David French Is Voting for Kamala Harris. Is He Right?

And a discussion of the great Bulwark/Dispatch Twitter kerfuffle

Above: the nicest, most decent, and seemingly the most hated, man in political commentary.

“He’s wrong about voting for Harris, he’s wrong for endorsing Harris, and he’s wrong about writing a column pegged to his vote rather than his endorsement.” — Jonah Goldberg, Voting Isn’t A Window Into the Soul, August 14, 2024

“And so, part of my problem with your approach is, I have no problem with you endorsing Harris. But your vote is different than an endorsement.” — Jonah Goldberg (speaking to David French), The Skiff, August 16, 2024

“I don’t really have a big problem with David voting for Harris. I have a problem with David endorsing Harris.” — Jonah Goldberg, Dispatch Podcast, August 16, 2024

Recently, disputes have broken out online among the small group of conservatives who still oppose Donald Trump. All agree they will not vote for Trump. The fault line runs between those who will vote for Kamala Harris, and those who say they will not.

The issue came to a boiling point when David French wrote a piece for the New York Times announcing his intent to vote for Kamala Harris. A lot of conservatives piled on French. Some of the people doing the piling-on are people I like, like Charles C.W. Cooke and Jonah Goldberg.

Some of these critics’ arguments are not entirely coherent. See the above quotes for an example.

I am proud of David’s position, and I want to go on record as explaining why I think he is right and his critics are wrong.

First, let me put my cards on the table. I voted for Joe Biden in 2020 and I will vote for Kamala Harris in 2024. I explained my reasoning the last time we were confronted with an issue like this, in 2020. In a piece I published at The Dispatch on October 30, 2020, titled Donald Trump Turned Me into a Mugwump, I noted that Mark Twain reasoned in the 1884 election that a vote for Grover Cleveland was functionally two votes against his dishonest and stupid Republican opponent James G. Blaine. As I said about the 2020 election:

Many of my fellow travelers who share my free-market, small-government, classical liberal views have decided to simply sit this one out. I do not criticize them for this. As a general rule, I do not like to criticize anyone for their vote. I don’t criticize those who will stay at home, or even those who will vote for Donald Trump because they dislike Joe Biden’s policies. (Hell, I don’t like most of Biden’s policies. I see this election as Rule of Law vs. No Rule of Law. But not everyone sees it the same way, and that’s fine.) Voting is a personal matter, and people vote (or refuse to vote) for all kinds of reasons. That’s their business.

But I am persuaded by the Mugwump logic. To parallel Twain’s argument above, I must ask myself: Why am I keeping back my vote for Donald Trump? Plainly the answer is, to do what I can to defeat Donald Trump. I consider him to be a criminal, an illiterate doofus, a danger on the world stage, and a person who is completely nuts with his finger on the nuclear trigger. Very well then, refusing to vote for Trump is a vote against Trump. The common-sense procedure would be to cast two votes against him, by turning in my vote for Joe Biden. After all, Trump has told his supporters to vote twice: once by mail and again at the polling booth. That’s not legal, of course—but if there is a legal way to cast the equivalent of two votes against Trump, I might as well take it.

My view expressed above encompasses two basic ideas:

• The most effective way to oppose a candidate in the voting booth is to vote for their opponent, because it effectively counts as two votes against them.

• Generally, voting is a personal choice, and I am loath to criticize people’s personal choices on that front. (As we will see in a moment, I am going to make an exception—for people who criticize others’ votes. I think that’s fair, under the “turnabout is fair play” rule.)

Now let’s turn to David French’s piece. He begins the piece by declaring his policy opposition to Kamala Harris on a very important issue: abortion. I think his criticism of Harris’s policy position is important. One of the reasons other conservatives offer for refusing to vote Harris is that when someone announces their intent to vote for a Democrat, they inevitably go soft on criticizing the Democrat’s policies. French immediately signals he is not going to do that.

So why is he voting for Harris? French makes clear that his vote is rooted not in a positive support for Harris, but a rejection of Donald Trump and everything he stands for:

Since the day Donald Trump came down that escalator in 2015, the MAGA movement has been engaged in a long-running, slow-rolling ideological and characterological transformation of the Republican Party. At each step, it has pushed Republicans further and further away from Reaganite conservatism. It has divorced Republican voters from any major consideration of character in leadership and all the while it has labeled people who resisted the change as “traitors.”

What allegiance do you owe a party, a movement or a politician when it or they fundamentally change their ideology and ethos?

French talks about the way that Trump has normalized serial lying, and threats of violence. About Trump’s celebration of the January 6 insurrectionists, and his attempts to steal an election. About Trump’s cruelty.

As for abortion, he notes that abortion rates rose under Trump and have risen since the Dobbs decision.

Although you wouldn’t know if from listening to his critics, French does not spend much time lionizing Harris. About the only positive thing he says for her is that “voting for a Democrat” is “the best way to confront violent Russian aggression” and that “[i]f Harris wins, the West will still stand against Vladimir Putin.” Isn’t this hard to deny? As for Trump’s view on Ukraine, he did withhold money from them as president for selfish political reasons. And as for NATO, all Trump cares about is other countries paying more for their own national defense. (He seems to think the money comes to us!) And if they don’t, he once told a NATO country’s president, he would tell Russian leaders “to do whatever the hell they want.”

Trump said “one of the presidents of a big country” at one point asked him whether the US would still defend the country if they were invaded by Russia even if they “don’t pay.”

“No, I would not protect you,” Trump recalled telling that president. “In fact, I would encourage them to do whatever the hell they want. You got to pay. You got to pay your bills.”

If you care about Ukraine—and French and I both consider it the biggest issue in the world—you’re going to want to favor Harris.

But other than that, French’s piece is really devoted far more to what a disaster another Trump administration would be.

Jonah Goldberg’s Criticism: Is Goldberg Upset by the Vote, the (Nonexistent) Endorsement, or Both?

Enter Jonah Goldberg, who has issued a series of confusing and self-contradictory critiques of French’s position. Those quotes were the introduction to this very newsletter, and I am going to dive into their context now.

A Note on My Admiration for Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes

Before I do, I think it’s important for me to say something up front. I admire Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes (whose views I also criticize in this newsletter). I am going to take them on in this newsletter vigorously—and I am going to argue that their arguments about how people should view this election do not match up to the danger that Donald Trump poses. Before I do, I think it’s important to acknowledge that both of these men have been very vocal, for years, about Donald Trump and the threat he poses. They have spoken out despite knowing that their words would harm their income, their opportunities in conservative punditry, and even friendships.

I still remember the day I decided to subscribe to The Dispatch. I was reading a tweet from Goldberg talking about how he and Steve Hayes had decided to quit Fox News because they were offended at Tucker Carlson’s documentary about January 6, which was packed with lies. As I remember it, Goldberg emphasized that he and Steve Hayes had given up a lot of opportunities and had lost friends as a result of taking a stand against Trump and Trumpism. But they believed it was worth it to say what they believed. I thought a publication put out by people like that deserved my support. I still think I was right.

Even though I will argue in this piece that these folks’ arguments about the election have blind spots and are at times incoherent, I want to make sure that anyone reading this understands the context for my remarks. It is because I respect these men that I am pushing back against some of their current arguments. I hope my pushback, while vigorous, is accepted as fair, and as a constructive addition to the dialogue. That is the way I intend this piece to be seen, and I hope it is seen that way.

Also, I admire David French and his stance on the election, and I also intend by this piece to offer him solidarity against the attacks he is facing from people like Goldberg.

Goldberg’s Written Piece

Goldberg’s first critique of French was in writing. It was published August 14, 2024 and was titled Voting Isn’t A Window Into the Soul, with a deck headline reading: “And why I disagree with David French’s endorsement.”

I just want to make a note before we go any further: French never uses any form of the word “endorse” (including the word “endorsement”) in his New York Times piece. That is a notable fact, given all the times that Goldberg makes reference to French’s “endorsement.”

Goldberg, whose writing I generally enjoy, starts by observing that French’s vote in Tennessee doesn’t matter. Fair enough! (In truth, no one person’s vote will likely ever determine the outcome of any presidential election. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter for whom you vote.) Then he says:

What bothers people is that he’s endorsing Harris over Trump. And this is where I disagree with him. I still love the guy and think he’s one of the most decent and intellectually honest people I know. I just think he’s wrong. Not bad, just wrong. 

Indeed, I think he’s doubly, or even triply, wrong: He’s wrong about voting for Harris, he’s wrong for endorsing Harris, and he’s wrong about writing a column pegged to his vote rather than his endorsement. 

(All bold emphasis in this piece is mine. The italics here are Goldberg’s.) Keep that in mind: according to Goldberg, French is wrong about voting for Harris; and he’s wrong for endorsing Harris (which, again, he did not actually do); and he’s wrong to write a column pegged to his vote and not his endorsement.

I ask you to take notice of this statement, because Goldberg will soon contradict all three views, in appearances on two subsequent podcasts.

In his written piece, Goldberg then goes on to offer his specific reasons for saying French is wrong about these three things: 1) “wrong about voting for Harris”; 2) “wrong for endorsing Harris”; and 3) “wrong about writing a column pegged to his vote rather than his endorsement.” As he offers his criticisms in this order, I will address them in the same order.

1. “Wrong About Voting for Harris”

Goldberg says: “Let’s start with the vote.”

Goldberg criticizes French’s vote based on an argument that French could send a more effective signal about disaffected conservatives by writing in a conservative—thus communicating, to those who read the tea leaves of electoral results, that French was a “gettable” conservative voter, if only the GOP had run someone reasonable. Instead, Goldberg argues, French’s vote for Harris will just look like another Democrat voting for a Democrat.

By the way, in the podcast where French and Goldberg discuss the issue, French has an effective rebuttal to this argument: we tried the subtle “vote third party” tactic in 2020, and the GOP didn’t get the message. The time for subtlety is over. It’s time for Trump to lose as badly as possible.

2. “Wrong for Endorsing Harris”

Goldberg next criticizes French’s endorsement (an “endorsement” which, again, did not happen) for three reasons. Goldberg ostensibly frames these reasons as reasons that he himself, Jonah Goldberg, does not do endorsements (“I don’t really do endorsements, for several reasons”) but it is important to recognize that he also offers these three reasons as reasons that he is arguing that French is, quote, “wrong for endorsing Harris.” Goldberg can’t claim these arguments are merely personal to his own decisionmaking process. Rather, Goldberg has explicitly structured the argument as one that contends that David French is “wrong” about these various issues.

First:

If Harris issues some heinous executive order, you can be sure David’s inbox will overflow with “this is what you wanted!” nonsense.

It’s worth taking a moment here to dwell on this argument, because it can be fairly summarized in this way:

The first reason I think you are wrong to have endorsed Harris, David French, is because many people will react to your endorsement in a manner that I find profoundly stupid. Therefore, you shouldn’t have made the endorsement.

Although that is my paraphrase and not a quote from Goldberg, that is actually Goldberg’s argument. I am not being unfair, as I will show you.

In his podcast with French, Goldberg rants and raves (with justifiction) about how stupid it is for critics to claim that your vote means that you asked for whatever the candidate ends up doing. (Note that in the podcast, he ties this reaction to “voting” while in his written piece he ties the same complaint to French’s “endorsement”—a fact that just reinforces my contention that Goldberg is inconsistent on the topic of whether he is objecting to French’s statement of intent to vote for Harris, or to French’s “endorsement” of Harris (an endorsement, again, that never actually happened). The following exchange occurs at 13:11 in the conversation between Goldberg and French:

GOLDBERG: First of all, as I put it in my thing, I really just can’t stand, particularly over the last ten years, the way people talk about the voting. Because it reduces complex sets of considerations. Like you’re making this point about how you’re voting for a foreign policy, mostly, when you’re voting for president, and all these things, and events change, and I get it, and I don’t really disagree with any of it. That’s all fine. But for the rest of your life, people are going to, every time Kamala Harris, if she gets elected, does anything, people are going to say: “well you voted for it.”

FRENCH: Yeah, I don’t care about that at all.

GOLDBERG: I understand that. But people say it to me, and it drives me crazy.

FRENCH: Oh, really?

GOLDBERG: ‘Cause it’s stupid. And it drives me nuts, and it’s a bad form of argumentation.

It is stupid!

And yet, as I just showed, Goldberg offered the following as a reason French should not have “endorsed” Harris:

If Harris issues some heinous executive order, you can be sure David’s inbox will overflow with “this is what you wanted!” nonsense.

I frankly find it bizarre that Goldberg thinks French should not offer an opinion that French believes to be true, simply because many people will inevitably react in a way that Goldberg and French (and I) agree is “stupid.”

I’m with French on this: “Yeah, I don’t care about that at all.” And I find it weird that Goldberg not only is bothered by it, but is so bothered that he actually offers it as a reason French should not have said something that French actually believes.

This is part of a disturbing trend, as we will see.

Second, Goldberg says that “endorsements trigger an instinctual desire to defend them after the fact.” His third reason strikes me as basically the same as the second: “I increasingly think that too many pundits see their role as being players in partisan contests.” The worry is the same: if you endorse, you’ll find it harder to criticize the person you endorsed.

This concern strikes me as overwrought. Nick Catoggio at The Dispatch has endorsed Harris, and he seems to have no trouble criticizing Harris and her ticket. Back when Biden was the nominee, Kevin Williamson said something to the effect that he would vote for the reanimated corpse of Joe Biden over Trump. He too had no problem criticizing Biden.

I endorse Harris. Her plans to go after “grocery store price-gouging” and to give $25,000 in loan assistance to first-time home buyers are woefully ignorant. Price controls lead to shortages. Government subsidies drive up prices. The instinct to immediately lean on government whenever there is an economic problem is dangerous and counterproductive.

See how easy that was?

Part of the reason this is easy is because I can always explain why I am endorsing Harris: Donald Trump is worse. He’s worse not just because he is the only criminal and would-be election thief. He is also worse on many policy matters. Economically, Trump wants to impose massive tariffs. He has voiced sympathy for the incredibly dangerous notion of our country defaulting on its debt—an issue that (like most issues) he clearly does not understand. As a matter of foreign policy, I don’t trust Trump to support Ukraine, which I consider to be the biggest issue facing the world today. His vice-presidential candidate recently suggested that Trump plans to hand Russia all the territory it has captured and then stick Germany with the bill for reparations. Then there are the most important reasons I oppose Trump, which go beyond mere policy: I don’t want his finger on the nuclear button; he tried to steal the last presidential election; and he is a convicted criminal who makes a mockery of the rule of law. Harris is far better than Trump, despite her counterproductive and often ridiculous policy proposals.

It is actually trivially easy to criticize people you have endorsed.

Moreover, Goldberg also never seems to confront the flip side of his concern: if you denounce a candidate, you may find it harder to say true things about that candidate that are positive. Certainly that is the claim made by those who employ the very stupid phrase “Trump Derangement Syndrome.” So the mirror image of the logic that Goldberg cites not to promote a candidate, could be cited as a reason not to criticize a candidate: why, if I take a position, I would have a harder time telling the truth about that candidate’s good policies or qualities!

In addition, taking a stance that you are not going to take a position in an election is also an opinion that, if expressed, a pundit may feel the need to defend—even if evidence changes. If you participate in a showy editorial about how the American people must reject the choices they have, it makes it tough to later say: actually, we should choose one of these people. You can start to look silly indeed if the need to make a choice becomes more and more obvious, yet you still stand by your position of studied neutrality.

In short, any position you take as a pundit is a position you will feel an urge to defend in the future—whether that position is to endorse a candidate, to oppose a candidate, or to remain neutral.

So never mind such concerns. Just decide what your position is, based on the facts available to you, and then tell the truth about what you think. Include the good, the bad, and the ugly. Tell the truth about why you might be wrong. And change your mind if you are wrong.

It’s not that hard.

3. “Wrong About Writing a Column Pegged to his Vote Rather Than His Endorsement”

Finally, Goldberg objects to French’s “framing of the endorsement around David’s vote.” This section of Goldberg’s piece seems to me especially muddled. If anyone can skim it and tell me what they think Goldberg’s point is, let me know. Goldberg instantly alienates me by citing an argument from Dan McLaughlin, whom Goldberg says he respects, but whom I find to be a partisan hack.

BRIEF ASIDE: A side note about why I say this about McLaughlin. I do not call him a hack lightly. I have met McLaughlin. He treated me to lunch many years ago. I liked him. He and I have communicated a lot over the years. In recent years, I became increasingly uncomfortable with his partisanship, but he is hardly alone in this sense. Where I broke with McLaughlin is something I will detail in my next Substack. In brief, we were arguing about the New York case against Donald Trump, and Dan made a major error in describing the judge’s ruling. I demonstrated with screenshots and links that he was in error. He responded by saying that any prosecutor who believes the New York prosecution of Trump was fair does not deserve to hold their public position—in effect saying I should be fired. When I blocked him, as he knew I would, he paraded it around on Twitter as evidence of how I supposedly refused to debate him—because, according to him, I was the one losing the argument. (I promise you that is not true, and I will write it up in the future in loving detail.)

In short, to avoid being shown up in an argument, Dan McLaughlin declared me unfit to hold my job and then boasted about how I blocked him as a result. This episode showed me that Dan is not just partisan, but also sloppy, nasty, and dishonest to boot. So, unlike Jonah Goldberg, I do not have any respect for Dan McLaughlin at all. END ASIDE.

I don’t care what Goldberg says about Dan McLaughlin’s argument because it’s a Dan McLaughlin argument, and so obviously it is going to be a slippery and hyperpartisan diatribe about how bad Harris is. According to Goldberg, McLaughlin is “miffed that David is unforgivably silent about” Harris’s leftism. Whatever. No rational non-partisan cares what McLaughlin thinks. I care only what Goldberg has to say about it. And he says that French’s error was “succumbing to both the voter’s desire to feel good about their vote and the columnist’s desire to make a positive case for his position.” I can’t begin to understand how either is bad, and Goldberg doesn’t help much. It seems like Goldberg’s beef is also that French didn’t say enough about why Harris is terrible. He says it would have been better for French to say: “I think Harris is pretty terrible for a slew of reasons, but a Harris presidency would be the lesser of two evils for the following reasons.” OK . . . but I don’t see why that means French was “wrong about writing a column pegged to his vote rather than his endorsement.” I’ve read this section of Goldberg’s piece about 10 times now, and I think I’m destined not to understand Goldberg’s point here. And frankly, I don’t think that’s my fault. He really does not express his opposition to French’s position well at all.

Goldberg’s Statements on The Dispatch Podcast

Two days later, Goldberg discussed his piece on The Dispatch Podcast with Sarah Isgur and Megan McArdle. The episode is titled David French Is Wrong (Or Is He?). At 3:35 in the podcast, Goldberg says:

GOLDBERG: And I don’t really have a big problem with David voting for Harris. I have a problem with David endorsing Harris.” That was my objection.

Now we’re getting somewhere! After being told that the problem was both French saying he was going to vote for Harris and his endorsing Harris, we now learned that it wasn’t the vote that bothered Goldberg. It was the endorsement. (Which, again, didn’t actually happen.)

But I interrupted Goldberg there, and interrupting people on podcasts is Sarah Isgur’s job, not mine! Let me allow Goldberg to continue where he left off:

GOLDBERG: And my added objection was framing the endorsement as a[n] explanation for why he was voting for her. Which gets to my real problem, my real gripe, which has nothing to do with David, and has everything to do with how people friggin’ talk about voting in this country. Love democracy, think it’s great, love Republican government, think that’s awesome, I love talking about politics on a [trails off] . . . I friggin’ hate talking about how ya gonna vote. I hate when people ask me how are you gonna vote. I used to have sovereign contempt for journalists who said they didn’t vote, because they wanted to stay objective. I have much more sympathy for it now. Because the problem is, you have very complicated arguments are sluiced through the manure pens into a single binary signal called your vote. And that somehow people conclude that I, if I were to say that I’m voting for Harris, which I’m not, they would conclude from that, oh, you support x, y, z that Harris supports, and I don’t. And I wouldn’t, even if I was going to vote for her. If I decided I was going to vote for Trump, it doesn’t mean I was in favor of January 6th or any of these kinds of things. Votes are a decision in a moment in time. But we talk about votes and electorates as if they’re these static, stable things, and we turn Trump voters or Biden voters or Obama voters into a form of identity politics. And I think it is philosophically, epistemologically, ontologically, and politically and psychologically unserious. So there you go.

Based on this rant, you would think the dumbest possible reason to question someone’s statement about who they are going to vote for, would be that people are going to come out of the woodwork and blame the politician’s subsequent actions on you. Because Goldberg just made clear, again, his utter contempt for the notion that your vote symbolizes your agreement with any of the policies of the candidate you voted for. So of course, Sarah Isgur chimes in to say she thinks that’s . . . one of the most persuasive arguments in Goldberg’s piece. Huh??

ISGUR: Uh, one of the most persuasive lines to me was also the point that, you know, David is now going to get endless emails, if there is [sic] four years of a Harris administration, every time she does something, there will be some trend: “David French voted for this.”

GOLDBERG: Right.

ISGUR: “David French supported this; David French wanted this”; whatever it may be.

To me, that is self-evidently the worst argument possible against French’s position—and given Goldberg’s (correct) rants about how dumb this “you asked for this” reaction is, it’s the argument that makes the least sense for Goldberg to make, or for Isgur to find compelling. The people who make that argument against French, we all agree, are idiots making a bad argument. So why on Earth would French care about that argument? And why do Goldberg and Isgur think it’s a reason for French not to vote for Harris, or not to endorse Harris?

Interestingly, in the podcast, Megan McArdle reluctantly admits she is voting for Harris, and Goldberg makes the point that of course this doesn’t mean McArdle supports Harris’s views on price-fixing. Which just reinforces the point I just made. Why is it OK in Goldberg’s mind for McArdle to say she is voting for Harris, but not French? Neither is saying price-fixing is good, or anything like it. But the thought that McArdle is taking the same position as French never seems to occur to anyone (except McArdle, who declares her intent to vote for Harris with some trepidation in her voice, even though the other two already knew she has said that before).

Instead, Isgur goes off on some boring and largely irrelevant tangent about journalists voting, and we never really get clarity about why Goldberg says “I don’t really have a big problem with David voting for Harris. I have a problem with David endorsing Harris.” Well, maybe it will be settled in Goldberg’s discussion with David French!

Goldberg’s Discussion with David French

For Dispatch members, there was an episode of the Skiff later that same day titled “David French Defends His NYT Kamala Endorsement,” in which Goldberg and French talk through these matters.

In this podcast, Goldberg’s position only gets muddier. If you had hoped to hear him explain more about how he is OK with French voting for Harris, but not endorsing her, you were in for some confusion when this happened, at 14:10 in the podcast:

GOLDBERG: And so, part of my problem with your approach is, I have no problem with you endorsing Harris. But your vote is different than an endorsement.

Whaaaaa? Isn’t that the opposite of what you just said in the other podcast??

OK, at this point, I’m just lost. First it was both the vote and the endorsement. Then, it wasn’t the vote, it was the endorsement. Now, it’s not the endorsement, it’s the vote.

Goldberg repeats his arguments about sending “a message to the GOP and to conservatism generally” by voting third party and not for the Democrat. As I said above, French has a good response: the time for subtlety is over.

But it’s what comes next that especially bothers me. This is a big enough deal that it deserves a section all on its own.

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Jonah Goldberg: Refusing to Vote for Harris as a Way of Persuading Conservatives Not to Vote for Trump

There is a point in the Goldberg-French discussion that, to me, suggests that Goldberg has lost his way in this argument, and has allowed himself to become subject to a form of audience capture.

I want to be completely fair to Goldberg here, and so I am going to quote him extensively. This exchange occurs at 21:36 in the Skiff podcast with Goldberg and French:

GOLDBERG: There was an episode of Seinfeld where, I think his name was Chris Whatley, who’s played by the Breaking Bad guy. He converts to Judaism and starts telling all these cliche Jewish jokes.

FRENCH: [laughing] I remember this, yeah.

GOLDBERG: Seinfeld’s offended, and Elaine says: “You’re offended as a Jew"?” and he says: “No, I’m offended as a comedian!” And so, my objection has less to do with the substance of endorsing Harris, or any of those sorts of things, than as a form of argumentation.

FRENCH: Mmm.

GOLDBERG: It’s like columnist to columnist here, right? I salute you for not caring that people are upset about you doing this and saying that they’re going to tell you for the rest of your life that you voted for this and all that kind of thing—

FRENCH: No, I care about intelligent arguments. I do not care about stupidity like: “Anything that Kamala Harris does I endorse from this point forward,” yeah.

GOLDBERG: OK. The problem is, I put it to you, that as a matter of persuasion, that when you tell people you’re voting for Harris, smart people, dumb people—one of the things we’ve learned in the last decade or so, much to our chagrin, is that a lot of smart people lose their friggin’ minds when thinking about politics.

FRENCH: Oh, for sure.

GOLDBERG: Right? Right? And they’re not bad people, and they’re not dumb people. They just—whether you want to call them “red-pilled” or “triggered” or whatever it is, but, there are sort of cascades of ways of thinking about things that get set off by little things, and then you get on this permission structure path and you go in a weird place. And in my opinion, when you tell people you’re voting for Harris, and you ground your endorsement through the prism of your vote, what a lot of people hear is: “Oh, he’s just a Harris voter, so why should I take anything else”—or, “He’s just a Democrat, so why should I take anything else he has [to say] seriously?” And I’m not a big fan of being a political strategist in column writing. My whole criticism of the right for the past ten years is, too many people have taken it upon themselves to be de facto consultants for the GOP. But, at the same time, I agree it’s a stupid thing to do, but a lot of smart people do it, is that when they hear that you’re voting for someone, and if you say you’re voting for Harris, or Biden, or Clinton, then it flips a switch in their head. And I don’t think it should. I think it’s a dumb thing to do, but it does. And they take you differently. So if the goal here is to persuade more people to vote against Trump, put it that way, because that’s your real goal here, is to get, to make sure Trump doesn’t win.

FRENCH: Mm-hmm.

GOLDBERG: Right? Putting it in the terms that you did, I think turns off gettable persuadable people. Like you would have gotten, you would have hurt Trump more if you had taken my advice and said, be strategic, sort of like Mitt Romney—

FRENCH: Mm-hmm.

GOLDBERG: —his speech in 2016, you know, where he says, if you’re in a state where Kasich is leading, vote for Kasich, if you’re in a state where so-and-so is leading, right? If you encourage people to be strategic about it, you would give people permission to think about it in a different way that would rest more comfortably with their own conscience.

FRENCH: So I’m going to be in wild disagreement at that point.

So am I. Because what Goldberg is arguing here is a form of audience capture. He may not think of it that way, but it is. Goldberg is saying: if you come out and say you plan to vote for a Democrat, people see you differently. And those people will tune you out. So therefore, you should not say you are going to vote for a Democrat.

As an aside: if you haven’t watched the episode about the dentist who turns Jewish, you owe it to yourself. The dentist is named Tim Whatley, and the person who asks Seinfeld if he is offended as a Jew is Father Curtis, but Goldberg has the gist of the joke exactly right, and the whole situation is typical Seinfeld/Larry David humor:

Matt Lewis: Refusing to Vote for Harris as a “Branding” Exercise

At this point, I want to shift gears for a moment to a conversation on the Dispatch Podcast that Jamie Weinstein had with Matt Lewis. The episode came out on August 12 and is titled What Should Never Trumpers Do Now?

Matt Lewis says at 25:48 that he can’t vote for Kamala Harris because, in part, it is a “branding” issue for him as a conservative columnist:

WEINSTEIN: How do you rationalize not—if you do think that Trump is a threat to democracy, not voting for whoever’s running against him, particularly after January 6?

LEWIS: All right. So let me give you an answer. I think it will be unsatisfying. But the good news is, there’s like, it’s a three or four prong answer. So it’ll probably be three or four unsatisfying sort of bullet points. OK, so first of all, as I noted, I live in West Virginia. So it doesn’t matter how I vote. Second of all, I would argue that my commentary and my columns, which have been pretty consistently very tough on Donald Trump, I don’t pretend that they are going to make a big difference, but I certainly believe that they will be more important than my vote in West Virginia. Third, I have to be honest about this. There is some branding involved, OK? So, if I, if Matt Lewis, conservative columnist, who wants to someday over—not oversee, but someday witness, a restored Republican party, if I vote publicly, and endorse and vote for Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, then to some degree, at some level, I am endorsing their views.

He goes through Tim Walz’s record on the issues and says that Walz is not his cup of tea, although his vibes are good. At 27:27 Lewis continues:

It will be harder for me, at some point, to help the Republican party and the conservative moment restore itself, if that day ever happens, if I become kind of part of the Democratic coalition. And we have seen, Jamie, I think you and I have both witnessed people who used to be conservative who are now, essentially, all, all, all, you know, all in. They’re not like tentatively supporting, they’re not like tentatively supporting Kamala Harris in the short term just until, just to stop Trump. No, they’ve kind of drunk the Kool-Aid. And I understand why. Because there is a temptation to be a part of a tribe. You want to be a part of something. And it’s very uncomfortable being where I am.

Lewis goes on to talk about the need to join a gang in prison—”you gotta pick a team” or you’ll get shanked. But he ultimately says that if he lived in a swing state and knew his vote would make the difference, he would vote for Harris and then try to attack everything she tried to do.

So Lewis thinks “[t]here is some branding involved” in not publicly saying he will vote for Harris, because if he joins the “Democratic coalition” then it will be harder to “help the Republican party and the conservative moment restore itself” in the future. And clearly, that will be because he branded himself poorly.

What’s the Difference Between Goldberg’s “Persuasion” Argument and Lewis’s “Branding” Argument?

I’m at a loss to see how Goldberg’s argument is much different from Lewis’s “branding” concerns. Let’s review two of Goldberg’s arguments that disturbed me the most:

• David French should not tell the world he is voting for Harris because that will open him up to stupid people saying “you asked for it” when Harris does bad things.

• As a conservative columnist, if you want to persuade conservatives not to vote for Trump, it’s best not to say you’re voting for Harris, because that will alienate conservatives and they won’t listen to you.

Both of these arguments boil down to this:

Do not say something you believe in, because your audience will react poorly to it.

I am disappointed by these arguments. You have to think about how your audience will react to what you say, of course. But you should never let it keep you from saying what you believe.

As I said earlier, I still remember the day I decided to subscribe to The Dispatch, and my decision was borne of admiration for Jonah Goldberg and Steve Hayes and the stand they were taking on behalf of truth.

I also remember the day I became a lifetime Dispatch subscriber. It was when I learned that my favorite writer on the Web, Allahpundit, now known as Nick Catoggio, had been hired by The Dispatch—an outcome I had promoted and hoped for.

Nick has written about what a pundit’s duty is, and that duty is to tell the truth. In a post from July titled “‘I Wish I Was More Brave,’” Nick had this to say:

On the latest episode of The Dispatch Podcast, Steve Hayes and The Bulwark’s Tim Miller wrestled with a thorny question. Do people involved in politics have a duty to be honest?

There’s certainly some moral duty to do so. We don’t want, and couldn’t survive, a system composed entirely of Donald Trumps. But politics is a business in which someone wins and someone loses, Miller pointed out. Absolute candor about your own side’s flaws raises the risk of losing, especially if the other side isn’t as candid about its own.

For political commentators, I think the duty to be honest is absolute. All commentary purports to describe the world as it is, after all; when it passes off self-serving lies as reality, it breaches that warranty. If your writing about politics prioritizes what’s useful over what’s true, you’re not doing commentary, you’re doing propaganda. And the normalizing of propaganda in American political discourse leads nowhere good.

If you’re too cowardly to tell your readers the truth for fear they’ll accuse you of hurting the cause, you should quit. You’re hurting the country by mainstreaming Orwellianism.

This is exactly right.

Being Charitable: “Steelmanning” Goldberg’s Argument

Now I want to make it clear: I’m not saying Goldberg is lying to his readers. I’m not even saying he is making a decision not to tell his readers the truth,

But it does sound like he is advocating, not just being mindful of how he phrases his arguments, but actually changing the content of his argument, based on his readers’ likely reaction. It sounds to me too much like Matt Lewis’s concern about “branding.” And that seems both like a slippery slope that can lead to bad places, and reminiscent of the type of excuse we have heard from a lot of politicians who have flipped on Trump or been reluctant to criticize him. (Something Goldberg and Steve Hayes have not been guilty of, I am pleased to say.)

I’m trying to be as charitable as possible to Goldberg’s point of view, because I like him and I don’t want to be unfair to him. But neither do I want to twist myself into a pretzel and interpret what he has said in a bizarre manner that does not comport with his actual words, just because I don’t like what he seems to be saying.

So let me, as they say, “steelman” his argument. (This means doing the opposite of “strawmanning” the opponent’s argument. It means stating the argument of one’s opponent in terms as strong as possible—in a manner that they would agree you stated it fairly.)

Every columnist has to decide what to write about and how to say it. They have to take their readers’ reactions into account. Maybe the columnist knows he has written three columns about the same topic in the past month, and even though he really would like to write a fourth, he knows his readers can’t deal with reading yet another column on that same issue. So he picks a different thing to write about.

Then there is the matter of persuasion.

As a prosecutor, I am aware of the need to tailor a persuasive message to the audience. If I know my jury is filled with people who love to watch TV, I’m less likely to fill my argument with obscure literary references. When I am asking questions in court, I want to use language my jury will understand—and if there are terms I suspect they do not know, I will want to take care to make sure those terms are explained.

Any of us would probably choose different messages to emphasize at a speech given at the Federalist Society than we would in a speech delivered to the DNC.

Also, context matters. We speak differently in church than we do in court, and differently on the basketball court or at a bar among friends than we do at a funeral.

So yes: audience and context matter, and our presentation and emphasis change depending on the venue and the audience. And I think Goldberg would say that’s all he meant. That, if you’re going to try to convince conservatives to take a particular action, you want to let them know your goals align with theirs. That you’re not some “other” with a wholly foreign set of policy preferences.

Having accomplished the so-called “steelmanning” of Goldberg’s argument, allow me to retort.

Let’s imagine that I am a conservative columnist who wishes to write about the topic of how people should think about the upcoming election. Seems like a fairly likely topic for a conservative columnist to write within 60 days of a presidential election, no? Such a column might be expected to discuss issues like: Who is the better candidate? Who poses a bigger threat to the nation? Whom does the columnist plan to vote for? More importantly (since a well-known columnist’s influence extends far beyond his or her own vote): for whom does the columnist recommend that the reader cast his or her vote?

If a conservative columnist allows his public views on such topics to be influenced—or worse yet, determined—by how his audience will receive his opinions . . . well, then, I would argue that the columnist has been captured by his audience.

And yet, isn’t that what Goldberg is arguing? His argument is fairly summarized in this way: David French, you should not tell your readers you are voting for Harris, because that will cause them to pay less attention to you when you tell them not to vote for Trump.

This is, in fact, advice that a conservative columnist should allow his public views to be determined by the anticipated audience reaction.

That sort of thinking is very dangerous, in my view. Goldberg is heading down the wrong path here. His intentions are good; he’s looking for the most effective way to persuade a cohort of people of the truth of a proposition (“you should not vote for Donald Trump”) that is very important. But his method of persuasion has nothing to do with the concept of fearlessly saying what you think is true—and in my view, Goldberg’s mindset requires a columnist to submit to audience capture, and rationalizes it as the best way to maintain influence over his audience.

It’s hard to distinguish this from Matt Lewis’s concept of “branding” or from the concept of audience capture.

Audience Capture Is the Root of Most of Our Problems

I shouldn’t need to take much time to make the point that audience capture is a sinister force in our politics—and some form of it undergirds the worst pandering we see in our politics.

Every single time a GOP politician awkwardly avoids criticizing Donald Trump after Trump makes a complete and utter ass of himself in public (which is often a daily or even hourly event), that GOP politician is knuckling under to a form of audience capture. They know that they have two choices: give up their careers like Jeff Flake or Bob Corker (who? Exactly!) or suck it up and find some way to deflect. And they all do the latter—and the reason they do it is simple: to keep the voters (the “audience”) happy. You can’t get re-elected if you piss off Trump and he riles up his cult against you. So you keep your mouth shut, and tell yourself you’re doing it for The Greater Good. Capitol Hill will be a saner place with good people like me, you rationalize. Sure, you can’t speak your mind about Trump, but who speaks their mind all the time?

This is a very dangerous view for a columnist. Here again, I subscribe to the Allahpundit/Catoggio model: “the duty to be honest is absolute” and “[i]f you’re too cowardly to tell your readers the truth for fear they’ll accuse you of hurting the cause, you should quit.”

Again: I’m not saying Goldberg is being dishonest or cowardly—but his advocating for a columnist to refrain from endorsing a Democrat to maintain credibility with conservatives? That’s one step down a very slippery slope towards the pit of acting in that manner. Goldberg initially earned my respect as someone who tells it like it is, and hence I feel the need to issue a clarion-call warning that his dispute with French does not seem to be rooted in an “always tell it like it is” mindset.

And I can’t help but notice that Goldberg’s argument puts him in the position where he gets to benefit from maintaining his credibility with conservatives who hate the idea of voting for a Democrat—while David French, who is telling the hard truths, is suffering the usual unfair opprobrium he has suffered for the last nine or ten years. Don’t think that French doesn’t notice this, either, even though he is cheerful about it. In his conversation with Goldberg, he alluded to it in his usual happy warrior manner:

GOLDBERG: Thank you for moving the Overton window, though. That’s nice.

FRENCH: You’re so welcome. I’m happy to take those arrows. Now you’re more reasonable and moderate compared to me. I’ve seen the posts: “@JonahDispatch has retained his conservative integrity and David has now demonstrated fully that he’s a complete sellout.” So, you’re welcome, Jonah. [Laughs]

GOLDBERG: Alas, there’s just not a lot of people left who are willing to say that.

But it seems Goldberg wants to hold onto the respect of those who are willing to say that.

I have some bad news for him, though. As he holds onto their respect, his attack on French is having a different effect on some of the rest of us.

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PSA to Conservative Pundits: Your “Branding” Might Help You with One Audience, But I Assure You It Is Alienating Another Audience

Here’s another point I’d like to make very clear: even if your concern is “branding,” I’m here to tell you that there are many of us who reject the brand.

Let’s revisit the part of Goldberg’s argument to which I am objecting: the notion that “if you say you’re voting for Harris, or Biden, or Clinton, then it flips a switch” in the head of certain conservatives, who then “take you differently” which makes it less likely that you can “persuade more people to vote against Trump.”

Let me state this plainly. If you cannot say you’re voting for Harris, that flips a switch in my head, and you instantly lose some degree of credibility with me.

Let me do some throat-clearing. There are different ways to disagree with someone about a vote they plan to make. Here are three typical ways, in increasing order of aggression.

• I disagree with the way you plan to vote, or with your planned endorsement.

• You’re wrong to vote that way, or to endorse this particular person.

• No reasonable person could vote that way, or make that endorsement.

I try to avoid the last form of argument. I reserve the second form for those who I see using it (in my opinion incorrectly) against others. And I will note that David French adopts the first, least aggressive approach possible. In his column, he explicitly makes the following very charitable statement:

Reasonable people disagree with me. I have friends and family members who will vote for Trump only because he is more moderate than Harris on abortion. I hate the idea that we should condition friendship or respect based on the way in which a person votes. Time and again we make false assumptions about a person’s character based on his or her political positions. There are truly bad actors in American politics, but we cannot write off millions of our fellow citizens who vote their consciences based on their own knowledge and political understanding.

I agree with all of this. And I am generally reluctant to criticize people for how they vote. I make a rare exception who inject themselves into conversations about how others should vote. People like Jonah Goldberg or Charles C.W. Cooke, who have taken it upon themselves to criticize French over his column.

So I feel perfectly comfortable telling Goldberg he is wrong not to vote for Harris. Because he told David French that French is “wrong” to have said he was voting for Harris.

I believe I am not alone in this view.

And so, when I see that Goldberg seems subject to a bit of “audience capture” from an audience that recoils at a statement of intention to vote for a Democrat . . . well, I want to remind him that there is another audience out here. Namely, there are those of us who recoil at a statement of intention not to vote for the Democrat in this election.

This leads us neatly into the Great Bulwark/Dispatch feud.

The Great Bulwark/Dispatch Feud

It appears that conservative Trump skeptics appear to divide broadly into two groups:

• Conservative Trump skeptics willing to vote for Harris to keep Trump out of office (we’ll call them the “Bulwark types”)

• Conservative Trump skeptics unwilling to vote for Harris, who instead declare an intent to sit out the election in some form (we’ll call them the “Dispatch types”)

Now, my shorthand is completely unfair in an important sense. My man Nick Catoggio, formerly Allahpundit, is my favorite writer on the Web. He is distinctly in the first, better camp—the camp I have called the “Bulwark types” even though Nick writes for . . . The Dispatch. And as I have said, if I had to guess, I would place another of my favorite writers, Kevin Williamson, also in the first camp. And he also writes for The Dispatch. Also, Megan McArdle is a frequent guest on The Dispatch Podcast, and she has openly declared her intent to vote for Harris. So I salute these three folks, and I salute The Dispatch (of which I am a lifetime member) for hosting their opinions.

Why, then, do I label The Dispatch as standing for the second, incorrect point of view? It largely has to do with the wrongheaded opinions of the two principal members of the site: its founders, Steve Hayes and Jonah Goldberg. (I’ve already taken Goldberg’s opinions apart, and I will get to those of Hayes next.)

Many of you may have witnessed a recent Twitter spat that seemed to crystallize the difference between the two sites’ approaches. The Twitter spat was principally between Steve Hayes (the Dispatch CEO) and Sarah Longwell (the Bulwark publisher).

I am distinctly and unequivocally on the Bulwark side of this dispute—and indeed, I weighed in on Longwell’s side in the dispute in question. So let me offer my perspective on this spat and why I think it matters.