Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good

Between 1933 and 1981, there were 24 sessions of Congress. For 22 of those 24, Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. During the same time there were 12 presidential terms. Eight were served by Democrats.

Now Democrats can lose, twice, to a party led by Donald Trump, whose campaigns have been natural experiments in just how bad a can...

Last time, I argued that if liberals still believe in an open society — free, equal, and pluralistic — we must defend reason. It's the shared "meeting space" that makes the open society possible.

But we must also understand that reason alone isn't enough.

If we filter all our experience through rationality, we become separated from it, as if we're not living life, but observing it with scientific...

It's a fundamental assumption of liberal democracy that we debate our differences with reason. 

But now that assumption looks like a relic of a bygone age — specifically, the Age of Enlightenment, from the late 17th to early 19th centuries.

The Enlightenment produced more scientific progress than all of previous history — the very idea of progress comes to us from the Enlightenment. It had the same impact on the generation of ...

Woke theory aims to liberate our minds, but imposes limits on how we think: Many ideas are judged oppressive, and therefore "problematic."

Liberal tolerance is seen as potentially oppressive too, for the same reason.

Will liberals stand up for what they believe in? Should they?

This episode: We begin to see if liberals can take their own side in a quarrel.

Liberals and the woke left see many of the same problems in society, from structural oppression to alienation.

And yet the ideology of the woke left is incompatible with liberalism.

For liberals, it starts with the very idea of wokeness, as an awakening from illusions, or false consciousness. The goal is supposed to be liberation. Bu...

As you know if you've been following my posts and podcast episodes lately, I'm writing and releasing the chapters of my new book The Liberal Backbone in real time. When Joan Esposito of WCPT Chicago heard about it, she had an idea: a "radio book club," with me coming on her show to talk about the book as it comes together, chapter by chapter, with her an...

Are the woke just a bunch of Marxists?

No, but that claim isn't based on nothing. The Theory behind wokeness is complicated, but some of its key concepts are inherited from Marx, in modified form. And it becomes much easier to understand Theory if you understand something about Marx — which few people do, because Marx doesn't make it easy.

The word "woke" has at least two meanings — and they're so different, they contradict each other.

By one of them, any liberal can be proud to be called woke, because to be woke in this sense is to recognize bigotry and oppose it. But by the other meaning, liberals can't be woke, even if they want to. That's because if you're this kind of woke, you reject liberalism.

Spencer explains in this chapter of&n...

It's hard to stand for something if you're not even sure what that something is. And many liberals have become unsure what liberalism is.

For a long time, few of us had to think much about it. Liberalism was just default political reality.

It was like water is for the young fish in David Foster Wallace's famous parable: They can't see the water, because it's everywhere.

Let's remember...

With American democracy facing its greatest crisis since the Civil War as a corrupt autocrat returns to the presidency, I want to do my part, however small, to help right now.

So I'm going to try an experiment: writing a shorter, more tightly focused book, and releasing chapters as I write them. They'll appear as posts and podcast episodes, like ...

Ernest Hemingway is famous for the terse economy of his writing. And in one of the most resonant examples of that quality, he captured the essence of catastrophic failure in just a few words, in his novel The Sun Also Rises.

The alcoholic veteran Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt.

"Two ways," he says. "Gradually and then quickly."

As it is with one person going broke, s...

If we believe in democracy, I believe we have a responsibility not only to vote for it but to speak up for it, including to family and friends, despite how hard that might be. That doesn't mean berating or insulting them. It can be done quietly and respectfully. In my own view it's a mark of respect and even love to give people the whole truth about what we b...

According to my guest this time, the United States is entering a Latino century, and that might be what saves our democracy.

Mike Madrid is a top expert on Latino voting, and in recent years he's become a national leader in the bipartisan fight to save democracy.

He's been the political director for the California Republican Party, a senior adviser to both Republicans and Democrats, and a co-foun...

Many liberals are deeply confused about how to respond to the campus protests over Gaza. And I think it's an example of the confusion liberals are feeling generally over a lot of issues.

I believe much of the confusion can be traced to the assumption that all political opinions can fit on a single line, from left to right. 

For this one-dimensional, one-line model to work, there can only be one left and one right — but there a...

As we risk obliviously repeating catastrophic mistakes others have already made, Spencer Critchley has some thoughts about memory and freedom, from people who know the precious value of both.

Excerpt: "Most of us in the U.S. have been spared the necessity of knowing history, and instead have been able to live as if the world was created at our birth. But people in Central and Eastern Europe have already been trammeled by the histor...