The Liberal Backbone

(Find the full post and podcast at Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good.) Ever since I published my book Patriots of Two Nations in 2020, I’ve been working on another one — a much bigger one, as it’s turned out.

And I’m still working on that big book. But 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 publishing it in real time. I don’t know if this is going to work, but I’m going to set myself the goal of releasing chapters of this book as I write them. They’ll appear as posts and podcast episodes first.

At the risk of being about as presumptuous as a writer can be, I’ll say that my plan is something like what Charles Dickens did when he first published The Pickwick Papers in a newspaper, chapter by chapter.

There are many reasons why we are where we are, and in this little book I’m not going to try to address all of them. Instead I’m going to try to answer what I think are two of the most important but most poorly understood questions we’re facing:

How did Democrats, and liberals in general, get so bad at politics?

And what can they do about it?

Yes, the right wing media bubble, bigotry, and other factors contributed to Donald Trump’s victory. But Democrats have their own advantages, advantages they often squander, starting with the fact that most Democratic policies are popular with large majorities of the American public. The trouble is, Democrats, and liberals in general, are not.

I hope you’ll consider taking part in this experiment. As I publish each chapter, please feel free to give me any comments, suggestions, or corrections you have to offer. Patriots of Two Nations became a better book than it might have been because of the generosity of advance readers. You’ll find those readers thanked, from my heart, at the front of that book.

My working title for this new book is The Liberal Backbone. What follows here is my first draft of Chapter One.

Here we go — I sure hope this works.

Continue reading at dastardlycleverness.com.

Photo by Alexander Gardner, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.