A collection of 33 posts
What, exactly, had I said that was so dangerous as to lead Democrats to engage in character assassination and undermine liberal democratic norms? Nothing I hadn’t already said last January when I testified before Congress about climate change and energy.
If liberal strategies end up providing weaker results than illiberal ones, liberals might want to revise not only their COVID-19 policy, but also some of their broader assumptions about human nature.
For Fromm, Horkheimer, and Adorno, this project could only end in a desire for mass death. This is because, in a nihilistic sense, death is the ultimate form of order, stripped of all the anxieties and challenges which come with life.
Furet feared that there now appeared to be a simultaneous deadening of politics as the apparently unchallengeable hegemony of quasi-liberal democracy grew, and a dangerous backlash against the system.
The rise of populism, of Trump, of opiate epidemics, of bitter polarization, and of yawning economic inequality have tempered the triumphalism of those who once celebrated the inevitable victory of markets and democracy.
A standing citizens’ assembly would reveal the people’s considered opinion as opposed to their unconsidered opinion measured by endless opinion polls.
Harassment and the advocacy of violence are serious issues, and there is nothing morally objectionable about social media companies.
Complaint sometimes reflects an honest desire to be able to ask the unaskable, speak the unspeakable, and ponder the imponderable.
Among academics, it is considered a badge of honor to be paid in copies, or not at all. After all, you can’t put a price tag on genius!
Suspicious reading is applied to any and every medium as well as every form of individual expression.
The transhumanist perspective insists that humans have a distinctly separate mind and body, and that what happens to one need not affect the other.
The fact that the complex history of liberalism is largely ignored by both its opponents and its alleged friends
Marxian critique of liberalism is powerful and penetrating. It splits liberalism into two parts—an intellectual part and a social part—and shows a conflict.
For only then can reason ensure that the moral and social bonds of universal human brotherhood are sustained.
By the end of the twentieth century, liberal democracy seemed not only triumphant but, to some, inevitable.