Liked the focus on ideological pluralism on trying to bring high openness people from various political perspectives together. Feels like a much more open, organic, and bottom up version of what the IDW was ostensibly trying to do 7 years ago.
The big failure of the IDW (well, there were many big failures, but that requires a whole analysis) was that its spiritual ethos was rooted in a GenX nostalgia that “if we could just just turn the political clock backward then we could return to a fruitful liberalism”. That entire orientation — based on the desire to bring back a non-existent reality, one that has already passed away — has to be thrown in the garbage. There can be no tolerance for any wimpy calls to “return to somewhere better”, because it completely blocks out the ability to look at and act within the landscape as it exists right now.
*Especially if you are the type of person who remains committed to liberal principles!*
Then, it becomes **unbelievably important** to basically grieve over old loyalties to liberal systems and institutions, and fully acknowledge how they have completed burned up – particularly in the past 15 years. Punch the wall hundred times, yell into your computer, write a bunch of screed; do what it takes to deal with the disappointment and sense of betrayal and broken trust.
Because, if you’re a person who wants to actually inject some forward-looking sobriety into the political game, you need to be able to come to table and orient to what comes after the tantrum-over-loss with an uncompromising sense of discernment and maneuverability. And there is no waiting for the right time anymore, really, because it's not waiting for any of us. There are discursive choices to be made even in the midst of a cloudy frontier that doesn't seem to possess any answers, let alone complete ones. Choices that allow the view and engagement in this space to widen and breathe rather than continue to narrow and calcify.
Learn which people you can talk to and the projects you can participate in that center a baseline level of simple honesty about competing or conflicting interests (even in the midst of great animosity), and start engaging with how these various factions look to order these real interests into some agenda or coherence.
A thorough follow up reply to this would need a good 90 minutes. In short, another sign I need to get moving on doing a Substack.
In broad strokes, the greatest shift I've made politically in the last decade was away from the mentality you describe above. I used to argue, well, if we could just somehow do a system restore of secular modernist liberalism as it existed during the JFK era and then evole naturally from there, we could get back on the trajectory of going to Mars etc. But secular modernist liberalism didn't survive its encounter with the New Left due to inherent structural flaws that left it vulnerable to changing facts on the ground. Just look what happened with Bernie 2016.
Likewise the if-we-could-just-go-back-to-the-1990's arguments. There's this whole active online subculture of Xennials / the Oregon Trail Generation. We've old enough to remember when the US last really worked well, but weren't able to take advantage of it by the time we reached full adulthood. So I can see both the appeal and the flaws of the IDW. If we went back to the 1990's, we'd just Groundhog Day repeat the forces that led to the Woke Era.
Instead at this point, you'll need a complete rupture to remove the forces of Wokeness and compromised institutions. I'd like to see the best elements of liberalism preserved in a new framework (call it post-liberalism, but I have no idea how that would relate to the already established and name-claimed "Post-Liberalism"), but with much sturdier scaffolding holding the overarching structure together.
Hopefully the reply makes sense coherently in the Cliff's Notes version, and doesn't come across as just word salad.
Liked the focus on ideological pluralism on trying to bring high openness people from various political perspectives together. Feels like a much more open, organic, and bottom up version of what the IDW was ostensibly trying to do 7 years ago.
The big failure of the IDW (well, there were many big failures, but that requires a whole analysis) was that its spiritual ethos was rooted in a GenX nostalgia that “if we could just just turn the political clock backward then we could return to a fruitful liberalism”. That entire orientation — based on the desire to bring back a non-existent reality, one that has already passed away — has to be thrown in the garbage. There can be no tolerance for any wimpy calls to “return to somewhere better”, because it completely blocks out the ability to look at and act within the landscape as it exists right now.
*Especially if you are the type of person who remains committed to liberal principles!*
Then, it becomes **unbelievably important** to basically grieve over old loyalties to liberal systems and institutions, and fully acknowledge how they have completed burned up – particularly in the past 15 years. Punch the wall hundred times, yell into your computer, write a bunch of screed; do what it takes to deal with the disappointment and sense of betrayal and broken trust.
Because, if you’re a person who wants to actually inject some forward-looking sobriety into the political game, you need to be able to come to table and orient to what comes after the tantrum-over-loss with an uncompromising sense of discernment and maneuverability. And there is no waiting for the right time anymore, really, because it's not waiting for any of us. There are discursive choices to be made even in the midst of a cloudy frontier that doesn't seem to possess any answers, let alone complete ones. Choices that allow the view and engagement in this space to widen and breathe rather than continue to narrow and calcify.
Learn which people you can talk to and the projects you can participate in that center a baseline level of simple honesty about competing or conflicting interests (even in the midst of great animosity), and start engaging with how these various factions look to order these real interests into some agenda or coherence.
A thorough follow up reply to this would need a good 90 minutes. In short, another sign I need to get moving on doing a Substack.
In broad strokes, the greatest shift I've made politically in the last decade was away from the mentality you describe above. I used to argue, well, if we could just somehow do a system restore of secular modernist liberalism as it existed during the JFK era and then evole naturally from there, we could get back on the trajectory of going to Mars etc. But secular modernist liberalism didn't survive its encounter with the New Left due to inherent structural flaws that left it vulnerable to changing facts on the ground. Just look what happened with Bernie 2016.
Likewise the if-we-could-just-go-back-to-the-1990's arguments. There's this whole active online subculture of Xennials / the Oregon Trail Generation. We've old enough to remember when the US last really worked well, but weren't able to take advantage of it by the time we reached full adulthood. So I can see both the appeal and the flaws of the IDW. If we went back to the 1990's, we'd just Groundhog Day repeat the forces that led to the Woke Era.
Instead at this point, you'll need a complete rupture to remove the forces of Wokeness and compromised institutions. I'd like to see the best elements of liberalism preserved in a new framework (call it post-liberalism, but I have no idea how that would relate to the already established and name-claimed "Post-Liberalism"), but with much sturdier scaffolding holding the overarching structure together.
Hopefully the reply makes sense coherently in the Cliff's Notes version, and doesn't come across as just word salad.
Really interesting emphasis of politics from human interest
I'll give this a listen on my drive home today. Best of luck to you guys.