Persuasion is already good at Focusing on Important Changes, Not Ephemeral Fights, and at calling out violations of the principles of philosophical liberalism.
But I joined in July 2020 because of the promise to develop a fighting community based on persuasion. It seemed to start out toward that. But the community part atrophied, and “persuasion” itself was almost never discussed.
Persuasion is hard, extremely hard. We have not learned how to do it, because we don’t discuss it and we don’t test our theories. Instead we talk philosophy—that’s good. But it doesn’t do much good if we don’t learn how to persuade.
Most people think very concretely (even I do and my background is math, theoretical physics and economics). We don’t easily apply philosophy. Rather our philosophy is more likely to grow out of understanding reality, concretely.
We do need to think abstractly a bit — what exactly actually changes minds? — we had best frequently anchor that to empirical observation and experiments trying to persuade friends who are easy targets because they half agree with us. That’s still hard.
Just to illustrate my point (I’ve not yet made too much real progress) the best technique I know is to tell someone a simple, fairly shocking fact that can be well documented from sources they trust. If I can get that across then draw a one-step conclusion to a generalization of it.
In my own life I’ve been deceived many times by far left sources, and every time that I’ve escaped it’s been because I finally found clear facts from trusted sources. It was never due to some philosophical insight.
The only way for us to fight and to learn how to fight, using persuasion, is to work together more collectively. Yascha, you are the perfect person to make that happen. We trust you and trust is the bedrock of community. Please think about this and return to your July 2020 roots.
"The outcome of last Tuesday’s election is not owed to the popularity of Donald Trump; it is owed to the unpopularity of the alternatives."
This is a distinction without meaning given that the presidential election always comes down to two choices. I would argue that the election results are clear that Trump was the popular choice. I don't know what data you are relying on to back this claim that he was unpopular. He could fill arenas with supporters, and Biden and Harris had to hide in the root cellar and basement due to the embarrassment of their turn outs.
I think a better way to frame this is that Democrat sucked so much that it created a massive popular uprising of hope for change, and Trump was offering the hope for change.
If Democrats want to win, they just need to stop sucking so much.
At the age of nearly 80, and having taught American history at the elementary level for over 40 years, I know, as does any one who knows anything about our history, that political turmoil is etched into our DNA. We also tend to forget how young we are, and thus how new we are at the practice of the extraordinary design created for us during that hot summer in Philadelphia. As I used to tell my sixth graders, I could have spoken to someone who fought in the Civil War. A man who fought in the Civil War could have talked to someone who fought in the Revolution and lived through the birth of the United States. We are that close to our Founding.
So perhaps it is not so strange that we are still trying to learn how to be Americans in the midst of this maelstrom of opinions as to what a ‘real’ American ought to be. And not strange that so many of us seek a simplicity of definition like that promulgated by the likes of Donald Trump.
It is also worth remembering that it took three millennia from the creating of the first large scale societies until anyone even tried democracy at anything but the smallest scale; and another two millennia before anyone tried to define a country at its founding as one. Up until we tried it, it was a nearly unthinkable proposition. Everybody knew people couldn’t be trusted to rule themselves at any level above a small village, and even then it was problematic.
Perhaps, then we need above all to understand and to remember what an extraordinary experiment we are engaged proving out. We ought to reaffirm every day ’the great task remaining before us”, that this experiment is ’the last best hope of earth’. and that ‘as a nation of free men, we shall live through all time or die by suicide’ I think no one ever understood these truths as well as the man who uttered those phrases.
Yes, yes, beautifully said. There's an evolution going on. Only stumbling block on the way to one humanity is our free will. We could screw it up as no other animal ever could. Like my post today is titled, "It takes disasters to get massive changes to happen" -- good or bad.
I don't recall Persuasion feeling the need to articulate comparable principles for the incoming Biden administration. Might one, in hindsight, suggest civility (our electorate is not "garbage"), honesty (about Biden's mental competence), rule of law (repeated violation of congress' appropriation authority; DEI mandates that violate civil rights), etc.
I look forward to the Trump administration reporting.
“Writers who blame liberalism for everything that is wrong in the world while forgetting that these ideals also stand at the root of our society’s greatest achievements are playing an intellectually shoddy game of three-card monte. But if we are to make sure that liberalism triumphs over the course of the 21st century, we need to get serious about the job of rejuvenating this tradition.”
Saying that liberalism is the catalyst for society’s greatest achievements is like saying the revolutionary war was based on taxation without representation; it’s simplistic. I would argue that rationalism and Christianity set the foundations for a free society, not liberalism. Liberalism is a daughter-tradition descended from process philosophy and Transcendentalism before that. Transcendentalism replaced God with man, process philosophy completed the equation by replacing God with the state. Liberalism is a religion of the state: the state (NOT sovereign under God, but sovereign in itself) is salvific, holding the key to all life’s problems. That is not a tenable worldview, and I think many voters voted against it on November 4.
The reason? If the state is the alpha and omega of human life it can create and deny rights at will; law becomes plastic, the constitution becomes a “living document” that people tamper with until it loses all meaning (Roe v. Wade is a good example of “liberal” jurisprudence at work). Also, freedom is not government securing the rights of people through liberal institutions; it is civil liberty–freedom from government intervention (as enumerated by the Bill of Rights, which are not rights so much as they are statements of what the government *can’t* do).
We need to get back to limited government, the state as an endowment of our Creator, not ourselves, and absolutist jurisprudence. Liberalism is opposed to all three.
Funny, I thought that (at least in the US) the State derived its just powers from the consent of the governed, subject to "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God." How is that NOT liberalism?
You're falsely conflating liberalism with Statist atheism -- which is properly the domain of Marxists and their ilk. You can keep your poison pill!
1. "Subject to the laws of nature and nature's God" is Enlightenment rationalism, not liberalism. Rationalists were deists; most still believed in God. Liberalism is atheist. It is a materialist perspective.
2. Marxism is merely a different expression of socialism (taking control of institutions from the outside in, via violent overthrow, as opposed to Fabian socialism, which seeks a "peaceful" revolution from the inside out, through existing structures).
3. In my opinion, liberalism is just a more domesticated form of statist atheism. Think about it: if the state is the mechanism for progress, the state necessarily becomes an end in itself, precluding human individuality and personhood. We can see this in cradle-to-grave policy, which is technically "by the people, for the people", but only after the people have been deceived by the state into thinking their happiness consists of what only the state can provide. Catching my drift? Socialists (and liberals, I make no distinction) want people to own nothing and be happy. That is not "by the people, for the people."
4. Also, a government by the people, for the people, outside the covering of a transcendent, moral order is subject to anarchy. Washington himself said that when religion dies, public virtue, and thus good governance, dies as well. These are sparknotes, but I hope they are helpful.
I could spend weeks quibbling over your scurrilous ("poison pill") definition of liberalism -- especially classical liberalism (which I'd contend is rooted in the Enlightenment rationalism of the Founders [of Deists, of Spinoza], NOT in atheism)...
But I'll keep it simple: To paraphrase Phil Ochs, "Hey, Franco-American [as in "Francisco Franco"], find yourself another country to be part of!"
Thank you for showing up the way you do. I've been a follower since 2020, and I just upgraded to paid for the second time. I appeciate being challenged. I appeciate the hard parts. I appreciate the learning. So many thanks Yascha and the whole team!
One reads with interest the “Three preliminary principles” about how we should proceed which our team adopted at a recent editorial meeting.” Here’s a readers comments on that excellent strategy.
• “Much of the media is inevitably going to obsess over Trump for the next four years. This will hopefully include serious investigative work into the actions of his administration and incisive critiques of its missteps.” Yascha, by your utterances you have shown yourself to become completely unhinged, biased and vitriolic towards Trump up to now. They say “a leopard can’t change it’s spots”… but there is always that hope.
• “Rejuvenate the Liberal Tradition.” Your request to your readers in your article the other day “…. To please tell me why Donald Trump won this election,” was a ballsy move and your thumbs-up to a few replies of your readers was interesting. Suggest you re-read what over a hundred readers opinions were to your request.
• Your book “The Identity Trap” clearly states that identity politics “won’t work” to achieve what those leftists want to believe such a dogma will correct in our society today. You and your editorial staff must hammer on that the adoption of this vile and divisive ideology, the rejection of meritocracy, and the ruinous DIE ideology, MUST cease to be employed by the ruling classes, the elite and the academics. This almost has to be a “crusade,” if you really want to expose and explode these Woke hand grenades, which this cult supported by academia, has rolled into our western culture.
• Expose, name and reject the ideas of those “ Writers who blame liberalism for everything that is wrong in the world while forgetting that these ideals also stand at the root of our society’s greatest achievements are playing an intellectually shoddy game of three-card monte.” Fire them from your cadre of writers, for sure and expose them for the charlatans that they are. .
• “Keep Swimming Against the Stream” yes…. and you have made a good start! Expose with truth and facts, “Propaganda” for what it is and the NEWS papers and broadcasting outlets that are wedded to institutionalised lying.
• Do not agree with and again expose those NEWS outlets that are only based on ideology and reject reason, and sensibility.
• Descend from your ivory tower and stay close to the concerns, aspirations, and dreams of us hoi polloi and reject all woke ideology – as it has been clearly shown that the unwashed just don’t buy it. They are the people.
If you can stay true to these values and principles, and not get hoodwinked into thinking that the “idea du jour” of academia and their philosophy, is the same as what the silent majority also want. Bon courage, mon ami…. Here’s to the next 4 years. Stay focused, stay on track and stay truthful to yourself.
I honestly don't know how I got here--I assume either or both Damon Linker or some contributor to The Bulwark. I arrived a skeptic (as I have become for every outlet) and became a monthly subscriber based on this post. Or part of it. You got me with "Focus on Important Changes, Not Ephemeral Fights".
sincerely, hoping that you will keep in mind that conservatism is part of the beautiful arc of classical liberalism. I also hope that you will make very strong arguments against progressivism and paleoconservatism on a constitutional basis. i’m just not seeing right now why you’re gearing up as if Trump is Hitler. That itself seems like the Kool-Aid’s been digested when I listen to you I guess I could use an example of what Trump’s planning to do that is anathema to the liberal order.
Thank you, Yascha. These principles are exactly what I subscribe to Persuasion for. Keep up the good work, whatever it takes. I for one will be with you.
I hope that Persuasion can continue to be not just an alternative to the legacy media but also an intellectual forum. All too often, fights over "liberalism" or "the left" are conducted in the vacuum, as if these concepts did not have any history or their meaning was self-evident. I know that Americans tend to believe that American culture is human nature but this is actually not the case. I would like to have the American events put in a global context. For example, Iran is apparently waiting to negotiate with the Trump administration - after concocting an assassination plot. Why? What is going on in the Islamic Republic that we need to know about? More intellectual globalism, please, even as economic globalism is running out of steam.
Here's a way to think about what Donald Trump means in the grand scheme of things:
By using the most truly amazing trains of thought on all the crisscrossing and parallel and otherwise situated tracks laid down by the long arm of all the laws of logic up there in our H. sapiens brains and maybe borrowing some or all of the sounder parts of sophistry and paradox and faith-based excogitation and logic of the fallacious and or the fuzzy persuasion and maybe also tossing in a pinch or two of the hard-to-argue-with quality of circular and double and group and positive thinking and the tautological doubling down on a thought and definitely cherry-picking some of the less iffy ins and outs of using our commonsense and going with our gut and or with the funny feelings in our bones and throwing in a helping of the disbelief-suspension that comes with wrapping our already-mentioned H. sapiens brains around all the hard scientifically uncovered funny business way down there in the quantum sphere and of course placing great weight on the ontological and epistemological implications of a teeny-tiny little in and out-popping quantum whatnot’s owing the particulars of all its odd goings-on to its being exposed to the powers of a big somehow animated agglomeration of its fellow whatnots’ observation, I gotta think (using my own personal three-pounds’-worth of faculties for employing the modes and approaches to the proverbial using of one’s head mentioned above) that there’s no reason in the whole wide realm of human reasoning to believe that a crack lay team of the straight-thinkingest and thought-leadingest and mull-happiest losers of themselves in seriously deep thought that a high-powered thinking cap has ever sat atop the over-sized and -stuffed head of (and also maybe a back-up squad of the luckiest of our best educated guessers ever) couldn’t outdo even the so highly motivated and divinely inspired intelligent design types in proving beyond a reasonable or any other kind of doubt that some manner of catharsis-starved audience bigger than us is out there taking in this incredible spectacle we human beings are making of ourselves down here on this globe posing as a stage where the world’s most terror and pity-evoking tragedy imaginable is being played out.
There’ve got to be a million doubletons of major and minor propositions out there for affixing a conclusion to apiece in formulating all the syllogistical building blocks needed to refutation-proof all the a posteriori lines of ratiocination refutation-proofing their already-mentioned a priori tandem-mates in making the case that thanks to some anchor principle along the lines perhaps of some unbreakable law or laws of conservation fundamentally coupled maybe even with some second principle along the lines of something newfound like a natural law of unnatural human attraction to polarity there’s no way the universe would ever in a trillion years waste the unthinkable volume of cathartic value in a tragedy in the making for the 13.7 billion years (give or take a couple hundred million) it took to arrive at this final act of this human drama locked into conflict a la Aristotle and also a la the two already-alluded-to natural laws of attraction and polarity brought to us and brought always into conflict compliments of the vagaries of fate or something like it maybe or maybe it was a simple all-overarching force along the lines of mischief or more likely it was the already-mentioned cosmic audience whose almost bottomless want of catharsis is so all-powerful that there’s never been any question of our not strapping on the buskins and marching off to such awful plot points along our dramatic arc as the dawn of the farming that brought us the formalized hierarchies that introduced the kinds and amounts of the hubris and other civilization-induced human flaws that make it no problem at all for us players in our various tragic and sometimes not uncomic roles to learn so little from such horrible plot points as the world and all the other kinds of wars brought to us compliments of the players up there at the top of our formalized hierarchies (and such plot points as the advent of the nuclear age and such plot points as the repeated reaching of the next must-avoid waymark along the road to runaway global warming) that here we all are pathetically sharing a stage with such scene-stealing extra-large embodiments of all the already-mentioned human flaws as the newly elected leader of all the free world that’s so rock-solidly nothing but a stage for delivering some divine-sized gift of deliverance.
Okay, I'm a paying subscriber now. I'll go to being a founding member if you let me found anything with you. I am you. Every word. And more. You'd know that if you read anything of mine, just like I know when I read anything of yours.
You won’t get it all -- I have ideas galore, for basic, causative things and for this and that in a world where we are not running on opposition but are a cooperative humanity. Then we'd enact utopian things. Why not? Humans are awesome. We just need to get going in the right direction. "Just." Ha.
Nice try at whitewashing your image while continuing to blacken that of your opposition. You only persuade your fellow radical leftists.
The very last thing populists desire is authoritarians. You are apparently unable to detect the illiberal aspects of you positions or your own authoritarian tendencies.
Persuasion is already good at Focusing on Important Changes, Not Ephemeral Fights, and at calling out violations of the principles of philosophical liberalism.
But I joined in July 2020 because of the promise to develop a fighting community based on persuasion. It seemed to start out toward that. But the community part atrophied, and “persuasion” itself was almost never discussed.
Persuasion is hard, extremely hard. We have not learned how to do it, because we don’t discuss it and we don’t test our theories. Instead we talk philosophy—that’s good. But it doesn’t do much good if we don’t learn how to persuade.
Most people think very concretely (even I do and my background is math, theoretical physics and economics). We don’t easily apply philosophy. Rather our philosophy is more likely to grow out of understanding reality, concretely.
We do need to think abstractly a bit — what exactly actually changes minds? — we had best frequently anchor that to empirical observation and experiments trying to persuade friends who are easy targets because they half agree with us. That’s still hard.
Just to illustrate my point (I’ve not yet made too much real progress) the best technique I know is to tell someone a simple, fairly shocking fact that can be well documented from sources they trust. If I can get that across then draw a one-step conclusion to a generalization of it.
In my own life I’ve been deceived many times by far left sources, and every time that I’ve escaped it’s been because I finally found clear facts from trusted sources. It was never due to some philosophical insight.
The only way for us to fight and to learn how to fight, using persuasion, is to work together more collectively. Yascha, you are the perfect person to make that happen. We trust you and trust is the bedrock of community. Please think about this and return to your July 2020 roots.
PS Here's the frightening history that lies behind the Identity Trap and Trump: https://yaschamounk.substack.com/p/help-me-understand-why-trump-won/comment/76518178
Sounds good. See my Comment.
"The outcome of last Tuesday’s election is not owed to the popularity of Donald Trump; it is owed to the unpopularity of the alternatives."
This is a distinction without meaning given that the presidential election always comes down to two choices. I would argue that the election results are clear that Trump was the popular choice. I don't know what data you are relying on to back this claim that he was unpopular. He could fill arenas with supporters, and Biden and Harris had to hide in the root cellar and basement due to the embarrassment of their turn outs.
I think a better way to frame this is that Democrat sucked so much that it created a massive popular uprising of hope for change, and Trump was offering the hope for change.
If Democrats want to win, they just need to stop sucking so much.
Good distinction. See my comment.
At the age of nearly 80, and having taught American history at the elementary level for over 40 years, I know, as does any one who knows anything about our history, that political turmoil is etched into our DNA. We also tend to forget how young we are, and thus how new we are at the practice of the extraordinary design created for us during that hot summer in Philadelphia. As I used to tell my sixth graders, I could have spoken to someone who fought in the Civil War. A man who fought in the Civil War could have talked to someone who fought in the Revolution and lived through the birth of the United States. We are that close to our Founding.
So perhaps it is not so strange that we are still trying to learn how to be Americans in the midst of this maelstrom of opinions as to what a ‘real’ American ought to be. And not strange that so many of us seek a simplicity of definition like that promulgated by the likes of Donald Trump.
It is also worth remembering that it took three millennia from the creating of the first large scale societies until anyone even tried democracy at anything but the smallest scale; and another two millennia before anyone tried to define a country at its founding as one. Up until we tried it, it was a nearly unthinkable proposition. Everybody knew people couldn’t be trusted to rule themselves at any level above a small village, and even then it was problematic.
Perhaps, then we need above all to understand and to remember what an extraordinary experiment we are engaged proving out. We ought to reaffirm every day ’the great task remaining before us”, that this experiment is ’the last best hope of earth’. and that ‘as a nation of free men, we shall live through all time or die by suicide’ I think no one ever understood these truths as well as the man who uttered those phrases.
Yes, yes, beautifully said. There's an evolution going on. Only stumbling block on the way to one humanity is our free will. We could screw it up as no other animal ever could. Like my post today is titled, "It takes disasters to get massive changes to happen" -- good or bad.
Good principles.
I don't recall Persuasion feeling the need to articulate comparable principles for the incoming Biden administration. Might one, in hindsight, suggest civility (our electorate is not "garbage"), honesty (about Biden's mental competence), rule of law (repeated violation of congress' appropriation authority; DEI mandates that violate civil rights), etc.
I look forward to the Trump administration reporting.
Having some trouble with this passage:
“Writers who blame liberalism for everything that is wrong in the world while forgetting that these ideals also stand at the root of our society’s greatest achievements are playing an intellectually shoddy game of three-card monte. But if we are to make sure that liberalism triumphs over the course of the 21st century, we need to get serious about the job of rejuvenating this tradition.”
Saying that liberalism is the catalyst for society’s greatest achievements is like saying the revolutionary war was based on taxation without representation; it’s simplistic. I would argue that rationalism and Christianity set the foundations for a free society, not liberalism. Liberalism is a daughter-tradition descended from process philosophy and Transcendentalism before that. Transcendentalism replaced God with man, process philosophy completed the equation by replacing God with the state. Liberalism is a religion of the state: the state (NOT sovereign under God, but sovereign in itself) is salvific, holding the key to all life’s problems. That is not a tenable worldview, and I think many voters voted against it on November 4.
The reason? If the state is the alpha and omega of human life it can create and deny rights at will; law becomes plastic, the constitution becomes a “living document” that people tamper with until it loses all meaning (Roe v. Wade is a good example of “liberal” jurisprudence at work). Also, freedom is not government securing the rights of people through liberal institutions; it is civil liberty–freedom from government intervention (as enumerated by the Bill of Rights, which are not rights so much as they are statements of what the government *can’t* do).
We need to get back to limited government, the state as an endowment of our Creator, not ourselves, and absolutist jurisprudence. Liberalism is opposed to all three.
Funny, I thought that (at least in the US) the State derived its just powers from the consent of the governed, subject to "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God." How is that NOT liberalism?
You're falsely conflating liberalism with Statist atheism -- which is properly the domain of Marxists and their ilk. You can keep your poison pill!
1. "Subject to the laws of nature and nature's God" is Enlightenment rationalism, not liberalism. Rationalists were deists; most still believed in God. Liberalism is atheist. It is a materialist perspective.
2. Marxism is merely a different expression of socialism (taking control of institutions from the outside in, via violent overthrow, as opposed to Fabian socialism, which seeks a "peaceful" revolution from the inside out, through existing structures).
3. In my opinion, liberalism is just a more domesticated form of statist atheism. Think about it: if the state is the mechanism for progress, the state necessarily becomes an end in itself, precluding human individuality and personhood. We can see this in cradle-to-grave policy, which is technically "by the people, for the people", but only after the people have been deceived by the state into thinking their happiness consists of what only the state can provide. Catching my drift? Socialists (and liberals, I make no distinction) want people to own nothing and be happy. That is not "by the people, for the people."
4. Also, a government by the people, for the people, outside the covering of a transcendent, moral order is subject to anarchy. Washington himself said that when religion dies, public virtue, and thus good governance, dies as well. These are sparknotes, but I hope they are helpful.
I could spend weeks quibbling over your scurrilous ("poison pill") definition of liberalism -- especially classical liberalism (which I'd contend is rooted in the Enlightenment rationalism of the Founders [of Deists, of Spinoza], NOT in atheism)...
But I'll keep it simple: To paraphrase Phil Ochs, "Hey, Franco-American [as in "Francisco Franco"], find yourself another country to be part of!"
Amen.
Thank you for showing up the way you do. I've been a follower since 2020, and I just upgraded to paid for the second time. I appeciate being challenged. I appeciate the hard parts. I appreciate the learning. So many thanks Yascha and the whole team!
One reads with interest the “Three preliminary principles” about how we should proceed which our team adopted at a recent editorial meeting.” Here’s a readers comments on that excellent strategy.
• “Much of the media is inevitably going to obsess over Trump for the next four years. This will hopefully include serious investigative work into the actions of his administration and incisive critiques of its missteps.” Yascha, by your utterances you have shown yourself to become completely unhinged, biased and vitriolic towards Trump up to now. They say “a leopard can’t change it’s spots”… but there is always that hope.
• “Rejuvenate the Liberal Tradition.” Your request to your readers in your article the other day “…. To please tell me why Donald Trump won this election,” was a ballsy move and your thumbs-up to a few replies of your readers was interesting. Suggest you re-read what over a hundred readers opinions were to your request.
• Your book “The Identity Trap” clearly states that identity politics “won’t work” to achieve what those leftists want to believe such a dogma will correct in our society today. You and your editorial staff must hammer on that the adoption of this vile and divisive ideology, the rejection of meritocracy, and the ruinous DIE ideology, MUST cease to be employed by the ruling classes, the elite and the academics. This almost has to be a “crusade,” if you really want to expose and explode these Woke hand grenades, which this cult supported by academia, has rolled into our western culture.
• Expose, name and reject the ideas of those “ Writers who blame liberalism for everything that is wrong in the world while forgetting that these ideals also stand at the root of our society’s greatest achievements are playing an intellectually shoddy game of three-card monte.” Fire them from your cadre of writers, for sure and expose them for the charlatans that they are. .
• “Keep Swimming Against the Stream” yes…. and you have made a good start! Expose with truth and facts, “Propaganda” for what it is and the NEWS papers and broadcasting outlets that are wedded to institutionalised lying.
• Do not agree with and again expose those NEWS outlets that are only based on ideology and reject reason, and sensibility.
• Descend from your ivory tower and stay close to the concerns, aspirations, and dreams of us hoi polloi and reject all woke ideology – as it has been clearly shown that the unwashed just don’t buy it. They are the people.
If you can stay true to these values and principles, and not get hoodwinked into thinking that the “idea du jour” of academia and their philosophy, is the same as what the silent majority also want. Bon courage, mon ami…. Here’s to the next 4 years. Stay focused, stay on track and stay truthful to yourself.
I honestly don't know how I got here--I assume either or both Damon Linker or some contributor to The Bulwark. I arrived a skeptic (as I have become for every outlet) and became a monthly subscriber based on this post. Or part of it. You got me with "Focus on Important Changes, Not Ephemeral Fights".
Looking forward to what's to come.
sincerely, hoping that you will keep in mind that conservatism is part of the beautiful arc of classical liberalism. I also hope that you will make very strong arguments against progressivism and paleoconservatism on a constitutional basis. i’m just not seeing right now why you’re gearing up as if Trump is Hitler. That itself seems like the Kool-Aid’s been digested when I listen to you I guess I could use an example of what Trump’s planning to do that is anathema to the liberal order.
Thank you, Yascha. These principles are exactly what I subscribe to Persuasion for. Keep up the good work, whatever it takes. I for one will be with you.
I hope that Persuasion can continue to be not just an alternative to the legacy media but also an intellectual forum. All too often, fights over "liberalism" or "the left" are conducted in the vacuum, as if these concepts did not have any history or their meaning was self-evident. I know that Americans tend to believe that American culture is human nature but this is actually not the case. I would like to have the American events put in a global context. For example, Iran is apparently waiting to negotiate with the Trump administration - after concocting an assassination plot. Why? What is going on in the Islamic Republic that we need to know about? More intellectual globalism, please, even as economic globalism is running out of steam.
Here's a way to think about what Donald Trump means in the grand scheme of things:
By using the most truly amazing trains of thought on all the crisscrossing and parallel and otherwise situated tracks laid down by the long arm of all the laws of logic up there in our H. sapiens brains and maybe borrowing some or all of the sounder parts of sophistry and paradox and faith-based excogitation and logic of the fallacious and or the fuzzy persuasion and maybe also tossing in a pinch or two of the hard-to-argue-with quality of circular and double and group and positive thinking and the tautological doubling down on a thought and definitely cherry-picking some of the less iffy ins and outs of using our commonsense and going with our gut and or with the funny feelings in our bones and throwing in a helping of the disbelief-suspension that comes with wrapping our already-mentioned H. sapiens brains around all the hard scientifically uncovered funny business way down there in the quantum sphere and of course placing great weight on the ontological and epistemological implications of a teeny-tiny little in and out-popping quantum whatnot’s owing the particulars of all its odd goings-on to its being exposed to the powers of a big somehow animated agglomeration of its fellow whatnots’ observation, I gotta think (using my own personal three-pounds’-worth of faculties for employing the modes and approaches to the proverbial using of one’s head mentioned above) that there’s no reason in the whole wide realm of human reasoning to believe that a crack lay team of the straight-thinkingest and thought-leadingest and mull-happiest losers of themselves in seriously deep thought that a high-powered thinking cap has ever sat atop the over-sized and -stuffed head of (and also maybe a back-up squad of the luckiest of our best educated guessers ever) couldn’t outdo even the so highly motivated and divinely inspired intelligent design types in proving beyond a reasonable or any other kind of doubt that some manner of catharsis-starved audience bigger than us is out there taking in this incredible spectacle we human beings are making of ourselves down here on this globe posing as a stage where the world’s most terror and pity-evoking tragedy imaginable is being played out.
There’ve got to be a million doubletons of major and minor propositions out there for affixing a conclusion to apiece in formulating all the syllogistical building blocks needed to refutation-proof all the a posteriori lines of ratiocination refutation-proofing their already-mentioned a priori tandem-mates in making the case that thanks to some anchor principle along the lines perhaps of some unbreakable law or laws of conservation fundamentally coupled maybe even with some second principle along the lines of something newfound like a natural law of unnatural human attraction to polarity there’s no way the universe would ever in a trillion years waste the unthinkable volume of cathartic value in a tragedy in the making for the 13.7 billion years (give or take a couple hundred million) it took to arrive at this final act of this human drama locked into conflict a la Aristotle and also a la the two already-alluded-to natural laws of attraction and polarity brought to us and brought always into conflict compliments of the vagaries of fate or something like it maybe or maybe it was a simple all-overarching force along the lines of mischief or more likely it was the already-mentioned cosmic audience whose almost bottomless want of catharsis is so all-powerful that there’s never been any question of our not strapping on the buskins and marching off to such awful plot points along our dramatic arc as the dawn of the farming that brought us the formalized hierarchies that introduced the kinds and amounts of the hubris and other civilization-induced human flaws that make it no problem at all for us players in our various tragic and sometimes not uncomic roles to learn so little from such horrible plot points as the world and all the other kinds of wars brought to us compliments of the players up there at the top of our formalized hierarchies (and such plot points as the advent of the nuclear age and such plot points as the repeated reaching of the next must-avoid waymark along the road to runaway global warming) that here we all are pathetically sharing a stage with such scene-stealing extra-large embodiments of all the already-mentioned human flaws as the newly elected leader of all the free world that’s so rock-solidly nothing but a stage for delivering some divine-sized gift of deliverance.
Okay, I'm a paying subscriber now. I'll go to being a founding member if you let me found anything with you. I am you. Every word. And more. You'd know that if you read anything of mine, just like I know when I read anything of yours.
You won’t get it all -- I have ideas galore, for basic, causative things and for this and that in a world where we are not running on opposition but are a cooperative humanity. Then we'd enact utopian things. Why not? Humans are awesome. We just need to get going in the right direction. "Just." Ha.
Let's try you reading my last two posts:
Last week: Dream of the Earth: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/the-dream-of-the-earth
Today: It takes disasters to get massive change to happen: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/it-takes-disasters-to-get-massive-a2b
Then tell me you love me…
Nice try at whitewashing your image while continuing to blacken that of your opposition. You only persuade your fellow radical leftists.
The very last thing populists desire is authoritarians. You are apparently unable to detect the illiberal aspects of you positions or your own authoritarian tendencies.