As you know if you’ve been following my posts and podcast episodes lately, I’m writing and releasing the chapters of my new book The Liberal Backbone in real time. When Joan Esposito of WCPT Chicago heard about it, she had an idea: a “radio book club,” with me coming on her show to talk about the book as it comes together, chapter by chapter, with her and her listeners.
On December 13, we had the first episode, and I thought it went great — Joan is one of my favorite interviewers. We explored the book’s big themes: what liberals actually stand for and how they can stand up for it a lot more effectively, at a time when that’s needed more than ever.
I’m sharing the interview here, lightly edited.
As always, you can find the text version at DastardlyCleverness.com and at Substack. And I hope you’ll follow me on Substack — just search there for Spencer Critchley.
— Spencer
Listen on any podcast app, at YouTube, at Substack, or here:
Transcript
00;00;00;00
Spencer Critchley (interview excerpt)
Liberals find themselves kind of trapped within this alienated mindset, and in politics it’s fatal, because politics is not about intellectual ideas and about the communication of information. Politics is almost entirely emotional, about how people are feeling.
00;00;17;09
Spencer Critchley (Intro)
Welcome to Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good. I’m Spencer Critchley. As you know if you’ve been following my posts and podcast episodes lately, I’m writing and releasing the chapters of my new book, The Liberal Backbone, in real time. When Joan Esposito of WCPT Radio in Chicago heard about that, she asked if I’d come on her show to talk about the book as it comes together.
I normally talk with Joan and her listeners for an hour once a month. Now, the plan is to turn my appearances into a kind of radio book club about The Liberal Backbone. On December 13th, we had the first episode. It was an opportunity to explore the big themes of The Liberal Backbone: what liberals actually stand for, and how they can stand up for it a lot more effectively, at a time when that’s needed more than ever.
I thought it was a great conversation, so I’m going to share it here, lightly edited. As always, you can find the text version at DastardlyCleverness.com and at Substack. I hope you’ll follow me on Substack. Just search there for Spencer Critchley. Here now is my conversation with Joan Esposito about The Liberal Backbone.
00;01;28;19
Voiceover
Joan Esposito: live local and progressive, on WCPT 820.
00;01;34;27
Joan Esposito
Spencer Critchley is author of the one of the books that if you haven’t read it, you should be reading it: Patriots of Two Nations. And he hosts the podcast Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good. Spencer is here to talk in part about his new book. Spencer, how are you doing?
00;01;53;27
Spencer Critchley
I’m doing okay, Joan, how are you doing?
00;01;56;10
Joan Esposito
I was telling the audience about your idea that for your next book, rather than waiting until it’s all done and releasing it that way, that you were going to release it chapter by chapter.
Let’s talk about the first chapter.
00;02;14;13
Spencer Critchley
So that’s introducing the concept. And the idea of the liberal backbone is that I think liberals have become, by and large, confused about what they actually stand for, because it’s a strength and a weakness of liberalism that it’s so tolerant and inclusive.
That’s the great thing about it, that liberalism makes very few demands on you as to what you believe. So you can be religious, belong to any religion. You can be atheistic, you can be conservative, you can be progressive, you can be a lot of different things and still be a liberal.
And liberalism will welcome you into the society with very few limits — except if you try to tear that society down, if you try to behave in ways that contravene the basic commitments of liberalism, like commitments to nonviolent resolution of disputes and commitments against the destruction of liberalism itself and replacing it with authoritarianism, for example — just to name a topical example. But it’s because — so that’s great about liberalism, that it’s so inclusive and so open to ideas, at least in its ideal case, when it’s actually actually being implemented the way it should be.
But it’s also a tremendous vulnerability. And liberal democracies often fail, because they make it, they make themselves so vulnerable to attack. And very often when a democracy fails, a demagogue, like a Trump-like figure, is actually popularly elected in a legitimate election and then sets about destroying the democracy. And that’s happened repeatedly throughout history. It’s actually what normally happens.
So the point of the liberal backbone is liberals, while maintaining their commitment to tolerance, I think, need to learn how to stand up for what they do stand for more effectively because they have a reputation for standing for nothing. And as I say in the in the first chapter, I begin with — if you’d like, I could read a couple of sentences just to give a sense of it.
00;04;19;10
Joan Esposito
Yes, please.
00;04;20;07
Spencer Critchley
So the first chapter begins, “What, if anything, do liberals stand for? It can be hard to tell. And it has been for a long time. Back in 1941, Robert Frost described a liberal as someone who ‘never takes their own side in a quarrel.’ And Frost was far from the first to notice. Two decades earlier, Carl Schmitt had declared that if you asked liberals to choose between crucifying the Messiah or a bandit, the response would be ‘a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation.’ It’s bad enough when you have to admit that a beloved poet and fellow liberal have had a point. It’s so much worse when it’s a top Nazi lawyer.”
Which is what Carl Schmitt was when he was speaking that way about liberals. You know, I think you have to admit there’s a certain truth in what Carl Schmitt said, that liberals love to convene discussions and form committees, and debate with each other, potentially endlessly. And the question that’s often raised, as I ask in the first line, is what do liberals actually stand for? And if you ask liberals themselves, often you’ll find they’re kind of uncertain.
And that’s a very bad way to be at this moment politically. It’s great, as I say, in terms of building an open society, but politically it’s extremely vulnerable. It makes you extremely vulnerable. And this is a time when liberals need to understand what are those core principles they actually do stand for and be able to stand for them effectively, because I think they’ve become confused and become ineffective at politics.
00;06;01;03
Joan Esposito
When you talk about these core principles, are you talking about, “Liberal, what do you stand for?” “I stand for freedom.” Is that what you’re talking about? Because that’s kind of an ultra-broad word that can mean different things in different scenarios. Or are you talking about something more specific?
00;06;23;12
Spencer Critchley
Well, that’s a really great question because really, these are a few, really a short list of 4 or 5 core principles that are the essence of liberalism, going back to the 16- and 1700s with people like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson and others. But those each of those principles, you need to understand what you mean by that.
And freedom is a great choice. Liberalism, if nothing else, is a philosophy of freedom, hence the name “liberal,” from Latin “libertas.” That was the idea, that everybody should be free. But that right there is a core area of disagreement between liberals, the MAGA right, and what’s often called the woke left. And the MAGA right is anti-liberal, meaning against this philosophy of liberalism.
And the woke left — the woke left that’s associated with things like cancel culture and you know, in its extreme form the sort of thought policing kind of approach. That’s actually descended from an anti-liberal version of the left that goes back at least to Karl Marx. — not that they’re all Marxists, but he’s one of the roots of it.
And that’s a core area of confusion for present day liberals, because many liberals assume that there’s only one version of the left and there’s only one version of the right, and if you’re woke, you’re somewhere on the far, progressive left and that’s the same thing. But in fact, there are two, at least two fundamentally different lefts. They disagree on fundamental principles.
00;08;17;22
Joan Esposito
Left and Lefter? Or, how do we —
00;08;20;11
Spencer Critchley
No, they’re not left — they’re different. Think of two separate lines. So it’s not a question of how far left you are.
00;08;27;09
Joan Esposito
Okay.
00;08;27;24
Spencer Critchley
You can be a very far left liberal, a very progressive, social democratic liberal like a Bernie Sanders or an AOC, for example, and you’re still a liberal.
But if you’re this kind of version of the woke left I’m describing, which actually does not believe unreservedly in free speech, for example, that left is actually explicitly anti-liberal. And they say that themselves. They think liberalism is a big problem. They think it contributes to oppression. And that’s a key area of confusion right now because many, many people hear these ideas which are essentially anti-liberal and think they have to agree with them because they too are on the progressive left, say, but they don’t realize there’s actually two incompatible versions of progressivism.
And then you see the same thing on the right: people who we traditionally call conservatives are actually also believers in liberalism, the broad philosophy of freedom on which liberal democracy is based.
00;09;35;20
Joan Esposito
That’s why I like when we’re talking about all these different positions, I like the image of a horseshoe rather than a spectrum, rather than a line, because it seems to me that you get to the, at least some on the far left and some on the very far right, are closer in their feelings than the bottom of the horseshoe, which would be in the more middle of the road, pragmatic people.
00;10;01;20
Spencer Critchley
Well, the idea of the horseshoe kind of meets and you get, the extreme far left and extreme far right meet, where the horseshoe gets close together at the bottom. And that is, that can be useful. One way they meet is they both become anarchists, coming at it from different directions. But what I’m saying is it’s not even one line, whether it’s bent or straight.
Because if you think about, we typically think about left, right, the left right spectrum of opinion, you’re somewhere between the far left and the far right. And those are all of the possibilities. You’re somewhere between far left, middle, and the far right. What I’m saying is there are people who don’t believe in that line at all.
They’re not on that line because they don’t believe in it. That line represents liberal opinion from like a libertarian conservative, a very small government conservative on the right to a very progressive Bernie style liberal on the left. But I’m saying there are people on the left and the right who aren’t on that line at all, because they don’t believe in liberalism.
And so this is a key area of disagreement. And you asked about freedom. Liberals define freedom as individual freedom. So it’s the the right that every individual in the world has to be free of coercion, to think freely, decide for themselves as long as they’re not hurting anybody else, and to live in a society where they can govern themselves through democracy.
So that’s the liberal definition of freedom. But MAGA, for example, comes from a tradition that equates freedom with the liberation of a group: the nation, basically, the liberation of the nation from its oppression or corruption by foreign invaders or domestic saboteurs. So it’s a more mystical kind of liberation, and if you listen to what MAGA people are saying, the really committed MAGA believers, they are talking about that kind of liberation, the liberation of a people, what they think of as “real Americans,” from all of these threats they think they’re facing.
And once they’re liberated, they will come together as a strong community of people who share the same values and are united and strong and powerful and virtuous. That’s a very different concept of freedom and it often overrides individual freedom, because if you are not a member of that people, because you don’t have the right religion, for example, you don’t have the right political beliefs, the right kinds of extreme right wing values, you are not free. You don’t get the same rights to freedom because you’re a threat. You’re at least a foreigner and a corrupting influence in our culture, which must be protected. So you explicitly do not get the same rights to freedom, and then you find out that even the members of the group don’t. They don’t, they’re not really free.
They believe they are, because they believe they are a part of this great national spirit and mission. But they find out, of course, that they are totally expendable and will end up being exploited and oppressed. Because what this is really about is whoever is in charge at the top. And on the left, they — the anti liberal left — also has a very different conception of freedom.
They see liberal individual freedom as a state of being alienated from true human nature, which wants to be communitarian and cooperative and peaceful. And we’ve been fooled into thinking that we’re individuals who need to make our own way, separate from each other, because it divides us and keeps us weak and fools us into participating in this alienating, industrialized lifestyle where all we do is chase money and status and compete against each other, which only ends up serving the powerful, rich people who are in charge and who are selling us products and, convincing us to work at low wages and all of this stuff.
So those people think the concept of the liberal individual is actually an artifact of this much larger, oppressive system that we live in. And when we wake up — this is part of the derivation of this sense of “woke,” is when we wake up and realize we are living within a giant illusion designed to keep us oppressed — we will break down the whole system, whether, not necessarily in a violent revolution, but we’ll take it apart, start over, and build a communitarian society where we will liberate our true natures which want to be co-operative, and maximally inclusive and, nonviolent and all that sort of thing. So you can see how you can take any of these definitions of freedom you want. You know, as a liberal
I will say you are perfectly free to believe any of these things. I am not saying you should not believe in any of these things, but also as a liberal, you have to decide whether you believe that or not. And a lot of liberals have a hard time saying things like “I believe in individual freedom” and just saying that.
00;15;22;25
Joan Esposito
We need to take a break, but I want to. Yeah, that’s what I want. I want you to, you talked about these core principles, but if we can’t even decide on what we’re talking about, when we’re talking about freedom, it seems to make articulating those core principles a little tricky. Maybe what you’re saying is we have to be much more specific rather than using a generic word. But we’re, Spencer Critchley and I, are going to take a real quick break, we’re going to continue this discussion in just a minute.
00;15;51;17
Voiceover
Let’s get social with WC A20 and follow us on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter at WCPT 820. Chicago’s Progressive Talk WCPT 820, where facts matter. John Esposito: live, local, and progressive, on WCPT 820.
00;16;13;13
Joan Esposito
I’m joined by Spencer Critchley. You know him as the author of Patriots of Two Nations. He also does the podcast Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good. He has a new book that he is releasing chapter by chapter. You can search his name on Substack and find it, the website associated with Dastardly Cleverness, has it and pretty much wherever you can find Spencer Critchley, you can sign up to get chapters of this book.
The book is called The Liberal Backbone, and we started this discussion by talking about “What are core principles?” And I threw out the word “freedom,” which turned out to be a little more complicated than might appear. But so you’re saying, rather than just saying, “I believe in freedom,” [say] “I believe in individual freedom.”
More specific than that, though, Spencer, does it need to be drilled down even further?
00;17;19;09
Spencer Critchley
To do this, it’s really more about that level of just getting clear on what your core values actually are.
00;17;25;29
Joan Esposito
But if I say I’m a firm believer in individual freedom, I mean, that could be interpreted by some as being anti-government. You know, we don’t want the government telling us what to do. We all decide what we’re going to do on our own whenever we want.
00;17;41;07
Spencer Critchley
Yes.
00;17;41;29
Joan Esposito
And so I do believe government has a role. I don’t believe government belongs in the doctor’s office, but I think government has a role in society. So how do I articulate that in my definition of freedom?
00;17;56;05
Spencer Critchley
Right. Well, within the definition of freedom, you can get quite specific if you want to. I want to keep it as simple as possible, because I know most people are not all that interested in ideology and if., and even if you are and you aren’t prepared to devote a lot of time to it, you can quickly feel like you’re getting lost in the weeds and find people arguing over exactly what liberalism means. But for example, another core principle of liberalism is democratic self-government. So you could say, I believe in individual freedom. You know, classically, liberals would define that in simple terms, as each of us should be free to think and do whatever we want as long as we’re not infringing on other people’s freedom — you know, not causing harm to other people — would be a short version of the liberal definition of individual freedom. But another principle of liberalism is that you believe in democratic self-government. So you do believe, you do also believe that there should be a government, because the government is there to protect the freedom of everybody. And it turns out that we can, liberals will freely agree to create a government not only to protect our freedom through having a military, for example, but providing services to people.
So the government makes sure you have clean water, and the food isn’t poisonous, and you could easily decide, we want to have good public schools, all of it subject to voting and debating, to make sure that enough of us do agree with this stuff, and that starts to make people have positive freedoms, not just the negative freedom of freedom from being coerced or interfered with, but the positive freedom to grow up healthy, to grow up educated, and to be able to realize, your desires, interests and dreams, as a vision of freedom as positive freedom.
So if you want to get into that level of detail, you can. But at a minimum, you can just say, “I believe in the freedom of each individual to think and do whatever they want, as long as they’re not hurting anybody else.” And that’s a lot, to decide that you actually believe in that. And then you, another principle of liberalism is you believe in democratic self-governance and which, as I say, introduces, yes, “I’m not an anarchist,” right? I part company with anarchists. I don’t believe if we destroyed the government that we would just self-organize and everything would be fine. So —
00;20;29;21
Joan Esposito
I can’t imagine that anybody can espouse that belief. I mean, have you paid attention to people? Do you see what people are like, is self organized?
00;20;41;03
Spencer Critchley
So, Joan, let me give you an example of how the confusion shows up in day to day life. Now, again, I am not saying people should not be allowed to be anarchists or part of the woke left, or even MAGA, really, as long as they don’t hurt anybody. I am saying though, that if you believe in liberalism and want to defend it, want to politically defend it effectively, you do need to be able to stand up for what you believe in, in the great debate over what where this country should go, right?
If you aren’t clear about what you stand for or don’t, aren’t skilled at standing up for it, you’ll get rolled over by all these other, much more ideological, much more committed people. And so that’s what I’m saying. And so the way this shows up, the way this shows up in day to day life is anarchism, for example, becomes quite popular amongst liberals like the Occupy Wall Street movement, for example, because that sounds like something liberals would believe in.
Obviously Wall Street has committed a ton of abuses and has a lot to answer for, rendering all those people homeless in the 2008 financial crisis, etc., etc.., right, and so a lot of liberals think, “Yeah, I’m down with Occupy Wall Street.” Well, one of the co-founders of Occupy Wall Street was explicitly an anarchist, a very well informed, thoughtful, smart person who was an anarchist.
And a lot of the ideology that was driving Occupy Wall Street was anarchist ideology. And when you get people getting, for example, having a meeting and the whole point is we’re going to decide everything with everybody involved by consensus, and people will be sitting there snapping their fingers throughout the meeting to indicate how they feel about — “I support this idea,” you may find that you’re participating in an anarchist exercise here. Now, that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing. All you’re doing is having an inclusive meeting and inviting everybody to contribute, right? But you can find yourself actually appearing to espouse an anarchist solution to the Wall Street problem when you don’t. And then when your opponents on the right, as they will, accuse you of being an anarchist.
Now, if you are an anarchist, you should say, “Hell yes, I am, and I’m proud of it. Let’s have an argument.” Fine. But if you’re a liberal, you’re not an anarchist. And if you’re not sure what the difference between a liberal and an anarchist is, or if you’re behaving in ways that really look like you are an anarchist, you’re politically going to be really ineffective, because we’ll get back to the thing of “What do liberals actually stand for?”
00;23;31;04
Joan Esposito
We are up against a break for news. Spencer Critchley, we are talking about his new book, The Liberal Backbone. Then we are going to be right back after the news.
00;23;43;21
Voiceover
Because facts matter. You are listening to WCPT 820. Joan Esposito: live —
00;23;52;04
Joan Esposito
“Celebrating our power to bring about change”— local “Everybody has to work together” — and progressive — “I think you get the idea.”
00;24;00;07
Voiceover
On WCPT 820.
00;24;04;01
Joan Esposito
Spencer Critchley is the author of the book Patriots of Two Nations. He also hosts the podcast Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good. If you go to his Substack or the web page for the podcast, you can sign up to get chapters of his new book, which he is releasing chapter by chapter. The book is called The Liberal Backbone, and we are talking — How many chapters do you have right now, Spencer?
00;24;35;18
Spencer Critchley
Five — yeah, one a week for five weeks, I didn’t know I’d be able to do it this fast. I don’t know if I can keep it up, but we’ll see.
00;24;43;10
Joan Esposito
Well, we were talking about definitions of terms. We were talking about core principles and what it means to to be a liberal and what you believe in. Let’s move on to the next point you make. I don’t know whether it’s in the first chapter or the next chapter.
00;25;01;08
Spencer Critchley
Well, I’ve spent the first few chapters having sort of set up that premise, that I think liberals are confused about what they stand for., and as politicians have become ineffective at standing for it.
00;25;12;25
Joan Esposito
Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that people are very confused. So let’s back up a second before we move on. What would be, if there was a politician that wanted to speak to a group and tell that group what they stood for, what would be the kinds of sentences, the messages? We already talked about not just saying, “I believe in freedom,” but “I believe in individual freedom as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else.”
What other would be, what other statements would you want to hear? So you know what somebody believes in?
00;25;50;15
Spencer Critchley
Well, actually in the context of a political campaign, it should be mostly about very simple messages and most of the focus on the non-verbal component, just introducing yourself as somebody that people like and trust to be a strong leader for people like them. It really comes down to about that and most of that is nonverbal.
And one of the ways that I think that liberals and the Democratic Party in particular, keep going wrong is they keep thinking, “Oh, we just need to do some more polling and come up with a message that works better.” And I really don’t think that’s it. I don’t think that there is a message that in itself matters very much.
00;26;39;24
Joan Esposito
Really. Because I’ve kind of been one of those people saying that.
00;26;44;11
Spencer Critchley
Oh, because we as liberals, we tend to be so rational. We tend to think everything is about information. And so we look at something like the incredibly successful Obama campaign and we think, “Oh, it’s because he had that ‘hope and change’ message. That was a really good message.” And you would see people copying that kind of thing, and they would copy the graphic design of his posters or the graphic design of his logo.
And what they didn’t realize is that’s the tip of the iceberg. It was Obama as a person who seemed to embody a set of values that people really connected with, mostly non-verbally, mostly through the rhythm of his speech and his cadences and the way he looked when he was talking, and not the information content of his words so much as the poetry.
One of the exercises I often do when I’m training on this subject is I take a passage from his famous 2004 Democratic Convention speech about “There’s no red America, no blue America” and I translate it into the standard kind of language we get taught to use in college, and far too many liberal politicians use, where it’s all information.
So I translate that into language like like — for example, like listing liberal principles! — and saying, “We believe in individual freedom, defined as the freedom of every one of us do as they please and without fear of government coercion” — the way I was just talking a short while ago because I was answering the question of what actually is it, which is appropriate when you’re explaining what it is — but when you’re campaigning, it just falls flat.
And so I would in my trainings, I would translate it into the sort of academic, intellectual language, perfectly clear, but just purely informational, that has come to dominate the way liberals talk. And then I would give people what Obama actually said and what he said was things like, “In America, we believe we should be able to tuck our children in at night without fearing a knock at the door” — you know, like when the secret police come for you. Now, that is the poetry of campaigning. And it only works if it feels authentic, if it connects with you culturally and feels like something you, too, deeply care about, and of course people deeply care about their children.
00;29;01;18
Joan Esposito
What if your authentic self is not charismatic? Joe Biden is a good man. I think he did many good things as president, but he’s nobody’s idea of a stimulating speaker. He’s no orator, you don’t want to, you don’t feel like throwing yourself into whatever project he’s pitching.
00;29;25;18
Spencer Critchley
Well, and you don’t have to be Obama. You’re right. There are many ways to do this. It does need to feel authentic, and it does need to connect with people on an emotional level, which doesn’t necessarily have to be soaring rhetoric, like with Obama or beautiful poetry. And I will say Biden for most of his career has been a very effective politician and often a very effective campaigner, as he was in 2020.
You know, he was an underdog and he won because his political instincts were right. And he did what I was describing in his own way. He’ll never be an Obama, but in his own way, he got voters to see that they liked and trusted him to be a strong leader for them. And that’s always, always the challenge.
And before I forget, I’d really like to mention something that’s going to emerge as a key concept in this book.
And that’s the concept of alienation. And the idea is that historically, we’ve been in a period of alienation going back to the rise of science and the Age of Enlightenment, when reason started to take over as the dominant mode of knowledge in our society.
And in many ways, that’s wonderful. We have science and medicine and incredible progress and incredible wealth by historical standards. All of that stuff is great, but there’s been this process of alienation, from a life where you feel immersed in the world and feel part of the world, because before the rise of science and the Age of Enlightenment, most people believed sincerely in God, whoever their God was, or they believed in spirits.
You know, many people believed in fairies and demons, and they believed that nature was inhabited either by God or by these spirits. And life was meaningful because you believed things happened for a reason. You might not be happy, you might be miserable, but you weren’t suffering from a life that was empty and seemed completely pointless, and where the only point was to stay alive as long as you can and make as much money as you can and try to buy some luxury and entertainment before you die.
But since the triumph of reason in the Enlightenment, Western culture as a whole has suffered this great alienation from that way of being and is kind of cast adrift spiritually. Many people, of course, continue to be religious and do live in sort of the traditional way, where they firmly do believe their life has meaning and God explains it, etc..
But many people, especially educated people, are forced to live with constant doubt about what all of this means or the possibility that it means absolutely nothing. And all of our — everything we think most about, meaning of life, beauty, art, love — is all just basically an evolutionary accident that’s completely pointless. It’s like the heat that’s being thrown off the human machine while it gets about its main purpose, which is to survive long enough to reproduce and then die.
So alienation is a core problem because liberals, as increasingly an educated group of people, tend to be trapped inside what Max Weber, the sociologist, once called an “iron cage” of rationalism. And they are living in this alienated frame of mind, which they can more or less cope with because they’re highly educated and maybe they can afford a lot of therapy or they can afford to study meditation or they’ve found some new spiritual practice that’s helping them through this.
But it’s an extremely difficult and often even terrifying and at least anxiety-inducing way to live. And furthermore, because you’re in this alienated state of highly developed, rational thought, you lose connection with the poetry of the Bible, for example, or the poetry of ancient myths and legends. And you come to speak in a very alienated way that’s highly rational and intellectualized.
And when you speak to other people, you yourself are alienating, because you come across as if you, in effect, have no soul, would be the way it’s often described. You come across as this sort of parody of the educated, northern, white person, from England or Germany or somewhere, who has no soul and can’t dance and speaks in an oddly stilted sort of way — somebody from my background, for example.
And this state of alienation: liberals find themselves kind of trapped within this alienated mindset, I believe, and in politics it’s fatal, because politics is not about intellectual ideas and about the communication of information. Politics is almost entirely emotional, about how people are feeling.
And if you have become alienated from the way people, most people experience life, where they are immersed in it, for better or for worse, and you come across as somebody who just, is just like, oddly disconnected from it all, so that even when you’re trying to be one of the folks, it seems oddly stilted or studied, which describes all too many Democratic politicians, not not all of them, but a great many of them, and I would say describes the thinking of the Democratic Party as a national organization generally, where everything is poll-driven, it’s poll-tested, everything is about the latest slogan or, the latest policy points, which have been poll-tested. It’s all analytical thinking as opposed to what actually works in politics.
00;35;02;09
Joan Esposito
And the part about where politics is emotional: I did not agree with this for a second, but there were all the people that, “Well, you know, Kamala isn’t winning over more voters because she’s not spending enough time talking about policy. You know, she needs to spend more time — ”
00;35;19;19
Spencer Critchley
I think that’s exactly wrong. People, actually, people have a really hard time getting this, I think: As hard as it is to believe, almost nobody actually cares about policy. Now, that doesn’t mean policy doesn’t matter. And it doesn’t mean that people aren’t suffering because they’re not making enough money, or they can’t afford health care or child care, they can’t afford groceries, whatever it is. It doesn’t mean they don’t care about fixing health care or fixing the child care problem. They do, but they don’t care at all about the policy details. They don’t care about the policy itself. Right? They care because they love their children, or they care because they are afraid. These are very primal emotions, like love, “I love my children.” Or fear. I am afraid that if I lose my job, we are homeless, or I am afraid that if my wife gets any sicker, she’ll have to die because we don’t have health insurance.
You know, that’s the way people care about policy, even sophisticated people. They don’t — you know if you’re rich, they don’t care about, most of them some, like tax experts, care about the details of tax policy — but most even sophisticated, wealthy people don’t care about the details of tax policy. They just want to hang on to their money, or they don’t trust the government to spend tax money well, or whatever it is. But that’s all about feeling. “I don’t want you to have my money because I don’t trust you.”
It’s all very basic, primal emotions. So being more specific about policy is, I think, not only a waste of effort, but potentially very likely counterproductive, because you’ll be so ineffective as a campaigner. Now, what you have to do is give people the feeling that you have really good policies. And liberals have a hard time imagining this.
00;37;21;25
Joan Esposito
Okay, that’s interesting. “I’m not going to bore you with policies, but you’ve got to feel —” is that why we get Donald Trump saying it wasn’t a policy, but, “Food is too expensive. Elect me. Everything will be better.”
00;37;39;15
Spencer Critchley
That’s basically, that convinces lots of people and it convinces, surprisingly, highly educated, sophisticated people. This shocks me. I mean, how well-educated, intelligent — who you would think are nobody’s fool, actually, by Trump, they actually honestly believe Trump is a good manager of the economy. I mean, and they make sincerely — I mean some of it’s just, it’s driven by an irrational desire, I think, to hang on to their money or they find other aspects of his, what he stands for, appealing, like the uglier aspects, appealing, but they can’t admit it to themselves. But the fact is, these are sophisticated people who actually, despite all the evidence that Trump has economic policies that make any sense at all, and that he has any record of knowing what the hell he’s doing with the economy or in business, that he was anything other than a serial failure who got lucky as a businessperson.
But this is what liberals, because, I say, they’re living in a state of rationalistic alienation, they actually think that people make votes based on carefully considered examinations of policy alternatives and rational debates, as if it’s a university seminar or something. That is not at all the way politics works. And even when people who are voting for people who I really thought they should vote for, like Biden, like Obama, most of those votes, those people didn’t really understand the details of what they were voting for.
Some did because they really care or they happened to be experts in that area. But most people were just basing their votes on “I like and trust this person, and I think he’s going to fight for people like me.” “He’ll make the economy better.” But it goes about as far as that, or he’ll protect us from war or he’ll look out for the children or whatever, but it doesn’t get much deeper than that. It gets down to “I believe this person will do that. I’m choosing a leader who I trust will get that stuff done for me. And I don’t actually understand how they’re going to do it.”
00;39;44;17
Joan Esposito
What about when you’ve got somebody like Trump, who tells any particular audience he’s in front of not the truth, not what he thinks, not what he plans to do, but rather just tells them what they want to hear? That makes somebody feel good. Is that what you’re saying? That should be the way forward?
00;40;06;29
Spencer Critchley
But this is the enormous challenge that liberalism is facing and this is part of how liberalism and liberal democracy contains the seeds of its own destruction, because it’s open to people like Trump. A liberal society is often called the open society. It’s open to all ideas and almost all ideas, and almost all people, except people who are trying to kill other people or hurt them, or trying to tear the whole thing down.
But it’s because it’s open, it’s vulnerable. So it’s vulnerable to demagogues like Trump, who are willing to just lie their heads off and deliberately exploit people’s emotions, to deliberately exploit what I’ve been describing: the fact that we are wired to respond to politics emotionally. They know that, so they exploit emotion all the time. It’s all about exploiting fear, resentment, anger, or irrational —
00;41;00;24
Joan Esposito
I agree with you that that’s what’s going on, Spencer, what I don’t understand —
00;41;04;21
Spencer Critchley
That doesn’t mean we have to be that way.
00;41;06;10
Joan Esposito
But I mean, that’s the core of the Republican Party: get people to feel something and the easiest thing is to make them feel anger, make them all angry about something. But it’s, they’ve been doing this for a while. How have people not wised up to this? “Oh, there they are again, trying to make me mad.”
00;41;28;16
Spencer Critchley
Somehow humanity is always vulnerable to this. I believe, and the psychologists will back me up on it, this is wired into us by evolution, to make decisions this way. We make very fast, emotion-driven decisions, because in the wild that works better. You survive longer if you do that, because you only have a split second to decide.
“Is that something scurrying in the underbrush that I can pounce on and eat and thereby survive? Or is it a very dangerous predator, like a snake or a lion or something, which I must flee and therefore survive?” And you cannot sit there, like the way Carl Schmitt described liberals, and decide together, the tribe, sit down and appoint a committee and consider all the alternatives. Right? And so that’s why it works so well. And demagogues have been doing this since people first noticed there were such things as demagogues back in classical Athens. You know, there was this demagogue known as Cleon, who was one of the first identified demagogues who did exactly this, and demagogues have been popping up throughout history.
The founders of the United States, the demagogue was one of the people they most feared, and they explicitly in multiple places, in the Federalist Papers in multiple places, they warn against demagogues. And they describe essentially, Donald Trump, essentially, warn against people who have mastered “the petty arts of deception,” if I’m remembering that right, for example, and who excite the passions of the crowd, but who lack the character to be leaders and are driven by personal ambition.
They knew this was one of the greatest threats to the survival of the democratic republic. And they were basically, if you read it, it’s chilling because they’re describing Donald Trump perfectly, but this is something humans are always vulnerable to. And again, if liberals are going to defend liberalism, they have to know that and they have to know how to campaign against it effectively.
Hence the idea of “the liberal backbone:” rediscovering your backbone and learning how to stand up and stand straight.
And so as a campaigner, you need to appeal to people emotionally. You need to master the arts of a demagogue, frankly, but you do it honestly, with good intent.
00;43;33;06
Joan Esposito
You master the skills of a demagogue, but do it honestly. Okay?
00;43;38;03
Spencer Critchley
That’s exactly what Obama did. You know, technically, Obama was a demagogue because he understood how to excite the passions of the crowd by appealing to their emotions. But he was doing it honestly, with good intentions. He wasn’t lying to them. And his intentions were laid out there. He told you what he stood for and he actually meant it.
He wasn’t going to suddenly surprise you. And you weren’t going to find out he was actually an authoritarian or a crook. And I know that from working inside the campaign. I mean, I don’t want to exaggerate my role, but I was enough inside the campaign to hear Obama on phone calls and to interact with all the other people on the campaign, including the people leading it, and to know that from top to bottom, that campaign was an honest expression of what Obama stood for and was being run honestly as a campaign. So it is totally possible —
00;44;31;13
Joan Esposito
Give us an example of that, of something that indicated what he stood for in a clear way, that still he was able to have resonate emotionally with people.
00;44;42;11
Spencer Critchley
Well, for example, what I just said in that speech, about describing freedom from a repressive government, describing it as “In America, we believe you should be able to tuck your children into bed at night knowing that they’ll be safe from that late night knock at the door,” for example, to talk about it in those terms.
He would do that repeatedly. If you go back and watch or listen to those speeches, the language was poetic. It was descended from a tradition. You know, one of the major streams that he was drawing from was the civil rights movement, which is very much tied to the black church, which produced people like Martin Luther King — or oratory, or going back to slave days, it’s the oratory of the black churches, going back into the into the 19th century, for example, the preachers would be, in many cases, masterful orators, using the cadences of the Bible. And Obama was very much part of that tradition. He knew what he was doing and he would draw on other great speakers.
And a lot of what he was doing was it was all about the imagery and the rhythm in what he was doing that was communicating with people so powerfully. And the thing is those are essentially demagogic skills. That’s a technical term, so it doesn’t have to be pejorative. And it becomes positive when you’re doing it honestly with good intentions — and which, as I say, I witnessed with my own eyes and ears — as was the case on the Obama campaigns. There was never a moment where you could detect that, “Oh, this is actually just the usual sleaze and manipulation.” That was just not happening.
And it’s crucially important, I think, for Democrats to understand what works and doesn’t work in this regard. In my own work, I’ve often described what I’m attributing to Obama here as “giving the truth a fighting chance.” So you can’t just tell people factually accurate information and win a campaign, or persuade them of anything. Information by itself has almost no persuasive power, no matter how smart the person you’re talking to is. They might like to think of themselves as a sort of person who makes truly rational decisions, but they’re in fact deluding themselves about that.
And so giving the truth a fighting chance means you’re not going to just give people factually accurate information. You are going to appeal to their emotions and do your damnedest to persuade them, to make them come around to see things the way you want them to see things, but you’re going to be telling them the truth and they will remain free to disagree with you.
They can open themselves up to the risk of being persuaded and decide in the end that they are not persuaded and they can go away from that interaction and neither of you, you have not victimized them and they have not been victimized. And that is, I think, the way for Democrats is to rediscover these basic truths of persuasion and try them that way.
00;47;46;06
Joan Esposito
As we wrap this up, I want you to tell people again the easiest way to get the chapters as you write them, because I’m going to have in January, the first of the year, January 6th, Spencer is going to come back and there will be a quiz. So what’s the easiest way to get the chapters?
00;48;05;29
Spencer Critchley
So if you go to DastardlyCleverness.com, they will appear there in full, and already there are five, and they’ll keep showing up there. Also, as an alternative, you can go to Substack.com/@SpencerCritchley. There are five chapters that have shown up there and will continue to show up. And you can subscribe to me on Substack and I really hope you will.
I’m pretty new there, so I only have a few subscribers, and I really hope you’ll subscribe to me there. And if you want, you can sign up for my email list, which is at DastardlyCleverness.com. You can sign up and I will email you the chapters, along with other things, with a firm promise never to spam you and never to share your email address with anybody else.
00;48;50;06
Joan Esposito
Well, this is really helpful, Spencer, because since the election, I’ve had people say, “Please give us an idea of books we can read or organizations we can join.” You know, people feel like they’re really motivated to refuse and resist. So, this is our first book club book. All right.
00;49;11;17
Spencer Critchley
Oh, that’s great, that’s great. I’m also, one thing I used to, I did this before COVID. I was organizing events called Saving Democracy back when what we’re seeing now was only a threat. And people seemed to find those very useful and I’m hoping to get back to organizing events as well. So maybe down the road we can, might be able to offer that as an invitation to people as well.
00;49;35;03
Joan Esposito
Excellent, excellent. Spencer Critchley, author of Patriots of Two Nations, it is always a pleasure. Thank you so much for being here.
00;49;42;12
Spencer Critchley
Joan, thank you very much. I really appreciate it.
00;49;45;18
Spencer Critchley (Outro)
You’ve been listening to an interview with me by Joan Esposito of WCPT-AM in Chicago. If you’re not in Chicago, you can listen to her show online Mondays through Fridays at HeartlandSignal.com.
You can also subscribe to the podcast version. Just look for “Joan Esposito Full Episodes.” Thanks to Joan for letting me replay this episode here, and thank you for listening.
I’ll be back next time with the next chapter of The Liberal Backbone.
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