By Jonah Goldberg
Friday, October 03, 2025
The Hedgehog and the Fox was arguably Isaiah
Berlin’s most famous
essay (deal with it, fans of Rabindranath Tagore and the Consciousness
of Nationality). The title was a reference to a snippet allegedly written
by the Greek poet Archilochus: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog
knows one big thing.”
Berlin took this idea and ran with it with a certain
amount of whimsy, not realizing that so many people would take it very
seriously. Berlin divided philosophers into hedgehogs and foxes: Plato, Nietzsche, Hegel, et al., were
hedgehogs with (allegedly) just one big idea that drove their thinking and
influence. (Berlin doesn’t really spell out the nature of everyone’s
hedgehogginess or foxiness, and if he didn’t have to, I certainly don’t.)
Aristotle, Shakespeare, Joyce, Balzac (Editor: “no need for potty mouth”),
et al., were foxes.
The influence of this dichotomy has been remarkable
(Wikipedia has a serviceable summary),
working its way into business books, geopolitical strategy, pop psychology, and
legal philosophy.
If it’s good enough for that stuff, it’s certainly good
enough for rank punditry.
I think both the GOP and the Democrats are each having an
identity crisis, but not the same identity crisis. The Democrats have a fox
problem, the Republicans a hedgehog problem.
Here’s what I mean in a nutshell: The Democrats don’t
know who they are; the Republicans do. And, yes, both are problems. Let’s start
with the Democrats.
If you search for articles about the Democrats' “identity
crisis,” you’ll find no shortage of results. The
New Yorker: “The Democratic Party’s Identity Crisis.” Axios:
“The 10 theories driving Dems' identity crisis.” The Associated
Press: “Democrats clashed over their shutdown strategy. But the party’s
identity crisis runs far deeper.” And so
on.
In the Axios piece, Alex Thompson lays out 10
theories Democrats offer for why they’re a mess. The fact that there are 10—and 10 hardly
exhausts the number of theories out there—is itself evidence of the fox
problem.
When Joe Biden was president, you could argue that
Democrats had one big problem: Joe Biden. He was too old, too weak, too
unpopular, and too unimaginative to lead the party. But Biden was still the
keystone holding together the edifice of the Democratic Party because he was
president.
I’m no expert on stonework, but I can imagine a scenario
where a mason or engineer says, “Hey, that keystone is crumbling. We need to
replace it, or the whole structure will collapse.” And then some idjit says
“Okay” and just yanks it out, not thinking about the fact that the keystone,
despite its decrepitude, was still the only thing holding everything together.
Also, focusing on the keystone assumes that the rest of the structure is in
good shape when in fact its sorry state was merely a symptom of a more systemic
problem. When your car has a rust problem, something will break first due to
rust, but that doesn’t mean all the other pieces aren’t rusty too.
The replacement for Biden was Kamala Harris, and Harris
was in fact symptomatic of the party’s larger dysfunction.
The fatberg Omnicause.
The term “Omnicause” is widely credited to Mary
Harrington in an Unherd essay
from a few years ago. Hadley Freeman added some metaphorical color last year in
the Jewish
Chronicle, in her essay, “Welcome to the Omnicause, the fatberg of
activism.”
“Fatberg,” if you didn’t know, isn’t the Department of
War’s new term for overweight Jewish soldiers—it’s the term of art for a mass of
congealed fats, grease, and oil that combine with wet wipes and generic trash
in sewer systems.
Anyway, the point is that the progressive left is
obsessed with the idea that everything is connected. “From Gaza to the
climate,” one might imagine Greta Thunberg explaining, “it’s one supply chain
of oppression: The war machine runs on the same fossil-fueled, settler-colonial
patriarchal logic as border imperialism and the carceral state. Before we can
provide housing for all, we must acknowledge the indigenous stolen land that
the houses will be built on. Decarbonize, decolonize, democratize—all at once!
Climate justice that isn’t trans-inclusive isn’t justice!”
That’s parody, but there’s a reason it has the ring of
truth. For instance, just weeks after Kamala Harris was sworn in as vice
president, she was given an intelligence briefing that used what she considered
to be problematic adjectives to describe female foreign leaders. So according
to the New
York Times, she ordered up a review of intelligence briefings for
unacceptably gendered language.
The most famous, and damaging, recent example of
Omnicausism was when Harris told the ACLU that she favored government-funded
transgender surgeries for illegal immigrants and criminals in federal custody.
Video of her defending that position was turned into the Trump campaign’s most
aired and most effective
ad of the 2024 election cycle. It ended with “She’s for they/them. He’s for
you.”
That ad and the issues behind it have been masticated
plenty already, but it’s worth noting that while the text was about transgender
issues, the subtext was that Harris cared more about fatberg solidarity than
she did about the average voter. But what hasn’t gotten enough attention is why
the ACLU pushed
for such a policy in the first place. The ACLU used to have a very narrow
but important mission: defending free speech and other First Amendment rights.
But over the years, it has increasingly become a giant clump of wet wipes in
the progressive fatberg.
The ACLU denies it has abandoned its historic mission,
and that can be debated. But what is undebatable is that it expanded its
contemporary mission to be a member in good standing of the Omnicause. Whatever
you may think of the idea of tax dollars being spent to offer sex change
surgeries (sorry, “gender-affirming care”) to federal prisoners and immigrant
detainees, there’s no reason for the ACLU to take a position on it.
I even have some sympathy for the ACLU, because basically
all progressive organizations these days are staffed by largely interchangeable
Omnicausers. In 2022,
nearly 700 ACLU staffers signed a petition demanding that the group condemn the
war in Gaza and join the boycott, divest, and sanctions crowd. The leadership
rejected the petition, to their credit. The Slack channel Jacobins at the New
York Times had more immediate success with their internal revolt, the end
result of which is that Bari Weiss will be the editor in chief of CBS News.
(I should make one quick nod to intellectual history. As
much as I like the Omnicause thing, it’s not really a new idea. One can play
intellectual connect-the-dots and trace it back to the popular fronts of the 20th
century and the social justice project generally.).
Strangers in a strange land.
What does this have to do with the Democrats’ identity
problem? A lot. It’s not that everything the ideological base of the Democratic
Party believes is wrong or unpopular. I may not like it, but some of their
economic ideas are quite popular, as Zohran Mamdani’s glide path to Gracie
Mansion suggests. But if you have to believe all of it, you’re going to
get defined by the most offensive links in the Great Chain of Fatbergness. If
you campaign on affordable housing, better access to health care, and
liquidating the kulaks, don’t be surprised if your kulak liquidation proposal
ends up in Republican ads. Whatever you think about Trump’s “they/them” ad, the
simple fact is that it was completely fair game politically. It used Harris’
own words.
Indeed, Mamdani’s apparent success is itself a problem
for Democrats, because the rest of the country doesn’t have the politics or
demographics of New York City.
Regardless, that’s only a small aspect of the problem.
For most of the last century, Democrats were the majority party. In 1977, 1 in
2 Americans identified as Democrats while barely 1 in 5 identified as
Republicans. When I was in college, the South was still reliably blue. In their
institutional memory and self-understanding, Democrats believe that they speak
for “the people” the way, say, FDR did, while Republicans speak for “elites.”
This self-conception endures in many progressive institutions and the mainstream
media.
This leads to a tendency to assume that progressives
still speak with authority for average Americans. But this gets the causality
backward. Democrats used to speak with authority for average Americans because
the party actually represented the views of average Americans. The views of
average Americans don’t change with whatever Democrats say. If Democrats say
2+2 = 4, that’s representative of the views of Americans. If they start saying
2+2 = 37.6, Americans won’t just start believing that. In other words, just
because Democrats use “Latinx” doesn’t automatically make the term popular.
They’ve been slow to learn that lesson.
In the last quarter century, the things Democrats said—in
obeisance to the Omnicause—drifted farther and farther from the attitudes of
normal Americans. Like the ugly American who thinks if they just shout louder
in English foreigners will understand, progressives just shouted “racist” or
“bigot” louder as if that would just win the argument. The arrogance of it all
just accelerated the trend of the white working class—the largest voting bloc
now and for the foreseeable future—moving into the Republican fold.
The Democrats’ fox problem isn’t just that they believe
lots of different things that don’t go together, it’s that they’ve got hedgehog
envy and want the giant fatberger to be One Big Thing. And their One Big Thing
is just not popular.
And, to be fair, the Democratic coalition is not one
undifferentiated fatberg of left-wing radicals. But the Democratic coalition
has no unifying hedgehoggy idea that pulls everyone together. Sure, opposing
Trump helps because they can get an intraparty consensus around that, but it’s
not enough. Private sector labor unions and public sector labor unions may talk
a big game about unity, but they have divergent interests. Professional
identity politics activists may see everything through the Omnicause prism, but
the actual ethnic groups they purport to speak for don’t. The Democrats have
scooped up a lot of college-educated suburban voters, but beyond attacking
Trump, they haven’t figured out how to appeal to them without pissing off the
rest of their coalition.
There’s an additional challenge for Democrats. The same
muscle memory that makes them think they represent the mass of Americans also
leads them to cling to a script that depends on Republicans playing their part.
The Democrats are the party of government. There’s
nothing inherently wrong with that.
But two problems flow from this fact. The first is that
if you’re the party of government and you let the fatberger cadres force
ridiculous policies on crime, housing, and education on you, you won’t run the
government well. And what is the point of being the party of government if you
can’t run the government well? Most people want the government to fight crime,
not fight for the rights of criminals. What is the point of being the party of
public education if you put the interests of teachers’ unions above the
interests of children? Those new suburban voters don’t want to send their kids
to public schools to help make the case for higher salaries for public school
teachers or to provide new recruits for settler-colonialism or queer theory.
They’re happy to pay for public schools if public schools put kids first.
The second problem is that in a two-party system, being
the party of government can only provide a comparative advantage when the other
party isn’t the party of government.
The GOP is a big-government party now. Trump is not an
ideological conservative—because he doesn’t really have an ideology and he’s
not a conservative. Yuval Levin had a great piece at National Review that
pointed out the fact that, despite all the drama about DOGE and rescissions and
draconian cuts, Trump
hasn’t changed the fiscal trajectory of the federal government at all. Trump’s
tariffs are not only protectionist—the standard orientation of
Democrats—they’re a major tax increase on Americans, the proceeds of which he
now wants to distribute as subsidies
for farmers. He’s not a constitutional originalist. He’s not (really) a
pro-lifer. He’s certainly not laissez-faire or libertarian in any meaningful
way. In short, he’s very few of the things the left and Democrats know how to
argue with.
If your self-definition hinges on your enemy playing to
type, it can be very confusing when your enemy doesn’t play to type anymore. If
you’re a boxer who has never fought anything but right-handed opponents, a
southpaw is going to catch you at a disadvantage.
The GOP’s crisis.
I could go on, but this is a good segue to the GOP’s
identity crisis, which will require fewer words to describe.
The GOP should replace the elephant with the hedgehog.
Because the GOP now simply stands for one thing: Donald Trump. You can hold
virtually any position you want in the Republican Party today, so long as you
don’t let it get in the way of supporting and applauding Trump. The Democratic
message is a cacophony; the Republican message is simple: Trump. Trump’s
favorite new hat reads: “Trump
was right about everything.” Whatever you think about that (preposterous)
statement, it’s a really pithy and accurate encapsulation of the GOP today.
And not just the GOP. As I noted
earlier this week, the “institutional isomorphism” that has plagued the left
for decades has infected the right. Most avowedly right-wing institutions have
gone the way of talk radio and the Heritage Foundation. Indeed, Heritage should
use an asterisk after the word “think” in think tank, indicating a footnote
that reads “pending approval by Trump.” With a few notable exceptions,
right-wing media is simply pro-Trump media.
Whether you call this a cult of personality or offer
complicated institutional explanations involving the distorting role of
primaries and the economic incentives created by balkanized media and small
donors, it’s still an objective fact: The GOP’s identity has been totally
defined by Donald Trump. What is the correct policy? Whatever Trump says it is.
Because the Democrats are a mess, this has worked to the
advantage of the Republicans. But momentary electoral and political success
only masks the GOP’s identity crisis. Whether for actuarial reasons or
constitutional ones, Donald Trump won’t be president for that much longer. When—or if—he leaves office, he will surely
try to maintain control of the party.
But how will that work? If Republicans win in 2028, will
an old man in Mar-a-Lago still dictate policy? Will the Republican candidate
promise to follow Trump’s lead no matter what? That’s awfully beta male. Will
such a candidate differentiate himself from Trump and earn the wrath of his
superfans or Trump himself? What idea will unite the party after Trump?
Or what ideas can a Republican campaign on that won’t make him look like a
hypocrite or heretic to the faithful?
Max Weber pioneered the study of
“charismatic” leaders. Charisma in this sense doesn’t mean “charming” in the
colloquial sense but charming in the deeper more mystical sense: leaders who charm,
ensorcell, inflame with passion. Charismatic leaders become whatever their
followers want, or need, them to be. Like it or not, Trump is a charismatic
leader.
But Weber also wrote about the bureaucratic or
routinization of charisma (Veralltäglichung der Charisma) when
charismatic leaders go away. Suddenly, the mystical, enchanting, unifying
populist passions need to be encoded in rules, processes, and policies. What
was once perceived as heroism devolves into schtick and kitsch. Battles for
succession—like those that plagued Islam after Muhammad died, or Alexander the
Great’s empire, or the civil rights movement after Martin Luther King Jr.’s
assassination—consume the once-unified movement as different factions vie for
power. Revolutionary movements recede into bureaucratic drudgery. Grifters feed
off the remaining passions. The Tea Party and Black Lives Matter movements
started as organic populist uprisings and descended into money-grubbing
fundraising operations quickly thereafter. The Republican Party under Lincoln
was a righteous engine for human liberation and national salvation. After
Lincoln, it descended into carpetbagging graft.
You can tell yourself the idea of MAGA will endure after
Trump, but the only tangible idea holding MAGA together right now is Trump.
I don’t know when it will happen, but the GOP hedgehog of
today is destined to become foxy sooner or later.
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