Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good

Liberals think of rhetoric as something you cut through to get to the substance. But in politics, rhetoric is the substance. Politics is the art of persuading people. If you can’t persuade them, you can’t get anything done. That doesn’t mean you have to lie to them. Yes, Donald Trump uses rhetoric, like all con artists. But so did Barack Obama, like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, and Cicero did. All saw rhetoric as a tool for moral work. You can speak poetically and still speak truth — deeper truth, if you do it well. If liberals want to stop losing, they need to re-learn how. Here's where to start. Full transcription and links at dastardlycleverness.com.

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

Every politician, or anyone trying to persuade anyone else of anything, faces two make-or-break moments: the moment before they say a word, and the moment they do. We turn to that second moment here. And to “Don’t Mess With Texas.” You probably know the slogan, but you may not know that it represents one of the most successful persuasion projects in history. There are many reasons for that, but among the most important is the power of one word. Full transcript and links at Substack and DastardlyCleverness.com.

The fiendish thing about the iron cage of alienation is that the harder you try to escape, the harder that gets. The more you try to think your way out, the more surely you lock yourself in. A case in point: The Democratic Party recently paid $20 million to study how to talk to men. If Democrats are alienated from men, it might just be because they see them as objects of study, as opposed to human beings they actually know. And it’s not just men who are becoming strangers to the Democratic Party. It’s black, Latino, Asian, and female voters too. Many are members of the party’s former, blue collar base. But how can Democrats get unalienated? How do you escape your own mind? Not by thinking the same old way, harder. You do it by learning to think in a different way. Find the full transcript and links for this episode at DastardlyCleverness.com.

Between 1933 and 1981, there were 24 sessions of Congress. For 22 of those 24, Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. During the same time there were 12 presidential terms. Eight were served by Democrats. Now Democrats can lose, twice, to a party led by Donald Trump, whose campaigns have been natural experiments in just how bad a candidate can be and still beat the Democrats. What happened? They got caught in what Max Weber called the Iron Cage: stuck in their rationalistic heads, Democrats have become alienated from much of America. Find the full transcript at dastardlycleverness.com.

Last time, I argued that if liberals still believe in an open society — free, equal, and pluralistic — we must defend reason. It’s the shared “meeting space” that makes the open society possible. But we must also understand that reason alone isn’t enough. If we filter all our experience through rationality, we become separated from it, as if we’re not living life, but observing it with scientific instruments. We become alienated. It’s a condition familiar to anyone who’s had a modern, reason-based education, especially in the humanities. It has come to define life within the modern, post-Enlightenment worldview. And as liberals have become ever more educated, it has come to define them. Thanks to the postwar education boom, more and more of them have gone to college. Meanwhile they have become alien, and alienating, to more and more voters. Find the full transcript at DastardlyCleverness.com. — Spencer

It’s a fundamental assumption of liberal democracy that we debate our differences with reason. But now that assumption looks like a relic of a bygone age — specifically, the Age of Enlightenment, from the late 17th to early 19th centuries. The Enlightenment produced more scientific progress than all of previous history — the very idea of progress comes to us from the Enlightenment. It had the same impact on the generation of wealth: Compared to economic growth since the Enlightenment, there was almost none during all the millennia before. And the Enlightenment gave us liberalism, the philosophy of freedom and equality on which the United States and all liberal democracies are founded. But ideologues of the MAGA right are openly hostile to the Enlightenment legacy. So too are the ideologues of the woke left. So liberals need to decide if they’re going to defend it. In its commitment to the open exercise of reason, liberalism supports anyone criticizing anything, including liberalism itself. That can be a severe political weakness. Self-critical, self-doubting liberals are notoriously self-defeating. So it’s up to liberals to make reason a political strength. That involves defending it as a vehicle not just of amoral productivity and technocratic progress, but the inspiring values liberalism owns but too seldom claims. You can find this episode's transcript, footnotes, and links at DastardlyCleverness.com and at Substack.

Woke theory aims to liberate our minds, but imposes limits on how we think: Many ideas are judged oppressive, and therefore "problematic." Liberal tolerance is seen as potentially oppressive too, for the same reason. Will liberals stand up for what they believe in? Should they? This episode: We begin to see if liberals can take their own side in a quarrel.

Liberals and the woke left see many of the same problems in society, from structural oppression to alienation. And yet the ideology of the woke left is incompatible with liberalism. For liberals, it starts with the very idea of wokeness, as an awakening from illusions, or false consciousness. The goal is supposed to be liberation. But it can look more like tyranny. It boils down to this: If I’m woke and you’re not, I see everything more clearly than you do. I have escaped from the prison of oppressive illusions in which you are still trapped. That means that if you disagree with me, I may decide your opinions are simply wrong, or oppressive. I may try to educate you, but if that fails, I may have to cancel you. And I can do that in the sincere belief that I’m pursuing liberation, yours and everyone else’s. My intentions may be entirely benevolent. But the logic is tyrannical. Find the full text of this episode at DastardlyCleverness.com and on Substack (where I'm @SpencerCritchley). — Spencer

As you know if you’ve been following my posts and podcast episodes lately, I’m writing and releasing the chapters of my new book The Liberal Backbone in real time. When Joan Esposito of WCPT Chicago heard about it, she had an idea: a "radio book club," with me coming on her show to talk about the book as it comes together, chapter by chapter, with her and her listeners. On December 13, we had the first episode, and I thought it went great — Joan is one of my favorite interviewers. We explored the book's big themes: what liberals actually stand for and how they can stand up for it a lot more effectively, at a time when that’s needed more than ever. I’m sharing the interview here, lightly edited. As always, you can find the text version at DastardlyCleverness.com and at Substack. And I hope you’ll follow me on Substack — just search there for Spencer Critchley. — Spencer

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

Are the woke just a bunch of Marxists? No, but that claim isn’t based on nothing. The Theory behind wokeness is complicated, but some of its key concepts are inherited from Marx, in modified form. And it becomes much easier to understand Theory if you understand something about Marx — which few people do, because Marx doesn't make it easy. In this fourth chapter of The Liberal Backbone, I explain two key Marxist concepts I plain language: structural oppression, and how a structure of ideas can make oppression seem normal. Marx was sure he'd discovered an infallible "science" of history. But in practice, it went terribly wrong. The effort to explain why would lead, via many branching paths, to Theory. Find more at Substack.

The word "woke" has at least two meanings — and they’re so different, they contradict each other. By one of them, any liberal can be proud to be called woke, because to be woke in this sense is to recognize bigotry and oppose it. But by the other meaning, liberals can’t be woke, even if they want to. That’s because if you’re this kind of woke, you reject liberalism. Spencer explains in this chapter of The Liberal Backbone. Find the full text and links at DastardlyCleverness.com.

It’s hard to stand for something if you’re not even sure what that something is. And many liberals have become unsure what liberalism is. For a long time, few of us had to think much about it. Liberalism was just default political reality. It was like water is for the young fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous parable: They can’t see the water, because it’s everywhere. Let’s remember that the word “liberalism” doesn’t only refer to beliefs on the left. It’s also the name of the philosophy of freedom on which the United States and every other liberal democracy were founded. When Thomas Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” he was referring to the principles of this kind of liberalism. But now we liberals are being forced to think about our default reality, because it’s being disrupted by two radical challenges from outside: one from the MAGA right and another from what’s commonly called the woke left — although the word “woke” needs some clarifying, which I’ll get to a little later. The trouble is, it can be hard for liberals even to see these challenges for what they are. They don’t fit within our default reality. More at substack.com/@spencercritchley.

With American democracy facing its greatest crisis since the Civil War as a corrupt autocrat returns to the presidency, I want to do my part, however small, to help right now. So I’m going to try an experiment: writing a shorter, more tightly focused book, and releasing chapters as I write them. They’ll appear as posts and podcast episodes, like this one. There are many reasons why we are where we are, and in this little book I’m not going to try to address all of them. Instead, I’m going to try to answer what I think are two of the most important but most poorly understood questions we’re facing: How did Democrats, and liberals in general, get so bad at politics? And what can they do about it? More: dastardlycleverness.com/liberal-backbone-chapter-01 — Spencer

Ernest Hemingway is famous for the terse economy of his writing. And in one of the most resonant examples of that quality, he captured the essence of catastrophic failure in just a few words, in his novel The Sun Also Rises. The alcoholic veteran Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he says. “Gradually and then quickly.” As it is with one person going broke, so it is with an entire economy crashing, or countless other catastrophes. There isn’t only a single failure, but a first, and then more — and then a cascade. And so it is when a democracy fails: it happens slowly and then all at once. Facing the possibility of a vindictive autocrat becoming president, the LA Times decides not to endorse his opponent, or anyone. Then the Washington Post does the same. Then USA Today and all the other Gannett newspapers follow. Some of their journalist employees protest, but almost no one walks off the job; a few editorial board members are rare exceptions. We can feel for those who keep their heads down. Given the precarious state of journalism, they know that if they lose the job they have now, there's almost nowhere else for them to go. Businesses, too, begin signaling their loyalty and obedience to the potential dictator. Their executives are driven by what they see as their duty to protect against risk — even as far larger risks gather. Nearly all their employees act essentially the same way. And as the cascade accelerates across society, a democracy that has survived many shocks fails. The last shock is sudden, even though the preparation was long. Until recently, it seemed unthinkable to most Americans that our democracy could fail. But it would be far from the first, as historians of democracy know well. One of the most insightful is Robert Kagan, who until recently was a member of the Washington Post editorial board. Kagan immediately recognized the meaning of the Post’s endorsement surrender. He resigned. It wasn't the first time he had made such a choice. In 2016, he left the Republican Party after it nominated Donald Trump. He sounded an alarm in an essay for the Post called “This Is How Fascism Comes to America.” But as Kagan’s principled choices demonstrate, fascism doesn’t have to come. Our democracy doesn’t have to fail. Some failure cascades are like avalanches: impersonal and irresistible. But when a human system fails, each step is a choice by an individual human being — by each of us. And sometimes, we make the right choice. Nothing is stopping us from doing that now, or at any time — nothing but our own character. “The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” as Shakespeare’s Cassius tells Brutus, with the Roman Republic falling around them. More: https://dastardlycleverness.com/slowly-and-then-all-at-once/

If we believe in democracy, I believe we have a responsibility not only to vote for it but to speak up for it, including to family and friends, despite how hard that might be. That doesn’t mean berating or insulting them. It can be done quietly and respectfully. In my own view it’s a mark of respect and even love to give people the whole truth about what we believe. So I’ve written an appeal to a friend who's planning to vote for Donald Trumo, imploring them, before it’s too late, not to make a mistake I believe they’ll regret for the rest of their life. I hope it might be useful for you, however you plan to vote. — Spencer

According to my guest this time, the United States is entering a Latino century, and that might be what saves our democracy. Mike Madrid is a top expert on Latino voting, and in recent years he’s become a national leader in the bipartisan fight to save democracy. He’s been the political director for the California Republican Party, a senior adviser to both Republicans and Democrats, and a co-founder of the never-Trump Lincoln Project. Now Mike has a new book, called The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy. One of his goals for it is to help the Democratic Party win against MAGA authoritarianism. He’s worried, though, that Democrats have been slow to get the message about Latinos and their crucial role in the nation’s future. And he thinks that helps explain why so many Latinos have been moving towards the Republican Party, a development many Democrats find baffling. According to Mike, they’re baffled because they don’t understand Latinos or other minorities nearly as well as they think they do. He says too many Democratic candidates, strategists, and pundits think of minorities as theoretical stereotypes instead of as real people with complex lives. That’s why Democrats tend to assume immigration is the top issue for all Latino voters, for example, or that most want to be talked to in Spanish. Both of those assumptions may seem reasonable theoretically, but are often wrong in reality. Mike argues that now more than ever, Democrats need to get reality right. That’s because first of all, the Latino vote can make the difference in crucial battleground states this year, including ones that may surprise you, like Wisconsin and North Carolina. And he believes that over the long haul, Latino voters can help revive all Americans’ faith in democratic institutions — and democracy itself. — Spencer

Many liberals are deeply confused about how to respond to the campus protests over Gaza. And I think it’s an example of the confusion liberals are feeling generally over a lot of issues. I believe much of the confusion can be traced to the assumption that all political opinions can fit on a single line, from left to right. For this one-dimensional, one-line model to work, there can only be one left and one right — but there are at least two lefts and two rights. And they’re not different as in further left or further right on the same line. They’re different as in not on the same line at all. And the difference goes back to the rise of liberalism, accompanied by the rise of an anti-liberal left.

As we risk obliviously repeating catastrophic mistakes others have already made, Spencer Critchley has some thoughts about memory and freedom, from people who know the precious value of both. Excerpt: "Most of us in the U.S. have been spared the necessity of knowing history, and instead have been able to live as if the world was created at our birth. But people in Central and Eastern Europe have already been trammeled by the history that has just now caught up with us. They’ve been trying to warn us for decades."