Don't Take Advice From Your Enemies

The most useless genre on earth.

Hello kids we are your friends. (Photo: Getty)

Politics is hard. Assembling coalitions, building strategies, overcoming ruthless opposition—it’s a lot. For the Democrats, the political moment is defined by a rising faction on the left, corrupt fascists on the right, and looming midterm elections intermittently overshadowed by regional crises. What, exactly, are we to do?

Fortunately, there is an entire universe of pundits that Democrats can turn to for help in navigating this challenging environment. For example, David Brooks in The Atlantic:

To encourage my Democratic friends, I would remind them of this fact: The Democratic Party became great not while pushing against the right. It became great while pushing against the left. Democrats can argue against Republicans in their sleep. They have a comfortable set of moves they can go to: trickle-down economics, tax cuts for the rich.

But mainstream Democrats have to think hard when arguing against the left. They have to toughen up. They have to clearly define what they believe and what they do not believe. They have to rally grassroots supporters willing to fight alongside them. They have to come up with some new agenda to compete with the get-everything-for-free agenda that the left is now offering.

Or Bret Stephens, in the New York Times:

What all this means for mainstream Democrats is that they resemble a national army under attack from an insurgency: They offer order and predictability when they need to be shocking and surprising; they seek to win by delivering incremental victories while their guerrilla opponents promise political transcendence. Unless something changes, those dynamics tend to set the army up for disaster.

What could change the dynamics? It would help if a Democratic leader stood up to make the case that democratic socialists are neither liberals nor progressives, at least in any honest sense of those words. They are atavists, blasts from a discredited and discarded past.

Or persnickety bow tie George Will, in the Washington Post:

The Democratic Party no longer has a knack for its business, which supposedly is politics… Never mind that Platner is a lout whose work résumé is thinner than his record of sponging off his parents. Rather than assess him as — Heaven forfend! — an individual, Democrats anointed him the embodiment of a category: the working class. He could be their favorite thing, a victim. He could make vivid their simpleminded binary of “oppressors” and “oppressed.” Oblivious of their insult to America’s working class, Democrats wonder why what once was their base has abandoned them.

Or Kimberley Strassel at the Wall Street Journal:

You might think that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee head Kirsten Gillibrand would be shouting “I told you so” and “the grownups are back in charge.” They are the “establishment” that the progressives unwisely defied by recruiting Mr. Platner.

Mr. Schumer had recruited the popular Gov. Janet Mills to take on GOP Sen. Susan Collins. Ms. Mills is a vetted professional with a lifetime of public service… She’d have been a formidable challenger.

Or her esteemed colleague, former Bush strategist Karl Rove:

Before the election, [DSA-aligned candidates] will help Republicans paint the Democratic Party as radical… Socialists running in deep-blue districts can keep saying outrageous things and win. But it’s places like Colorado’s Eighth District, pitting the former Army helicopter pilot against the leftist Yale law graduate, that will decide which party runs the House. Game on!

With such abundant on-the-record free advice, the Democrats can’t say that they weren’t warned about the perils of the leftist trap they are falling into.

These columns—a selection of what has appeared just in the past week—are examples of a particular genre of punditry that should not exist at all. That genre is: “Advice from your enemies.” The fact that these things continue to be published at such a rapid clip is evidence of the frail-mindedness among the readers, editors, and writers of these publications.

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Writing about politics is fine. Writing about what your political enemies are doing is fine. What is stupid, farcical, at best a trap and at worst a sign of a devastating collapse in American logic, is to purport to give political advice to your political enemies. It is one thing for a Republican pundit to write “I dislike socialism.” It is another, more ridiculous thing for a Republican pundit to write “Democrats must reject socialism, for their own good.” The only thing that exceeds the uselessness of writing these types of columns is the reading of them.

If you, a citizen who does not spend an unhealthy amount of time reading political punditry, have ever made the mistake at nodding sagely at one of these columns and filing their advice in the serious side of your mind, I now give you a gift: the gift of never having to do that again. Taking advice from people who do not share your goals is and will always be a trick, and a waste of time. Stop it!

Do I, on the opposite side of the political spectrum from these pundits, have opinions about what Republicans should do? I sure do. They should fall to their knees, grovel before their false gods, beg forgiveness from the oppressed people of the world, and reverse all of their political beliefs. It is fine for me to share all of these correct thoughts. But I hardly expect Republicans to consider this to be advice. I do not share their goals. I want their entire political project to fail. Imagine me pretending to strike the pose of Analytical Observer Whose Guidance Should Be Considered Valid Because It is Purely Strategic in Nature. Why the fuck would I do that? And why would they ever believe me? I could never have a genuine thought about what Republicans should do in order to help Republicans. I do not want to help Republicans. Such a thought would be contrary to my entire nature. And if I ever did have a useful idea to empower Republicans, why would I ever share it? I might as well write “A Burglar’s Guide to Breaking Into My Home While I am Out of Town This Weekend.” The very act of writing such a piece would reveal me to be either an undercover cop or a moron.

That is exactly what you are getting when you read a piece by David Brooks or Bret Stephens or any Wall Street Journal columnist about what the Democrats should do. (And I am only using the strictest definition of this dynamic here. In reality, it should be expanded to include all essays about What the Left Should Do by corporate Democratic officials, mewling centrists, “common sense” Democratic operatives who now write for the Free Press, and so on. In all of these cases, people who fundamentally disagree with your goals are allegedly giving you good faith tips on what you should be doing.) Our national political media discourse would be greatly improved by eliminating all of these pieces. Already, wise editors do not commission them, non-hacky writers do not write them, and smart readers do not bother to read them, except for comedy purposes. They exist in an intellectual world that is by and for suckers. If you find yourself in that orbit, now is a good time to show yourself out.

If you fear that you will miss something by not reading this style of essay, let me assuage your concerns. Here is the advice you will get in every single one: “My opponents should be more like me.” There you go. Never say I have not saved you time in your life.

When reading any piece of political advice, stop and ask yourself: “Does this person share my political goals? Are we trying to accomplish the same things? Is this a case of two people who share the same destination discussing the best way to get there? Or is it a case of someone who wants to go somewhere else trying to lure me away from where I want to go?” Pundits who are honest will make this distinction clear. They will say: Your beliefs are wrong, and mine are right, and you should join me, and here is why. They will not do the editorial version of the Steve Buscemi How Do You Do, Fellow Kids meme. You only have to imagine David Brooks in a fleece and Oxford shirt raising his hand in a DSA meeting to weigh in on the next Palestine protest to viscerally understand how absurd this whole style of criticism is.

Pundits can critique, insult, denigrate, and eviscerate their political opponents. That’s fine. Normal stuff. They can also try to sway their opponents from their misguided positions with passion, logic, and moral reasoning. Sure. Give it a shot. What they cannot do—not if they are honest, which is to say not if they are worth paying attention to at all—is to levitate above the earthy world of political beliefs altogether in order to deliver a dose of tactical wisdom that is untainted by the muddy blur of conviction. No. That one is a lie. Its pervasiveness in particular publications is one of the primary things that makes those publications such a big waste of time.

If you are my enemy just go ahead and try to defeat me. Don’t tell me how to be more like you. You suck!

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Also

• Related reading: How to Think About Politics Without Wanting to Kill Yourself; Shift Change at the Wheel Reinvention Factory; Columnists and Their Lives of Quiet Desperation.

• “We’re not just motorcycle lawyers. We’re motorcycle riders.” My latest very important piece at Flaming Hydra can be found here.

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