On the Morality of the Sober Observer
There is a peculiar pathology that has settled into certain corners of the right-libertarian and classically liberal commentariat, and I want to name it precisely, because imprecision here is its own form of capitulation.
The pathology is this: a refusal to assign moral categories to political events based on what those events are, and a substitution of that refusal with an assessment of what those events are likely to produce. In practice, this means that the people telling you Donald Trump is engaged in a coup are hyperventilating. We are being hyperbolic. We have placed ourselves outside the territory of sober analysis. Because, you see, the institutions surrounding Trump have not fully collapsed. People like me still post freely to Substack. The internment camps have not yet been erected. And therefore, to call what is happening a coup is to demonstrate that one has lost the plot.
I want to sit with this argument for a moment, because it deserves more than dismissal. It deserves autopsy.
What this framework is actually doing — dressed in the clothing of epistemological rigor — is deferring moral judgment until the consequences are sufficiently legible to be undeniable. Call it consequentialist moral deferral. The coup can only be named after it has fully succeeded in dispatching its opposition, at which point the naming is no longer useful, because the thing is already done. The “sober analyst” waits for certainty. But the moment of naming is the moment of contestation. By design, the waiting makes the naming too late.
I don’t think this is a factual error. I think it is a philosophical one. The people I am about to discuss are not confused about the facts. They are making a category error about how moral description works — treating “coup” as the name of a completed state rather than a process with a direction. Alex Pretti and Renee Good were shot in cold blood. An illegal war was started without congressional authorization. Inspectors general were fired in the night. A hand-picked panel just approved placing the sitting president’s face on a gold coin, after routing around the bipartisan advisory committee that declined to consider the proposal. Each individual step arrives with a nuanced explanation. The pattern does not.
I want to talk about Kmele Foster and Matt Welch, and The Fifth Column more broadly, because I think they are among the most interesting examples of this pathology precisely because they are not its worst practitioners. I am a paid subscriber to their podcast. I find them genuinely thoughtful. I enjoy watching Kmele squirm in his seat at certain moments — and he does squirm, visibly, audibly — as his internal moral radar fires and his philosophical commitments work to override it. The squirming matters. It means the problem is not bad faith. It is something more interesting and more troubling than bad faith.
Kmele’s commitment, as best I can articulate it, is that one must maintain moral distance to maintain an objective eye. That to take a side is to corrupt the analysis. That the political formation which would oppose this creeping authoritarianism is itself filled with various kinds of excess — ideological, institutional, epistemic — that he could not and would not endorse. And on this last point, I want to be honest: I mostly agree with him. My criticisms of the left have appeared in these pages. This is not a case where I think Kmele and I disagree on the facts, or even on many of the underlying moral judgments.
The disagreement is narrower and more devastating than that. It is about what the facts obligate.
Matt Welch is an even more striking case, because as far as I can tell, he and I perceive the structure of this moment in almost exactly the same way. The same facts, the same basic moral categories, the same probable consequences. And yet he insists on maintaining this posture of objective distance — looking upon the field and seeing the left as the yin to the right’s yang, the two poles of a partisan game in which no serious person can be seen to have chosen a team. He will tell you everything that is wrong. He will not tell you what it means.
What I want to ask both of them — what I think the historical moment demands they answer — is this: what does your framework protect?
The symmetrical moral stance — left excess balanced against right excess, both held at equal critical distance — does not merely describe a neutral position. It presupposes a symmetry of threat. It treats both formations as equivalent inputs into a scale, and finds the conscientious observer somewhere above both, weighing. But the actual situation is asymmetric in a way that makes the symmetrical framework do asymmetric work. One of these formations is attempting to dismantle the conditions under which Kmele’s preferred mode of analysis — skeptical, non-aligned, holding all power accountable — remains possible. The neutral posture does not preserve his independence. It helps destroy the ground it stands on.
Camus wrote this in 1946, in the rubble of a Europe that had just learned the lesson the hard way: at a certain threshold of political violence, the refusal to choose becomes its own choice, and not a neutral one. He was writing against the people of his own intellectual circle — people he respected, people who were not fascists, people who simply could not bring themselves to say the thing plainly because saying it plainly felt like surrendering the purity of their analysis. He was not patient with them. He thought the impurity of engagement was less dangerous than the purity of abstention.
I am not patient with this either, though I am trying to remain something close to it, because I think the people I’m describing are reachable, and because I think the fence-sitters reading this deserve to understand what they are watching.
What the “above the fray” posture protects is a self-conception. The sober analyst. The non-hysterical observer. The person who cannot be accused of partisanship. It is a professional and intellectual identity, and it has real value — I do not mock it — but it is being purchased at a specific cost that its holders are not accounting for in their ledgers. The cost is this: the studied neutrality between a functioning democracy and its active demolition is not neutrality. It is a form of normalization. And normalization is not a passive condition. It is the oxygen that whataboutism breathes. It is how a formation engaged in the systematic dismantling of democratic constraint maintains the appearance of being merely one controversial political actor among many, rather than what it is.
I am aware that calling it what it is invites the accusation of hyperbole. I am aware that the case against me includes the fact that I am still here, still writing, still publishing without consequence. I note, for the record, that this was also true of people in other times and places, at various points along the arc from republic to something else, right up until it was not.
The moral category does not wait for the arc to complete. The moral category describes the direction of travel.
I am watching Kmele squirm. I think, somewhere beneath the philosophical commitment, he knows which direction we are traveling. I think Matt Welch knows too. What I cannot understand — what I am not sure I will ever fully understand — is how knowing becomes insufficient reason to say so.
Mr. Moynihan is another matter.
"It is about what the facts obligate " - Is/ought?
I do not know those about whom you write, but fear of facing where we are, is not confined to the commentariat. I see it in all my friends. Once you look into the abyss....
Ditto for Matt Taibbi.