Persuasion in Service of What?

A Response to Dan Williams

Photo by Jochen van Wylick on Unsplash

Dan Williams

has produced an excellent essay, which I very much enjoyed reading. I also realized it was an essay I was going to have some amount of disagreement with. But a generative disagreement.

Dan argues that the liberal establishment’s challenge in the social media era is simple: persuade or perish. If you can’t control the public conversation, you must participate in it. Elite gatekeeping is dead. The anti-platforming stance has been disastrous. Rational persuasion actually works. And liberals need to stop treating engagement as dangerous and start treating withdrawal as suicidal.

He’s right about almost all of this. Which is why the disagreement is generative rather than oppositional. We converge on practice—I’m doing exactly what he’s calling for, engaging in public argument, meeting ideas where they are, refusing the comfort of echo chambers. But we diverge on philosophy, and that divergence matters.

What I realized while reading was that I was encountering an argument for technocracy-by-persuasion—a more sophisticated version of elite-knows-best, just wearing different clothes. It’s one step removed from my call for liberal populism, which I’ve been proselytizing for here at Notes From The Circus.

So this is me having the argument—friendly, respectful—that we need to have about what persuasion is actually for.