"Why Liberalism is Everything Bad" was an entire genre of popular political theory over the last decade that did well in terms of sales & a sense of relevancy but which was more often than not shoddy in argument and not likely to age well as the wheel of history continues to turn Albeit in a darker, more gruesome way these books were to the 2020s what Freakonomics & World Is Flat bestsellers were to the high point of postwar neoliberalism.

Everyone wanted to read the same argument over and over again! They wanted their prejudices reflected back at them!

BREAKING: philosopher Charles Taylor showed in 1983 that AI not only doesn't reason, it doesn't memorize, & it isn't even intelligent. This is because it's not even intrinsically doing anything at all except relative to a human subject.

https://twitter.com/RubenHssd/status/1931389580105925115

From Charles's study: "what is [that macine] really doing? There is no answer ... attribution of action-terms to such devices are relative to our interests and purposes." pp. 197, 193-194, Philosophical Papers I

My view, like Augustine's, is Stoicism is not actually a very powerful ethic. To the contrary, it's a (failed) form of coping with loss of control of one's emotional & political life. It teaches the impossible: an ethic of self-mastery that ends finally in the despair of suicide

https://twitter.com/philosophybites/status/1915987453162270746

I think sociologically speaking Stoicism spread in the later Roman Republic & long imperial decline precisely because it served as a kind attempt to buffer oneself from the "slings & arrows of outrageous fortune."

Today it has resurged fused with self-help as a popular antidote

The rise of MAGA should inspire a massive paradigm shift in the study of U.S. political science towards more historical & cultural approaches. The reigning schools—institutionalism, behavioralism & rat'l choice—all failed to grasp the biggest event in US politics in a generation If you look at who had early insight into MAGA they were either historians, philosophers & theorists (who all share humanistic historical training) or cultural critics & journalists outside the academy who aren't blinded by some big ahistorical wonkish theory or data mania

Let me clarify some thing that should be obvious about autocratic politics: the Regime doesn't care about your feedback, buyer's remorse, regret, second guessing, or policy confusion. Rule by a single person is not a democracy and the wonderings of people are irrelevant. I'm just doing my best to "live not by lies" over here, trying to tell you what it's like even when these truths are unpleasant and like a clanging cymbal in your ears...

Among the most dramatic/devastating moments in 20th century music? When Bob Dylan meets Donovan (the latter still a golden boy of folk & a rival) & sings him the scorching poetic opener to *It’s All Over Now Baby Blue.*

It's all over Donovan’s face: he’s been totally eclipsed Some are worry about Timothee Chalamet playing Dylan in the upcoming film, but I say if it’s a gateway for my students into possibly the greatest living user of the English language—who finally accomplished the reunion of music & poetics foreseen by the Romantics—then … good.

Fascism is a contested concept. The scholars lined up here are serious. I even took a seminar on fascism with A. James Gregor (middle book) in grad school.

But I think all these guys make a philosophical error about *how* ideologies work: as timeless cores not living traditions.

https://twitter.com/FeserEdward/status/1849935313969479771

Their philosophical error leads to errors of interpretation. They place limits on fascism that do not apply to any other ideology. Imagine if I said it is only liberalism if men dump tea in the harbor? Yet limits like this are placed on fascism.
From my ch. in Lost in Ideology:

The "fascism debate" is partly so confused & interminable because disputants assumes the wrong concept of ideology.

The skeptics often pose standards of usage not applied to any other ideology (e.g. fascism's absolute purity/political success). Ch 5 of my new book dispels this!

https://twitter.com/CoreyRobin/status/1774147758523306359

The mistake, philosophically speaking, is to not realize ideologies are what I call "liquid" & capable of hybrids.

For example, recently a new kind of fascism might very well have arisen through a hybridization with neoliberal CEO top-down power.

(p. 92 of new book):

I know the rise of post-liberalism means people on the Left & center Left now want to have some grasp of Alasdair MacIntyre

But I am vexed by the steady stream of sub par pieces summarizing his work. It's *almost* like watching the Right discuss "Marxism"
lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v46/… I should say the Rée is substantively better than both the think piece The Nation ran in May by Scialabba & Manent's biography

And all are better than early aughts when I was asked by a liberal Berkeley prof & former Shklar student why I wanted to write on Mac since he's "crazy"

Far from needing to jettison "identity politics," coming to terms with how to positively accommodate deeply diverse communities in a multicultural politics is the only peaceful path out of escalating nationalist violence.

You learn to live together, or you learn to die together. I don't think advocates of nationalist sovereignty, on all sides, realize how their political theory implies ethnic cleansing.

If you assume a nat'l identity is sovereign in a territory—and that land cannot resonate for other nat'lities—it entails continual "cleansing".

Want to understand the historical & philosophical features of nationalist violence better?

Charles Taylor is probably the greatest living political philosopher of nat'lism (my Chronicle piece riffed on his work).

Here is a basic Taylor on nat'lism reading list!

https://twitter.com/jasonwblakely/status/1709270365200150664

Taylor is the son of an Anglo dad & French-Canadian mom. Nat'list pathos & Quebec separatism were front & center

This shows in his most famous work on nat'lism: 1992's *The Politics of Recognition.* It tries to reconcile nat'lists to a multicultural state
fs2.american.edu/dfagel/www/Cla…

The Chronicle asked me to expand on my beef with Yascha Mounk's claim that identity politics starts with postmodern theory.

In that thread, I suggested it began much earlier in Romanticism & the Enlightenment

Its oldest form is *nationalism.*

More here:
rb.gy/qq2eq Yascha has written a book, The Identity Trap, that offers a history of Identity politics & rues its effects.

I think his history is misguided & leads him to misjudge both the role of identity in modern politics & its positive potential & pitfalls.

https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1706652441976906196

this is a bad genealogy.

the origin of identity politics is, in fact, Romanticism's ethics of authenticity fusing to the Enlightenment notion of popular sovereignty. the goal is recognition.

it's not popular to say but remains true: the oldest identity politics is *nationalism*

https://twitter.com/Yascha_Mounk/status/1706652441976906196

such a loooooooong thread and all Yascha really needed to read was CHARLES TAYLOR.

Since there has been revived criticism of Foucault lately (& while I accept there are dubious anti-humanistic themes in his thought) I nonetheless wish to affirm:

Foucault was an absolute master at the (humanistic) art of writing a book

And so many intellectuals today are *not* It's ironic, I admit, for a thinker involved in the thesis of the "death of the subject" & the "author function" but it remains an undeniable experience of reading him:

His books take you on a journey--there is a certain narrative flair. A sense that a book is unified by an arc

i am not a Foucauldian but i have learned a tremendous amount from him that still resonates, e.g.:

1. psychology/clinical practice as political

2. genealogical inquiry as applicable to a wider range of institutions

3. Hobbesian state sovereignty disaggregated (governmentality)

https://twitter.com/enzoreds/status/1699718582869913800

in terms of #1:
we live in an age of perhaps unprecedented depression, anxiety, and other such maladies.

Foucault is a provocative corrective to the mere naturalizations of these problems and the stripping away of any political and social dimensions.

another day of the new "conservatives" on this site in knots as they again discover eugenicists & nazis among their most fervent fellow travelers

why does this keep happening?

my review of Deneen's latest book implies an answer: the politics now overlap
chronicle.com/article/the-th… i appreciate the attempt to continually expel eugenicists from one's own political movement but at a certain point one must ask:

can so many far Right "Nietzschean," will-to-power, race authoritarians, be wrong to see some overlap & common cause?

https://twitter.com/DouthatNYT/status/1687796507888775168

reviews of Patrick Deneen's new book *Regime Change* have been crackerjack reads & quite critical.

(i've taken more notice than i normally might since i'm supposed to write my own soonish).

here are some that stuck in my mind from across ideological / journalistic spectrum: probably the reviewer that most subtly understands PD's project is @geoffwriteshere. he is very critical but careful.

the author is younger than PD but they shared advisors at Rutgers (McWilliams) & he grasps all of PD's corpus not just the last 2 books
publicseminar.org/essays/toward-…

i see such are the times that the average "person of education" is now more or less incapable of discerning the subtle yet fatal difference between a humanistic *irony* & a misanthropic *cynicism*! but i learned from reading Erasmus that the best response to human folly is simply *laughter*!

& in a corrupt age (where even those who think themselves most pious are easily spotted by children as vicious, petty & proud) what can we do but laugh all the harder and more often?

this book was handed out to me for *free* a few months back when the author spoke on campus & i've yet to make it past the distinct sensation of choking on something whenever i read the title ... because we must?

our cities, jobs, culture, economy, dictate it.

a common ideological exercise for a certain kind of thinker: take something millions of people experience as a grinding necessity and right an ode to one's own autonomy to *choose it*

intellectual dyspepsia!

i am allergic to one of the most common patterns of political criticism on the center-Left in the USA.

it takes a million forms but since i can remember (growing up in the early 1980s) it always amounts to the same:

"the Right's politics are just a fit of irrationalism!" what's wrong with this? several things.

first, it's wrong at the level of interpretation. it misses the self-understandings of the ideological rival & simplifies them.

second, it falsely assumes center-left liberalism is straightforwardly & obviously rational.

but it is not.

Trump's lamentable appeal goes beyond Weber's typology of legitimacy.

Certain kinds of liberal technocrats see him as a departure from modern "rationalization" and administrative competence. But this is not so much a social "science" description as itself expressive of ideology

https://twitter.com/CoreyRobin/status/1668378723983163394

This is a bigger problem for understanding our own time than first appears. Weber is seen by many social scientists as offering simple descriptions of the way that modern power can be legitimated

But social scientists deploying the categories inhabit an ideology of managerialism