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Personally, I'm a little less convinced of the 1st bullet point. In particular, I see many obstacles to a "free society in which everyone gets to pursue a dign
by the_benno 5y ago
Personally, I'm a little less convinced of the 1st bullet point.
In particular, I see many obstacles to a "free society in which everyone gets to pursue a dignified life": healthcare costs, ongoing climate disaster, erosion of labor rights, rising nativism and authoritarianism on the far-right, etc. chief among them. To be as monomaniacally focused on "cancel culture" as Mounk (and many others on the center/right of the American political spectrum) strikes me as misguided at best and disingenuously self-serving at worst.
Persuasion seems to me a massive over-reaction to the minor injustice that is "cancel culture" wrapped in some self-important and grandiose rhetoric.
- kspacewalk2 5y agoListen to the podcast and read some more articles on Persuasion. Mounk is not "monomaniacally focused on cancel culture". He's monomaniacally focused on defending liberalism from populism - there's a lot on his podcast about nativism, authoritarianism and the populist right (the whole damn podcast started as a way to explore how the populism of Trump, Orban etc can be defeated in the realm of ideas). And generally, I find him to be the most prepared interviewer with the most thoughtful questions that I ever encountered in podcasting.
- the_benno 5y agoThanks, I'll dig in some more. Perhaps I'm unfairly projecting onto Mounk and conflating his work with that of other "intellectual dark web" types and their fakakta cancel-culture takes. I haven't followed him closely since the flurry of discussion/debate when the project launched last summer.