He argued in favor of a gas tax. He was a defender of animal rights. He proposed paying reparations to African-Americans. He was fully opposed—on prudential, moral, and objective grounds—to Donald Trump.
And he was one of the two or three most important conservative minds of his generation. Charles Krauthammer was a man of many virtues, but high on the list was his heterodoxy.
A heterodox mind is one of the most valuable assets for a political writer. The most interesting people in this class are always the ones who have the capacity to surprise you. One of the reasons people enjoyed reading Krauthammer was that they could never be sure exactly where he would land. But his penchant for surprising his readers also functioned as a promise to them: You knew he was always telling you what he really thought. He was never simply toeing a line because that’s what his fellow-travelers (or the marketplace) demanded. He might be wrong, but he’d be wrong honestly. Which is the highest duty a writer owes to his reader.
That’s the writerly benefit of heterodoxy, but there’s a public benefit, too. All ideological and political systems tend toward conformity. The incentives for conforming to the dominant party, or ideological, consensus are too great and the penalties for dissent are too high. Consider, for example, how uniformly hawkish conservatives and Republicans became after 9/11. Or how quickly liberals and Democrats came to prize same-sex marriage over religious freedom in the aughts. When you look at politics through the lens of conformity, the degree to which everyone, on all sides, simply falls into line as a matter of course is shocking. Look at how quickly conservatives and Republicans lined up behind Trump in 2016. Look at how liberals and Democrats have shifted the goalposts on immigration and open borders.
But heterodox thinkers are like icebreakers patrolling a Nordic harbor in winter. They provide space for people to resist the pressures of conformity and think for themselves.
It doesn’t even matter if the heterodox mind is right or wrong on any given topic. The very fact of their in-group dissent makes the entire system of public debate function more effectively.
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Krauthammer’s nonconformity, however, went beyond—far beyond—the political. He was a trained physician who read Maimonides and whose two best and most enduring works are about space travel and chess. He was a man who had read everything, and was interested in everything else.
There is all sorts of sadness wrapped up in Krauthammer’s passing, but the one which I feel most deeply is this: They aren’t making any more of him.
Think about the number of people in the public square today with truly heterodox minds: George Will. Joan Didion. Phil Longman. Andrew Sullivan. It’s a short list and there aren’t a lot of people on it under the age of 50.
My great hope for Krauthammer’s legacy is that his example inspires young writers to look beyond politics for life’s great pleasures and, when they’re doing politics, to feel free—eager, even—to go off the reservation.
