been given, we can look back on these nuanced political discussions as an extravagant luxury we squandered.