The Uneasy Middle
I need to be honest about where my analysis of the current moment has taken me. It is an uncomfortable place.
I am, by many measures, a person of the left. (Like every annoying academic, I have iconoclastic and heterogenous views, which we like to call “complicated.” But if I’m being honest, I’m on the left.) I believe structural racism is real and consequential. I believe our healthcare system is a moral catastrophe. I believe that the concentration of wealth in this country is corrosive to democracy and that significant redistribution is necessary and just. On questions of sex and gender, I hold views that would place me in progressive company. I could continue, but the point is clear enough: when I imagine the country I want to live in, it looks considerably different from the one we have, and the distance between here and there runs mostly in the leftward direction.
And yet.
The argument I have been developing across these essays keeps pushing me toward conclusions that feel, if not conservative, then at least moderate in ways that trouble me. If the rule of law depends on widespread buy-in, and if that buy-in requires that people across the political spectrum believe electoral and legal outcomes to be reversible and survivable, then there is structural pressure against pushing too hard, too fast, in ways that make significant portions of the population feel locked out. The logic suggests patience, incrementalism, attention to legitimacy and process even when the substantive goals are urgent and the opposition is acting in bad faith.
Let me be concrete. I favor severe limits on firearm access. (I am not opposed to hunting, which I grew up around though not with, or to sport shooting, which I have enjoyed on occasion, or even to the sense of security that comes with owning a firearm, which I think is misplaced in the aggregate but understandable at the individual level and even true in some places. That’s the academic in me, caveating to the moon.) Yet I can see how aggressive gun laws and their enforcement would be inflammatory, and possibly futile and even counterproductive, without broader consensus. I favor strict limits on carbon emissions, enforced systemically rather than left to individual virtue; yet I can see how people experience such limits as encroachments on their lives and freedom. I strongly favor welcoming immigration policies; yet I recognize that they create real challenges for social cohesion and impose practical burdens on the communities where immigrants concentrate. My policy commitments have not changed; but thinking through our present moment has caused me to doubt the means by which I and those on “my side” might pursue them.
This is not the conclusion I expected when I started thinking through what it means to defend the rule of law. I thought I would arrive at a robust case for resistance, for using every legal tool available to protect democratic institutions from those who would undermine them and to advance the causes I care about. And there is such a case to be made. But alongside it, I keep finding reasons for restraint, for working within systems even when those systems are frustratingly slow, even broken, and for maintaining norms of forbearance even when the other side seems to have abandoned them.
I want to identify three distinct but related worries about where my newfound moderationist impulse leads me.
First, I worry that this framework becomes reflexively moderate, that it dresses up a temperamental preference for caution and against conflict as principled analysis. It is perhaps too convenient to discover that one’s considered view happens to counsel against dramatic action.
Second, I worry that it hands a veto to the bad-faith actors out there. The framework asks us to take seriously and to take into account the grievances of our political opponents. That gives everyone an incentive to manufacture grievances. What you are left with, then, is a lot of moderating ones own preferences for the purposes of placating the extremists. One need not be a game theorist to see why this is untenable.
Third, and most troublingly to me: moderation potentially casts aside the vulnerable. It is easy to counsel patience and incrementalism when you are not the one paying the price of time. I am a tenured professor with good health insurance and a comfortable income; I do not live on the ever-present edge of catastrophe; I am not the one whose marriage might be invalidated, whose bodily autonomy might be stripped away, or whose children might grow up in deprivation that shapes their entire lives. The people who urge moderation are rarely the ones bearing the cost of waiting. Who am I to tell the vulnerable to wait, to tread lightly?
I am reminded of Martin Luther King Jr.’s warning in his Letter from Birmingham Jail. He wrote about the white moderate “who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action.’” I find myself wondering whether my analysis is leading me to become exactly the figure King criticized: someone whose commitment to process and legitimacy and buy-in becomes, in practice, a brake on the pursuit of justice.
I take these worries seriously. But I don’t have a satisfying resolution. So where does that leave me? Well, reality has a way of demanding that we live in tension. I am not exactly comfortable with this sort of tension, but I have grown used to it as a condition of trying to think honestly about hard problems. So that’s the good news for my own psyche: I’m uncomfortable; but I’ve learned to wear the discomfort lightly.
But my own psyche is beside the point. There is a difference between living in tension and paralysis. Eventually, one has to make a choice and act. “Sitting in discomfort” isn’t a satisfying response. So, what is cause for moderation and what is cause for zealous action?
I do not have a formula, but let me suggest one approach.
The framework I have been developing assumes that accepting losses within a system is tolerable because the system allows for future correction. I have argued that the Supreme Court, our arbiter of last resort, has capitulated most in precisely this area, what I have called reversibility. The Court has given up on policing partisan gerrymandering, firmly rejected limits on money in politics, and gutted the Voting Rights Act. One might even argue (which is to say I would argue) that our current Supreme Court is itself both a product and an accelerant of these failures.
In political jargon, these are all known as “process issues.” Elites and highly engaged voters care about these things, but they do not move the needle when it comes to persuading and mobilizing voters. Voters care more about “kitchen table issues:” things like the cost of living (eggs, homes, cars, gas and utilities, education, etc), crime, and culture war issues. Consequently, political consultants counsel against focusing on process issues in the course of elections.
The consultants may be right, but there is a difference between running a campaign on these issues and tackling them once in a position of power. Politicians seem to sometimes confuse the two. Further, the consultants may be shortsighted in how they frame “process” and “kitchen table” issues as entirely separate from one another. The cost of living for the average person is not separate from money in politics, for example. The brazen corruption of the Trump administration and the emergence of a pliant oligarchy makes this visible in a way that it hasn’t been before.
So let me suggest the following: when it comes to elections, politicians should run against the corruption and oligarchy, tying them to kitchen table issues. And when it comes time to govern, they must focus hard, zealously, and fast on the process issues I have identified. Do whatever is possible within the political system to police partisan gerrymandering and to limit the damage money in politics, even if with only a robust and fast reporting and disclosure regime (which may be all the Supreme Court allows for now). And most of all, reform the Supreme Court (specifics on that forthcoming), because it has abused and destroyed the very mechanisms that make reversibility possible.
Virtually everything else I might care about, and that you might care about (climate change, medical insurance, immigration, drug policy, abortion rights, AI policy, whatever), is downstream. And that means accepting a degree of forbearance, of moderation, no matter how uncomfortable and compromised it makes us, on these other issues.