That time I tried to engage with someone from The Federalist as if they gave a shit about anything other than “owning the libs.”

Ok, this is going to be embarrassing for me, but here it goes anyway. Back in June of 2017 I, a stupid person, thought that, based on their impressive lineup of guests, The Federalist Radio Hour might come to serve as a clearing house for serious intellectual engagement on the non-Trump, right side of the political spectrum. So I listened to their podcast fairly regularly, hoping to learn what non-Trump conservatives thought about the world. I quickly became frustrated, however, by how quickly the conversations devolved into one ridiculous potshot after another against some liberal boogeyman that bore no resemblance to any actual liberal I’ve ever met. Being the good Deweyan pragmatist that I am I thought, ‘these conservatives aren’t doing themselves any favors by creating this bubble of like-mindedness. They should really do the other side justice so as to sharpen their own thinking and arguments.’

And so I, a stupid and naïve person, e-mailed the host of the podcast to make such a recommendation. Needless to say, there was no response. And now I understand more fully why there was no response (apart from this person undoubtedly being inundated with hundreds of emails from randos like me). Like virtually every existing conservative in contemporary America, the folks at The Federalist have little interest in actually engaging with the majority of their fellow Americans who don’t share their politics. They prefer to ridicule them, or worse.

So, in the interests of humiliating myself, here’s that e-mail from almost 2 years ago that I now look back on with an enormous, embarrassed cringe about how incredibly stupid I was (and presumably still am). It’s also a marker of how much my understanding of the American right has changed in a little under 2 years. I now know better than to waste my time writing such an e-mail. William F Buckley was a jerk, but at least he had the courage to debate James Baldwin and have a wide range of people he disagreed with on his TV program Firing Line. At this point, there is almost no one on the right who knows or cares a whit about what the other side thinks or wants, nor do they have any interest in engaging with them. So I’ll keep listening to Vox’s Weeds podcasts, where they employ an excellent journalist (Jane Coaston) whose beat consists almost entirely of covering the American right with nuance and sophistication. And I’ll let The Federalist just keep on owning the libs until, at some point, they’ll hopefully be moved to actually listen to the libs rather than just poke anti-intellectual fun at them.

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My email from June 2017.

Dear Ben — I’m an American Historian who teaches at Willamette University in Oregon. I write on 18th and 19th century American politics and culture (my first book was on the politics of the 1790s); and since 2010 I’ve been teaching a course on the History of American Conservatism. I listen to your podcast fairly regularly as a way to keep abreast of what’s happening in the world of thoughtful conservatism these days.

I often learn a lot from your shows, but I frequently find myself agitated by one, repeated offense that I’d urge you to remedy: almost every time the bogeyman of “liberals” or “leftists” is invoked, the straw person depicted bears no resemblance to any actual existing liberals or leftists I know (myself included). I think this is doing your audience a disservice, because it leaves them ill equipped to engage productively with an actual, living and breathing liberal should they encounter one. I think you owe it to your listeners to make the liberal or leftist argument in its strongest, most authentic form…and then explain why conservative arguments are more convincing, more fully grounded in the evidence, etc. Otherwise, you’re just a slightly more upscale version of Fox News or Infowars, creating a ridiculous “liberal” caricature that allows your conservative audience to stay in their safe place where they won’t have to encounter any alternate views that are actually well-thought out, supported by evidence, and reasonable.

I think you’re also doing our political culture a disservice by repeatedly deploying this caricature of “a liberal” on your show. Citizens who disagree with each other should avoid dehumanizing the other, and instead seek to interact in more respectful, humanizing ways. (This is only more evident in the wake of the recent, horrifying shooting in Alexandria.) I think this is a fairly conservative ideal, to engage our fellow humans with humility and empathy first. This is why I (an unrepentant progressive) started teaching a course on the History of American Conservatism in 2010 when the Tea Party movement erupted. I heard too many of my liberal students (and I’d say 75% of our students would identify as liberal) caricaturing conservatives, assuming that to be conservative meant to be ignorant and hateful. As someone with two Republican grandfathers (one a Goldwater-ite and the other more of an Eisenhower-Reagan Republican), I wanted to encourage my students to see American Conservatives (past and present) as beloved family members. Sure, they might find those family members infuriating now and then, but hopefully they could establish the habit of being infuriated by them while still loving them. The whole point of the class is to see American Conservatism from the inside, to try to understand what Conservatives think and why they think that way. That course has produced scores of liberal citizens who can now argue constructively with conservatives because they understand where they’re coming from — they can treat them as thinking humans who differ from them, rather than as “barely human” as Eric Trump would say.

Your show is perfectly positioned to do similar work at a national level, to nurture a political culture that is less about simplistic name calling and more about genuine engagement. Yet time after time, just when I think you or one of your guests is about to do that, you instead fall back on some ridiculous generalization about “liberals” that no actual “liberal” would ever own. This happened in your Yuval Levin interview (someone who’s book on Paine/Burke I’ve used in my class and who I generally read with great interest). This also happened in the Joel Salatin interview where his depiction of environmentalists bore zero resemblance to any environmentalist I’ve ever met (and I know many, many of them).

Here’s what would make me a happier listener, and what I also think would make your show better for all of your listeners. Either invite on a knowledgeable and thoughtful liberal (or moderate) to engage with some of your guests. For example, Mike Lee’s discussion of the anti-federalists was utterly detached from the last 100 years of scholarly writing on the founding era…it would have been worthwhile to have someone on who could have provided an alternate take on these issues, someone who could have respectfully challenged some of his historical assertions so that your listeners would walk away with a more well-rounded understanding of the anti-feds. Or, if you don’t want to have actual liberals on your show, why not bring their perspective into the picture in a robust manner? I listen to several progressive podcasts, and in almost every show they take several moments to say “ok, we think this policy is crap, but what are the best arguments that one could make in its behalf?” I haven’t listened to all of your shows, but based on the ones I’ve heard, I can’t remember ever encountering a moment like this.

Apologies for the long e-mail. Hope it is of some use. The nation is in desperate need of a humane and thoughtful conservatism, one that can counter the rage and willful ignorance that marks the alt-right movement that our current President has stoked.

Best regards,
Seth Cotlar