Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good

Normally, we should be reluctant to talk about politics in terms of morality. We can't live with each other, in peace anyway, if we think disagreement is a matter of good and evil. But that doesn't mean that democracy is amoral. Democracy will survive if we all stand up for the shared moral values that make democracy possible. That's what the peaceful protesters in Minneapolis are doing, even at t...

One of the most confusing things about Trumpism is this paradox: People who believe so strongly in individual freedom are also eager to give away all their power, to one man. Why? One reason: Human beings yearn for freedom, but when we actually get it, we may find it terrifying. So argued the influential German psychologist Erich Fromm in "Escape From Freedom," published in 1941, when another auth...

In a democracy, law enforcement exists to protect people: their safety and their Constitutional rights. Under authoritarianism, law enforcement protects power. Under autocracy, it protects the power of one man. Which way we're going to live is still up to us. The shooting of Renee Nicole Good shows us what's at stake. — Spencer

About a year ago, I started publishing draft chapters of my book in progress, The Liberal Backbone. It hit me lately that the draft is done – I realized that with the latest chapters I'd started writing a second book. That one will be on alienation, which I think deserves a book of its own. So I'm calling it. I'm going to switch to editing The Liberal Backbone — and, no doubt, editing some more, a...

Liberals think of rhetoric as something you cut through to get to the substance. But in politics, rhetoric is the substance. Politics is the art of persuading people. If you can't persuade them, you can't get anything done. That doesn't mean you have to lie to them. Yes, Donald Trump uses rhetoric, like all con artists. But so did Barack Obama, like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Linc...

Escape from the iron cage of alienation appears to be impossible: You'll never think of a way out, because it's thinking that locks you in. Unless you discover a different way to think. This episode: a dive inside the mind of a musician.

Every politician, or anyone trying to persuade anyone else of anything, faces two make-or-break moments: the moment before they say a word, and the moment they do. We turn to that second moment here. And to "Don't Mess With Texas." You probably know the slogan, but you may not know that it represents one of the most successful persuasion projects in history. There are many reasons for that, but am...

The fiendish thing about the iron cage of alienation is that the harder you try to escape, the harder that gets. The more you try to think your way out, the more surely you lock yourself in. A case in point: The Democratic Party recently paid $20 million to study how to talk to men. If Democrats are alienated from men, it might just be because they see them as objects of study, as opposed to human...

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 candidate can be and still beat the Democrats. What hap...

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 sam...

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. But it can look more like tyranny. It boils down to this: If I'm wo...

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 and her listeners. On December 13, we had the...

The first draft of Chapter 5 of my next book, The Liberal Backbone. It's a brief summary of the roots of woke thinking, which should make the woke left more understandable, especially for liberals trying to sort out what they do and don't stand for. More at Dastardly Cleverness.com/liberal-backbone-chapter-5 and at Substack.com/@spencercritchley. — Spencer

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. In this fourth chapter of The Liberal Backbone, I explain...

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 chapte...

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 that the wor...

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 this one. There are many reasons why we are where we...

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, so it is with an...

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 believe. So I've written an appeal to a...

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-found...

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 le...

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 a...

If you wanted to, you could consume nothing but presidential campaign coverage all day every day. But how much of it would leave you feeling better informed about casting what may be the most important vote of your life? Not better informed about the campaign as a sporting event, with all the expert play-by-play, color commentary, and stats. But better informed about questions that may not have ea...