While Democrats regroup, they need to focus on more than just what it takes to win the next election

There are a couple of intellectual arguments out there that make me uncomfortable, because they seem to make at least a halfway convincing case for a belief I find disturbing, or one that complicates all my other beliefs. A friend of mine sent me an article several years ago that has proved, repeatedly, to be one of those trouble makers. It was Adrian Vermeule's "Liberalism and the Invisible Hand," from the Spring 2019 edition of American Affairs. Vermeule first summarizes--largely uncontroversially, I would believe--that the neo-liberal world order, including the U.S. for at least a century, has relied to a great degree on an extension of economist Adam Smith's belief in the invisible hand into other realms. That is, given a free market, the best ends will tend to naturally assert themselves, as competition between suppliers and the signals from consumers eventually find a happy point that is close to the ideal one. We all pretty much understand how this works economically, but Vermeule focuses more attention on how this faith in the invisible hand has been turned to other ideas, such as the "free marketplace of ideas." 

The world has definitely done a 180 on me in my lifetime, because it used to be conservatives arguing for free markets, and now a conservative like Vermeule isn't unusual at all when he's undermining them. He spends some time in his article highlighting weaknesses in Smith's belief in free markets, including how ideal free markets never exist and how they require constant intervention from a not-invisible-at-all authority to continue working. He spends a lot more time, though, critiquing other, non-economic forms of invisible-hand faith, or "fideism," in his terms, meaning not just faith, but unwarranted faith. 

He points out how just like with economic markets, the free marketplace of ideas never really has the ideal conditions that its adherents admit are necessary for the mechanism to work. To my mind, his most effective example is in the Western jurisprudential practice of having a prosecution and a defense slug it out, and presumably, the correct outcome will ensue. I think even people like me who try to avoid news about high-profile court cases have seen enough examples of justice not working that we would probably accept the prima facie case against our court system leading reliably to just outcomes. If resources put into the defense and prosecution are not equal, why should we expect the outcomes to be? 

Our entire political system has gradually moved in the direction of being more like our legal system, characterized by a primarily adversarial system between parties. Whereas in times past, there was some shared sense of, for lack of a better expression, being on the same team, this seems to have largely disappeared. We no longer think it important to be honest and admit when the other side has a point about something. Instead, we oppose everything the opposition does and think it's up to them to do a good job to convince people that we're wrong. What we call partisan politics is nearly as bitter--and may yet become as violent--as sectarian politics once were. Trump's one-time advisor and likely still-influential voice Steve Bannon often described politics as being war, flipping Carl von Clausewitz's old aphorism of war being politics by other means. If politics is primarily conflict, why should we think the outcome will lead to anything more just or right than what court outcomes lead to? Instead, the side with the most resources and the one that wages war best will have its interests met, whether those interests are just or not. 

There's a real danger of falling into circular logic with a system that involves fideism in competition. If one side is currently holding power, they will never think they might be wrong, because after all, they won, and doesn't our system ensure that the right side wins? This is the logic that allows Trump to deride all of his critics as losers. They did, in fact, lose elections. You can see where too much faith in the power of competition to produce the right answers can lead. If we think that someone isn't on top because they don't deserve to be, then we will never change our minds, either, because if that person was right, they'd have won already. 

Plato understood this to be an inherent danger in democracy. He feared the ability of Sophists to win arguments for bad causes by making a weak argument sound strong. He felt the only defense was solid philosophy. Vermeule apparently believes the answer is in a Catholic theocracy, or at the very least in some ideology that predates humanism. I disagree, but it is hard to argue that invisible hand systems don't require some ideals outside of invisible hand systems to make them work. 

A number of philosophers had a crack at rebutting Vermeule, with what I felt was varying success. To me, the best possible line of refutation is that if the free market of ideas has produced the idea that at least at times, collaboration and cooperation should moderate competition and conflict, then maybe the system works, although in a self-contradictory and ironic way. Even if Vermeule is right and the only hope to escape from eternal conflict--which will necessarily always go not to the side that is right, but the side that wins--lies in ideas outside of secular free market thinking, I don't really care. The idea came from somewhere, and if it at least in part comes from religious-based thinking, that doesn't bother me. It's a good idea, wherever it came from. But that doesn't change the fact that I find Vermeule's basic argument difficult to refute entirely, and this challenge to one of the most fundamental underlying assumptions our society is based on is unsettling. It's clear that if society is going to work toward beneficial ends, there has to be something more at work than just no-holds-barred competition. You can't just cynically use media to convince people you're right; you should actually be right. 

One reason I think politics should be at least mostly the art of trying to make sure all the stakeholders get something even if nobody gets everything is tied to my basic agnosticism. I don't know the answers to anything for sure, and I have a hard time believing anyone else does, either. If there are people who disagree with me about what ends society should be pursuing, it's possible they are right and I'm wrong. It's possible I'm right. It's possible neither of us is. It's very likely all of us are at least a little bit mistaken. 

To take one example, if conservatives generally dislike social welfare programs and liberals generally like them, I don't think that means that most conservatives think we should have no social welfare programs, or that liberals think we should have so many that ninety percent of all income goes to paying taxes to cover them. There's some kind of balance to strike, and conservatives need liberals to avoid letting their own impulses go too far as much as liberals need conservatives to prevent their own worst tendencies from going unchecked. I don't believe this will ever lead to a Utopian perfect harmony, but rather to an always moving tension that hopefully has just enough stability that society can function. One of the most basic facts of society that kind of sounds like hopeful hippie hogwash but is actually cold, hard fact is that nobody knows everything, so we kind of need each other. That includes conservatives and liberals. The more we can cooperate and work together, the more we can accomplish, but also the more we cooperate and work together, the harder it is to avoid conflict. That's the eternal struggle of politics. 

In addition to the fact that nobody's philosophy is so perfect it doesn't need correction, there is also the fact that the very disagreements we have point to some shared ideals we seem, however unlikely, to still have. Maybe we do still have something outside of invisible hand fideism as a founding belief that holds us together. 

Why I think we ought to model the behavior we want

Everyone nowadays seems to be settling into the politics as conflict model. Democrats, for all their talk of how Trump's aggressiveness is unprecedented, seem to be more and more willing to match it with their own brash talk. This has certainly spread to the general public as well. A number of personalities I follow, whose reasonableness I admire, nonetheless will never say a single word about Trump or Republicans that is anything except full of scorn. 

Liberals will say that it was the conservatives who started the scorn, or who at least have continually pushed it up a notch. They'll say it was Trump who took it to new and unprecedented levels in a chief executive. They are probably right, at least based on my half-awake observations of political discourse since the late 80s. But there is more than one way to express contempt. If conservatives have done it with epithets like "libtard," liberals have often done it with sneering disregard. In any case, since squawk-box news programming involving putting two or more personalities on screen and then having them joust at each other in short segments first appeared soon after the advent of cable news (my first sign that something was really wrong in American politics), news shows haven't been short of liberals willing to spar on them. Liberals may have felt like their position needed to be defended, even if the forum was not ideal for fully developing ideas, but if liberals really valued truth over simply winning the war, they would have refused to ever go on a screaming match-type debate. The screaming debate, where neither side is listening to the other, is bad for society, even if the right side "wins" an individual round (by convincing more viewers they're right, I guess) here and there. 

Most liberals would probably argue that it's naïve to model virtue with an unvirtuous opponent, just like it's foolish to try to treat a bully with kindness and think he's going to become nice himself. A bully only responds to strength, so you have to meet him blow for blow. Hence the calls for Democrats to get "meaner." (Here, here, and here are examples.) People love to compare Trump to Hitler, even when they're trying not to, and I think a lot of Democrats suffer from the belief that any kind of cooperation with Republicans is the same as Chamberlain giving away the Sudetenland to Germany. It's appeasement. The more progressive end of the Democratic spectrum particularly wants a guerilla campaign. They only people they hate more than Republicans are moderate Democrats who are willing to work with them. The circular firing squad is far more pronounced among liberals than conservatives right now. Maybe that's part of the stress of losing, but it's also because of the way that liberalism has come to mirror religion, which better minds than me have pointed out (like here, here, and here). The way that the greatest hate progressives have is not for conservatives, but for liberals who aren't pure enough recalls to mind Elaine Pagels' The Origin of Satan, in which she argues that Christians began seeing the devil in non-believers, but then started seeing him more in other Christians they disagreed with. 

Half the time, liberals conveniently do the work of conservatives for them, likes the orcs in LoTR.

I understand the pragmatic argument that it's an imperfect world and we sometimes have to use imperfect means to achieve the right ends. Maybe it would be better if presidential debates were Lincoln-Douglas style, allowing ideas more time to develop, rather than distilling everything down to easily digestible two-minute segments because we assume the public can't handle anything more. Maybe it would be better if discussions on news segments between people who disagree were respectful and slowed-down, rather than Springer-style arguments that only barely stop short of fistfights. Maybe it would be better if political speeches tried to take an objective view of events, including admitting one's own shortcomings, rather than only giving one-sided cant and assuming it's the other side's job to find your weaknesses in their own media minutes. But the world is the world and there's nothing we can do in the short term to change it, so for now, to win the battles at hand, we have to use the tools society is using in order to win. We have to get our hands dirty. But if we only think that we'll be able to practice Socrates' "true rhetoric" after we've first used cut-throat rhetoric to defeat our enemies and bring about a perfect world, then we'll end up being like communists who only treat humans well after they've destroyed all their enemies. That is, we'll never end up trying to say anything that's really true, we'll just keep trying to win by any means necessary. 

Isn't now the best time to think of changing philosophies?

It's possible that this moment of liberal defeat is an opportunity, as many have pointed out. There's a growing desire to push out the old guard in the Democratic Party. New ways forward are being offered, whether it's to be meaner or to go with more progressive leadership like Mamdani and AOC or to become less progressive and more moderate. Whatever the plan is, I'd like to suggest that now is the time to get off the ever-accelerating treadmill of politics-as-conflict rhetorical approaches. It's not just about being more conciliatory. It's about communicating in more than sound bytes, in demonstrating a rhetoric of thoughtfulness rather than always being in attack mode. I'd love to see an interview in which I don't already know what the political representative is going to say before they say it. I want to see politicians whose speech seems to be that of a person who is genuinely reflecting on the world in an earnest and humble way, not someone who is talking down to me about a world they think they already fully understand. 

I'd like to see honesty as a core principle of politics. It can't be that every news item of every day confirms your worldview. If Epstein conspiracies were hogwash a few years ago--and they were--then they're hogwash now, even if it seems like a hopeful source of problems for your opponent. Focus on what's real, rather than what you think might score you points and get you clicks on your Instagram today. Sacrifice winning a point here and there in the political struggle of the moment in order to have a winning strategy for the next hundred years. The answer isn't just to make better use of podcasts and social media to win elections. It's not to do what the folks in strategic communications want. It's to ignore the people in communications and focus on authenticity. You will never win by trying to follow trends, anymore than you will write a great movie by imitating a movie everyone liked last year. People can smell out cynical use of trends. The answer in a world run by conflict isn't to fight dirtier; it's to offer a way out of conflict.