Your enemies might be right about you

Rude and true beats polite and wrong.

The emperor has no clothes

This is an essay about sight and blindness. It’s about the cruel honesty of the unsheathed knife. About the trap of subcultural belonging. About weakness. And it’s about how your enemies — not your friends — are free to point out what you can’t admit.

I drafted this in 2022 but didn’t publish. Now seems like the right time.

The Case of the Conservative Intellectuals

In the (first) Trump years, I remember people talking about the problem of “conservative intellectuals”. If they clearly had no connection to the actual conservative voters, what was the use of them? I remember quips that “Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens exist to make liberals feel that they are open-minded”. Or that their function was to explain movement conservative organizations and voters, and they clearly failed at that task. Or perhaps their task was to give liberals who were tempted by the conservative issue du jour intellectual cover to do so.

Maybe. I think it’s something else. The point of Ross Douthat isn’t to explain conservatism. The point of Ross Douthat is that he is free to point out that your emperor has no clothes.

You Need Outsiders

Outsiders fulfill an important role. Their point of view doesn’t have to be true, useful, or correct. It could be bananas.¹ They, personally, could be bananas.

They could be all that and more. But there is one key quality about them: they don’t care about your slogans, your memes, or your heroes. They’re not here to cheer on “the team”. They’re not bound by the same self-preserving silences. Which means they are free to see clearly what you cannot — and willing to say what your allies won’t.

This is why coaches exist. It’s why therapists exist. It’s why teachers exist. But you need more.

Your fetters are real:

1. You’re in the grip of ideas. You have blind spots.

2. You’re in the grip of a bundle of tactics associated with those ideas. You might act in predictable ways to stimuli.

3. Perhaps most importantly, you’re in the grip of a social scene that enforces behavior and blinders in the name of that bundle of ideas. Those behaviors and blinders might be arbitrary from a theoretic or platonic point of view — but they’re still quite real.

Or, to borrow a quote: “A theory is something you have. An ideology is something that has you.”

This is true no matter what social scene, intellectual tradition, or activist group you’re in. It's true for liberals and conservatives. Skater boys and punk girls. Theatre kids and athletes. Wordcels and shape rotators. Cavaliers and roundheads. Poptimists and rockists. We’re all in a trap formed by the very social and intellectual community we draw sustenance from.

There’s a way out. The way is to learn from your enemies.

Also — this insight is already used in practice!

Growing up, I remember being mystified by Westminster parliamentary systems. If control see-saws between parties, and parties have unified control of government, what’s stopping them from just undoing what the previous government did? I got some good answers to this question, including that undoing previous legislation takes precious time and effort.

But I think we can go a bit deeper. Sometimes our ideological enemies see our weaknesses clearer than we can. At best, we get a government that swaps between different factions, each ruthlessly attacking the failed policies of the incumbent and quietly keeping the good ideas that worked.

For example: Labour creates the NHS and the Tories keep it. The Tories set up “right to buy” for homes, and Labour expanded and expanded it. Labour gave central bank independence, and the Tories were not-so-secretly grateful it happened without backlash. The Tories deregulated finance; New Labour celebrated London’s rise as a global finance hub.

Enemies and Truth

When your friends are in the grip of ideology and wrong, your enemies can do or say the thing that is common-sense and correct. It’s not that the common-sense thing they’re saying is inherent to their ideology (“Joe Biden is incredibly old” isn’t an inherently conservative or liberal point of view). It’s just that your enemies will be rude and true while your friends will be polite and wrong.

Your friends will be wrong because of group think. They’ll be wrong because they all share similar biases. And they’ll be wrong because the cost of conflict with someone “in the scene” is much higher than conflict with someone outside of it.

Your enemies, on the other hand, want to win. And “I can’t be so boorish as to point your mistakes” is the last thing on their mind.

If your enemies are attacking you and winning, there’s a good chance it’s because you have a real weakness.

It’s not that they’ll be nice enough to attack your weakness with compassion: they’ll twist truth and be as unscrupulous as they can get away with. It’s not that they’ll only attack you for things you’re actually wrong about: maybe you are weak because you’re correct but unpopular.² But it still is a real weakness. Either way — you have a problem.

Even if it’s all horribly unfair — understanding where people don’t trust you, where they don’t like you, where you’re misunderstood, where people are liable to scandalous lies about you — that’s information. Useful information.

When we’re fully enmeshed in a social scene, we keep track of who is important, and who is an annoying barely tolerated crank. We forget that others looking in have neither the context nor desire to make that distinction. The worst members of your team often become its public face: the edgelords, the conspiracists, the assholes, the scolds, the predators, and worse. You know who will make sure to show you when that happens? Even when it hurts your feelings — especially if it hurts your feelings? Enemies. God bless them.

This is true in the plane of ideas. I think it’s true interpersonally. And I think it’s incredibly true in the field of politics.

Dear lefties — this is part of your tradition

In the emotionally exhausting combat of politics and culture wars, it sucks to lose, whether it’s a battle or the war. But when we do, it’s important to understand both why the other side won, as well as why our side lost. This can be challenging: what group of dedicated people who just took a hit would eagerly analyze their own weaknesses and flaws?³ But it’s still important.

And to my friends on the left, remember: historically, the left has engaged quite seriously with conservative ideas. Read some Marx if you want to see it. The first priority of a changemaker⁴ is to see reality with as much accuracy as possible. Know your enemy. Only then can you know yourself.

So that’s the reason to have friends of different ideologies around. Heck, let them be, I don’t know, weird ideologies. Hardcore Georgists. Iranian Monarchists. Radical animal liberationists. Veblenites. Bonapartists. Whatever you like!

So maybe we need more than Ross Douthat. Honestly, he might be too socially embedded in the urbane cosmopolitan crowd to really tell it to us straight.

Maybe, if we’re really in the wilderness, we need to pay attention to more of a Darth Vader type. A Chris Rufo. A Steve Bannon. The TV ads of the Trump campaign. Not that they’re right; they’re so, so, often catastrophically wrong. But because they go for the jugular; exactly where you’re weakest. And that’s the sort of honest malice I hope you never get from a friend.

1. Though, let’s be honest, everyone has some wisdom to share.

2. And maybe, just maybe, you have a weakness because you’re actually wrong about something. Imagine that.

3. Where I come from, that group has a name — high quality movement strategists. Or, as their opponents call them: moderates, sellouts, shitlibs, or worse.

4. Or radical, if that’s your preferred term