I was so glad to see President Biden speak clearly and forcefully last night about the true scale of the threat facing our democracy. The history is clear: Biden was right to link Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin with both the Confederacy and the Axis powers of World War 2, and he was right to stand squarely with Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln.
[Read more…] about Why Biden was right to link MAGA, the Confederacy & the Axis in his SOTU addressWill we survive “the desert of organized forgetting?”
As we risk obliviously repeating catastrophic mistakes others have already made, some thoughts about memory and freedom, from people who know the precious value of both…
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 history that has just now caught up with us. They’ve been trying to warn us for decades.
[Read more…] about Will we survive “the desert of organized forgetting?”On the podcast: The Rise of Tyranny, What to Know About Tech and Kids, and more
On recent episodes of Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good (available on all apps and now on YouTube):
How to win elections so we still *have* elections, featuring two guests with experience at all levels of politics going back to the Carter Administration, Les Francis and Lora Lee Martin.
Two conversations with Chicago radio host Joan Esposito. In one, Joan interviews me about the rising popularity of tyranny in the US and around the world. In the other, I ask Joan about her experiences building a popular progressive talk show from scratch.
Education and tech expert Katie Davis on What We Really Know About Kids and Tech.
Meta, Obama, and DOJ veteran Kevin Lewis on Artificial Intelligence.
And A Hollow Man Vacates the Chair, a conversation about the fall of Kevin McCarthy and what it means, with Kevin Lewis and Zach Friend. Zach has worked with the White House Council of Economic Advisors, the Senate, the House, on presidential campaigns, and as a local elected official. This one’s on YouTube as well:
GOP Extremism Expands the Democratic Map
I spoke recently with reporter Antonio Fins for the Palm Beach Post and USA Today network (there’s a non-paywalled version at the The Destin Log) about how the increasingly extreme positions of Republican leaders like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis may shift red states towards purple or blue — if Democrats can connect with voters over shared values. Here’s an excerpt:
‘Communication strategist Spencer Critchley, who worked for former President Barack Obama’s campaign, said Florida is an example of Republicans “riding the culture war horse too far” with “ever more extreme positions on abortion and guns and climate” even as the dangers of these policies materialize in peoples’ daily lives.
‘”The key there is to lead with the way this violates people’s fundamental values. That’s where Republicans are losing people,” he said of Biden’s strategy.
[Read more…] about GOP Extremism Expands the Democratic MapSince Obama, is it all downhill for liberalism?
It’s 14 years since the first Obama inauguration. It’s time that seems to have flown by, while also spanning an epoch.
I took this photo at the Obama campaign Inaugural ball, and it just popped up as a Facebook Memory. The happiness in those faces, back then, was shared by thousands of staff and volunteers, tens of millions of Americans of widely varying backgrounds and beliefs, and countless millions of people around the world. It looked as if Obama’s promise of change based on hope was coming true, through the power of liberal democracy to bring us all together.
But were we wrong? Was this not the beginning, but the end of that hope? In the time since, we’ve gone from the peak of liberalism to the resurgence of illiberalism, nationally and globally.
Partly because we don’t teach students how to be citizens any more, many people are confused about what liberalism is — doesn’t it just mean you’re a lefty? No. Everyone who believes in modern democracy is a liberal — if they still do believe in democracy. It was won at such great cost, but many of us seem willing to toss it away.
Liberalism is the philosophy of freedom, tolerance, and self-governance on which our democracy is based (which is why it’s often called a liberal democracy).
Usually, Americans only call people on the left liberals. But conservatives are liberals too — if they believe in liberal democracy. And if they don’t, they aren’t conservatives.
Trumpists aren’t conservatives. It’s common to call them that, but it’s a serious mistake. That’s because Trumpism is no form of liberalism at all. Trumpism is classic, nationalist authoritarianism, which can become outright fascism. As practiced by Trump and his most enthusiastic enablers and imitators, it has.
Since Obama’s election (though starting well before), support for authoritarianism has been rising rapidly, most dangerously on the right. But it’s been happening on the left, too.
On the left, authoritarianism had taken the form of the dogmatic intolerance that gets called wokeism — when that term isn’t being used in utterly bad faith by Trumpists, who deploy it against any honest discussion of the bigotry their demagoguery relies on.
The wokeism that actually is a problem is, like Trumpism, hostile to liberalism, although for different reasons. Both claim access to higher sources of authority than liberalism, which is founded not on authority but negotiation. Liberalism is designed for a world where beyond a few core principles, we’re not sure what the highest authority is.
As always with extreme nationalism, Trumpism claims a higher authority based on the imagined destiny of an ethnic nation as personified in a “strong man” leader.
Wokeism claims a higher authority based on the awakened consciousness of the people. “Woke” is originally an African-American slang term for knowing what’s really going on in a hard, unfair world. But it was adapted and appropriated by academic theorists, who gave it a more Marxian meaning of “awakened from false consciousness” — false consciousness being the illusion that an oppressive system is just normal reality. Capitalism, colonialism, identity-based discrimination, or even concepts and language become tools of oppression by building and maintaining false consciousness.
This is why some schools are introducing social justice teaching into seemingly unrelated classes like math and science, which are seen as imposing a Western, capitalist-oriented, false consciousness. And it’s why wokeness focuses so intensely on “correct” terminology, like the theoretically precise but emotionally flat “unhoused” in place of the poetically moving but presumably oppressive “homeless,” or the culturally oblivious “Latinx” in place of a variety of words used by the actual people to whom it’s been applied. If language imposes false consciousness, the thinking goes, it can liberate from false consciousness, if it’s used just right.
The trouble is, once you believe you know better than others what’s false and what’s true, you’re on your way to authoritarianism: those who disagree with you can only be mistaken or evil. The authoritarianism in this case isn’t based on nationalism, but rationalism: the postmodern critical theory from which wokeism springs — and which woke thinkers sometimes capitalize, authoritatively, as Theory.
This is one reason why extreme wokeness seems so much like Puritanism: the elevation of dogma to unquestioned authority. Dogmatists, whether religious or secular, try to make reality conform to their ideas about it, instead of the other way around. The latter happens to be the far less certain, but more tolerant, path of liberalism.
Some of the critiques of liberalism, from both the right and the left, are worth considering. Liberalism’s very reasonableness can feel culturally empty and meaningless, which makes it vulnerable to grand narratives of making the nation “great again.” At the same time, liberalism’s claim of reasonableness has often concealed heavy cultural and economic biases, with full freedom and equality granted only to members of privileged groups. That makes it vulnerable to grand theories of revolutionary liberation.
In both views, the current, liberal order can’t be reformed, but must be torn down.
But although liberalism is far from perfect, it remains the best way we’ve yet found to protect individual people from domination — in large part because it recognizes how flawed all people are. Liberalism accepts imperfection — of knowledge and of character — as inherent in human nature. So self-critique and reform are part of its design, which is why liberal societies have made more progress, of all kinds, than any others.
Authoritarianism, by definition, can’t tolerate critique of itself, and equates reform with corruption.
What’s happened to us since the hope-filled days of Obama isn’t so much a polarization of left vs. right, but of authoritarians vs. liberals, whether of the left or right.