More Than One Thing Is True

When I got my first smartphone in 2015, I also had an enormous amount of leeway outside of my minimal English teaching duties, time which I devoted to driving hither and thither all about montane Japan at 50 kilometers an hour, tops. As you might imagine, these journeys took up a great deal of time, time which I filled, for the first time, with podcasts. At that early juncture, at the start of the 2015 Presidential election primary campaign, I mostly listened to every political podcast I could get my hands on, with a strong bias towards shows with a bipartisan mix of pundits and magazine journalists who all lived in New York or DC, and who loved mixing it up about the wonderful game of politics as we used to know it. One of those figures who kept popping up here and there and was always interesting to listen to was Ross Douthat, the clever, mild-mannered Catholic conservative who comfortably existed within the bubble of the liberal media and actually connected with people. In the years since I’ve grown a bit more frustrated with Douthat, disappointed at times when I wished he would outright condemn or break with people who I felt had crossed a moral Rubicon – but he always had insightful things to say, regardless. Two months ago he left his column at the Times to join 60 Minutes, and I’ve been revisiting his valedictory column: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/08/opinion/obama-trump-biden-enemy.html.

It’s an interesting piece trying to wrestle with the disorientation felt by anyone who has tried to hold to somewhat stable principles over the last decade of fragmentation and political realignment, and I find that useful and challenging even as I strongly disagree, for instance, with Douthat’s opinions about the shortcomings of the pre-2016 establishment. Of course there were many problems with the structurally compromised and legislatively sclerotic political world before Trump, but I don’t think the elite consensus of globalized neoliberalism, social liberalism, and technocracy actually bears responsibility for the crisis – I think many voters just lost their minds. People don’t believe this now because the last ten years have made us used to how weird everything has gotten, but I remember it as it began, and it really was like a collective insanity was descending upon people who previously had been normal. But that’s not a very winning electoral message, and it doesn’t speak to the real concerns that people had which made them vulnerable to just such a moment. But I digress.

All that is to say, I reacted to Douthat’s column with a mixture of appreciation for how he expressed our political confusion and defensiveness toward his explanations for why that happened. I remain, of course, a very committed, if heterodox, liberal who has planted the flag in the year 2015 as the last year of normal politics and dug in there like Hiroo Onoda on Lubang Island. But the problem with simply trying to defend 2015 is that you end up speaking in broad generalizations, and sweeping aside every narrative that doesn’t fit. The economy was doing pretty well in 2015, America was doing well relative to most of history – but not for everyone. And there are many little wrinkles like this, which is why I am increasingly coming to rely on the truism that more than one thing is true at once. This should be common sense, and maybe it is and I just need to write this to remind myself of it, but I feel that in politics there is sometimes this tendency to be inflexibly immune to any two truths coexisting that seem to suggest contradictory implications. Perhaps I am trying to have my cake and eat it too, as I so often do – but then again, perhaps we need more non-exclusive imagination in how we think about politics, society, and life. We certainly need the flexibility and comfort with complexity to frankly acknowledge things we have learned over the last ten years without forgetting the things which were true before, and which some have since tried to erase. The question of how we reform and reunify without revising history to match populist misconceptions of reality feels both pressing and befuddling to answer.

Perhaps it is my stubborn tendency to argue for things I wish to be true while also trying to incorporate brute facts that don’t fit that, but as in theology I think we have to insist that if we know two things to be true which feel like they contradict, we should question the contradiction rather than the axioms involved.

In 2016 and in 2024, things were looking up economically, the system we had worked better than most systems throughout history, and we were gravely mistaken to upset the apple cart. And yet, many of the things we protest under Trump were happening, to a lesser degree, before him, and should have been taken seriously; and of course, even as the mixed-market economy of globalized free trade made possible the feeding of eight billion humans and heretofore unimaginable luxuries, it also left many people behind who felt their lives grow worse, and it ground up many other people around the world who were trying to claw their way out of base poverty. Both these things are true. What is the implication – are we to be institutionalists or radicals? That’s precisely the complexity I’m talking about – we have to maintain the ability to be both simultaneously as befits the truth.

Here’s another one: social liberals are right about there being a group on the far right who really do want to interfere in the personal lives of others to an unreasonable degree, and some of that is motivated by animus, and a lot of it is genuinely but has calcified into being expressed in a way indistinguishable from animus. And, social conservatives were right about many of the slippery slope edge cases they warned about, particularly regarding gender identity where children are concerned – and this at the same time that they are in many cases wrong about the salience gender should have in the first place in society.

The Islamic Republic of Iran are murderous bastards who commit terrorism against their own people, and we are morally obligated to help rescue the oppressed from them to the extent it is in our power – and Trump’s war has not only been stupid, illegal, and immoral, it has been worse than if we had done nothing at all. By the same token, invading Iraq in 2003 under the pretenses we did was morally wrong, and we are responsible for a vast number of collateral deaths that should not have happened – and, Iraq today is a better place because Saddam is gone. To say nothing of Israel-Palestine, perhaps the most harmfully reduced issue on earth, and one where to eschew tension between mutually inconvenient narratives in conflict, and to pick one over the other, is to surrender objective morality.

I could go on; cultural particularity should be cherished, but not preserved by means to chaining the legs of others; both liberal technocratic urban atomic YIMBYism and Tolkien’s pastoral conservatism are true and necessary in different ways; and democracy is indispensable to moral legitimacy, but it has no moral right to abrogate liberal human rights – but voters are often wrong and do just that. Most importantly, I object to the friend-enemy distinction, which we see crop up incidentally in Douthat’s column, because of the truth that a person is both your enemy who will harm you and your neighbor who you must love unconditionally into all eternity – that both these things are true.

This has been a bit rambly, but that’s to be expected when we’re all kernels in the political popcorn popper, at the apogee of our arcs, with no one knowing quite where in the pile they will land.