Thread by @JeffreyASachs

The Lincoln Project and the IDW were the two highest profile projects launched by centrists during the Trump years. The first tried to rescue conservatism from Trump. The second tried (ostensibly) to tamp down the Culture War. Both have failed. Why?

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Lots of reasons, obviously! But for myself, I keep coming back to tribalism. Not as a causal factor, but as an analytic framework. More than any other, tribalism has been the frame used by centrists to make sense of US politics. An atavistic flight from rationality.

I think this frame has served them very poorly, for two reasons. First, it permits them to shift the debate from matters of pressing political concern to one about the right and proper way to talk about those matters of pressing political concern.

That second order debate can obviously be very important, but it also has clear limitations, at least for the purposes of persuasion. It's also clearly been used as a tactic to naturalize or wave away all kinds of things that ought to be viewed as controversial or contingent.

And second, the focus on tribalism, and the assumption behind it that disagreement is in significant part due to cognitive bias, has led many centrists to adopt a posture of contempt for alternative political accounts. It's crippled their analysis as a result, I think.

In the great Social Divorce of 2016, each faction took custody of a different academic discipline. Conservatives, with their liquid modernity and Appalachian Ennui got sociology. They've also made a pretty strong claim on political theory.

Liberals got history and political science. Think the 1619 Project, Bright Line Watch, endless debates about fascism, etc.

Centrists got psychology. Heterodox Academy, Jordan Peterson, and (of course) tribalism.

Maybe the center was never going to hold. Maybe the IDW and LP did make a difference and things would have been much "worse" without them. But I doubt it. I'd like to see a bit of self-reflection from them. To pause, if only for a moment, in their scathing criticism...

...of identity politics and Trumpist populism, to gauge where they might have gone wrong. What they might have done differently. And maybe whether their own critics have a point.