From Tangle this week:
Dear readers,
Last week, I penned a piece titled “Yes, things are pretty bad right now.” It has become one of the most read pieces ever published in Tangle — it went viral on X and was reshared and aggregated by several other outlets. It also drove over 1,400 comments (and counting) on the Tangle website and led to hundreds of new paid subscribers and thousands of new readers. I’m proud of the praise the piece garnered — I felt like I made a good argument that was honest and fair, and I’m happy when that work is rewarded.
However, thousands of Tangle readers also unsubscribed after the piece came out, and hundreds more canceled their subscriptions. I presume that many of those readers were conservative or Trump-supporting readers. Quite a few wrote in expressing their displeasure at our decision to publish the piece, accused me of various pernicious biases, and said my writing was captured by a liberal audience
I am, obviously, disappointed (if not a tiny bit alarmed) by this response. As I made quite clear in the piece itself, we were always planning to a) Publish a response piece from a staff member who disagreed with some of what I wrote, and b) Share criticism of the piece from readers (which we still plan to do). My hope was that more of the people who didn’t like what I wrote would stick around for that, but I’m worried that isn’t happening.
To reiterate: I was speaking solely for myself and not Tangle as an institution (despite being its founder). I was expressing my personal opinion. I was analyzing the situation as I honestly see it. And I’m open to being proven wrong — in fact, I said in closing, I want to be proven wrong.
Today, we are going to fulfill the promise we made with a criticism of what I wrote, penned by Associate Editor Audrey Moorehead. Audrey is a fantastic writer, great thinker and awesome colleague, and I enjoy debating with her as much as I do anyone on staff. I’m proud to publish her piece here in Tangle as a continued commitment to self-reflection and viewpoint diversity as an organization.
As always, thanks for reading.
Best,
Isaac
Here is the rebuttal piece, written by another member of the Tangle team:
I found Tangle in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
At the time, I lived in deep-red Lynchburg, Tennessee, and my community was awash in anger and speculation about a “stolen election.”
I was alarmed by the various theories in my conservative media bubble, but the concept of a massive conspiracy to obstruct democracy was too much to take at face value. A stolen election would completely alter the way I saw the country I love. I knew these were serious accusations, and I didn’t want to trust them blindly. To my chagrin, when I tried to seek out different sources, most of the mainstream media seemed far too dismissive of fraud claims, treating them as self-evidently ridiculous and anyone who believed them — like my family and friends — as ignorant or stupid. I was predisposed to distrust these outlets, and they weren’t doing themselves any favors.
Luckily, I came across Isaac’s excellent work chronicling most, if not all, of the major election-fraud claims. Instead of starting from a place of complete skepticism and dismissal, Isaac presented the strongest arguments in favor of fraud — and then used evidence to prove them wrong. He had won my trust and piqued my interest in his product: Could I really see both sides of the conversation in one place, alongside fact-based reporting and Isaac’s take, which promised to be nuanced but honest?
Fast forward to now, and I’m pleased to report that reading — and working for — Tangle has challenged and invigorated me. I’m grateful to be exposed to alternate viewpoints; sometimes I’ve changed my mind, while other times I’ve learned how to better articulate my beliefs in the face of opposition. I truly think Tangle’s culture and approach are a model for bridging the partisan divide, and I feel honored to spend every day doing such important work.
When we were preparing last week’s Friday edition, the team (as usual) engaged in lots of debate. And while I absolutely believe Isaac was right to voice his concerns about the direction he thinks we’re headed, I also thought his piece wasn’t properly attuned to the conservative perspective on modern politics. I wanted to offer a counterpoint to his perspective, to explain how Trump isn’t the only one to blame for the erosion of our political institutions, and why so many in the conservative movement are willing to stomach Trump or even fully embrace him.
To be quite clear at the top: I’m not speaking for all, or even most, conservatives. For one thing, I have never been a fan of President Trump, and my trepidation has only grown over the course of his second term in office. In fact, I commend many of the principles Isaac was vouching for, and some developments in the modern conservative (or MAGA) movement alarm me, as a young conservative, even more than they do him. For example, the recent texting scandals and the subsequent intra-movement discourse worried me far more than they worried Isaac when he wrote about them. White supremacist extremists have been part of the right throughout my lifetime — just as communist, anti-American revolutionaries have been a fixture of the left — but those extreme views are clearly growing more influential in the GOP, and I felt like Isaac’s take on the leaked texts underrated those dangers.
Furthermore, I’m much more in line with old-school American conservatism, uplifting the benefits of traditional social structures (like the family and religious communities) while also emphasizing a limited federal government and personal freedoms. I think sincere religious faith and family formation are the keys to living a good life, but I think the law should allow you to disagree with me and live the life you want to live, so long as you’re not overtly harming yourself or others. Yet rising stars of the GOP seem to reject this religiously informed tolerance in favor of coarser Barstool conservatism, abandoning traditional social values in favor of uninhibited personal freedom, forgetting about the social harms that can follow, or more overtly religious postliberalism — enforcing narrow (often specifically Catholic) values by outlawing other lifestyles. As such, while I’ve never felt wholly at home in the Republican Party, I’ve begun to feel that it has completely cast me out.
And yet, despite being disturbed by what I see as a shift in the party’s ideology, I can still understand my friends and family who find the Trump administration the “lesser of two evils” — I myself even felt that way during the election. While I think major players in the Trump administration are acting in openly authoritarian ways, I don’t think all or even most of the GOP base supports this approach to government. In fact, I think their support of Trump and the GOP is driven by conservatives’ sense that the left has been trending toward authoritarianism. Understanding this feeling — even if you think conservatives are wrong to feel that way — is essential to moving forward from the moment we’re in, and reuniting our increasingly divided nation around the same common ideals.
I contend that the left has similarly eroded political norms and overstretched its power — if less extensively than Trump, still more than is acknowledged in the mainstream media and even by many Tangle readers who wholly endorsed last week’s piece. Furthermore, the left has been uniquely capable and effective at using its dominance in our cultural institutions to attempt to enforce ideological uniformity socially, and the backlash against this hegemony has led so many to Trumpism.
The governance.
Democrats’ erosion of our political norms may seem irrelevant compared to what we’re currently experiencing now, but analyzing their actions allows us to understand this administration. Democrats have paved the way for contemporary politicians to increasingly take advantage of slim electoral majorities and dubious presidential powers to attempt actions that, in previous years, might have been unthinkable.
Our modern politics have been embittered for decades, going back to Newt Gingrich’s culture war of the 1990s. But Democrats set off the erosion of governmental norms that they now blame Republicans for with the abolition of the filibuster for presidential nominees. You may know the story: Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV), upset at Republicans blocking Obama’s nominees for executive positions and federal judgeships, spearheaded an effort to remove the filibuster for the nomination process. But after using the SCOTUS filibuster to block Obama’s nomination of Merrick Garland, Senate Republicans responded in kind, removing the filibuster for SCOTUS nominees to ensure a conservative supermajority on the court for the foreseeable future. When Democrats have held the presidency or congressional majorities, they’ve championed ending the filibuster completely, but as conservatives and even other Democrats have pointed out, they have not made the same call from the minority. And if you ask most conservatives, Democrats started the tit-for-tat hollowing out of the filibuster that has led us to where we are today.
Additionally, Democratic presidents haven’t exactly been bashful about using sweeping executive power. They may not have been as aggressive as President Trump, but that is typically how the Overton window moves. One side advances, and then the other side responds in more extreme fashion.
Democratic presidents’ use of the office has certainly been enough to constitute a “lead up” to the current administration. Both Presidents Clinton and Obama used executive orders more aggressively than their predecessors. And President Biden was responsible for several overreaches of power: his student loan forgiveness plan, his eviction moratorium and his employer vaccine mandate, to name a few. While the courts struck down these actions — and President Biden obeyed the orders, just as Trump (begrudgingly) has so far — they still attempted to use the executive branch to unilaterally impose controversial policies, bypassing Congress to do so.
These examples might not seem as expansive as, say, Trump’s tariffs and attempts to end birthright citizenship, but that’s kind of the point. Student loan forgiveness, Covid-era eviction bans, and vaccine mandates felt like shocking overreaches to most conservative Americans (and many independents, too), in ways that motivated an equally shocking response (electing Trump). And even if you supported those Biden policies, the former president still pursued them from the top down and without Congressional debate or judicial approval.
To put it more directly, Trump is obliterating the Overton window. But Biden shifted it himself during his term, and against warnings that doing so might tee up a future leader like Trump to go even further.
On an even more sobering note, Democrats haven’t eroded just domestic policy norms. As Managing Editor Ari Weitzman made clear a few weeks ago, Trump’s extrajudicial strikes on Venezuelan drug boats follow precedent set in the Obama administration. Obviously, extrajudicial actions can be traced back to U.S. involvement in Vietnam or even further, and more recently through President Bush’s post-9/11 actions. But the justifications for President Obama’s extrajudicial drone strikes are eerily similar to the Trump administration’s arguments about its rights to strike the Venezuelan boats. The Obama administration argued that it didn’t have to provide evidence to courts proving its targets were guilty of terrorism in order to carry out strikes, just as Trump has not presented evidence to the public that the boats he’s struck were carrying drugs. While declaring these individuals as “narcoterrorists” is novel, it’s only an escalation of the philosophy President Obama used in the Middle East.
Each of these examples highlights how Democrats before Trump started to play faster and looser with longstanding traditions of governance and military power. Any of these individual actions might feel justified by anyone supporting the Obama or Biden or Trump administration’s goals — but as we’ve seen, no party has yet retained complete control over the government in perpetuity. When each party governs like it’ll never lose again, it only becomes easier for the other side to do the same — and the constant erosion only makes the slope more slippery.
The issues.
So much of what Isaac focused on in his piece was the ways in which Trump is eroding institutional norms or pushing the boundaries of the law. But he did very little grappling with the Democratic politics of the last two decades, which have enabled Trump to violate those norms with little political blowback.
Democratic cultural and policy positions in recent years have increasingly alienated moderate and conservative voters, who perceive these stances as shifting too far to the left. In response, these voters have lost trust in broader institutions, even those that should be neutral — which is why we now have RFK Jr. running the CDC and the Trump administration cutting grants to higher education. While moderate and conservative voters trust Republicans more than Democrats on a host of issues, a few are more salient than others: immigration and the “wokeness” movement on gender and race.
Immigration.
Perhaps the most sweeping, consequential actions from the Trump administration have been through its immigration enforcement, which is genuinely the set of actions that worries me most. Even so, I think it’s important to remember exactly how we got to this place — and to keep our heads about the real possibilities of escalation.
Isaac has pointed out before that the Biden administration’s immigration policy really did contribute to a crisis: Biden oversaw an unprecedented wave of immigration, and his policies directly contributed to the rise in both total border encounters and the number of unauthorized migrants entering and staying in the country. As a result, local governments were overwhelmed in communities suddenly inundated with so many new people, and that influx sparked alarm on the right about a loss of national identity or cohesion.
This massive and unmitigated immigration required a response. Obviously, ICE agents wearing masks on the streets, rounding people up indiscriminately and catching U.S. citizens and legal residents during that response is terrifying, and it’s easy for me to imagine this enforcement quickly being turned into a much more sophisticated operation to take down political enemies. Furthermore, it’s quite clear that White House immigration policy is being set by actors like Stephen Miller, who are using real anxieties about illegal immigration to push a far more insidious agenda directly connected to the rise of adherence to white nationalist views like the Great Replacement Theory.
Obviously, a reaction to immigration often carries with it allies to the cause motivated by racism or nativism. I’m reminded of the controversy during the leadup to the election last year over the influx of Haitian migrants to Springfield, Ohio: Bad actors used that situation to levy baseless claims against a vulnerable group, trying to stoke nativist sentiments. Yet the presence of bad actors shaping policy shouldn’t obscure the fact that, broadly, deporting illegal immigrants (regardless of their criminal record) remains a popular position, held by about 54% of Americans. This position in and of itself isn’t born out of the same racial animus that motivates the worst on the right; it’s driven by legitimate worries about overwhelmed social structures, as well as the effects of rapid cultural change in small communities that are most impacted by the influx of immigrants.
For many people, the question is not a judgment on “is Trump acting legally?”, but “would I rather have what we had under Biden or what we have now?” It’s unchecked illegal immigration versus unchecked executive power. And for many who were so alarmed by Biden, the latter is preferable to the former. A hardline stance on immigration to temporarily stem the flow and remove unauthorized migrants — especially those who have committed crimes, even if that number is small — could be a necessary response to the excesses of the Biden administration. And by and large, the public perceives the Trump administration’s policies as getting us closer to a sustainable immigration system than Democratic policies have.
Wokeness.
Perhaps the most important social and cultural event that drove people to Trump was the acceleration of identity politics in the early 2020s. In his piece, Isaac spent almost no time reflecting on why moderates and conservatives might be willing to abandon longheld principles in this specific political moment. After years of watching Democrats place too much emphasis on issues of identity compared to issues like immigration and the economy, Biden’s term ushered in an identity-focused era, employed through institutional power, which began to sow distrust among many moderates and conservatives in the institutions themselves.
The most overt politicized use of institutional power is the handling of the Covid pandemic, where CDC guidance was at first uniformly strict. Of course, Covid broke out during the Trump presidency — but the actions that most eroded conservative trust were carried out by state governments and prominent scientists. The rapidly changing guidance on masking was controversial, but that could have been chalked up to our evolving understanding of the virus; however, the rise of the Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of George Floyd threw a wrench in the gears.
Prominent scientists argued that social distancing and lockdowns were secondary to the project of racial justice. This immediately caused concern and skepticism among moderates and conservatives: Why were these protests — which caused $1–2 billion in property damage — acceptable, but churches were advised not to meet and schools in blue states remained closed for over a year? To many critics, Democratic state governments were openly showing lopsided ideological favoritism to a form of politics whose premise many found unconvincing.
Another wedge issue for Democrats is gender. Pew Research polling from February shows that a majority of Americans favor allowing trans individuals to play only on sports teams matching their biological sex and banning gender transition care for minors, while a plurality of Americans oppose insurance paying for gender transition care and support requiring trans people to use bathrooms matching their biological sex and banning elementary schools from teaching about gender identity. Notably, though, most Americans still believe that trans individuals should be protected from workplace discrimination.
With the rise of the transgender movement came the refrain that not allowing young people to medically transition would increase suicidality — but science has not yet been able to prove that claim. And research backs up the existence of complications and risks of gender transition care that many Americans likely find alarming to expose children to when the benefits are not as certain. As far as exposing children to teachings on gender identity goes, detransitioner word-of-mouth and recent studies suggest that at least some of the rise in gender-nonconforming identities may have been the result of social contagion. But rather than trying to take honest looks at the evidence, Biden administration officials tried to suppress scientific recommendations that countered its political views on trans care for minors.
You might be thinking, “What do debates around gender have to do with fighting Trump’s authoritarian tendencies?” The answer is that the conservative movement feels burned by American institutions — academia, the sciences, the courts, the media — and that feeling creates distrust, which also manifests as a desire to see someone “fight back.” So when Trump fights our institutions of higher education, conservatives see it as a war against decades of entrenched liberal bias at these institutions. When Trump connects on an issue like gender, he looks more credible when he tries to extort these institutions into abandoning their previously held biases. But it also makes him look more credible any time he challenges any of these institutions: When he questions the crime data in Washington, D.C. (which looks quite suspicious!) and advocates for deploying National Guard troops, many people are more willing to listen.
It’s not a coincidence that the most effective ad in the 2024 race was Trump’s ad attacking Kamala Harris using previous statements about providing transition treatments to prisoners; voters perceived her statement as wildly out of touch, proposing using tax dollars to fund medical procedures for a small percentage of the population. Harris didn’t make this statement during the campaign, but she never publicly denounced it either. And prominent Democrats still aren’t listening to voters on issues like women’s sports — AOC’s recent attack on Riley Gaines is proof of that. While I don’t think anti-trans activists like Gaines are acting in good faith, AOC’s line of attack is insensitive to the concerns of many Americans about the purpose of women’s sports giving women, as a biologically disadvantaged class, a chance to excel.
Many of the most progressive social views on race and gender aren’t shared by the majority of the public at the moment, and this is even more pronounced for committed conservatives who actively reject these ideas. But conservative views aren’t well represented in traditional cultural and institutional power centers, and the 2020s marked a shift where conservatives began to feel not only that they were underrepresented, but that they were actively being ignored and repressed by the establishment. They felt that liberals weren’t trying to advocate for social progress by bringing ideas to public square debates, but that they were trying to enforce the adoption of these positions undemocratically. And the lack of trust in the establishment that this seeded comes with consequences: the rise of the antivax movement, the dismissal of ex-military generals’ warnings about Trump’s actions, or the complete disregard for liberal media institutions’ claims of fascism.
When people are told, repeatedly, that their opinions and viewpoints are irrelevant or wrong, or that the causes they care about are less important than other causes, they become jaded and angry — and they turn to a strongman leader who will crush the opposition.
Actions and reactions.
For almost every issue Isaac covered in his piece, I could tie it to a Democratic action that motivated a Republican reaction. I’ve already talked about Trump’s mass-deportation effort being a backlash to Biden’s immigration policies, and the binary choice conservative voters feel like they are left with (mass immigration or executive overreach). But consider the others:
Acceptance of striking purported drug smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela is a whiplash response to the perception that Democratic-run cities — and liberal culture more broadly — have normalized drug use or crime. “Destroying the narcoterrorists” cannot be divorced from “safe injection sites” and abolishing cash bail. The choice conservatives recognize isn’t between legal, congressionally authorized strikes and what Trump is doing, it’s between “allowing drugs to flow into the U.S. without repercussion” and “punishing the smugglers.”
Acceptance of National Guard troops being deployed to Los Angeles or Portland is not about a conservative desire to give a president limitless power to use the military against civilians, as Isaac framed it. It’s a whiplash response to the belief that Democratic leaders have failed to protect or support federal law enforcement while they enforce the law — it’s a blowback to “sanctuary cities” that protect lawbreaking migrants from being detained and deported. The choice, again, isn’t between federal troops in major cities and no federal troops in major cities, it’s between allowing our cities to outright endorse illegal behavior or greenlighting an expansion of executive power to crack down on that behavior.
Even the overt profiteering from the office that the Trump family is engaged in is a whiplash response. Democrats, and their allies in the media and cultural apparatus, spent years framing inquiries into the Biden family as “conspiracy theories.” Stories about Hunter Biden were literally throttled by the biggest social media companies in the world. The insulting way President Biden, his allies in the media, and even our intelligence agencies lied to us about Hunter’s corrupt entanglements enraged conservatives. And it all culminated with a far-reaching, sweeping pardon of the president’s son. Now, when the Trump family profits from the presidency in openly corrupt ways, many Trump supporters easily shrug it off by saying, “At least they aren’t lying to us about it.” The choice isn’t between a president’s family profiting off the office or not, it’s about punishing this president’s family for something the last president’s family got away with.
Examples like this, which apply to much of what Isaac brought forward, abound. Prosecuting Letitia James comes after she promised to prosecute Trump as part of her campaign platform. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt framing Democrats as “Hamas sympathizers” and “illegal aliens” comes after Trump and his followers were described as “Nazis” and “fascists” for years on end. A Fox News host going into business with Trump’s son comes after decades of Democrats’ top operatives making conspicuous pivots into “news analysts” after leaving government.
The solution to all of this — what I think it will take to curb the rise of authoritarianism, to return to a place where left and right alike can understand each other, live in national harmony, and defeat the threats to our national order — is for both sides to be willing to police their own and consider the future they might be creating once they are (inevitably) again in the political minority.
I’ll reiterate: I am alarmed by the actions of the Trump administration and the rising ideologies on the right. I understand and share the impulse of Isaac, many moderates, and the broader left to call out the issue and fight back in any way possible — I think Trump’s executive overreaches represent the greatest threat to our country’s governing institutions in my lifetime. But at the same time, I fear that in the quest to vanquish Trumpism and postliberalism on the right, the left might try to throw out earnest conservatism, too.
And I don’t think that fear is unfounded, nor even a response to Trump. In fact, if I were to trace the right-wing backlash at the foundation of Trumpism to a single founding moment, it would be the media treatment of Mitt Romney during the 2012 election. Romney was a rather milquetoast conservative Republican, and yet he was maligned as a “race-mongering pyromaniac” who wanted to roll back women’s rights. This media treatment of Romney made Trump’s brashness appealing to an electorate who had seen their chosen candidate unfairly maligned: finally, right-wing interests had someone to fight for them. And as Trump’s personality began to garner strong loyalty, much more insidious actors saw him as an opportunity to make their more exclusive ideals — of a white, Christian nation — rise to prominence.
I am a conservative because I believe deeply in the fundamental promise of the American project: I think that the ideals set forward in the Declaration of Independence represent the best founding ideals of any nation. And while we’ve never fully lived up to those ideals, I think our national history is the story of taking steps forward (and sometimes backward) on the path to the total fulfillment of that vision of a nation built upon the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Pursuing that progress is essential to fulfilling our national promise. But it is equally essential not to sacrifice our morals on the path towards the future.
While I understand that not everyone is going to agree with conservatism as a project — and I welcome that debate — these ideals appeal to half the country, and I think ignoring, underrepresenting, and even demonizing conservatism enabled the rise of Trump and the slide into authoritarianism that Isaac outlined in his piece. If we want to combat authoritarianism, we need to lay aside hyperpartisan fearmongering and engage with ideas individually. We need to police our own sides and do our best to recognize those among us who want the best for the country, but disagree about what that is, because only then will we be able to accurately call out and combat the truly dangerous.
