The American right thinks the country needs to be restored—made great again, whatever that means. The liberal center thinks it needs to be saved from right-wing barbarians—and maybe from some leftists whom liberals find alarming. The left thinks the country still needs to be built: as a stronger democracy, a more secure economy, and a more genuinely plural and inclusive nation.



In the March issue of the New Republic, I argue that the left sees things that others in U.S. politics prefer not to see: For workers, women, people of color, citizens and the undocumented alike, being “equal” in a technical sense—having equal rights and participating in democracy by voting in elections every few years—is not enough defense against deep inequality and vulnerability; we also need changes that will deepen the lived experience of liberty, equality, and democracy, so that people can become both safer and more powerful. The left—inasmuch as it’s even one thing, which of course it isn’t entirely—has always emphasized equality, democracy, and the challenges capitalism can pose for both. Those problems are now front and center in the United States and around the world.

But what would it be like to ask a charitable, deliberately credulous question: What do liberals and conservatives know that the left has trouble seeing? It’s easy to see the other side’s failings and bad faith; whole online industries are devoted to pointing these out, from any standpoint you can imagine. But what do others get right? How might a person today draw insights from each of these perspectives, to become, as the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski once put it, a liberal-conservative-socialist?

It’s easy to see the other side’s failings and bad faith. But what do others get right?

As long as Trump is in power, we have a negative example of how strands of those ideologies can combine. The famous definition of anti-Semitism as “the socialism of idiots” hints at a picture of Trumpism’s ideological synthesis. His calls for “solidarity” in the form of America-first slogans, borders walls, and exclusion orders targeted at people who don’t “love us” in the right way are our very own American idiot socialism. His love of “winners” and the “best” and “smartest” people, his plutocratic meritocracy, is the (neo)liberalism of knaves, willing to embrace inequality as long as the market shows that it is deserved. (During the campaign, Hillary Clinton tried on the line that Trump’s pride in his partly inherited, wholly obscure wealth was an insult to real billionaires, a reminder of just how comfortable the Democratic Party has been with the self-congratulation of the very wealthy.) And his real fuel, of course, is the conservatism of thugs, from the constitutional vandalism of Mitch McConnell and the Republican Tea Party, willing to plug up or break whatever they cannot control, to the trolling and race-baiting of Breitbart. If nothing else, one would want to be the opposite of all these things.

A very different combination of values comes from the liberal centrists who believe the country needs to be saved from Trumpist barbarism and leftist excesses. What they see as needing to be saved is the moderating, stabilizing effect of institutions such as the Supreme Court, political norms such as basic bipartisan comity, and the practices of responsible, fact-based media like the New York Times. This position is a sort of conservative liberalism and it is the shared worldview of many Democratic party elites, centrist professionals, and other political moderates.