The race for the Democratic presidential nomination this year is generally cast as a contest between progressives and moderates. That’s accurate up to a point, but there’s much more to it than that. Peter Welch, Vermont’s sole congressman, suggested recently that whoever captures the Democratic nomination in 2020 would, if elected, be “the most progressive president in my lifetime.” We are not entirely sure about that, but it does reflect a fundamental shift in the party’s center of gravity.
With the New Hampshire primary only days away, we offer another way to view the race. It will take a little while to get there, though, so please bear with us.
In 1953, Isaiah Berlin, the eminent English philosopher and historian of ideas, published an influential essay on Leo Tolstoy titled The Hedgehog and the Fox. The title was drawn from a fragment of ancient Greek poetry: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Taken figuratively, Berlin wrote, those words can yield insights into one of “the deepest differences which divide writers and thinkers, and, it may be, human beings in general.”
This distinction is between, on the one side, “those who relate everything to a single, central vision, one system … in terms of which they understand, think and feel,” and on the other, those whose thought moves on many levels, embracing the vast variety of human experiences for what they intrinsically are. At the risk of oversimplifying, the difference is between a unitary worldview and a pluralistic one. That was the lens through which Berlin brilliantly explored Tolstoy’s outlook.
Even though our business today is not with dead Russian writers but with live American politicians, Berlin’s insight may be usefully brought to bear on the Democratic field.
Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren and perhaps Tom Steyer each have a unifying vision through which they view politics. It is one in which the country’s current difficulties can be largely traced to 40 years of unrestrained capitalism and globalization that have, with the aid of a fundamentally corrupt political system, concentrated immense wealth and power in the hands of a smaller and smaller slice of Americans, at the expense of the many. The remedy is, in Sanders’ formulation, a “political revolution” and in Warren’s, “big structural change.”
Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg seem to hold a more pluralistic view of the world. They acknowledge but do not wholly embrace the economic critique of the origin of the nation’s problems. They see a need for spiritual renewal and civility, assign great value to personal relationships and would pursue a pragmatic, flexible approach to addressing America’s deep divisions. In our meeting with Buttigieg, for instance, he said that America is experiencing “a crisis of belonging” and that the remedy is as much about tone as it is about policy.
Which worldview does the time demand? Your answer may depend in part on whether your own outlook is that of the hedgehog or the fox, but also on how you view the specific circumstances of the 2020 race.
Age, experience and electability are much discussed but are wild cards in our view. The first depends on a roll of the dice in life’s genetic casino; the second on which kind of experiences turn out to be most relevant to running for the presidency and which to governing afterward; the third on trying to predict the preferences of millions of other people whom you do not, and never can, know.
Certainly Democrats all agree that the imperative is to defeat Donald Trump at all costs and if possible, to thoroughly repudiate his reign of moral error. But we are convinced that there will be no return to pre-Trump norms when the president leaves office. They are shattered beyond repair, not only by his odious behavior but also by the toxic brew of misinformation, disinformation and provocation boiling up on social media.
What’s more, the pre-Trump “normal” is what gave rise in the first place to the widespread disaffection that manifested itself in his election. It’s clear that many Americans have lost faith in the political institutions that, however imperfectly, served as the template for American democracy for more than 200 years.
For instance, what does the rule of law even mean in the age of mass incarceration of the poor and minorities; when big banks are not held to account for bringing the financial system to the brink of collapse while millions of homeowners are foreclosed on; at a time when rogue or ill-trained police officers kill and brutalize unarmed civilians with impunity? What does it signify in the age of Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein; or when the fate of the planet is sacrificed to corporate avarice; or at a time when the makeup of the U.S. Supreme Court is determined solely by partisan passion?
Democracy lives through robust institutional restraints. When they falter, the country falters with them. To have a reasonable chance of righting the ship, the next president will be required to revitalize, or perhaps reinvent, those institutions to meet current conditions. Whether the single-mindedness of the hedgehog or the pluralism of the fox is best suited to that task, and others equally pressing — especially combating the mortal threat posed by climate change — is a question worth considering.
But whoever is asked to undertake this vital work as president will not succeed without mobilizing a powerful tide of support among ordinary Americans. They — you — must not only turn out to vote in large numbers but also stay engaged for the long haul in vindicating the Founders’ fighting faith in the promise of self-government.