The Unraveling Ideologue
An Origin Story
In July 2021, I paid a visit to my local Barnes and Noble, a store I once resented for squeezing out independent bookstores, but for which I now feel a certain affection. I wandered to its newsstand, much reduced from the magazine’s heyday, but still gloriously representative of the country’s hobbies and hobbyhorses. I affected nonchalance while browsing the racks of magazines, allowing my gaze to fall where it would, here on Wine Spectator, there on Model Railroader. But really I was there on a mission: to buy a copy of Reason magazine.
I took it from the shelf with a quickening pulse as if I were again twelve years old, sneaking glimpses at the soft-core science fiction of Heavy Metal, a magazine stocked by a local convenience store as a service to the pre-teens of Grapevine, Texas, awkwardly perched as we were between the centerfold era and the dawn of dial-up internet. We settled for cartoon nudity; what choice did we have? Everything else was polybagged. Not so with Reason, the libertarian magazine of “free minds and free markets.” No sex in Reason magazine, save the sex beat of senior editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown. So wherefore this slick touch of anxiousness as if I were doing something wrong?
In a sense, I had done something wrong. I had committed thought crime. I had tacitly admitted that my belief system might not be the oracle of all things shining and true, that it might have gaps or shortcomings or errors––that I might be wrong about cherished views on everything from taxation to gun control to canceling student loan debt. This was no epiphany. The soul-searching leading up to this moment was like Mike Campbell’s bankruptcy in The Sun Also Rises: it came on gradually and then suddenly. 1
I’m no longer certain what I believe about these issues or a bevy of other ones. But that lack of certainty is the point. It’s the injury my ideology could not endure. To be uncertain is to be adrift, shadowed by doubt and the fear of being wrong. And no one likes to be wrong, much less admit the fact. But slighting one’s ideology this way is different than, say, mixing up the order of the planets. 2 For the committed ideologue, being wrong cuts at his identity, at the deepest sense of himself. His beliefs operate as a system of interdependencies, giving rise to a sense-making structure on which meaning is attached and from which direction and purpose can be derived. This interconnectedness makes his belief system like a Jenga tower. Removing a single block weakens the tower’s structural integrity, however minimally. Keep removing blocks and, well, you know. Framed in these terms, is it any wonder my flirtation with libertarianism triggered a stress response, however mild? 3
Because it isn’t just that my internal sense of self was troubled. So, too, was a decades-long understanding of myself in relation to my peers, to various social institutions, to society itself. I stood for these things, not those. I voted for good guys and knew them from bad ones. My political identity extended even to my morning coffee, filtered by sanctimony, that I might radiate a sense of satisfaction having nothing to do with caffeine. I had, in short, carved out a place for myself in the world. I knew it by heart: the shape of its walls, the direction of its contours. Moreover, I had invited others into this space with me, friends and confidantes and coworkers. Then, of a sudden, this space had sprouted new corridors and crannies, trap doors and blind alleys. What had once offered the cloistered intimacy of a Hobbit-hole was now a warren of confusion, threatening to separate me from groups of which I’d once been a member in good standing.
Bad enough to suffer the potential disappointment of friends; what of my wife? What would she make of my change of heart? Had I doomed us to a marriage just like any other marriage? Reader, she mostly shrugged at this development. But then I don’t punctuate our pillow talk with exhortations to end the Fed. More to the point, her indifference to my squishy libertarianism revealed a discrepancy between the substance of our identities. Whereas my political identity had swollen over the years into a pulverizing colossus, like Tetsuo at the climax of Akira, my wife had kept hers small, as the investor Paul Graham urges readers to do.
Graham doesn’t mince words: “The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.” And I had worn mine like I’d bought them from Yves Saint Laurent. If you didn’t think to mention them, I surely would. I’ve since peeled off my labels, but they leave behind the residue of received wisdom and automatic thought. Building a framework of principles––with input from all corners of the political compass, and from which consistency in thought and action can be derived––will be the abiding project of my forties, and the reason I hang my shingle here with other misfits of the information professions.
So I’m an unraveling ideologue, clothed in raiment come somewhat undone. But one who knows too well how quickly loose threads make a comfy sweater, or a straitjacket. When next an argument offends me, when I sense that disagreement has somehow called my sense of self into question, I hope I’ll have the presence of mind to search out a loose thread in my garment––and give it a good pull.
This journey, from self-described socialist to… whatever I am now, is a tale for another time, but it stretches back at least as far as this op-ed by Mark Lilla.
We musn’t rule out the possibility that most of this comes down to my being a neurotic weenie, and that I should care much, much less what people think about me.
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