In your section on philosophical analysis you imply that people without graduate school will not understand it. Now, I did go to graduate school, the French department of Columbia University, to be exact. I also graduated from Barnard College. However, I believe that I would have been able to understand your analysis of Leo Strauss for example without all that education. It's quite possible to learn a lot from outside reading and other sources. I am sure that I have learned more broadly after university than during my years there. Therefore, I encourage you to delve into philosophy and give your readers the opportunity to reach up to your points of view.
Thanks, Laura. I appreciate that feedback. I need to balance several things. One is highly intelligent readers like you, who would enjoy more philosophical posts. Another is readers who prefer the less dense, snappier takes on headlines of the day. Yet another is my own struggle to come up with something relevant to write about philosophical topics. Often I think to bring philosophical insights into post on more concrete topics -- the "political analysis" posts, for example. That's why I'm so often making passing reference to something in Aristotle or Nietzsche. But I will try to come up with some more purely philosophical posts over the next few months -- for you and others like you. Thanks for being here.
As a paying subscriber, I love what you are doing and encourage you to do more of it. Balance and nuance are sadly in short supply in much of today's political and social analysis. I am surprised, however, to hear you say the following: "Something about our digitally networked world, along with its distinctive socioeconomic configurations and trends, is encouraging right-wing antiliberalism. We don’t really know what this something is or why it’s having this effect." I think we do have a pretty good idea of what this "something" is, though it is tough to know what to do about it. In short, liberalism succeeded by drawing on a set of social norms (mostly religious) that it simultaneously undermined, leaving an atomized population culturally adrift and exposed to the ravages of technology-fueled mass consumer capitalism. Many others have covered this territory better than I can. I would point you to the work of fellow Substack authors Paul Kingsnorth and N.S. Lyons, who have both delved deeply into the underlying currents.
Thanks for that. You might be right. I look at Lyons' work, and I really enjoyed his interview with Matthew Crawford a while back. I hope to write something on Crawford's Substack over the coming weeks or months. He's one of the few people thinking deeply about these themes. I think your description of the problem gets at part of it, but only a part. Here's another dimension, which I wrote about in some columns at The Week: Digital communications networks allow for the formation of political factions in virtual space. Our political institutions weren't devised with that in mind. James Madison thought factions would be based in physical space: local interests nested within regional and state interests, with those nested within the country as a whole. These interests would compete and somewhat cancel each other out, with the interests left over setting the agenda for government. But social media allows people living very far apart from one another to unite into a common faction. Think of rural voters in Oregon, Alabama, upstate New York, and Texas -- places with no real connection to each other in the world -- all coming together as rural voters who share an antipathy to the urban and suburban coasts. For the first time in history, those rural voters can punch together for political purposes. That is, they won't just have an impact in their respective states but at the national level. That's something new, and it's empowering rural-based right-wing antiliberalism in countries around the world. That has to be in the mix, too, if for no other reason than that it shows that finding a solution might be impossible, short of disenfranchising those voters, something I wouldn't support.
"Think of urban voters in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco -- places with no real connection to each other in the world -- all coming together as urban voters who share an antipathy to rural flyover country. For the first time in history, those urban voters can punch together for political purposes. That is, they won't just have an impact in their respective cities and states but at the national level. That's something new, and it's empowering urban-based left-wing antiliberalism in countries around the world."
To learn from someone who thinks differently than me, and also you seem to be a voice of relative reason on the left who does not swallow left ideology whole, but I think you do have some serious blind spots, and I would also hope to help you see better in those spots. And this is a good example: your notion that somehow rural voters have benefited more than urban voters from modern organizational methods really does not make a lot of sense. Rural voters have ALWAYS "punched together" becuse policies that benefit rural areas in different states are usually the SAME policies across different states. And also, why should rural voters benefit MORE than urban voters from these methods, which are available to all?
You said: Philosophical Analysis—These aren’t as common, mostly because they require a lot of preparatory work on my part, but also because I don’t want things to get too densely academic around here, excluding subscribers who haven’t gone to graduate school.
My response: These are my favorite posts BECAUSE I haven't gone to graduate school:)
I have appreciated reading entries in all of those categories. Congrats and thanks. I have been especially interested in the posts on particular thinkers on the right. It's not hard to understand why grasping politicians like DeSantis would latch onto policy entrepreneurs like Chris Rufo (of "CTR" branding fame) and try to extract any electoral advantage they think they could yield. But I am completely confounded (but fearfully fascinated) by the rightwing thinkers like Rod Dreher and Adrian Vermeule, who are powerful intellects but who seem to me to have gone off the deep end.
As a lefty, it's not hard for me to find things to hate about modernity, so that part doesn't mystify me. But I don't get why these kinds of successful, affluent, prominent and well-compensated men are so horrified by or contemptuous of the way the mass of people (especially women and secular people) are moved by liberal culture and its key notes of egalitarianism? Seems like there has got to be psychic reasons behind the philosophical ones.
(I'm a new comer so I don't know if you've written about Vermeule––would love to hear those thoughts.)
Thanks, Nancy. I really dislike Vermeule. Not just his writing and thinking, but his online personality. I would describe it as that of a sneering wise-ass. But I have written about him occasionally. The most serious engagement with his thinking was in this column at The Week:
One reason my writing approaches contempt in writing about him is that I think he's both recklessly radical and pretty thoroughly ignorant of politics. He's like a medieval theologian who spends his days debating angelology who then sometimes writes tracts about public policy. He makes grand, sweeping pronouncements about how politics should be ordered, but he couldn't care less about how politics actually works in pluralistic democracies. That's the only way I can account for his belief that American politics in the 2020s could plausibly be oriented toward the "common good" as defined by the Catholic Church. It's just absurd. Catholics are a minority. Right-wing Catholics are a small minority within that minority. That small faction of the country just isn't going to get the chance to boss the rest of us around. And any effort to do it would actually produce greater tumult, violence, and disorder -- meaning less achievement of the "common good." That makes his program self-refuting. But he's oblivious to this problem and prefers to build dream castles in his mind, and prefers to block everyone online who doesn't praise him, so he can live in those dream castles surrounded by people who defer to him.
Can you tell I dislike him?
Anyway, thanks for the comment -- and for being here.
Damon, when you begin to understand that the Democrats (and the worldwide Left more generally) are every bit as antiliberal as the Republicans, then you will begin to understand what is going on.
Also, when did "antiliberal" replace "illiberal" as the meaningless slur of the moment? So hard to keep up.
Example of the antiliberalism of the Democrats: Biden's student-loan forgiveness program. This involves a huge amount of money and was not debated, much less approved, by Congress. It's extremely doubtful that it would win a popular vote. And it favors a Democrat constituency (college grads, or at least those who had some college) at the expense of those who decided against college, possibly because they didn't want to go into debt! And now those folks are left holding the bag, paying extra taxes to fund the people who were less thrifty. And this was all decided by the imperial POTUS. It's infuriating!
And I say this as a college professor myself, for 40 years, in a STEM field, at a large R1 state university.
Congratulations on the first anniversary of this enterprise, Damon. I'm happy I've been along for the ride.
Thanks, Michelle. You're often the very first person to "like" a post. I notice, and I appreciate it very much.
Congratulations Damon and thank you for your work.
Thank you, Chuck.
Keep up the great work Damon!
Thanks, Bart.
In your section on philosophical analysis you imply that people without graduate school will not understand it. Now, I did go to graduate school, the French department of Columbia University, to be exact. I also graduated from Barnard College. However, I believe that I would have been able to understand your analysis of Leo Strauss for example without all that education. It's quite possible to learn a lot from outside reading and other sources. I am sure that I have learned more broadly after university than during my years there. Therefore, I encourage you to delve into philosophy and give your readers the opportunity to reach up to your points of view.
Thanks, Laura. I appreciate that feedback. I need to balance several things. One is highly intelligent readers like you, who would enjoy more philosophical posts. Another is readers who prefer the less dense, snappier takes on headlines of the day. Yet another is my own struggle to come up with something relevant to write about philosophical topics. Often I think to bring philosophical insights into post on more concrete topics -- the "political analysis" posts, for example. That's why I'm so often making passing reference to something in Aristotle or Nietzsche. But I will try to come up with some more purely philosophical posts over the next few months -- for you and others like you. Thanks for being here.
As a paying subscriber, I love what you are doing and encourage you to do more of it. Balance and nuance are sadly in short supply in much of today's political and social analysis. I am surprised, however, to hear you say the following: "Something about our digitally networked world, along with its distinctive socioeconomic configurations and trends, is encouraging right-wing antiliberalism. We don’t really know what this something is or why it’s having this effect." I think we do have a pretty good idea of what this "something" is, though it is tough to know what to do about it. In short, liberalism succeeded by drawing on a set of social norms (mostly religious) that it simultaneously undermined, leaving an atomized population culturally adrift and exposed to the ravages of technology-fueled mass consumer capitalism. Many others have covered this territory better than I can. I would point you to the work of fellow Substack authors Paul Kingsnorth and N.S. Lyons, who have both delved deeply into the underlying currents.
Thanks for that. You might be right. I look at Lyons' work, and I really enjoyed his interview with Matthew Crawford a while back. I hope to write something on Crawford's Substack over the coming weeks or months. He's one of the few people thinking deeply about these themes. I think your description of the problem gets at part of it, but only a part. Here's another dimension, which I wrote about in some columns at The Week: Digital communications networks allow for the formation of political factions in virtual space. Our political institutions weren't devised with that in mind. James Madison thought factions would be based in physical space: local interests nested within regional and state interests, with those nested within the country as a whole. These interests would compete and somewhat cancel each other out, with the interests left over setting the agenda for government. But social media allows people living very far apart from one another to unite into a common faction. Think of rural voters in Oregon, Alabama, upstate New York, and Texas -- places with no real connection to each other in the world -- all coming together as rural voters who share an antipathy to the urban and suburban coasts. For the first time in history, those rural voters can punch together for political purposes. That is, they won't just have an impact in their respective states but at the national level. That's something new, and it's empowering rural-based right-wing antiliberalism in countries around the world. That has to be in the mix, too, if for no other reason than that it shows that finding a solution might be impossible, short of disenfranchising those voters, something I wouldn't support.
Anyway, thanks for being here.
"Think of urban voters in New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco -- places with no real connection to each other in the world -- all coming together as urban voters who share an antipathy to rural flyover country. For the first time in history, those urban voters can punch together for political purposes. That is, they won't just have an impact in their respective cities and states but at the national level. That's something new, and it's empowering urban-based left-wing antiliberalism in countries around the world."
There, fixed it for you.
Almost makes me wonder why you subscribe to my Substack.
To learn from someone who thinks differently than me, and also you seem to be a voice of relative reason on the left who does not swallow left ideology whole, but I think you do have some serious blind spots, and I would also hope to help you see better in those spots. And this is a good example: your notion that somehow rural voters have benefited more than urban voters from modern organizational methods really does not make a lot of sense. Rural voters have ALWAYS "punched together" becuse policies that benefit rural areas in different states are usually the SAME policies across different states. And also, why should rural voters benefit MORE than urban voters from these methods, which are available to all?
You said: Philosophical Analysis—These aren’t as common, mostly because they require a lot of preparatory work on my part, but also because I don’t want things to get too densely academic around here, excluding subscribers who haven’t gone to graduate school.
My response: These are my favorite posts BECAUSE I haven't gone to graduate school:)
Thanks, Debbie. See Laura's comment above and my response to her. I will try to write more of those!
I have appreciated reading entries in all of those categories. Congrats and thanks. I have been especially interested in the posts on particular thinkers on the right. It's not hard to understand why grasping politicians like DeSantis would latch onto policy entrepreneurs like Chris Rufo (of "CTR" branding fame) and try to extract any electoral advantage they think they could yield. But I am completely confounded (but fearfully fascinated) by the rightwing thinkers like Rod Dreher and Adrian Vermeule, who are powerful intellects but who seem to me to have gone off the deep end.
As a lefty, it's not hard for me to find things to hate about modernity, so that part doesn't mystify me. But I don't get why these kinds of successful, affluent, prominent and well-compensated men are so horrified by or contemptuous of the way the mass of people (especially women and secular people) are moved by liberal culture and its key notes of egalitarianism? Seems like there has got to be psychic reasons behind the philosophical ones.
(I'm a new comer so I don't know if you've written about Vermeule––would love to hear those thoughts.)
Thanks, Nancy. I really dislike Vermeule. Not just his writing and thinking, but his online personality. I would describe it as that of a sneering wise-ass. But I have written about him occasionally. The most serious engagement with his thinking was in this column at The Week:
https://theweek.com/articles/907011/when-conservatives-interpret-constitution-like-progressives
And then I wrote a maximally irritated post about something he wrote just after the Dobbs decision was handed down:
https://damonlinker.substack.com/p/after-roe-the-pious-daydreams-of
One reason my writing approaches contempt in writing about him is that I think he's both recklessly radical and pretty thoroughly ignorant of politics. He's like a medieval theologian who spends his days debating angelology who then sometimes writes tracts about public policy. He makes grand, sweeping pronouncements about how politics should be ordered, but he couldn't care less about how politics actually works in pluralistic democracies. That's the only way I can account for his belief that American politics in the 2020s could plausibly be oriented toward the "common good" as defined by the Catholic Church. It's just absurd. Catholics are a minority. Right-wing Catholics are a small minority within that minority. That small faction of the country just isn't going to get the chance to boss the rest of us around. And any effort to do it would actually produce greater tumult, violence, and disorder -- meaning less achievement of the "common good." That makes his program self-refuting. But he's oblivious to this problem and prefers to build dream castles in his mind, and prefers to block everyone online who doesn't praise him, so he can live in those dream castles surrounded by people who defer to him.
Can you tell I dislike him?
Anyway, thanks for the comment -- and for being here.
Damon, when you begin to understand that the Democrats (and the worldwide Left more generally) are every bit as antiliberal as the Republicans, then you will begin to understand what is going on.
Also, when did "antiliberal" replace "illiberal" as the meaningless slur of the moment? So hard to keep up.
Example of the antiliberalism of the Democrats: Biden's student-loan forgiveness program. This involves a huge amount of money and was not debated, much less approved, by Congress. It's extremely doubtful that it would win a popular vote. And it favors a Democrat constituency (college grads, or at least those who had some college) at the expense of those who decided against college, possibly because they didn't want to go into debt! And now those folks are left holding the bag, paying extra taxes to fund the people who were less thrifty. And this was all decided by the imperial POTUS. It's infuriating!
And I say this as a college professor myself, for 40 years, in a STEM field, at a large R1 state university.