Listen on any podcast app, at YouTube, or here: If you’ve been following along, you know I’m presenting the first draft my next book, The Liberal Backbone, chapter by chapter. This time, Chapter 4: “We Need to Talk About Marx.” You can also find this at Substack. I hope you’ll follow me there. Those versions have links and footnotes as well. As always, I welcome … [Read more...] about We Need to Talk About Marx: Liberal Backbone Chapter 4
Episodes
Liberal Backbone Chapter 3: What DOES It Mean to Be Woke?
I promised last time to clarify the meaning of the word ”woke.” In fact, it has two meanings — and they’re so different, they contradict each other. By one of them, any liberal can be proud to be called woke, because to be woke in this sense is to recognize bigotry and oppose it. But by the other meaning, liberals can’t be woke, even if they want to. That’s because if … [Read more...] about Liberal Backbone Chapter 3: What DOES It Mean to Be Woke?
The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 2: Why Nothing Makes Sense
Photo: Gregor Mima, Pixelbay (Also available at Substack.) As I said in the previous chapter, liberals can be proud of being open to multiple opinions. But sometimes openness can look like emptiness, as if you stand for nothing at all. It’s hard to stand for something if you’re not even sure what that something is. And many liberals have become unsure what … [Read more...] about The Liberal Backbone, Chapter 2: Why Nothing Makes Sense
The Liberal Backbone
Ever since I published my book Patriots of Two Nations in 2020, I’ve been working on another one — a much bigger one, as it’s turned out. And I’m still working on that big book. But with American democracy facing its greatest crisis since the Civil War as a corrupt autocrat returns to the presidency, I want to do my part, however small, to help right now. So I’m going to … [Read more...] about The Liberal Backbone
Slowly and then all at once
Ernest Hemingway is famous for the terse economy of his writing. And in one of the most resonant examples of that quality, he captured the essence of catastrophic failure in just a few words, in his novel The Sun Also Rises. The alcoholic veteran Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he says. “Gradually and then quickly.” As it is with one … [Read more...] about Slowly and then all at once