Some Things I Wrote in 2022

Annual review

2022 was a pretty good year of writing for me, I have to say. Part of it, of course, is that it was the first full year of writing for The End of Safety; I had not written in anything approaching this quantity in years. But quantity is not quality, and there are some things I have written this year I’m genuinely proud of.

Liberal Currents

Liberal Currents turned five this year. I can hardly believe it’s been that long. The main purpose of Liberal Currents is of course, not to be a home for my writing, but to be the center of gravity in a community of liberals. I’m very proud of what we’ve accomplished to that end, which, if you are a paid subscriber or support us through Patreon, you’ll have heard about in some detail.

I do write there as well, however, and in fact reserve most of my big essays for it. The writing I am the proudest of this year therefore sits over there.

• Conserving Liberal Democracy replies to the right-libertarian Arnold Kling, whose essay conceded the necessity of the “regulatory state,” by arguing instead for its inevitability.

• Rationalism, Pluralism, and Fear in the Speech Debate is hopefully the last word I will have on this particular topic, but I am pleased with how it came out. The title is a blending of two books by Jacob Levy, whose work was practically the inspiration for starting Liberal Currents in the first place and still holds substantial real estate in my way of thinking.

• I wrote about rule of law in two directions; first, talking about the relative unimportance of written law, and second, talking about the nature of “legal politics.”

• A Realist Defense of Legislative Supremacy finally articulated a view I have only touched on briefly before, that modern democracy should be understood in terms of broad representation of the many interests and groups of society by professional politicians who negotiate on their behalf. The outcome is not “the will of the people” or the consequence of intellectual deliberation, but the result of pragmatic work done to build a governing coalition, preferably one that will not encourage those left out of the coalition to take extra-institutional actions in retaliation.

• The Case Against Dictatorship finishes the argument that the previous piece began, but in the negative. Where that one argues that representative democracy is the most practical arrangement, this one argues that its rivals are impractical and prone to dysfunction.

Ever since writing a first tentative essay about the nature of liberal democracy at the beginning of last year, I have made fleshing this out my main focus. The reason? Because I’d like to write a book about it! And now, with everything I have written—including no small amount of material left on the cutting room floor because they didn’t make sense in the particular essays whose draft they had been a part of—I’m quite confident I can do just that. I’ve already drafted the first chapter and am nearly done drafting the second, which is a revised and expanded version of the essay on representative democracy above.

I’ve had ambitions of writing a book before, which went nowhere, but I’m quite confident in this one. After all, I am not starting from scratch here; far from it. I am pretty sure that I will have a complete draft in 2023; in fact, I hope to have one within a matter of a few months, not a year. We will soon learn if my confidence was misplaced.

The End of Safety

Of course most of what I wrote by far was right here! Here are some highlights:

• Upyr, the only piece of fiction I wrote this year. A horror inspired by Timothy Snyder’s discussion of Stalin’s famine in Bloodlands.

• Gifts on a subtle art which many of us have practiced this past month.

• The Outdoor Birthdays of Brooklyn on a phenomena that has fascinated me as a suburban Virginia boy who is raising kids in Brooklyn.

• The Trip on my first flight since the pandemic began, and the uncertainty and anxiety it entailed.

• Painted Red is another horror story, but sadly a nonfiction one.

• The Powerless Rich looks at the billionaires like Marc Andreessen or Peter Thiel who both wield enormous influence and also try to play the victim, to act as though money is not power. Social Power follows up by talking a bit about just what it actually means to have or not have power.

• Seizing Independence, American Sacraments, and Prototypes of Liberty are three pieces in a similar vein. I still find much to admire in the history of the American founders and in the early pioneers of liberal democracy in general. I do not have much patience for, as Baldwin put it, “the collection of myths” and hagiography that usually passes for analysis of these figures, however. These three pieces develop a bit of my perspective in two distinct directions; I suspect this will eventually turn into something larger.

• I think a lot about written constitutions and what they do, as well as what they are supposed to do. The Constitution is Not a Social Contract and Constitutions Aren’t Wish Lists both argue about what constitution are not. The latter was a response to the failure of the proposed Chilean constitution, which had been packed chock full of substantive policy that would not have passed in the legislature. In a rather self-indulgent exercise, I also wrote A Model Constitution. I found it clarifying and intend to do it again for the US state-level.

• Democracy is Unpredictable was inspired by the midterm results, which no one saw coming and which reminded me of how important it is that elections keep everyone on their toes.

• Freedom of Speech is a Hedge on the limits but importance of a key liberty.

2022 was a good year of writing, but I can’t say I’ll miss it. It was also a year of perpetual sickness in my household; we had COVID in September, an even worse case of the flu in November just in time for Thanksgiving, and my oldest and I had strep in December, thankfully managing to recover before Christmas. Here’s hoping for a happier and healthier 2023.

Happy New Year, all. Thank you for subscribing and reading.