Hoxes and Fedgehogs

Dear Reader (including those recently sued by the QAnon Shaman),

The Hedgehog and the Fox was arguably Isaiah Berlin’s most famous essay (deal with it, fans of Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness of Nationality). The title was a reference to a snippet allegedly written by the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.”

Berlin took this idea and ran with it with a certain amount of whimsy, not realizing that so many people would take it very seriously. Berlin divided philosophers into hedgehogs and foxes:  Plato, Nietzsche, Hegel, et al., were hedgehogs with (allegedly) just one big idea that drove their thinking and influence. (Berlin doesn’t really spell out the nature of everyone’s hedgehogginess or foxiness, and if he didn’t have to, I certainly don’t.) Aristotle, Shakespeare, Joyce, Balzac (Editor: “no need for potty mouth”), et al., were foxes. 

The influence of this dichotomy has been remarkable (Wikipedia has a serviceable summary), working its way into business books, geopolitical strategy, pop psychology, and legal philosophy. 

If it’s good enough for that stuff, it’s certainly good enough for rank punditry.

I think both the GOP and the Democrats are each having an identity crisis, but not the same identity crisis. The Democrats have a fox problem, the Republicans a hedgehog problem.

Here’s what I mean in a nutshell: The Democrats don’t know who they are; the Republicans do. And, yes, both are problems. Let’s start with the Democrats. 

If you search for articles about the Democrats' “identity crisis,” you’ll find no shortage of results. The New Yorker: “The Democratic Party’s Identity Crisis.” Axios: “The 10 theories driving Dems' identity crisis.” The Associated Press: “Democrats clashed over their shutdown strategy. But the party’s identity crisis runs far deeper.” And so on. 

In the Axios piece, Alex Thompson lays out 10 theories Democrats offer for why they’re a mess.  The fact that there are 10—and 10 hardly exhausts the number of theories out there—is itself evidence of the fox problem. 

When Joe Biden was president, you could argue that Democrats had one big problem: Joe Biden. He was too old, too weak, too unpopular, and too unimaginative to lead the party. But Biden was still the keystone holding together the edifice of the Democratic Party because he was president. 

I’m no expert on stonework, but I can imagine a scenario where a mason or engineer says, “Hey, that keystone is crumbling. We need to replace it, or the whole structure will collapse.” And then some idjit says “Okay” and just yanks it out, not thinking about the fact that the keystone, despite its decrepitude, was still the only thing holding everything together. Also, focusing on the keystone assumes that the rest of the structure is in good shape when in fact its sorry state was merely a symptom of a more systemic problem. When your car has a rust problem, something will break first due to rust, but that doesn’t mean all the other pieces aren’t rusty too. 

The replacement for Biden was Kamala Harris, and Harris was in fact symptomatic of the party’s larger dysfunction.

The term “Omnicause” is widely credited to Mary Harrington in an Unherd essay from a few years ago. Hadley Freeman added some metaphorical color last year in the Jewish Chronicle, in her essay, “Welcome to the Omnicause, the fatberg of activism.”

“Fatberg,” if you didn’t know, isn’t the Department of War’s new term for overweight Jewish soldiers—it’s the term of art for a mass of congealed fats, grease, and oil that combine with wet wipes and generic trash in sewer systems. 

Anyway, the point is that the progressive left is obsessed with the idea that everything is connected. “From Gaza to the climate,” one might imagine Greta Thunberg explaining, “it’s one supply chain of oppression: The war machine runs on the same fossil-fueled, settler-colonial patriarchal logic as border imperialism and the carceral state. Before we can provide housing for all, we must acknowledge the indigenous stolen land that the houses will be built on. Decarbonize, decolonize, democratize—all at once! Climate justice that isn’t trans-inclusive isn’t justice!”

That’s parody, but there’s a reason it has the ring of truth. For instance, just weeks after Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice president, she was given an intelligence briefing that used what she considered to be problematic adjectives to describe female foreign leaders. So according to the New York Times, she ordered up a review of intelligence briefings for unacceptably gendered language. 

The most famous, and damaging, recent example of Omnicausism was when Harris told the ACLU that she favored government-funded transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants and criminals in federal custody. Video of her defending that position was turned into the Trump campaign’s most aired and most effective ad of the 2024 election cycle. It ended with “She’s for they/them. He’s for you.”

That ad and the issues behind it have been masticated plenty already, but it’s worth noting that while the text was about transgender issues, the subtext was that Harris cared more about fatberg solidarity than she did about the average voter. But what hasn’t gotten enough attention is why the ACLU pushed for such a policy in the first place. The ACLU used to have a very narrow but important mission: defending free speech and other First Amendment rights. But over the years, it has increasingly become a giant clump of wet wipes in the progressive fatberg. 

The ACLU denies it has abandoned its historic mission, and that can be debated. But what is undebatable is that it expanded its contemporary mission to be a member in good standing of the Omnicause. Whatever you may think of the idea of tax dollars being spent to offer sex change surgeries (sorry, “gender-affirming care”) to federal prisoners and immigrant detainees, there’s no reason for the ACLU to take a position on it. 

I even have some sympathy for the ACLU, because basically all progressive organizations these days are staffed by largely interchangeable Omnicausers. In 2022, nearly 700 ACLU staffers signed a petition demanding that the group condemn the war in Gaza and join the boycott, divest, and sanctions crowd. The leadership rejected the petition, to their credit. The Slack channel Jacobins at the New York Times had more immediate success with their internal revolt, the end result of which is that Bari Weiss will be the editor in chief of CBS News. 

(I should make one quick nod to intellectual history. As much as I like the Omnicause thing, it’s not really a new idea. One can play intellectual connect-the-dots and trace it back to the popular fronts of the 20^th century and the social justice project generally.).

What does this have to do with the Democrats’ identity problem? A lot. It’s not that everything the ideological base of the Democratic Party believes is wrong or unpopular. I may not like it, but some of their economic ideas are quite popular, as Zohran Mamdani’s glide path to Gracie Mansion suggests. But if you have to believe all of it, you’re going to get defined by the most offensive links in the Great Chain of Fatbergness. If you campaign on affordable housing, better access to health care, and liquidating the kulaks, don’t be surprised if your kulak liquidation proposal ends up in Republican ads. Whatever you think about Trump’s “they/them” ad, the simple fact is that it was completely fair game politically. It used Harris’ own words. 

Indeed, Mamdani’s apparent success is itself a problem for Democrats, because the rest of the country doesn’t have the politics or demographics of New York City. 

Regardless, that’s only a small aspect of the problem. For most of the last century, Democrats were the majority party. In 1977, 1 in 2 Americans identified as Democrats while barely 1 in 5 identified as Republicans. When I was in college, the South was still reliably blue. In their institutional memory and self-understanding, Democrats believe that they speak for “the people” the way, say, FDR did, while Republicans speak for “elites.” This self-conception endures in many progressive institutions and the mainstream media. 

This leads to a tendency to assume that progressives still speak with authority for average Americans. But this gets the causality backward. Democrats used to speak with authority for average Americans because the party actually represented the views of average Americans. The views of average Americans don’t change with whatever Democrats say. If Democrats say 2+2 = 4, that’s representative of the views of Americans. If they start saying 2+2 = 37.6, Americans won’t just start believing that. In other words, just because Democrats use “Latinx” doesn’t automatically make the term popular. They’ve been slow to learn that lesson.

In the last quarter century, the things Democrats said—in obeisance to the Omnicause—drifted farther and farther from the attitudes of normal Americans. Like the ugly American who thinks if they just shout louder in English foreigners will understand, progressives just shouted “racist” or “bigot” louder as if that would just win the argument. The arrogance of it all just accelerated the trend of the white working class—the largest voting bloc now and for the foreseeable future—moving into the Republican fold. 

The Democrats’ fox problem isn’t just that they believe lots of different things that don’t go together, it’s that they’ve got hedgehog envy and want the giant fatberger to be One Big Thing. And their One Big Thing is just not popular. 

And, to be fair, the Democratic coalition is not one undifferentiated fatberg of left-wing radicals. But the Democratic coalition has no unifying hedgehoggy idea that pulls everyone together. Sure, opposing Trump helps because they can get an intraparty consensus around that, but it’s not enough. Private sector labor unions and public sector labor unions may talk a big game about unity, but they have divergent interests. Professional identity politics activists may see everything through the Omnicause prism, but the actual ethnic groups they purport to speak for don’t. The Democrats have scooped up a lot of college-educated suburban voters, but beyond attacking Trump, they haven’t figured out how to appeal to them without pissing off the rest of their coalition. 

There’s an additional challenge for Democrats. The same muscle memory that makes them think they represent the mass of Americans also leads them to cling to a script that depends on Republicans playing their part. 

The Democrats are the party of government. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. 

But two problems flow from this fact. The first is that if you’re the party of government and you let the fatberger cadres force ridiculous policies on crime, housing, and education on you, you won’t run the government well. And what is the point of being the party of government if you can’t run the government well? Most people want the government to fight crime, not fight for the rights of criminals. What is the point of being the party of public education if you put the interests of teachers’ unions above the interests of children? Those new suburban voters don’t want to send their kids to public schools to help make the case for higher salaries for public school teachers or to provide new recruits for settler-colonialism or queer theory. They’re happy to pay for public schools if public schools put kids first. 

The second problem is that in a two-party system, being the party of government can only provide a comparative advantage when the other party isn’t the party of government. 

The GOP is a big-government party now. Trump is not an ideological conservative—because he doesn’t really have an ideology and he’s not a conservative. Yuval Levin had a great piece at National Review that pointed out the fact that, despite all the drama about DOGE and rescissions and draconian cuts, Trump hasn’t changed the fiscal trajectory of the federal government at all. Trump’s tariffs are not only protectionist—the standard orientation of Democrats—they’re a major tax increase on Americans, the proceeds of which he now wants to distribute as subsidies for farmers. He’s not a constitutional originalist. He’s not (really) a pro-lifer. He’s certainly not laissez-faire or libertarian in any meaningful way. In short, he’s very few of the things the left and Democrats know how to argue with. 

If your self-definition hinges on your enemy playing to type, it can be very confusing when your enemy doesn’t play to type anymore. If you’re a boxer who has never fought anything but right-handed opponents, a southpaw is going to catch you at a disadvantage. 

I could go on, but this is a good segue to the GOP’s identity crisis, which will require fewer words to describe. 

The GOP should replace the elephant with the hedgehog. Because the GOP now simply stands for one thing: Donald Trump. You can hold virtually any position you want in the Republican Party today, so long as you don’t let it get in the way of supporting and applauding Trump. The Democratic message is a cacophony; the Republican message is simple: Trump. Trump’s favorite new hat reads: “Trump was right about everything.” Whatever you think about that (preposterous) statement, it’s a really pithy and accurate encapsulation of the GOP today. 

And not just the GOP. As I noted earlier this week, the “institutional isomorphism” that has plagued the left for decades has infected the right. Most avowedly right-wing institutions have gone the way of talk radio and the Heritage Foundation. Indeed, Heritage should use an asterisk after the word “think” in think tank, indicating a footnote that reads “pending approval by Trump.” With a few notable exceptions, right-wing media is simply pro-Trump media. 

Whether you call this a cult of personality or offer complicated institutional explanations involving the distorting role of primaries and the economic incentives created by balkanized media and small donors, it’s still an objective fact: The GOP’s identity has been totally defined by Donald Trump. What is the correct policy? Whatever Trump says it is. 

Because the Democrats are a mess, this has worked to the advantage of the Republicans. But momentary electoral and political success only masks the GOP’s identity crisis. Whether for actuarial reasons or constitutional ones, Donald Trump won’t be president for that much longer.  When—or if—he leaves office, he will surely try to maintain control of the party. 

But how will that work? If Republicans win in 2028, will an old man in Mar-a-Lago still dictate policy? Will the Republican candidate promise to follow Trump’s lead no matter what? That’s awfully beta male. Will such a candidate differentiate himself from Trump and earn the wrath of his superfans or Trump himself? What idea will unite the party after Trump? Or what ideas can a Republican campaign on that won’t make him look like a hypocrite or heretic to the faithful? 

Max Weber pioneered the study of “charismatic” leaders. Charisma in this sense doesn’t mean “charming” in the colloquial sense but charming in the deeper more mystical sense: leaders who charm, ensorcell, inflame with passion. Charismatic leaders become whatever their followers want, or need, them to be. Like it or not, Trump is a charismatic leader. 

But Weber also wrote about the bureaucratic or routinization of charisma (Veralltäglichung der Charisma) when charismatic leaders go away. Suddenly, the mystical, enchanting, unifying populist passions need to be encoded in rules, processes, and policies. What was once perceived as heroism devolves into schtick and kitsch. Battles for succession—like those that plagued Islam after Muhammad died, or Alexander the Great’s empire, or the civil rights movement after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination—consume the once-unified movement as different factions vie for power. Revolutionary movements recede into bureaucratic drudgery. Grifters feed off the remaining passions. The Tea Party and Black Lives Matter movements started as organic populist uprisings and descended into money-grubbing fundraising operations quickly thereafter. The Republican Party under Lincoln was a righteous engine for human liberation and national salvation. After Lincoln, it descended into carpetbagging graft. 

You can tell yourself the idea of MAGA will endure after Trump, but the only tangible idea holding MAGA together right now is Trump.

I don’t know when it will happen, but the GOP hedgehog of today is destined to become foxy sooner or later.

Canine Update: So we’re starting to wonder if what we assumed was Pippa’s spanielly intransigence, stubbornness, lethargy, and entitlement might actually be a hearing problem. She doesn’t come to the door when we come home as often, and it might not be because she doesn’t want to abandon her napping position, but because she just didn’t hear us come in. She is getting worse about following commands, which can be a problem when walking her when cars are around (Pippa has never taken to a leash, and it hasn’t really been a problem until lately). We continue to test the theory, but obviously that would be a bummer. Dogs really shouldn’t be allowed to get old. Other than that, the girls are doing great. October is D.C.’s best month, and the girls have loved the weather. One of TFJ’s sisters is coming to visit, and Pippa hopes she will bring some of the toys Pip left there as a puppy. Zoë recently agreed to share some of her Dingo survival skills by teaching the dogs in the pack to drink from the hollow of a tree. They’ve learned well. Gracie is thriving, and Fafoon continues to judge you harshly. And yes, Chester continues to be appeased. I’m bad about getting video of it, because after I am done walking and treating the furry members of my family, I need to sit and have my coffee and not get up and do another video of the payment of the Chestergeld. But I know there’s demand so I’ll try to do better. Maybe only on Fridays or something. 

Member Name: James Blessman

Why I'm a Dispatch Member: It seems that everyone has gone crazy, but The Dispatch reminds me I'm not alone and that insanity is a choice.

Pet’s Name: Dug

Pet’s Breed: Deutsch Drahthaar

Pet’s Age: 3

Gotcha Story: I had been wanting a pointer for a while. My wife wanted a wirehaired dog. I did some research and found the Drahthaar, a dog that could hunt it all.

When we went to pick him up my wife had a list of very German names for him (it’s a German breed). The kids watched Up in the car on the way. Even as a pup he had bushy eyebrows, so instead of Manfred he came home as Dug.

Pet’s Likes: Hunting, swimming, camping, hiking, and fetch. Lots of fetch.

Pet’s Dislikes: Sitting still.

Pet’s Proudest Moment: When he fetches the 8-year-old’s stuffed bear, especially if said 8-year-old is chasing him, quite upset.

A Moment Someone (Wrongly) Accused Pet of Being Bad: He gets in trouble with the wife for sitting on the Adirondack chairs even though he's just chilling.

Do you have a quadruped you’d like to nominate for Dispawtcher of the Week and catapult to stardom? Let us know about your pet by clicking here. Reminder: You must be a Dispatch member to participate.

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