The easiest way to get people to embrace an evil thing—such as one of the U.S.’s two major political parties—is simply to offer them two evils and ask them which they prefer. As long as there are people who pick the other evil and are willing to argue about it, you’ve soon created raging, sometimes violent partisans, and good quickly gets forgotten. People rarely summon the courage or imagination to say: neither of the above.
As Ayn Rand noted, the much-mocked Shakespeare character Polonius gave some good albeit shallow advice, including “Neither a borrower nor a lender be.” But instead of lauding poor dead Polonius, we praise the likes of Goethe for barking forced-choice rules such as that one must be “hammer or anvil,” like a sexual deviant who can only imagine picking sadism or masochism as an approach to a relationship, completely overlooking the option of neither doing nor suffering harm.
Something resembling Rand’s largely-justified contempt for “parasites,” those who live off their fellow citizens against those fellow citizens’ wills, now exists in the minds of many on the right, who properly condemn leftists’ desire to tax and redistribute instead of creating wealth. Alas, though, people can never leave well enough alone—never just sit stably with Polonius in that neither-A-nor-B position—but must run headlong into the ostensibly “opposite” evil (which is usually just the same evil in slightly different garb). If I’m not on defense, many people think, it must be time to go on offense.
So, right-wingers, instead of standing pat as rugged individualists, show a growing lust to be predators instead of parasites, as if that’s any moral improvement. Most of them are proud not to be feeding at the trough of government welfare (in theory), which is great, but they’re eager to give harmless migrants, enterprising Latin America drug producers, and miscellaneous foes of Trump a few kicks in the ribs. Instead of dragging civilization down from below like the leftists, they pride themselves on raining death from above, even if they aren’t quite as formally militaristic as they were in the Bush/Kristol days.
The over-eagerness to treat politics as an exercise in reverse-psychology makes it very easy to get people to praise things that their principles would obviously normally require them to condemn.
Want the right to embrace currency-printing and inflation? Just tell them that Trump wants those things and that the Federal Reserve is defying his will. Want the right to embrace taxes? Tell them some corporations run by liberals are resisting them while some people are hungry in the heartland. Want the right to call for big government to keep operating in its destructive business-as-usual fashion? Tell them the Democrats keep voting against reopening the government—though that’s how every member of Congress should vote, always, I’d think. I mean, what are you, a socialist? (Each of the major parties always wants the other party to get the “blame” for government shutdowns, as if shutting down the Big Government leviathan were a bad thing.)
Even last week’s New York City mayoral election, a contest fought almost entirely between Democrats and nominally ex-Democrats, became something of a phony right/left battle in which both sides were evil but one had a slightly more feminine and one a slightly more masculine vibe (analogous to the growing sex divide in polls of voters’ identification with the two major parties). By the end, if you were sufficiently lacking in self-respect that you were willing to vote, you could pick mama’s boy Mamdani, the new Democrat standard-bearer and son of a rich filmmaker mom, or alleged sexual predator and belligerent-sounding tough guy Andrew Cuomo, with his last-minute endorsement from Trump. Presto, it’s a binary choice.
For lack of any better options with a snowball’s chance in Hell of being elected, we ended up not with a mayor-elect who will be truly gentle and dainty and hands-off, as many latter-day hippies who picked Mamdani over Cuomo (and Sliwa) might like to imagine, but with one who regardless of his practical impact is plainly a totalitarian at heart, saying in his victory speech, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve and no concern too small for it to care about.”
And you thought the right was intrusive? Well, it is, but so too is the left—no real alternative, which is my broader point. Don’t pretend you’ve done anything more than escape the frying pan by plunging into the fire, New York. Mamdani may not grope you, but he will most certainly be all up in your business, especially if your business is behind in its tax or regulatory compliance.
Religion is a secondary concern, and we New Yorkers are usually happy to ignore it, but it’s also troubling Mamdani’s old intern felt comfortable posting a video message saying not only that Mamdani’s ascension is part of a metaphorical global jihad but that each person listening to her should ask what he or she is willing to risk in the current legal environment to further that cause.
Not every Democrat who loves the systemic violence of the state is fond of the more sporadic, decentralized violence of terrorists and common street criminals, but they’re growing more comfortable blurring that distinction—and Republicans cheering masked, unidentified thugs raiding the Democrats’ non-violent neighbors doesn’t help. The line between crime and politics is getting so blurry that, on the bright side, I may not get any more pushback when I tell people, as I have for decades, that government’s merely a form of organized crime.
Bangor, Maine just elected to its city council Angela Walker, who did 10 years in prison a couple of decades ago for killing a man who made a racist remark to her, beating him and stuffing his mouth with sand. She was part of a slate of progressive candidates, if you insist on calling that progress.
But is she any worse than governor-elect Abigail Spanberger from Virginia, who by having worked for the ostensibly very-legal CIA is forbidden, she says, to discuss some six years of her life spent working for that agency while holding five passports? Will her voters ever know what laws she may have skirted or who was harmed?
Democratic Texas State Rep. Jolanda Jones, meanwhile, unapologetically told CNN, while talking about congressional races and what it takes to boost black voters’ confidence, that when it comes to her political opponents, “If they go low, I’m going to the gutter... I’m going to go across your neck [makes cutting motion]... You got to hit hard enough where they don’t come back.”
This borderline-barbaric thinking is easily found on the right as well, and not just in the form of street-fighting Proud Boys. Look no farther than relatively sedate Canadian psychologist-pundit Jordan Peterson, with his constant claims that “the hero has to be a monster” before he can be effective. Tell that to your new pal Jesus, you long-winded dime-store Nietzsche.
But then, I shouldn’t be shocked that today’s huge crop of attention-seeking political pundits, faced with false choices such as wimpy vs. monstrous, end up not by rejecting false dichotomies but by embracing the worst aspects of each thing proffered, squaring circles in the most illogical and ugly ways without ever really transcending the choice.
Back at Brown University, I wrote that that college’s more-radical version of hypocritical limousine liberals should be called “aristosocialists,” mostly rich Marxists, and nowadays I see right-wing activist Chris Buskirk, who seeks to organize a post-Trump network of MAGA billionaires in order to build a seemingly-contradictory future of conservatism and mild industrial planning, calling his hybrid vision “aristopopulism.” It may be time to just go back to using the term “feudalism” to describe the controlling-and-combative mindset of most of our political activists and leaders these days, across the spectrum.
I say: neither a victim nor an attacker be, neither sheep nor wolf.
But if you want an example of a lovable predator, I’ll pause to note the passing in September, at 18, of a natural hunter from Japan who was for a time the most popular animal on the Internet, Maru the cat. I don’t pretend to his level of popularity, though in my quiet, relatively non-combative way—specifically, by wearing my “I think: therefore I can’t be a socialist” t-shirt while not voting on Election Day—I at least ended up on the vlog of area photographer Peachy Deegan.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey