Sheri Berman: Is the Game of Democracy Over?
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
Release Date: 09/08/2022
What DOES It Mean to Be Woke? The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 3
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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 .
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The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 2: Why Nothing Makes Sense
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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....
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The Liberal Backbone
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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...
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Slowly and then all at once
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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:...
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To a Friend Voting for Trump
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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...
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Mike Madrid on Why Latinos May Save Democracy
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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...
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Confused About the Gaza Protests? This May Be Why.
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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...
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"The President of Forgetting"
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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."
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What's the Real News About Election '24? With Mike Madrid & Zach Friend
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
If you wanted to, you could consume nothing but presidential campaign coverage all day every day. But how much of it would leave you feeling better informed about casting what may be the most important vote of your life? Not better informed about the campaign as a sporting event, with all the expert play-by-play, color commentary, and stats. But better informed about questions that may not have easy, satisfying, or entertaining answers? Better prepared to think, and not just react? On this episode of Dastardly Cleverness, we go hunting for that kind of election coverage, find a little, and try...
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Luke Freeman on the promise & challenges of Effective Altruism: how to make giving count
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
By some measures, well over half of charities do little or no good. When similar charities are compared, the most effective ones can be up to 100 times more effective than the least. And there’s often a big mismatch between where donors direct their support and where the need and potential benefits are greatest. A movement called effective altruism aims to make giving work better by identifying the most effective charities in the world and encouraging donors to support them generously and strategically. There's been a lot of excitement about it, but lately it's also drawn critics of its...
info_outlineOne way of thinking about democracy is as a game — a game in which freedom, equality, and even lives are at stake.
And one way of thinking about the state of our democracy is that one of the two main competitors is no longer playing the game, but trying to destroy it.
As with any game, the rules of democracy only matter if we agree they do.
Ultimately, we can’t prove that things like civil debate, fair elections, and following the law are good things, we just agree that they are, like we might agree that aces are high. Except we’re not playing for chips.
My guest this time is a leading expert on the game of democracy, why it matters so much, and how it could come to an end.
Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University.
Much of her research focuses on how European democracies have developed, struggled, and often failed many times before succeeding. That’s if they do succeed, and if that success lasts. The lasting success of democracy isn’t guaranteed, as we’re all seeing, all too clearly, right now.
Sheri Berman’s most recent book is Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day, published by Oxford University Press. She also writes for many scholarly and popular publications, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and VOX.
