What does responsible punditry look like in September 2025 post-America?

Opinions and principles are not the same thing

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I’m going to start with excerpts from some items I’ve already come across in my initial daily perusings. I don’t think I need to engage in any preliminaries regarding the common theme running through them. It should be obvious right away.

On Hugh Hewitt’s radio show, Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett said this:

And I think it is a sign of a culture that has– where political discourse has soured beyond control and something that we need to really pull back. I mean, obviously, well, I assume that the person who murdered Charlie Kirk was mentally ill, but nonetheless, you know, to create a culture in which political discourse can lead to political violence is unacceptable in the United States.

Hewitt then noted that Coney Barret quoted “G.K. Chesterton, as well as his brother, on page 38 of Listening to the Law. The two argued incessantly but never quarreled. You continued, ‘A good argument involves logic and a search for truth. A quarrel is an effort to tear down your sparring partner. Sparring with intellectual opponents is the way to hear the other side. Shunning others just because they disagree with you is also a recipe for a lonely and ultimately unhappy life.’”

Yesterday, at her Substack, Kristin DuMez had a post titled “Things Are Different Now”:

Years ago, I developed an online discipline. I didn’t advertise it, I just did it. When something terrible happens—a school shooting, a brutal murder, a police shooting, natural disasters—I don’t post about it. Not immediately. I decided to preserve my own space to be human first. Not to immediately try to find just the right words, to place the event in a preferred context, and to spend the next hours or days defending those words.

I followed this practice when I heard that Charlie Kirk had been shot. And then when I heard he had died. When I inadvertently saw the video, close up, on a Republican politician’s social media feed. When I heard he was a leftist, and then a groyper, and every other iteration. And when I started to witness the aftermath.

A few days out, let me say a few things. First, Charlie Kirk’s killing was horrific and wrong. Full stop.

I spoke at a beautiful event here in Wisconsin last night, and here’s what I said:

We don’t need all of us to step back. But perhaps more of us should.

To be human first.

I know many of us are coming here tonight from different places. Different experiences. We are working with different sources of information. We are processing different feelings and different fears. I hope we can all join together in lamenting the killing of Charlie Kirk, and in praying that God would be near to those who grieve his loss, and comfort them with his presence.

And just as I needed to remind myself, I want to remind all of us: we have choices. And we don’t all have to make the same choice, or demand that others choose just as we do. What’s happening in this country right now feels so much bigger than any of us. It feels as though there’s so little that we can control. I’m feeling that right now.

There may not be much one person can do to fix things. But I do think there are things each of us can do that can make things worse. Let’s pray for the wisdom and restraint to respond in truth and love.

In the days after his killing, I faced an additional difficulty. As a historian of the Christian Right, I have written about Kirk before. The day he was killed, I was editing a section of my next book where I write about him.

As a historian, my job is to place events in context. Charlie Kirk was part of a movement. He helped create a movement. Explaining that is what I bring to the table.

But our current context has changed dramatically in the past few days. It will probably continue to do so.

I watched as this movement took the next steps in the hours and days after, striding into territory that was entirely predictable to those who study reactionary movements. Calling for vengeance. Using dangerous rhetoric to spin the killing into a call for holy war against “the Left”—a category left undefined so that it can be endlessly expanded.

A friend from another country asked me: “Is this your Reichstag fire?”

“It might be,” I told him.

She then links to, and excerpts from, a Substack post by commentator and IU political science professor Jeffrey Isaac:

What happened last Wednesday was truly terrible.

Have I said enough?

Many friends and colleagues, people I both like and respect, have been telling me for days that they are looking forward to reading what I have to say about what happened this past Wednesday.

Anyone likely to read this piece probably knows that I am very opinionated and I write often about current events. I am appreciative, and even honored, that so many very smart and good people—though not that many!!—care about what I think. And it is good that at least some people like what I say, because I am constitutionally unable to not say what I think.

And yet I have been hesitant to say much of anything about what happened last Wednesday—an episode whose ramifications will unfold for many days and weeks to come–for a number of reasons. And I’ve decided that perhaps the most meaningful thing I can do right now is to explain why.

One reason for my hesitation is that almost everything that can be said has already been said by others (this is of course almost always true, but until recently the costs of ignoring it have approached zero; that is no longer the case, as I will explain below).

Much of what has been said is predictable pundit bullshit of the Ezra Klein variety. Much of it is predictable MAGA demonization of “the left,” combined with predictably dangerous accusations, threats, and calls for vengeance. There have also been some very sharp commentaries with which I agree—a little more on this below, but only a little.

But it has honestly not been clear to me what I have to say that meaningfully adds to the cacophony or brings us one millimeter closer to a better politics. What, then, is the point?

A second, reason, related, is that I am tired, deeply tired.

I have been writing about these things, doggedly, for almost a decade. A fucking decade. In 2016 this shit took over my first sabbatical in over twenty years, after twelve years of working on Perspectives on Politics. And it has held me captive ever since. It has sometimes been observed that I look like Al Pacino (yes, yes, DeNiro too). I have often felt like Michael Corleone in Godfather III (if this eludes you, just read on).

None of the very bad things that are happening now surprise me at all. None. At all.

I more or less predicted all of them a very long time ago. Not the details of course, but the general descent into authoritarianism. I was one of many—most more famous than I am, though none more prescient, if truth be told– who were disparaged from the right as sufferers of “Trump derangement syndrome” and disparaged from the left as sufferers of “liberal tyrannophobia.” There has been no shortage of warnings, and critiques, and predictions of doom and more sober reflections on how to defend our pathetic and precarious democracy. And yet the tyrant has been returned to power, and it is hard to avoid feeling like all of that serious and sincere writing was like whistling in the wind.

I am tired. I am also bored of having to keep saying more or less the same things, over and over again, and to no discernible avail. Those things might be very important and deadly serious. But is anyone listening who has not heard these things already? Again, what is the point?

And then there is a third reason: I am afraid.

Afraid.

Not in the sense of the commonplace and easily stated observation that “I’m afraid for the future of our country”—though I am very afraid for the future of our country.

I am afraid for my colleagues and my friends and my fellow citizens, whatever their legal status, who write and teach and speak publicly, and I am afraid for my students who are finding their voices amidst this disaster, and I am afraid for myself, as someone who writes and teaches and speaks in especially direct ways. (Who else do you know who back in 2019 gave a featured talk at the American Political Science Association on “Is Motherfucker the Concept Political Science Now Needs” and then published it online?) I am afraid for my sanity. I am afraid for my job. I am afraid for my physical well-being. And most of all I am afraid for my civil liberty.

I repeat. I am afraid for my civil liberty.

Or if you like, my “bourgeois freedom.”

Isaac, with whom I’m personally acquainted (he’s an excellent jazz pianist and we have many musician friends in common) goes on to get into some points one would expected a left-leaning political science professor to make, and with which I must respectfully disagree. I am not fond, for instance, of his vague attempt draw a parallel between the Kirk murder and “what takes place, with some regularity, in the Middle East and elsewhere, often with the support of our own government.” But the earlier point I quote above is valid by any standard. Cancel culture is as rampant as ever, and the way the Trump administration - and wannabe state governments - has addressed the obvious left-dominated campus climate in America is bone-headed and has done nothing to get higher education back to a state actual conservatives would like to see.

Abe Greenwald’s daily newsletter (it’s available to email subscribers) for Commentary magazine puts the matter like this:

I believe there’s a strong possibility that the United States is nearing a dangerously explosive era of political violence. And almost every day, the possibility seems to grow. So why is it that I find well-meaning suggestions to “lower the temperature” objectionable? The question isn’t rhetorical. I’m still trying to figure out the answer.

In part, I think it’s that “lower the temperature” strikes me the way “thoughts and prayers” (incorrectly) strikes some liberals—as an insufficient wish. I don’t bear any hostility toward those who want to “lower the temperature,” but I do believe it lets everyone off too easy.

The concept is almost passive. One lowers the temperature on a thermostat to cool a room. But, for one thing, we are not all in the same theoretical room—which in itself is a growing crisis. And for another, the problem isn’t mechanical but human.

Which makes the idea of lowering the temperature difficult to accept in another way. There is in it an implicit suggestion to let the other side’s transgressions slide a little. If one sees the other side’s transgressions as a threat to national stability, however, this seems inadvisable. Am I, for example, to get less angry the next time I witness a throng of 20-somethings chant for the destruction of my people?

Advising that we “lower the temperature” is a way of casting a wand over the country in hopes that we don’t need to address the many diverse challenges that have contributed for years to our national fever. In practice, lowering the temperature would mean making headway on a host of distinct, yet thoroughly intertwined, modern dilemmas. Among these are the florid mental-health crisis of Generation Z, the unchecked slime of social media, the explosion of conspiracy theories, the decline in religious faith, the infiltration of our discourse by foreign saboteurs, the radical capture of cultural and political institutions, the disappearance of political incrementalism and bipartisanship, the ideological siloing of Americans, the bifurcation (or thorough fracturing) of media, a growing preference among Americans for isolation, and a public square too chaotic to navigate.

This is a lot to work on. And in the end, merely hoping to lower the temperature is a reluctant admission that we’re out of useful ideas about what to do. It’s a bit like telling someone in a crisis to “just try and relax.” If they could, they would. And if they did, it wouldn’t make the crisis go away. It might even allow it to fester.

Here’s the thing. There’s no good reason for us to be out of ideas. Taken individually, many of the problems listed above are bedeviling but far from intractable. Mental illness is treatable—imperfectly perhaps, but measurably. Foreign influence operations can be and have been dismantled. Institutional drift can be slowed, halted, and even reversed. Media are restructuring in hopes of reaping the rewards of different, less partisan, models.

The fact that some of the challenges (particularly, the social media sewers) do seem genuinely overwhelming is precisely why we’d do well to remember the incrementalism part. That means we fix what we can, where we can, to the degree that we can. Let’s try that for a while and then see where the general temperature stands.

So what is a cultural observer to do? You folks know where I stand. Three-pillar, Frank S. Meyer fusion conservatism is far from obsolete. It is based on timeless, immutable verities.

When I say I champion free-market economics, it’s not just an opinion. It’s at the core of human freedom generally. One place to start a defense of it is with what Locke has to say about property:

As much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does, as it were, enclose it from the common. . . . God, when he gave the world in common to all mankind, commanded man also to labour, and the penury of his condition required it of him. God and his reason commanded him to subdue the earth, i.e. improve it for the benefit of life, and therein lay out something upon it that was his own, his labour. He that in obedience to this command of God, subdued, tilled and sowed any part of it, thereby annexed to it something that was his property, which another had no title to, nor could without injury take from him.

With regard to the exchange between people - or organizations - of what belongs to each, I like my own formulation of what is sacrosanct about it: A good or service is worth what two parties engaged in a transaction agree that it is worth. Period. No other entity - certainly not government -has any business being a party to that transaction.

From this flow my views on tariffs, taxes, the minimum wage and a host of other economic phenomena.

With regard to the Judeo-Christian values pillar, the fact that various self-proclaimed Christian spokespersons have used the historical facts of the Gospel in grotesque ways, ranging from “love is love” to “Donald Trump’s agenda is God’s agenda”, and the fact that persons in positions of spiritual authority in various denominations have abused their power to indulge their lust and damaged generations of young lives, does nothing to diminish the truth of holy Scripture. The Lord reigns, no matter how destructive his children’s antics.

With regard to the need to understand what the West is and why it must be defended, immersion in the great works of those who have shaped the West, as well as a comparison of how the West views human flourishing relative to how it’s viewed by any other civilization, will convince any honest inquirer of the infinite worth of the human soul, why virtue and beauty are essential, and what magnificent contributions we’ve been bequeathed with.

Regarding Greenwald’s discussion above of lowering the temperature, I likewise find that a pretty lame thing to encourage people to do.

I long ago outgrew the need to get into those raw, vituperative-in-the-extreme back-and-forths on social media, which inevitably deteriorate into ad hominem attacks of the most juvenile kind. When I examined the immediate rush it would give me, I wasn’t proud of myself.

But I still chime in on social media on these matters. Because I want the record to show where I stand and why.

I will never back down on stating forthrightly what a horrendously harmful force Donald Trump is. What he is doing on each of the three fronts enumerated above is harm on a scale that’s quite possibly irreparable. Ditto for JD Vance, Pete Hegseth, Kash Patel, Tulsi Gabbard, Peter Navarro, Scott Bessent and pretty much everyone in the Very Stable Genius’s administration.

I know it’s costing me some friends. Old ones, folks I met in seventh grade. They tell me to stick with food and music posts. One even said, “Shame on you. You used to be a beautiful person.”

But here’s the thing: I don’t do memes. Ever. When I post about Trumpism, it is about some specific act committed by a Trumpist that’s harmful to the three pillars of actual conservatism. And I’ll explain my position as thoroughly as anyone requests me to.

I can’t be silent about this, not at a time when Russia has placed Iskander missile systems on a Kaliningrad highway by the Polish border, flown attack drones into Polish airspace, done likewise over Romanian airspace, and engaged in provocative exercises with Belarus. Not at a time when Putin, Lukashenko and Kim accepted Xi’s invitation to an enemies-of-the-West summit. Not at a time when Indian prime minister Modi felt compelled to attend, irritated as he was by the tariffs post-America imposed on his country, after two decades of the two nations carefully building productive relations. Not when US soybean growers are being decimated by China turning to Argentina for that product. Not when South Korea is irritated with post-America for the ICE roundup of South Korean electricians electricians at the under-construction Georgia battery plant. Not when Pam Bondi is trying to quash First Amendment rights with some “hate speech” nonsens.

We’re getting all excited about the latest clown show vying for our attention here in post-America when the world is discernibly becoming far more perilous. We may have the mightiest military on the planet, but in many ways, we’re a joke to the tyrants listed above, and useless to other Western countries.

The whole reason I write Precipice posts is that I’m trying to encourage maturity in discourse. And that doesn’t mean lowering the temperature. It means standing firm in what I know to be true. Standing on the Narrow Sliver of Terrain, if you will.

This is no time for me to be quiet. Life becomes more serious by the day.