We Were Paying Attention

Here's to the deluded ones. Who, it turns out, were not that.

Photo by Samantha Weisburg on Unsplash

The reactionaries got what they wanted. This is worth stating plainly, because a certain kind of liberal commentary keeps treating the current moment as a disaster that has befallen the country — a catastrophe that surprised everyone including its authors. It is not that. It is the successful execution of a political program whose authors told us, for years, in plain language, exactly what they were going to do. They have done it. The dismantling of the administrative state is what they wanted. The capture of the judiciary is what they wanted. The war with Iran is what they wanted. The ICE camps and the deportations are what they wanted. The assault on universities and the neutering of the adversarial press is what they wanted. The concentration of executive power beyond any constitutional check is what they wanted. The consolidation of tech-billionaire authority inside the machinery of the state is what they wanted. The attacks on trans people and on reproductive rights and on every marginalized population the productive system designated as surplus — all of this is what they wanted. They got it. The project has been, on its own terms, a success.

What the project reveals, now that it is visible at full scale, is what the project always was. It is not a positive vision of human flourishing that happens to require some losses along the way. It is a vision whose content is the losses. They want a smaller country. Fewer people in it. Fewer institutions mediating between power and the population. Fewer rights inconvenient to capital. Fewer norms constraining what the powerful can do to the weak. Fewer cultures complicating the monoculture they imagine as natural. Fewer voices in the press. Fewer judges who might rule against them. Fewer professors teaching things that embarrass them. Fewer immigrants reminding them that the American experiment has always been plural. The losses are the point. Once you see this, the current moment stops being confusing. The administration is not failing to produce prosperity. It is producing the losses, which is what its base wanted, and the pain — falling on the people being removed — is not a bug but the feature they came for.

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The people who authored this project, the people who fund it, the people who staff it, and the people who cheer for it are who they have always been. The current moment is not a change in their character. It is a disclosure of their character. For years they operated under constraints that forced them into a public register compatible with the constitutional order — gesturing at democratic norms they did not believe in, mouthing the vocabulary of pluralism they privately held in contempt, framing their projects as reforms within the existing system rather than as attacks on the system itself. Those constraints are gone. The public register has caught up with the private disposition. What you see now is what they always were. The mask is no longer necessary.

Look at what they say, out loud, in public, to their own audiences. The technology executive who fantasizes on investor calls about killing his competitors and drone-striking rivals. The venture capitalist who writes that democracy and freedom are incompatible. The political operatives who speak of their opponents as vermin, as parasites, as enemies within. The immigration enforcers who celebrate the suffering of families torn apart as a feature of a correctly functioning policy. The senators who joke about their colleagues being executed, and the journalists who laugh along. The influencers who promote the eliminationist rhetoric of regimes the previous generation of conservatives would have refused to name in polite company. The billionaires who speak of taxpayers as hosts and themselves as the productive class being farmed, and who have begun to act on the implications of that framing. None of this is an accident of rhetoric. It is what they have always believed, now said out loud, because nothing stops them from saying it out loud, because they have won and they know they have won and they no longer need the mask.

They want to subdue the people their project is harming. If subduing is not enough, they are comfortable with killing. This is not a metaphor and it is not a rhetorical excess. It is the observable disposition of the project toward the populations it has designated as obstacles. The ICE detention deaths are not administrative errors. The Palestinian civilians dying under American munitions are not regrettable collateral. The trans kids driven to suicide by the legal and cultural apparatus constructed against them are not unintended consequences. The women dying from denied reproductive care are not tragic anomalies. These are the project’s outputs, produced by design, defended by their authors, celebrated by the base that elected them. The disposition toward the harmed is not sympathy constrained by difficult tradeoffs. It is contempt for the harmed, delivered as the thing the project was built to deliver. If you cannot see this, you are not paying attention.

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There is a story in the Christian tradition about the serpent and the fruit. The serpent tells Eve the fruit will not kill her but will open her eyes. It is the archetypal devil’s offer — the promise that the forbidden thing is not actually dangerous, that the people warning you are the real deceivers, that the fire will not burn if you just put your finger in it. The point of the story is that the devil lies. The fire burns. The burning was the point of the offer.

A lot of people put their finger in the fire over the last decade. Not because they were sinners and not because they were fools. Because they were running an honest empirical test. The test was: are the liberal critics of the reactionary project reading the situation correctly, or are they hysterical partisans inflating threats to keep their own coalition together? The way to answer this question is to take the reactionaries’ claims seriously, see what happens when their program is implemented, and update on the evidence. That is the method of a serious person. It is what intellectually honest people do when they are uncertain.

The test has been run. The evidence is in. The reactionaries were not telling the truth about what they were going to do. Or rather, they were telling the part of the truth about dismantling the existing order while concealing the part about what they were going to replace it with. What they were going to replace it with is the project we are now living inside. The project is not producing prosperity. It is not producing order. It is not producing a restored community of shared values and revived civic virtue. It is producing the losses I named earlier — concentrated, by design, on the populations the project has designated as the legitimate targets of loss. It is producing the concentration of power in a few hands, which the American constitutional tradition was built to prevent. It is producing, in real time, the end of the American experiment as a self-governing republic, and its replacement by something that looks more like the authoritarian regimes the project’s intellectual godfathers have been openly admiring for years.

If you ran the test in good faith and the test has delivered its results, the appropriate response is to update. That is not humiliation. That is what intellectually honest people do. The humiliation is in refusing to update — in clinging to the hypothesis after the evidence has disconfirmed it, because admitting the disconfirmation would require admitting that the people who told you the hypothesis was wrong from the start were right from the start. The admission is hard. The refusal is harder, and it is now costing the country more than the admission would cost you.

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Those of us who were paying attention were not suffering from any kind of delusion. We were not trapped in partisan hysteria. We were not failing to see the legitimate concerns the reactionaries raised about genuine problems in American life. We saw those concerns. We took them seriously. We disagreed with the prescription — not because we were committed to the status quo, but because we could read what the reactionaries actually said and extrapolate what they actually intended to do. The extrapolation was not complicated. It required taking them at their word. Most of the mainstream commentary refused to do this because taking them at their word sounded alarmist, and alarm was coded as a failure of professional composure.

That is the failure that now has to be named. The centrist and mainstream commentary did not fail to see the evidence. It failed to extrapolate from the evidence, because extrapolating correctly would have required a register of alarm the professional culture prohibited. The people willing to extrapolate — the writers and scholars and activists who said in 2016 and 2020 and 2022 and 2024 that the reactionary project intended exactly what it is now doing — were treated as unserious for saying so. The norm of professional composure punished accurate prediction. It rewarded the measured tone that refused to name what was coming, because the measured tone was what the commercial model of the centrist press required. That model is now producing a press incapable of describing the regime it is living under, and the descriptive capacity has migrated to the places — the newsletters, the independent platforms, the scholarly monographs, the specific outlets that preserved a register of alarm — where accurate prediction was possible because the professional penalty for it was absorbed by the writer rather than filtered out by the institution.

The vindication is not personal. I am not asking you to acknowledge that I was right, or that any specific writer was right. The liberal tradition, read carefully, contains the conceptual resources for understanding what reactionary movements are, what they do when they come to power, and why the specific institutions of constitutional republicanism exist to constrain them. The tradition predicted the current moment because the tradition was built in response to earlier versions of the current moment. The people who read the tradition correctly were able to predict accurately. The people who dismissed the tradition as outdated — who thought the end-of-history thesis of the 1990s meant the older liberal warnings about concentrated power and reactionary movements were no longer relevant — were the ones who failed to predict. The failure of prediction indexed the abandonment of the tradition, not the tradition’s inadequacy.

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The reason it matters what you do with the evidence is that restoring the republic requires the people who were curious to join the people who were paying attention. The reactionary coalition is not the majority. It is a coalition of minorities — a faction of the wealthy, a faction of the aggrieved, a faction of the ideologues, a faction of the opportunists — held together by the shared project of subtraction and by control of the levers of power. It has been numerically defeated in most of the recent elections it has contested. What it has instead of numbers is an organized faction working in concert with an asymmetric constitutional architecture that magnifies minority power, a media environment that has systematically misdescribed the stakes, and a set of billionaires willing to spend unprecedented sums to tilt the playing field. The project is powerful but not popular. It can be defeated.

Defeating it requires a coalition that includes the people who were curious. The hardcore reactionaries are not persuadable. Their commitment is an expression of who they are, not a mistake to be corrected, and the only politics available with respect to them is containment and democratic defeat. The curious are different. The curious were running the empirical test, and the test has delivered its results. The liberal project — the positive case for pluralistic self-government, for the rule of law, for the institutions that constrain concentrated power, for the civic conditions under which human beings can flourish in their full diversity — is the project that was right about the reactionaries and is also the project capable of replacing what the reactionaries have broken. The curious, having run the test, are welcome in the coalition that was right. You do not need to confess to having been stupid. You only need to acknowledge that the test has been run and that the results favor the side that was paying attention.

The welcome is sincere, and it is not triumphant. The people who were paying attention are not looking for the satisfaction of having been proved right. They are looking for help in the specific work of restoring what is being destroyed. The work is not small. The constitutional damage is real. The institutional damage is real. The human damage, to the people the project designated for loss, is real and in many cases will not be undone in the lifetimes of the people who survived it. The rebuilding will take a generation. It requires as many hands as can be mustered. The hands of the curious, now that the curiosity has been resolved, are welcome.

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There is a line in the Whitman poem I invoked in a comment on Matt Zwolinski’s essay yesterday, in a different context, that speaks to what I am trying to say here. The poem — O Me! O Life! — asks what good anything is given the vanity and emptiness and suffering of existence, and answers its own question in the final lines: That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse. The play is the collective project of human flourishing. The verse is whatever the individual life adds to it. The question of whether the contribution matters is settled not by the grandeur of the contribution but by the fact of contributing at all. The play goes on because people contribute to it. It stops when they stop.

The reactionary project is a project of stopping the play. It wants the play smaller, less plural, closed off to contribution from the populations it has designated as unworthy. The liberal project is the project of keeping the play going. Its content is the preservation of the conditions under which contribution remains possible — for everyone, across the full diversity of human formations, through the plural institutions that protect the space in which contributions can be made. This is not a procedural commitment. It is a metaphysical one. It holds that the play is what existence is for, and that the removal of contributors is a loss to the whole.

The curious who are now updating their understanding are, I hope, coming to see that the liberal project was the right project because the liberal project is the project of the play going on. The reactionary alternative was never a competing vision of the good. It was the project of ending the play, or of continuing it only for a narrower cast, with the rest of us struck from the program. This is not a policy disagreement. It is a disagreement about whether the play is worth keeping.

I believe the play is worth keeping. The evidence of the last several years has confirmed, for anyone willing to look at the evidence, that the people who said the play was worth keeping were right, and that the people who said the play could be improved by subtraction were lying — to themselves, to their followers, to the country that gave them the chance to prove their thesis and is now suffering the consequences.

We were paying attention. It was not delusion. It was reading the situation accurately while most of the commentary refused to read accurately, because reading accurately required an alarm the commentary’s professional culture would not permit. The alarm was warranted. The evidence has confirmed it. The work now, for everyone who has eyes to see, is to join the project that was right — not in triumph, not in contempt for those who tested the claim and have now been disabused, but in the specific civic labor of restoring what can be restored and preserving what still can be preserved, so that the play goes on, for everyone, through the longest night of our republic that any of us has lived to see.

The play goes on. Contribute your verse.

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Go Deeper into the Circus

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