A Letter From Back Home

As I cut ties with the progressive establishment to launch The Ivy Exile, I wondered how much hate mail to expect. But, gratifyingly, real humans not consumed in social media pissing matches have been mostly generous and kind, even when detailing all the ways I’m so wrong, wrong, wrong!

I especially appreciated an edifying exchange last week with a fiery lefty social worker who nonetheless strained his mightiest to meet me as halfway as possible. It was a bit like corresponding with my former self, with everything I’d been raised to believe, before I hit the brick wall of finally meeting my heroes.

The aim of this dissident Substack is less selling any fixed conclusions than making my best stab at maximum experiential honesty to help foster further consideration. That’s what real liberalism is supposed to be all about, encouraging genuine conversation now verboten under today’s vindictive managerialism. I don’t need people to agree with me, but I do need people expansive enough in spirit to try to empathize with different points of view. So special thanks to @DadofDraco—a self-described “fragment of the World Spirit”—for making the effort.

Our interaction began with some tweets:

Soon, @DadofDraco “slid into my DMs,” as the kids say, to extend an olive branch and make his case.

It took a few days to assemble a response worthy of his thoughtfulness: it was a golden opportunity to try to explain to my former tribe why I left. Here’s what I ultimately sent him.

Hello, fellow human of good intentions,

I appreciate your reaching out, your checking out the Substack, and your very gracious note! I grew up in your school of thought and studied public policy/went into journalism to help spread the good word. And then a strange thing happened: I met and marketed the supposed experts making big promises about their ability to engineer a better society, and found that many were intellectually dishonest and indifferent at best toward the ordinary people they ostensibly served. Regardless of their intentions, I no longer believe the governing class has a critical mass of sufficiently honest, rigorous, and nuanced public servants to achieve the benevolent technocracy they promise. It's not that I'm against the ideal in theory, or that my values have changed, but that from depressing personal experience I don't think it is on the menu of achievable policy.

The terms "liberal" and "progressive" are often used interchangeably, but there are important historical distinctions. For all that the word has been dragged through the mud, liberal connotes concern for everyone and the conviction that diverse voices must be heard, whereas going back to Woodrow Wilson et al progressivism has often entailed a self-anointed vanguard imposing 'scientific' governance by hook or by crook since the proles are too brainwashed, ignorant, and stupid to understand what's good for them. You sound like an earnest liberal genuinely concerned for the downtrodden (my kind of liberal!), but I've met precious few professional progressives in elite institutions with your priorities. Rather, they tend to see themselves as the natural intellectual aristocracy, born to rule, magnanimously casting their pearls before ungrateful swine.

Of course there's no lack of right-wing bigots and reactionaries — just as there remain plenty of bigots and radicals on today's left, too, at least as influential in corridors of power. To characterize the bulk of normie center-right voters as sleeper cells full of fascists is about as accurate as casting conventional center-lefties as rabid communists — most conservatives do not want to put women back in the kitchen, LGBTQ people back in the closet, or blacks back into slavery. Indeed, Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell are today perhaps the most universally beloved figures on the right. The vast, vast majority of Republicans are decent people who (justifiably) doubt the competence and good will of the Democratic party, just as the vast, vast majority of Democrats are decent people with a rosier view.

So when I suggest that the left and right need one another, it’s to be canaries in each other’s coal mines, and to call out each other’s blind spots and bullshit. You’re absolutely correct that conservatives’ fixation on fiscal restraint and individual responsibility can lapse into callousness. They need to hear from conscientious people like you about the daily difficulties of vulnerable people on society’s margins, and be nudged to confront the profound moral conundrum of what human beings owe each other in this richest country on earth.

But by the same token, the left needs to grok that human beings and institutions have limitations, that policy choices often bring tragic unintended consequences, and that disappointments and failures cannot simply be blamed on right-wing sabotage. Ambitious policy requires a mode of substantive discourse today’s epistemically sealed progressives systemically reject, so expectations must be adjusted accordingly.

My next post is slated to address what’s become of the profession of social work, drawing from some more of my conflicted experience. I hope you’ll be willing to give it a look with the same good faith and open mind you’ve brought to this exchange. It’s been a pleasure meeting you!

All best,

Jesse

[Eventually I decided I’d enjoyed the back and forth enough to make it the new post, so please stay tuned for the previously-scheduled reflections of a child of social workers on what’s become of the profession.]

Did I change that reader’s mind? Probably not, and he certainly has the right to his opinion. But he made me think, and hopefully I made him think, and perhaps in that process can be found a way out of the Manichean dead end of contemporary American politics.

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Next: Anti-Social Work

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