Welcome!

I am in the process of redesigning this site. A great deal of old material has been deleted. I’ve included links to some published pieces in the “Archives” section.

The redesign is prompted by several things. Simple opportunity plays a part: having retired from my day job, I now have the time to indulge such projects. But I can’t in all honesty say that’s the main reason. If it were, I would have made these changes when I originally retired a year ago. The real driver has been my long, slow rethinking of our politics— what it’s about, where it’s going, what we can reasonably expect from it, and what it does (and doesn’t) mean to me personally.

The 2016 election cleaned my clock. It wasn’t simply that I expected Hillary Clinton to win and was surprised when she didn’t; I’d been surprised by elections before. What made 2016 into such a thunderclap for me was its obliteration of a political narrative I’d spent the previous four-to-five years constructing.

That narrative had a number of moving parts. It distinguished between two orders of political life: the bump-and-grind of everyday politics— where we should put the new fire station, what the top marginal tax rate ought to be, whether states should tax internet purchases— and disputes over the governing framework within which those issues are litigated. I suggested that every community has to decide (at least) two questions about its framework: (1) What concepts and standards are essential to it? (2) To whom does it apply— that is, who can, and who cannot, become a full-fledged member of the community, eligible for all the rights it affords and all the duties it imposes? Crucial among these, I insisted, were the right to vote, to stand for election, to hold office— in short, the right to exercise political power.

I then applied this model to American politics. I sorted political actors into two groups. One consists of those who largely accept the recent drift of our politics toward a welfarist conception of (1) and an increasingly expansive definition of (2). (Here “welfarist” is used in the technical economic sense.) Such persons, whom I called “modernists,” accept that government has a vital role in assuring a fair distribution of essential resources and capabilities, and they applaud the gradual extension of political rights to groups previously marginalized and oppressed. They tend to embrace the notion I labeled “liberal universalism”— the idea that every (functionally normal) human being is a potential member of our political community. (Subject, of course, to reasonable pragmatic considerations such as immigration levels, etc.)

The other group rejects at least one of these ideas. Some, including libertarians, reject (1). They deny that government should concern itself with whether resources are allocated fairly or in a way that supports human well-being. Instead, they assign people certain rights and then argue that the only legitimate function of government is to secure and enforce these. Others focus their animus on (2). They look at liberal universalism and see a dreadful mistake. Citizenship, they say, cannot be made available to everyone; it must be restricted to those who meet certain criteria— racial, religious, economic, ethnic, etc.

This group as a whole I referred to as “anti-modernists.” In most of my writing— in the Salon pieces, for example— I spent more time on those offended by the second element of modernism than the first. I traced their opposition to various factors, in particular to America’s original sin of Black chattel slavery and its corrosive influence on our political psychology. These considerations were especially pertinent, I argued, to any attempt to understand the politics of the South, just as the South was central to any account of the behavior of the Republican Party. In my view, it is precisely the GOP’s southward pivot in the 1960s— its embrace of the white Southern voters who fled the Democratic Party when it embraced the cause of Black equality— that explains the Party’s evolution over the last fifty years or so. The basic contours of that evolution— the GOP’s increasing reliance on ever-more-shrill rhetoric, especially where race is concerned; its relentless obstructionism during the Obama years; its remorseless support of conspiracy theories that scapegoat ethnic and other minorities— were the subject of many of the articles I wrote between 2013 and 2016. They created a Republican electorate that was radicalized, vengeful, and paranoid: in other words, an electorate that could make Donald Trump its presidential nominee.

And then, the election. I was crushed by the outcome in a way I’d never been; even Bush’s reelection in 2004, which struck me as perverse and disastrous, didn’t affect me as deeply. Then I was knocked off center for a week, maybe a little more. 2016 sent me into a tailspin whose worst aspects— anger, incredulousness, revulsion, an enervating intellectual torpor— lasted the better part of a year. To put it simply, I was— for the first time in my life, really— in something like a depression.

There were two crucial steps in digging out. The first, predictably perhaps, involved a bit of self-deception. I had recorded all the ways in which Trump’s victory was “flukey”— how much it depended on accidents such as Russian hacks and letters from James Comey— but I hadn’t dwelt on the role of certain structural aspects of our politics, particularly the electoral college. I knew, of course, that the electoral college was the formal cause of Trump’s win, but I didn’t dwell on it, didn’t really ponder it. When I did, it occurred to me that perhaps I was over-interpreting the election. Trump’s victory might have all (and only) the profundity of a clunky 18th century political deal— that is, not much. The man was still a menace, certainly, and he had to be opposed at every turn, but maybe 2016 wasn’t so much a source of great truths about our politics as simply another reason to be pissed off at the Founders. Given this, outrage might well be justified, nervousness too— but depression? Probably not.

All true, as far as it goes. But of course there’s an element of defensiveness here. Sloughing off the profundity of Trump’s election— its revelatory power— was a not-so-very discreet signal to myself that I didn’t have to struggle so much with what it meant. Because maybe it didn’t mean that much. Maybe I was simply trying to bring the cause into line with the effect. Something as horrific as a Trump presidency had to derive from conditions equally momentous, did it not? Or did it? Maybe there was no proportionality here. Trump’s election could be both genuinely disastrous and merely an accident, a kind of quirk. Couldn’t it?

Well, sure. But as I listened more closely to what I was saying and writing in response to the election, I detected a pattern. I just can’t believe this, I would say. I can’t believe we went from the suave urbanity of Barack Obama to the racist crudity of Donald Trump. I can’t believe we put this bulbous toad in the White House. I thought we were better than this.

And there it was. The story I had spun about American politics was a story, at bottom, of progress— a story in which some really good ideas about liberty and equality gradually transcended the mostly awful society in which they reposed and ultimately saved it from itself. The point of calling the good guys “modernists” wasn’t just to lay down a temporal marker, it was to identify them as the good guys: enlightened, rational, forward-thinking— people who had slipped the surly bonds of the past and stepped onto the bright sunlit uplands. And the “anti-modernists”? Where were they? Well, where do you think? Some place dark and dank, AKA “the dustbin of history.”

I had committed the egregious sin of “Whiggism”— so denominated by the British historian Herbert Butterfield, who, in his “The Whig Interpretation of History,” permanently stigmatized the tendency of liberal historians such as Macaulay and Trevelyan to depict all of British history as a long, slow, but irresistible slog toward parliamentary democracy. When Donald Trump, an arch anti-modernist if ever there was one, broke the tape first in 2016 it was a heat-seeking missile aimed right at this conceit. It destroyed my callow confidence that certain things were off the table, that some political threats didn’t have to be taken seriously anymore. Politics suddenly seemed a lot less predictable, and a whole lot more ominous, than it had before. And this thought, for me, was both terrifying and dispiriting.

Realizing all this, I gradually moved from depression to a much more mundane (if still uncomfortable) state: embarrassment. My belief that some fundamental corner had been turned in American politics now struck me as silly, shallow, and inane. Which it was. Even more galling was that I had buried this puerility under a sheen of hardnosed, realist rhetoric. Politics is about conflict, I would write. It’s about power. Elections decide who rules, and whose ideas rule. I would write articles about the Tea Party and its cracked worldview, but to me the Tea Party was moribund, anachronistic, quaint: I might as well have been writing about a Tyrannosaurus Rex. It never occurred to me that it was a live option in our politics, a direction we as a country might decide to take. When I had to face up to this possibility, it knocked me on my ass.

Of course, the two lifeboats that ferried me back to sanity are related. One reason I scanted the electoral valence of “anti-modernism” was that I discounted the mischief our archaic political system, particularly the electoral college, might wreak. Between them, those insights enabled me to start thinking again about politics, but in a way— I hope— that is more lucid and mature. I still think many of the details of my pre-2016 work are sound, but its “Whiggish” exoskeleton— its blithe, Marvel Comics certainty of a heroic victory over Evil— has been jettisoned. What has replaced it is an acceptance of struggle, and a realization that, tragic as it may be, few things are ever really off the table in politics. These thoughts don’t offer the warm blanket of a liberal end of history, but the loss in comfort is more than adequately compensated by the gain in veracity.

Other things have changed since 2016. I still think a lot about politics, and write a fair amount about it, but other subjects— and other kinds of writing— are also important to me now. In a sense this was always the case, but the emphases have shifted. Some of this may eventually manifest itself here. For now, however, I’ve posted on a separate page (“Welcome to Trumpistan!”) a piece I wrote after the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. It’s longish— I shopped it around but the takers wanted cuts I wasn’t willing to make— but the length is an index of my shock and horror at what it describes.