Time for conservatives to trade the megaphone for the gavel
Conservatives are ascendant across the western world, like progressives were ten years ago. Let's hope they don't make the same mistakes progressives did.
History may be repeating itself in the United States, but not in the way many people seem to think.
No, President Trump is not America’s Hitler. (Neither is Elon Musk.) Trump may admire some things about Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping and joke (or not?) about annexing foreign countries. Trump and some in his inner circle seem to admire Viktor Orbán, and his illiberal democracy in Hungary. But the U.S. system of checks and balances is far, far stronger than it is in any of those other countries.
China, Russia, and Iran have repeatedly tried to meddle in our elections and they have largely failed to have an influence. The January 6th attack and the “stop the steal” effort to overturn the 2020 election results were powerful symbolic attacks on American democracy, but they came nowhere close to actually stopping the peaceful transfer of power, even though Trump still held all of the powers of the presidency at the time! The Trump administration today may be testing some constitutional limits of Presidential power, but so far they are also always making a public legal argument about why they have the constitutional right to do what they’re doing, and they are following court orders when they lose. So, if you’re worried that we won’t have elections in 2026 or 2028, calm down. (But keep exercising your constitutional rights to speak up, sue, etc. That’s an important part of the system of checks and balances!)
Before we write off the idea that history is repeating itself, though, stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
After one political party presides over four years of what the public sees as chaos—chaos that hurts the average voter and the country’s standing in the world—the other party wins the White House with a sizable electoral-college victory, along with control of both houses of Congress, despite a relatively narrow popular-vote victory. The consensus is that moderate voters just wanted a return to normalcy, not a radical lurch to the other side.
Although the new President does enact some bold and popular policy changes, which reverse unpopular excesses of the previous administration, he also tricks himself into believing that he has a sweeping mandate to move the country far in the direction of his biggest partisan supporters. He pays more attention to pleasing everyone in his party than to governing for everyone in the country. He surrounds himself with an army way-too-online staffers and advisers, many of whom are obsessed with race and gender while accusing their opponents of being the real bigots. He and his staffers confuse their way-too-online partisan obsessions with the interests of the average voter. The President’s most zealous way-too-online supporters use Twitter (or X) to mob anyone in the party who dissents. He and his staffers stretch the constitutional limits of their power, which hands them some embarrassing court rebukes and opens the door for the next President from the other party to similarly abuse their power.
By the way, the President—who is 78 years old on inauguration day—seems to occasionally forget some important things, and goes on to be increasingly managed by his unelected staff as his term goes on. His party’s political machine does everything it can to marginalize any moderates among their ranks who dare point any of this out. At the start of his term as President, the opposition party is at one of its weakest moments in decades. At the end of his term, his missteps allow the other party to hand his successor an embarrassing electoral defeat.
Am I talking about President Biden in 2021, or President Trump today? If you’re not sure, then I’ve made my point.
Trading the megaphone for the gavel
In 2015—as the power of feminist cancel culture was just starting to ascend on college campuses—feminist law professor Janet Halley wrote a now-famous Harvard Law Review article called “Trading the Megaphone for the Gavel in Title IX Enforcement”.
Halley’s thesis was that, while feminists had been insurgents—“speaking truth to power” but lacking power themselves—they benefitted from jettisoning nuance in favor of clear and emotionally powerful messaging, and from prioritizing the needs and rights of some groups over others. This was the ‘megaphone’ posture. Nuance, fairness, and ‘bothsidesism’ sometimes get in the way when you’re trying to raise awareness about an issue that those in power aren’t taking seriously.
However, now that feminism had become powerful on campuses and in the federal government, Halley argued that these virtues of the megaphone posture were becoming vices. They were leading to abuses of power. They were harming other groups that the progressive movement was supposed to care about, such as black men. And they risked alienating the public in ways that could threaten the durable success of the feminist movement. In other words, it was time to trade the megaphone for the gavel. The ‘gavel’ metaphor (referring to a judge’s gavel) represents the duty of those in power to consider facts and nuances carefully, and weigh rights, responsibilities, and fairness for all, not just for their original core constituency.
As we now know, too few progressives in positions of power took Halley’s advice. Instead, 2015 was the beginning of the ‘woke’ decade, which ended up causing significant harm to the progressive movement, the groups they supposedly care about, and society as a whole, through increases in crime and illegal immigration, learning losses in schools, and erosion of social and inter-group cohesion, to name a few specific examples. Progressives made similar mistakes, and caused similar harms, in other western countries as well.
But the megaphone left wasn’t all bad. It deserves credit for pushing issues like racial inequality and climate change to the front of public consciousness, even if it often did so in ways that lacked nuance and judgment, and grated on the average person. In other words, the megaphone left was an effective megaphone, but it failed as a gavel.
Now, in 2025, the megaphone left’s excesses have caused the political right to become powerful, both in the United States and across the western world. And the megaphone right deserves some credit for putting the megaphone left’s failures on the political and intellectual maps. But will the now-powerful political right trade the megaphone for the gavel, or will they repeat the megaphone left’s mistakes?
My impression is that influencers in the coalition that got Trump elected and/or are sympathetic to sizable parts of his agenda—including longtime conservatives, MAGA supporters, recent converts from tech, moderates and liberals fed up with progressive excesses, etc.—are currently fighting this out (not always with mutually exclusive positions), and time will tell who wins.
For example, Chris Rufo argues that the governing coalition should exclude “principled conservatives” and “reasonable centrists” (both in scare quotes), on the grounds that they don’t have enough skin in the game and they don’t care enough about getting things done. Helen Pluckrose (of the Sokal Squared/grievance studies hoax fame) describes a growing rift between (small-l) liberal and illiberal factions within the anti-woke movement. Konstantin Kisin has, on a few occasions, been critical of a segment on the right (which he calls the “woke right”) that he sees as mirroring the bigotry, nihilism, illiberalism, and anti-western rhetoric of the woke left. Elon Musk has mostly been a cheerleader and enforcer of whatever President Trump is saying recently, but he previously sharply criticized segments of the MAGA base that he sees as racist and too opposed to legal immigration.
Oh, and here’s Tomi Lahren on the state of today’s DEI discourse:
A gavel posture doesn’t mean you can’t make big changes.
Before I lecture conservatives too much, I’ll put my cards on the table: I might be one of those “reasonable centrists” Chris Rufo is warning you about. I have some views (e.g. on the importance public investments in public goods and using government power to correct market failures) that align with American liberals, and others (e.g. on the importance of markets, a strong shared national identity and patriotism, supporting family values, and being tough on crime) that align with American conservatives. I don’t vote in U.S. elections (I have a green card but I am not yet a citizen), but I have made no secret of the fact that I wasn’t thrilled with either choice in 2024. However, I would push back against any notion that I have no skin in the game (e.g., I have taken intellectual risks as a scholar and career risks as a whistleblower, both before getting tenure), or that I have no appetite for change to the progressive regime in institutions like higher education.
With that throat-clearing out of the way, let me say this: one of the most common logical errors that megaphones use to dismiss gavels is that being discerning and measured, and looking out for the interests of all voters (not just those on your own side), are at odds with making change and showing strength when in power. I would argue that if you care about making change that makes a difference and lasts (rather than change that provokes backlash, is short lived, accidentally undermines its own goals, and empowers extremists on the other side), and if you care about strength of character (not strength of schadenfreude), the gavel posture is the one you need.
Again, we’ve seen this unfold on the political left over the past decade. Academia and other institutions of the left allowed their megaphones to move fast, break things, and sideline gavels, all in the name of making rapid change—change that was ‘too important’ to entertain gavels’ hemming and hawing—on issues like racial inequality and climate change. And look where that got us. Crime, drugs, unsheltered homelessness, and capital flight have devastated poor urban communities. Educational achievement gaps have widened, especially in some of the bluest cities and states. The woke movement played a significant role in getting Trump elected, and DEI has become so unpopular that it has tainted tangentially related fields of study concerning inequality and women in the eyes of the federal government. We passed one big, federal policy on climate change—whose durability will probably owe most to its moderation and appeal across the aisle, not its ambition—but we are out of the Paris agreement; we have a solar and wind opponent in the White House; and the climate movement is widely seen as an electoral and popular liability to Democrats, even though the issue of climate change actually still helps Democrats in elections. I could go on, but you get the point: progressives would have much more of the things they claim to want if the Democrats spent more time listening to people like Matt Yglesias, and less time listening to people like those running their recent DNC leadership conference.
Which brings me back to conservatives. They could spend the next four years securing the border, without doing anything cruel like separating families; developing a thorough and careful approach to cutting government waste, without throwing away important, lifesaving, and popular programs they haven’t taken the time to understand; aggressively rooting out illegal race and gender (and ideological) discrimination in the public sector, private sector, and higher education, without wrecking America’s world-leading engines of science, innovation and education, running roughshod over the First Amendment, empowering the racists and sexists within their own ranks, or reflexively yelling “DEI!” every time a plane crashes or a minority serves in a leadership role; fostering thoughtful conversations about gender and women’s rights, which appropriately safeguard minors from irreversible life-altering decisions and acknowledge biological reality, but which also allow everyone to live their lives with dignity and non-discrimination; and getting tough on crime without bringing back mass incarceration or widespread racial profiling. All of these changes would be meaningful, popular, and therefore durable.
Or, conservatives could spend the next four years cowering in fear of their loudest, most extreme, and most online elements—those who blast any call for discernment and moderation as insufficient commitment to the cause, and who try to oust any pundit or politician in their coalition who dissents. Progressives would have no high ground, because they just spent a decade doing the same things. But, if conservatives do this, my prediction is that they will significantly increase the odds of having a resurgent woke Democratic administration in the White House in 2029. Rinse and repeat.
As I’ve argued before, the left and right political extremes pretend to be enemies, but they are actually best friends.
It’s really not that hard
Let me be slightly more specific and blunt.
I’m for cutting waste in government spending and getting the deficit under control at the minimum possible cost to the U.S. public and U.S. interests. I think Elon Musk is a brilliant guy with a real track record of cutting waste in his companies. But I’m for the U.S. government upholding its oath to the Constitution and respecting the separation of powers, which gives Congress—not the White House—control of the purse. I hope that Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) will use their vast intellects, creativity, and work ethic to come up with a thoughtful, comprehensive, and transparent proposal for cutting waste in government, and that Congress will legislate any and all parts of their proposal that serve the country’s interests.
I’m against wasteful and ideological spending laundered as ‘foreign aid’. But I’m for actual foreign aid that saves children from starving and promotes key U.S. strategic interests. I’m against lazily or haphazardly throwing the latter away and conflating it with the former.
I’m for border security, and for getting tough on crime, drug trafficking, and the cartels. I’m for encouraging NATO members (including Canada) to meet their 2%-of-GDP military spending commitments. But I’m against starting pre-textual trade wars with our closest ally and threatening to annex them. (Full disclosure: I am a Canadian citizen.)
I’m for cracking down on illegal government censorship and ending politically motivated prosecutions (which Trump’s hush money case in New York probably was). I am also against politically motivated retaliatory purges of the Department of Justice and FBI.
I’m against discriminatory hiring, admissions, and promotion practices on college campuses. I’m against prioritizing ideology or demographics over merit, especially in life-and-death fields like medicine. I’m against ideological capture of academic institutions that degrades the scientific method and censors people and ideas. I agree that all of these things have become huge problems over the past decade, and that we probably need government intervention to solve these problems.
But I’m also against blunt-force anti-DEI policies that defund research grants with words like “women” or “inequality” in them. I’m especially against policies that pause cancer research while the government fishes for thoughtcrimes. I’m repulsed by unsubstantiated smears against helicopter pilots who died serving their country as “DEI hires” because they’re female. I believe that it’s markets’ job—markets for ideas, attention, and students—to decide which disciplines or lines of inquiry in academia are good and which are dead ends. It’s (mostly) not the government’s job.
I suspect that most Americans agree with me on these points. (I will write a post getting into the data on this soon.)
For the past two elections, swing voters have been begging for normalcy. They don’t want January 6, nor chaos in Congress and the executive branch, so they voted out Trump in 2020. They also don’t want revolving doors for criminals, undefended borders, and obsessive creation of racial hierarchies in the name of “antiracism”, so they voted out the Democrats in 2024. They want a country that is proud, strong, and for everyone.
I’m cautiously optimistic that at least one of the two parties will eventually figure this out. It’s really not that hard.
(The above clip, from the movie Road Trip, comes to my mind a lot when I watch political news. I suspect it also sums up the average voter’s feelings about the past decade in U.S. politics.)