Unfortunately, so much of what we see these days is people deliberately trying to position themselves within the right, rather than advance anything larger.
Right-of-center media and politics are suffering from a glut of obsessive positioning. Once you start noticing this, you can’t stop.
As with many things, positioning isn’t all bad. You can build a clear identity — a brand, if you will — by standing for particular ideas or priorities. At some level, that’s an essential skill for an ambitious politician or a political commentator. At times, that means separating yourself from the stances of others on your own side. People get to know where you’re coming from, what you consider important, what you’ll compromise on, and what you won’t.
But the end goal of politics has to recognize that this is a team sport. You build coalitions — for a party, a movement, an idea, an issue, an agenda — by getting more people on board, even at the cost of some intellectual clarity or rigor or your own personal brand. Whatever it is you’re selling, you want more people to buy it. At least, that’s how you do this job if you’re doing it for a cause. Which is how I think about political writing; there are far better ways to make money. I made a lot more money as a lawyer. In the long run, where’s the professional satisfaction from building a political brand if you’re not going to accomplish anything with it?
Unfortunately, so much of what we see these days is people deliberately trying to position themselves within the right, rather than advance anything larger. (This is an aspect of the dynamic Yuval Levin often writes about: how we live in an epidemic age of people using institutions solely as platforms for themselves). A coalition-builder, in taking a stance, might try to sand down its roughest edges in order to attract more broad-based support. But someone obsessively pursuing positioning will do the opposite, and play wedge-issue politics with their own side. The idea of a wedge issue is to take a stance that your political opponent can’t stomach in order to separate the opponent from the larger number of people who will take your side. If you can get yourself on the 80 percent side of an 80/20 issue, when your opponent is on the 20 percent side, you win. But driving wedges within your own coalition works differently. We see this a lot these days with right-populists: They insist upon injecting some element into their own arguments that is false or irresponsible or offensive, apparently for the specific purpose of ensuring that the more honest and responsible elements of the right can’t follow them where they are going. Maybe that means demanding the end of the filibuster to pass an otherwise-defensible bill, or injecting blunt racial animus into an otherwise-arguable immigration stance, or insisting upon selling otherwise-reasonable electoral reforms with outright lies about the volume of voter fraud. Whatever the issue, the point is not to get consensus and a wide coalition but to get its opposite: to drive away people of sense and decency and integrity so that you can convince their audience that you are the real fighter, or at least so that you can convince your existing audience that they are conspiring to keep your people from getting what they want.
The continual need for populists to posit an elite conspiracy within their own side that is sabotaging them only accentuates this dolorous tendency. It feeds a continual demand for internecine warfare for its own sake that makes populist coalitions inherently unstable. And it ultimately drives the populist right to feel a complete disconnect between their professional satisfaction in their jobs and whether they actually accomplish anything for the right as a whole relative to the left.