Shaming, Self-improvement, and Political Action

By Wade Lee Hudson

In “The Shaming-Industrial Complex, Becca Rothfeld describes the problem: Absent structural change, self-improvement will be limited. A large network of supportive small teams whose members are aware of this problem could be one solution. In itself, this network could constitute structural reform, which Rothfeld seeks. It could also nurture a strong sense of community whose members, given their awareness of the Shaming-Industrial Complex, would logically pursue structural reform in other social sectors and, ideally, cultivate holistic and systemic transformation.

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systemicWade Lee HudsonPersonal, social, culturalComment
The Enemies of Liberalism Are Showing Us What It Really Means

“After three decades of dominance, liberalism is losing its hold on Western minds,” Matthew Rose writes in his powerful new book, “A World After Liberalism.”

Rose does not mean liberalism in the way we typically use the word. This is not about supporting universal health care or disagreeing with Justice Samuel Alito. Rose means liberalism as in the shared assumptions of the West: a belief in human dignity, universal rights, individual flourishing and the consent of the governed.

That liberalism has been battered by financial crises, the climate crisis, checkered pandemic responses, right-wing populists and a rising China. It seems exhausted, ground down, defined by the contradictions and broken promises that follow victory rather than the creativity and aspiration that attend struggle.

At least, it did.

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politicalWade Lee Hudsonforeign policyComment
Where Does American Democracy Go From Here?

Mason: The word “identity” keeps coming up, and this is a really crucial part of it. And remember that we have research about intergroup conflict, right? Don’t look at this as, like, a logical disagreement situation. We’re not disagreeing on what kind of tax structure we should have. We’re not just disagreeing about the role of the federal government in American society. What we’re disagreeing about is increasingly the basic status differences between groups of people that have existed in America for a very long time. One of the things that Nathan Kalmoe and I found in our forthcoming book is that if you look at Democrats and Republicans who really, really hate each other and call each other evil and say the other party is a threat to the United States, the best predictor of that is how they think about the traditional social hierarchy.

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politicalWade Lee HudsondemocracyComment
American "Progress" and Putin's Mysticism

Transcript: Ezra Klein Interviews Timothy Snyder

…So by the politics of inevitability, I mean the notion that sometimes goes under the heading of progress. I mean the idea that some kind of outside force is going to guarantee that the things that we desire and wish for are actually going to come about. And if that seems abstract, then what I mean in particular with reference to the United States after the end of communism in 1989 is the notion that there are no alternatives left in the world.

To quote Margaret Thatcher or to quote Frances Fukuyama, history is over. And it’s inevitable that a larger force, namely capitalism, is going to bring about the thing that we desire, namely, democracy and freedom. And that idea was in the air. That idea shaped everything else. And I think that idea has a lot to do with the crisis of democracy and freedom that we’re in right now.

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politicalWade Lee HudsonHistory, foreign policy, rationalityComment
Ezra Klein Interviews Fareed Zakaria

Transcript: March 4, 2022

Fareed Zakaria Has a Better Way to Handle Russia — and China

The case for thinking strategically, not ideologically, about great power conflict.

I’m Ezra Klein, and this is “The Ezra Klein Show.”

It is eerie knowing that you have lived through the end of an era and that you’re now witnessing the birth of another. For most of my life, foreign policy has not been dominated by great power conflict. And that is a defining characteristic of that period. There have been crises. There have been wars. There have been horrors. But America was too strong and other countries too weak to really worry about world wars or even cold wars, to see the world as this great power chessboard.

That’s changed….

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politicalWade Lee Hudsonforeign policy, cooperation, dominationComment
Vladimir Putin’s Clash of Civilizations

“…In this vision the future is neither liberal world-empire nor a renewed Cold War between competing universalisms. Rather it’s a world divided into some version of what Bruno Maçães has called “civilization-states,” culturally-cohesive great powers that aspire, not to world domination, but to become universes unto themselves — each, perhaps, under its own nuclear umbrella.

This idea, redolent of Samuel P. Huntington’s arguments in “The Clash of Civilizations” a generation ago, clearly influences many of the world’s rising powers — from the Hindutva ideology of India’s Narendra Modi to the turn against cultural exchange and Western influence in Xi Jinping’s China. Maçães himself hopes a version of civilizationism will reanimate Europe,…” (read more)

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CulturalWade Lee Hudsonforeign policyComment
Hannah Arendt on Violence and Politics

By Wade Lee Hudson

As political violence permeated the United States and spread across the globe, in 1969 the influential political philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote On Violence. This small, passionate book analyzed the nature and sources of violence, offered some prophetic speculations, and challenged many widespread assumptions — including some that I had embraced but now reject. This re-evaluation will lead me to rewrite some of the content on this site.

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SystemicWade Lee Hudsonnonviolence, political, personal, cultural Comments
Self-Reform and Political Action

Political organizations don’t encourage members to engage in self-reform to undo divisive social conditioning, including the desire to dominate and the willingness to submit. And personal- and spiritual-reform organizations don’t nurture political action to help change oppressive public policies. If these two communities made simple shifts in their approach, they could come together and build an independent social movement powerful enough to persuade Washington to respect the will of the people, transform social structures throughout society, and support compassionate personal growth.

The first step is to agree on a shared worldview rooted in compassion.

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systemicWade Lee Hudsoncultural, social, personal, economic, environmental, politicalComment
The Growing Democracy Project

By Michael Johnson

The Growing Democracy Project (GDP) is a cultural and political program for developing a legion of everyday citizens who can generate enough collective power to make democracy the dominant political force in our country.

The strategy is to produce abundant, persistent, and effective citizen action to solve shared problems at all levels of our society.

The means is the continuous development of participants’ “habits of the heart” and skillful democratic means.

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systemicWade Lee Hudsonpersonal, social, cultural, politicalComment