Disclaimer - I have not read Allen's book. I will try to read it.
Based on your description however - I find these kinds of "more democracy" ideas a little hard to swallow.
Allen's approach (again assuming I'm grokking correctly) seems to require a massive increase in the complexity of government, since we will need to "redesign the rules of governance," including the "rules organizing the microinteractions of the economy" and the "organizational protocols of civil society," in order to "remove or at least lessen the operating forces of domination."
Ignoring for a moment the incredible practical difficulty in implementing such a plan - this would be extremely unpopular if subjected to democratic vote! - this reads to me as an underfit, over-engineered solution to the most salient problems of neoliberalism. Those problems are many, but in a world historical sense, do not include domination. This isn't to say that domination isn't a strong feature of neoliberal life, but simply that contemporary American economic and social arrangements feature less outright domination than perhaps any competing society in human history.
The problem, as both Allen and Deneen point out, is something closer to spiritual control - a sense that one's life has a purpose and that one is able to make progress against that purpose in a sufficiently free manner. Deneen is correct I think in his analysis that extreme political freedom is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve this kind of spiritual control. But he is both morally misguided and practically wrong in proposing a conservative theocracy as the solution. 21st century Westerners are not going back to that arrangement, nor should they.
A more fruitful approach IMO would be to try to find other methods to achieve spiritual control within the existing neoliberal system, which for all its flaws, has actually performed very well across a number of important vectors (poverty reduction, minority rights, geopolitical stability). I like Allen's notion of getting individuals more agency and involvement in their day-to-day life, but I struggle to see "democracy" as the right lens for this. Hierarchy exists in at-scale political systems for good reason; it needs to be balanced with egalitarianism but it is impossible to avoid completely. In other spheres of life however - spheres like family, art, community, that do not function at scale - hierarchy can be more effectively suppressed in favor of egalitarian decision making.
These spheres are precisely the social functions which have been sidelined by neoliberalism, because they don't produce the kind of profit (or material well-being, if we're being more generous) that the system optimizes to. This has been, broadly speaking, a disaster. But I don't see any reason why we need to completely reorder society in order to return focus to these other historically dominant parts of life. If you could even get back to say 1960s levels of community participation, that would be a massive win.
I find it much easier to imagine successful social movements intended to re-emphasize non-scale community, than the total upheaval of our political system in favor of theocracy or some form of deliberate democracy. Apologies of course if I'm misreading Allen - I will try to read her book ASAP.
Great comment. The value of devolving certain things to local — non-scaled — entities may be huge. Interestingly, there’s some (not many but some) decent thinkers among the radical left here in the Mutual Aid world. Most of them are outright socialists but they also reject big-state Soviet style socialism. I find an interesting commonality between them and some of the radical-right (Catholic reactionaries and Dissident Right) in recognizing the need for local institutions and control. There’s something there when widely disparate groups are groping toward the same conclusion.
I don't think that more democratic participation requires increased complexity in government. In fact, my impression is that the technocratic bent of neoliberalism thrives on unnecessary complexity which brings democratic control out of the reach of a lot of people and into the hands of "experts" who make decisions based on metrics like GDP or prices.
A more democratic and participatory society would necessarily entail a simpler government which facilitates engagement from a wider population.
The issue, of course, is that the mechanisms of economic planning are increasingly captured by monopolists in the US and without a reduction in their power and concentration alongside the simplifying and reduction of the government, a few monopolists will dictate the economic and political future of people, again removing their agency. They already do this, but in a way that can be obscured and sometimes limited (sometimes supported) by government bureaucracy.
Putting aside whether or not it would produce better outputs, why would an economy managed by "a lot of people" entail simpler government than an economy managed by a small group of experts?
I''m not supportive of the extreme free-market position, but there is abundant evidence that competition is good for workers and consumers. Competition happens in a more decentralized economy.
I think it's tempting to think "if only the experts gave more weight to metrics like GDP per capita, or measures of happiness, or employment level, etc.", but I think the industry capture of experts makes that point moot. With no concentration of power in the hands of the purported experts, that form of power cannot be captured by moneyed interests. However, as I noted they would have their own forms of power worth reducing at the same time.
Finally, we get to the same problem here of "who decides who the experts are?" Which aligns with the original post. Should a normative concept of "the common good" be imposed on everyone by experts, or should we increase participation so that people have more agency and control over their lives?
"Competition happens in a more decentralized economy." YES!'
Between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s the USA, after it having built up slowly for a couple of decades prior, made a huge leap towards both public sector and private sector centralization. And we switched from a generally diffused economy that was to a significant degree governed by competitive market structures into a concentrated one that is largely governed by private sector mass area central planning.
And capital "G" Globalization is central planning at a planetary scale. But many in the developing world are waking up to this and realizing that the reason things have gove the way they are is because an infentismal share of the human species has them locked into a planetary division of labor that seeks near zero redundancy so by definition almost most humans will be locked out.
The darkly ironic thing is that there would still be lots and lots of trade and competition through market frictions, just as as trade grew and grew through the hundreds of years of high tariffs and was a things for thousands of years before Globalization, there would be far more firms operating in far more paces now if Globalization had not happened, and so the dark ironic thing is that there would be far more foreign trade had Globalization's "free" trade deals never happened
It seems to me that this excellent original post would be enriched with even a few sentences on neoliberalism's multifarious definitions (It's an approach to economic policy! It's a cultural system! It's a political order!) and to neoliberalism's Hayekian and ordo-liberal roots as an attempt to maintain the rule and safety of capital over the rule and interests of the demos.
I've read some of it, she's seems to play a common trick, she's calling for more NGOs and more power to NGOs, while largely affirming most key areas of public policy should be 1) completely locked away from the public and 2) be universally standardized so as theres no policy variation across geographies.
Given that she'd be so empowering NGOS, we'd have less democracy
She wrote a book calling for less democracy with a title suggesting that it was arguing for more
I'm being sincere, where am I wrong, the book largely avoids specificity and judgement s but across the times it does, it just seems to add back up to an affirmation of capital "G" Globalism. Just leads the reader back to where they started
Take this money quote from page 142: "an underlying dialectical argument between nationalist and cosmopolitan concepts of membership". Either for or against, open or closed, good or bad. I know very few people who believes in either of those tings and in fact there are options that I very STRONGLY suspect most would choose that don't fit either. You can absolutely have deep integration while maintaining frictions so as to enable variability in public policy and outlook wise almost no people consider solely just members of a single economic and social units with not spatial fixing and at the same time almost no considers themselves literally alien to the rest of the species nor do they desire to be literally separated from all other economic units.
And look how she appeals to authority with Economists: "methods of globalization have freed goods and capital to flow to where they can be put to their best use... [theres] consensus among economists that nearly all of the benefit to be had from liberalizing trade and capital flows has already accrued."
Very cogent and sophisticated arguments can be made that most all people in most countries of the world are worse off than they otherwise would be had capital "G" Globalism never happened at all. And ironically theres likely less trade than there otherwise would be had it never happened at all.
Her mere affirmation of Economists and her appeals to authority via them affirm my original comment. There is very little room for meaningful policy variability with capital "G" Globalization, and no human being on the entire planet is ever, ever allowed to debate her or rather the authorities she appeals to regarding the validity of their polices. In short, all human beings will have the almost the same exact policies and almost all human beings will never ever ever be allowed to contest them politically. Its Quintessentially anti-democratic
I've read some of it, she's seems to play a common trick, she's calling for more NGOs and more power to NGOs, while largely affirming most key areas of public policy should be 1) completely locked away from the public and 2) be universally standardized so as theres no policy variation across geographies.
Given that she'd be so empowering NGOS, we'd have less democracy
She wrote a book calling for less democracy with a title suggesting that it was arguing for more
What are some actual exampels of Rawlsian inequality, those that benefit the least well off? I am also concerned that in the Rawlsian system, nothing is yours by right, and the concept of earning or deserving things does not exist. It looks like as if everything that exists and what will be produced in the future would be a shared inheritance to be divided as we see fit. You could invent the elixir of living to 500 years tomorrow and society could just decide you don't deserve to get rich on it.
I worry that there is a tension between "pluralism" and "sense of control" which are both taken to be constituent parts of this vision. On the national level, where all factions are contesting power, you would expect pluralism and sense of control to be inversely correlated - the more groups and interests you have, the less any one group feels in control of the outcome. Indeed, one common thread of the current political discourse is that everyone feels that their (self-evidently correct, popular) ideas are being subverted by some other (clearly illegitimate, undemocratic) counter force. Even the much derided and presumptively all-powerful "monopolists" of Silicon Valley are aggrieved! Perhaps there is some anti-democratic Moloch out there subverting everyone's goals equally, but my belief is that we live in a highly contested time and the median voter has strong status quo bias. Under those conditions democracy means most highly engaged partisans will be frustrated.
The way to combine pluralism and sense of control would seem to be federalism and devolution of power. The U.S., fortunately, has that in spades. Unfortunately, politics is getting ever more nationalized, with politically engaged people fixating on the national culture way controversies du jour rather than the local community issues they can most directly control. How many of us American, Substack reading political junkies can name our representatives in the state legislature or enumerate what the most important issues on our local city council's agenda are? Surely involvement with these organizations will better provide the sense of community, purpose, and control aspired to in Allen's book? Not to out myself as a soulless neoliberal, but maybe people have revealed their preferences on this point.
I worry that lying behind the "political economy" arguments of the post-neoliberal left is not the belief that a highly contested democratic sphere will give people meaning in their lives (things are pretty highly contested now and everyone is miserable, people don't engage at the level where they can most expect to impact the system, etc.), but the belief that they can tweak society to generate the political coalition that will carry their ideas against all challengers. From a piece that Dr. Farrell quoted in a recent blog post ("Thinking Like A Matt"):
"The most successful of such firms have proved to be extraordinarily adept in leveraging their loyal consumer base into an active public narrative and political advocacy strategy in order to secure legislative and legal support for the platform business model."
To me this is saying the quite part out loud: the "political economy" problem generated by neo-liberalism is that - contra the views of right thinking people - most people actually like these businesses. Therefore the post-neoliberal left's mission must be to properly regulate societal relations so that the people will naturally align with forces of democracy (i.e. the good left-wing ideas) to reestablish a "sense of control" (i.e. people with the good left-wing ideas are in power). I am skeptical that political views and outcomes are manipulatable in this way.
I have a question... throughout this piece you refer to everyone by their last name after the first mention, except for the woman, whose thesis you seem to support. It was very distracting to me, as a woman myself, that Danielle Allen was referred to as "Danielle" rather than "Allen." Why??? Do you not understand how that diminishes her point of view? And yours as well frankly, as I do not trust you to accord proper respect to all women and their ideas, especially those in academia. Do better.
The answer to your rhetorical question is that it is demonstrably based on an incorrect premise. Two people are referred to by their first names -Danielle and Matt. The very straightforward reason for that is that I am on first name terms with both of them. As I say specifically in the text, Danielle is a friend and co author. I recognize the good intentions behind your comment but suggest that in future you take care to read carefully before accusing people of disrespectful behavior. There may be other explanations.
But your readers are not on a first name basis, or friends with Dr Allen and you are writing about her in context of her expertise. In this situation and out of respect for your colleagues you should refer to everyone in the same form. And honestly, anyone with a PhD should be referred to as "Dr" in every instance, or at least in the first instance, or maybe just ask those you are writing about how they prefer to be named when you write about them. Again, do better.
Certainly, there is an important debate around how women scholars should be referred to in public, and your views are appropriately noted. I believe that the way in which I have talked in this instance is reasonable - but should anyone who I write about have any issues, of course, I'm going to listen to them and revise appropriately.
But I will point out again that you started with an accusation that was both obnoxious and false. You suggested that I single out women in a straightforwardly sexist way, calling them by their first name, and men by their surname, in a way that diminished them. When I pointed out that this was flat out untrue (as evidenced by the post you were condemning), you shifted to the generic demand that all people with doctorates should be presumptively referred to "in every instance, or at least in the first instance" by their title.
That isn't arguing in good faith, or attempting to persuade - it's straightforward goalpost moving. That's not surprising - decades of desultory spats on the Internet have taught me that when people make an embarrassing error, they are more liable to double down on it than admit and retrench. And there is even some good social science on this! I refer you to Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (or: if you really insist, Dr. Hugo Mercier and Dr. Dan Sperber) on how our reasoning faculties evolved not to figure out the world, but to allow us to offer convincing seeming rationales for why we are right, goddamn it. More at https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/in-praise-of-negativity but really, read the book.
All that said, discussions in which one party is unwilling to engage in good faith are annoying and time consuming. So this, for better or worse, is the final word in this argument. I will be deleting any further comments from you.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of democratic control of the economy...but what exactly differentiates a liberalism + "democratic control of the economy" from socialism?
And again, I'm all in favor of socialism but then let's call it that and not pretend that there's some tweaked liberalism that can achieve socialism's intended outcomes with socialism's methods.
Also, "The Democratic bet - in its current formulation - is a small-l liberal bet on a political system in which a wide variety of diverse groups and voices argue it out through democratic means." - given how often the leadership of the Democratic party has put their thumb on the scales in the last ten years (and of course before), a) I'm not convinced that this is a correct formulation of the "Democratic bet", and b) they've shown themselves very happy with less democracy so it's somewhat understandable when right-wing thinkers assume that they would be amenable to their ideas.
Disclaimer - I have not read Allen's book. I will try to read it.
Based on your description however - I find these kinds of "more democracy" ideas a little hard to swallow.
Allen's approach (again assuming I'm grokking correctly) seems to require a massive increase in the complexity of government, since we will need to "redesign the rules of governance," including the "rules organizing the microinteractions of the economy" and the "organizational protocols of civil society," in order to "remove or at least lessen the operating forces of domination."
Ignoring for a moment the incredible practical difficulty in implementing such a plan - this would be extremely unpopular if subjected to democratic vote! - this reads to me as an underfit, over-engineered solution to the most salient problems of neoliberalism. Those problems are many, but in a world historical sense, do not include domination. This isn't to say that domination isn't a strong feature of neoliberal life, but simply that contemporary American economic and social arrangements feature less outright domination than perhaps any competing society in human history.
The problem, as both Allen and Deneen point out, is something closer to spiritual control - a sense that one's life has a purpose and that one is able to make progress against that purpose in a sufficiently free manner. Deneen is correct I think in his analysis that extreme political freedom is neither necessary nor sufficient to achieve this kind of spiritual control. But he is both morally misguided and practically wrong in proposing a conservative theocracy as the solution. 21st century Westerners are not going back to that arrangement, nor should they.
A more fruitful approach IMO would be to try to find other methods to achieve spiritual control within the existing neoliberal system, which for all its flaws, has actually performed very well across a number of important vectors (poverty reduction, minority rights, geopolitical stability). I like Allen's notion of getting individuals more agency and involvement in their day-to-day life, but I struggle to see "democracy" as the right lens for this. Hierarchy exists in at-scale political systems for good reason; it needs to be balanced with egalitarianism but it is impossible to avoid completely. In other spheres of life however - spheres like family, art, community, that do not function at scale - hierarchy can be more effectively suppressed in favor of egalitarian decision making.
These spheres are precisely the social functions which have been sidelined by neoliberalism, because they don't produce the kind of profit (or material well-being, if we're being more generous) that the system optimizes to. This has been, broadly speaking, a disaster. But I don't see any reason why we need to completely reorder society in order to return focus to these other historically dominant parts of life. If you could even get back to say 1960s levels of community participation, that would be a massive win.
I find it much easier to imagine successful social movements intended to re-emphasize non-scale community, than the total upheaval of our political system in favor of theocracy or some form of deliberate democracy. Apologies of course if I'm misreading Allen - I will try to read her book ASAP.
Great comment. The value of devolving certain things to local — non-scaled — entities may be huge. Interestingly, there’s some (not many but some) decent thinkers among the radical left here in the Mutual Aid world. Most of them are outright socialists but they also reject big-state Soviet style socialism. I find an interesting commonality between them and some of the radical-right (Catholic reactionaries and Dissident Right) in recognizing the need for local institutions and control. There’s something there when widely disparate groups are groping toward the same conclusion.
I don't think that more democratic participation requires increased complexity in government. In fact, my impression is that the technocratic bent of neoliberalism thrives on unnecessary complexity which brings democratic control out of the reach of a lot of people and into the hands of "experts" who make decisions based on metrics like GDP or prices.
A more democratic and participatory society would necessarily entail a simpler government which facilitates engagement from a wider population.
The issue, of course, is that the mechanisms of economic planning are increasingly captured by monopolists in the US and without a reduction in their power and concentration alongside the simplifying and reduction of the government, a few monopolists will dictate the economic and political future of people, again removing their agency. They already do this, but in a way that can be obscured and sometimes limited (sometimes supported) by government bureaucracy.
Putting aside whether or not it would produce better outputs, why would an economy managed by "a lot of people" entail simpler government than an economy managed by a small group of experts?
I''m not supportive of the extreme free-market position, but there is abundant evidence that competition is good for workers and consumers. Competition happens in a more decentralized economy.
I think it's tempting to think "if only the experts gave more weight to metrics like GDP per capita, or measures of happiness, or employment level, etc.", but I think the industry capture of experts makes that point moot. With no concentration of power in the hands of the purported experts, that form of power cannot be captured by moneyed interests. However, as I noted they would have their own forms of power worth reducing at the same time.
Finally, we get to the same problem here of "who decides who the experts are?" Which aligns with the original post. Should a normative concept of "the common good" be imposed on everyone by experts, or should we increase participation so that people have more agency and control over their lives?
"Competition happens in a more decentralized economy." YES!'
Between the latter 1970s and mid 1980s the USA, after it having built up slowly for a couple of decades prior, made a huge leap towards both public sector and private sector centralization. And we switched from a generally diffused economy that was to a significant degree governed by competitive market structures into a concentrated one that is largely governed by private sector mass area central planning.
And capital "G" Globalization is central planning at a planetary scale. But many in the developing world are waking up to this and realizing that the reason things have gove the way they are is because an infentismal share of the human species has them locked into a planetary division of labor that seeks near zero redundancy so by definition almost most humans will be locked out.
The darkly ironic thing is that there would still be lots and lots of trade and competition through market frictions, just as as trade grew and grew through the hundreds of years of high tariffs and was a things for thousands of years before Globalization, there would be far more firms operating in far more paces now if Globalization had not happened, and so the dark ironic thing is that there would be far more foreign trade had Globalization's "free" trade deals never happened
It seems to me that this excellent original post would be enriched with even a few sentences on neoliberalism's multifarious definitions (It's an approach to economic policy! It's a cultural system! It's a political order!) and to neoliberalism's Hayekian and ordo-liberal roots as an attempt to maintain the rule and safety of capital over the rule and interests of the demos.
I've read some of it, she's seems to play a common trick, she's calling for more NGOs and more power to NGOs, while largely affirming most key areas of public policy should be 1) completely locked away from the public and 2) be universally standardized so as theres no policy variation across geographies.
Given that she'd be so empowering NGOS, we'd have less democracy
She wrote a book calling for less democracy with a title suggesting that it was arguing for more
I will say no more than that that is a ... remarkable ... reading of the book.
I'm being sincere, where am I wrong, the book largely avoids specificity and judgement s but across the times it does, it just seems to add back up to an affirmation of capital "G" Globalism. Just leads the reader back to where they started
Take this money quote from page 142: "an underlying dialectical argument between nationalist and cosmopolitan concepts of membership". Either for or against, open or closed, good or bad. I know very few people who believes in either of those tings and in fact there are options that I very STRONGLY suspect most would choose that don't fit either. You can absolutely have deep integration while maintaining frictions so as to enable variability in public policy and outlook wise almost no people consider solely just members of a single economic and social units with not spatial fixing and at the same time almost no considers themselves literally alien to the rest of the species nor do they desire to be literally separated from all other economic units.
And look how she appeals to authority with Economists: "methods of globalization have freed goods and capital to flow to where they can be put to their best use... [theres] consensus among economists that nearly all of the benefit to be had from liberalizing trade and capital flows has already accrued."
Very cogent and sophisticated arguments can be made that most all people in most countries of the world are worse off than they otherwise would be had capital "G" Globalism never happened at all. And ironically theres likely less trade than there otherwise would be had it never happened at all.
Her mere affirmation of Economists and her appeals to authority via them affirm my original comment. There is very little room for meaningful policy variability with capital "G" Globalization, and no human being on the entire planet is ever, ever allowed to debate her or rather the authorities she appeals to regarding the validity of their polices. In short, all human beings will have the almost the same exact policies and almost all human beings will never ever ever be allowed to contest them politically. Its Quintessentially anti-democratic
I've read some of it, she's seems to play a common trick, she's calling for more NGOs and more power to NGOs, while largely affirming most key areas of public policy should be 1) completely locked away from the public and 2) be universally standardized so as theres no policy variation across geographies.
Given that she'd be so empowering NGOS, we'd have less democracy
She wrote a book calling for less democracy with a title suggesting that it was arguing for more
What are some actual exampels of Rawlsian inequality, those that benefit the least well off? I am also concerned that in the Rawlsian system, nothing is yours by right, and the concept of earning or deserving things does not exist. It looks like as if everything that exists and what will be produced in the future would be a shared inheritance to be divided as we see fit. You could invent the elixir of living to 500 years tomorrow and society could just decide you don't deserve to get rich on it.
Hi Henry, first time long time here - how close do you think this comes to the Pettit et al school of 'civic republican' theory?
Very close indeed - Danielle makes a lot of use of his arguments about domination.
I worry that there is a tension between "pluralism" and "sense of control" which are both taken to be constituent parts of this vision. On the national level, where all factions are contesting power, you would expect pluralism and sense of control to be inversely correlated - the more groups and interests you have, the less any one group feels in control of the outcome. Indeed, one common thread of the current political discourse is that everyone feels that their (self-evidently correct, popular) ideas are being subverted by some other (clearly illegitimate, undemocratic) counter force. Even the much derided and presumptively all-powerful "monopolists" of Silicon Valley are aggrieved! Perhaps there is some anti-democratic Moloch out there subverting everyone's goals equally, but my belief is that we live in a highly contested time and the median voter has strong status quo bias. Under those conditions democracy means most highly engaged partisans will be frustrated.
The way to combine pluralism and sense of control would seem to be federalism and devolution of power. The U.S., fortunately, has that in spades. Unfortunately, politics is getting ever more nationalized, with politically engaged people fixating on the national culture way controversies du jour rather than the local community issues they can most directly control. How many of us American, Substack reading political junkies can name our representatives in the state legislature or enumerate what the most important issues on our local city council's agenda are? Surely involvement with these organizations will better provide the sense of community, purpose, and control aspired to in Allen's book? Not to out myself as a soulless neoliberal, but maybe people have revealed their preferences on this point.
I worry that lying behind the "political economy" arguments of the post-neoliberal left is not the belief that a highly contested democratic sphere will give people meaning in their lives (things are pretty highly contested now and everyone is miserable, people don't engage at the level where they can most expect to impact the system, etc.), but the belief that they can tweak society to generate the political coalition that will carry their ideas against all challengers. From a piece that Dr. Farrell quoted in a recent blog post ("Thinking Like A Matt"):
"The most successful of such firms have proved to be extraordinarily adept in leveraging their loyal consumer base into an active public narrative and political advocacy strategy in order to secure legislative and legal support for the platform business model."
To me this is saying the quite part out loud: the "political economy" problem generated by neo-liberalism is that - contra the views of right thinking people - most people actually like these businesses. Therefore the post-neoliberal left's mission must be to properly regulate societal relations so that the people will naturally align with forces of democracy (i.e. the good left-wing ideas) to reestablish a "sense of control" (i.e. people with the good left-wing ideas are in power). I am skeptical that political views and outcomes are manipulatable in this way.
I have a question... throughout this piece you refer to everyone by their last name after the first mention, except for the woman, whose thesis you seem to support. It was very distracting to me, as a woman myself, that Danielle Allen was referred to as "Danielle" rather than "Allen." Why??? Do you not understand how that diminishes her point of view? And yours as well frankly, as I do not trust you to accord proper respect to all women and their ideas, especially those in academia. Do better.
The answer to your rhetorical question is that it is demonstrably based on an incorrect premise. Two people are referred to by their first names -Danielle and Matt. The very straightforward reason for that is that I am on first name terms with both of them. As I say specifically in the text, Danielle is a friend and co author. I recognize the good intentions behind your comment but suggest that in future you take care to read carefully before accusing people of disrespectful behavior. There may be other explanations.
But your readers are not on a first name basis, or friends with Dr Allen and you are writing about her in context of her expertise. In this situation and out of respect for your colleagues you should refer to everyone in the same form. And honestly, anyone with a PhD should be referred to as "Dr" in every instance, or at least in the first instance, or maybe just ask those you are writing about how they prefer to be named when you write about them. Again, do better.
Certainly, there is an important debate around how women scholars should be referred to in public, and your views are appropriately noted. I believe that the way in which I have talked in this instance is reasonable - but should anyone who I write about have any issues, of course, I'm going to listen to them and revise appropriately.
But I will point out again that you started with an accusation that was both obnoxious and false. You suggested that I single out women in a straightforwardly sexist way, calling them by their first name, and men by their surname, in a way that diminished them. When I pointed out that this was flat out untrue (as evidenced by the post you were condemning), you shifted to the generic demand that all people with doctorates should be presumptively referred to "in every instance, or at least in the first instance" by their title.
That isn't arguing in good faith, or attempting to persuade - it's straightforward goalpost moving. That's not surprising - decades of desultory spats on the Internet have taught me that when people make an embarrassing error, they are more liable to double down on it than admit and retrench. And there is even some good social science on this! I refer you to Hugo Mercier and Dan Sperber (or: if you really insist, Dr. Hugo Mercier and Dr. Dan Sperber) on how our reasoning faculties evolved not to figure out the world, but to allow us to offer convincing seeming rationales for why we are right, goddamn it. More at https://www.programmablemutter.com/p/in-praise-of-negativity but really, read the book.
All that said, discussions in which one party is unwilling to engage in good faith are annoying and time consuming. So this, for better or worse, is the final word in this argument. I will be deleting any further comments from you.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of democratic control of the economy...but what exactly differentiates a liberalism + "democratic control of the economy" from socialism?
And again, I'm all in favor of socialism but then let's call it that and not pretend that there's some tweaked liberalism that can achieve socialism's intended outcomes with socialism's methods.
Also, "The Democratic bet - in its current formulation - is a small-l liberal bet on a political system in which a wide variety of diverse groups and voices argue it out through democratic means." - given how often the leadership of the Democratic party has put their thumb on the scales in the last ten years (and of course before), a) I'm not convinced that this is a correct formulation of the "Democratic bet", and b) they've shown themselves very happy with less democracy so it's somewhat understandable when right-wing thinkers assume that they would be amenable to their ideas.