The Week Wrap

Two weeks, actually -- and yes, that's a play on words

I’m going to begin and end this wrap with home news. Up top: The Week, where I have been a columnist sporadically since 2015 and regularly since 2017 is getting out of the opinion business.

The Week’s main product has always been the print magazine, which is a popular and successful (and very well-done) news digest, and that is going to continue as before. Their U.S. website, however, has long been an opinion portal whose hallmark has been striving for not only a diversity of views but a diversity that was importantly different from the kind of diversity that you’ll see at The Washington Post, The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal. The Week published paleocons like Michael Brendan Dougherty and leftists like Ryan Cooper, libertarians like Shikha Dalmia and centrists like Damon Linker, all distinctive writers and thinkers who tended to avoid being siloed within the political dispensations with which they identified and who prided themselves on refusing to “think with the church” as it were. You can find people like them at other opinion pages, but they’d be the exception to a rule where most opinion columns cluster around the predilections of the publication’s core readership. It was genuinely special to be part of an enterprise that strove for something different.

Now that enterprise is coming to an end. The new ownership of The Week has decided to align its web presence more closely with the identity of the print magazine, which means the U.S. website will no longer be an opinion portal. I think it’s a real shame they’re shutting down something that not only published so much good writing and thinking over the years but that, as I understand it (and I am not privy to any inside information here; this is just what I hear through the rumor mill), was also delivering on its core mission of driving subscriptions to the magazine in a fiscally sustainable manner. But I think it’s a particular shame because there are so few other places like The Week out there whose core brand is presenting a range of interesting and relevant argument accessible to mainstream readers but not clustered around a particular political sensibility.

Substack, of course, aspires to be precisely that kind of place. But Substack isn’t performing the editorial and curatorial function that a place like The Week did. When I write here, I’m cultivating my own voice and my own audience, without assistance, and that’s what nearly all writers here are doing. I’m not part of a collective enterprise with other writers who I feel a kind of native obligation to read and interact with. And while I do read other Substack writers—quite a few—I’ve curated that list myself, and am therefore inevitably reproducing my preexisting biases. Even if I seek out people I disagree with, I’m seeking out the kinds of people I disagree with who I already know I want to read. That’s not the same as discovery.

I know Substack has been putting more effort over time behind promoting individual writers. I get emails from them all the time suggesting people to read. I hope that, in so doing, they are performing a real curatorial function, boosting people who not only write well and frequently and for whom they have identified a likely audience (I’m sure they’re doing that, and that they’ve got quite sophisticated tools for the last one), but who are writing things that are worth reading. That’s the most important thing an editor does, in identifying writers and in steering their writing. It’s also one thing an algorithm really can’t do. As someone who worries a great deal about our contemporary penchant for training humans to be more algorithmically tractable, I hold as distinctly precious any institution that constitutionally stands against that tide.

I don’t know what’s going to happen to The Week’s archives, but I hope they’ll remain there in their current form. Right now, that means here. If for whatever reason they decide to eliminate the archive, there’s always the Wayback Machine.

What about the future? Well, the transition at The Week means I won’t have a regular place for opinion writing apart from here—and, of course, Modern Age where I will continue to write on film, theater and the arts more generally. (Watch for a long piece about Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Joel Coen’s take thereon in the next issue.) That likely means I’ll be spending more time writing for Substack, but it also means I’ll be looking for other outlets for that kind of work. I don’t expect to find a perfect replacement for The Week, someplace I can pitch opinion pieces to an editor every week and get published nearly every time. But I’ll certainly be out there, so do keep a lookout.

On the assumption that this is going to become a more central home for me, I’ve now turned on paid subscriptions at $5/month or $50/year. I hope many of you who already subscribe will decide to upgrade to paid subscriptions—or even founding member subscriptions. Doing so would be a powerful vote of confidence that you want to see me continue to write here, and to write more. And if I wind up disappointing you, well, you can always unsubscribe. I don’t know how much paid-subscriber-only writing I’m going to do here, but the one thing I can reassure you is that these weekly wraps will remain free for all, so even if you don’t become a paid subscriber you’ll always have access to a digest of my work, and links to anything I’ve written elsewhere.

The other thing I’m going to be spending more time on is film stuff . . . but for home news on that front, you’ll have to wait for the end of this post.

The French Center Holds

Emmanuel Macron won the second round of the French election yesterday, and depending on how you look at it he either won in a landslide that was notably larger than what people were anticipating after the first round, or won by a notably narrower margin than he did against the same opponent five years ago. Did the center hold? Or is it crumbling?

I think the results largely vindicate my read after the first round. Macron has, in fact, infused the center with vitality, as evidenced by the fact that he won a larger share of the vote in the first round than he did last time and not notably less than many of his predecessors (he won about the same as François Hollande did in 2012, a bit less than Nicolas Sarkozy won in 2007, and more than Jacques Chirac won in 2002 or that either Chirac or Lionel Jospin won in 1995). More notably, Macron went into the election vastly more popular than the incumbent Hollande was in 2017, or than Sarkozy was in 2012. Macron does not enjoy majority support—but he enjoys far more support than any recent incumbent French president. That’s a testament to the fact that he has been far more dynamic, responsive and forward-looking than any recent French president—and that he has achieved real results.

What has changed, then, is not that the center hasn’t held or is failing but that it has ceased to represent a broad consensus. The far left and far right parties who have fundamental disagreements with France’s overall direction are now widely viewed as legitimate opposition parties. That’s the difference between a 41.5% second-round showing for Marine Le Pen in 2022 and a 17.8% showing for her father twenty years ago. It’s also the difference between Jean-Luc Mélenchon of the left-populist La France Insoumise coming in a close third in the first round in 2022 and Lionel Jospin of the establishmentarian Socialists coming in a close third in the first round twenty years ago. Because they are viewed as legitimate alternatives, they have a real chance to win. The center, then, cannot be sustained by manufacturing a false consensus that no longer exists; it has to win on the merits. That, ultimately, is a good thing.

I’m not trying to be flip here. The collapse of consensus politics has real consequences in terms of political stability. But that collapse is real—it can’t be waved away. It’s a very good thing for the center to stand up and fight on the merits, to say that its views are correct and will do good for the citizenry and the nation, while its opponents are wrong and will do harm to the citizenry and the nation, rather than to declare that their way is the only acceptable way and that their opponents are mad or controlled by foreign powers or otherwise illegitimate. The latter is how the center ultimately fails, because that game is the populist game, and the populists are better at playing it. If and when we return to an era of tranquil consensus politics, we’ll know it. In the meantime, I remain impressed with Macron because, as the Trump line goes, “at least he fights.”

Will the American Center Hold?

So what about us? Well, my only post this week On Here was about precisely that, or, more accurately, how to revive it. Big picture, I think it’s very hard for the Democratic Party to present itself to the nation as the representative of that kind of consensus center. That’s partly because of branding—the Democrats are perceived as only one half of that center, not the whole—but partly because the left fringe of the Democratic Party really is pretty far left, and is bigger than people may realize (though still a minority not only in the country as a whole but within the Democratic Party itself). It’s simply implausible for the Democrats to disavow their left wing, but it’s equally implausible for the country as a whole to decide that the left is part of the consensus while the right is not. Unfortunately, by this point I think it’s also implausible to suggest that the Republican Party is going to be restored to anything like its prior identity as a part of that old-time consensus.

The exclusion of alternatives leaves the Macron strategy, the formation of a center-oriented party that is dynamic, responsive and forward-looking that will fight for the center on the merits. In the American political system, third parties have usually bid for the presidency, and have failed. That’s a reflection of the realities of the Electoral College, which requires any victor to have a very broad geographic base, which is hard for a novel party to achieve. France’s electoral system has nothing similar; the risk in their system in the absence of consensus is that the center, if divided, might fail to make it into the runoff, leaving France with the unpalatable choice of two anti-consensus populist parties. But in the American system, an insurgent party really has to displace at least one of the major parties, and plausibly bid to do so permanently, as the Republicans did.

But precisely the structures that limit the viability of third parties in bidding for the presidency make it entirely plausible for a third party to bid for at least a few seats in the Senate, and thereby control the balance of power. And that’s what my post is about:

There’s no reason in principle why North Dakota, say, couldn’t have two viable parties, neither of them being the Democrats. And if the second party were still to the left of the Republicans, even if significantly to the right of the Democrats, that would increase political competition while also opening up possibilities for passing the parts of the Democratic agenda that could actually obtain geographically broad popular support.

There are any number of practical objections that might be made to such an idea—but let’s assume for the moment that it actually happened. What then? Three senators arrive in Washington from a brand new party, and the first question they’ll be asked is: which party are you caucusing with? If they answer “the Democrats,” then the whole charade probably falls apart. They’d be viewed no differently from Angus King in Maine, and be readily tarnished by their association with the Democratic brand.

But what if they don’t answer “the Democrats?” What if they say, instead, “here are our demands for forming a coalition—and we’re ready to negotiate with anyone.” Now we’ve actually changed the game. In fact, changing that game first might be the best way to open up space for the kind of novel competition I’m suggesting we might need.

In the piece, I suggest that the way to bootstrap a coalition-based Senate would be for moderates like Democratic Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Republican Senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska to declare themselves independents. In a 50-50 Senate, they’d control the balance of power all by themselves, and they both have sufficient local clout to plausibly fend off challengers from the Democratic Party, leaving them as the centrist alternatives to more extreme Republicans. That would, nominally, shift the Senate to the right, but not really because I wouldn’t expect either of them to change their actual views or voting behavior. Their leverage would just become explicit, and the subject of coalition agreements like in a parliamentary system. The real change happens when other independents crop up in one-party states, forcing that party to face the consequences of real competition.

Something like that might happen pretty soon in Utah, for example, where the Democratic Party has decided to back Evan McMullin as an independent against the increasingly Trumpy and alarming incumbent Republican Senator Mike Lee. For his campaign to be viable, though, McMullin needs to be clear that he is not promising to caucus with the Democrats, that he would, in fact, prefer to caucus with the Republicans, but that he has conditions for caucusing that, in theory, either party could meet. If he doesn’t do that, and if Lee can effectively accuse him of being a Democrat in all but name, then I doubt he stands much of a chance.

In any event, I’ll be very curious to see whether we start to see more independent challengers to unpopular incumbents in one-party states. It’s a potential solution to the serious problem the Senate poses to democratic accountability that doesn’t require a constitutional overhaul, and it’s also a potential solution to the increasing extremism of the two major parties that doesn’t require them to disown their own core voters. Those are good enough reasons for me to hope it comes to pass.

New Features

The other home news I have to report is that I will, for the first time, be directing a feature film, from a script which I wrote. I’m not sure how many of my readers are aware, but there’s this whole other side of my life involving film that has played out over the past decade. I’ve directed two short films, Public Speaking (which premiered in 2017 and was a finalist for Best Narrative Short at the Austin Film Festival that year) and Gone Fishing (which premiered in 2014), both from scripts that I wrote. I’ve been on the producing team of four feature films: Infinitely Polar Bear (premiered in 2014), The Runner (premiered in 2015) We’ve Forgotten More Than We Ever Knew (premiered in 2016) and The Seagull (premiered in 2018). I’ve also written a number of feature scripts, none of which have yet been made into films—and that is what’s about to change.

The film I’m gearing up to make, currently titled Resentment, is about the unraveling of a triangular relationship over the course of a long night of drinking by all three characters at a hip cocktail bar in Brooklyn. I like to describe it as an early Mike Nichols film; Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf and Carnal Knowledge are both lode-stars for me. I’m incredibly excited to be taking this next step, and completely terrified as well.

I expect the film to take more and more of my time over the months to come. We’re still in the fundraising phase, and once we’re fully funded the clock really starts ticking. Making a film is like starting a small business: it is all-consuming, and has to be. That’ll no doubt trade off with how often I'm able to post here. Nonetheless, I also intend to use this space to share some of the experiences along the way, alongside the other writing I do on various topics. I hope the combination proves of interest.

If you’re interested in learning more about the film—particularly if you’re interested in supporting it in one fashion or another—I’d love to hear from you directly, so please reach out. And please share the news with anyone you know who you think would be interested, and encourage them, to subscribe here to keep abreast. The bigger the audience I can build for the film in advance of making it, the better my chance of getting it proper distribution.

It’s going to be a heck of a ride, I have no doubt. I hope you’ll enjoy going on it with me.