The Pundit's Progress
The pundit business runs on credibility like a car runs on gas. Fill up too much and you'll flood the engine. Run empty and you're stuck on the shoulder watching traffic pass. The trick is knowing when to refuel and how much to put in the tank.
The right-wing commentator starts life as something else entirely. Maybe they marched against war, wrote for the college paper about social justice, or did some ketamine at an EDM festival. Could be they voted for Carter or Dukakis or backed Ralph Nader. Their early writing carries the perfume of progressive thought. That scent grows fainter as the years pass.
The transformation happens slowly, like watching rust form on a fender. First comes doubt about a particular policy. Then questions about the movement's direction. Soon they're penning pieces for conservative outlets about their "journey away from the left." As always, the journey sells better than the destination.
Having been a leftist gives them authority the lifelong conservative lacks. They know the secret handshakes, the passwords, the hidden doors. When they criticize their former allies, it carries the weight of insider knowledge. "I was there," they say. "I know how these people think."
But timing matters. Stay too long in the middle and you risk becoming irrelevant. Move too far right too fast and you lose the moderate audience. The sweet spot lies somewhere between reasonable doubt and total conversion. Smart pundits milk this transition period like farmers at dawn.
The left-wing version follows similar beats but with different lyrics. Their origin story often involves breaking free from conservative religion or coming out as gay in a Republican family. The personal becomes political becomes profitable. Early pieces appear in mainstream outlets hungry for authentic voices of transformation: "How I Left the Right” in The Atlantic, "How I Left the Left” in Commentary.
Both sides face the same trap. Success breeds expectations. The audience wants more revelation, more denunciation, more proof of loyalty to the new tribe. What starts as thoughtful criticism hardens into dogma. Nuance dies by degrees.
Take the right-wing pundit who begins questioning affirmative action. Fair enough. But soon they're claiming universities are secret Marxist training camps. Once again, the point stands. Then they're selling gold on infomercials and peddling books about demon-possessed breakfast cereals and finding reptilians and gray aliens under every coffee table.
The left-wing writer follows their own downward spiral. The moderate critique of religious fundamentalism becomes a wholesale attack on faith itself. Questions about police misconduct expand into calls to abolish all law enforcement and eventually to subsidize gender reassignments for all released prisoners, the entire Cleveland Browns roster, and Santa’s reindeer. Each escalation shrinks their audience while intensifying the loyalty of those who remain.
Geography plays its part. New York and DC function as pressure cookers for bubble-boy political opinions. Pundits and media mavens cluster in the same bars, the same restaurants, the same television studios. They breathe the same recycled air and huff the same farts until independent thought becomes impossible. Group think isn't a choice but a survival mechanism. "We recommend to our writers not to consort with other people in the media," Splice Today publisher Russ Smith said many years ago, when he was running New York Press. Few are wise enough to heed this advice.
The final stage looks the same from either direction. The once-thoughtful voice becomes a carnival barker, hawking increasingly bizarre theories and products to an ever-shrinking lunatic fringe. They end up preaching to a choir that demands constant proof of faith through increasingly extreme pronouncements.
Some escape this fate. They maintain enough credibility to keep their mainstream platforms while pushing their chosen agenda. But they're rare birds in a landscape filled with cautionary tales. Most fly too close to the ideological sun and crash into the sea of irrelevance.
The trick isn't avoiding bias—everyone has that. The trick’s maintaining enough distance from your own convictions to see them clearly. But that's hard to do when your paycheck depends on presenting a patina of passionate certainty. Doubt doesn't juice those Substack subscriptions or draw cable news bookings.
Maybe that's why the best pundits eventually stop being pundits at all. They evolve into something else—historians, daytime talk-show hosts, novelists, academics, party insiders, big-time Ponzi scheme "new media" disruptors. They trade the sugar rush of daily outrage for the slower satisfactions of deeper thought, easy money, or longer cons.
But there's always a new crop ready to take their place. Fresh voices beginning their own journey from one side to the other, convinced they'll be different, they'll maintain perspective, they'll avoid the traps that caught their predecessors. Most won't. The gravitational pull of extremism is too strong, the rewards of moderation too meager. To truly belong to the club, you’ve got to be willing to do the elephant walk.
The cycle continues, endless as our climate-changing seasons. Today's moderate becomes tomorrow's zealot becomes next year's cautionary tale, selling WiFi-blocking crucifixes or chakra-stimulating power crystals depending on which side they’ve sided with. The only difference is the speed of the transformation and the particular flavors of outrage being peddled.
That's the pundit's progress—from thoughtful critic to true believer to historical footnote. The smart ones cash out before the final act. The rest keep performing long after the audience has left, shouting their delusional certainties into an empty theater.