In the early 2000s, I used to read the conservative political journal National Review. I wanted to follow what I believed was a good-faith presentation of the conservative perspective, an outlook I fundamentally respect intellectually. It’s also hard not to empathize with conservative political philosophy if you were partly raised by Gandalf.
Not all change is for the better. Not all progress – no matter how well-intentioned – improves the lives of the disadvantaged. Babies do get thrown out with the bathwater. I get it. And there are positions that I think are logically coherent even if I have reached different conclusions. I can understand how someone can support the death penalty while defending the life of the unborn.
I gave up on National Review because – between the defenses of lower taxes and the raids on progressive sacred cows – there was always something else, like an intermittent odor that vanishes every time you try to sniff it out, only to return just when you thought you were imagining it.
I once ordered an intriguing-sounding dish off a menu in Colombia. When it arrived it smelled elusively pungent, reminding me of something I couldn’t put my finger on. Then – bang – the word “cowshit” came to me, and I realized I had ordered tripe stew. In the same way, I finally recognized the odor haunting the pixels of the National Review when, as a young professional, I encountered the word “leadership.”
The German word for “leader” is “Führer.” Yes, as in “Der Führer.” And as someone with complex ties to Germany, the idea of “leadership” sends shivers down my spine, to this day. “Führer” was not just a title in Nazi Germany; the “leadership principle” (Führerprinzip) was its ideological foundation. The will of the supreme leader has overriding force over people and laws.
The belief that we need a strong leader to keep the trains running on time is the basic ingredient for the catastrophes of not just the 20th century, but of most of the centuries of the written word. Hearing the word “leadership” – or worse, “strong leadership” – used positively, not just at National Review, but all over the US political and corporate discourse, rang alarm-bells. “Any society that idealizes ‘leadership’ is headed towards authoritarianism” was my exact thought at the time, twenty years ago.
Of course it occurred to me that my reaction was overblown. And so said anyone else I mentioned it to at the time, too.
But the word “leadership” connected a word to the ephemeral stench I sensed at National Review and other “conservative” media. It gradually grew stronger and stronger. And when an odor grows stronger gradually, the risk is that you no longer notice it.
It took a particularly egregious fart of fascism for me to abandon the National Review entirely. In a 2007 article, contributor Mona Charen presented as fact a completely unsubstantiated claim that Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto had survived an assassination attempt via a bomb strapped to a baby (just weeks before her successful assassination by adults). In her article, Charen wanted to illustrate the utter depravity of “the terrorists,” implicitly letting the US off the hook for a “clumsy” war in Iraq and the use of torture in Guantanamo.
Disregarding facts in the service of demonizing an opponent and justifying heinous acts – that’s on page two of the authoritarian’s playbook. But it would be unfair to pin the “authoritarian” label on Charen. Instead, I see her article as an eruption of what lies beneath in us all, but in the last two or three decades has grown, surfaced, and found a home in the US political party nominally representing “conservativism.”
I can empathize with the tug towards authoritarianism. At its root lies the disillusionment that comes when – in the process of becoming adults – we first confront the fact that we don’t all agree on what’s true and good. It’s a nauseating experience. The realization that there may be no such thing as the absolute truth, and that even if there is, your own view will never encompass the whole of it, is like an abyss opening at your feet.
How you react to that abyss determines what basic political ideology you adopt. Some of us search for a strong hand that holds us back from falling, even if that hand extends from the sleeve of a brown shirt.
Some of us see the abyss as a void that we can fill through our collective efforts. By communicating – talking, writing, arguing – we can like the five blind men touching the elephant, make overall progress on a working theory of reality. The project is never complete. And that means that everybody, regardless of the gifts they have or haven’t been born with, or whether they have been born at all yet, can contribute pieces to the puzzle.
2007, the year of Charen’s article, also witnessed the birth of a blog by a writer recently interviewed in the New York Times, Curtis Yarvin. Yarvin is explicitly in the camp of those who reach for the authoritarian’s hand at the edge of the abyss. He argues that a strong executive, a “monarch,” can more efficiently lead the way to the “common good.”
If the “common good” were obvious, then maybe an efficiency argument would have some foundation. But the common good is elusive. It’s one of those things – maybe the most important thing – we’re collectively striving to discover and negotiate about.
Deliberative democracy is the set of rules and institutions we have adopted to ensure that as many people as possible can participate in our conversations about what is good and true. The voting part of democracy is simply a mechanism to halt the discussion periodically so that we can choose a course of action – a policy – that constitutes a test of our hypotheses about the good and true. Other decision-making mechanisms besides voting are conceivable. We can even include coin-flipping when we reach an impasse. Just as important as the decision-making mechanisms are the rules we adopt to structure the deliberation that informs the decision.
Deliberation is what helps us discover which decisions are important and which aren’t, what the options are, and most importantly, what criteria – what values – should inform whether we prefer one course of action over another.
The Supreme Leader achieves efficiency not by cutting through deliberation and red tape to achieve a known goal. The Supreme Leader’s “efficiency” comes from ending the search for the good and true, offering a plastic substitute in its place.
Say what you will, Yarvin should be commended for surfacing what many nominally “conservatives” like Charen have been keeping submerged, consciously or unconsciously, for the last two decades. And by all accounts, Yarvin’s views are resonating among those with the money and access required to change the rules and institutions through which we order our affairs.
The true political frontier doesn’t divide conservatives from progressives. The true dividing line is between those who embrace the collective and unending quest for the good and the true and those who want to end it by the most expedient means: submitting to the will of a supreme leader.
We have been born into the interesting times in which that line is being drawn more clearly once again.
The Ruminathans 