Horseshoes and Hand Grenades and Neoconservatives and Contrarians

A parable about defining your own views strictly in opposition to others.

Photo by Rob Wicks on Unsplash

Like a lot of folks who participate in and observe the marketplace of ideas, last week I read Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet’s In These Times essay on former lefties who have turned to the MAGA right with interest. That essay made multiple New York Times columnists think about horseshoe theory: the belief that at the extremes the far left begins to resemble the far right.

It made me think of 30 Rock.

One of my favorite lines from that show comes from the episode when Carrie Fisher plays legendary comedy writer Rosemary Howard. She persuades Liz Lemon to quit her job — only for Liz to realize in horror what she has done when she sees Rosemary’s apartment. When Lemon asks for her job back after explaining what happened, Jack Donaghy counsels her, “never go with a hippie to a second location.”

There is an Ideas Industry corollary to this piece of advice: never follow a thought leader after they have been right once.

In The Ideas Industry I argued that public intellectuals were like Isaiah Berlin’s foxes: they knew a little about a lot. This quality enabled them to be excellent critics. Thought leaders are like Berlin’s hedgehogs: they know one big thing and they stick with it. Just as hammers see the world as nothing but nails, thought leaders see the world as consisting only of situations that can be explained by their big idea.

As we know from Philip Tetlock’s Expert Political Judgment, the thing about thought leaders is that they are right far less often than public intellectuals. But — and this is a big “but” — they are more likely to be correct about a big, out-of-the-box development.

The danger in the marketplace of ideas is that when a thought leader is right once, it is human nature to believe that they have puzzled out some fundamental insight that will lead to even more insights in the future. We know from Tetlock, however, that this is usually not the case. Thought leaders being right about something big twice in a row is a highly unlikely outcome.

What does this have to do with the Matt Taibbis, Glenn Greenwalds, and Naomi Wolfs of the world? I would suggest that they already had their thought leader moment in the sun. It took place 20 years ago when they opposed the war in Iraq.¹ They looked at what the neoconservatives within the Bush administration were selling and astutely concluded it was a crock. They spoke up at a time when most of the foreign policy community went along with the invasion.

The neoconservatives were wrong; they were right. Remember, however: never follow a thought leader after they have been right once.