All posts tagged: liberal democracy

Solzhenitsyn’s Warning for the United States

Published by skeptic

While clearing out a storage room filled with books, I came across a slim volume, A World Split Apart, the text of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard commencement address. I remember listening to the speech at the time and being disconcerted by the petulant commentary it elicited. Solzhenitsyn had been in the United States only three years, having been expelled by the Soviet government and living as a recluse in Vermont. The consensus—certainly among the great and the good of Cambridge, Massachusetts—was that he was an ultranationalist, a reactionary, and, above all, an ingrate. At the time, I thought the reaction peevish and beside the point. Rereading the speech, it seems even more urgent that we pay heed to his excoriating critique of Western liberalism. Solzhenitsyn did misunderstand some of the key elements of Western, and specifically American, liberal democracy. He was no democrat, although he unreservedly opposed cruel and arbitrary government. It is true, too, that his deep religious faith and mystical belief in Russia’s destiny were and remain alien to most non-Russians. And it …

How Humanism Can Save the World

Published by skeptic

One evening not long ago, I was doomscrolling on social media, wading through the detritus of our present moment: Videos of terrorists in Israel decapitating a man with a garden hoe. A clip of Donald Trump being cruel and narcissistic. Footage of mobs physically assaulting some lone stranger they disagree with, pummeling him as he lies prone on the ground. These are all products of the rising tide of dehumanization that has swept across the world. The famous dates of our century point to this great unfolding of barbarism—September 11, 2001; January 6, 2021; October 7, 2023. The causes of this rising culture of dehumanization are almost too many to count: tribalism, racism, ideological dogmatism, social media. All this amounts to the steady evisceration of the moral norms that can make our planet a decent place to live—and their gradual substitution with distrust, aggression, and rage. Dehumanization is any way of seeing and acting that covers the human face, that refuses to recognize and respect the full dignity of each person. Then, as I was …

Reader Views on the Role of Taboos

Published by skeptic

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Last week I asked readers, “How should liberal democracies utilize or eschew taboos?” Replies have been edited for length and clarity. We in liberal democracies have a fondness for countercultural expression and norm challenging that can seem paradoxical—if so many of us come to love a rebel, when do they stop being a rebel and start being the status quo? Weighing this question, taboo is the fulcrum, not an object we can put on or remove from one of the scales. When someone breaks a taboo in a way that resonates with a lot of people, as in the case of Bronze Age Pervert [an internet personality and bodybuilder who advocates for fascist politics and was profiled in The Atlantic’s September issue by Graeme Wood], that is our cue to relitigate the taboo. To be clear, this should rarely lead to discarding …

Israel’s Protest Movement Is a Lesson in Democracy

Published by skeptic

The left in the U.S. hasn’t shown much love for the democracy movement that has rocked Israel since January. Such indifference is, perhaps, unsurprising, because many progressives consider Israel to be a—if not the—force for evil in the world. At its recent convention, the Democratic Socialists of America put forward a resolution titled “Make DSA an Anti-Zionist Organization in Principle and Praxis,” and the Harvard Crimson editorial board has “proudly” endorsed a campus protest that equated Zionism with “white supremacy,” among other ills. Even many liberals, including Jewish ones, seem oddly disconnected from the events that are unfolding; in the United States, demonstrations against the Netanyahu government have been insignificant and mainly confined to small left-Zionist groups. Some critics insist that Israel isn’t a real democracy because Arab Israelis face discrimination, or because Israel was founded as a state of refuge for the Jewish people, or because the occupation persists. Underlying this view is an oddly moralistic, rather than political, understanding of democracy that confuses it with purity. Democracy—the rule of law, the equality of …

The Role of Taboos in a Liberal Democracy

Published by skeptic

Welcome to Up for Debate. Each week, Conor Friedersdorf rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here. Question of the Week How should liberal democracies utilize or eschew taboos? (See any and all items below for context, and feel free to construe the question broadly or to focus on anything related to it.) Send your responses to [email protected] or simply reply to this email. Conversations of Note In the September 2023 issue of The Atlantic, my colleague Graeme Wood profiles Bronze Age Pervert, a pseudonymous illiberal philosopher who has gained a cult following on the ideological right while mixing “ultra-far-right politics, unabashed racism, and a deep knowledge of ancient Greece.” Many people understandably believe that his self-published manifesto ought to be taboo. Might successfully maintaining such a taboo safeguard liberal society from those who seek to end it? BAP’s rise has been especially upsetting to some of the academics who worked with him as a graduate student. Here is …

The Rise of Bronze Age Pervert

Published by skeptic

In 2014, the actor B. J. Novak, best known as Ryan, the weaselly temp from The Office, went on the Late Show With David Letterman and confessed to a small role he’d played 17 years earlier in the history of the American far right. The significance of this role could not have been obvious at the time, either to Novak (who was in high school) or to its victims, the bewildered patrons of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Novak had recruited a Romanian classmate with a deep voice, and together they’d recorded an audio tour for the exhibition “Tales From the Land of Dragons: 1,000 Years of Chinese Painting.” With the help of friends, they then slipped cassettes containing their tour into the museum’s official audio guides. Explore the September 2023 Issue Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read. View More Art lovers must have wondered about the thick Eastern European accent that greeted them, over the twang of a Chinese string instrument. The Romanian soon became opinionated (“Personally,” …

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All posts tagged: liberal democracy

The Rise of Bronze Age Pervert