The dominant thrust of “heterodoxy” is a healthy skepticism towards mass movements, overly broad claims to signal virtue, and rigid ideological positions. This orientation on part of the centre-left and centre-right across the political spectrum has proven to be a necessary check against the internet-encouraged, herd-like consensus that many have embraced in recent years. In the summer of 2020 and during the double disasters of George Floyd’s death and the coronavirus pandemic, I was intrigued by a conservative heterodoxy in preserving liberalism’s greatest achievements: tolerance of differing points of view and freedom of expression. This felt refreshingly neutral, different from right-wing reactionary reactions, and a genuine rejection of dogma. I thought Donald Trump and everything he stood for was clearly incompatible with that kind of thinking.

But over the past four years, as Trump and his movement have stepped up their attacks on our democracy, I have begun to wonder whether this mentality, which inherently refuses to choose sides, contains a fatal flaw.

No orthodoxy alone provides an adequate solution to every problem; No ideological team deserves your full commitment. And yet this election cycle has repeatedly shown that the reflex of independence, of rejecting gatekeeping, of punching the “elites” – or, more simply, representatives of the status quo – can also numb people to the existential threats that reasonable compromise envisages. counter positions were developed. Our values ​​can be turned against us. When heterodoxy is elevated above all other priorities, it risks collapsing in on itself.

Until recently, opposition to Trump across the heterodox slice of the cultural spectrum was the obvious response to his reckless and destabilizing political presence. The number of centrists who self-identify as “Never Trumpers”; It starts with Trump’s current running mate. I compared it in this magazine There were a lot of people up to “cultural heroin”. But as the race has tightened in recent months, I have noticed a noticeable shift in the attitudes of many liberal and centrist voices: a loosening of vigilance and softening toward Trump.

This is not to be confused with the 180-degree pivot by writers and journalists who are prominent MAGA converts like Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Bill Ackman, as well as former Democrats like Naomi Wolf. We became outright Trump fans. What I observed last summer, as Joe Biden’s campaign burned itself out and Kamala Harris got the nomination, was a more general fatigue among many heterodox thinkers and a reluctance to support the Trump alternative currently on offer. Many people agree that Harris is not an ideal candidate. But given the sheer scale of it all, I wanted to understand how someone who wasn’t under the spell of the MAGA cult might hesitate to support it.

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To take this ambivalence seriously, I reached out to two of the most thoughtful heterodox commentators I know. Kmele Foster and Coleman Hughes are podcasters with significant followings. Both are “Black,” but Hughes is an ardent advocate of colorblindness (he wrote a book called this year). The End of Racial Politics) and Foster (like me) reject racial categories. In my view, they represent the man of steel version of heterodox viewpoints, and as they confirmed to me this week, neither plan to vote.

Hughes told me when we spoke in September that he viewed Trump’s behavior around Jan. 6, 2021, as “disqualifying.” Still, he listed two reasons why he failed to support Harris. The first concerned the growing perception that the Trump threat was exaggerated. “If I really felt that Trump was going to end American democracy or run for a third term or start a nuclear war if he won, I would vote for Kamala in a heartbeat,” he said. And he actually voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016 because he found Trump’s rhetoric so alarming. “He spoke loosely about recording Muslims in a registry. “He talked loosely about the use of nuclear weapons,” he recalled. “I would basically vote for Bugs Bunny instead.”

Although Hughes feared Trump’s fascist tendencies, he found the reality of the Trump administration much less dramatic. “He governed more like a normal Republican,” he said. “In fact, many of his policies will prove to be not right-wing enough.” He told me he’s learned to “downplay” much of what Trump says: “It’s basically his businessman instinct. He literally talks about it The Art of the Agreement. “You start by saying something crazy and then you pivot back to a point that will give you an advantage in negotiations.”

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In 2020, Hughes voted for Biden, whom he sees as a moderate liberal and a politician with a record of reaching across the aisle. That’s not how he perceives Harris, who he sees as aligned with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders and as “deeply destructive to the long-term development of the country.” As for foreign policy, he said, “I haven’t even seen a 10-second clip of him influencing me by analyzing what’s going on in the world regarding geopolitics, foreign conflicts and so on.” “I get basically zero signals about his competence as a manager or administrator.”

Foster is an entrepreneur (he founded telecommunications and media companies) and a libertarian who rarely feels represented by a mainstream politician, but he insists he might vote for a more moderate Democrat. Foster said he is most concerned about “the excesses of the culture war” and “how (they) can become weirdly totalitarian once they become part of the bureaucracy, whether it’s on a college campus or within the federal government.” I. He thinks the left is blind to the fact that it, too, has a “profound capacity to abuse power.” He noted “gender issues,” the move to defund the police, and criminal prosecutions of Trump, among other examples, and said they carried a “political taint.”

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Those who worry about Trump “destabilizing institutions” should have similar concerns about Democrats, Foster said. He has floated the idea of ​​packing the U.S. Supreme Court with more justices from some prominent voices on the left to dilute the conservative majority; He believes this shows an alarming disregard for norms because “there’s more complexity on the part of Democrats and it’s less obvious that some of the things they’re trying to do are bad.”

He sees little evidence that Harris opposes or opposes such trends. It’s hard not to agree with him at this point. Harris has said little about what she might do to distinguish herself not only from the Biden administration but also from iterations that briefly and unsuccessfully sought the presidency in 2019. He failed to make that clear to Anderson last month. The only concrete mistake Cooper has made as a leader is even though most of the country knows he is running for president in cognitive decline.

Many of the concerns raised by Hughes and Foster are intriguing. And yet, alarmingly, all this seems pointless; as if we were discussing the temperature of the water as our famous ship sank and the features and specifications of life rafts. Both Hughes and Foster were among those who signed the contract. Harper’s letter It’s 2020’s bipartisan declaration against creeping liberalism. (I was one of the letter’s authors.) It has often been misrepresented by its critics as an anti-woke document, but it began with an unequivocal condemnation of Donald Trump, who “represents a real threat to democracy.” As Mark Lilla, one of the other authors of the letter, Nnoted Lately New York Book ReviewThis election is ultimately not about change or policy, or even thwarting Trump; “This is more fundamentally about preserving our liberal democratic political institutions.”

If we fail to do so, with the flawed depository we have been provided with, we may look back on these nuanced policy debates as an extravagant luxury we squandered.