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13 Jul, 4 tweets, 2 min read
For the rest of the week, @dmarusic & I are lifting the paywall on some of our Friday Essays at @WCrowdsLive. We've each selected three of our favorites, which you can now read in full.

First up is my review of Obama's memoir: wisdomofcrowds.live/oh-the-audacit…
#2. The Case Against Consensus

Why we should take pleasure in the generative possibilities of conflict

wisdomofcrowds.live/against-consen…
#3. Why Christianity Failed

Americans, like Europeans before them, found themselves with a religion that did not speak to the most essential political questions

wisdomofcrowds.live/why-christiani…
For the rest of our Friday Essays, check out the full series here: wisdomofcrowds.live/friday_essays/

If you'd like to get future Friday Essays, please do consider subscribing 👇🏽

wisdomofcrowds.live/subscribe/

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More from @shadihamid

Shadi Hamid Profile picture
12 Jul
I have a new essay for @WCrowdsLive on public education, critical race theory, and whether children are a red line in the woke wars. To what extent does "culture" really matter? 1/x

wisdomofcrowds.live/the-tyranny-of…
Some of the passages in @michaelbd's brilliant book struck me. Here he is on how enveloping culture can be:

"Its judgments become so familiar that it exists like a voice in your head. And yet it is impossible to explain exactly how this happens" 2/x amazon.com/My-Father-Left…
In some contexts, particularly would-be democracies, public education becomes a main *political* battlefield. Before they wanted to win elections, Islamist parties were preoccupied with curricula development. No else cared. They cared. 3/x
Read 7 tweets
Shadi Hamid Profile picture
2 Jul
If you missed it, I wrote a review of Obama's memoir for @WCrowdsLive. Why did I read it, you ask? I had a duty and duty called. The passages on the Arab Spring are especially interesting but not in the way you might expect. 1/x wisdomofcrowds.live/oh-the-audacit…
The first thing I noticed was the self-regard masked as self-awareness, a clever trick that apparently went down well with most mainstream reviewers who, when they did offer gentle criticism, did so with sufficient reverence. 2/x
To Obama's credit (or discredit), he basically sounds like me sometimes. For example, he seems to understand that autocracy, by definition, isn't permanent. Yet despite this knowledge, he spends the next several years acting against his own counsel. 3/x
Read 10 tweets
Shadi Hamid Profile picture
23 Jun
If you missed it, this is a brilliant essay from @dmarusic for @WCrowdsLive. As usual, Damir cuts through the noise on American exceptionalism, Biden's foreign policy, and the question of hypocrisy. 1/x

wisdomofcrowds.live/diminishing-re…
The opening paragraph alone is 🔥

2/x
I haven't seen the argument made in quite this way before. @dmarusic argues that moral perfectionism has always been paralyzing, but that its benefits once may have outweighed the costs. Now, it is mostly a liability. 3/x

wisdomofcrowds.live/diminishing-re…
Read 7 tweets
Shadi Hamid Profile picture
13 Jun
I have a new @WCrowdsLive essay on the idea of the "arc of history." Martin Luther King was discussing racism and civil rights at home. Obama repurposed it more broadly to include America's global role. But did the arc exist beyond our own borders? 1/x

wisdomofcrowds.live/morality-is-im…
As an aside, there is an interesting question of how the notion of progress is eschatologically problematic for Islam and to some extent Christianity. For many Muslims, progress exists, it just runs counter to historical time. 2/x
MLK spoke of the "arc of the moral universe." Obama adapted this and came up with the "arc of history." Meanwhile, "the right side of history" wasn't new. Clinton used it 20 times. What was new was Obama's emphasis on the *wrong side* of history. 3/x
Read 7 tweets
Shadi Hamid Profile picture
11 Jun
Not a joke, my first published academic article was on feminist theory...

And it exists on the internet: org.uib.no/smi/seminars/n…
Kinda funny to read this 15 years later Image
Doing Foucault and critical theory in college was helpful. You realized power relations were vital to understanding policy outcomes; no institutional arrangements were "neutral"; everything was basically a social construction; and objectivity was an illusion
Read 4 tweets
Shadi Hamid Profile picture
9 Jun
If you missed it, our two-part conversation with @DouthatNYT on @WCrowdsLive is out. A deep dive into decadence, wokeness, interplanetary colonialism, anti-supernaturalism, and the perils of meritocracy

wisdomofcrowds.live/ross-douthat-p…
In Part 2, I ask @douthatnyt whether Christianity, in contrast to Islam, struggles with "rationalist" elites because it doesn't present itself as an explicitly rationalistic faith.

Full conversation here: wisdomofcrowds.live/ross-douthat-p…

Here's a teaser 👇🏽

The question of why educated elites don't seem to find Christianity compelling despite an obvious and often intense desire for meaning and structure is something of a puzzle. @douthatnyt has been excellent on this: nytimes.com/2021/04/10/opi…
Read 4 tweets

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