When I joined this newspaper as a columnist, 17 years ago, Barack Obama was still enjoying the flush of first-term popularity. In both political and cultural circles, there was vaulting confidence that his fusion of social liberalism and technocratic ambition had swept away the conservative era in American politics.
The columnist’s job contains multitudes, but it’s useful to have a primary antagonist, a specific worldview that you think needs to be challenged and critiqued. For me, for many years, that worldview was the elite consensus of the early Obama era — a mostly left-of-center perspective that also belonged to Silicon Valley moguls, centrist politicians in the style of Michael Bloomberg and portions of the Republican consultant class.
It was a perspective that was morally permissive and self-consciously cosmopolitan, uniting multilateralism and hawkishness in foreign policy, and optimistic that a meritocratic elite could guide a globalizing world toward prosperity and harmony.
In part, I opposed this worldview on substantive grounds. I was religious where it was largely secular, I was pro-life where it was pro-choice, I had doubts about its approach to issues as various as mass immigration, marijuana legalization and the Middle East.
In part, I opposed it on political grounds. A lot of Republicans were convinced that the G.O.P. needed to adapt to the consensus to survive, effectively becoming a second culturally liberal party but with free-market vibes, and I was certain that was wrong.
And finally, I critiqued the elite consensus because it desperately needed elite critics, and lacking them it was constantly tempted into overreach. Even when it started out in a reasonable place it didn’t know when to stop, and there was too much about human nature that it didn’t seem to know.
Across the last decade in Western politics, this elite consensus came to grief for some of the reasons that I expected. It failed to anticipate the downsides of expert-driven policies, it was unprepared for the darker effects of technological change, it took social liberalism so far that it left vulnerable people adrift or abandoned to their vices, and it blundered in foreign policy because it didn’t expect the non-Western world to push back so hard against its plans.
But watching this crisis unfold, I find that I’ve lost my sense of which contemporary worldview is most in need of criticism or opposition, where the good guys and bad guys are. Each major faction seems potentially dangerous, tempted toward the dark side in some unique way, contested or cross-pressured to a degree that makes me uncertain where the side of the angels really lies.
Start with the populism that has risen to power because of the elite consensus’s failures. For many conservatives who shared my critique of the Obama-era establishment, the populist rebellion has been the vessel for their hopes. But in Donald Trump’s second term populism has displayed most of the vices that its critics anticipated. It has been corrupt and bullying and destabilizing. It has rewarded hacks and cronies. And it stumbled into a Middle Eastern war with even less preparation than its establishment predecessors.
For many liberal readers, these sins make populism the maximum danger, the singular emergency. But as Trumpism has flailed and failed, it hasn’t consolidated the kind of authoritarian power anticipated by its most alarmed opponents. At the moment, Trump 2.0 has no great popularity, no legislative capacity, no policy legacy that a Democratic successor can’t easily roll back. The president himself might still be a dangerous figure, there might be darker forces waiting in the wings — but I don’t think that justifies making anti-populism the measure of all things.
Especially when you consider the alternatives. First, there is what remains of the center-left establishment, some of whose vices look less serious in light of Trumpism — self-satisfied technocrats might be preferable to self-dealing hatchet men — but that remains culpable for the mistakes that led to populism’s rise and at sea amid changed political conditions.
After 2020 we tried putting this establishment back in charge, but the Biden era just gave us a more left-wing version of meritocratic hubris, replacing experts with interest groups, maxxing out on social liberalism and illegal immigration and then unraveling completely in the end. Something similar could be said about the Keir Starmer experiment in Britain. There is no evidence that the old elite has a blueprint suited to contemporary governance, no reason to expect that it won’t just cycle through the same mistakes and backlash.
But if you don’t want to join the populist backlash, then the only alternative to propping up the liberal establishment is putting the West in the hands of Wokeness 2.0, Hasan Piker Thought and Democratic Socialists of America energy — social progressivism with socialist characteristics.
I don’t want to describe this movement as categorically worse than its establishment opponents, since sometimes the left grasps things the center misses.
But I lived through the years of peak woke, and it was a McCarthyite experience. I lived with the blue-state governance that doctrinaire progressivism encouraged, and it yielded civic and educational collapse. And I would prefer not to give the far left the power to regulate and prosecute and rewrite the federal budget.
Then, finally, all of these political forces — the unpopular populists, the flailing establishment, the rising left — are displaying their vices in the shadow of the artificial intelligence revolution, which is creating new zones of power in which the friend-enemy distinction is almost impossible for me to parse.
Anthropic or OpenAI? The Pentagon or the frontier labs? The weird accelerationists or the even weirder doomers? The China hawks or the data center skeptics? The people who think A.I. is a normal technology (and thus might underestimate its dangers) or the people who think they’re making a machine god (and thus might end up in its thrall)?
Again and again, the choice of which side to favor and which side to fear depends on unknown things about how far and how fast the technology will move. And unknown things about how a given worldview might interact with these changes and the temptations they create. And unknown things about how existing political factions align themselves for and against different perspectives on A.I.
Which makes this a very important time for the kind of journalism that asks a lot of questions before it leaps to opinionated claims.
For the past two years, I’ve been fortunate that The Times has let me pursue that kind of questioning as a podcast host. And this month, I accepted a position with CBS News’s “60 Minutes,” where the asking of questions will be central to my professional work.
That means that this is my last column for The Times, in this season at least. Once I would have imagined a valedictory essay offering some stirring brief for religious conservatism, some last foray into the territory where I was most likely to be in disagreement with my readers. But I don’t think that quite fits the moment.
Instead, I’ll express — along with incalculable gratitude to The Times itself, my colleagues and editors — a hope that I have contributed illumination. I hope my writing has added something to your understanding of America’s complexity, the world’s uncertain future and the strangeness of our times.
I hope that I make that kind of contribution at “60 Minutes.” I hope The Times can continue to illuminate the world as only a great newspaper can. And wherever I’m working and whatever you’re reading, we’ll all be going into the future together — and trusting, like many Americans before us, that there’s an angel giving directions somewhere in the storm.
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The post Who Is My Enemy? I’m No Longer Sure. appeared first on New York Times.
