The Danger of Having Only One Idea

 I am profoundly confused as to why progressive groups and pundits are gearing up for another campaign to oust Chuck Schumer from Senate leadership (see this Substack post, e.g., and this petition from Moveon.Org). The guy just led our party to a historic victory in the midterms!

Meanwhile, candidates in the progressive lane turned in less than stand-out performances, in a field that was extremely favorable to Democrats. They didn't flip any seats in the Senate, and they managed to lose a House seat in Maine (Jared Golden's district). 

Compare that to the moderate-lane Dems who sailed to comfortable victories in such improbable places as Texas and Kansas and Ohio—several of whom Schumer personally recruited to the race. Whatever one thinks of him, these midterms were a profound vindication of his leadership. 

You'd expect the Republicans to be contemplating leadership changes after their wipeout loss. But instead, here I am receiving mass emails in my inbox from progressive groups demanding Schumer's head, after he just won blowout victories. Why? 

"Because he represents the Establishment," the answer usually goes. I don't know what that means at this point, other than being a weird indirect slur about the fact that Schumer is Jewish. "He supports AIPAC," we are told. Ditto on that one. 

These are the times that remind us of the peril in political life of the "person with one idea," as William Hazlitt once called them. 

It takes the true monomania of the single-issue voter, after all, to decide that Schumer (who by the way has abundantly criticized the current Israeli government, and rightly so) is somehow so objectionable on this one issue that it's worth ignoring everything else he just delivered for our party. 

As Hazlitt wrote of the person with one idea: "If you happen to remark, 'It is a fine day,' or 'The town is full,' it is considered as a temporary compromise of the question; you are suspected of not going the whole length of the principle."

Hazlitt said that it is all well and good to have a cause, but—"why should it be the only one?"

So too, it's fine to disagree with Chuck Schumer. But it's not so fine to inflate those small areas of disagreement to such obsessive sizes that one ignores the plain evidence of one's senses, which is that he understands this party and this electorate and was able to get results. 

It's still less fine to make the degree of a politician's opposition to Israel the sole litmus test of all political worth. Once you end up doing that, you soon find that people like Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes pass your one test, better than Chuck Schumer does. 

And if you discover one day that you have more in common with Tucker Carlson than with Chuck Schumer, I'm telling you—you are no longer a leftist or a Democrat or a progressive worthy of the name. 

Of course, some will disagree. They will tell me that I am the bad leftist. The Stalinists said the same thing during the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact too. 

And so, to the Tucker Carlson progressives today who tell me that I am the bad leftist, I say what Arthur Koestler did of the Stalinists after 1939: "[F]rom then onward I no longer cared whether Hitler’s allies called me a counter-revolutionary."