Paul Crider

@paulcrider.liberalcurrents.com

10735 Followers 2212 Following

Liberal in the Smith-Douglass-Mill-Anderson vein. Writer and editor for Liberal Currents. https://bsky.app/profile/liberalcurrents.com

Social media post from The UnPopulist. It is a quote from Ezra Klein, who says "There's very little blood in modern liberalism. There's a lot of what we don't want. And not enough of a vision that people can feel pulsing in the things we say."
Graphic showing a collage of movie posters with the text superimposed: “DESCRIBE YOUR FAVORITE MOVIE AS BORING AS POSSIBLE”
Selection from the Marginal Revolution blog, titled "Andrew Hall is on a roll" He is one of the new(ish) thinkers on the rise, here is his latest piece. Excerpt: For most of the past decade, anti-billionaire language was a niche product. Democratic emails invoked billionaires in the mid-single digits through 2017 and 2018, spiked briefly to around 14 percent during the Warren and Sanders primary surge in 2019, and then settled back down—through the entire Biden presidency, the billionaire appeared in roughly one of every twenty to twenty-five Democratic fundraising emails, barely more than in Republican ones. Then came January 2025. In the weeks after an inauguration that seated tech CEOs in the front row and the dizzying drama of Elon Musk’s ill-fated DOGE experiment, billionaire mentions in Democratic emails quadrupled, peaking above 20 percent of all emails sent and holding around 15 percent ever since. Anti-billionaire fundraising tactics are now a mainstay of Democratic messaging. Yes, billionaire derangement syndrome is now a thing. As a side note, I was told that Andrew is the son of the great economist Robert E. Hall of Stanford.
Profile clip of Bernie Porn, President of polling firm EPIC MRA.
In a wide-ranging response to my questions, Edmund Fawcett, the author of “Liberalism: The Life of an Idea,” argued that liberals could recover if they became, as once, inclusive, democratic. If, that is, they made their promises for everyone, not just a few. They’d also need to relearn how to talk of their principles as if they mattered and we should care about them. That brings in D.S.A. Name aside, they’re what for years we called progressives or social democrats. They want liberal promises for everyone. They want revenue or debt to spend on improving well-being and public services. To a left liberal (e.g., me), that’s appealing. The liberal centrism of Zakaria and Wooldridge, Fawcett wrote, feels ambiguous to me. Is it a meritocratic fight against cosseted advantage? Or a democratic fight to extend fairer shares to all? It sounds more the first. In which case, yes, it does leave ground to the left for D.S.A. to win. The D.S.A., Fawcett added, “might replace the Democratic Party (unlikely given first-past-the-post, bane of insurgents). Or its zeal and confidence might nudge Democrats leftward. I’d like to see that, but I’m not betting my pension on it.”
Text discussing Pope Leo calling on the US to welcome immigrants with "compassion and generosity."
By the time Zeidler was elected to his first term as mayor in 1948, the Socialist Party’s influence in Milwaukee was barely an echo of what it had been in the time of Seidel or the early decades of Hoan’s mayoral administration. As historian Tula A. Connell has pointed out, the organization that laid the foundation for Zeidler’s first election was not the Socialist Party but the Municipal Enterprise Committee (later the Public Enterprise Committee), a grassroots coalition of activists who were united not by party membership but by common aspirations. Zeidler continued to be active as a leader in party affairs at both the local and national levels. But in his role as a mayor, he identified as a liberal—a term that, in his usage, included democratic socialists and like-minded people of any party affiliation. Party discipline was an important element of Socialist success in the early twentieth century, when the famed “bundle brigade” canvassed for votes in working-class neighborhoods. But as historian S. Ani Mukherji has pointed out, efforts to maintain discipline were less effective in the Popular Front era.
I’ll put it plainly: Democrats need to grow a backbone, and we cannot be afraid to have a conversation about systemic reforms to restore voting rights. I have been saying that it is time for a no-bad-ideas brainstorm. Because the threats to voting rights are structural, our solutions must be as well. Here are some of the things that must be on the table to ensure power stays with the people: Expanding the Supreme Court beyond its 9 members Reforming or eliminating the Electoral College Using the tools available to the Senate Judiciary Committee to implement real consequences for judicial nominees who lie Enforceable ethics reform for the members of the Supreme Court Enacting statehood for Washington, DC and Puerto Rico
Book cover for Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821 - 1853, by Charles A. Hale. Brown book with red fleur de lis designs.
I live in New York, a city of eight million people who get along—more or less, most of the time—without killing each other. I go outside every day, and I see the old Italian men sitting outside on the sidewalk drinking beer, and the little girls in their hijabs and Paw Patrol backpacks, and the plumbers setting off strings of firecrackers in the street on a Friday afternoon because they’re bored, and the Hasidic families riding Surrey bikes or Segways down by the waterfront, and the white guy eagerly confirming the MTA conductor is Bengali so he can proudly trot out his five words of Urdu, and the Puerto Rican family who run the breakfast shop I go to most mornings with the discord signup sheet for queer meetups on the counter, and the Yemeni bodega with the hand-written cardboard ‘Happy Rosh Hashanah!’ sign in the door.
Social media pic blurb with two female Star Wars actors (Rosario Dawson and Daisy Ridley, but neither dressed as their respective Star Wars roles). It reads: BREAKING NEWS LUCASFILM'S UPCOMING STAR WARS PROJECTS WILL BE DOMINATED BY FEMALE LEADS
The DSA of today reflects this internally, even if many of its members don’t explicitly acknowledge it. Ideologically it represents a fusion of socialist and liberal ideas: the belief in the permanence of politics, not a pursuit of its abolition; the belief in pluralism as a good in itself; the recognition that no revolution abolishes disagreement and the need for civil mediation of differences.
That’s why I come back to my point, which is that our proposed principle has to be to allow the number of people in that you can successfully absorb. And that absorption means political absorption, so that there isn’t a backlash, as well as material absorption, so that they aren’t out on the street all the time looking for scraps, and they can be gainfully employed and given the social services that they deserve. And over time, I think you’ll have a much more stable, and probably much more generous immigration regime this way.
And then I think that we need to actually depoliticize immigration, because it’s not really the thing that causes all of these other problems that make people want to vote for Trump, right? People voted for Trump because he promised them all sorts of economic goods, right? That the world was going to be better. And people are turning on him now because he hasn’t delivered on those things. And in the context of that, he used immigration as a scapegoat to say, “This is the reason why you can’t have all these nice things, and I’m going to deport all these people and then things will be great.” And so what immigration has been useful for politically is as this sort of political cudgel. And when we engage in that game, the Left will always lose because of nationalism, and because things really do suck. And if you’re talking about immigration, it’s easy to point at immigrants and scapegoat them, right?
I think the other part, this thing that you said about nationalism, is something I’m thinking about a lot and trying to understand. I think that you may be right, but also that it’s the responsibility of the Left to change it. And not in terms of yelling at people and saying “You’re racist” and that kind of thing, but it makes me think about the Mamdani campaign. I think it was effective in the sense that it didn’t say migration is a problem, even though all those people were bused into the city and exacerbated housing problems, right? He didn’t say it was a problem. He was like, “Immigration is great. I support immigrants. Immigrants have rights,” all that stuff. But the core of the campaign was about material issues, something else, right? And I think that the Left out of power should focus on immigrants’ rights.
Vivek Chibber It seems to me a pretty clear-cut principle, which is you should allow only as many immigrants in as your infrastructure and your political culture can absorb. Now, that’s not giving any numbers. That’s not giving any clear laws, but it’s a principle. So in certain countries, that’ll mean a fairly restrictive immigration policy.
All that said, I think it’s important to acknowledge the basic support for deportation remains in place. What people are objecting to is the brutality of it and the militarization of it, and they don’t like these federal troops coming into their cities and overturning the local cops, and overturning the local machine of law and order. But it would be a mistake to think that there is now a movement against the deportation regime per se. It’s important for the Left to recognize this: Across all the different sectors of the population, the basic idea that if people are here illegally, if they’re here clandestinely, then they shouldn’t be allowed to stay, or that there has to be some kind of tightening of the sluices through which they’re coming in. I think that still remains in place.
Vivek Chibber This was the context in which you see Trump running for his second presidency. There was a palpable sense of a national immigration crisis. And it was obviously not concocted out of thin air. Biden and Kamala Harris refused to deal with it or acknowledge it. And Trump made tremendous political capital out of this. If you compare his two presidential campaigns, in the first one, he’s running as much more of a populist and outsider, wanting to shake the halls of power. And in the second one, the populism is basically gone. And it’s full-frontal anti-immigration and incredibly racist. And then, of course, the issue of the wars, of wanting to end the forever wars. But he comes into office essentially on an anti-immigrant platform. And that is largely because of the way in which, as Suzy is saying, Biden handled immigration during his presidency.
Suzy Lee Well, I think the first thing is that the Biden administration intensified the crisis through the way that it highlighted migration. I think they made political hay out of undoing the Trump era migration policies, which were very unpopular. But in so doing and making immigration this big-ticket item, it means that it told the rest of the world, “We’re opening our borders. You’re welcome to come.”
Image of Jonathan Haidt next to a slide titled "Both Sides Deny 'Inconvenient Truths'" Left: IQ deniers, Heritability deniers, Sex difference deniers, Evolution deniers, Stereotype accuracy deniers Right: Young-earthers, Evolution deniers, War crimes deniers, climate change deniers
Political quiz with all four sliders at 50/50. Resule is Georgia Meloni.
Political quiz result showing closest match is Zohran Mamdani. 77% Woke 50/50 Techbro Neo-Luddite 52% Hopepilled 91% Davos
Poll question: I support the death penalty. Response: Strongly disagree.
Poll question: The primary cause of crime is poverty and deprivation. Response: Disagree
Poll question: I think 'alternative' girls are ... Response: Sexy.
Poll question: How many genders are there? Response: At least three. Don't play games with me, kid.
Poll question: I support building more nuclear energy plants. Response is Agree.
Wordle with four guesses: reins, later, power, queer (which was the answer).
Black and white picture of Alan Greenspan and Ayn Rand in the White House with Gerald and Mrs Ford. Not sure who the guy on the right is.
There are illiberal ideas on the left. You will find the occasional glazing of communist regimes among DSA members, or even post-communist reactionary regimes like Russia. Rhetoric about revolution and seizing the means of production aren’t uncommon, and markets as such are sometimes derided even apart from the more normatively laden term, capitalism. Some factions of the DSA oppose electoral politics altogether, or favor a Green style spoiler approach. If such factions come to dominate the DSA, they will ruin all good will from liberals. Degrowth is a program with illiberal implications that has gained traction in recent years.
Screen capture of CNN story showing DSA at +17 among Dems and Congressional Dems at only +4.
What the left believes The Economist was too quick to attack “Gen-Z socialism” (June 6th). Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Zohran Mamdani aren’t cold war socialists committed to central planning, vanguardism and foreign dictatorships. They are democratic pragmatists who support civil and political liberties, good governance and expanded public services. This is the stuff of “sewer socialism”, not Stalinism. Today’s socialists want to abolish the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency because they believe in freedom of movement, and because masked thugs are kidnapping people off the streets. The push to tax billionaires comes not from a zero-sum mentality, but from witnessing massive wealth weaponised against liberal democracy itself. Like its namesake, a Green New Deal seeks to save capitalism from capitalists, and cool the planet too. Universal health care is no more a threat to American liberalism than it was to the British kind. Finally, The Economist itself has warned of the risks apartheid poses to democratic legitimacy. The horrors in Gaza have just awakened liberals to this danger. These can all be defended on liberal grounds. There are illiberal ideas on the left, but it is the liberal ideas that are attracting followers. We should ask ourselves why we so often find that socialists express our values better than our fellow liberals. Paul Crider Associate editor Liberal Currents San Francisco
Liberal Currents Mentioned meme, with various images, books, and historical liberals portrayed.
I'm pretty like a car crash Ugly as a lullaby You really wanna try it Experiment on me Experiment on me Experiment on me Experiment on me Lock up your sons, make way for the daughters You be the lamb, and we'll be the slaughter You've burned the witches, now you're defenseless Who needs a Y this many X's? Lock up your sons, make way for the daughters You be the lamb, and we'll be the slaughter You've burned the witches, now you're defenseless Who needs a Y this many X's? Lock up your sons, make way for the daughters You be the lamb, and we'll be the slaughter You've burned the witches, now you're defenseless Who needs a Y this many X's? Who needs a Y this many X's? Who needs a Y this many X's? Who needs a Y this many X's? Who needs a Y this many X's?
Four panel comic of a normal person doing normal things, while a man in a maga hat reacts by becoming a skinhead nazi.
Tweet from Bari Weiss that reads "I couldn't be happier to welcome the singular @DouglasKMurray to @TheFP as a weekly columnist."
But the underlying point is that materialism was Marx’s big con. His vision was not fundamentally about scientific central planning run by technocratic managers. It wasn’t about wealth or production or technological efficiency. It was a spiritual vision about rejecting modern specialization and the division of labor for a life of leisure in which the masses could reconnect with an authentic way of living not mediated by the institutions of modern life. Much the same thing applies to his fantasy about how we’re going to have a “dictatorship of the proletariat” while simultaneously the state “withers away.” The unifying thread between these seemingly opposite statements is that we would rid ourselves of all mediating institutions, so the proletariat would dictate, but they would somehow do it directly, without the need for representative government or even a bureaucracy.
It’s worth noting the extent to which this makes Marx a critic of the very process of technological progress and innovation. Again, from Capital. All methods of raising the social productiveness of labor are brought about at the cost of the individual laborer…; they mutilate the laborer into a fragment of a man, degrade him to the level of an appendage of a machine, destroy any remnant of attraction in his work and turn it into a hated toil; they estrange him from the intellectual potentialities of the labor process in the same degree as science is incorporated in it as an independent power.
The thing to note about this is that the exploitation that victimizes the worker is not that he gets paid too little for his labor. To the contrary: It is the very fact of being paid for labor at all, and the damage this supposedly inflicts is not material but is “the deformation of his consciousness.” Here is how Kołakowski describes it. The fact that labor-power is a commodity means that man functions as a thing, that his personal qualities and abilities are bought and sold like any other commodity; his brains and muscle, his physical energy and creative powers are reduced to a state in which only their exchange value counts for anything. This reification, the turning of a personality into a thing, is the measure of human degradation under capitalism. And here is Marx in Capital. [L]abor is the worker’s own life-activity, the manifestation of his own life. And this life-activity he sells to another person in order to secure the necessary means of subsistence. Thus his life-activity is for him only a means to enable him to exist.
Anakin and Padme meme. A: Rape is about power and domination, not sex. P: Yeah, rape is terrible. P: Rape is bad, right?
Iconic scene from Inglourious Basterds, where the English (or maybe American?) spy reveals himself by holding up the wrong three fingers in asking for three glasses.
Old tweet from Amy Thunderjam, user @IfSheBeWorthy, that reads "I just called Beta Ray Bill 'BoJack Norseman' so my work is done for the day."
If the border is everywhere, then what exactly is the border? It is best understood not as a fixed line, but as an ordering regime of human immobility and labor discipline thickening across space and time to reproduce a global colonial order and stabilize racial capitalism. Abolishing ICE, then, necessitates abolishing the border wherever it proliferates, and dismantling the conditions spawning both the global crisis of displacement and a global empire of borders.
A noisy image of books, figures, and images associated with Liberal Currents, including books by Charles W Mills, Jacob T Levy, and Elizabeth Anderson, and images of Richard Rorty, Frederick Douglass, and Adam Smith. And cartoons of some kind of tea-sipping trans anime girl and the blank-mentioned girl. Also features the Liberal Currents logo.
Bluesky profile page for @cnliberalism.org. It reveals that I am blocked.
Bearded white guy wearing a dark blue shirt thay reads "LIBERAL CURRENTS, PRO-TRANS, PRO-TRANSIT"
Keanu Reeves in a suit and tie walking towards the camera holding a cross gun. He's walking through a red-lit hellscape. A heavenly backlit angel looms behind him.
Taxes are not a punishment. They’re the fuel in the engine of the republic, a positive affirmation of and direct investment in our values, and a system of incentives and disincentives to shape our collective vision of the good. They pay for education, infrastructure, foundational research, national defense, healthcare, public services, and more. Taxes are how we build the world for each other.
Why Marxists Act Woke too, and It’s Not New Some people who adopt Marxism today do so as a brand identity to signal they are more radical than the mainstream democratic socialist camp. They talk a radical game and meander about principles, but when it comes down to election night, they usually rally behind a liberal party like the Democrats. They do so in the name of strategically resisting the supposed threat of “fascism” that never comes, while contributing to the very woke discourses that fuel popular right-wing reaction. They double down on the most unpopular woke positions on immigration, LGBTQ insanity, and anti-male feminist discourses that mystify the problem and fuel the gender wars. These sorts of symbolic capitalist individuals, whose commitment to Marxism often depends on the stability of their employment, often fall into the same traps, treating communism as essentially an anti-fascist radical ideology rather than building their own independent politics. They fall prey to the same PMC thinking and false narratives that progressive and PMC leftists have, particularly regarding the cycle of action and reaction and the nature of right-wing populism. Right-wing populism cannot be understood without understanding what it is reacting to: the revolt of the elites, the culture of condescension, the decades of material abandonment dressed up in the language of progress. A communist who treats Trumpism as inexplicable fascism rather than as a predictable popular reaction to the very class dynamics Marxism is supposed to analyze has already abandoned materialism for the same moralized framing that liberals use. They have not transcended woke politics. They have merely adopted its conclusions under a more radical-sounding vocabulary.
Book cover for Beyond Liberal Egalitarianism: Marx and Normative Social Theory in the Twenty-First Century, by Tony Smith. Book cover is some slightly impressionistic painting of tomatoes and other round foods on a table.
Black and white image of Thomas Paine (left). Title page of a first or early edition of Common Sense (right).
Political quiz result with five slider bars. Result is Social Democrat.
"I'M A LIBERAL" Two panels. Left panel: "What you hope they mean" with images of figures like Frederick Douglass, Adam Smith, and Liz Anderson. Right panel: "What they usually mean." With images of Matt Yglesias, Steven Pinker, Yascha Mounk, etc.
Three panel meme based on 1920s Liberal Party meme. Left panel is a scruffy, crazed figure; text reads "ANTIWOKE LEFT". Right panel is the same figure; text reads "REACTIONARY CENTER". Middle panel is a suave, confident figure dressed in a black suit; text reads "LIBERAL SOCIALISM".
Book open in the middle. Glass of beer behind the book. Bread rolls to the side. In the background is a typical Texas Roadhouse.
Book opened to the Preface. The phrase "liberal currents" is underlined.