Partisanship

How I learned to stop worrying and vote Democrat

I am a partisan, of sorts, and have been since 2016, when events drew me out of a prolonged period of political self-doubt and quietism. For a few years, I had focused on obscure intellectual topics such metaphysics, ontology, and most of all hermeneutics. I wouldn’t say this was all a waste of time, but I would say that it was quite easy to crank out thoughts on these topics without ever touching anything in the news cycle.

I had, for some time, become nervous about what was then known as call-out culture, and was dubious of the theories behind the social justice vocabulary that appeared to be spreading in some quarters. Those were my instincts, but I largely had not taken the time to really explore those topics, and partly out of a lack of interest and partly out of avoidance, I continued not to do so, and therefore to stay out of it.

Donald Trump’s success was a wake up call. He began his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists, and went downhill from there. His views on women combine the sensibilities of a 13-year-old boy with the entitlement of the born wealthy, to put things mildly. He would also very clearly aim to squeeze every red cent he could out of the office for which he was running, and all of this he was quite forward about. Indeed, he wore his retrograde, corrupt, bigoted character on his sleeves, as some sort of rejoinder to people who think that women and minorities are people deserving of the same basic human decency as anyone. And, through a series of events made possible entirely by America’s peculiar institutions for selecting our chief executive, he won.

Hermeneutics and metaphysics didn’t quite have the same sex appeal for me at that point. I drank up the political philosophy of Jacob Levy, who emphasized, among many other things, the centrality of parties and partisanship in the basic functioning of democracies. So I decided I would try my hand at partisanship, in earnest. While I still was not sure of the merits of the brand of analysis which used “patriarchy” and “white supremacy” as its foundational theoretical concepts for understanding our current system, the fact is that America had not only produced a man like Donald Trump, but some 63 million Americans voted for him.

So I decided that for every new media event that blew up around “social justice” or “woke mobs” or “cancel culture,” I would always begin by giving that side the benefit of the doubt. And of course, once you begin to give anything the benefit of the doubt, you start to notice all the particular cases that hold more merit than you’d realized. That was certainly so here. Outside the realm of political news, in the realm of books and papers, there was more merit still: in Ian Haney-López's Dog Whistle Politics, for example. If a bit sweeping in its history, it very clearly fleshed out a model of a real world phenomena I have personally observed myself on numerous occasions. Richard Rothstein’s The Color of Law, beyond providing a detailed history on a topic on which I knew little, had a profound effect on how I think about law and institutions in general. 

But media events are not driven by scholars of the highest caliber; indeed, even in the era of “cancel culture” stories, they are rarely driven by scholars at all. For most of these cases, the vocabulary of social justice, which does indeed have its roots in the fields of critical gender and critical race studies, is simply a method of generating a set of conclusions regardless of the inputs—that is, the particulars of the case. This is not unique to this vocabulary. Across the partisan aisle, the ideological orbit of the Republican Party has adopted vocabularies of its own, to similar ends. That is largely the game on social media and in the hot-take mill, which, in my early enthusiasm for partisanship, I once defended. The intellectual emptiness of this enterprise cannot be overstated. In attempting to defend some of it without contradicting my actual firmly held beliefs, I performed a number of logical contortions which felt about as comfortable as their physical equivalent.

And the intellectual roots of this hollowness run deeper than the overzealous social media account in the midst of the great Darwinian struggle for retweets, likes, and shares. In attempting to replace the place of “capitalism” as a total concept in the old Marxist analysis with “patriarchy” or “white supremacy,” the theorists of these things took a flawed framework and made it worse. There is no single encompassing system that created the numerous, largely but far from entirely local mechanisms of segregation which Rothstein so carefully describes. As the more traditional left-materialists Barbara and Karen Fields put it in Racecraft, many in this intellectual milieu write “as though the chief business of slavery were the production of white supremacy rather than the production of cotton, sugar, rice, and tobacco.” Critical studies isn’t truly a theoretically unified field, and it does have valuable scholarly output (like Hanley-López's), but in general the Fields sisters are on the mark, especially in the transition from scholarship to political and administrative language. Many of the interesting critiques of the substance of this phenomena come from the left.

But the larger point is that partisanship is a political strategy, not an analytical one. I vote for Democrats because the Republican Party is, at present, the party of Donald Trump, of “stop the steal,” and of being reflexively against any measures—no matter how unintrusive—to suppress or safely build immunity against COVID-19. These are rather existential matters that cannot be ignored; beyond them, I am also an atheist, a liberal, and differ with the typical GOP voter on a number of values such as respecting people’s sexual preferences or gender presentation (for fairly prosaic liberal reasons).

But the default state of our polarized public sphere is for one side to take the opposite stance of the other. This is the basic structure, within which actors on either side can start and then complicate, build nuance. But this starting point is inevitably a reactive opposition. Reasoning by opposite is not a particularly reliable way to draw accurate conclusions. In 2020 there were anti-Trump conservative journalists I follow who were the first to alert me to the catastrophic decisions made by the Cuomo administration which led to an enormous number of nursing home deaths. No one is guaranteed a correct judgment or reliable information, but I do try and find people who have shown themselves to be trustworthy, in both the sense of being reliable and the sense of having some integrity. Not a single one is a Trump supporter, but many are deeply religious and socially conservative. Trustworthiness doesn’t follow a party line.

In a nation of 330 million people, divided into two major parties, each coalition is going to involve many contradictory ideologies whose adherents share some concrete goals. Six years after Trump won and a little over one year after he lost, I am comfortable with the distinction between serious, scholarly, intellectual discussions of institutions and social causes, on the one hand, and fads among undergraduates, activists, and administrators, on the other. I am comfortable with my partisanship and with the fact that there are a lot of intellectually dubious notions in circulation among my co-partisans. Many people seem to react to this reality by self-identifying as independent, but end up predictably voting for one party or the other anyway. That’s fine; no one owes a party their loyalty. But I think it’s healthy to accept that you can share interests and goals with people without agreeing on every detail. Indeed, that is arguably the chief wisdom of the liberal tradition.