Any political coalition has groups that you'd rather not be near. To be a coalition of any significance or real power is to include some divergent opinions. On the left you might see this best when the people who think campus politics (“occupy the library!”) actually matter unite with the indigent poor; when I worked in right wing politics, it was the guy with the knight helmet talking about medieval values or those oddly fixated on immigrants or the gold standard. There were always people that you didn't really want to associate with. Effective coalitional politics takes knowing when to associate or disassociate with those people. Eventually some of the people that you thought were crazy are going to turn out to actually be crazy, but it's hard to say that you knew all along. Especially when, in order to exercise power or build influence, your people engage with those potentially crazy people. That's the underlying challenge with the David Brooks piece linked below—he came up through the conservative movement and now disagrees with it, but calls out the conservative movement by saying the reactionary fringe has won and he knew all along they were bad. It’s probably true he’s significantly changed and arguably true that right-wing politics aren’t what they were in the 1980s, but he doesn't give his earlier self nearly enough credit or criticism for the ways he used to think and the ways he used those crazy-adjacent right-wing movements to build his own reputation and power.
Thus, when Brooks is the character who doesn’t change and when says he was right all along, you aren’t quite sure he’s believable. Is there a good way to tell people that you were right along? The essay where the writer was right all along won’t convince anyone of anything aside from the fact that the writer is the kind of person who has a deep need to be right and not enough self-awareness to go along with it. That's one reason why my fairly hostile email about the people I used to work with in politics never made it to my site. There wasn't a way I could find to write it that didn't make me seem smug—there wasn’t much of a point to it aside from how I am more right than I used to be (and they aren’t). Who wants to read that?
Whether a piece is readable depends on the writing; whether the author is believable depends on their self-awareness. The second two pieces get much closer to this ideal.
Reading
The items below are essays or articles that I found interesting, either in topic or in the quality of the writing. The titles and subheads are from the originals. When possible, I give free or gift links to paywalled content.
I Should Have Seen This Coming
When I joined the conservative movement in the 1980s, there were two types of people: those who cared earnestly about ideas, and those who wanted only to shock the left. The reactionary fringe has won.
This thing will fail
Trump will not restore the "strong gods" of community, family, and faith.
Come With Me if You Want to Survive an Age of Extinction
The digital age is creating a "bottleneck" that threatens traditional cultures, art forms, and even human reproduction. As people become distracted by virtual experiences, they may lose touch with real-life connections and skills. To survive this crisis, we must intentionally engage in the things we love and resist the pull of the virtual world.