I absolutely agree that we need an open pluralistic society where divergent, intellectually diverse views and politics are not merely tolerated but seen as essential. Robust even heated debate over ideas is essential to making the best decisions- as a society, through the messy process of politics, elections, legislation.
So, although a registered democrat, I voted for Trump in 2024. I was shocked and red pilled by the covid authoritarian paradigm. A virus doesn't cancel the bill of rights and democratic debate. I saw credentialed scientists, like Jay Bhattacharya, censored on social media when they criticized the lockdowns and school closures. The government mandated a brand new mrna vaccine platform with NO Long term safety studies. But discussion of this was taboo in all left or center left media. Also taboo is questioning the transgender ideology as it pertains to children.
We know from the case Murty vs Biden that the Biden admin pressuring social media companies to censor speech criticizing their covid policies.
Fast forward. Now I am very disappointed that the Trump team is censoring both Pro Palestine speech and anyone who makes mean comments about Charlie Kirk. However, I do see a lot of MAGA people and Republicans criticizing and pushing back. Whereas with the Democrats I didnt see any tolerance for divergent views. Remember when Seth Moulton said he didnt want his daughters playing high school sports against biological men? Has ONE democrat said anything critical of the Biden admin vaccine mandates? Or of gender surgeries on children?
It seems to me like everyone is so safely surrounded by the VERY polarized media they selected during the Democrat's winning streak that right now most people are being led to believe that everyone agrees with them.
If you're a high-minded Republican, you'll believe that "a lot of MAGA people and Republicans" are pushing back on the egregious violations by the current admin. A few years ago, many high-minded Democrats thought there was an impressive amount of pushback as well.
I am not sure that this "What About What THEY Did?" game can land you anywhere useful or helpful
You make an important point. I just try to read media that I believe is honest, even if they have a point of view. Glenn Greenwald is someone I listen to almost everyday. Matt Taibbi also.
Anyway, I am thrilled that democrats are now defending the first amendment.
Ms. Williams, I'm sorry to ask such a loaded question, but has it occurred to you that you are picking nits off an animal while ignoring that is quickly dying from a ferocious disease?
I acknowledge that the transgender issue has become an unfortunate third rail of Democratic politics—in no small measure because the unmitigated cruelty of the right towards transgendered people makes it difficult for liberals to be too critical without seeming to abandon them.
As for COVID "censoring", we are talking about a moment where we were attempting to get a global pandemic under control—mistakes were made on both sides of our cultural divide, but none more devastating than the right's indulgence of anti-vaccine quackery. Studies have found political affiliation with Donald Trump to be the most powerful predicting factor in high COVID death rates—in other words, Trump literally became a COVID comorbidity.
Setting those issues aside and turning to the Trump administration, we now have an unmitigated and unprecedented national disaster on our hands. The censoriousness of Trump is merely one facet of the overwhelming damage being done to our government, our world standing and reputation, our safety and national security, and our civic health.
We have an FBI that has virtually stopped prosecuting white collar crime, shut down counterterrorism and counterintelligence, fired or driven away many of our most experienced agents, and reoriented itself toward pursuing Trump's personal grievances. He is openly demanding the prosecution of his political enemies and firing people when they tell him that there's nothing to prosecute. And his "Border Czar" Tom Homan was just revealed to have been under investigation for accepting bribes to steer government contracts people's way, while the Trump Administration simply dropped the investigation and buried it. They aren't even denying it.
Our Defense Department (excuse me, Department of War) is being run by an incompetent man-child cosplaying as a "warrior" who has now declared that press access will only be granted to reporters who uncritically and unquestioningly parrot the official Pentagon line. All while they are summarily executing alleged drug runners by launching missiles at boats in international waters, in blatant violation of international law and every commonsense principle of due process.
Speaking of due process, we have legal residents and in some cases U.S. citizens being picked up off the street by masked agents and given no due process before being shipped off the foreign gulags and other countries with which they have no familiarity, while the Trump Administration blatantly defies the Constitution by declaring birthright citizenship invalid and attempting to strip American citizens of their basic rights.
This farce is, of course, directed by Tom Homan, the aforementioned crook being protected by our corrupt DOJ and FBI. Sold to Americans as targeting dangerous criminals, this anti-immigration push is in fact targeting the lowest-hanging fruit so that they can meet the arbitrary quotas set by Stephen Miller, one of the most disturbingly racist and fascist people in this administration. And it's both ruining our reputation and killing our tourist industry.
We've kneecapped our world-class scientific research community, kicking off a brain-drain that is going to cost us for years to come. We're alienating our best federal employees, particularly our crucial statistical compilation and assessment capabilities, which much of the world runs on. We've frittered away the trust we had built up over the past 75 or so years with the international community, and abdicated our position as leader of the free world with our feckless, pathetic President being led around by the nose by the world's worst autocrats, and seemingly confused about who are our allies and who are our adversaries.
He has taken an economy that was in fantastic shape and turned it in the other direction with his senseless and incoherent economic policy. He has openly enriched himself off the Presidency, to the tune of billions of dollars as he forces cryptocurrency down our throats, threatening the value and stability of the U.S. dollar while his arbitrary and petty tariff regime threatens the global trading order and drives away allies.
He is jeopardizing the health of Americans by putting an unqualified crank in charge of HHS, who now threatens access to crucial vaccines while propounding utter garbage about Tylenol causing autism. Our medical and health community is in complete disarray over this, as trust in government health expertise has completely imploded in order for Trump to increase his appeal with online "big-pharma" fear mongers and conspiracy theorists.
Given all of this—and believe me, I could go on—how is it that the issues of transgender teens, tiny in number as they are, and hindsight criticism of public health awareness management in response to a once-in-a-lifetime (we hope) pandemic, don't pale in comparison as rather frivolous and petty concerns? I really don't get this, but this is the answer to your question—nobody is criticizing the Biden administration's policies because by and large they successfully navigated us through a deadly pandemic, and there are now myriad other threats to our country being brought on by Biden's opposition.
When is the "heterodox" crowd going to get a sense of perspective and start taking appropriate measure of things that matter most and are most pressing? When are they going to stop obsessing over their pet issues and turn their critical gaze where it is needed the most right now, to the abuses of power and the dire threats to American democracy posed by a lawless and corrupt President and administration?
Thank you for your comments. I could respond to many of the claims you make. But I will just respond to one: You defend democratic policy on transgenderism - which includes teaching kindergarteners about it! ( personal experience). You seem to suggest that democrats do this because of the "unmitigated cruelty of the right towards transgender people."
This is absolutely false. The thought leaders on this issue on this such as Abigail Shrier and Miriam Grossman- or JK Rowlings- always say that transgender adults have very right to live as they see fit, with full civil rights of any other citizen. They deserve the same love, honor and respect as any other human being. I would challenge you to find a leading national right wing politician who has ever insulted or beeen "cruel" about adult transgender people.
I will tell why the democrats beat the transgender drum. They think its a voting block and they think it will expand the LGBTQ voting block. Elections are won by 2% or 1% so they are willing to be divisive and stir up emotions to get the transgender votes. According to Glenn Greenwald, the transgender lobby is also fed by huge amounts of money from the Pritzker family and from lobbying groups that had formerly supported gay marriage, but needed a new cause.
Isabelle, I apologize for my delay in responding to this; life's been hectic lately.
But I'm honestly kind of stunned by your question. You're aware that Donald Trump is literally kicking transgendered people out of the military right now, no? Some of them have served for 10, 15 years or more. Usually when the military attempts to incentivize early retirement, people who have served 15-18 years are made eligible for retirement benefits. Not here. Their "incentive" is, come forward now and you might get a better deal than if we have to come find you. Thanks but no thanks for your service.
Does that not seem unbelievably cruel? How about outright bans on care for transgender youth, while people are still in the midst of treatment? I'm skeptical of youth gender affirming care as well, but completely banning it is *way* over the line, as some Republicans with integrity—like Mike DeWine and Asa Hutchinson, recognized by *vetoing* anti-trans bills passed by Republican legislatures. And those anti-transgender bills are *all over the place* now in Republican politics.
Why? Because it's a winner.
Understand that I'm saying this even as someone who thinks transgendered women *shouldn't* be able to compete in women's sports! But just listen to the rhetoric of people like Ron Desantis, who don't even make an effort to sound compassionate and only speak of transgenders as a threat—a threat to girls sports, to girls' bathrooms, to girls everywhere.
Any Republican politician who thinks they can benefit from it has employed this kind of rhetoric, and it has been reflected in the way online influencers like Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh (just to name a couple) have spoken about transgenders. At CPAC '23, Michael Knowles said, "Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely–the whole preposterous ideology, at every level."
Which is a big part of why, and I'm sorry to have to be so blunt, but it's utterly preposterous to accuse Democrats of "sowing division" for an extra couple percentage points. They would have to be blind to both public sentiment and basic political arithmetic.
Firstly, transgendered people don't account for even 1% of the population, and as you can imagine they are already overwhelmingly liberal. Democrats could almost ignore them and they would still have to be delusional to vote Republican. Not to mention they tend to be concentrated in blue areas of the country where Democrats already safely control things. And the amount of people they lose on this issue, as Republicans have ably demonstrated, easily dwarfs whatever meager gains they might make.
Secondly, the Democrats' problem isn't that they are themselves divisive—even Joe Biden, who was perhaps the most trans-friendly Democrat there was, didn't go around talking Iike some hysterical social justice warrior. Believe me, Democrats would *love* it if the whole transgender problem would just go away because it absolutely *does not* work for them as a political issue. It's like Republicans and health care—it's a drag on their electoral prospects and everyone knows it.
And when I say "everyone", that of course includes Republicans. That's why they made an explicit political choice to go hard after transgenders because they saw that public opinion wasn't with them on youth gender medicine and transgenders in sports. As I said, for the most part I'm on that side of those issues as well.
But instead of just having sober conversations that show a bit of compassion, people like Trump, Desantis, Nancy Mace, MTG, et al just keep speaking in demagogic language, calling transgendered women and girls "men" and "boys", freaking out over bathroom usage (recall that hissy fit Mace and MTG threw over Sarah McBride using the ladies' room, with McBride choosing the high road and standing down), and highlighting every horror story they can find in order to make transgendered people seem like villains, victimizers, and abusers. It's been a complete punching down campaign.
And you know what? It worked. In fact it may have been the decisive factor in Trump's win. Republicans spent an inordinate amount of money towards the end of the 2024 campaign on attack ads that painted Harris as overly friendly to transgendered people. Harris, for her part, barely touched the issue unless asked about it because she knew it was a loser.
I agree that Democrats have a problem with advocacy groups. But threats by LGBT groups to force Democrats to take unpopular stands on transgenders are mostly hollow. Unlike the pro-Palestinian activists, they aren't delusional as to which party represents their interests. Maybe primaries are an issue for some Democrats, but by and large this is a liberal cultural issue, and that makes it difficult for Democrats because they have to walk a fine line.
And the worse the right treats transgenders, the more the left is inclined to close ranks around them. And we all know why they're doing it. When before now have right-wing men ever shown a whit of interest in girls' sports? It's a political issue that has paid huge dividends for them, enough to get people to turn away from Trump's undeniable corruption and unfitness for office.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see how anyone can deny that Republicans, not Democrats, have been the ones sowing division for electoral gain. J.K. Rowling and Abigail Shrier are irrelevant. I'm talking about Republicans, and the only Republican who matters these days. The one who sets the tone for everyone else, who heads up a cult of personality that has a death grip on the party.
And that guy has unquestionably kicked transgendered people in the teeth to maintain power.
Thanks for your long response. It does help me to understand the thinking of unapologetic democrats. I accept that you make some valid points, for example, a transgender person serving in the military for many years should be treated with respect. I dont deny that some politicians may be scoring political points ( on both sides).
But some of your other points are hyperbolic. I watched Matt Walsh's " What is a Woman?" documentary, and it was definitely opinionated, but it was not cruel or hateful. He just let the people speak who thought that gender affirming "care" for children is a good thing. Have you watched it?
As for stopping gender affirming "care" for minors, you have to realize that to many of us, it seems like child abuse to be doing it in the first place. Children are given powerful synthetic hormones ( in the case of boys, the same hormones are are given for chemical castration). At some point they will get irreversible genital mutilation surgeries ( often multiple). I have heard stories from therapists of teenage girls who are planning to have their breasts removed, and they dont understand that its irreversible.
Surely as a democrat, you can't ignore financial incentives on the part of hospitals and even surgeons. I am not saying these are evil people, but incentives matter.
We can agree to disagree. You believe Republicans are horribly cruel to transgender people. I believe that the transgender lobby exagerrates dramatically the alleged cruelty of the republicans . And I believe that removing the genitals of children and putting them on synthetic hormones for life is cruel.
"Remember when Seth Moulton said he didnt want his daughters playing high school sports against biological men? Has ONE democrat said anything critical of the Biden admin vaccine mandates? Or of gender surgeries on children?" Perhaps, Ms. Williams, you've been getting your information in the wrong places.
I would be very happy to be wrong about this. Can you name which other democrats in congress supported Seth Moulton? And can you name one nationally prominent democrat politician who has said that the school closures were way too long, lockdowns don't work, and the covid vaccine shouldn't have been mandated ?
Ms. Williams--The ranks of democratic elected officials who have taken a stance against trans athletes is thin beyond Moulton. There was a NJ state senator, Paul Sarlo, who also argued on NPR against such competitions. Besides politicians, however, several prominent voices on the left and right (Bill Mahr, Andrew Sullivan, Dave Chappelle) have spoken out loudly. And, as a lifelong democrat, I certainly agree that the unfair competition is, well, unfair. I wrote a 13th Clown Substack about this topic some weeks ago. As for school closures and lockdowns, in the heat of epidemic, fighting a new virus, an abundance of caution seemed prudent until more science was available. Looking at it with 20/20 hindsight it's easier to be critical. Compared to the horrendous advice given to the MAGA faithful about the vaccine, causing thousands of unnecessary deaths, the policies that now seem unwarranted were far less harmful.
I don't consider myself a MAHA faithful. But I didn't take the new covid vaccine because I was sceptical of a brand new mrna platform. Also, after the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, it was pretty clear that covid was not all that dangerous. So I skipped the vaccine, got covid and don't regret my choice. I had a choice because I was not a federal employee, or a school teacher or a healthcare worker in a democrat state.
It's telling that an essay dripping with contempt for post-liberal thinkers begins with an incipit admitting one of their central premises: that liberalism's neutrality as to morals and values is only nominal, concealing an actual hostility towards traditional sources of the same (faith, enduring local communities, shared national histories, etc.). And indeed, the author proceeds to evince exactly that antipathy for the remainder of the piece. While correctly crediting liberal societies for allowing for a productive, competitive interplay of various viewpoints, he ignores entirely the central post-liberal insight that liberalism itself is toxic to the emergence of these constructive, vital forces within the body politic. Similarly, Reno's diagnosis of weakness as the Open Society's most pressing concern, an eminently plausible one in light of current trajectories, is summarily dismissed without so much as a cursory counterargument.
Granting that it may be conceptually useful to contrast Bergson's Open vs. Closed societies, it must be acknowledged that history is messier than political philosophy, and in any case, I think that the author's historical analysis on the basis of these categories is severely lacking. Granting that Nazi Germany and the USSR are reasonable approximations of closed societies, it is *not* true that the UK and the US were correspondingly tidy representations of open societies at the time of their great victories. Churchill was voted out, but FDR had established the most lopsided executive authority seen in US history to that point. The war effort was strong because of open traits like economic adaptability and dynamism, true, but also relied on fervent patriotism, a strong sense of national purpose, loyalty to fellow citizens, and to a not insignificant degree, Christian faith. It should go without saying that, looking around at our country and the West in 2025, that we do not find the America or UK of 1945 or even 1991. A cogent defense of liberalism in our actual current circumstances will have to dispense with anachronistic comparisons.
Having read Reno's Return of the Strong Gods, it made me wince to read this piece, which relies upon it heavily in substance, but grotesquely caricatures its arguments. On Reno's account, the elevation of shared loves and loyalties is our best hope for rejuvenating our national political life in an age of technologically- and ideologically-driven atomization and meaninglessness. This is a very long way from tiki torch parades, or the thinly veiled and unjustified accusation of racialism. That Mr. Kahn feels confident in making such an poorly-supported leap in his argument rather proves Reno's point: a political conversation where any appeal to the sources of national identity that have typified most human societies throughout our species' recorded history can be neutered by saying "but the Nazis" is an impoverished and unhelpful one.
Lastly, Kahn's accusation of "goldfishness" unfortunately looks more apt when applied to his own perspective than to Reno's. Kahn's historical memory seems to go back to 1914 at earliest, while Reno is calling on us to draw on more ancient and enduring sources of national vitality. If all we can see in that call are the sickle and the swastika, then it's hard to see where Persuasion can begin.
Hi Brett, thank you for the thoughtful reply. I simply don’t agree that liberalism is hostile towards traditional sources of meaning. Liberalism, in the way I tend to conceive of it, represents a marketplace of ideas, and it’s like the concessionaire who runs the marketplace and makes sure that nobody, through whatever form of fanaticism or bullying, is keeping viable ideas from appearing in the marketplace. There’s nothing in that structure that’s inimical to traditional sources of morals or values.
As for Reno, I’ll probably write a fuller reply to his book at some point, but, honestly, his argument strikes me as extraordinarily short-sighted. Being worried about ‘weakness’ and then jumping into fervent strength is almost the perfect illustration of going from the frying pan into the fire. What he describes is something about popular will - the shared “we” - but that’s obviously just a kind of majoritarianism and he seems not to consider in any real way what’s supposed to happen when minorities or dissidents or anybody, for any reason at all, happens not to share in the “popular will.”
And thanks for the thought-provoking essay. I agree that many liberals conceive of liberalism as content-neutral. True, it's not hard to find examples within the liberal philosophical tradition who are explicit in their desire to weaken the hold of traditional faith, for example (Paine & Voltaire especially), but for American liberalism specifically, there has been a conventional rhetorical respect of traditional sources of meaning, at least until recently.
Where I think the post-liberals (I'm thinking of Deneen specifically here) are correct is in their analysis of liberal regimes as actually implemented politically, and as they have developed over time. Among other things, Deneen argues convincingly that meritocratic liberalism undermines local communities by "strip mining" their human capital for deployment to elite metropoles; that liberal secularism brackets religious faith in such a way that questions of ultimate meaning are quarantined away from the political conversation (recall Sen. Feinstein's infamous criticism of the dogma-possessed Amy Coney Barrett); and that relentless commodification erodes away local and national customs, leading to a pervasive sameness that undermines the meaningful particularities of individual human lives. These phenomena pose questions that liberals simply cannot ignore. How can a liberal society "progress" without a normative, if not shared, conception of the Good? Of what consolation is the worldly success of certain talented & motivated individuals, from the perspective of the communities and families that are estranged from them? etc., etc.
Liberals disagree with Deneen that liberalism is causally responsible for the above, but for that response to be convincing, it would be helpful to hear about the more likely culprits.
I have my own criticisms of Reno (I'm still not entirely sure I know what a "Strong God" is, for example). But above, you seem more concerned about Western societies being "fervently strong" than you do about them being weak. This illustrates the built-in problem with the Open Society ethos. Reno is right to point out that this ethos arose at a very particular time and place in history, and I think it's worth considering if our problems today are different enough than 1945 that a reconsideration of the threats facing liberal democracies is warranted. As re: concern about majoritarianism, you seem rather more optimistic than I am that Reno or other post-liberals could muster such a majority on the basis of their ideas. But in any case, concern about majoritarianism long predates Popper; arguably, minority protections would be best reinforced by actually attending to the theological/philosophical basis for the conception of human rights to begin with. (This seems timely today, what with talk of "filtered air" as the next human right to be enshrined by the UN.)
To close, I wanted also to point out that Reno's Strong Gods (whatever that means) are not exclusively traditionalist in orientation. He thinks the identitarian American Left is animated by such forces, for example. The book is descriptive before it is prescriptive; the strong gods are returning, like it or not. Let's try to choose as best we can which of them hold sway.
I think the Open Society is really oikophobia, as described by Roger Scruton:
An extreme and immoderate aversion to the sacred and the thwarting of the connection of the sacred to the culture of the West appears to be the underlying motif of oikophobia; and not the substitution of the culture by another coherent system of belief. The paradox of the oikophobe seems to be that any opposition directed at the theological and cultural tradition of the West is to be encouraged even if it is "significantly more parochial, exclusivist, patriarchal, and ethnocentric". (Mark Dooley, Roger Scruton: Philosopher on Dover Beach (Continuum 2009), p. 78.)
Hi Alex, yeah, that’s really the question isn’t it? I haven’t heard the term “oikophobia” before! I deeply, respectfully, disagree with that conception - and I think that’s the whole bone of disagreement. I don’t believe that the ‘open society’ or ‘pluralism’ is rooted in dislike of home or the family or anything like that. It’s just built around the idea that the world is complicated, different ideas from different societies are coming at you, and there are these clashes of values that you have to mediate in some way. I believe that it’s perfectly possible to be patriotic, to love your family, to participate strongly in your birth culture, and still be a proud member of the open society. I know a lot of people, of the Scruton/Reno style don’t believe this, but I would stake everything I have on that.
Thanks for your comment. You still have the problem of alienation. Modern liberalism is so alienating people don't know what a woman is or what sex they are.
The idea of family, home, ancestors and the sacred as inter-connected and essential to the individual's path to membership in his culture may well be universal. In his autobiography and testimony to spiritual awakening, Russell Means wrote about his experience as a young Native American who rediscovered his "home" in his traditions as an Indian and not as a member of the white man's tribe: "In that humiliating moment, I came to realize how white people look upon us: We're not real human beings, we don't exist, we have no care, no rights, no sensibilities. We're tourist attractions." Russell Means, ''Where White Men Fear to Tread'' (St. Martin's Press, 1995) p. 111.
Russell Means' rejection of the dominant culture resulted in his acceptance of the sacredness of his own ancestors' rituals. A far different response emerges from Karl Marx towards Western Judeo-Christian culture. Marx describes alienation, or at least that of the "workers," as even more estranged than Abraham and Means: "Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates independently of the individual–that is, operates on him as an alien, divine or diabolical activity—so is the worker's activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self." Karl Marx, ''Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,'' p. 111.
I'm not sure liberalism is exactly to blame for alienation. I think the alienation may just be the result of the technological structure of how we live - the machines, etc, have a way of pushing us apart from each other. I don't think liberalism is particularly a cause of any of that. And I don't see liberalism - the way I understand liberalism - is being in any kind of contradiction with a celebration of hearth and home.
To go back to Scylla and Charybdis, what is in between? I think the essay leads to false dichotomy of open vs closed, individual vs community. But there is a breadth of more thinking. In Common Law tradition, there is a long standing and strong component of Public Interest. It is a limit to individualism, while yet not collectivist. That, I believe, is the path to follow.
The form the liberalism took at the end of the War, neoliberalism, skewed too far to the individualism, and left decreasing standards for most members of society. That is causing a rebound to intense focus by many on collective systems. So simply focussing on some kinds of freedom without public interest is unlikely to deliver the results for democracy.
Hi Ryan, those are interesting points. I do recognize that the critique of Popper is that what he espoused just turned into neoliberalism or "Cold War liberalism." It would be interesting to understand more of what you mean by "Common Law." I tend to subscribe to the idea that a certain moderation was the path through the absolutisms of the 20th century, and "pluralism" is the term I would give to that spirit of moderation, but that may be a slightly naive way of thinking about it.
I realize that neoliberalism is a boogeyman term thrown around, but I mean it precisely.
For context I am a public servant in Canada. We go through Public interest training and, while US also shares a background in Common Law, it diverged from British and Commonwealth traditions a bit earlier. In Canada, we have a hybrid between the British and American systems of unwritten and written constitutions. I would say a major aspect of common law, similar in the US, is the unwritten aspects. In Canada, in our written constitution, we have a clause for government for "Peace, Order, and Good Governance" (POGG). It is very broad. Our supreme court acts similar to the USA and holds the government accountable to many of the unwritten aspects of our constitution, which holds how vague concepts are defined.
I think that post-war New Deal liberalism probably had a good balance between public good and private interest, not that it was perfect. I like the analogy of Tacking from the conservative writer Michael Oakeshott; who's conservatism is about pragmatic adjustments opposed to narrow idealism. I think it balances well with the pluralism that you write about. I find that combining that kind of conservatism with liberalism is likely to deliver long term stability.
I must say, it's been a while since I've read Popper. I think that the balance fits in. There is a big tent to play under within liberalism, including Popperian pluralism. I guess that's where my comment comes in; some forms of liberalism are more narrow focused than other. As growth has slowed (and reversed for many segments), I think those forms of liberalism are falling faster and more readily to demagogic illiberalism.
A friendly addition to the reading list: Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. Vienna’s liberal, cosmopolitan world felt permanently open—art as civil religion, manners as guardrails—until events revealed how thin those safeguards were. It’s a reminder that an open society needs more than sentiment: institutions that learn, protections for minorities, civic habits that withstand shock, and a living memory of what can go wrong. Without these, cultural vibrancy can camouflage political fragility.
You dismiss the view that “the deepest truths of human relations have been worked out in cultural traditions, and, usually, were settled a long time ago.”
But that dismissal misses the deeper origin: The deepest truths of human relations are biological—and only then embedded in cultural traditions.
Gender differences, for example, are not mere social constructs. They arise from neurological development, hormonal architecture, and biological tension between brain and body. Culture may shape expression, but it does not erase the structural reality of difference.
The fault lines in Rwanda, Bosnia, Myanmar, Sudan—and now in France, the UK, Sweden, Germany, and the United States—are not simply political. They are differences in personhood, both cultural and biological. They are not misunderstandings. They are collisions of identity.
Liberalism, in its modern form, fails to recognize this.
It sees tyranny only through its own filters—blind to the fact that governmental power has been used to impose ideological conformity, especially through the machinery of DEI at every level of society.
It mistakes resistance to imposed ideology as tyranny itself, rather than an attempt to overthrow it.
The fault line of the liberal argument , is the failure to accept and grasp the distinction of difference, between groups and within groups.
Your open society cannot function at scale until it understands that difference is not a flaw to be corrected, but a truth to be acknowledged.
Whoa there. You think that being Houthi vs being Tutsi, or Serb vs. Bosnian, or Buddhist vs. Muslim are differences in "personhood"? That's pretty essentialist, my man, and the primrose path to denying the personhood of others as opposed to seeking common ground.
Please reread the comment, The fault lines are differences in personhood at the group level, whether cultural or biological. Something indisputable I would have thought. The very act of seeking common ground presupposes that differences exist. They cannot simply be waived away, as some liberal thinkers have assumed. Rather, they must be recognized and engaged—within a framework that allows for both separatism and integration, once those differences have been meaningfully accommodated.
Imposition, after all, is no less a form of tyranny than any other.
The human longing for eternal existence is the natural portal for the smuggling of idolatry: a rock, a tree or some arbitrarily defined tribe (nation, race, even gender) can outlast your life, so it is natural to put those trivial but durable objects over the daily miracle of (mortal) consciousness.
But nothing really exists but you (your conscious mind, your cartesian self, your res cogitans) and other conscious beings. The public life is instrumental: the government, the flag or the garbage collection service are necessary, and consequently worthy of the sacrifice of blood and treasury, but their value is to make the private life possible. It is in private life where we find what matters: romantic love, family life and the quest for knowledge, enlightenment and creation.
What do you mean when you say that "nothing really exists but you […] and other conscious beings"? Do you think that rocks are immaterial? If yes, what do you mean by "exists"?
Over this essay you seem to swap out the meaning of "pluralism" to "woke". Substacks like this are pretty willing to stick their nose out and call woke illiberal though, e.g .Nate Silver on "Blueskyism".
Up top:
"The point was that it isn’t as if there is only one truth, just as there isn’t one way of tying a tie, but that the ways of tying ties aren’t infinite either—that there may be a series of different systems that are each true, or, maybe better to say, workable. ... The task of political philosophy then becomes not about looking for truth—there will always be different contenders for that—but about triangulating and triaging between the different viable systems that present themselves within a given society."
Below:
"Like a blast of fetid air, Reno helps to remind those of us who believe in pluralism and the Open Society exactly what we are against. The basic issue at the moment is that 1945—and also, really, 1989—are long enough ago that people have allowed themselves to forget their lessons. Mass populations with daddy issues are willing to place their trust in strongmen. Identities based on likeness are easier to organize around than identities based on the somewhat abstruse arguments of pluralism."
It makes me want to put a question like this to you: Do you believe men and women have fundamental differences? At the top of the essay I think your answer is "that's valid," at the bottom I think it's "absolutely not", and maybe we should even enforce people to think it's not.
We should all be clear that illiberal excesses had taken over woke politics by 2020. By 2024 the woke project is trying to cancel anyone for supporting Israel -- you think that doesn't have any scrap of forgetting the lessons of the Holocaust in it? So what's the electoral pitch here -- tell the rightist voters that to restore open society, what they really have to do is go back to 2020 woke? They've already voted that they won't be gaslit on that, I wouldn't keep trying.
Hi Daniel, I think you're confusing liberalism with anything that codes politically left. The two are pretty different. "Liberalism," in the way I think about it, is a philosophy dedicated to protecting the open marketplace of ideas and working towards a pluralistic structure in which minorities are protected and all voices are heard. To me, that's very different from the dialogue-kibboshing fanatics on the left who've become so prominent over the last decade - and Persuasion, more than just about anybody, has really taken to task that trend in leftist discourse.
No I get that, you get that, I don't think your essay adheres to that distinction. Like you're writing about pluralism but you also personally have politics and you're privileging those politics. The result is you're too damning to rightist voters. In U.S. 2024, they voted against woke which is an Open Society thing to do, and they also voted out an infirm Biden, who they pretty much perceived as attempting coup on behalf of some shadow governing figure. Those seem like good starting points for systems of thought that might be supplied by the right.
Well, first of all, in order to have elections you need something like an open society. And part of the open society is to accept the results of elections that you don’t like, which everybody in the liberal camp was willing to do. There’s a paradox in that the keepers of the open society also may have their own positive philosophy, which is where things get muddy and it can be hard to draw a line between the two. It’s that exercise that’s sort of what Persuasion is all about. But if you have the adherents of the Closed Society in power, things start to look very different very quickly. I definitely think we’re seeing that with MAGA and Trump and some of the moves to start to forestall elections.
So I wish I didn't say rightist which can mean "far right," I mean more like "voted right." I'm just saying I think you're ascribing an intent or a yearning for a closed society from a Trump vote and you can't do that. You believe a Trump vote has the effect of creating a closed society but it doesn't mean those voters agreed with you at the time, and I think problems with Democrats were substantial enough that constitutes a reasonable disagreement. I followed focus groups of Biden-Trump voters this year through March, and they were in the peculiar place of continuing in this logic -- in a MI focus group, they all detested Trump and 9/10 said they'd still vote for him because they found Kamala very flawed. (Keep in mind off the raw approximation, 1/10 would flip the results.)
Intellectually or emotionally I really don't know what to do with these voters now. They seem important, build bridges and so on. I do think part of the mystery is our side taking *significantly* more seriously the problems with left authoritarianism *including* the Biden stunt. Center libs are blaming woke, okay true enough but the rot was also dead in the middle of the left center. And the left will point out corporate has captured the center anyway -- true even under a healthy dem-capitalism, but you could say it's gotten worse.
Like I'm seriously proposing just calling it the Democratic coup attempt of 2024, maybe just as an Overton window thing, a little edgelord on purpose, but I think if you can't get that self critical you're not really doing the open society thing. You're doing Bidenism. Biden was a big believer in creating a closed society facsimile to compete with theirs then selling it as an open one. It was probably the only way for him to justify running -- if Trump ran, meaning Biden showed his magnanimity by not prosecuting him, I guess so they could be foils. Anyway, this is a tangent, but if you really truly believe open beats closed, then open has to get vulnerable enough to not be closed, and get vulnerable in the most dangerous moment, so as to abandon the strategy of closed v closed.
And interestingly you're moving into a theory of why should a liberal admit wrongdoing when the right *needs* to admit wrongdoing. Well what better way to restore a common value than admit where your side failed it.
Hi Daniel, All thoughtful points. For this essay, I wasn't thinking all that much about Trump or MAGA. More about these kinds of eternal tendencies within statecraft towards open and closed. Athens is always cited as the paradigm of open and Sparta of closed. It's perfectly possible to be a reasonable person and have an allegiance to one or the other. Several states in the last twenty years or so have very conspicuously undergone the journey from open to closed - Russia most prominently, then places like Hungary, and Israel has more recently joined the list. The US is slightly more confusing. When MAGA emphasizes closing borders, raising tariffs, and withdrawing from foreign policy committments, that's obviously a gesture in the direction of a "Closed" society. I don't necessarily mean that that's bad, it just obviously fits the parameters of "Closed" and then, if those measures really are imposed, you'll find yourself having to deal with all the various ramifications of being in a Closed Society. Of course I agree with you that Biden was far from the epitome of an Open Society. The censoriousness that has raged on the left for the past ten years or so is very troubling to me and I don't fully understand where it comes from - Persuasion by the way has been extraordinarily active in denouncing that sort of censoriousness and closed-mindedness. It's a great question - an open (!) question - whether that censoriousness is built into liberalism, which is what a lot of the post-liberals argue, or whether it's another more leftist tradition that has managed to disguise itself as liberal. Personally, I subscribe to the latter view, but certainly we can have a very healthy argument about whether liberalism inevitably gives way to the kind of censoriousness that has been wrecking our political landscape.
The problem is that societies have to be both closed *and* open. The unity of shared values - based on shared historical experiences and traditions - is essential to every society; but openness to challenges is also essential to avoid "implosion" into rigid exclusivity. This balance has been accomplished in modern societies through a combination of localism and universalism, relegating most core human values, such as religion and sexuality and family structure, to the sphere of "private" action. That compromise has broken down: everyone, left and right, wants to bring these "private" issues into the public sphere.That require a redefinition of values, which is inevitably a long, slow process. But the progressives insist that it be fast ("Time's Up!"), which inescapably leads to bitter conflict; both progressives and conservatives revert to their worst, most simplistic selves. Basically (almost) everyone agrees that values need to change - no one really wants to go back to public drawing and quartering or slavery or many other aspects of the past. But that change cannot be done by decree.
Day of the Jackal. That was my first AHA. Usual Suspects. WOW. It’s the idea that the one who resides among us may very well be the one who sows the chaos. One, not ten million, not three hundred million. One. St. Paul talks about the race we are running/surviving and the notion that we simply cannot do it alone. We cannot run the race or whatever it is that we are doing without each other. It can’t happen. Saul/Paul had been the very one who was championing the fight against one group and decided that perhaps that wasn’t the best approach to living a peaceful and productive life. He wasn’t talking to one group. Jesus wasn’t either. The message was for all who heard it. All. We are all flawed. The very notion that if one group of flawed individuals bans together against another flawed group of individuals as the way out of being flawed is simply preposterous. It isn’t logical. It isn’t truthful. And it sure isn’t peaceful. I am not sure how this ever became a popular message being as children wouldn’t even recognize it as such. Let’s start over with the basics: just watch how children play when no one is talking.
One thing to keep in mind is that it is easier to close a society whose experiment with openness dates back to the mid-20th century, than it is to close a society whose tradition of openness dates back to at least 1215 (Magna Carta) or, perhaps, much earlier.
> The reality is that very little has changed since 1945. We still have states with massive nuclear arsenals pointed at one another.
This seemed disingenuous to the point that it confused me. The number of missiles and the eay they are treated has changed SO MUCH that I cannot hear this and understand the author. Much of the following paragraph was similar but was focused on much abstracter (and less objectively comparable) ideas
I’m sorry Alex, but what exactly has changed since the development of nuclear weapons? We still have strong states in control of planet-obliterating arsenals. That means that a state/nuclear arsenal falling into the wrong (i.e. intemperate) hands is just as much of a problem now as it was at the height of the Cold War.
I absolutely agree that we need an open pluralistic society where divergent, intellectually diverse views and politics are not merely tolerated but seen as essential. Robust even heated debate over ideas is essential to making the best decisions- as a society, through the messy process of politics, elections, legislation.
So, although a registered democrat, I voted for Trump in 2024. I was shocked and red pilled by the covid authoritarian paradigm. A virus doesn't cancel the bill of rights and democratic debate. I saw credentialed scientists, like Jay Bhattacharya, censored on social media when they criticized the lockdowns and school closures. The government mandated a brand new mrna vaccine platform with NO Long term safety studies. But discussion of this was taboo in all left or center left media. Also taboo is questioning the transgender ideology as it pertains to children.
We know from the case Murty vs Biden that the Biden admin pressuring social media companies to censor speech criticizing their covid policies.
Fast forward. Now I am very disappointed that the Trump team is censoring both Pro Palestine speech and anyone who makes mean comments about Charlie Kirk. However, I do see a lot of MAGA people and Republicans criticizing and pushing back. Whereas with the Democrats I didnt see any tolerance for divergent views. Remember when Seth Moulton said he didnt want his daughters playing high school sports against biological men? Has ONE democrat said anything critical of the Biden admin vaccine mandates? Or of gender surgeries on children?
It seems to me like everyone is so safely surrounded by the VERY polarized media they selected during the Democrat's winning streak that right now most people are being led to believe that everyone agrees with them.
If you're a high-minded Republican, you'll believe that "a lot of MAGA people and Republicans" are pushing back on the egregious violations by the current admin. A few years ago, many high-minded Democrats thought there was an impressive amount of pushback as well.
I am not sure that this "What About What THEY Did?" game can land you anywhere useful or helpful
You make an important point. I just try to read media that I believe is honest, even if they have a point of view. Glenn Greenwald is someone I listen to almost everyday. Matt Taibbi also.
Anyway, I am thrilled that democrats are now defending the first amendment.
We try to make political moves like this by default but gosh darn it, it doesn't do anything but make us feel better for our failures
The great Matt Taibbi, somone I read, just wrote an article on whether the censorship is worse now or under Biden.
https://www.racket.news/p/no-things-arent-worse-now-on-speech?r=1n48k8
Ms. Williams, I'm sorry to ask such a loaded question, but has it occurred to you that you are picking nits off an animal while ignoring that is quickly dying from a ferocious disease?
I acknowledge that the transgender issue has become an unfortunate third rail of Democratic politics—in no small measure because the unmitigated cruelty of the right towards transgendered people makes it difficult for liberals to be too critical without seeming to abandon them.
As for COVID "censoring", we are talking about a moment where we were attempting to get a global pandemic under control—mistakes were made on both sides of our cultural divide, but none more devastating than the right's indulgence of anti-vaccine quackery. Studies have found political affiliation with Donald Trump to be the most powerful predicting factor in high COVID death rates—in other words, Trump literally became a COVID comorbidity.
Setting those issues aside and turning to the Trump administration, we now have an unmitigated and unprecedented national disaster on our hands. The censoriousness of Trump is merely one facet of the overwhelming damage being done to our government, our world standing and reputation, our safety and national security, and our civic health.
We have an FBI that has virtually stopped prosecuting white collar crime, shut down counterterrorism and counterintelligence, fired or driven away many of our most experienced agents, and reoriented itself toward pursuing Trump's personal grievances. He is openly demanding the prosecution of his political enemies and firing people when they tell him that there's nothing to prosecute. And his "Border Czar" Tom Homan was just revealed to have been under investigation for accepting bribes to steer government contracts people's way, while the Trump Administration simply dropped the investigation and buried it. They aren't even denying it.
Our Defense Department (excuse me, Department of War) is being run by an incompetent man-child cosplaying as a "warrior" who has now declared that press access will only be granted to reporters who uncritically and unquestioningly parrot the official Pentagon line. All while they are summarily executing alleged drug runners by launching missiles at boats in international waters, in blatant violation of international law and every commonsense principle of due process.
Speaking of due process, we have legal residents and in some cases U.S. citizens being picked up off the street by masked agents and given no due process before being shipped off the foreign gulags and other countries with which they have no familiarity, while the Trump Administration blatantly defies the Constitution by declaring birthright citizenship invalid and attempting to strip American citizens of their basic rights.
This farce is, of course, directed by Tom Homan, the aforementioned crook being protected by our corrupt DOJ and FBI. Sold to Americans as targeting dangerous criminals, this anti-immigration push is in fact targeting the lowest-hanging fruit so that they can meet the arbitrary quotas set by Stephen Miller, one of the most disturbingly racist and fascist people in this administration. And it's both ruining our reputation and killing our tourist industry.
We've kneecapped our world-class scientific research community, kicking off a brain-drain that is going to cost us for years to come. We're alienating our best federal employees, particularly our crucial statistical compilation and assessment capabilities, which much of the world runs on. We've frittered away the trust we had built up over the past 75 or so years with the international community, and abdicated our position as leader of the free world with our feckless, pathetic President being led around by the nose by the world's worst autocrats, and seemingly confused about who are our allies and who are our adversaries.
He has taken an economy that was in fantastic shape and turned it in the other direction with his senseless and incoherent economic policy. He has openly enriched himself off the Presidency, to the tune of billions of dollars as he forces cryptocurrency down our throats, threatening the value and stability of the U.S. dollar while his arbitrary and petty tariff regime threatens the global trading order and drives away allies.
He is jeopardizing the health of Americans by putting an unqualified crank in charge of HHS, who now threatens access to crucial vaccines while propounding utter garbage about Tylenol causing autism. Our medical and health community is in complete disarray over this, as trust in government health expertise has completely imploded in order for Trump to increase his appeal with online "big-pharma" fear mongers and conspiracy theorists.
Given all of this—and believe me, I could go on—how is it that the issues of transgender teens, tiny in number as they are, and hindsight criticism of public health awareness management in response to a once-in-a-lifetime (we hope) pandemic, don't pale in comparison as rather frivolous and petty concerns? I really don't get this, but this is the answer to your question—nobody is criticizing the Biden administration's policies because by and large they successfully navigated us through a deadly pandemic, and there are now myriad other threats to our country being brought on by Biden's opposition.
When is the "heterodox" crowd going to get a sense of perspective and start taking appropriate measure of things that matter most and are most pressing? When are they going to stop obsessing over their pet issues and turn their critical gaze where it is needed the most right now, to the abuses of power and the dire threats to American democracy posed by a lawless and corrupt President and administration?
Thank you for your comments. I could respond to many of the claims you make. But I will just respond to one: You defend democratic policy on transgenderism - which includes teaching kindergarteners about it! ( personal experience). You seem to suggest that democrats do this because of the "unmitigated cruelty of the right towards transgender people."
This is absolutely false. The thought leaders on this issue on this such as Abigail Shrier and Miriam Grossman- or JK Rowlings- always say that transgender adults have very right to live as they see fit, with full civil rights of any other citizen. They deserve the same love, honor and respect as any other human being. I would challenge you to find a leading national right wing politician who has ever insulted or beeen "cruel" about adult transgender people.
I will tell why the democrats beat the transgender drum. They think its a voting block and they think it will expand the LGBTQ voting block. Elections are won by 2% or 1% so they are willing to be divisive and stir up emotions to get the transgender votes. According to Glenn Greenwald, the transgender lobby is also fed by huge amounts of money from the Pritzker family and from lobbying groups that had formerly supported gay marriage, but needed a new cause.
Isabelle, I apologize for my delay in responding to this; life's been hectic lately.
But I'm honestly kind of stunned by your question. You're aware that Donald Trump is literally kicking transgendered people out of the military right now, no? Some of them have served for 10, 15 years or more. Usually when the military attempts to incentivize early retirement, people who have served 15-18 years are made eligible for retirement benefits. Not here. Their "incentive" is, come forward now and you might get a better deal than if we have to come find you. Thanks but no thanks for your service.
Does that not seem unbelievably cruel? How about outright bans on care for transgender youth, while people are still in the midst of treatment? I'm skeptical of youth gender affirming care as well, but completely banning it is *way* over the line, as some Republicans with integrity—like Mike DeWine and Asa Hutchinson, recognized by *vetoing* anti-trans bills passed by Republican legislatures. And those anti-transgender bills are *all over the place* now in Republican politics.
Why? Because it's a winner.
Understand that I'm saying this even as someone who thinks transgendered women *shouldn't* be able to compete in women's sports! But just listen to the rhetoric of people like Ron Desantis, who don't even make an effort to sound compassionate and only speak of transgenders as a threat—a threat to girls sports, to girls' bathrooms, to girls everywhere.
Any Republican politician who thinks they can benefit from it has employed this kind of rhetoric, and it has been reflected in the way online influencers like Charlie Kirk and Matt Walsh (just to name a couple) have spoken about transgenders. At CPAC '23, Michael Knowles said, "Transgenderism must be eradicated from public life entirely–the whole preposterous ideology, at every level."
Which is a big part of why, and I'm sorry to have to be so blunt, but it's utterly preposterous to accuse Democrats of "sowing division" for an extra couple percentage points. They would have to be blind to both public sentiment and basic political arithmetic.
Firstly, transgendered people don't account for even 1% of the population, and as you can imagine they are already overwhelmingly liberal. Democrats could almost ignore them and they would still have to be delusional to vote Republican. Not to mention they tend to be concentrated in blue areas of the country where Democrats already safely control things. And the amount of people they lose on this issue, as Republicans have ably demonstrated, easily dwarfs whatever meager gains they might make.
Secondly, the Democrats' problem isn't that they are themselves divisive—even Joe Biden, who was perhaps the most trans-friendly Democrat there was, didn't go around talking Iike some hysterical social justice warrior. Believe me, Democrats would *love* it if the whole transgender problem would just go away because it absolutely *does not* work for them as a political issue. It's like Republicans and health care—it's a drag on their electoral prospects and everyone knows it.
And when I say "everyone", that of course includes Republicans. That's why they made an explicit political choice to go hard after transgenders because they saw that public opinion wasn't with them on youth gender medicine and transgenders in sports. As I said, for the most part I'm on that side of those issues as well.
But instead of just having sober conversations that show a bit of compassion, people like Trump, Desantis, Nancy Mace, MTG, et al just keep speaking in demagogic language, calling transgendered women and girls "men" and "boys", freaking out over bathroom usage (recall that hissy fit Mace and MTG threw over Sarah McBride using the ladies' room, with McBride choosing the high road and standing down), and highlighting every horror story they can find in order to make transgendered people seem like villains, victimizers, and abusers. It's been a complete punching down campaign.
And you know what? It worked. In fact it may have been the decisive factor in Trump's win. Republicans spent an inordinate amount of money towards the end of the 2024 campaign on attack ads that painted Harris as overly friendly to transgendered people. Harris, for her part, barely touched the issue unless asked about it because she knew it was a loser.
I agree that Democrats have a problem with advocacy groups. But threats by LGBT groups to force Democrats to take unpopular stands on transgenders are mostly hollow. Unlike the pro-Palestinian activists, they aren't delusional as to which party represents their interests. Maybe primaries are an issue for some Democrats, but by and large this is a liberal cultural issue, and that makes it difficult for Democrats because they have to walk a fine line.
And the worse the right treats transgenders, the more the left is inclined to close ranks around them. And we all know why they're doing it. When before now have right-wing men ever shown a whit of interest in girls' sports? It's a political issue that has paid huge dividends for them, enough to get people to turn away from Trump's undeniable corruption and unfitness for office.
I'm sorry, but I just don't see how anyone can deny that Republicans, not Democrats, have been the ones sowing division for electoral gain. J.K. Rowling and Abigail Shrier are irrelevant. I'm talking about Republicans, and the only Republican who matters these days. The one who sets the tone for everyone else, who heads up a cult of personality that has a death grip on the party.
And that guy has unquestionably kicked transgendered people in the teeth to maintain power.
Thanks for your long response. It does help me to understand the thinking of unapologetic democrats. I accept that you make some valid points, for example, a transgender person serving in the military for many years should be treated with respect. I dont deny that some politicians may be scoring political points ( on both sides).
But some of your other points are hyperbolic. I watched Matt Walsh's " What is a Woman?" documentary, and it was definitely opinionated, but it was not cruel or hateful. He just let the people speak who thought that gender affirming "care" for children is a good thing. Have you watched it?
As for stopping gender affirming "care" for minors, you have to realize that to many of us, it seems like child abuse to be doing it in the first place. Children are given powerful synthetic hormones ( in the case of boys, the same hormones are are given for chemical castration). At some point they will get irreversible genital mutilation surgeries ( often multiple). I have heard stories from therapists of teenage girls who are planning to have their breasts removed, and they dont understand that its irreversible.
Surely as a democrat, you can't ignore financial incentives on the part of hospitals and even surgeons. I am not saying these are evil people, but incentives matter.
We can agree to disagree. You believe Republicans are horribly cruel to transgender people. I believe that the transgender lobby exagerrates dramatically the alleged cruelty of the republicans . And I believe that removing the genitals of children and putting them on synthetic hormones for life is cruel.
"Remember when Seth Moulton said he didnt want his daughters playing high school sports against biological men? Has ONE democrat said anything critical of the Biden admin vaccine mandates? Or of gender surgeries on children?" Perhaps, Ms. Williams, you've been getting your information in the wrong places.
I would be very happy to be wrong about this. Can you name which other democrats in congress supported Seth Moulton? And can you name one nationally prominent democrat politician who has said that the school closures were way too long, lockdowns don't work, and the covid vaccine shouldn't have been mandated ?
Ms. Williams--The ranks of democratic elected officials who have taken a stance against trans athletes is thin beyond Moulton. There was a NJ state senator, Paul Sarlo, who also argued on NPR against such competitions. Besides politicians, however, several prominent voices on the left and right (Bill Mahr, Andrew Sullivan, Dave Chappelle) have spoken out loudly. And, as a lifelong democrat, I certainly agree that the unfair competition is, well, unfair. I wrote a 13th Clown Substack about this topic some weeks ago. As for school closures and lockdowns, in the heat of epidemic, fighting a new virus, an abundance of caution seemed prudent until more science was available. Looking at it with 20/20 hindsight it's easier to be critical. Compared to the horrendous advice given to the MAGA faithful about the vaccine, causing thousands of unnecessary deaths, the policies that now seem unwarranted were far less harmful.
I don't consider myself a MAHA faithful. But I didn't take the new covid vaccine because I was sceptical of a brand new mrna platform. Also, after the Diamond Princess Cruise Ship, it was pretty clear that covid was not all that dangerous. So I skipped the vaccine, got covid and don't regret my choice. I had a choice because I was not a federal employee, or a school teacher or a healthcare worker in a democrat state.
Well, bless your heart.
It's telling that an essay dripping with contempt for post-liberal thinkers begins with an incipit admitting one of their central premises: that liberalism's neutrality as to morals and values is only nominal, concealing an actual hostility towards traditional sources of the same (faith, enduring local communities, shared national histories, etc.). And indeed, the author proceeds to evince exactly that antipathy for the remainder of the piece. While correctly crediting liberal societies for allowing for a productive, competitive interplay of various viewpoints, he ignores entirely the central post-liberal insight that liberalism itself is toxic to the emergence of these constructive, vital forces within the body politic. Similarly, Reno's diagnosis of weakness as the Open Society's most pressing concern, an eminently plausible one in light of current trajectories, is summarily dismissed without so much as a cursory counterargument.
Granting that it may be conceptually useful to contrast Bergson's Open vs. Closed societies, it must be acknowledged that history is messier than political philosophy, and in any case, I think that the author's historical analysis on the basis of these categories is severely lacking. Granting that Nazi Germany and the USSR are reasonable approximations of closed societies, it is *not* true that the UK and the US were correspondingly tidy representations of open societies at the time of their great victories. Churchill was voted out, but FDR had established the most lopsided executive authority seen in US history to that point. The war effort was strong because of open traits like economic adaptability and dynamism, true, but also relied on fervent patriotism, a strong sense of national purpose, loyalty to fellow citizens, and to a not insignificant degree, Christian faith. It should go without saying that, looking around at our country and the West in 2025, that we do not find the America or UK of 1945 or even 1991. A cogent defense of liberalism in our actual current circumstances will have to dispense with anachronistic comparisons.
Having read Reno's Return of the Strong Gods, it made me wince to read this piece, which relies upon it heavily in substance, but grotesquely caricatures its arguments. On Reno's account, the elevation of shared loves and loyalties is our best hope for rejuvenating our national political life in an age of technologically- and ideologically-driven atomization and meaninglessness. This is a very long way from tiki torch parades, or the thinly veiled and unjustified accusation of racialism. That Mr. Kahn feels confident in making such an poorly-supported leap in his argument rather proves Reno's point: a political conversation where any appeal to the sources of national identity that have typified most human societies throughout our species' recorded history can be neutered by saying "but the Nazis" is an impoverished and unhelpful one.
Lastly, Kahn's accusation of "goldfishness" unfortunately looks more apt when applied to his own perspective than to Reno's. Kahn's historical memory seems to go back to 1914 at earliest, while Reno is calling on us to draw on more ancient and enduring sources of national vitality. If all we can see in that call are the sickle and the swastika, then it's hard to see where Persuasion can begin.
Hi Brett, thank you for the thoughtful reply. I simply don’t agree that liberalism is hostile towards traditional sources of meaning. Liberalism, in the way I tend to conceive of it, represents a marketplace of ideas, and it’s like the concessionaire who runs the marketplace and makes sure that nobody, through whatever form of fanaticism or bullying, is keeping viable ideas from appearing in the marketplace. There’s nothing in that structure that’s inimical to traditional sources of morals or values.
As for Reno, I’ll probably write a fuller reply to his book at some point, but, honestly, his argument strikes me as extraordinarily short-sighted. Being worried about ‘weakness’ and then jumping into fervent strength is almost the perfect illustration of going from the frying pan into the fire. What he describes is something about popular will - the shared “we” - but that’s obviously just a kind of majoritarianism and he seems not to consider in any real way what’s supposed to happen when minorities or dissidents or anybody, for any reason at all, happens not to share in the “popular will.”
Cheers,
Sam
And thanks for the thought-provoking essay. I agree that many liberals conceive of liberalism as content-neutral. True, it's not hard to find examples within the liberal philosophical tradition who are explicit in their desire to weaken the hold of traditional faith, for example (Paine & Voltaire especially), but for American liberalism specifically, there has been a conventional rhetorical respect of traditional sources of meaning, at least until recently.
Where I think the post-liberals (I'm thinking of Deneen specifically here) are correct is in their analysis of liberal regimes as actually implemented politically, and as they have developed over time. Among other things, Deneen argues convincingly that meritocratic liberalism undermines local communities by "strip mining" their human capital for deployment to elite metropoles; that liberal secularism brackets religious faith in such a way that questions of ultimate meaning are quarantined away from the political conversation (recall Sen. Feinstein's infamous criticism of the dogma-possessed Amy Coney Barrett); and that relentless commodification erodes away local and national customs, leading to a pervasive sameness that undermines the meaningful particularities of individual human lives. These phenomena pose questions that liberals simply cannot ignore. How can a liberal society "progress" without a normative, if not shared, conception of the Good? Of what consolation is the worldly success of certain talented & motivated individuals, from the perspective of the communities and families that are estranged from them? etc., etc.
Liberals disagree with Deneen that liberalism is causally responsible for the above, but for that response to be convincing, it would be helpful to hear about the more likely culprits.
I have my own criticisms of Reno (I'm still not entirely sure I know what a "Strong God" is, for example). But above, you seem more concerned about Western societies being "fervently strong" than you do about them being weak. This illustrates the built-in problem with the Open Society ethos. Reno is right to point out that this ethos arose at a very particular time and place in history, and I think it's worth considering if our problems today are different enough than 1945 that a reconsideration of the threats facing liberal democracies is warranted. As re: concern about majoritarianism, you seem rather more optimistic than I am that Reno or other post-liberals could muster such a majority on the basis of their ideas. But in any case, concern about majoritarianism long predates Popper; arguably, minority protections would be best reinforced by actually attending to the theological/philosophical basis for the conception of human rights to begin with. (This seems timely today, what with talk of "filtered air" as the next human right to be enshrined by the UN.)
To close, I wanted also to point out that Reno's Strong Gods (whatever that means) are not exclusively traditionalist in orientation. He thinks the identitarian American Left is animated by such forces, for example. The book is descriptive before it is prescriptive; the strong gods are returning, like it or not. Let's try to choose as best we can which of them hold sway.
I think the Open Society is really oikophobia, as described by Roger Scruton:
An extreme and immoderate aversion to the sacred and the thwarting of the connection of the sacred to the culture of the West appears to be the underlying motif of oikophobia; and not the substitution of the culture by another coherent system of belief. The paradox of the oikophobe seems to be that any opposition directed at the theological and cultural tradition of the West is to be encouraged even if it is "significantly more parochial, exclusivist, patriarchal, and ethnocentric". (Mark Dooley, Roger Scruton: Philosopher on Dover Beach (Continuum 2009), p. 78.)
Hi Alex, yeah, that’s really the question isn’t it? I haven’t heard the term “oikophobia” before! I deeply, respectfully, disagree with that conception - and I think that’s the whole bone of disagreement. I don’t believe that the ‘open society’ or ‘pluralism’ is rooted in dislike of home or the family or anything like that. It’s just built around the idea that the world is complicated, different ideas from different societies are coming at you, and there are these clashes of values that you have to mediate in some way. I believe that it’s perfectly possible to be patriotic, to love your family, to participate strongly in your birth culture, and still be a proud member of the open society. I know a lot of people, of the Scruton/Reno style don’t believe this, but I would stake everything I have on that.
Thanks for your comment. You still have the problem of alienation. Modern liberalism is so alienating people don't know what a woman is or what sex they are.
The idea of family, home, ancestors and the sacred as inter-connected and essential to the individual's path to membership in his culture may well be universal. In his autobiography and testimony to spiritual awakening, Russell Means wrote about his experience as a young Native American who rediscovered his "home" in his traditions as an Indian and not as a member of the white man's tribe: "In that humiliating moment, I came to realize how white people look upon us: We're not real human beings, we don't exist, we have no care, no rights, no sensibilities. We're tourist attractions." Russell Means, ''Where White Men Fear to Tread'' (St. Martin's Press, 1995) p. 111.
Russell Means' rejection of the dominant culture resulted in his acceptance of the sacredness of his own ancestors' rituals. A far different response emerges from Karl Marx towards Western Judeo-Christian culture. Marx describes alienation, or at least that of the "workers," as even more estranged than Abraham and Means: "Just as in religion the spontaneous activity of the human imagination, of the human brain and the human heart, operates independently of the individual–that is, operates on him as an alien, divine or diabolical activity—so is the worker's activity not his spontaneous activity. It belongs to another; it is the loss of his self." Karl Marx, ''Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844,'' p. 111.
I'm not sure liberalism is exactly to blame for alienation. I think the alienation may just be the result of the technological structure of how we live - the machines, etc, have a way of pushing us apart from each other. I don't think liberalism is particularly a cause of any of that. And I don't see liberalism - the way I understand liberalism - is being in any kind of contradiction with a celebration of hearth and home.
To go back to Scylla and Charybdis, what is in between? I think the essay leads to false dichotomy of open vs closed, individual vs community. But there is a breadth of more thinking. In Common Law tradition, there is a long standing and strong component of Public Interest. It is a limit to individualism, while yet not collectivist. That, I believe, is the path to follow.
The form the liberalism took at the end of the War, neoliberalism, skewed too far to the individualism, and left decreasing standards for most members of society. That is causing a rebound to intense focus by many on collective systems. So simply focussing on some kinds of freedom without public interest is unlikely to deliver the results for democracy.
Hi Ryan, those are interesting points. I do recognize that the critique of Popper is that what he espoused just turned into neoliberalism or "Cold War liberalism." It would be interesting to understand more of what you mean by "Common Law." I tend to subscribe to the idea that a certain moderation was the path through the absolutisms of the 20th century, and "pluralism" is the term I would give to that spirit of moderation, but that may be a slightly naive way of thinking about it.
I realize that neoliberalism is a boogeyman term thrown around, but I mean it precisely.
For context I am a public servant in Canada. We go through Public interest training and, while US also shares a background in Common Law, it diverged from British and Commonwealth traditions a bit earlier. In Canada, we have a hybrid between the British and American systems of unwritten and written constitutions. I would say a major aspect of common law, similar in the US, is the unwritten aspects. In Canada, in our written constitution, we have a clause for government for "Peace, Order, and Good Governance" (POGG). It is very broad. Our supreme court acts similar to the USA and holds the government accountable to many of the unwritten aspects of our constitution, which holds how vague concepts are defined.
I think that post-war New Deal liberalism probably had a good balance between public good and private interest, not that it was perfect. I like the analogy of Tacking from the conservative writer Michael Oakeshott; who's conservatism is about pragmatic adjustments opposed to narrow idealism. I think it balances well with the pluralism that you write about. I find that combining that kind of conservatism with liberalism is likely to deliver long term stability.
I must say, it's been a while since I've read Popper. I think that the balance fits in. There is a big tent to play under within liberalism, including Popperian pluralism. I guess that's where my comment comes in; some forms of liberalism are more narrow focused than other. As growth has slowed (and reversed for many segments), I think those forms of liberalism are falling faster and more readily to demagogic illiberalism.
A friendly addition to the reading list: Stefan Zweig’s The World of Yesterday. Vienna’s liberal, cosmopolitan world felt permanently open—art as civil religion, manners as guardrails—until events revealed how thin those safeguards were. It’s a reminder that an open society needs more than sentiment: institutions that learn, protections for minorities, civic habits that withstand shock, and a living memory of what can go wrong. Without these, cultural vibrancy can camouflage political fragility.
Thanks Anna! That's a good book.
You dismiss the view that “the deepest truths of human relations have been worked out in cultural traditions, and, usually, were settled a long time ago.”
But that dismissal misses the deeper origin: The deepest truths of human relations are biological—and only then embedded in cultural traditions.
Gender differences, for example, are not mere social constructs. They arise from neurological development, hormonal architecture, and biological tension between brain and body. Culture may shape expression, but it does not erase the structural reality of difference.
The fault lines in Rwanda, Bosnia, Myanmar, Sudan—and now in France, the UK, Sweden, Germany, and the United States—are not simply political. They are differences in personhood, both cultural and biological. They are not misunderstandings. They are collisions of identity.
Liberalism, in its modern form, fails to recognize this.
It sees tyranny only through its own filters—blind to the fact that governmental power has been used to impose ideological conformity, especially through the machinery of DEI at every level of society.
It mistakes resistance to imposed ideology as tyranny itself, rather than an attempt to overthrow it.
The fault line of the liberal argument , is the failure to accept and grasp the distinction of difference, between groups and within groups.
Your open society cannot function at scale until it understands that difference is not a flaw to be corrected, but a truth to be acknowledged.
Whoa there. You think that being Houthi vs being Tutsi, or Serb vs. Bosnian, or Buddhist vs. Muslim are differences in "personhood"? That's pretty essentialist, my man, and the primrose path to denying the personhood of others as opposed to seeking common ground.
Please reread the comment, The fault lines are differences in personhood at the group level, whether cultural or biological. Something indisputable I would have thought. The very act of seeking common ground presupposes that differences exist. They cannot simply be waived away, as some liberal thinkers have assumed. Rather, they must be recognized and engaged—within a framework that allows for both separatism and integration, once those differences have been meaningfully accommodated.
Imposition, after all, is no less a form of tyranny than any other.
When I read Lyons essay I thougt, “they are not strong Gods, but bloody idols”:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pRvchqexE96mbCB4f/political-idolatry
The human longing for eternal existence is the natural portal for the smuggling of idolatry: a rock, a tree or some arbitrarily defined tribe (nation, race, even gender) can outlast your life, so it is natural to put those trivial but durable objects over the daily miracle of (mortal) consciousness.
But nothing really exists but you (your conscious mind, your cartesian self, your res cogitans) and other conscious beings. The public life is instrumental: the government, the flag or the garbage collection service are necessary, and consequently worthy of the sacrifice of blood and treasury, but their value is to make the private life possible. It is in private life where we find what matters: romantic love, family life and the quest for knowledge, enlightenment and creation.
What do you mean when you say that "nothing really exists but you […] and other conscious beings"? Do you think that rocks are immaterial? If yes, what do you mean by "exists"?
The “really” is important there. Rocks and berkelian trees that fall unobserved somewhat exist, but far less than conscious beings.
Over this essay you seem to swap out the meaning of "pluralism" to "woke". Substacks like this are pretty willing to stick their nose out and call woke illiberal though, e.g .Nate Silver on "Blueskyism".
Up top:
"The point was that it isn’t as if there is only one truth, just as there isn’t one way of tying a tie, but that the ways of tying ties aren’t infinite either—that there may be a series of different systems that are each true, or, maybe better to say, workable. ... The task of political philosophy then becomes not about looking for truth—there will always be different contenders for that—but about triangulating and triaging between the different viable systems that present themselves within a given society."
Below:
"Like a blast of fetid air, Reno helps to remind those of us who believe in pluralism and the Open Society exactly what we are against. The basic issue at the moment is that 1945—and also, really, 1989—are long enough ago that people have allowed themselves to forget their lessons. Mass populations with daddy issues are willing to place their trust in strongmen. Identities based on likeness are easier to organize around than identities based on the somewhat abstruse arguments of pluralism."
It makes me want to put a question like this to you: Do you believe men and women have fundamental differences? At the top of the essay I think your answer is "that's valid," at the bottom I think it's "absolutely not", and maybe we should even enforce people to think it's not.
We should all be clear that illiberal excesses had taken over woke politics by 2020. By 2024 the woke project is trying to cancel anyone for supporting Israel -- you think that doesn't have any scrap of forgetting the lessons of the Holocaust in it? So what's the electoral pitch here -- tell the rightist voters that to restore open society, what they really have to do is go back to 2020 woke? They've already voted that they won't be gaslit on that, I wouldn't keep trying.
Hi Daniel, I think you're confusing liberalism with anything that codes politically left. The two are pretty different. "Liberalism," in the way I think about it, is a philosophy dedicated to protecting the open marketplace of ideas and working towards a pluralistic structure in which minorities are protected and all voices are heard. To me, that's very different from the dialogue-kibboshing fanatics on the left who've become so prominent over the last decade - and Persuasion, more than just about anybody, has really taken to task that trend in leftist discourse.
No I get that, you get that, I don't think your essay adheres to that distinction. Like you're writing about pluralism but you also personally have politics and you're privileging those politics. The result is you're too damning to rightist voters. In U.S. 2024, they voted against woke which is an Open Society thing to do, and they also voted out an infirm Biden, who they pretty much perceived as attempting coup on behalf of some shadow governing figure. Those seem like good starting points for systems of thought that might be supplied by the right.
Well, first of all, in order to have elections you need something like an open society. And part of the open society is to accept the results of elections that you don’t like, which everybody in the liberal camp was willing to do. There’s a paradox in that the keepers of the open society also may have their own positive philosophy, which is where things get muddy and it can be hard to draw a line between the two. It’s that exercise that’s sort of what Persuasion is all about. But if you have the adherents of the Closed Society in power, things start to look very different very quickly. I definitely think we’re seeing that with MAGA and Trump and some of the moves to start to forestall elections.
So I wish I didn't say rightist which can mean "far right," I mean more like "voted right." I'm just saying I think you're ascribing an intent or a yearning for a closed society from a Trump vote and you can't do that. You believe a Trump vote has the effect of creating a closed society but it doesn't mean those voters agreed with you at the time, and I think problems with Democrats were substantial enough that constitutes a reasonable disagreement. I followed focus groups of Biden-Trump voters this year through March, and they were in the peculiar place of continuing in this logic -- in a MI focus group, they all detested Trump and 9/10 said they'd still vote for him because they found Kamala very flawed. (Keep in mind off the raw approximation, 1/10 would flip the results.)
Intellectually or emotionally I really don't know what to do with these voters now. They seem important, build bridges and so on. I do think part of the mystery is our side taking *significantly* more seriously the problems with left authoritarianism *including* the Biden stunt. Center libs are blaming woke, okay true enough but the rot was also dead in the middle of the left center. And the left will point out corporate has captured the center anyway -- true even under a healthy dem-capitalism, but you could say it's gotten worse.
Like I'm seriously proposing just calling it the Democratic coup attempt of 2024, maybe just as an Overton window thing, a little edgelord on purpose, but I think if you can't get that self critical you're not really doing the open society thing. You're doing Bidenism. Biden was a big believer in creating a closed society facsimile to compete with theirs then selling it as an open one. It was probably the only way for him to justify running -- if Trump ran, meaning Biden showed his magnanimity by not prosecuting him, I guess so they could be foils. Anyway, this is a tangent, but if you really truly believe open beats closed, then open has to get vulnerable enough to not be closed, and get vulnerable in the most dangerous moment, so as to abandon the strategy of closed v closed.
And interestingly you're moving into a theory of why should a liberal admit wrongdoing when the right *needs* to admit wrongdoing. Well what better way to restore a common value than admit where your side failed it.
Hi Daniel, All thoughtful points. For this essay, I wasn't thinking all that much about Trump or MAGA. More about these kinds of eternal tendencies within statecraft towards open and closed. Athens is always cited as the paradigm of open and Sparta of closed. It's perfectly possible to be a reasonable person and have an allegiance to one or the other. Several states in the last twenty years or so have very conspicuously undergone the journey from open to closed - Russia most prominently, then places like Hungary, and Israel has more recently joined the list. The US is slightly more confusing. When MAGA emphasizes closing borders, raising tariffs, and withdrawing from foreign policy committments, that's obviously a gesture in the direction of a "Closed" society. I don't necessarily mean that that's bad, it just obviously fits the parameters of "Closed" and then, if those measures really are imposed, you'll find yourself having to deal with all the various ramifications of being in a Closed Society. Of course I agree with you that Biden was far from the epitome of an Open Society. The censoriousness that has raged on the left for the past ten years or so is very troubling to me and I don't fully understand where it comes from - Persuasion by the way has been extraordinarily active in denouncing that sort of censoriousness and closed-mindedness. It's a great question - an open (!) question - whether that censoriousness is built into liberalism, which is what a lot of the post-liberals argue, or whether it's another more leftist tradition that has managed to disguise itself as liberal. Personally, I subscribe to the latter view, but certainly we can have a very healthy argument about whether liberalism inevitably gives way to the kind of censoriousness that has been wrecking our political landscape.
The problem is that societies have to be both closed *and* open. The unity of shared values - based on shared historical experiences and traditions - is essential to every society; but openness to challenges is also essential to avoid "implosion" into rigid exclusivity. This balance has been accomplished in modern societies through a combination of localism and universalism, relegating most core human values, such as religion and sexuality and family structure, to the sphere of "private" action. That compromise has broken down: everyone, left and right, wants to bring these "private" issues into the public sphere.That require a redefinition of values, which is inevitably a long, slow process. But the progressives insist that it be fast ("Time's Up!"), which inescapably leads to bitter conflict; both progressives and conservatives revert to their worst, most simplistic selves. Basically (almost) everyone agrees that values need to change - no one really wants to go back to public drawing and quartering or slavery or many other aspects of the past. But that change cannot be done by decree.
Day of the Jackal. That was my first AHA. Usual Suspects. WOW. It’s the idea that the one who resides among us may very well be the one who sows the chaos. One, not ten million, not three hundred million. One. St. Paul talks about the race we are running/surviving and the notion that we simply cannot do it alone. We cannot run the race or whatever it is that we are doing without each other. It can’t happen. Saul/Paul had been the very one who was championing the fight against one group and decided that perhaps that wasn’t the best approach to living a peaceful and productive life. He wasn’t talking to one group. Jesus wasn’t either. The message was for all who heard it. All. We are all flawed. The very notion that if one group of flawed individuals bans together against another flawed group of individuals as the way out of being flawed is simply preposterous. It isn’t logical. It isn’t truthful. And it sure isn’t peaceful. I am not sure how this ever became a popular message being as children wouldn’t even recognize it as such. Let’s start over with the basics: just watch how children play when no one is talking.
One thing to keep in mind is that it is easier to close a society whose experiment with openness dates back to the mid-20th century, than it is to close a society whose tradition of openness dates back to at least 1215 (Magna Carta) or, perhaps, much earlier.
> The reality is that very little has changed since 1945. We still have states with massive nuclear arsenals pointed at one another.
This seemed disingenuous to the point that it confused me. The number of missiles and the eay they are treated has changed SO MUCH that I cannot hear this and understand the author. Much of the following paragraph was similar but was focused on much abstracter (and less objectively comparable) ideas
I’m sorry Alex, but what exactly has changed since the development of nuclear weapons? We still have strong states in control of planet-obliterating arsenals. That means that a state/nuclear arsenal falling into the wrong (i.e. intemperate) hands is just as much of a problem now as it was at the height of the Cold War.