Wouldn't It Be Nice

It would be incredibly easy to expand what I’m doing here, to cultivate more regular readers, to increase traffic, to get more comments and restacks on posts. I know the game because I played it for years when I published my (usually angry) thoughts on a blog that averaged many thousands of daily views and when I was (overly) active on Twitter. I have a very keen sense of what will draw more readers, boost engagement, encourage people to share my content, and subscribe to make sure they don’t miss anything.

But I’m not going to do it.

I wrote a post last week that a few hundred people read and thought about (at least I’m hoping you thought about it), and the message of that post was that we need to get away from what I called enemy-based politics. Over the past year, I’ve written extensively about the outrage machine of social media and the way that it warps our society. There’s something intoxicating about all the notifications that blow up your phone after you’ve published something about how the other side is terrible and must be defeated at all costs, or something snarky about how the latest news item shows the depravity of our political enemy. My sense of humor and my sarcasm was built for this.

But I’m not going to do it.

I’ve watched people offer an endless stream of invective, thinking that the only way to change people’s minds is to keep angrily hammering away at the politicians and pundits who are getting it wrong—on purpose and nefariously, obviously!—because that will rally our side to defeat their side in November. And, as they do it, they gain a steady stream of followers or subscribers or whatever because we’re conditioned now to be attracted to the outrage and the grievance. There’s no consideration that we’re only speaking to those who already with us and widening the gulf between us and those who have different views. I’ve not only watched it, but I played my part for longer than I should have.

So I’m just going to keep writing about how and why to be a political liberal at a time when people aren’t being rewarded for it but when it’s more important than ever. The reason I’m doing this, as I set out at the very beginning of this Substack experiment, is that I believe we need to make liberalism seem appealing again and we really need to double down on the ideas that are central to it as a political philosophy. Ultimately, if we can’t explain why it’s important for political liberals to win elections and if we can’t highlight why these ideas, norms, and institutions matter, all the outrage and vilification in the world isn’t going to bring us back to a place where we can talk seriously with one another about the concepts of a political community or the common good.

It would be amazing if one could build up a following just as quickly by talking about the importance of local elections as by yelling about which congressional candidate’s digital ad makes you angriest. But you can’t and that’s ok with me.

I honestly think that we need to make a fundamental break with the politics of anger and enemies, and instead embrace working together to get our society back on track, and so I’m going to keep plugging away here with that in mind. I’m not going to encourage you to work with or to vote for people whose ideas are terrible, but I am going to keep emphasizing that yelling about why they’re terrible doesn’t do anything at all to convince anyone that you’re right.

Here’s an example that’s been on my mind lately:

For the past decade (at least), we’ve witnessed the gradual hollowing out of public higher education in this country through state budget cuts, federal attacks, and reputational damage arising from both a hostility to expertise and a general assault on the entire concept of a liberal education rather than a technical one. The answer from universities has generally been anemic, often focusing on how much money the university contributes to the state’s economy. It turns out that “We’re a sound investment” has failed to move the needle when citizens are constantly told that a university offers nothing but trigger warnings and safe spaces for fragile purple-haired Communists and bad grades and social stigma as punishment for innocent apple-cheeked Americans who express their patriotism. Some people would rather miss out on a good investment if they think the thing they’re being asked to invest in is straightforwardly bad.

What we’ve generally failed to do is to go on a full-throated barnstorming campaign to explain why the state university matters, why the legislature ought to pay for it, why our kids should aspire to graduate from it, why the research its faculty members produce and the workforce it educates propel the state forward. And, perhaps most importantly, we ought to be explaining not only why studying engineering or chemistry is crucial but also why studying Spanish or political science is too. We ought to have lobbyists at the legislature talking about the dollars, for sure, but we also need to have twice as many administrators, faculty, students, and alums out there talking to their neighbors about the virtues of a liberal education for the people. Yes, we’re going to teach your kids math and science, and we’re going to train the next generation of teachers and architects and journalists and nurses. And we hope they’ll also learn a second language and read Shakespeare and meet someone from a very different faith background and deepen their own beliefs and make a friend who disagrees with them about politics and do a group project with someone from another country and develop an academic interest in a topic they never even knew existed before they came to campus.

And, here's the part that won’t earn me any points but is nevertheless crucial: we also need to listen to people who are angry or scared, who have a different opinion than we do, who think we’re lying or who feel that we look down our noses at them. As tempting as it is to talk to people who already agree with us and as tempting as it is to talk at people who just need to wise up and change their minds, we have to enter into these conversations with a different outlook. We need to practice saying, “Tell me more about why you think that” and then really listening to their answer. Rather than assuming that we can defeat our enemies with our superior logic and reasoning, we ought to try to actually make a connection with them, to listen to their concerns, and to treat their ideas as serious and worthy of our time and attention. It might be the case that we don’t see eye to eye in the near term, but we have to start building relationships of trust with our neighbors if we’re ever going to get to a place where we can talk about what we might accomplish together.

I know that’s not as satisfying as treating our political opponents with the contempt we feel they deserve. I know it doesn’t lead to likes and shares. But it’s the only path forward so I’m going to keep at it.