How I Changed
Or: How I Became a Mugwump
I mentioned in the last newsletter that I intended to write something explaining how my views have changed in response to the events of the Trump era. But first I want to make it clear that the changes I am describing are relatively small, more a shift in emphasis than in basic principles.
The biggest ideological changes of the Trump era are not on my side. It’s the rest of the right that changed. (See the image above for an attempt to track this quantitatively.) To those observing from the outside, it is obvious that people who sign up for Trumpism completely transform themselves. Free marketers become protectionists, secularists become “culture war Christians,” people who once sang paeans to the Constitution become advocates of one-man rule. Most disturbingly, people who used to talk in old Reaganite terms about the positive contributions of immigrants now delight in the administration’s performative cruelty toward immigrants. Look at Marco Rubio, the son of Cuban refugees who is now the chief enforcer of the administration’s arbitrary detention of foreigners.
Compared to that, I have been an island of stability.
I have subscribers who have been reading this newsletter for 21 years. Some of you have been reading me even longer, back in the ancient era of print, in my youth in the west that is forgotten. For very new readers, I’ll just briefly explain that while my background would have been described as being “on the right”—back when that meant something different—I was never a conservative and not even quite a libertarian. For the general reader, I usually described myself as a “secular free-marketer,” and that’s still true. But the context of the times has changed, and the main fault line in American politics is very different from what it was ten or fifteen years ago.
This is the context for how I have changed, which I can categorize under four headings.
I Became a Mugwump
This whole discussion about how I have changed was touched off by my embrace of “state capacity libertarianism,” or something similar to it. As I put it, “To be against statism—the stifling supremacy of the state—is not the same thing as being against the state.” Firing bureaucrats and dismantling government agencies does not necessarily make us more free. A good portion of what is being done right now is just vandalism, motivated more by revenge against “the establishment” rather than any rational plan. My explanation of this is too recent to need repeating.
I would just add that we’re going to see this even more clearly when it comes to infectious disease. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., is busy destroying the government’s ability to track infectious diseases and to develop or promote vaccines—and we’re eventually going to experience the results. I remember for years having conservatives reproach me for my small government views by bringing up quarantine and infectious disease as a legitimate role of government. And they talked me into it—then they decided that infectious disease experts are the enemy and went howling off after bogus “alternative medicine” cures. Like I’ve been saying, they’re hippies of the right.
So I have become much more interested in genuine reforms than in performative hatred of “bureaucrats.” If you want to change how government operates, try changing the actual laws. If you think the system doesn’t work, try creating a new system based on better ideas.
Yes, there are a few Nestors out there, pettifogging rule-enforcers who delight in saying “no” to everything. But one thing the DOGE fiasco has made clear is the extent to which civil service rules first adopted in the late 19th Century fostered a professional, non-partisan, non-corrupt federal bureaucracy. We’re going to regret replacing them with partisan hacks and place-seekers in a new authoritarian spoils system.
I guess this makes me a Mugwump.
I Was Radicalized for Incrementalism
In the past few years, I have become in one respect more modest and circumspect in what I hope to achieve from politics. In another respect, I have become a wild-eyed radical, almost a revolutionary.
Passionate political activists often complain that politicians are not bold enough in pursuing their goals, and they fantasize about achieving their entire ideal agenda by a coup de main. That’s exactly what the Trump administration is attempting right now. But I’ve warned that our system is supposed to prevent this kind of radical change, and that this is a good thing. The political constraints that prevent your minority faction from getting everything it wants also prevent any other faction from getting what it wants.
Even if I liked everything the current administration is doing, I would be afraid that it has set a precedent that could lead to equally radical change in the opposite direction when the wheel inevitably turns against them. I’m already hearing far left types on social media talk about this. They point to what Trump is doing and say—I’m only slightly paraphrasing—“See, we could have had single-payer health care by now and forgiven all student loans. We never had to be constrained by the legal niceties.”
But the real problem with the temptation of authoritarianism is that you don’t actually get your ideal agenda. You get whatever the strongman wants. You may have wanted less regulation—but he has a lust for more tariffs. You may have wanted free speech in the universities—but he wants to be able to snatch people off the street and deport them for writing an op-ed. You may have wanted him to stand up to China—but instead he’s obsessed with seizing Greenland. It’s a devil’s bargain, and you don’t get what you thought you were promised, you get the strongman’s whims.
That’s the issue on which I have been radicalized, starting with January 6. Donald Trump is trying to complete what he started then. He wants power that is unchecked by Congress, by the courts, by the press, by the legal profession, and eventually by the voters. He wants the ability to impose his whims by force.
We need radical action to stop this. And when Trump is pushed out of power—if he is pushed out of power—we may need some radical reforms to rein in executive powers that have clearly become too big and unrestrained.
But the purpose should be to move us back to slow grind of normal politics, which, precisely because it makes leaders answerable to all the people, requires painstaking attempts at consensus and results only in incremental change.
I Became a Liberal Democrat
I just mentioned the radicalizing impact of Trump’s attack on the US Capitol. The central change in my views over the last ten years is that I have become an open, self-proclaimed liberal democrat.
Astute readers will notice that I did not capitalize either of those words, so it does not refer to being a Democrat in the partisan American sense (or a Lib Dem in the UK). Nor does it refer to “liberalism” in its conventional 20th Century usage, meaning advocacy of the welfare state. It just means being an advocate of liberal democracy, and I think we’re at the point when this is increasingly how the term is understood.
This is not really a change in my views, either. I have always been an advocate for the US Constitution, which is a charter for a representative government—that’s the democracy part—with explicit protections for individual rights—that’s the liberal part.
The big change is that liberal democracy is now the main fault line in our politics, though even that seems like an understatement. This is better: The fate of liberal democracy is the fundamental crisis of the current moment. The Trump administration is sweeping it away, and we need to mobilize a maximum effort to restore it.
I recommend something Jonathan Last wrote recently about how there is no longer “liberal” media versus “conservative” media. There is pro-democracy media, and everything that is not explicitly and courageously pro-democracy eventually becomes authoritarian, either by explicitly propagandizing for the regime or by agreeing to soften its coverage and suppress dissent, which is already happening.
I’ve been talking for a while about how I suspect we’re in the middle of a vast new political realignment, and that has now crystallized. The new political spectrum isn’t left versus right. It’s liberalism versus authoritarianism.
I Was Awoken Without Really Getting Woke
The last big change is my, well, awakening on the resurgent problem of racism.
Part of the new authoritarian movement is a strong undercurrent of racism. For example, the latest incident in Pete Hegseth’s supposedly “anti-woke” purge of the military is the U.S. Naval Academy removing from its library “The Autobiography of Martin Luther King Jr., Einstein on Race and Racism, and a biography on Jackie Robinson.” We must expunge these subversive influences.
There’s a big pattern to sketch here, and I think it’s part of a recurring cycle in American history where we make big leaps forward on issues relating to race or other forms of bigotry—and then a few decades later, there is a backlash. We abolish slavery, but then we abandon Reconstruction, allow the South to impose segregation, and the Klan rises in nationwide popularity. It’s a long pattern of two steps forward and one step back, and right now, the country is taking a definite step back.
It took me a while to catch on to this because I grew up and have lived in one of the “two steps forward” eras, in which things were moving forward so quickly that we worried that maybe gay marriage was going too far. (In retrospect, it definitely didn’t.) Or we worried about abuses on the part of those who were trying to exploit opposition to racism to impose their own zealotry. Yet now the far more serious threat is that we are moving sharply backward toward old-fashioned, unreconstructed bigotry.
I was struck a while back by something written by Jay Nordlinger, the last reasonable man at National Review. He recounts how when he was young, “Feel free to laugh, but Jim Crow and the civil-rights struggle seemed distant to me. The Montgomery Bus Boycott, the assassination of Martin Luther King—all those things seemed distant to me when I was in, say, high school,” only ten years later. I felt a shock of recognition. Based on the timeline he gives here, Nordlinger is five years older than I am, and I felt much the same way. Yet the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was about as close to my youth as the Iraq War is to today.
I think there might be a psychological effect from the fact that there was a great technological shift to reporting the news in color instead of black-and-white, so everything before the 1970s feels more distant, more old-fashioned. But it’s also because we were on the other side of a cultural shift in which open expressions of racism, which had once been commonplace, rather suddenly became taboo—at least in the broad national culture and in the places where I grew up.
But we shouldn’t be surprised that the mindset behind racism hadn’t really gone away. And I’ll admit that as a white man, those remnants of racism were less visible and urgent for me. But now it has all been unleashed again with a cohort of young men who boast about being into racism before it was cool. I had a similar experience in 2016 when a bunch of antisemites crawled out of the sewers and started to show up on Twitter. My Jewish friends had to inform me that, while these people may have been less visible to me, they had never really gone away.
That’s why I give one cheer for wokeness. We do in fact need to be awakened to the realities of racism and its long historical legacy, particularly because some people really want to put us to sleep on this issue. But I have been awoken, without really becoming “woke” in the sense of subscribing to the whole “postmodern” ideology that is associated with that term.
Oh, and I have also been won over to a version of feminism, thanks in part to Alysia Ames and her point that we have undervalued certain kinds of work that we traditionally relied on women to provide for free. It’s one of these “systemic” critiques that I think actually explains a lot.
Like I said, these changes are less about substance than a shift in emphasis. I never denied that racism exists, that it is bad, or that it has a continuing influence. But I have grown to realize that it is a bigger problem, with a more substantial impact in the present, than I had realized. I always appreciated representative government and free elections—but I appreciate them more now that I can no longer take them for granted. I was never an anarchist, but I didn’t used to go out of my way to defend the usefulness of any government programs. And as for the older guys warning me to pursue changes more slowly and incrementally—well, I’m one of them now.
So there you have it, my confession about how my views and priorities have changed—but not, I think, my basic principles.
Oh, and if you’ve spotted any other important way you think I’ve changed over the years, mention it in the comments and I’ll let you know if I agree.
I don't think you've changed a bit, not fundamentally. It is American politics that has slowly gone insane.
I'm totally with you on the change in emphasis.