Yup, not just mythos, but a return to a future of sci-fi with futures that are livable, even quasi-utopian (enough dystopias already!), not a projection of the European Middle Ages into stories of dynasties in space, and/or leaving behind of science for magical wish fulfillment and dragons (except for Smaug).
Want to stop rushing climate change? Tell stories of a world positively transformed by green tech. It's not impossible. Still, it's mostly unseen. That's the fault of our scriveners.
I think it would go without saying if the liberal intellectual and philosophical community were making the positive case, it would influence the creative arts in that direction to. I'm simply trying to influence the community which is most tuned-in to what I am saying.
I came to your essay through a conversation I was already having — about Nietzsche, about consciousness as the irreducible site where meaning is made, about what it costs to live without delegating judgment to any authority. Your opening paragraphs landed because they named, in political language, something I have held for a long time in philosophical and personal terms.
Your diagnosis of the abandoned positive register is precise. Allow me to add something from outside the American context: I grew up in Catalonia during the final years of Franco's dictatorship. The liberal tradition you describe — its mythopoetic resources, its civic inheritance — was not available to us. The trace of the republic crushed by fascism had been actively suppressed. Many of us built the path while walking it, with limited tools and no sustrat — no prior ground to stand on.
What you call the transmission — the thing that has been failing — we never received it in the first place. And yet the values survived, more as instinct than as culture. And that is how we passed them on: not as doctrine but as orientation. A compass, not a map.
I think this adds something to your argument: the positive case for liberty does not only need to be articulated by intellectuals within established traditions. It also lives, quietly and stubbornly, in people who built it from scratch under conditions that made it dangerous to hold. A part that perhaps does not get seen as much, but that belongs to the tradition nonetheless.
I really appreciate this piece! The need for liberals to articulate a positive vision of the future is something I think about often. In the sense that the president’s personality and behavior keeps us (understandably) locked in a cycle of reacting to him, we too have become reactionary! Put that atop the “end of history” mentality that I think largely led us to stop making the positive case in the first place…and it’s no wonder people are finding us uninspiring.
Who in your opinion is someone in public life & leadership who is doing it well? I know he’s controversial among some circles but I think someone like Graham Platner is a great example of the Positive Case in action.
Beautifully articulated. I love the way you tease out all the nuances. And I so thoroughly agree that the positive needs to be accentuated. If we dwell too much on the negative it begins to feel like getting stuck in quicksand.
Going on Offense for Liberalism -- If liberalism means we don’t tell others what to think or how to run their lives, it withers under critiques of social shortcomings (as if all of them were attributable to liberalism rather than just a by-product of its liberality).
Defense against critiques does require a review of shortcomings but also requires a review of the nobler purposes that allow for making mistakes in judgment – even capitulations to critics exercising bad faith. Liberals need to confront the spectacle of bad faith rising out of emotionally undeveloped critics. Not all positions seemingly acceptable to liberalism are, in fact, acceptable. We don’t stay on the barricades when the battle is generally won. We take them down and live our inherited life.
But it’s quite right to argue for a restatement of the reasons why deliberate backsliding is contrary to our purpose as a liberal environment. And we can start with a rejection of the way “liberalism” has been mischaracterized. An essential restatement begins with blowing up the construction of “conservatism” as an antipode. “Conservatism” is, in fact, a psychological disposition derived from emotional immaturity, a state of insecurity, paranoia, rigidity, hostility – all the markers for emotional immaturity and the denial of full human intelligence by the epigenetic effects of the battering and neglect of infants/toddlers. Liberalism, on the other hand, is a rational and emotionally mature response to the question of governance once held back by privileged and belligerent immaturity. It is political, and comes in numerous flavors and intensities, depending on environmental circumstances and social scale.
Conservatism is a posture more than an ideology. In much the same way that libertarianism, when looked at honestly, is a posture. And both conservatism and libertarianism can be productive forces in a liberal polity. Liberal conservatism is a posture that's focused on preserving the institutions of liberty. This used to form a faction of the Republican Party. Most of these individuals, who are still alive, have moved to the Democratic Party. It's a useful posture. Bill Kristol is a prominent example of a liberal conservative intellectual who has made this jump.
Libertarians at their best, are fighting government overreach. They're activist lawyers suing to protect the First Amendment, and suing to prevent regulatory capture of state licensure schemes to the benefit of incumbents.
Again, both the libertarian and conservative posture are, within a liberal container, generative. But libertarian and conservative postures can be applied against illiberal ends. And I have certainly wasted a lot of words explaining that at this publication.
"If liberalism means we don’t tell others what to think or how to run their lives, it withers under critiques of social shortcomings (as if all of them were attributable to liberalism rather than just a by-product of its liberality)." I think this is not enough. One reason liberalism is failing is that it is not solving the problems (climate change, exreme inequality, poverty, war, AI, surveillance, corporate power, environmental degradation, pollution, creating a child-friendly society, ... whatever the problems are from your pov liberalism is failing at solving them ...)
I think you can make this point with half the words. It’s a good point—liberalism does need a positive case. You explained that case with just one paragraph. I’d recommend expounding on that one paragraph with more concrete language. I’d love to read that!
I want to address your critique head on. I am not writing here for people who are looking for just the take-aways. I am writing for people who want understanding. Not just the "what to do" but the why, the how, and the implications. There are people who come here and are frustrated that I don't just "get to the point". And I see this feedback frequently, and I simply have to say that anybody saying such a thing is misunderstanding greatly what I'm trying to do here.
I don’t think you should tell people “what to do.” My suggestion was more about using concrete language to explain what you’re trying to say—actually explain it. Your entire point in this 14 minute read was one paragraph. I’d love to hear more about that.
The title names the thesis. The essay is not expansion of the thesis; it is the demonstration of the thesis. What I am arguing is that liberal intellectuals have become rusty at making the positive case, and that the rust has specific causes and specific consequences. If I published only the one paragraph you liked, I would have asserted the thesis without demonstrating it — and the demonstration is the point, because I am arguing against a discourse culture that has trained readers to accept assertions in place of demonstrations.
The reason the essay is fourteen minutes long is that the argument requires fourteen minutes of sustained attention to land. If it could have landed in two minutes, I would have written a Note. I did write a note — the one-sentence version is the post that preceded the essay. The essay does what the Note cannot do, which is make the case that the note compresses. Both forms have their uses. The essay is for readers who want the argument in its full form. The Nnote is for readers who want the compression. Neither is a failure of the other.
I understand this mode is not universally preferred, and I am not trying to convert readers who prefer the compressed form. I am trying to do the work the compressed form cannot do. The length is not an accident of verbosity. It is the form the argument requires.
I guess I’ll just be honest. When you write like this, the writing isn’t good. You repeat yourself over and over. You overmake points that require much less explanation. You get pedantic because it seems like you’re following a formula for “how one writes smart sounding things.” You think you’re using all these different forms of discourse for different purposes, but you’re not—you’re writing tedious things and good things (though IMO your ideas are almost universally awesome).
By way of example …EVERYONE knows that liberals have been making only negative arguments in the age of trump. Using a formal, structured format to over-analyze something that everyone already knows is just a waste of words. You don’t need to use a formulaic, forced style to say such simple things. Just say them and explain them briefly, once.
I hope you take this criticism constructively, as that is the intention. You have great ideas and I think feedback like mine is vital for you to learn how to express them better.
I think that, if done right, repletion of an idea, or its recapitulation in slightly different terms, can work a kind of rhetorical layering which can aid memory, and impress the value especially of an important idea more firmly on the mind when it might otherwise escape, or exit it without the same weight, most of all today, when we are all submerged in evanescent media.
In my view, Mike is typically very good with these techniques, and is a shrewd writer generally who is edifying to read, not to mention astoundingly productive. If he talks too much from time to time (we all do), he doesn’t usually. I don’t think he did here.
Nonetheless, I similarly agree with both of you. The writers I have read whose phrases and ideas I have found most memorable, e.g. Joan Didion, George Orwell, Schopenhauer (the ideas themselves are a factor, of course) are pithy and concise, they do not unnecessarily repeat themselves, and they never waste words. As models, they are lodestones, but ones from which a writer can and should deviate if the task requires it. Faulkner, after all, didn’t write Absalom Absalom! for nothing, and he wouldn’t have if he had followed all the rules.
You are so on point about this. Something we don't ever want to live our lives in a defensive crouch explaining and qualifying our desires. A life defined by what we're opposed to small and pitiful. Our politics should be about what is most human and affirmations of who we are, what we value, and turning our vision into real things not talking ourselves out of them or
I agree left/right are philosophically unsatisfactory terms. I use them reluctantly and call them 'non-universal in definition' and philosophically 'unstable'.
I think there is a confusion about the Right over the differences between Conservatism and Libertarianism and the confused and convoluted arguments it creates. I think a tenable liberal right position rejects both explicitly while creating an optimal 'mild-hybrid'!
I agree it's about rejecting illiberalism. The tricky part is how to apply Popper's paradox to 'enforce' that. We need a Popper's Implementation Charter!
Trump had no popular vote in 2016 and was well beaten in 2020. That he won in 2024 with a popular majority evidences my point, not yours I think.
My constant fear has been our continued coexistence with Republicans. I have repeatedly said that we do not need Republicans; we would be a truly democratic country without them, with a national health plan for all, gun control, a wage scale for all, and a respectful retirement package for everyone. I have advocated for a soft secession and, eventually, a full secession, with two countries existing side by side as Republican and Democratic states.
The November election will be a landslide for the Democrats. However, the Republicans, especially in the South, will still be alive and waiting to undo all the progressive ideas enacted by the Democrats. The reality is that our country has long been a battle between the North and the South, between the Republicans and the Democrats. We have swung back and forth between the two parties.
The Republican opponent now is the MAGA movement, the radical believers in Trump who think he can do no wrong. Our immediate enemy is MAGA, the diehard followers of Trump. Nothing Trump could do would change their undying commitment to him. That is up to now. Their belief in Trump resembles the mentality of cult members who would follow their leaders over a cliff rather than change their belief in their leaders' superior wisdom. Cultism takes many forms, and once the believers lock into the programmed mentality, they will not change. Religious systems and social societies share characteristics of cultism. Think of the soul-searching and torment that occurs when someone is considering leaving a formal religion, and now compare that to the agreement of all the followers of Jim Jones in Africa, who agreed to a mass suicide of 918 people in Jonestown. Once they have established a belief, it is almost impossible to change that thinking process. We see the same things in neighborhoods, states, and sports teams' obsessions.
So why is Trump a destroyer of MAGA
Trump’s bizarre behavior, irrational decisions, and deteriorating mental condition are causing them concern. Trump's deranged decision-making and his continued demonstration of this mental deterioration are slowly weakening their belief that he is their savior. He is providing them with daily examples of his dysfunctional mentality, and he will continue to deteriorate, presenting more and more examples of this failing personality.
Trump is past the point of retreating to normal behavior; he has drunk the Kool-Aid and is obsessed with POWER. Like all authoritarian leaders, power is the motivating factor behind their delusions. Steven Cohen, in his book Disloyal, tries to capture Trump's “magnetic force because he offered an intoxicating cocktail of power, strength, celebrity, and a complete disregard for the rules and realities that govern our lives. To Trump, life was a game, and all that mattered was winning and his desire for power at all costs.” The lust for power can drive a person insane, consuming them and amplifying their magnetic effect; insatiability grows over time.
He will continue his erratic behavior and will present examples of it daily. In 6 months, he will become unrecognizable, and it will be impossible for MAGA not to see these examples of his deterioration. So, Trump will have done something that no one else could have; he may have destroyed MAGA, something that could have been done only by him.
I agree that the positive case for liberalism needs to be made. But it is more difficult now than it was 200 years ago. We have to learn from the mistakes. Maybe all the mistakes can be boiled down to what I like to call cartesian arrogance, what James C Scott called high modernity in "Seeing like a state" and including what Polanyi called "disembedding", what Arendt called "atomization", etc. I think we need to take stock and then come up with a new vision for the future. One of my favourite thinkers along these lines is Craiutu, see eg "Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals".
Whenever liberals make a positive case the oligarchic Right co-opts the language to subvert its meaning. Obama used to say that he couldn’t support anything positive without endangering it, since it would be so attacked by his opposition.
Mike, isnt this lop-sided? You argue for a positive liberty-oriented liberalism, but only mention the oligarchic Right to fight. What about the illiberal left that has/is dominating many fields over the same recent decade you quote?
I have made plenty of critiques of illiberalism on the left. And do so on a pretty regular basis. The most intense anti-liberal threat is from the right and they are the ones making the most robust and popular case against liberalism. They are the ones in power. So I do not regret the lack of the throat-clearing, no.
I see. I come across your writing intermittently and haven't seen this balance yet, but thank you for responding. To me, to write about liberalism's principles in such a comprehensive piece, citing timeless and universal principles sought across centuries-old quests for freedom and self-government, and then to reduce the aim to one temporal polar target (who are only in power because of a widespread negative reaction to the Democrat illiberalism of 2020-24), feels like reducing grand constitutional philosophy to political jockeying. Having been behind the Iron Curtain three times a decade or so before the Berlin Wall collapsed, I know and smelled the decades-long murderous, suffocating human tragedy of Marxism that so many Western intellectuals still hanker for forms of, and are naive to, and I disagree about the asymmetry of threat over anything but the very short term. A reaction was necessary. True, now the lesson is harsh. But illiberalism was the cause before the reaction. Therefore throat-clearing when introducing and advocating broader constitutional issues is always beneficial I think. Otherwise, one can come across as either borrowing liberalism until your preferred politics is returned, or as an Icarus about the illiberal Left. Thank you and others for the opportunity to read and engage with the ideas - it helps me to think!
I only use the terms "left" and "right" to communicate with others who insist on these categories. They are philosophically incoherent.
Early theorists of capitalism like Adam Smith were understood by their contemporaries as left-wing. Smith was arguing against an entrenched economic order — feudal privilege, hereditary aristocracy, state-granted monopolies, guild restrictions on labor — that was coded right-wing in his own time. Now Smith is read broadly as a right-wing figure. This tells us nothing about Smith and everything about how the left/right axis has rotated over the intervening centuries. For most of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, what people understood as right-wing was largely anti-capitalist. Herbert Hoover wrote a book opposing capitalism. The recoding of capitalism as a right-wing arrangement happened largely after the Second World War, and the recoding is a fact about discourse rather than a fact about the underlying political philosophy.
This matters for your challenge because the challenge is structured by categories that do not carve nature at its joints. The actual distinction I care about is liberalism versus illiberalism — whether a political actor accepts the framework that protects contestation, revisability, and the distributed authorship of our common life, or whether they reject that framework in favor of some prior order (theological, hierarchical, technocratic, revolutionary) that would dispense with the framework in service of a predetermined outcome. By that distinction, I apply the same standard to illiberal movements regardless of which cultural tribe they emerge from, and I have criticized illiberalism on the progressive side when I have encountered it and thought it needed naming.
On the historical question — yes, there was cultural and institutional illiberalism in progressive spaces from roughly 2020 to 2024, and it was real, and it was worth criticizing. What I do not accept is the claim that it is the primary cause of the current reactionary ascendancy. The reactionary project has been building for longer than that, has deeper structural roots — oligarchic capture, social media dynamics, decades of institutional hollowing-out, long-running ideological investment by specific funders and thinkers — and would have found its opening regardless of how progressive spaces behaved during the Biden years. The attempt to make progressive overreach the primary explanation for the reactionary turn is a framing that serves the reactionary project by treating its rise as a natural consequence of liberal failure rather than as a deliberate and well-funded ideological undertaking with its own history and its own agents. I decline that framing because I think it is historically inaccurate, not because I think progressive illiberalism is beneath criticism.
I honor your experience behind the Iron Curtain. Soviet-bloc authoritarianism was terrible and the witness of those who lived under it is one of the most important correctives available to contemporary political thought. What that witness establishes is that Marxist authoritarianism, when it takes state power, is a catastrophe. What it does not establish is that contemporary American progressive illiberalism is on a trajectory toward that catastrophe, which is a different claim requiring different evidence. I take the first claim with full seriousness. I decline the second not because I dismiss the first but because the second does not follow from the first.
And I do not throat-clear, no. The piece was an argument for the recovery of the positive case for liberalism. It was not an attempt at comprehensive threat assessment. The absence of extended progressive-illiberalism balancing is deliberate — the essay was doing a specific kind of work, and that work did not require balancing every possible illiberal formation before making the affirmative case. Other essays have done that work, and will do it again. This one was for what I argued it was for.
Thank you for the engagement. These are questions worth having out in the open.
Thank you. I replied immediately yesterday but it didn't send! So I rewrite here...
I agree left and right are poor philosophical terms. I regard them as 'ill-defined' (maybe 'undefinable' in their current usage), and 'unstable' even in the fairly short term.
I think people get confused about the Right, conflating Conservatism and Libertarianism in their arguments. These are very different. I would reject the viability of both, while accepting a possible ethical and viable gentler position between the two. I call it a 'mild-hybrid'!
I share your campaign - against illiberalism, while not being naive. The issue is in resolving Popper's paradox - how do you ensure (enforce) liberalism without lasting illiberality then absorbed into the collective psyche?! We urgently need an implementation manual and decision tree to guide this question of 'active liberalism protection'!
On the primary cause of the current reactionary ascendancy...
1. Of course there is always an authoritarian project on the Right (but also on the left, so no exceptionalism there). Our job is to highlight and consistently reject both projects, I believe.
2. Trump won in 2016 with 63m votes and without the popular vote. He was then beaten easily in 2020. The Democrats were made. Then the Democrats went illiberal (far more than left-leaning moderates can feel, but right-leaning moderates can) - my assertion here - and Trump inevitably won in 2024, and even with the popular vote (rare for a Republican) with 14m more votes in 2024 than in 2016 and with a significant 20-24 swing. Yes, the voting numbers changed, but the shift, by any analysis, was significant. Was this due:
a) to a new, unbelievably efficient authoritarian right machine rarely seen before in Republican history, supporting a brilliant candidate, to get these votes? No, they even held their own nose and voted for someone like Trump, who everyone knows is, let's say, not graceful. It's not a secret.
So, was it b) that swing voters recognised a more comprehensive and dangerous illiberal push on the left (ie more than you account for)? We could list them. I think actually the evidence is with more with b) than a).
And I do appreciate the comprehensive analysis, the thoughtful commentary. It matters to me to dig deeply and then process at level of "the why, the how and the implications." The ideas you share provide substance that is essential right now.
Yup, not just mythos, but a return to a future of sci-fi with futures that are livable, even quasi-utopian (enough dystopias already!), not a projection of the European Middle Ages into stories of dynasties in space, and/or leaving behind of science for magical wish fulfillment and dragons (except for Smaug).
Want to stop rushing climate change? Tell stories of a world positively transformed by green tech. It's not impossible. Still, it's mostly unseen. That's the fault of our scriveners.
I think it would go without saying if the liberal intellectual and philosophical community were making the positive case, it would influence the creative arts in that direction to. I'm simply trying to influence the community which is most tuned-in to what I am saying.
Mike,
I came to your essay through a conversation I was already having — about Nietzsche, about consciousness as the irreducible site where meaning is made, about what it costs to live without delegating judgment to any authority. Your opening paragraphs landed because they named, in political language, something I have held for a long time in philosophical and personal terms.
Your diagnosis of the abandoned positive register is precise. Allow me to add something from outside the American context: I grew up in Catalonia during the final years of Franco's dictatorship. The liberal tradition you describe — its mythopoetic resources, its civic inheritance — was not available to us. The trace of the republic crushed by fascism had been actively suppressed. Many of us built the path while walking it, with limited tools and no sustrat — no prior ground to stand on.
What you call the transmission — the thing that has been failing — we never received it in the first place. And yet the values survived, more as instinct than as culture. And that is how we passed them on: not as doctrine but as orientation. A compass, not a map.
I think this adds something to your argument: the positive case for liberty does not only need to be articulated by intellectuals within established traditions. It also lives, quietly and stubbornly, in people who built it from scratch under conditions that made it dangerous to hold. A part that perhaps does not get seen as much, but that belongs to the tradition nonetheless.
Thank you for doing this work.
I really appreciate this piece! The need for liberals to articulate a positive vision of the future is something I think about often. In the sense that the president’s personality and behavior keeps us (understandably) locked in a cycle of reacting to him, we too have become reactionary! Put that atop the “end of history” mentality that I think largely led us to stop making the positive case in the first place…and it’s no wonder people are finding us uninspiring.
Who in your opinion is someone in public life & leadership who is doing it well? I know he’s controversial among some circles but I think someone like Graham Platner is a great example of the Positive Case in action.
Beautifully articulated. I love the way you tease out all the nuances. And I so thoroughly agree that the positive needs to be accentuated. If we dwell too much on the negative it begins to feel like getting stuck in quicksand.
Going on Offense for Liberalism -- If liberalism means we don’t tell others what to think or how to run their lives, it withers under critiques of social shortcomings (as if all of them were attributable to liberalism rather than just a by-product of its liberality).
Defense against critiques does require a review of shortcomings but also requires a review of the nobler purposes that allow for making mistakes in judgment – even capitulations to critics exercising bad faith. Liberals need to confront the spectacle of bad faith rising out of emotionally undeveloped critics. Not all positions seemingly acceptable to liberalism are, in fact, acceptable. We don’t stay on the barricades when the battle is generally won. We take them down and live our inherited life.
But it’s quite right to argue for a restatement of the reasons why deliberate backsliding is contrary to our purpose as a liberal environment. And we can start with a rejection of the way “liberalism” has been mischaracterized. An essential restatement begins with blowing up the construction of “conservatism” as an antipode. “Conservatism” is, in fact, a psychological disposition derived from emotional immaturity, a state of insecurity, paranoia, rigidity, hostility – all the markers for emotional immaturity and the denial of full human intelligence by the epigenetic effects of the battering and neglect of infants/toddlers. Liberalism, on the other hand, is a rational and emotionally mature response to the question of governance once held back by privileged and belligerent immaturity. It is political, and comes in numerous flavors and intensities, depending on environmental circumstances and social scale.
Conservatism is a posture more than an ideology. In much the same way that libertarianism, when looked at honestly, is a posture. And both conservatism and libertarianism can be productive forces in a liberal polity. Liberal conservatism is a posture that's focused on preserving the institutions of liberty. This used to form a faction of the Republican Party. Most of these individuals, who are still alive, have moved to the Democratic Party. It's a useful posture. Bill Kristol is a prominent example of a liberal conservative intellectual who has made this jump.
Libertarians at their best, are fighting government overreach. They're activist lawyers suing to protect the First Amendment, and suing to prevent regulatory capture of state licensure schemes to the benefit of incumbents.
Again, both the libertarian and conservative posture are, within a liberal container, generative. But libertarian and conservative postures can be applied against illiberal ends. And I have certainly wasted a lot of words explaining that at this publication.
When you say conservatism, what do you mean? I would include some forms of conservatism under liberalism, eg Burkean conservatism.
"If liberalism means we don’t tell others what to think or how to run their lives, it withers under critiques of social shortcomings (as if all of them were attributable to liberalism rather than just a by-product of its liberality)." I think this is not enough. One reason liberalism is failing is that it is not solving the problems (climate change, exreme inequality, poverty, war, AI, surveillance, corporate power, environmental degradation, pollution, creating a child-friendly society, ... whatever the problems are from your pov liberalism is failing at solving them ...)
I think you can make this point with half the words. It’s a good point—liberalism does need a positive case. You explained that case with just one paragraph. I’d recommend expounding on that one paragraph with more concrete language. I’d love to read that!
I want to address your critique head on. I am not writing here for people who are looking for just the take-aways. I am writing for people who want understanding. Not just the "what to do" but the why, the how, and the implications. There are people who come here and are frustrated that I don't just "get to the point". And I see this feedback frequently, and I simply have to say that anybody saying such a thing is misunderstanding greatly what I'm trying to do here.
I don’t think you should tell people “what to do.” My suggestion was more about using concrete language to explain what you’re trying to say—actually explain it. Your entire point in this 14 minute read was one paragraph. I’d love to hear more about that.
What is the point you think I was trying to make?
The title, was it not? The positive case for liberalism?
The title names the thesis. The essay is not expansion of the thesis; it is the demonstration of the thesis. What I am arguing is that liberal intellectuals have become rusty at making the positive case, and that the rust has specific causes and specific consequences. If I published only the one paragraph you liked, I would have asserted the thesis without demonstrating it — and the demonstration is the point, because I am arguing against a discourse culture that has trained readers to accept assertions in place of demonstrations.
The reason the essay is fourteen minutes long is that the argument requires fourteen minutes of sustained attention to land. If it could have landed in two minutes, I would have written a Note. I did write a note — the one-sentence version is the post that preceded the essay. The essay does what the Note cannot do, which is make the case that the note compresses. Both forms have their uses. The essay is for readers who want the argument in its full form. The Nnote is for readers who want the compression. Neither is a failure of the other.
I understand this mode is not universally preferred, and I am not trying to convert readers who prefer the compressed form. I am trying to do the work the compressed form cannot do. The length is not an accident of verbosity. It is the form the argument requires.
I guess I’ll just be honest. When you write like this, the writing isn’t good. You repeat yourself over and over. You overmake points that require much less explanation. You get pedantic because it seems like you’re following a formula for “how one writes smart sounding things.” You think you’re using all these different forms of discourse for different purposes, but you’re not—you’re writing tedious things and good things (though IMO your ideas are almost universally awesome).
By way of example …EVERYONE knows that liberals have been making only negative arguments in the age of trump. Using a formal, structured format to over-analyze something that everyone already knows is just a waste of words. You don’t need to use a formulaic, forced style to say such simple things. Just say them and explain them briefly, once.
I hope you take this criticism constructively, as that is the intention. You have great ideas and I think feedback like mine is vital for you to learn how to express them better.
I think that, if done right, repletion of an idea, or its recapitulation in slightly different terms, can work a kind of rhetorical layering which can aid memory, and impress the value especially of an important idea more firmly on the mind when it might otherwise escape, or exit it without the same weight, most of all today, when we are all submerged in evanescent media.
In my view, Mike is typically very good with these techniques, and is a shrewd writer generally who is edifying to read, not to mention astoundingly productive. If he talks too much from time to time (we all do), he doesn’t usually. I don’t think he did here.
Nonetheless, I similarly agree with both of you. The writers I have read whose phrases and ideas I have found most memorable, e.g. Joan Didion, George Orwell, Schopenhauer (the ideas themselves are a factor, of course) are pithy and concise, they do not unnecessarily repeat themselves, and they never waste words. As models, they are lodestones, but ones from which a writer can and should deviate if the task requires it. Faulkner, after all, didn’t write Absalom Absalom! for nothing, and he wouldn’t have if he had followed all the rules.
You make a very good point, and enunciate it with some poetry. I like to think I managed both criticism and some positivity with this piece at https://www.futureeconomics.org/2019/10/two-cheers-for-liberalism/ The poetry is sadly absent, perhaps!
You are so on point about this. Something we don't ever want to live our lives in a defensive crouch explaining and qualifying our desires. A life defined by what we're opposed to small and pitiful. Our politics should be about what is most human and affirmations of who we are, what we value, and turning our vision into real things not talking ourselves out of them or
I agree left/right are philosophically unsatisfactory terms. I use them reluctantly and call them 'non-universal in definition' and philosophically 'unstable'.
I think there is a confusion about the Right over the differences between Conservatism and Libertarianism and the confused and convoluted arguments it creates. I think a tenable liberal right position rejects both explicitly while creating an optimal 'mild-hybrid'!
I agree it's about rejecting illiberalism. The tricky part is how to apply Popper's paradox to 'enforce' that. We need a Popper's Implementation Charter!
Trump had no popular vote in 2016 and was well beaten in 2020. That he won in 2024 with a popular majority evidences my point, not yours I think.
TRUMP, A DESTROYER OF MAGA
My constant fear has been our continued coexistence with Republicans. I have repeatedly said that we do not need Republicans; we would be a truly democratic country without them, with a national health plan for all, gun control, a wage scale for all, and a respectful retirement package for everyone. I have advocated for a soft secession and, eventually, a full secession, with two countries existing side by side as Republican and Democratic states.
The November election will be a landslide for the Democrats. However, the Republicans, especially in the South, will still be alive and waiting to undo all the progressive ideas enacted by the Democrats. The reality is that our country has long been a battle between the North and the South, between the Republicans and the Democrats. We have swung back and forth between the two parties.
The Republican opponent now is the MAGA movement, the radical believers in Trump who think he can do no wrong. Our immediate enemy is MAGA, the diehard followers of Trump. Nothing Trump could do would change their undying commitment to him. That is up to now. Their belief in Trump resembles the mentality of cult members who would follow their leaders over a cliff rather than change their belief in their leaders' superior wisdom. Cultism takes many forms, and once the believers lock into the programmed mentality, they will not change. Religious systems and social societies share characteristics of cultism. Think of the soul-searching and torment that occurs when someone is considering leaving a formal religion, and now compare that to the agreement of all the followers of Jim Jones in Africa, who agreed to a mass suicide of 918 people in Jonestown. Once they have established a belief, it is almost impossible to change that thinking process. We see the same things in neighborhoods, states, and sports teams' obsessions.
So why is Trump a destroyer of MAGA
Trump’s bizarre behavior, irrational decisions, and deteriorating mental condition are causing them concern. Trump's deranged decision-making and his continued demonstration of this mental deterioration are slowly weakening their belief that he is their savior. He is providing them with daily examples of his dysfunctional mentality, and he will continue to deteriorate, presenting more and more examples of this failing personality.
Trump is past the point of retreating to normal behavior; he has drunk the Kool-Aid and is obsessed with POWER. Like all authoritarian leaders, power is the motivating factor behind their delusions. Steven Cohen, in his book Disloyal, tries to capture Trump's “magnetic force because he offered an intoxicating cocktail of power, strength, celebrity, and a complete disregard for the rules and realities that govern our lives. To Trump, life was a game, and all that mattered was winning and his desire for power at all costs.” The lust for power can drive a person insane, consuming them and amplifying their magnetic effect; insatiability grows over time.
He will continue his erratic behavior and will present examples of it daily. In 6 months, he will become unrecognizable, and it will be impossible for MAGA not to see these examples of his deterioration. So, Trump will have done something that no one else could have; he may have destroyed MAGA, something that could have been done only by him.
I agree that the positive case for liberalism needs to be made. But it is more difficult now than it was 200 years ago. We have to learn from the mistakes. Maybe all the mistakes can be boiled down to what I like to call cartesian arrogance, what James C Scott called high modernity in "Seeing like a state" and including what Polanyi called "disembedding", what Arendt called "atomization", etc. I think we need to take stock and then come up with a new vision for the future. One of my favourite thinkers along these lines is Craiutu, see eg "Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals".
Whenever liberals make a positive case the oligarchic Right co-opts the language to subvert its meaning. Obama used to say that he couldn’t support anything positive without endangering it, since it would be so attacked by his opposition.
Mike, isnt this lop-sided? You argue for a positive liberty-oriented liberalism, but only mention the oligarchic Right to fight. What about the illiberal left that has/is dominating many fields over the same recent decade you quote?
I have made plenty of critiques of illiberalism on the left. And do so on a pretty regular basis. The most intense anti-liberal threat is from the right and they are the ones making the most robust and popular case against liberalism. They are the ones in power. So I do not regret the lack of the throat-clearing, no.
I see. I come across your writing intermittently and haven't seen this balance yet, but thank you for responding. To me, to write about liberalism's principles in such a comprehensive piece, citing timeless and universal principles sought across centuries-old quests for freedom and self-government, and then to reduce the aim to one temporal polar target (who are only in power because of a widespread negative reaction to the Democrat illiberalism of 2020-24), feels like reducing grand constitutional philosophy to political jockeying. Having been behind the Iron Curtain three times a decade or so before the Berlin Wall collapsed, I know and smelled the decades-long murderous, suffocating human tragedy of Marxism that so many Western intellectuals still hanker for forms of, and are naive to, and I disagree about the asymmetry of threat over anything but the very short term. A reaction was necessary. True, now the lesson is harsh. But illiberalism was the cause before the reaction. Therefore throat-clearing when introducing and advocating broader constitutional issues is always beneficial I think. Otherwise, one can come across as either borrowing liberalism until your preferred politics is returned, or as an Icarus about the illiberal Left. Thank you and others for the opportunity to read and engage with the ideas - it helps me to think!
I only use the terms "left" and "right" to communicate with others who insist on these categories. They are philosophically incoherent.
Early theorists of capitalism like Adam Smith were understood by their contemporaries as left-wing. Smith was arguing against an entrenched economic order — feudal privilege, hereditary aristocracy, state-granted monopolies, guild restrictions on labor — that was coded right-wing in his own time. Now Smith is read broadly as a right-wing figure. This tells us nothing about Smith and everything about how the left/right axis has rotated over the intervening centuries. For most of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, what people understood as right-wing was largely anti-capitalist. Herbert Hoover wrote a book opposing capitalism. The recoding of capitalism as a right-wing arrangement happened largely after the Second World War, and the recoding is a fact about discourse rather than a fact about the underlying political philosophy.
This matters for your challenge because the challenge is structured by categories that do not carve nature at its joints. The actual distinction I care about is liberalism versus illiberalism — whether a political actor accepts the framework that protects contestation, revisability, and the distributed authorship of our common life, or whether they reject that framework in favor of some prior order (theological, hierarchical, technocratic, revolutionary) that would dispense with the framework in service of a predetermined outcome. By that distinction, I apply the same standard to illiberal movements regardless of which cultural tribe they emerge from, and I have criticized illiberalism on the progressive side when I have encountered it and thought it needed naming.
On the historical question — yes, there was cultural and institutional illiberalism in progressive spaces from roughly 2020 to 2024, and it was real, and it was worth criticizing. What I do not accept is the claim that it is the primary cause of the current reactionary ascendancy. The reactionary project has been building for longer than that, has deeper structural roots — oligarchic capture, social media dynamics, decades of institutional hollowing-out, long-running ideological investment by specific funders and thinkers — and would have found its opening regardless of how progressive spaces behaved during the Biden years. The attempt to make progressive overreach the primary explanation for the reactionary turn is a framing that serves the reactionary project by treating its rise as a natural consequence of liberal failure rather than as a deliberate and well-funded ideological undertaking with its own history and its own agents. I decline that framing because I think it is historically inaccurate, not because I think progressive illiberalism is beneath criticism.
I honor your experience behind the Iron Curtain. Soviet-bloc authoritarianism was terrible and the witness of those who lived under it is one of the most important correctives available to contemporary political thought. What that witness establishes is that Marxist authoritarianism, when it takes state power, is a catastrophe. What it does not establish is that contemporary American progressive illiberalism is on a trajectory toward that catastrophe, which is a different claim requiring different evidence. I take the first claim with full seriousness. I decline the second not because I dismiss the first but because the second does not follow from the first.
And I do not throat-clear, no. The piece was an argument for the recovery of the positive case for liberalism. It was not an attempt at comprehensive threat assessment. The absence of extended progressive-illiberalism balancing is deliberate — the essay was doing a specific kind of work, and that work did not require balancing every possible illiberal formation before making the affirmative case. Other essays have done that work, and will do it again. This one was for what I argued it was for.
Thank you for the engagement. These are questions worth having out in the open.
Thank you. I replied immediately yesterday but it didn't send! So I rewrite here...
I agree left and right are poor philosophical terms. I regard them as 'ill-defined' (maybe 'undefinable' in their current usage), and 'unstable' even in the fairly short term.
I think people get confused about the Right, conflating Conservatism and Libertarianism in their arguments. These are very different. I would reject the viability of both, while accepting a possible ethical and viable gentler position between the two. I call it a 'mild-hybrid'!
I share your campaign - against illiberalism, while not being naive. The issue is in resolving Popper's paradox - how do you ensure (enforce) liberalism without lasting illiberality then absorbed into the collective psyche?! We urgently need an implementation manual and decision tree to guide this question of 'active liberalism protection'!
On the primary cause of the current reactionary ascendancy...
1. Of course there is always an authoritarian project on the Right (but also on the left, so no exceptionalism there). Our job is to highlight and consistently reject both projects, I believe.
2. Trump won in 2016 with 63m votes and without the popular vote. He was then beaten easily in 2020. The Democrats were made. Then the Democrats went illiberal (far more than left-leaning moderates can feel, but right-leaning moderates can) - my assertion here - and Trump inevitably won in 2024, and even with the popular vote (rare for a Republican) with 14m more votes in 2024 than in 2016 and with a significant 20-24 swing. Yes, the voting numbers changed, but the shift, by any analysis, was significant. Was this due:
a) to a new, unbelievably efficient authoritarian right machine rarely seen before in Republican history, supporting a brilliant candidate, to get these votes? No, they even held their own nose and voted for someone like Trump, who everyone knows is, let's say, not graceful. It's not a secret.
So, was it b) that swing voters recognised a more comprehensive and dangerous illiberal push on the left (ie more than you account for)? We could list them. I think actually the evidence is with more with b) than a).
And I do appreciate the comprehensive analysis, the thoughtful commentary. It matters to me to dig deeply and then process at level of "the why, the how and the implications." The ideas you share provide substance that is essential right now.
Holding this as hope. Thank you