Minneapolis: Saving Democracy From Moral Bankruptcy
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
Normally, we should be reluctant to talk about politics in terms of morality. We can't live with each other, in peace anyway, if we think disagreement is a matter of good and evil. But that doesn't mean that democracy is amoral. Democracy will survive if we all stand up for the shared moral values that make democracy possible. That's what the peaceful protesters in Minneapolis are doing, even at the risk of their own lives: showing us how to rescue our democracy from moral bankruptcy. Video & transcript: https://spencercritchley.substack.com/p/minneapolis-saving-democracy-from
info_outline
MAGA: An Escape From Freedom
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
One of the most confusing things about Trumpism is this paradox: People who believe so strongly in individual freedom are also eager to give away all their power, to one man. Why? One reason: Human beings yearn for freedom, but when we actually get it, we may find it terrifying. So argued the influential German psychologist Erich Fromm in "Escape From Freedom," published in 1941, when another authoritarian was at the peak of his power.
info_outline
The Shooting of Renee Good
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
In a democracy, law enforcement exists to protect people: their safety and their Constitutional rights. Under authoritarianism, law enforcement protects power. Under autocracy, it protects the power of one man. Which way we're going to live is still up to us. The shooting of Renee Nicole Good shows us what's at stake. — Spencer
info_outline
The True Crisis: The Liberal Backbone Chapter 15
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
About a year ago, I started publishing draft chapters of my book in progress, The Liberal Backbone. It hit me lately that the draft is done – I realized that with the latest chapters I’d started writing a second book. That one will be on alienation, which I think deserves a book of its own. So I’m calling it. I’m going to switch to editing The Liberal Backbone — and, no doubt, editing some more, and then, more. To make time for it, I’ll be cutting back on the frequency of podcast episodes for a while. For this one, I want to sum up why I think it’s so crucially important for the...
info_outline
The Art of Politics: The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 14
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...
info_outline
Escape From the Iron Cage: The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 13
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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.
info_outline
How to Lose in One Word: The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 12
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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 and .
info_outline
It's the Alienation, Stupid: The Liberal Backbone Chapter 11
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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,...
info_outline
The Iron Cage: The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 10
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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 .
info_outline
How We Became Aliens: The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 9
Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good
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...
info_outlineErnest 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/