A Coalition of the Both Decent and Sensible

Linking Arms against the Illiberal Extreme

In an essay last week (“Jonah Goldberg, heal thyself!”), I touched on a topic – “both-sidesism” – to which I return here.

Charlie Sykes (founder and editor-at-large) and Mona Charen (policy editor) are leaders of The Bulwark, a website that “focuses on political analysis and reporting without partisan loyalties or tribal prejudices.” Among their other contributions, the two of them share their topical insights in a weekly podcast conversation, “Just Between Us.” 

In yesterday’s episode, Sykes and Charen engaged in an important conversation about illiberalism and dangers that flow from its presence on both sides of the political divide. The title of the episode – “Cancer Versus Heart Attack” – reflects the disparate nature of the dangers, as they described them.

Recounting conversations that he had at a recent conference, Sykes said:

[W]e’re combatting rampant illiberalism that we’re seeing around the country, [but] you cannot defend liberalism against illiberalism if you ignore the illiberalism on the left.

[...]

Now this is not to say that it’s equivalent, but we have a two-front war here. And it was an interesting discussion of “How do we deal with this?” And the best analogy, the best description of this…was to compare the various threats. That dealing with the anti-democratic illiberalism of the MAGA right is a heart attack, but the illiberalism of the left is more like cancer.

The illiberalism of the MAGA right is clear enough, highlights being: the attempts to overturn the 2020 presidential election; the ongoing denialism and ferocious campaign of lies about that election and others; and abuses of official power to suppress and punish opposition and impinge upon free speech.

What did Sykes and Charen mean by illiberalism on the left? Here from Charen are some examples:

[T]here are a number of ways that you can track that it is an issue. One of them is that when you look at polling, you know, of young people, well, Americans in general, but even college students and others, saying, you know, how often do you self-censor because you’re afraid that you cannot say what you think without fear of retribution, and it’s very, very high. People are feeling stifled. They’re feeling afraid to express themselves because of a rigid, censoriousness that is out there. And, you know, censoriousness, these are not easy things. It’s not easy to draw the lines. I mean, you want people to think that certain kinds of opinion are kind of out of bounds, right? And yet, when those lines start to shrink, and shrink and shrink. 

For example, we all agree that it is out of bounds to use the n-word. It’s so offensive. It’s beyond bounds. People should not do it and they should be punished for using it. But when professors just refer to the term in a course about racism or so on and they are punished because they mouthed the forbidden words, then you’re getting into an area that’s lost its moorings and has become crazy.

And so that’s the sort of thing – these distinctions are hard to draw and you understand that sometimes it’s well intentioned as in forbidding the n-word, but other times it’s not so well intentioned. It’s intended to intimidate and bully people.

[...]

And then one other thing I would say about – and you were talking, I think last or two weeks ago about Richard North Patterson, who wanted to write a book that was about race and class and issues that are perennials in our lives and out country, and he got blowback because he himself is white. And if you impose that kind of a standard, which is very common on the left now, you know, there are people whose books have been canceled because they were the wrong ethnicity and they tried to write. And by the way, they tried to write completely sympathetically about other people’s life experience and this is ruled out of bounds. Well, in that case you’re giving up on the idea of  human empathy in general. You know, I don’t need to know what’s in your heart because I see your skin color and therefore...  

I have commented extensively on this phenomenon, largely in The BRIDGE Project, a private Facebook group that is devoted to building understanding among people of diverse demographics and contrasting social and political outlooks. While I have expressed concern that racial essentialism and censoriousness often aggravate the very social ills that are their targets, I had not come to the political conclusion that Sykes and Charen described:

CHAREN

And so, as crazy as the right is and as vicious as the right is these days, it’s still true that we are in a dialogue, and that things that happen on the left do stimulate the right to be even worse. 

SYKES

Okay, so that was my side. This is a dialogue. And if you don’t understand how some of that stuff provides jet fuel to the illiberalism of the right, then you can’t engage in that dialogue. Because it does. It does feed into it. 

[F]or example, you have this heavy-handed bullying from people like Ron DeSantis, etcetera, going after diversity programs, as if somehow diversity or even using words like being inclusive is somehow too woke. This is obnoxious. This is heavy-handed. This is illiberal. But in order to understand why part of this is happening and why it is appealing, you need to understand at least, “What is the objection? What triggers this response?”

This theme found strong expression in today’s edition of “White Flag with Joe Walsh.” Readers may remember Walsh as a former Tea Party Congressman and conservative talk radio host who, like Sykes, Charen, and others, experienced a political awakening in the age of Trump.

Today Walsh interviewed Josh Hammer, who, as they discussed, has a very different political outlook.

HAMMER

I take a very realistic view as to where we are in the 21st century, both geopolitically and in terms of what I view as the cultural rot and degradation that have happened for decades and decades, and that kind of informs my views on a lot of various subjects, whether it is foreign policy, immigration, or perhaps most provocatively for you and I would perhaps be a disagreement over the use of state power to combat the woke ideology, or at least what I refer to as the woke ideology.

[...]

[W]hen I look at the world in the year 2023 or really for the past years in general, and I’ll really underscore this kind of public-private collusion when it comes to big tech and the Twitter files and all of that – obviously the technology industry is not, it’s not exclusive to them, it’s just a very good example of it – when I look what’s happening here, to me, government overreach, while it is still a problem is not the biggest problem that we face. Rather, what I view as the biggest problem is the spread and the metastasis of  this deeply pernicious civilizationally self-hating woke ideology, which is a fire, a great conflagration actually, that if we do not put it out in time will swallow this country whole and ultimately destroy it. 

And if I’m looking at the deeply, deeply, deeply pernicious influence this ideology has had on so many institutions even outside of government – I mean, obviously it’s affected the administrative state, the deep state, no doubt about that. But whether you look at academia, the private sector, Fortune 500 companies, elementary school classrooms, I fail to see how we can turn that back without some prudential use of state power.

Common to the two conversations is the idea that the excesses of “woke ideology” on the left have provoked the illiberal response from the right. 

There may be some truth to that. I believe it is more accurate to observe that demagogues on the right – Josh Hammer among them – are opportunistically exploiting the excesses on the left for their own ends, quite distinct from the need to address harms that they so egregiously exaggerate. Further, the illiberalism on the left is overwhelmingly a social and cultural phenomenon occurring in non-governmental institutions and in society at large. This is rather different from the kind of government persecution of vulnerable groups, such as the transgender community (to name just one), that has become all the rage in Florida and many other states.

As Sykes and Charen further noted in their conversation, the culture war has fully engaged the Republican electorate, to the exclusion of proper public policy priorities. 

SYKES

So you saw this new CBS poll about Republican primary voters? Let me read to you the way CBS wrote it up: 

*****To the extent the Republican primary is a contest at all right now, it looks like it's one between Donald Trump and a sentiment one might call "Trump fatigue."

And Trump is winning that matchup easily.

Here's why: MAGA-sounding ideas are widely held in the Republican electorate, an environment that plays heavily to Trump's advantage.*****

So they asked people, “Do you prefer a Republican nominee who” – they said 85 percent of them preferred a candidate who challenges woke ideas. Sixty-six percent said they preferred a Republican candidate who opposes any gun restrictions. Any gun restrictions. It gets worse. Sixty-one percent of likely GOP primary voters said that they preferred a 2024 Republican candidate who says Trump won in 2020. Sixty-one percent. Fifty-seven percent said they preferred a candidate who just makes liberals angry.

CHAREN

Yeah, our colleague Sarah Longwell did a piece a few weeks ago about the pre-Trump Republican Party and the post-Trump Republican Party, and there is a divide.  It is a hinge moment in history.  And the party has been dramatically altered and all that we can now hope for is that because things are so narrowly divided, and because minorities of Americans call themselves either Republicans or Democrats – the plurality is independents. Now those independents tend to vote one way or the other, they tend to lean Democrat or lean Republican. The number of true independents is fairly small. But our elections are determined by really narrow slices. And so we still are back where we were a minute ago in the other conversation, which is we still have to engage in persuasion for that slice of crucial voters who will determine the outcome. 

SYKES

Yeah, the question is, “Who’s talking to them right now? I’m not sure at the moment. Because if you don’t understand all these crosscurrents that we were talking about before, then I don’t know that you’re able to talk to those voters, because those voters are not necessarily coming from exactly where you want them to be coming from.

Sykes and Charen here speak to one of the strategies of the anti-authoritarian movement that I described in my April 21 essay, “Meeting the Authoritarian Challenge”: depolarization. The more that people who are both decent and sensible are able to make common cause against and draw people away from the illiberal MAGA extreme, the greater our prospects for preserving our democracy. This is why groups like The BRIDGE Project and organizations like Braver Angels and Beyond Conflict are so important. We all have roles to play.