Liberals think of rhetoric as something you cut through to get to the substance. But in politics, rhetoric is the substance.

Politics is the art of persuading people. If you can't persuade them, you can't get anything done.

That doesn't mean you have to lie to them.

Yes, Donald Trump uses rhetoric, like all con artists. But so did Barack Obama, like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, and Cicero did. All saw rhetoric as a tool for moral work.

You can speak poetically and still speak truth — deeper truth, if you do it well.

If liberals want to stop losing, they need to re-learn how.

Here's where to start.

Full transcription and links at dastardlycleverness.com.

Escape from the iron cage of alienation appears to be impossible: You'll never think of a way out, because it's thinking that locks you in.

Unless you discover a different way to think.

This episode: a dive inside the mind of a musician.

Every politician, or anyone trying to persuade anyone else of anything, faces two make-or-break moments: the moment before they say a word, and the moment they do.

We turn to that second moment here.

And to "Don't Mess With Texas." You probably know the slogan, but you may not know that it represents one of the most successful persuasion projects in history. There are many reasons for that, but among the most important is the power of one word.

Full transcript and links at Substack and DastardlyCleverness.com.

The fiendish thing about the iron cage of alienation is that the harder you try to escape, the harder that gets. The more you try to think your way out, the more surely you lock yourself in.

A case in point: The Democratic Party recently paid $20 million to study how to talk to men.

If Democrats are alienated from men, it might just be because they see them as objects of study, as opposed to human beings they actually know.

And it's not just men who are becoming strangers to the Democratic Party. It's black, Latino, Asian, and female voters too. Many are members of the party's former, blue collar base.

But how can Democrats get unalienated? How do you escape your own mind?

Not by thinking the same old way, harder. You do it by learning to think in a different way.

Find the full transcript and links for this episode at DastardlyCleverness.com.

Between 1933 and 1981, there were 24 sessions of Congress. For 22 of those 24, Democrats controlled both the House and the Senate. During the same time there were 12 presidential terms. Eight were served by Democrats.

Now Democrats can lose, twice, to a party led by Donald Trump, whose campaigns have been natural experiments in just how bad a candidate can be and still beat the Democrats.

What happened?

They got caught in what Max Weber called the Iron Cage: stuck in their rationalistic heads, Democrats have become alienated from much of America.

Find the full transcript at dastardlycleverness.com.

Last time, I argued that if liberals still believe in an open society — free, equal, and pluralistic — we must defend reason. It's the shared "meeting space" that makes the open society possible.

But we must also understand that reason alone isn't enough.

If we filter all our experience through rationality, we become separated from it, as if we're not living life, but observing it with scientific instruments.

We become alienated.

It's a condition familiar to anyone who's had a modern, reason-based education, especially in the humanities. It has come to define life within the modern, post-Enlightenment worldview.

And as liberals have become ever more educated, it has come to define them. Thanks to the postwar education boom, more and more of them have gone to college.

Meanwhile they have become alien, and alienating, to more and more voters.

Find the full transcript at DastardlyCleverness.com.

— Spencer

It's a fundamental assumption of liberal democracy that we debate our differences with reason.

But now that assumption looks like a relic of a bygone age — specifically, the Age of Enlightenment, from the late 17th to early 19th centuries.

The Enlightenment produced more scientific progress than all of previous history — the very idea of progress comes to us from the Enlightenment. It had the same impact on the generation of wealth: Compared to economic growth since the Enlightenment, there was almost none during all the millennia before. And the Enlightenment gave us liberalism, the philosophy of freedom and equality on which the United States and all liberal democracies are founded.

But ideologues of the MAGA right are openly hostile to the Enlightenment legacy.

So too are the ideologues of the woke left.

So liberals need to decide if they're going to defend it.

In its commitment to the open exercise of reason, liberalism supports anyone criticizing anything, including liberalism itself.

That can be a severe political weakness. Self-critical, self-doubting liberals are notoriously self-defeating.

So it's up to liberals to make reason a political strength. That involves defending it as a vehicle not just of amoral productivity and technocratic progress, but the inspiring values liberalism owns but too seldom claims.

You can find this episode's transcript, footnotes, and links at DastardlyCleverness.com and at Substack.

Woke theory aims to liberate our minds, but imposes limits on how we think: Many ideas are judged oppressive, and therefore "problematic."

Liberal tolerance is seen as potentially oppressive too, for the same reason.

Will liberals stand up for what they believe in? Should they?

This episode: We begin to see if liberals can take their own side in a quarrel.

Liberals and the woke left see many of the same problems in society, from structural oppression to alienation.

And yet the ideology of the woke left is incompatible with liberalism.

For liberals, it starts with the very idea of wokeness, as an awakening from illusions, or false consciousness. The goal is supposed to be liberation. But it can look more like tyranny.

It boils down to this: If I'm woke and you're not, I see everything more clearly than you do. I have escaped from the prison of oppressive illusions in which you are still trapped. That means that if you disagree with me, I may decide your opinions are simply wrong, or oppressive.

I may try to educate you, but if that fails, I may have to cancel you.

And I can do that in the sincere belief that I'm pursuing liberation, yours and everyone else's. My intentions may be entirely benevolent. But the logic is tyrannical.

Find the full text of this episode at DastardlyCleverness.com and on Substack (where I'm @SpencerCritchley).

— Spencer

As you know if you've been following my posts and podcast episodes lately, I'm writing and releasing the chapters of my new book The Liberal Backbone in real time. When Joan Esposito of WCPT Chicago heard about it, she had an idea: a "radio book club," with me coming on her show to talk about the book as it comes together, chapter by chapter, with her and her listeners.

On December 13, we had the first episode, and I thought it went great — Joan is one of my favorite interviewers. We explored the book's big themes: what liberals actually stand for and how they can stand up for it a lot more effectively, at a time when that's needed more than ever.

I'm sharing the interview here, lightly edited.

As always, you can find the text version at DastardlyCleverness.com and at Substack.

And I hope you'll follow me on Substack — just search there for Spencer Critchley.

— Spencer