everyone is a radical now

I’ve recently subscribed to David French’s really good Substack newsletter (named The French Press – kudos to David for such a pun!) He’s the first real conservative writer I’ve added to my daily rotation, unless you consider Andrew Sullivan a conservative (I don’t; he’s much too middle of the road, in a good way.) David wrote this last week a very perceptive post on the extremism of the culture wars that I can’t recommend enough, and that I’ll write a few posts about here. While I certainly don’t see eye to eye with David on the substance of a lot of political issues, I like reading him because temperamentally I think we are so similar – the same way I view Alan Jacobs, another conservative-ish writer who I value greatly. We all hold strong positions, but we do so in an even keeled way – temperamentally conservative, while not necessarily being politically so (at least in my case.)

What really jumped out to me in his piece was his identification of something I have felt myself over the last couple of years: the rise of the conflict between extremism or radicalism and moderation, over and against the classical conflict between left and right. Here is David:

Last month The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg published a fascinating interview with Israeli prime minister Yair Lapid. The entire interview is worth reading—especially if you have interest in Israeli politics and the prospects for Middle East peace—but two sentences from the prime minister stood out as particularly insightful. “Everybody is stuck in this left-versus-right traditional dynamic,” he said. “But today, all over the world, it’s centrist versus extremist.”

I wanted to stand up and cheer. Now, to be clear, this is a strange position for me. I’ve always been conservative. In the left versus right context, I’ve always considered myself a man of the right—the Reagan right. But when the extremes grow more extreme, and the classical liberal structure of the American republic is under intellectual and legal attack, suddenly I’m an involuntary moderate. 

I identify very strongly with this. Politically, I am a creature of the left. I carry a strong commitment to a class-based, social democratic labor-leftism, and I support policies that advance the interests of the working class and minority groups within a framework of responsive, egalitarian democracy. But, I find myself occupying a place within our current political moment that is more centrist or moderate than I’ve ever been. Just a David finds himself on the outs with what constitutes the right today, I find it hard to identify with the American left in many ways. Not because I’m drifting right, but exactly because I’ve stayed pretty steady in my political commitments and watched the left drift away from me, not further left, but instead in a direction that would be more vertical on a scale of political orientations. Think something like this:

I’m in that green square, near the horizon line but just below it, and about 2/3 of the way left. The mainstream left seems to not have moved much left, but instead just further and further up the scale. Same on the right: the libertarian right is almost non-existent, while the mainstream right has moved very quickly up. In this drift, on the the left and the right, those of who have maintained political commitments- and even more importantly, have refused to be buffeted by the fickle winds of American politics – have been left somewhat homeless. Another way to put this is, mainstream politics no longer shifts along the left-right axis, but instead sees who can go vertical the fastest, and those of us committed to a debate on that left-right axis are largely shouting into the abyss.

Here is David on his view of being left behind (sorry for the long quote, but its all so crucial to argument I’m making here):

So, for example, I’m a person who believes in the traditional Christian doctrines of marriage and sexual morality. I don’t believe in sex outside of marriage between a man and a woman. I don’t agree that trans men are “men” or that trans women are “women,” and while I strive to treat every person I encounter with dignity and respect, I don’t use preferred pronouns because their use is a form of assent to a system of belief to which I don’t subscribe.

That makes me pretty far right, correct? Not when the right gets authoritarian or closes its mind and heart to the legacy of real injustice. I’m apparently the conservative movement’s foremost defender of the civil liberties of drag queens. I’m constantly decried as “woke” in part because I don’t discard all of the relevant insights gained from critical race theory, I strongly oppose efforts to “ban” CRT, and also because I believe in multigenerational institutional responsibility to ameliorate the enduring harm caused by centuries of racial oppression. 

The through line is pretty simple. I’m both a traditionally orthodox Christian and a strong believer in classical liberalism, pluralism, and legal equality. I’m a believer in those political values because I’m a traditionally orthodox Christian. I want to create and sustain the kind of republic that was envisioned by George Washington at his best, a place where “Everyone will sit under their own vine and under their own fig tree, and no one will make them afraid.” 

I do not want to commandeer the government to “reward friends and punish enemies,” and I do want to protect the fundamental freedoms of even the most strident of my political opponents. This is not because they’ll like me if I do, but because it is just and right to defend the rights of others that I would like to exercise myself. 

Again, I certainly don’t share the specifics of these politics with David, but I share this feeling and this temperamental commitment to liberalism, even if I at times have strong criticisms of the liberal tradition¹. Such much of politics today is about owning our enemies on social media, about punishing those with disagree with, and even more so, those who dissent from the orthodoxy of the moment. Its become about using the power of politics and media to control and enforce a vision of the world, not economically, but culturally. I have no problem using the levers of government to craft a more economically egalitarian and fair world; I do have issues with using those levers to force people to believe certain things. For a long time, its been understood by most people that the First Amendment forbids such things; now, that is a decidedly fringe belief, according to the new consensus among the authoritarian left and right. (Just do a search on Twitter for the term “free speech bro” to see what I’m talking about.)

I wanted to highlight this from David’s essay and write this post as a way of laying down a marker about something that has increasingly become an intellectual prior for me at this point: our politics is all extremism and radicalism at this point, and that is a bad thing. I feel left behind by this, and I think a lot of other smart people are too, especially a large contingent of normies who aren’t obsessed with politics and social media culture. Its a new Silent Majority in the making, not built around latent racism and disapproval of the counterculture, but instead around a tendency to shake our heads at all the braying idiots in our cultural arenas and a desire to live our life, for things to make a little more sense, and for our leaders to just try to make the world a little better and easier for everyone to live in. This marker is important for me because its influencing so strongly the things I’m thinking and writing going forward. Consider me a libertarian-leftist-moderate.

¹ Those criticisms are theologically rooted, however, not politically. I think in politics, liberalism is about the best we can do right. But it still has shortcomings that a good theological lens brings into view.