Being critical all the time is exhausting. Here’s how to dial it back.
Casting judgment on others has never been so easy. Social media gives onlookers the opportunity to scoff at a person’s every choice, from how they dress to what they feed their children. How people have behaved during the pandemic has inspired plenty of judgment in its own right: At the height of restrictions, adherence — or lack thereof — to masking and social distancing measures practically became barometers of people’s characters, indicating a lack of personal responsibility and empathy or an abundance of hysteria and over-caution, depending on your views.
While it gets a bad rap, in pre-modern times, judgment helped keep people safe. Judgments were alarm bells allowing humans to distinguish between toxic and harmless food, trustworthy and untrustworthy tribe members, and hardworking and lazy kinspeople, explains psychologist Carla Marie Manly, author of Joy From Fear: Create the Life of Your Dreams by Making Fear Your Friend.
Judgment is also a signal that someone’s behavior is unusual or out of context to your particular in-group, says Adam Moore, lecturer of psychology at the University of Edinburgh, who studies judgment and decision making. “The role that automatic judgment plays,” Moore says, “is social signaling, social norm reinforcing.”
But in today’s mobile, digitally facilitated world, judgment can take on new, toxic forms, Moore says. When you silently cast judgment on someone from afar based on an Instagram story, you don’t get feedback from other people — or even the subject of your judgment — and you don’t learn how to make comments or critiques in a constructive way. “Normally in a social situation, you judge somebody’s behavior, and their response to you helps to calibrate your interaction with them, and also the responses of other people around you,” Moore says. “Because so much of our lives are disconnected from each other … we don’t perceive that body language and we don’t perceive that social feedback anymore.”
Digital platforms also incite and prioritize outrage and conflict, making it easy to look down on others from your moral high horse. When people are constantly sneering at others on public platforms, the perception of what “normal” social judgments should look like is skewed. “In normal communities and in normal, functional families, passing judgment on other people’s behavior, it functions very well,” Moore says. “Families rarely break up because somebody says, ‘Hey, you’re acting like a jerk’ at a Fourth of July party.”
While judgments help signal social norms and allow us to identify our people, mean-spirited critiques are unproductive. Discernment, on the other hand, can help you identify unhealthy and toxic behaviors, Manly says. In today’s polarized world, it’s important to detect when someone’s attitudes and beliefs pose a threat to others’ rights and well-being. Unless someone’s behavior is actively harming themselves or others (in which case, you should name the behavior, tell the other person how you’re feeling, and set boundaries on how you’d like them to act moving forward), learning to curb petty moral righteousness is possible, but requires slowing down your thoughts and having some empathy.
Look inward
If you’re motivated to stop hurtful critiques, you have to evaluate their source. When you feel a twang of annoyance when a friend impulsively books a vacation despite constantly complaining about money, ask yourself why you’re upset by this behavior or what purpose your anger or annoyance serves in this instance. Anger is often a signal that another person isn’t taking your well-being into consideration or there’s a conflict, Moore explains. Does your friend’s last-minute trip conflict with upcoming plans the two of you have or is it simply something you wouldn’t personally do?
“Do I have any reason to demand that other people in this situation care more about me than whatever signal they’re trying to send?” Moore says. “Even if the answer to that question is yes, having to stop and think about it often turns the volume down on things.”
In order to reframe judgmental thoughts, you need to catch them in the act. “We have to pull back and go, ‘I’m being judgy, I don’t really want to do that,’” Manly says. If you find yourself whispering a snide remark to your friend about a stranger’s shoes, try to reframe the judgment by complimenting the person’s confidence, for instance. Just as being judgmental is a practiced habit, so is stopping thought patterns that lead to hurtful observations and assumptions. “If we come to notice we’re doing something that is unhealthy and pause and stop it, then we are far less likely to go down that path,” Manly says. “That’s why I like compensating because if I do catch myself doing something that’s comparative, rather than just noticing, I give myself other positive hits [like] ‘look at their beautiful smile.’”
Manly also suggests looking back on previous moments of judgment and thinking about what you could do better next time. Recall a moment you made a judgmental remark. What was the response? Would the statement make someone feel better about themselves if they heard it? Do you feel better about yourself having remembered it? If not, allow these reflections to guide you so the next time you see someone talking on speaker phone on the subway, for example, you can instead internally marvel at their interesting phone case instead of scoffing at having to hear their entire conversation.
Practice curiosity, compassion, and empathy
When people buck social conventions, those casting judgments are often quick to be offended before considering a reason why someone else is engaging in that behavior. Say your colleague is quitting their job before landing a new one and you’re outraged at their irresponsibility. Instead of jumping to conclusions, get curious and ask them about their reasons for resigning or what they hope to accomplish during their time off. “Curiosity is the antidote for judgment,” Manly says. Manly suggests meeting those you’re unjustly judging with compassion: hoping they’re happy and doing well.
When it comes to differences of opinion, it can be easy to assume that someone who doesn’t share your beliefs is “evil or stupid,” Moore says. Instead of reacting aggressively in an attempt to change their mind, Moore suggests thinking of a good-faith reason why someone would think this way as a means to slow down the judgment process. What does the person you’re judging know about their behavior or beliefs that you don’t know?
For example, when it comes to relatives with differing political opinions, Moore suggests thinking about how the loved one ended up believing what they believe: the media they consume, the people they surround themselves with. “I find that helps me to not make toxic judgments about other people’s motivations,” he says. “It’s really, really easy and very, very tempting to assume that people who disagree with you about something that you believe in very strongly or have very strong beliefs about are evil or stupid.”
Of course, you should never compromise on important moral and social issues, Moore says. Relationships with people whose views are antithetical to your own will have to be renegotiated and you’ll need to decide how to move forward if you want to maintain contact. But you can control your initial assumptions of them based on their beliefs. “What function is expressing those judgments serving right now?” Moore says. “Am I trying to build consensus about an issue or am I just trying to wave my flag and say I’m of the red tribe or the blue tribe or the green tribe?”
Stay in your lane
There are very few things you can do to convince people your way of thinking and living is ideal. Save for the occasions where someone’s behavior is dangerous and harmful, Manly says to focus only on what you can control. “We can only control our behaviors, our thoughts, and our actions.”
Many human behaviors are actions signaling to others what kind of person you are or what groups you belong to, Moore says. Instead of criticizing your aunt for constantly sharing bizarre Minion memes on Facebook, consider she’s just vocalizing her membership in the coalition of Minion-lovers. Understanding actions’ underlying meanings can help you avoid pointless arguments trying to sway someone to your side of an issue.
Instead of judging and attacking and hoping others see your way, sympathize with others’ reasoning for their actions, don’t feed into toxic thoughts, and lead by example.
“You can’t make somebody value the things that you value,” Moore says. “All you can do is try to gently demonstrate that valuing the things that you value makes the world around you better and people will want to move there in some intellectual or moral sense.”
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The past month’s conservative victories were decades in the making. Three books about the right reveal what it cost the movement.
The January 6 committee has been investigating, among other things, how it is that such a grievous attack on the Capitol could have happened in the first place. A key answer to that question will not be found not in White House call records or intercepted Proud Boys texts, but in a document released publicly last week: the Supreme Court’s ruling overturning Roe v. Wade.
That Trump would incite violence in pursuit of power was not only predictable but predicted — including by his Republican opponents in the 2016 primary. Yet Republicans elevated him to the world’s most important job, and have made no secret why. “The first thing that came to my mind [after Trump’s general election win] was the Supreme Court,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell told the Washington Post in a recent interview.
With Trump’s election, the conservative establishment succeeded in cementing its control over the Court. But this victory required that they cede control over their movement to an unstable demagogue.
American conservatism is thus simultaneously ascendant and in crisis. The right has extraordinary political power, but its traditional leadership seems less capable than ever of imposing limits on how it is wielded. The GOP’s future belongs to the radical forces represented by Trump and the members of the establishment most willing to cater to them. Those few Republicans in power willing to stand up to the rot of Trumpism — like Rep. Liz Cheney, Rep. Adam Kinzinger, and Sen. Mitt Romney — find themselves on the outside looking in.
This state of affairs is perhaps the inevitable endpoint of the American right’s decades-old strategy for attaining power. Conservative doctrine never truly captured the hearts of a mass audience; to attain power, the movement needed to ally itself with forces of far-right reaction who raged against the idea of equality at the heart of modern democracy.
American conservatism was an attempt to tame the untamable: to domesticate this reactionary impulse and channel it in electoral politics in service of an elite-driven agenda. Its leaders managed to exercise some control over radicals in the specific context of Cold War America — but the effort was fated to fail eventually.
And now it’s threatening to bring American democracy down with it.
The dark heart of reactionary politics
Modern democracy is, at heart, premised on the liberal ideal of equality: that because no person is inherently superior to any other, all deserve to help shape the rules that govern society as a whole.
That this idea will strike many readers as banal speaks to the success of the liberal democratic project, which has taken a premise that challenges every historical hierarchy and elevated it to the level of received wisdom.
These hierarchies, however, are not without their defenders. Anti-egalitarian politics have regularly proven to be politically potent, with many citizens in seemingly advanced democracies repeatedly showing themselves willing to support political factions that challenge liberalism’s most cherished ideals.
Matthew Rose’s recent book A World after Liberalism tells the story of a handful of “radical right” thinkers who built intellectual foundations for anti-egalitarian politics. The writings of the people he highlights — German cultural essentialist Oswald Spengler, Italian quasi-fascist Julius Evola, American Nazi sympathizer Francis Parker Yockey, French philosopher Alain de Benoist, and the proto-Trumpian pundit Sam Francis — range from mystical treatises about cultural symbology to conspiracy theorizing to more conventional political journalism.
But according to Rose, a scholar of religion by background, they share key traits in common: most fundamentally, a belief in the group as the primary unit of political life. The group they champion happens to be European peoples or, for some, the white race.
Liberalism centers individuals, treating them as equals and granting them rights against the state in order to be able to live their lives in the way they choose. Radical right theorists see this as a terrible mistake.
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“Liberalism is evil in principle because it destroys the foundations of social order,” Rose writes, summarizing his subjects’ views. “Political life does not depend on truths or values that transcend our identities [but rather] recognizing that human identity, at its most primordial level, is something inherited.”
Their reasons for arriving at this conclusion differed, but virtually all venerated Western culture and deplored its alleged corrosion by liberal thought.
Evola’s pre-World War II work, for example, argued that humans by their nature require rituals and a sense of the sacred to achieve meaning in their lives. He believed that liberalism destroyed this most profound source of human significance by subjecting what Evola called capital-T Tradition to rational scrutiny and arguing for the political equality of all persons.
Meanwhile, Yockey, writing in the late ’40s and ’50s, argued that rationality is an expression of Western man’s most fundamental feature: a drive toward mastery and domination. He blamed a deformed “Jewish” form of reason, embodied in the work of Marx and Freud, for corrupting the West — seeding a corrosive self-doubt about its own heroic past that has put Europe and North America on the road to cultural suicide.
Such ideas may seem far removed from the mainstream, but you hear their echoes in today’s berserk politics. Steve Bannon has cited Evola as an influence; Rose sees in Yockey’s writing the seeds of the “cultural Marxism” theory popular on the culture warrior right.
More importantly, a dive into their work reveals that these thinkers capture something real: a politics that’s felt, on a more instinctual level, by millions of ordinary people across the Western world.
We have ample evidence from social science that large swaths of the white population across Europe and North America find cultural and demographic change unsettling. This sense of cultural displacement has powered the rise of a particular kind of reactionary nationalism, from Trump to Brexit to the continental far-right.
The thinkers of the radical right were at once too intellectual, too bizarre, and too unfashionable to ever really gain a mass following in their lifetimes. But they intuited something that many mainstream thinkers failed to see — that there is a persistent constituency for illiberal cultural politics in advanced Western democracies.
This insight comes out most clearly in Rose’s chapter on Sam Francis, an American political writer who died in 2005. Francis was once a member in good standing in the mainstream conservative movement. Yet Francis came to see the Reaganite GOP as a sham opposition — “beautiful losers” unable to grapple with the looming demographic threat to American civilization posed by a rising non-white population.
“The civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people,” he said at a 1994 white nationalist conference.
This racism got him booted from the ranks of mainstream conservatism; Rose describes a 1995 op-ed offering a “biblical defense of slavery” as the breaking point. Yet Francis’s viciousness also made him perversely prescient. He believed that, for Republicans, “trying to win non-whites, especially by abandoning issues important to white voters, is the road to political suicide.”
Instead, he argued that the GOP would need to awaken the slumbering consciousness of the so-called “Middle American Radicals” — middle- and lower-class white voters who were core supporters of right-wing extremists like Joseph McCarthy and George Wallace.
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AP
The best way to do so, Francis argued, was “to make use of a Caesarism and the mass loyalties that a charismatic leader inspires.”
The American right’s long ride on the reactionary tiger
When Donald Trump first came down that golden escalator in 2015 to announce his candidacy, most observers dismissed him as a joke. As he rose in the polls, the mainstream right saw him as less funny and more of a threat. In January 2016, the flagship conservative magazine National Review dedicated an entire issue, titled “Against Trump,” to reading him out of the movement.
But as we came to learn, elite disapproval proved unable to withstand Trump’s ability to harness the rage of Francis’s Middle American Radicals. The conservative movement, conquered, bent the knee — bringing the radicals out from the shadows and into positions of power.
A few lifelong conservatives have since come to ask themselves: “How did it come to this?”
Matthew Continetti has an insider’s perspective on this question. Founder of a right-wing news site called the Washington Free Beacon, he is currently a senior fellow at the conservative American Enterprise Institute. The conservative movement is not just his professional career, but also personal: He is the son-in-law of Bill Kristol, a leading light of the movement turned Never Trumper.
Continetti’s new book The Right, a history of (as the subtitle puts it) “the hundred year war for American conservatism,” tells the story of a mainstream conservative movement that tried to include the far right in its political coalition while maintaining control — a balancing act that started failing the second Trump began running.
For his part, Continetti has played the Trump ascendancy coyly. He has both effusively praised Trump, writing in 2018 that “for Republicans, it doesn’t get much better than this,” and called for the president’s impeachment after the events of January 6 — making him the embodiment of the internal conflict at the heart of his book.
The bulk of The Right is devoted to explaining how modern conservatism rose to challenge the hegemonic liberalism of FDR, eventually emerging as a dominant force in American politics. Scholars like libertarian economist Friedrich Hayek developed the raw intellectual materials for what would become conservatism. Popularizers like National Review founder William F. Buckley synthesized these ideas into a coherent whole and brought them into the political realm. Leaders like Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan applied conservative doctrine to the political realm, seizing the reins of one of America’s two major parties.
In broad strokes, this is the fairly standard origin story that conservatives tell about themselves. What sets Continetti’s account apart is a willingness to engage more honestly with the darker side of the movement — how a movement that claimed to venerate the American founding and Constitution repeatedly aligned itself with forces that stood against some of its most cherished principles.
Take Joe McCarthy, the communist-hunting demagogic senator. At the height of McCarthy’s powers in 1953, Buckley and co-author L. Brent Bozell wrote a book — titled McCarthy and His Enemies — that criticized his excesses but mostly defended him from his critics. Years after McCarthy’s fall from grace, in 1968, Buckley still described him as a man ultimately pushing a decent anti-communism.
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AP
In one of Continetti’s deftest passages, he draws a subtle equivalence between the reasoning behind the conservative defense of McCarthy and its contemporary embrace of Trump:
McCarthy had enveloped the Right in his elaborate conspiracy theory. He fed off conservative alienation from government, from media, from higher education. For a time, it seemed as though this strategy of condemning American institutions as irrevocably corrupted was popular and might succeed. It could not, of course. Ultimately fantasies cannot withstand the pressure of reality.
Here Continetti exposes a central danger for the conservative movement: Its alliance with the radical right over shared antipathy to the mainstream tends to bleed over, inexorably, into outright sympathy for the radicals.
In the late 1950s and 1960s, the John Birch Society — a grassroots radical right organization that pitched a McCarthy-style conspiracy theory about a creeping communist takeover — emerged as a potent political force.
At first, conservatism’s most prominent leaders chose to tolerate the organization. Barry Goldwater said he disagreed with Birchers on some issues but saw “no reason to take a stand against” them; Buckley said he hoped the group “thrives” (with the caveat that they tone down conspiracy theories directed at Republicans like Eisenhower). In private, Continetti records, these men would admit that the Birchers were absurd and dangerous — but necessary for the movement’s cause.
Conservatives did eventually break with the Birchers after using them to gain a political foothold. And for some time, they really did have success channeling the radicals without succumbing — keeping the fringe “cabined off,” as Continetti puts it, due in no small part to America’s rivalry with the Soviet Union.
But almost immediately after the Cold War, the equilibrium began to wobble. In 1992 and 1996, Pat Buchanan — an anti-immigration extremist who had held important positions in the Nixon and Reagan White Houses — ran for the Republican presidential nomination. Those radical right campaigns, both advised by Buchanan’s friend Sam Francis, were more successful than many expected.
“There was no doubt that Buchanan connected with large numbers of grassroots conservatives and GOP voters,” Continetti writes. “That Republican leaders sought to handle him with kid gloves…signified a malaise within conservatism.”
This is an admirably frank assessment, but one that also lets the conservative center off a little too easy — treating them as merely accommodating illiberal forces rather than acting illiberally themselves, as they frequently did in the post-Cold War era.
In 1994, a new crop of hard-right conservatives entered Congress and, under House Speaker Newt Gingrich, reoriented the party towards a no-holds-barred legislative style scornful of historic norms. In Bush v. Gore, the Supreme Court’s conservatives embraced dubious legal logic to elevate George W. Bush to the presidency; once in office, Bush proceeded to shred civil liberties in the name of fighting terror. After Barack Obama’s election, the rise of the Tea Party led to another far-right resurgence in the Republican Party — one embraced, despite its clear racist overtones, by the party leadership.
Mainstream conservatives were not pure victims of a hostile radical right takeover: Their in-principle commitment to democracy and liberal rights was always thinner than their paeans to the Constitution made it seem. A movement with a history of sacrificing democratic principles in pursuit of policy and political victories was always vulnerable to a demagogue — as Donald Trump would prove in 2016.
Continetti seems to condemn the Trump presidency in the book’s penultimate chapter, but his assessment is colored by the tendencies in conservatism he himself diagnosed. In Continetti’s view, the Trump presidency was not necessarily rotted from the core, but was a largely successful enterprise ruined almost single-handedly by the Capitol riot:
If Trump had followed the example of his predecessors and conceded power graciously and peacefully, he would have been remembered as a disruptive but consequential populist leader who, before the coronavirus pandemic, presided over an economic boom [and] reoriented America’s opinion of China… Instead, when historians write about the Trump era, they will do so through the lens of January 6.
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In the final chapter, he argues that the future of conservatism rests in a kind of Trumpism without Trump: one that incorporates “the modifications to conservative policy positions that Donald Trump forced on the movement [while] untangling the Republican party and conservative movement from Donald Trump.”
Continetti’s faith in the movement’s power to channel the forces behind Trumpism, even after January 6, is an unintentional vindication of one of his book’s core lessons: that riding the radical right tiger is fundamental to conservatism’s political strategy.
How power corrupted conservatism
Unlike Continetti, Tim Miller has made a decisive break with Trump and the Republican Party. A longtime Republican campaign operative who worked for John McCain in 2008, the Republican National Committee in 2012, and Jeb Bush in 2016, he was one of the authors of the now-infamous “Republican autopsy” after the 2012 election, which argued that the party should embrace a more socially moderate agenda (especially on immigration) to win over younger voters and people of color.
Miller’s just-released book Why We Did It attempts to tell the story of how he went from Republican stalwart to Never Trumper — and why the overwhelming majority of his friends and coworkers did not.
Miller points to the strategy laid out by Continetti as a key source of rot: that decades of courting far-right supporters helped convince Republicans that they could stoke reactionary fervor while simultaneously controlling their real-world influence.
“Those of us at the Republican National Committee, on the Hill, and throughout various GOP campaign high commands were under the impression that we were wise enough to be the self-imposed limits on the base’s excesses,” he writes.
Miller uses himself as an example of the psychology at work — a long-closeted gay man who worked for a party that opposed his fundamental rights. He describes himself, and most political operatives, coping with such tensions by treating politics as more of a game they played for a living than something with real-world stakes.
Once you start playing the game, it’s very hard to quit. Your professional success and financial well-being depend on continued advancement in the party. The demanding nature of the job leaves limited time for socializing and hobbies. Your coworkers become your social circle, your job your entire identity.
When your entire life centers on the party, you contort your own psychology to justify unconditional allegiance — even when someone you despise becomes its leader. Miller illustrates the power of this psychology, and the way in which it contorted the entire Republican Party, through a series of vignettes and case studies of high-profile Republicans he knows personally.
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Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — who Miller recalls cornering him and Jeb Bush in a New York bar for hours to rant about Trump — believed converting to Trumpism would better position him to influence key decisions. Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), the formerly moderate lead author of the GOP autopsy report, correctly judged Trumpism to be the best way to advance her career.
The most affecting such portrait in Miller’s book is of his formerly close friend Caroline Wren, a top Trump fundraiser who helped plan the January 6 rally. Miller describes Wren as kind and empathetic; in 2015, she was so affected by the Syrian refugee crisis that she flew to Germany to help resettle children seeking asylum.
Yet this person, somehow, ended up as an enabler for Donald Trump. Today, she still refuses to admit that Biden won the election.
When Miller presses her on why, she says her attraction to Trump was “probably all negative” — that she had come to despise liberals so much that she was willing to help Trump burn it all down. This idea, that America’s greatest enemy is overweening liberalism, is what justified the political alliance with the far right even among the most high-minded conservative intellectuals.
Joe McCarthy had the right enemies, so his excesses could be forgiven. The Birchers could help fight the liberals, so they needed to be tolerated and even appeased (for a time). Trump may have tried to undermine democracy, but at least he can give us the Supreme Court.
In creating or capturing a series of institutions — think tanks, magazines, activist groups, and above all the Republican Party — the conservative movement built a political entity that could help it challenge liberalism. But this body was so oriented toward anti-liberal politics that it could muster little resistance against a radical right infection; once a serious enough case presented, the virus swiftly consumed the host. And after it did, the social and professional structure of these institutions compelled nearly everyone involved to get with the program — even at the cost of abandoning democratic institutions.
The Supreme Court’s rulings on abortion, guns, and religion may have many conservatives thinking it was all worth it: Despite the indignities, their partnership with Trump got them the policy victories they wanted. And with Trump facing mounting legal trouble while Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis continues rising in the 2024 primary polls, they may believe in their power to create a Trumpism without Trump.
But the split screen last week between the January 6 hearings and the Supreme Court’s seismic decisions couldn’t have been more instructive on the dangers of this belief — twinned reminders of what the Republicans were willing to countenance and what it won in the process. The only two Republicans who dared to join the January 6 Committee, Adam Kinzinger and Liz Cheney, are (respectively) retiring and facing a daunting primary challenge. A Republican who stood up to Trump’s lies — Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers — nonetheless affirmed he’d still vote for the former president in 2024.
What America faces now is a conservatism unbounded. While the movement of the past regularly partnered with the radical right, and even shared some of its beliefs, it also would on occasion police it — belatedly turning out the Birchers and Sam Francis. Today’s conservatism has jettisoned that modicum of caution. It’s a conservatism that isn’t conservative but downright revolutionary.
And having had a taste of victory, there is no sign that the Republican Party is willing, or even capable, of reimposing the limits that once made it safe for democratic politics.
Lanhee Chen isn’t the traditional Republican pick in California. That’s the point.
On paper, Lanhee Chen seems like a perfectly fit candidate to be California’s top fiscal watchdog. The 43-year-old Bay Area denizen holds four degrees from Harvard; he teaches public policy at Stanford; he has deep policy experience working for both political parties; and he isn’t an average white guy. He was — literally — born on the Fourth of July.
But there’s an elephant in the room: He’s running as a Republican.
A Democrat has held the office of state controller since the 1970s, but Chen emerged as the top vote-getter in the June primary; he racked up about 2.4 million votes, or just under 40 percent of all votes cast. But it’s hard to say that that leaves him as the favorite for the general election. He faced a field of serious Democratic opponents who raked in about 60 percent of the vote combined and will face Malia Cohen, who serves on the state’s tax commission, like the last two controllers.
Chen isn’t like other Republicans running in races around the country this year. His experience has been firmly in the party’s moderate establishment, television punditry, and, more recently, academia. He’s not swearing fealty to former President Donald Trump, and never challenged the legitimacy of President Joe Biden’s election. His immigrant, minority background gives him a different perspective on how the party should posture itself, and how the controller’s office should work. And he’s daring to offer a different vision for his state’s dying Republican Party — even as it clings to pyrrhic victories in pockets of the West Coast.
That his party will listen to his pitch is dubious. But that the state’s voters will care is a bet he’s willing to take.
Who is Lanhee Chen?
Chen is quick to list the ways he’s different from other Republicans in California. Born to Taiwanese immigrants, he grew up in Rowland Heights, a neighborhood with a large Taiwanese American community about 25 miles west of Los Angeles, and embedded himself in a world of civics, speaking, and political nerdiness.
He founded his public high school’s chapter of the Junior State of America (a youth political education group), and competed in Lincoln-Douglas debate. While in college, he participated in Harvard Model Congress, an annual college conference that simulates how Congress works — while also rooming with future Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). He says he felt motivated by his parents’ immigrant experiences to understand how American government worked.
“My parents didn’t have a family business to go into, they didn’t have a lineage,” Chen told me over a Zoom interview from his home in Mountain View, California, where he was recovering from a Covid-19 infection. “That mentality from a very early age was something that I took on, that you have to work hard, you have to live by the rules, and you have to do your best to succeed in a society that gives you a lot of opportunity to do so.”
He spent his post-college years as a political consultant, getting an education in advocacy at the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in 2003, before a law degree and PhD at Harvard.
He advised former President George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign on health policy around that time, and when Mitt Romney prepared a run for the presidency in 2007, Chen jumped at the opportunity. It was a short-lived campaign, but Chen’s political future was just starting: he taught for a year at UC Berkeley in 2010 before joining Team Romney again in 2011, for Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign as its top policy director. By then he was described as a “prodigy,” a “dynamo,” and the campaign’s “orchestra leader.”
“Here was a guy who was kind of wonky at heart, incredibly smart, and a very principled guy at his core,” Chen said. “We didn’t agree on everything, obviously. But at the end of the day, I was really, really fortunate to have that experience working with him.”
The two maintain a friendship, Chen said, and Romney emphasized Chen’s “invaluable” counsel in a statement to Vox that also endorsed his run for state controller.
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Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images
By the time Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) launched his presidential bid in 2015, and the campaign hired him as a part-time policy adviser, Chen was already a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution and teaching at Stanford. He remembers watching in disbelief at the roaring reception Trump received in the 2016 primary, and establishment Republicans’ inability to crowd Trump out.
“Trump came to the California party convention,” he said, “And I remember seeing the images of throngs of people who were around and near the hotel, just wanting to catch a glimpse of him. I remember thinking, This is different. And I don’t think I fully appreciated it at the time.”
Everyone knows what happened next. Chen, meanwhile, returned to Hoover and branched out into a new career path: media punditry. He became a political commentator for CNN in 2016, and frequented most of the Sunday morning shows. Before making a decision to run, he also wrote a column for CNN Opinion.
Now he’s running a race himself, attempting to carve out a path as a reasonable Republican without attacking Trump’s legacy or alienating the voters he still influences. That challenge was difficult in his primary race, and it will only get harder now.
Can a Republican win in California?
California is a uniquely difficult state if you’re a Republican politician aspiring for relevance. The California Republican Party has been razed in the last decade and exists mostly as a regional power, holding a few congressional seats inland and in Southern California, three mayoralties out of the state’s 10 largest cities, and a modest minority in the state legislature.
It’s almost cliché to mention, but no Republican has won statewide office since 2006, when Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger won reelection. Registered Democrats outnumber registered Republicans by a nearly 2 to 1 margin, and in any given election year, self-identified independents can outnumber Republicans. Republicans recently eked out a second-place ranking in voter registration numbers during the flashy attempt to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom last year, but even with special rules that required a simple majority to oust the governor, Republicans fell 11 percentage points below the needed margin.
“For the last 20 years, the letter ‘R’ after a name is a scarlet letter in California politics,” Garry South, a longtime Democratic strategist and campaign manager in California, told me. “Democrats carried all eight statewide constitutional offices in 2010, all eight in 2014, all eight in 2018. And there’s no reason to believe that that pattern is going to change in 2022.”
Republicans are still competitive in the Central Valley and the sparsely populated rural mountainous communities of Northern California, as well as in the historic birthplace of Reaganite conservativism, Southern California, where Republicans managed to flip back three congressional seats after losses in 2018’s “blue wave.” But the state party has struggled to build any infrastructure to sustain a statewide effort. Both the party and candidates lack the money needed to sustain the years-long effort needed to persuade voters across the state.
“These are pyrrhic victories. The party’s death spiral is over, the body is there, but it’s a zombie,” Mike Madrid, the former political director for the CAGOP and a longtime Republican strategist, told me about the future of the party.
As is the case elsewhere in the US, Trump casts a shadow on the California GOP. No polls have captured Trump’s favorability in the state since the presidential election (when polls showed he had the support of nearly 90 percent of Republican voters), but the most energetic, activist members of the party are still willing to embrace the former president.
But while Republican candidates in red — and even some purple — states can find success by hewing close to Trump; that’s not going to work for Chen, who needs to win over Democrats and independents. That leaves him with a conundrum: He can’t count too much on the state’s Republican Party — though the party, along with Romney, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, and the Los Angeles Times, has endorsed him in the race. He also can’t outright attack his party when he needs most of its voters to make the race competitive.
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He’s attempted to find a middle path. On Fox News, he’ll attack Newsom’s handling of the pandemic, but not vaccination. He won’t say who he voted for in 2016 or 2020, and hasn’t spoken up aggressively against Trump, his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, or his crusade to elect election deniers to Congress and state offices across the country. He’s not embarked on an effort to revive conservatism, elect more Republicans, or rebuild the party of Lincoln and Reagan.
“I’m going to run my own campaign,” he said. “There are going to be a lot of other people on the ticket and running nationwide, but I’m going to focus on my message and delivering what I believe is the core set of my beliefs on transparency, accountability, and the value of good fiscal management.”
So far, he’s tried to keep his pitch tied to his qualifications. “The reality is that a good controller needs to be focused — not spending their time out worrying about issues that they have no control over — but really focused on how do we make the state work better? How do we make sure that we spend smarter?” he told me.
Madrid took a dim view of this strategy when speaking to me, arguing that if Chen aspires to successfully follow Govs. Charlie Baker (R-MA) and Larry Hogan (R-MD) as models for winning as Republicans in Democratic states, he needs to be willing to take aggressive public stances on Trump.
“Lanhee, as much as he’s been a student in everything else, gets an F, candidly, in the leadership and courage departments. Where was he when the country and the party needed him most? He was silent,” Madrid said. “Nobody cares if you can balance the checkbook or write checks better than anybody else when you failed to seize the obvious moment in history, which was to stand up and do the right thing. That’s what Californians and people are looking for.”
To be competitive, Chen will also need to ramp up his fundraising operation. So far, he’s raised about $3 million for the race. His Democratic rival, Cohen, has about $2 million so far.
South, the Democratic consultant, estimates that “to run a decent race for statewide office in California is about a $20 to 30 million proposition.” Los Angeles’s expensive primary for mayor — conservative Democrat (and former Republican) Rick Caruso spent $41 million, about $37 million more than his closest rival, for a second-place finish — shows that even massive fundraising or spending isn’t enough to win a race. But in a state as large as California, with many of the US’s most expensive media markets, and with Chen’s low name recognition, he is likely to need a lot more money.
Ultimately, Chen’s path to victory relies upon winning over all of California’s Republican voters, and putting together a coalition of independents and fiscally conservative Democrats large enough to overcome Cohen’s structural advantages. How big that coalition is will depend on turnout. Should November mirror the June 7 primary, in which participation was a staggeringly small 32 percent, a near-decade low, it is possible (though still unlikely) that Chen could eke out a surprise win.
Why Chen thinks he can break the streak
Chen knows the political wind is blowing against him, but he hopes voters look at him for his credentials. “The numbers are what they are. I’m not going to sit here and try and spin you and say the numbers are not that bad,” Chen said. “But my message is aimed at voters across the political spectrum. And we’re going to be talking to people who may be self-identified Democrats or independents who lean Democrat. But the reality is, they don’t like the direction our state is headed. And they want some accountability for it.”
That pitch is part of the reason the Los Angeles Times’s editorial board endorsed him, but it will be a tough sell. Part of his strategy has been to assure people he’s focused on being a great controller, and isn’t pursuing this job to later seek a higher office. But when he talked to me about his campaigning so far, he sounded more like a candidate for governor or senator, listing out stories of conversations with Californians frustrated with rising costs of living, homelessness, and crime — things he’d have no control over as controller.
He told me he planned on spending more time in Southern California, especially among Asian American and Latino voters, because those are the folks he grew up around, and because both groups have shifted toward Republicans in recent election cycles and felt disenchanted with Democratic incumbents.
He is also hoping that the general frustrations with incumbents and parties in power — before the Supreme Court decision ending the constitutional right to an abortion, the trend of governing parties losing badly in midterm elections meant a red wave seemed to be a given — may help him in a midterm year. The race is also a sleepier contest traditionally, so he might benefit from voters willing to split their vote down the ballot. There’s certainly precedent for that happening, like in 2006, when Schwarzenegger won reelection and Republican Steve Poizner won the insurance commissioner’s race, while Democrats swept all other state offices and retained majorities in the legislature.
Ultimately, whether Chen wins or loses will be a signal about the future of the California Republican Party. He’s possibly the best candidate Republicans have put up in the state in years. But if the most moderate, clean-cut candidate can’t put the party back on the map, can anyone?