Sam Quinones: "America and hope in the time of fentanyl and meth"
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
Release Date: 10/11/2022
Defending Enlightenment: The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 8
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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,...
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Meet the New Boss: Chapter 7 of The Liberal Backbone
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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.
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What Liberals DON'T Stand For — Chapter 6 of The Liberal Backbone
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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...
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What (and Where) Is the Liberal Backbone? Spencer on WCPT Chicago with Joan Esposito
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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...
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From Marx to Theory to Wokeness: The Liberal Backbone Chapter 5
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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
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We Need to Talk About Marx: The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 4
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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....
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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:...
info_outlineIn many ways, addiction has become a defining feature of life in America. More and more of us have become addicted to drugs like alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and opioids, and to other things increasingly recognized as addictive, like sugar, junk food, and social media.
The problem has been growing for decades, but in recent years it has exploded. A record for deaths by overdose was set in 2020, at a level six and a half times higher than just 10 years before. The 2020 record was smashed last year, with the overdose death rate still rising. Overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45.
Some of the toll is probably related to the COVID pandemic. But much of it is also caused by a seemingly infinite supply of incredibly addictive and dangerous synthetic drugs, especially meth and fentanyl. They can be obtained or made cheaply by almost anyone, and sold at an enormous profit. Often they’re mixed in with other illegal drugs, or with counterfeit versions of legal drugs. Now there are reports of fentanyl pills made to look like candy.
Spencer's guest this time is one of the leading experts on the addiction crisis, and one of its most powerful storytellers. Journalist Sam Quinones sounded the alarm on opiate addiction in 2015 in his multiple-award-winning book Dreamland. That book focused on the devastation visited on a small Ohio town from two sources: the aggressive marketing of a supposedly safe universal painkiller called Oxycontin and a flood of cheap, black tar heroin. Dreamland played a major role in exposing the scale and the origins of the opioid epidemic, and that helped produce consequences for many of those who promoted and profited from that epidemic.
Sam Quinones was well ahead of the crowd when he wrote Dreamland, and he still is. His latest book is called The Least of Us. In it, he describes how the addiction crisis has gotten even worse — and yet he also gives reasons for hope. Those reasons are found in the stories of ordinary people who reject the despair that addiction feeds on and amplifies. They’re replacing it with small acts of rebuilding and love, the mutual care that may be the only lasting cure for addiction.