When Heterodoxy Goes Too Far

The governing impulse of “heterodoxy” is a healthy skepticism of mass movements, overly broad claims meant to signal virtue, and rigid ideological positions. This orientation, within a segment of the center-left and center-right on the political spectrum, has proved a necessary check on the internet-stimulated, herd-like consensus so many others have adopted in recent years. During the summer of 2020 and the twin calamities of the death of George Floyd and the coronavirus pandemic, I was drawn to a heterodoxy that was conservative in its preservation of liberalism’s greatest achievements: tolerance of diverse perspectives and freedom of expression. It felt refreshingly unaligned, distinct from right-wing reactionary backlash, and like a genuine disavowal of dogma. Donald Trump and all he stands for, I thought, was clearly incompatible with such thinking.

But in the four years since, as Trump and his movement have strengthened their assault on our democracy, I have begun to wonder if this mindset that refuses, by definition, to pick sides contains a fatal flaw.

No single orthodoxy provides adequate solutions to every problem; no ideological team deserves your total allegiance. And yet, this election cycle has repeatedly shown that a reflex to be independent, to reject gatekeeping, to punch at “elites”—or, more simply, representatives of the status quo—can also leave people numb to existential threats that reasonable-consensus positions were developed to oppose. Our values can be turned against us. When heterodoxy is raised above all other priorities, it risks collapsing in on itself.

Until recently, within the heterodox slice of the cultural spectrum, opposition to Trump was the obvious response to his singularly reckless and destabilizing political presence. The number of self-described centrist “Never Trumpers”—starting with Trump’s current running mate, who once compared him in this magazine to “cultural heroin”—were legion. But as the race tightened in recent months, I’ve been struck by a palpable shift in attitude among many liberal and centrist voices—a slackening of vigilance, and a softening on Trump.

This is not to be confused with the 180-degree pivot of prominent MAGA converts such as Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Tulsi Gabbard, and Bill Ackman, as well as writers and journalists such as Naomi Wolf—erstwhile Democrats who’ve become outright Trump fans. What I observed this past summer, as Joe Biden’s campaign self-immolated and Kamala Harris seized the nomination, was a more general exhaustion among many heterodox thinkers, and a disinclination to support the alternative to Trump that was now on offer. Harris, many agree, is not an ideal candidate. But given the enormous stakes, I wanted to understand how anyone not already ensorcelled by the cult of MAGA could hesitate to support her.

[Kurt Andersen: Bill Ackman is a brilliant fictional character]

I reached out to two of the most thoughtful heterodox commentators I know in an earnest attempt to take this ambivalence seriously. Kmele Foster and Coleman Hughes are both podcasters with significant followings. Both are “Black,” though Hughes is an ardent advocate for colorblindness (he wrote a book this year called The End of Race Politics) and Foster (like me) rejects racial categories. They represent, in my view, the steel-man version of heterodox perspectives, and neither, they confirmed to me this week, is planning to vote.

Hughes told me, when we spoke in September, that he sees Trump’s behavior around January 6, 2021, as “disqualifying.” Yet he listed two reasons he couldn’t bring himself to support Harris. The first had to do with a growing sense that the Trump threat had simply been exaggerated. “If I really felt that Trump was going to end American democracy or run for a third term if he wins, or start a nuclear war, I would vote for Kamala in a heartbeat,” he said. And indeed, he voted for Hillary Clinton in 2016, because he found Trump’s rhetoric so alarming. “He spoke loosely about putting Muslims on a registry. He spoke loosely about using nukes,” he recalled. “I would’ve voted for basically Bugs Bunny over him.”

Despite his fears of Trump’s fascist tendencies, Hughes found the reality of the Trump administration much less dramatic. “He governed a lot more like a normal Republican,” he said. “In fact, many of his policies would be seen as not right-wing enough.” He’s learned, he told me, to “discount” much of what Trump says: “It’s basically just his businessman instinct. He literally talks about this in The Art of the Deal. You start by saying something crazy, and then you walk your way back to a point of leverage in negotiations.”

[Read: An ethicist reads ]The Art of the Deal

In 2020, Hughes voted for Biden, whom he viewed as a moderate liberal and a politician with a record of reaching across the aisle. This is not at all how he perceives Harris, whom he sees as aligned with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders, and “deeply destructive to the long-term flourishing of the country.” When it comes to foreign policy, “I haven’t seen even a 10-second clip of her impressing me by analyzing anything going on in the world related to geopolitics, foreign conflicts and so forth,” he told me. “I have basically zero signals of her competency as a manager or executive.”

Foster is an entrepreneur (he’s founded telecommunications and media companies) and a libertarian who seldom, if ever, feels represented by a mainstream politician, though he insists that he could vote for a more moderate Democrat. Foster is most concerned about “the excesses of the culture war” and how, “when they become a part of the bureaucracy, whether it’s on a university campus or within the federal government, [they] can actually become weirdly totalitarian,” he told me. He thinks the left is blind to the fact that it, too, has “a profound capacity for the abuse of power.” He pointed, among other examples, to “gender issues,” the movement to defund the police, and the criminal prosecutions of Trump, which, he said, have “a political taint” to them.

[Read: If Trump is guilty, does it matter if the prosecution was political?]

People who are concerned about Trump “deranging institutions” should have a similar concern about Democrats, Foster said. He brought up the idea floated by some prominent voices on the left of packing the U.S. Supreme Court with more justices in order to dilute the conservative majority, which he believes shows an alarming disregard for norms that goes unnoticed because “there’s a greater sophistication on the part of Democrats that makes it a lot less obvious that some of the things that they’re trying to do are bad.”

He sees scant evidence of Harris speaking out against or countering such trends. On this point, it is hard to disagree with him. Harris has said precious little about what, if anything, she would do to distinguish herself not just from the Biden administration, but also from the iteration of herself who briefly and unsuccessfully sought the presidency in 2019. Last month, she could not articulate to Anderson Cooper a single concrete mistake she has made in her capacity as a leader, even as most of the country knows that she covered for a president in cognitive decline.

Many of the concerns Hughes and Foster raise are compelling. And yet, to a disconcerting degree, it all seems beside the point—as though we are debating the temperature of the water and the features and specifications of the life rafts as our proverbial ship is sinking. Both Hughes and Foster were signatories on the Harper’s letter of 2020, a bipartisan statement against creeping illiberalism. (I was one of the writers of the letter.) It has frequently been misrepresented by its critics as an anti-woke document, but it began with an explicit condemnation of Donald Trump, “who represents a real threat to democracy.” As Mark Lilla, one of the letter’s other writers, noted recently in The New York Review of Books, this election is not ultimately about change or policy, or even about blocking Trump; “it is more fundamentally about preserving our liberal democratic political institutions.”

If we cannot manage that, with whatever flawed custodian we have been provided, we may look back on these nuanced policy discussions as an extravagant luxury that we squandered.