American Feudalism
A liberalism that divides humanity into a master class and a slave class deserves an asterisk as “white liberalism.”
Paul Crider
Paul Crider is a husband and father living in the San Francisco Bay Area. He daylights as a semiconductor engineer but otherwise likes to spend his time reading and writing.
Neutralizing MAGA: Applying Frederick Douglass's Fugitive Philosophy
Governments must be a terror to evildoers if they would be praised to those who do well. It will not do for a government with the knife of treason at its throat, to bear the sword in vain. [Lecture on Haiti, 1893] Frederick Douglass lived the life of a fugitive,
Against the Slave Power: the Fugitive Liberalism of Frederick Douglass
Douglass elaborated a political theory from his experiences as a slave, where institutions were directed against people like him. He had to become attuned to the differential character of law as it applied to slaves and other outlaws.
Misappropriating Douglass
Frederick Douglass deserves every bit of the accolades heaped upon him, but he was not a libertarian—and this isn’t a close call.
Democracy Demands Open Borders
Every immigrant is a vote for America. Every deportation is a vote against America.
An Arrow Against All Illiberals
Ian Dunt's How To Be a Liberal is a history of liberalism's conflicted nature and a call to arms for a dynamic, inclusive liberalism.
Frankly Illiberal, Fukuyama
The esteemed political scientist and founding editor of American Purpose, Francis Fukuyama, has taken aim at woke liberalism, which he defines as “[interpreting inequality not as] between broad social classes like bourgeois and proletariat, but rather as the marginalization of narrower identity groups based on race, ethnicity, gender, or sexual
The Liberal Centrist Trap
Identity politics is vital for liberalism precisely because oppression is never neutral, color-blind, or universal.
Liberals of the Anthropocene
Liberals have an environmental problem. Many, if not most, liberals understand that climate change caused by greenhouse gas emissions and associated environmental problems require a concerted political response. Yet as a political movement fundamentally committed to the value of the individual, liberalism hasn’t always had much to say about
Degrowth: Neither Left Nor Right, But Backward
Degrowth. The word itself is shocking. For anyone accustomed to the assumptions of positive economic growth in public policy and the fear and hardship associated with economic contractions—recessions—degrowth evokes self-destructive policy, if not a return to primitivism. Yet degrowth deserves a hearing. I hope to show that degrowth
No, Libertarians Cannot "Reclaim" Liberalism
In 2021 the libertarian representative Justin Amash “reclaim[ed] the word ‘liberal’ for classical liberalism” in a tweet. This wasn’t the first reclamation. George Mason University economist Daniel Klein assembled a “statement of no surrender on the word ‘liberal’” with several hundred signatories, drawing a line in the sand
Liberalism versus Reaction in Ayn Rand
We are as gods and might as well get good at it. – Stewart Brand, Whole Earth Catalog Ayn Rand was a brilliant, inventive thinker whose contributions go largely unsung outside libertarian circles. Rand developed a secular eudaimonist ethics decades before the 20th century revival of virtue ethics ignited. She pioneered