My 2024 in Writing

Politics and intellectual distractions

I wrote seven essays at Liberal Currents this year and four posts at The End of Safety, not including another post like this one where I am writing about people’s writings.

Killing some time here on New Year’s Eve, I thought I’d lay them out chronologically.

February 25, I wrote a post here about the pure sociology school developed by the late Donald Black. My attention was drawn to this somewhat obscure group when Joseph Heath applied its framework to provide what to my mind is the only interesting theory of “cancel culture.” I read the book he recommended, as well as another by Black himself, and some papers. I intend to read more, in fact, and intended to make more of what I had read. I spent a fair amount of the year reading about the political science of ethnic conflict and wanted to combine the two into a theory of immigration politics. I did not get that, but I did get this little explainer on Black’s framework at least, as well as another essay I’ll talk about below.

The first half of the year was slow for me writing-wise. As I mentioned, I was reading up on ethnic conflict and it was quite a slog. At the end of May I came out of my cave and wrote about writing; specifically how writing can be actually valuable for advancing the cause of liberalism. I argued that writing can help build movements by articulating shared values, it can provide useful tools of analyses, and it can lay out practical steps for people to take when they are in a position to do so.

In the second half of the year I gave myself over to the dread that we were about to walk this country right off a cliff in November. This implied that rather than writing about what writing can accomplish, I should perhaps be actually trying to accomplish those very things with my writing. On July 19 I wrote as succinct a case against Trump as possible with what I hoped required as few shared assumptions as was feasible. In short, that whether or not he would succeed, it is plain as day that he will try to do some very terrible things.

The Liberal Currents editorial team in particular and the community in general was seriously thinking about what we would need to do in the event of a Trump victory. I wanted to learn more about the concrete specifics of what Civil Rights organizers had done in their day, the tactics and methods that get glossed over in the typical tellings. I turned to Thomas E. Ricks’ Waging a Good War: A Military History of the Civil Rights Movement 1954-1968. In mid-August, I then argued that we can still organize the way that they did, and suggested some ways that we might adapt to the different techno-informational environment we live in now.

For most of the next two months I focused more on publishing good essays in this effort than on writing them myself. My writing was more a matter of personal coping, of seeking intellectual interests that drew me away from an election whose result I could not control beyond my vote and my attempts at influencing the votes of others.

So in September I wrote two posts here. The first argues that canons are overrated, and that instead intellectually curious people ought to engage with living literatures, which are live conversations among subject matter experts. The second attempts to understand machine learning through the lens of the classic empiricist-rationalist divide.

On the first of October, at Liberal Currents, I wrote an analysis of open societies and the forces that work against them as well as those that work in their favor. This began as my attempt to draw on the pure sociology framework and the ethnic conflict literature to shed some light on underappreciated dynamics in open societies, but ended up involving neither. In that way, the piece failed to be what I wanted it to be. I am all right with the result, however; it took thoughts I’ve had in pieces elsewhere and formulated them into something workable. I have not abandoned the ultimate goal of using those literatures for analyzing immigration politics in particular and social openness in general, but Trump’s victory puts it on the backburner.

On October 15th, I made my final plea in writing of any length to vote against Trump. Whereas the July piece made a short, focused argument, the October one tried to simply quote a small sample of Trump’s own recent words and beg the reader to take them seriously.

I began writing a practical plan for political resistance in the event of a Trump victory two weeks before the election. I was glad that I did, as I doubt I could have seriously thought it through after the fact. As it was, I did a bit of copy editing and had it published on November 7th.

On a rather less serious note, I wrote a post here about how to get started on Bluesky, the Twitter alternative. Liberal Currents has been tremendously successful there, but that is not the only reason I recommend it. Do go over and give it a try.

On December 5th, I published my final essay of the year. It drew on a recent paper by the political scientist Xavier Márquez on the ways that regimes become personalist. I believe that the most likely risk over the next four years is that Trump will consolidate his personal power over the federal government. In the essay I discuss what that would look like, using Márquez’s framework.

I have a mostly completed piece that will go up in the New Year arguing that we must remain staunch advocates of democracy even when the largest block of voters chooses very badly. Democratic disenchantment is a luxury we can ill afford.