A Field Guide to the Mid-Career Reversal

A note on the most reliable form of personal growth available to the modern political careerist, who once had principles, and who now has a corner office.

It is one of the most beautiful processes in nature. The young politician arrives in Washington with what he calls his principles. The principles are real. The principles have been shaped by his upbringing — his parents fled an authoritarian regime, the regime was Cuba, the lesson was that strongmen are the enemy of human dignity and must be opposed wherever they appear. He believes this. He says it on television. He says it with the fluent, slightly trembling intensity of a man who has practiced the saying of it in a mirror, but who also, in some interior chamber, means it. He is thirty-eight. He has good hair. He is going places.

Several years pass. The young politician runs for president. He runs against a man he describes, in front of a cheering crowd, as a con artist. He says this with feeling. He says this with what looks like alarm. He warns the country, with the urgency of a man who has read history, that the con artist is a threat to the conservative tradition, to the American republic, to the very ideals his parents fled to protect. He is correct. He is also losing the primary. The con artist is winning. The con artist is winning by saying, at higher volumes and with worse grammar, the things the young politician thought were beneath the office. The voters, asked to choose between the dignified version and the embarrassing version, have chosen, with what can only be called enthusiasm, the embarrassing version. The young politician concedes. He pledges, having pledged earlier in the cycle that he would do so, to support the nominee. The nominee is the con artist. The young politician supports the con artist. He still believes the things he said before. He says he still believes them. He just supports the con artist now. There is no contradiction here. There is, in fact, a kind of deepening. He is becoming, before our eyes, a more sophisticated version of himself.

This is the first stage of the reversal, and it is the most charming. The principles are still visible. The compromise is grudging. There is a quality of being held against one’s will. The young politician walks around the Senate looking slightly pained. He grills Cabinet appointees with what observers call “tough questions.” The questions are tough. The votes are not. He votes the way the party votes. He votes for the Cabinet appointees he just grilled. The grilling, on inspection, was a kind of performance. The performance was for the principles, which still live in him, somewhere, perhaps in a small velvet-lined box he checks on Sundays. The voting was for the future. The future requires the votes. The principles understand. The principles, after a while, stop checking the box.

The middle phase is the most psychologically interesting. This is the phase in which the politician begins to convince himself that the alignment with the con artist is not a betrayal of his principles but a sophisticated extension of them. The new alignment, he discovers, allows him to pursue his real values from a position of greater influence. The grandstanding of his earlier years was, on reflection, somewhat self-indulgent. The mature thing is to be in the room, where decisions are made. The room, of course, is the room of the con artist, and the decisions are the decisions of the con artist, but the politician now has access to the room, which means his principles have access to the room, which means, by a kind of geometric logic that is not quite spelled out but is felt very strongly, that his principles are now influencing the decisions of the room. This is why he stays. This is why he supports. This is why he votes against impeachment. He is not abandoning his principles. He is putting them in a position to win.

It is important, at this stage, to refrain from asking the politician to demonstrate where, exactly, his principles are influencing the decisions of the room. The politician does not have an answer. The politician has been asked, in fact, and the answer was a series of phrases that, on inspection, did not address the question. The phrases were grave. The phrases mentioned national interest, the long view, the importance of working within the system. The phrases were arranged in the rhythm of a man defending himself, and they had, beneath them, a certain hollow quality, like a wooden building whose interior has been quietly hollowed out by termites and which still, from the street, looks structurally sound.

The third phase is the magic. This is the phase in which the politician’s old positions begin to be retrieved, dusted off, and re-deployed in service of the con artist’s agenda — but with the meanings reversed. The politician once championed Ukraine against Russia. The politician now champions a peace deal favorable to Russia. The politician once described Vladimir Putin as a war criminal. The politician now describes Vladimir Putin as someone with whom productive conversations are possible. The politician once defended NATO with the kind of fervor usually reserved for personal religious conviction. The politician now explains that NATO is a complex alliance in need of “rebalancing.” None of these reversals are presented as reversals. They are presented as evolutions. They are presented as the natural development of a serious man’s thinking under changing global conditions. The conditions, on inspection, are that the boss has changed his mind, and the politician’s job is to defend the boss’s mind, and the politician has, accordingly, defended it. The principles, in their velvet-lined box, do not protest. The principles, by this point, are mostly dust.

What is remarkable about the third phase is the politician’s apparent serenity. He does not, at this point, seem troubled. He has stopped showing the small physical tells of the man whose words and beliefs are at war — the slight tightening around the eyes, the over-emphatic gesture, the half-second pause before the harder line. The pauses are gone. The gestures are smooth. The eyes are clear. He has, by some interior process that nobody outside has access to, made peace with whatever it is he has become. This peace is the most disturbing part of the whole transformation. It is one thing to watch a man betray his principles. It is another to watch the betrayal cease to register, in his own face, as betrayal. It is a third thing to watch him discover, in this new condition, the deepest professional satisfaction of his life.

For he is, it must be said, doing very well. The reward for the third phase is the position he could not otherwise have obtained. He is now Secretary of State. He is, in the official sense, the chief diplomat of the United States. He travels to capitals where, ten years earlier, he gave thunderous speeches about the importance of resisting authoritarian aggression, and he now sits across from authoritarian aggressors and explains, with the same fluency, why their aggression should be accommodated. The hosts notice the difference. The hosts are too polite to mention it. The hosts have their own histories with reversals, in some cases more dramatic than his, and they recognize a kindred spirit when they see one. The dinners are pleasant. The wine is good. The conversation glides, the way conversation glides between people who have all, in their own ways, traded the version of themselves they once had for the version of themselves they now are, and who have all, in different languages, made peace with the trade.

Back home, the people who knew him in his idealistic phase reach varying levels of equanimity about the change. Some of them write op-eds. The op-eds note, with a kind of weary precision, that the man who used to denounce the trading of principles for power has now traded his principles for power. The op-eds get five hundred shares on platforms owned by the same companies that benefit from his trade policies. The man himself does not read the op-eds. He has staff for that. The staff prepare summaries. The summaries are not flattering. The man receives the summaries, sets them aside, and goes to dinner. The dinner is fine. The dinner is, in fact, better than the dinner he used to have when he had principles. The wine is better. The company is more important. The lighting is more flattering. He looks across the table at his peers, who have made similar trades, and he sees, in their faces, the same small private knowledge that lives now in his own.

The technical name for what has occurred is, in the political science literature, “adaptation,” which is the same word biologists use to describe how lizards develop the capacity to grow back their tails. The analogy is not perfect, because lizards grow their tails back to escape predators, whereas the political adaptation is in the opposite direction — the adaptation is in service of the predator, who has eaten the previous tail and is now offering, in exchange, a corner office. But the underlying principle is the same. The species that adapts is the species that survives. The species that survives is the species that gets reproduced. The species that gets reproduced becomes, over generations, the entire ecosystem. We are watching, in real time, the emergence of an entirely new political species, and the species is doing very well, and the ecosystem is reorganizing itself around the species, and the older species — the ones who held positions, who could be relied upon to say the same thing in 2026 that they said in 2016 — are now, in evolutionary terms, the dodos. They will not survive the next election. The next election will be won by the new species, which has perfected the trick of saying anything to anyone with the same intensity, and meaning, by some adjusted definition, every word.

The man’s defenders, asked to explain the reversals, have developed a small repertoire of explanations. The world has changed, they say. The strategic situation requires new approaches. He is being pragmatic. He is being a team player. He is doing what serious people do when they are entrusted with serious responsibilities, which is to put aside their personal preferences and serve the larger project. The larger project, in every case, is the project of the man who once described him as a small-handed weakling and who he once described as a con artist. The larger project has not changed. Only their relationship to it has. Both men have, in the technical sense, kept their word about the other. Both men have, in the looser sense, found that the relationship can accommodate quite a bit of historical inconsistency, provided neither party brings it up.

What is funny, and it is funny in the specific way of all real political comedy, is that none of this is hidden. The whole transformation has occurred in public. The video clips of the previous positions are available on the same platforms that broadcast the current positions. The contradictions can be assembled in two minutes by anyone with a reasonable internet connection. The man himself does not deny them. He simply, when asked, does not engage with them. He answers a different question. The different question is the one he wishes had been asked. The different question gets answered with great fluency. The original question, the one about the contradiction, dissolves, the way most questions dissolve in modern political discourse, into the next question, which is also different, and which is also fluently answered, and so on, and so on, until the segment ends and the man goes home to his dinner.

This is the magic of the modern political reversal. It does not require denial. It does not require explanation. It does not even require the appearance of consistency. It requires only the calm, professional production of new statements that contradict the old statements, delivered with the same affect, in the same voice, by the same person, with no apparent awareness that any contradiction has occurred. The audience is meant to notice. The audience does notice. The audience also, in significant numbers, does not care. The audience has been trained, over decades, to accept inconsistency as a feature of public life rather than a flaw. The man is just doing what they all do. The man is, in this sense, the most honest practitioner of the form. He is not pretending he hasn’t reversed himself. He is reversing himself in plain sight, and trusting that the system will accommodate him, and the system, every single time, accommodates.

The deeper joke, and it is the joke that reveals what the whole essay is really about, is that the man has not betrayed any actual principle. The principle that animated his early career — the principle of opposing strongmen — has been replaced by another principle, which is the principle of being in the room with the strongman. He has not changed his values. He has discovered that his values were always one specific value, slightly miscoded. The miscoded version was “opposition to authoritarianism.” The corrected version is “proximity to power, by whatever means available, regardless of who holds it.” The early career was the miscoded version doing what it could in a Republican Party that had not yet been captured. The late career is the corrected version doing what it can in a Republican Party that has. He is, in his own quiet way, deeply consistent. The consistency is just running on a different axis than the one we were trained to look at.

This is the most uncomfortable observation, because it generalizes. It does not stay confined to one man. The political species we are watching emerge is not unique to him. It is emerging across both parties, across multiple countries, across the whole post-war architecture of liberal politics. The species is characterized by a certain flexibility about positions that is paired with a certain rigidity about access. The position is whatever the position needs to be. The access is the goal. The species is selected for by the structure of contemporary political life, in which the older incentives that rewarded principled stands have been dismantled, and the newer incentives reward only the smooth maintenance of proximity to whoever holds the levers. We are watching the species win. The species will continue to win, because the structure has been built to reward it, and the alternative species is being driven slowly into the journalism, the academy, and the unemployment line.

The man himself is not the disease. The man is the symptom of a system that produces men like him, in increasing numbers, with increasing fluency, every cycle. The previous generation of politicians had to lie. The current generation does not have to lie, because the truth — that they will say anything to remain in the room — is now considered, by most of the audience, an acceptable baseline. The acceptance of this baseline is the actual political development of the past forty years. The reversal of any individual politician is, in that context, just an instance.

It is going to get more interesting before it gets less interesting. The species, having figured out that nothing is required of it except calm fluency under cameras, is reproducing rapidly. Each new generation of the species is more adept than the last. The thirty-eight-year-old version of the man, with the trembling fluency about Cuban exiles, is now embarrassed by his earlier intensity, and his successors will not have his intensity at all. They will skip the principled phase entirely. They will start, on day one, with the calm fluency. They will already know, going in, that the principles are decoration. The decoration is for the campaign. The substance is the room. The room is the only thing that matters. They will be smoother than he was. They will not have the small private knowledge in their faces that he, on close inspection, still has. They will be perfect.

And the older species, the ones who still mean what they say — the diminishing population of cranks and oddballs and serious people who refuse the trade — will be, by the time the next political generation arrives, mostly dead. They will be remembered, briefly. They will be honored, in the way the dead are always honored, with brief speeches at events that nobody attends. The honoring will be done by the new species, who will have learned, by then, to do this too with calm fluency. The new species will praise the old, and praise them well, and use the praise to cement their own positions, and the praise will be applauded, and then everyone will go to dinner.

The dinner will be very nice.

The wine will be excellent.

And the only people who will not be there are the people who used to mean what they said.

They could not, on inspection, be reached for comment.