I'm Not Just Independent. I'm Anti-Partisan.
On the politics of thinking for yourself—and the quiet radicalism of calling it like it is
I’m often asked: Are you a Democrat or a Republican?
I hate that question. It isn’t an offensive, or even unreasonable, question. But it assumes a binary that, increasingly, I find both intellectually unsatisfying and oftentimes meaningless. My honest answer is neither. Not because I’m indifferent to politics. Quite the opposite actually. It’s because I’ve followed politics closely enough to know that party labels, especially at the local level, tell you very little about whether someone is actually right or whether they’re qualified for the job.
That’s why I’m not just politically independent. I am anti-partisan. But let me be precise about what that means, because it is often misunderstood.
Being anti-partisan isn’t the same as being apolitical. I have many views—strong ones—on housing policy, fiscal responsibility, the role of local government, and many other issues. It isn’t the same as being a centrist, as if the truth must always live in the middle, either. And it isn’t an “I’m above-it-all” detachment that lets you feel superior without actually engaging or debating the issues at hand. There’s also a version of anti-partisanship that is little more than a personality type—the person who cannot help but be contrarian, who takes pleasure in disagreeing with whoever is in the room, who mistakes heterodoxy for wisdom. That is not what I am describing.
To be anti-partisan, as I mean it, is a commitment to evaluating ideas on their merits rather than on the basis of who is advancing them or which party they belong to.
That distinction matters more than ever because modern partisanship has become less about policy and more about identity. The question isn’t what do you believe? but who do you stand with? Across multiple levels of government, Republicans who once championed free markets now embrace protectionism because their party switched positions. Likewise, many Democrats who spent years decrying executive overreach cheer it on when it serves their desired ends. That inconsistency isn’t accidental; it’s structural. It is what hyper-partisanship demands.
The deeper problem, however, is that partisanship doesn’t just distort how we govern; it distorts how we think. When your political identity is rooted in party loyalty, every new piece of information is processed through the lens of whether it helps or hurts your side. Evidence stops being something you reason from and becomes something to reason around—something to be selectively deployed in defense of a conclusion you were never really open to reconsidering.
“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that. His reasons may be good, and no one may have been able to refute them. But if he is equally unable to refute the reasons on the opposite side, if he does not so much as know what they are, he has no ground for preferring either opinion.”
–John Stuart Mill
This is how otherwise intelligent people end up defending positions they would have found indefensible five years ago, simply because the party moved and they moved with it. Anti-partisanship is, at its core, a demand that we take ideas seriously on their own terms. It requires asking not who said this but is this true, and does it work.
Partisanship isn’t just a bad habit that individuals could correct if they tried harder. It is a set of incentives—social, professional, and political—that actively punish independent thinking and reward conformity. Politicians who break with their party on a single issue face primary challenges, loss of funding, and ostracism from their own side. Voters who express ambivalence get lectured that this is too important a moment to be sitting on the fence. Commentators who refuse to pick a side find themselves without an audience, because audiences have largely sorted themselves into camps that want to be confirmed, not challenged. The system selects for loyalty. Anti-partisanship is, in that sense, a kind of resistance—not to any particular party, but to the machinery of the two-party system itself.
The most common objection I hear is that anti-partisanship is just false equivalence in disguise—that saying “both sides have flaws” is a way of avoiding the harder judgment that one side is, in fact, worse. It’s a fair critique, but it misses the point. Anti-partisanship does not require you to conclude that both parties are equally wrong on every issue, or that every disagreement has a sensible position on each side. That would be its own form of intellectual dishonesty, a reflexive symmetry that is just as lazy as reflexive loyalty. What anti-partisanship actually requires is simpler and more demanding: that you evaluate each question on its own terms, without your conclusion being predetermined by which team benefits.
An anti-partisan can—and sometimes must—conclude that one party is badly wrong, or that one side’s position is genuinely worse. The difference is in how you arrive at that conclusion. A partisan arrives there because it confirms what they already believed. An anti-partisan arrives there in spite of the fact that it might complicate their preferred narrative. The commitment isn’t to symmetry. It’s to honesty. And honesty, applied consistently, is sometimes asymmetric.
Nowhere is hyper-partisanship more corrosive than in local politics, which today feels like the last arena where pragmatism can still win. Local government is, at its core, a practical enterprise. The job of a county commissioner, city council member, or mayor is not to advance an ideological vision. It is to run the business that is local government—to ensure that public schools are adequately funded, roads are well maintained, neighborhoods are safe, and taxpayer dollars are managed responsibly. These are not Republican problems or Democratic problems. They are problems that require competent, pragmatic people who answer to their constituents rather than to a party apparatus. When partisanship colonizes that space, it doesn’t make local government more principled; it just makes it less functional.
There is, however, a cost to being anti-partisan. People want to know where you stand, and “it depends on the issue” is an unsatisfying answer in a world that rewards talking points and punishes nuance. And partisan identity offers something genuinely valuable: a community, a shared narrative, a sense that your political engagement means something because it connects you to a larger movement. To opt out of that is to accept a certain kind of loneliness in your political life. But when people organize their political lives around party loyalty rather than principled reasoning, they stop updating their beliefs. They stop listening. They mistake consistency for integrity, when in fact they’ve just stopped thinking. The cost is real. But I think it is worth it.
What you get in return is something more durable: intellectual freedom. One of the tragedies of partisan life is that it forecloses genuine intellectual movement. If your conclusions are shaped by the party platform, then new evidence can only be processed in one of two ways—either it confirms what you already believed, or it gets explained away. There is no third option, no honest reckoning with the possibility that you were wrong. Anti-partisanship holds that third option open. It allows you to follow an argument wherever it goes, even when it goes somewhere uncomfortable, even when it means admitting that the other side got something right. The capacity to say I was wrong or they have a point is not weakness. It is a basic precondition of serious thought. And it is becoming rarer.
Being anti-partisan doesn’t mean having no convictions. It means your convictions answer to the evidence, not to the party. That’s a simple standard. And it shouldn’t be as rare as it is.