The superficial story this presidential election cycle is that you get radical left-wing policies if you vote for the ticket with Tim Walz in the vice president slot, whereas you get radical right-wing policies if you vote for the ticket with JD Vance in the vice president slot. Yet each man is obviously on his respective ticket because those mushy, inattentive, indecisive swing voters in the Midwest need to see a name they recognize as one of their own. The two aren’t really that different.
The slightly deeper election story—a libertarian, more philosophical one though still not the full tale—is that, very roughly speaking, the left usually wants government to control the economy and the right usually wants government to control the culture. Much has changed in the past decade or so, with shifts in things like which party deploys antiwar rhetoric and which one trusts pharmaceutical companies and intelligence agencies, but that basic left-econ, right-culture pattern holds.
To libertarians like me, then, it has long been troubling that the Midwest, that bland, flat region that has given us both Walz and Vance, tends to combine (in the sentiments of its residents and thus in the purported values of its politicians) both a desire for government to stabilize economic conditions (through unions, regulations, etc.) and a desire for government to stabilize the culture (whether by using government against immigrants, drug gangs, foreign governments, domestic perverts, or some other target). I don’t think government is competent to control either the economy or the culture, or indeed anything.
A slightly more nuanced and sympathetic view of Midwestern-style political anxieties, though—our sophisticated third pass at understanding this election season—is that people in old-fashioned, rural settings, whether in the Midwest, parts of my native rural New England, or for that matter a tiny village in the rainforests of Brazil, are understandably wary of being manipulated by distant, impersonal, arrogant forces, often in big central cities, regardless of whether those distant manipulators are basically-governmental or basically-corporate in nature.
Anxious citizens may not understand all the big conflicts of our times, but they figure it can’t hurt to have someone who sounds like one of their own in a position of power fighting for the little guy. Maybe they’re right. Maybe that’s a more rational strategy for defending themselves against political depredations than hoping for a tidy resolution in their lifetimes to one of the more philosophical, more often discussed culture wars ostensibly motivating the pundits and activists: right vs. left, private vs. public, religious vs. secular, NATO vs. the bad guys, etc.
There’s something to be said, in other words, for dropping the usual Manichean frames and trying the simpler and more broadly applicable lens of (roughly speaking) powerful-vs.-fringe. People who sense they’re on the fringe will fumble around for some way to strike back at the powerful, even if they know the weapon at hand isn’t ideal and even if they know they’re to some extent swinging blindly. They aren’t going to be soothed by representatives of perceived central power (whether that means liberal big government or well-connected rich white guys) telling them, condescendingly, to calm down and drop the weapon.
So, though it’s as unnatural for me as a libertarian to drop the private-vs.-governmental litmus test for evaluating policies as it is for one of the socialists against whom I usually argue to do so, I can understand the desire, often more useful than precise ideological nitpicking, simply to side with those who seem more vaguely and attitudinally like the rebels against those who seem vaguely and intuitively like the controlling bigshots, policy details and budget numbers be damned.
There will be some to whom the upbeat Midwestern schoolteacher (and his wacky laughing non-white lady running mate) sounds reassuringly non-authoritarian and some to whom the up-by-his-bootstraps smirking Midwestern hillbilly (and his sybaritic, unserious showbiz New Yorker running mate) sounds like the fighter who’s on your side.
I can understand people leaning either way—though I’d always caution that you should never assume government is truly on the side of any cultural faction or demographic, only on its own power-amassing, self-serving side. With its arrogant ineptitude, government can negligently devastate hurricane-ravaged regions through sheer inefficiency even if it doesn’t have the power to steer storms or any burning desire to kill hillbillies. Regardless, better to leave things to the locals, who have some clue what’s going on.
The drastically opposite attitude—trying to manage the whole globe from the heights of intellectual, political, and financial power—is such a precarious and likely doomed long-term strategy that even elite journalists such as James Pogue writing in Vanity Fair are starting to sound a lot like paleoconservative pessimists. Will such intellectuals fully wise up before Rome collapses and the barbarians in the hinterlands rush the palace?
Even with my attempt to balance the left-wing and right-wing implications in these thoughts, all this may sound very paleoconservative to some readers (that is, roughly, pro-rural, anti-big-city, sort of decentralizingly Buchananite). But you can also think of these ideas as anti-colonial, if that makes them jibe more easily with your left-leaning, perhaps even your far-left intuitions.
Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose new book excoriates Israel and defends the Palestinians, might be well served by taking a broader anti-colonial analytical approach, though it may sound odd for a libertarian or culturally moderately-conservative person to be urging Coates to think more anti-colonially. Whether one concludes the Palestinians are truly oppressed or not, it would make more sense to view them as people who at least think of themselves as oppressed than to shoehorn their conflict into the very specific, narrow ideological framework/analogy of quasi-blacks vs. quasi-whites, which is what Coates tends to do to every conflict.
It appears, if a few vague posts on X are right, that Helen Andrews—with whom I’ve admittedly had personal and philosophical differences in the past but who I’ve never denied is very smart—may have just been fired by American Conservative for writing in the even-farther-right Compact that Coates in fact fails, despite all his talk of empathizing, to understand the Israeli/Palestinian conflict because he feels compelled to turn it into a rehash of the 1960s struggle for black civil rights in the U.S. Coates, an MSNBC host, and maybe even a donor or publisher at American Conservative if the timing is non-coincidental (I have no idea) all think or pretend to think it is sheer racism to accuse Coates of turning the Middle East into nothing more than another iteration of the tensions in the American South.
But of course Coates easily invites such accusations (and not just from Andrews but, for instance, from a CBS correspondent who has been getting subjected to sensitivity training for criticizing Coates’ approach in recent days). Even Andrews’ mention of Coates likely contrasting Israeli successes with the imaginary successes of Wakanda is not some racist non-sequitur. Coates has written Marvel’s Black Panther comics and likely has the futuristic Wakanda on the brain frequently, just as he plainly always has anti-black racism on the brain, for good or ill. It may not be the best lens for understanding the Middle East, and there may be wider, more revealing lenses available, is about all I think Andrews was saying in that piece (in fairly paleoconservative fashion).
There are advantages to being on the lookout for oppression-in-general but potential analytical dangers in too forcibly mapping one kind of oppression onto another in which you are already emotionally or intellectually invested.
If you don’t think Coates might be at risk of doing the latter, recall that well before he took on the topic of the Palestinians, this is how he described the 9/11 attacks here in the U.S.: “But looking out upon the ruins of America, my heart was cold. I would never consider any American citizen pure. I kept thinking about how southern Manhattan had always been Ground Zero for us. They auctioned our bodies down there, in that same devastated, and rightly named, financial district. And there was once a burial ground for the auctioned there. All I knew was that Bin Laden was not the first man to bring terror to that section of the city...I could see no difference between the officer who killed Prince Jones and the police who died, or the firefighters who died. They were not human to me. Black, white, or whatever, they were the menaces of nature; they were the fire, the comet, the storm, which could—with no justification—shatter my body.”
Sounds a bit too obsessed with his favorite topics to see things with fresh eyes, if you ask me—and it should be obvious I don’t say that to dismiss the evils of slavery, nor most likely do Coates’ many other critics. Ah, well. Complex topics all. And here’s a belated Happy Indigenous People’s Day regardless.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey