Dastardly Cleverness in the Service of Good

Last time, I argued that if liberals still believe in an open society — free, equal, and pluralistic — we must defend reason. It's the shared “meeting space” that makes the open society possible. But we must also understand that reason alone isn't enough. If we filter all our experience through rationality, we become separated from it, as if we're not living life, but observing it with scientific instruments. We become alienated. It's a condition familiar to anyone who's had a modern, reason-based education, especially in the humanities. It has come to define life within the modern, post-Enlightenment worldview. And as liberals have become ever more educated, it has come to define them. Thanks to the postwar education boom, more and more of them have gone to college. Meanwhile they have become alien, and alienating, to more and more voters. Find the full transcript at DastardlyCleverness.com. — Spencer

It's a fundamental assumption of liberal democracy that we debate our differences with reason.  But now that assumption looks like a relic of a bygone age — specifically, the Age of Enlightenment, from the late 17th to early 19th centuries. The Enlightenment produced more scientific progress than all of previous history — the very idea of progress comes to us from the Enlightenment. It had the same impact on the generation of wealth: Compared to economic growth since the Enlightenment, there was almost none during all the millennia before. And the Enlightenment gave us liberalism, the philosophy of freedom and equality on which the United States and all liberal democracies are founded. But ideologues of the MAGA right are openly hostile to the Enlightenment legacy. So too are the ideologues of the woke left. So liberals need to decide if they're going to defend it. In its commitment to the open exercise of reason, liberalism supports anyone criticizing anything, including liberalism itself. That can be a severe political weakness. Self-critical, self-doubting liberals are notoriously self-defeating. So it's up to liberals to make reason a political strength. That involves defending it as a vehicle not just of amoral productivity and technocratic progress, but the inspiring values liberalism owns but too seldom claims. You can find this episode's transcript, footnotes, and links at DastardlyCleverness.com and at Substack.

Woke theory aims to liberate our minds, but imposes limits on how we think: Many ideas are judged oppressive, and therefore "problematic." Liberal tolerance is seen as potentially oppressive too, for the same reason. Will liberals stand up for what they believe in? Should they? This episode: We begin to see if liberals can take their own side in a quarrel.    

Liberals and the woke left see many of the same problems in society, from structural oppression to alienation. And yet the ideology of the woke left is incompatible with liberalism. For liberals, it starts with the very idea of wokeness, as an awakening from illusions, or false consciousness. The goal is supposed to be liberation. But it can look more like tyranny. It boils down to this: If I'm woke and you're not, I see everything more clearly than you do. I have escaped from the prison of oppressive illusions in which you are still trapped. That means that if you disagree with me, I may decide your opinions are simply wrong, or oppressive. I may try to educate you, but if that fails, I may have to cancel you. And I can do that in the sincere belief that I'm pursuing liberation, yours and everyone else's. My intentions may be entirely benevolent. But the logic is tyrannical. Find the full text of this episode at DastardlyCleverness.com and on Substack (where I'm @SpencerCritchley). — Spencer

As you know if you've been following my posts and podcast episodes lately, I'm writing and releasing the chapters of my new book The Liberal Backbone in real time. When Joan Esposito of WCPT Chicago heard about it, she had an idea: a "radio book club," with me coming on her show to talk about the book as it comes together, chapter by chapter, with her and her listeners. On December 13, we had the first episode, and I thought it went great — Joan is one of my favorite interviewers. We explored the book's big themes: what liberals actually stand for and how they can stand up for it a lot more effectively, at a time when that's needed more than ever. I'm sharing the interview here, lightly edited. As always, you can find the text version at DastardlyCleverness.com and at Substack. And I hope you'll follow me on Substack — just search there for Spencer Critchley. — Spencer

The first draft of Chapter 5 of my next book, The Liberal Backbone. It's a brief summary of the roots of woke thinking, which should make the woke left more understandable, especially for liberals trying to sort out what they do and don't stand for. More at Dastardly Cleverness.com/liberal-backbone-chapter-5 and at Substack.com/@spencercritchley. — Spencer

Are the woke just a bunch of Marxists? No, but that claim isn't based on nothing. The Theory behind wokeness is complicated, but some of its key concepts are inherited from Marx, in modified form. And it becomes much easier to understand Theory if you understand something about Marx — which few people do, because Marx doesn't make it easy. In this fourth chapter of The Liberal Backbone, I explain two key Marxist concepts I plain language: structural oppression, and how a structure of ideas can make oppression seem normal. Marx was sure he'd discovered an infallible "science" of history. But in practice, it went terribly wrong. The effort to explain why would lead, via many branching paths, to Theory. Find more at Substack.

The word "woke" has at least two meanings — and they're so different, they contradict each other. By one of them, any liberal can be proud to be called woke, because to be woke in this sense is to recognize bigotry and oppose it. But by the other meaning, liberals can't be woke, even if they want to. That's because if you're this kind of woke, you reject liberalism. Spencer explains in this chapter of The Liberal Backbone. Find the full text and links at DastardlyCleverness.com.

It's hard to stand for something if you're not even sure what that something is. And many liberals have become unsure what liberalism is. For a long time, few of us had to think much about it. Liberalism was just default political reality. It was like water is for the young fish in David Foster Wallace's famous parable: They can't see the water, because it's everywhere. Let's remember that the word “liberalism” doesn't only refer to beliefs on the left. It's also the name of the philosophy of freedom on which the United States and every other liberal democracy were founded. When Thomas Jefferson wrote “We hold these truths to be self-evident…” he was referring to the principles of this kind of liberalism. But now we liberals are being forced to think about our default reality, because it's being disrupted by two radical challenges from outside: one from the MAGA right and another from what's commonly called the woke left — although the word “woke” needs some clarifying, which I'll get to a little later. The trouble is, it can be hard for liberals even to see these challenges for what they are. They don't fit within our default reality. More at substack.com/@spencercritchley.

With American democracy facing its greatest crisis since the Civil War as a corrupt autocrat returns to the presidency, I want to do my part, however small, to help right now. So I'm going to try an experiment: writing a shorter, more tightly focused book, and releasing chapters as I write them. They'll appear as posts and podcast episodes, like this one. There are many reasons why we are where we are, and in this little book I'm not going to try to address all of them. Instead, I'm going to try to answer what I think are two of the most important but most poorly understood questions we're facing: How did Democrats, and liberals in general, get so bad at politics? And what can they do about it? More: dastardlycleverness.com/liberal-backbone-chapter-01 — Spencer

Ernest Hemingway is famous for the terse economy of his writing. And in one of the most resonant examples of that quality, he captured the essence of catastrophic failure in just a few words, in his novel The Sun Also Rises. The alcoholic veteran Mike Campbell is asked how he went bankrupt. “Two ways,” he says. “Gradually and then quickly.” As it is with one person going broke, so it is with an entire economy crashing, or countless other catastrophes. There isn't only a single failure, but a first, and then more — and then a cascade. And so it is when a democracy fails: it happens slowly and then all at once. Facing the possibility of a vindictive autocrat becoming president, the LA Times decides not to endorse his opponent, or anyone. Then the Washington Post does the same. Then USA Today and all the other Gannett newspapers follow. Some of their journalist employees protest, but almost no one walks off the job; a few editorial board members are rare exceptions. We can feel for those who keep their heads down. Given the precarious state of journalism, they know that if they lose the job they have now, there's almost nowhere else for them to go. Businesses, too, begin signaling their loyalty and obedience to the potential dictator. Their executives are driven by what they see as their duty to protect against risk — even as far larger risks gather. Nearly all their employees act essentially the same way. And as the cascade accelerates across society, a democracy that has survived many shocks fails. The last shock is sudden, even though the preparation was long. Until recently, it seemed unthinkable to most Americans that our democracy could fail. But it would be far from the first, as historians of democracy know well. One of the most insightful is Robert Kagan, who until recently was a member of the Washington Post editorial board. Kagan immediately recognized the meaning of the Post's endorsement surrender. He resigned. It wasn't the first time he had made such a choice. In 2016, he left the Republican Party after it nominated Donald Trump. He sounded an alarm in an essay for the Post called “This Is How Fascism Comes to America.” But as Kagan's principled choices demonstrate, fascism doesn't have to come. Our democracy doesn't have to fail. Some failure cascades are like avalanches: impersonal and irresistible. But when a human system fails, each step is a choice by an individual human being — by each of us. And sometimes, we make the right choice. Nothing is stopping us from doing that now, or at any time — nothing but our own character. “The fault is not in our stars, but in ourselves,” as Shakespeare's Cassius tells Brutus, with the Roman Republic falling around them. More: https://dastardlycleverness.com/slowly-and-then-all-at-once/

If we believe in democracy, I believe we have a responsibility not only to vote for it but to speak up for it, including to family and friends, despite how hard that might be. That doesn't mean berating or insulting them. It can be done quietly and respectfully. In my own view it's a mark of respect and even love to give people the whole truth about what we believe. So I've written an appeal to a friend who's planning to vote for Donald Trumo, imploring them, before it's too late, not to make a mistake I believe they'll regret for the rest of their life. I hope it might be useful for you, however you plan to vote. — Spencer

According to my guest this time, the United States is entering a Latino century, and that might be what saves our democracy. Mike Madrid is a top expert on Latino voting, and in recent years he's become a national leader in the bipartisan fight to save democracy. He's been the political director for the California Republican Party, a senior adviser to both Republicans and Democrats, and a co-founder of the never-Trump Lincoln Project. Now Mike has a new book, called The Latino Century: How America's Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy.  One of his goals for it is to help the Democratic Party win against MAGA authoritarianism.  He's worried, though, that Democrats have been slow to get the message about Latinos and their crucial role in the nation's future. And he thinks that helps explain why so many Latinos have been moving towards the Republican Party, a development many Democrats find baffling.  According to Mike, they're baffled because they don't understand Latinos or other minorities nearly as well as they think they do. He says too many Democratic candidates, strategists, and pundits think of minorities as theoretical stereotypes instead of as real people with complex lives. That's why Democrats tend to assume immigration is the top issue for all Latino voters, for example, or that most want to be talked to in Spanish. Both of those assumptions may seem reasonable theoretically, but are often wrong in reality. Mike argues that now more than ever, Democrats need to get reality right. That's because first of all, the Latino vote can make the difference in crucial battleground states this year, including ones that may surprise you, like Wisconsin and North Carolina. And he believes that over the long haul, Latino voters can help revive all Americans' faith in democratic institutions — and democracy itself. — Spencer

Many liberals are deeply confused about how to respond to the campus protests over Gaza. And I think it's an example of the confusion liberals are feeling generally over a lot of issues. I believe much of the confusion can be traced to the assumption that all political opinions can fit on a single line, from left to right.  For this one-dimensional, one-line model to work, there can only be one left and one right — but there are at least two lefts and two rights. And they're not different as in further left or further right on the same line. They're different as in not on the same line at all. And the difference goes back to the rise of liberalism, accompanied by the rise of an anti-liberal left.

As we risk obliviously repeating catastrophic mistakes others have already made, Spencer Critchley has some thoughts about memory and freedom, from people who know the precious value of both. Excerpt: "Most of us in the U.S. have been spared the necessity of knowing history, and instead have been able to live as if the world was created at our birth. But people in Central and Eastern Europe have already been trammeled by the history that has just now caught up with us. They've been trying to warn us for decades."

If you wanted to, you could consume nothing but presidential campaign coverage all day every day. But how much of it would leave you feeling better informed about casting what may be the most important vote of your life? Not better informed about the campaign as a sporting event, with all the expert play-by-play, color commentary, and stats. But better informed about questions that may not have easy, satisfying, or entertaining answers? Better prepared to think, and not just react? On this episode of Dastardly Cleverness, we go hunting for that kind of election coverage, find a little, and try to supply some ourselves. I'm joined by two people I can always count on to leave me better informed. Mike Madrid is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project and one of the country's top political consultants, with special expertise on Latino voting trends. Mike previously served as the press secretary for the California Assembly Republican leader, as the political director for the California Republican Party, and as a senior adviser to both Republicans and Democrats. He's the author of the upcoming book The Latino Century. And Zach Friend has worked for multiple presidential campaigns, the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the U.S. Senate, and the U.S. House of Representatives, and has served for multiple terms as an elected official in Santa Cruz County, California. Zach is the author of the book On Message. -- Spencer Critchley

By some measures, well over half of charities do little or no good. When similar charities are compared, the most effective ones can be up to 100 times more effective than the least. And there's often a big mismatch between where donors direct their support and where the need and potential benefits are greatest. A movement called effective altruism aims to make giving work better by identifying the most effective charities in the world and encouraging donors to support them generously and strategically. There's been a lot of excitement about it, but lately it's also drawn critics of its ethical premises and the behavior of some who call themselves effective altruists. In this episode Spencer explores both the promise challenges of effective altruism, in a fascinating conversation with one of the movement's leaders, Luke Freeman, Executive Director of Giving What We Can.

There are lots of reasons to be cynical about the crisis in our politics. The trouble is, one of the biggest causes of that crisis is cynicism itself. We should always be skeptical about politics. People aren't angels, as James Madison reminded us. But skepticism involves checking to find out what's really going on, good or bad. Cynicism is just assuming that it's all bad. This is often mistaken for savviness, which lends cool-kids credibility to claims like “all politicians are crooks,” or “there's no difference between the parties,” or “government never works.” Except none of those claims actually stands up to skeptical scrutiny. Political journalists reinforce cynicism when they cover politics, day by day, as a dirty game in which all the players are more or less the same: self-interested schemers. NYU journalism professor Jay Rosen blames it on what he calls “the cult of savvy,” which rewards reporters for the cynicism of their coverage, when what we need from them is skepticism. Skepticism is healthy, and necessary for democracy. You can't say either about cynicism. If we automatically accept cynical beliefs as true, we make them ever more likely to become true. People who work on behalf of hope gradually withdraw from the arena, leaving it to people all too happy to encourage despair. And those are people who do in fact have very bad motivations. In this way cynicism reinforces itself and becomes a political death spiral. Democracy can't run on despair. But authoritarianism depends on it. This is why authoritarians like Vladimir Putin or Donald Trump don't care that you know they're lying — they want you to know they're lying. It serves their interests if you conclude that everyone is a liar, and lose hope.  Then your only safe choice is to back the most powerful liar. All this is why I wanted to talk this time about what has become a deeply unfashionable topic: morality in politics. Yes, it does exist, and in a democracy it must exist. And once again I talk with Kevin Lewis and Zach Friend.  Kevin has been a communications advisor and spokesman for former President Barack Obama, the White House, the Department of Justice, both Obama campaigns, and Meta. Zach has worked for the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, and several presidential campaigns, including both of Obama's. He's currently an elected Supervisor in Santa Cruz County, California. Both have seen lots of the good and bad in politics, but neither is a cynic. — Spencer

A three-way conversation featuring host Spencer Critchley, Kevin Lewis, and Zach Friend on leadership lessons from the ouster of Kevin McCarthy, as compared with far better examples set by Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, and others. It turns out, to the shock of cynics everywhere, that character matters! Kevin was the post-presidency spokesman for former President Barack Obama. During the Obama administration he served at the White House and at the Department of Justice, where he advised Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. He's also worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and both Obama campaigns. Zach has worked for the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the U.S. Senate, the House of Representatives, and both Obama campaigns as well. He's currently serving in local government as an elected Supervisor in Santa Cruz County, California. A video version of this episode is on YouTube.

If you want to know more about the risks and rewards of artificial intelligence, you could hardly do better than to consult with someone who's been a senior communications advisor for Facebook, lately known as Meta, the US Department of Justice, and a President of the United States. And that's what Spencer did for this episode. Kevin Lewis was the post-presidency spokesman for former President Barack Obama. During the Obama administration he served at the White House and at the DOJ, where he advised Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch. He's also worked for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and both Obama campaigns. We talk about how AI is transforming communication, politics, business, and even our understanding of reality and identity. We get into Senator Charles Schumer's current efforts to help Congress catch up with a rapidly-growing technology few people understand. And you'll hear some of Kevin's anecdotes about working with some very interesting people under very interesting circumstances.

If you have children in your family, you're probably worried about what technology might be doing to them. And maybe there's some hope about what tech might do for them. In this episode, you can get guidance from one of the world's top experts on the subject. Dr. Katie Davis is a researcher and associate professor at the University of Washington, and the director of the university's Digital Youth lab. She's been studying technology and children for nearly two decades, starting with her time at Harvard University, where she studied under, and worked closely with, the renowned psychologist Howard Gardner. Katie's first book, The App Generation, was co-written with Gardner. Her third and latest book, Technology's Child, was released recently by MIT Press.

The episode before last, Spencer was the guest for a change, interviewed by Joan Esposito, who hosts a liberal talk radio show originating at WCPT-AM in Chicago. This time, Spencer interviews Joan about how she manages to conduct smart, in-depth, live political conversations three hours a day, five days a week — sometimes devoting a full hour to a topic when the standard is a few minutes. We hear what Joan has learned as a radio host, as a TV news anchor, and in other roles, helping people understand what's going on in their lives and in the world.  

Sam Farr devoted 44 years of his life to elected office at the local, state, and federal level. That included 24 years as the Congressman for the Central Coast of California, where he grew up in the seaside village of Carmel.  Among his inspirations were his father, longtime state legislator Fred Farr; President John F. Kennedy; and the Peace Corps, which he joined as a young man. If that makes him sound like an idealist, that's accurate, but it's only half the picture. The other half is very pragmatic, with an obsessive focus on the nuts and bolts of policy and politics. As you'll hear in this interview, when both of those halves come together, democracy can work. Sam has lots of great stories about how that happens, some of them funny, some very moving, and all of them hopeful.

Spencer often talks with Joan Esposito, who interviews him about politics for her show on Chicago's WCPT-AM. This episode of Dastardly Cleverness replays one of those conversations that's especially relevant now. Joan and Spencer focus on why democracy, after all its successes, is now in so much danger from authoritarianism. They talk about: Why so many people are choosing authoritarianism over democracy, mostly on the right but on the left too How the sources of America's division go back to the Founding The breakdown of the moral consensus that used to hold us more or less together and how that allows demagogues to appeal to the worst in us What Plato, Freud, Marx, religion, and Silicon Valley tech bro's have to do with all this And more. You can hear more smart, thoughtful interviews by Joan Esposito over the air on WCPT-AM Chicago, online at heartlandsignal.com, on SoundCloud, or with any podcast app — just search for “Joan Esposito.”

Even with democracy in grave danger, Democrats are in a close race against the people who are trying to finish it off. How can that be, and what should they do about it? Questions like that have been dominating discussions among a group of some of the country's most senior Democratic Party veterans, including former House Democratic Leader Dick Gephardt, one-time presidential favorite Gary Hart, and until her recent death, former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. And our two guests this time: Les Francis and Lora Lee Martin.

In many ways, addiction has become a defining feature of life in America. More and more of us have become addicted to drugs like alcohol, heroin, cocaine, and opioids, and to other things increasingly recognized as addictive, like sugar, junk food, and social media. The problem has been growing for decades, but in recent years it has exploded. A record for deaths by overdose was set in 2020, at a level six and a half times higher than just 10 years before. The 2020 record was smashed last year, with the overdose death rate still rising. Overdose is now the leading cause of death for Americans between the ages of 18 and 45. Some of the toll is probably related to the COVID pandemic. But much of it is also caused by a seemingly infinite supply of incredibly addictive and dangerous synthetic drugs, especially meth and fentanyl. They can be obtained or made cheaply by almost anyone, and sold at an enormous profit. Often they're mixed in with other illegal drugs, or with counterfeit versions of legal drugs. Now there are reports of fentanyl pills made to look like candy. Spencer's guest this time is one of the leading experts on the addiction crisis, and one of its most powerful storytellers. Journalist Sam Quinones sounded the alarm on opiate addiction in 2015 in his multiple-award-winning book Dreamland. That book focused on the devastation visited on a small Ohio town from two sources: the aggressive marketing of a supposedly safe universal painkiller called Oxycontin and a flood of cheap, black tar heroin. Dreamland played a major role in exposing the scale and the origins of the opioid epidemic, and that helped produce consequences for many of those who promoted and profited from that epidemic. Sam Quinones was well ahead of the crowd when he wrote Dreamland, and he still is. His latest book is called The Least of Us. In it, he describes how the addiction crisis has gotten even worse — and yet he also gives reasons for hope. Those reasons are found in the stories of ordinary people who reject the despair that addiction feeds on and amplifies. They're replacing it with small acts of rebuilding and love, the mutual care that may be the only lasting cure for addiction.

One way of thinking about democracy is as a game — a game in which freedom, equality, and even lives are at stake. And one way of thinking about the state of our democracy is that one of the two main competitors is no longer playing the game, but trying to destroy it. As with any game, the rules of democracy only matter if we agree they do. Ultimately, we can't prove that things like civil debate, fair elections, and following the law are good things, we just agree that they are, like we might agree that aces are high. Except we're not playing for chips. My guest this time is a leading expert on the game of democracy, why it matters so much, and how it could come to an end. Sheri Berman is a professor of political science at Barnard College, Columbia University.  Much of her research focuses on how European democracies have developed, struggled, and often failed many times before succeeding. That's if they do succeed, and if that success lasts. The lasting success of democracy isn't guaranteed, as we're all seeing, all too clearly, right now. Sheri Berman's most recent book is Democracy and Dictatorship in Europe: From the Ancien Regime to the Present Day, published by Oxford University Press.  She also writes for many scholarly and popular publications, including the New York Times, The Washington Post, Foreign Policy, Foreign Affairs, and VOX.

It's not just Democrats who need the Democratic Party to remember how to win elections. Democracy does. Spencer's guest this time has some great ideas on where to start, based on his unique, decades-long experience studying politics from the inside and out. Walter Shapiro has reported on 11 presidential campaigns, going back to Ronald Reagan's landslide defeat of Jimmy Carter in 1980. He's written for the Washington Post, Newsweek, Time, USA Today, Roll Call, and The New Republic among others, worked for President Carter, and teaches at Yale.

Spencer's guest this time has fascinating, important insights about Vladimir Putin's "memory war:" a campaign to rewrite history with Russia at the center of the world stage. That campaign is being enacted with horrific violence in Ukraine, but is pursued in different ways around the world, including in the United States. Dr. Jade McGlynn is a senior researcher in Russian Studies at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, a former lecturer in Russian at Oxford University, and a contributor to Foreign Policy, The Telegraph, The Spectator, and others. She's the author of The Kremlin's Memory Makers, coming soon from Bloomsbury, and is currently writing a second book, Putin's Unreality. Find more info and links at https://dastardlycleverness.com/jade-mcglynn.

Mike Madrid is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, a longtime political consultant for candidates of both parties, and a leading expert on Latino voting. Mike says Latino voters are sounding an urgent alarm for the Democratic Party about how it may lose the presidency and more, by losing its working class base. And Mike believes that's not just a problem for Democrats: At this time in our history, democracy needs Democrats to win. Mike says the problem is that Democrats have increasingly become the party of a well-educated, well-intentioned, but disconnected elite, as recently wrote an op-ed for the New York Times called “While Democrats Debate ‘Latinx,' Latinos Head to the G.O.P.” In this episode, he discusses it with host Spencer Critchley in a fascinating, wide-ranging discussion.

The way we live is also the way we get sick and die: "Lifestyle diseases" are the leading causes of death for Americans, six out of ten of whom have a chronic condition. And yet we treat the symptoms, with expensive drugs and procedures, instead of addressing the causes. After training at top medical schools, our guest Dr. Rose Kumar walked away from a promising career in what she calls our industrialized healthcare system. She says it was killing her to have to treat patients like machines instead of people, and she knew there was a better way. And she's working to prove it at her multidisciplinary health center, where the care is based on both rigorous science and attention to a patient's whole life, not just their illness. More: dastardlycleverness.com/rose-kumar  

In Singapore, you can face a heavy fine or even jail for offenses like spitting on the sidewalk and importing chewing gum. Meanwhile in New Zealand, a man who hatched himself from a giant egg was appointed the country's “official wizard.” These are examples of tight and loose cultures. Much of what's going on in America and the world right now can be understood better through knowing more about tightness and looseness: for example, the appeal of authoritarian leaders, or refusals to follow COVID safety guidelines. Spencer's guest this time is Michele Gelfand, an expert on tight and loose cultures, a Stanford University cultural psychologist  and the author of the fascinating book Rule Makers, Rule Breakers: Tight and Loose Culture and the Secret Signals That Direct Our Lives.

Even if you see through the phony panic being spun up by Trumpists, some of what you hear from critical race theorists can sound extreme, especially if you don't know much about the context. In this episode, host Spencer Critchley offers a guide for people who feel confused about Critical Race Theory but aren't sure why.

Sometimes we can't "just move on." Sometimes we must first confront the truth about the past. According to our guest this time, we can do that through transitional justice. It addresses situations where doing wrong is not the exception, but has been made normal, as has happened in places like South Africa under apartheid, Northern Ireland during the Troubles—and the United States during our long history of racism, and more recent history of democracy under attack. Colleen Murphy is a professor of Law, Philosophy, and Political Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an expert on transitional justice. As she makes powerfully clear in this episode, transitional justice has helped other societies truly move forward—and is already under way in parts of the US. Sometimes, as with the murder of George Floyd or the attack on the US Capitol, it's because the truth confronts us, whether or not we're ready to confront it.

We already know a lot about how to reform policing: not just to make it more fair, but to make it more effective. It turns out that when police work in partnership with the communities they protect, crime goes down, often way down. Spencer's guest this time is an expert on what works. Georgina Mendoza McDowell is an attorney and public safety expert who has worked with the Obama Justice Department, a White House initiative to reduce youth violence, a Washington DC-based international development consultancy, and now with Evident Change, a data-driven policy consulting nonprofit.

It may be hard for many Americans to imagine, but there are striking parallels between post-Civil-War America and post-World-War-2 Germany. Our guest this time is an expert on those parallels, and wrote a deeply-researched, insightful, and important book about them. Philosopher Susan Neiman is the author of Learning From the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil. She describes how Germans finally began what a process of vergangenheitsaufarbeitung, or “working off the past.” It has helped Germany both to make atonement, and to build a better society. As America begins facing its own forgotten, buried, or rewritten past, we can learn a lot from this book and its author.

Compared to other high-income countries, our rate of gun deaths per capita is 25 times higher. But much of what Americans think they know about the costs and causes of gun violence is wrong. And few are aware of solutions that have already been shown to work. To help fix that, The Guardian has been running a series of in-depth stories called “Guns and Lies.” Its lead reporter is Spencer Critchley's guest this time, Abené Clayton. Abené Clayton started covering community gun violence in her hometown of Richmond, California and continued during her time at UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. In this episode, she recounts her own experiences with gun violence and the discoveries she's made while covering the issue as a reporter. It's a fascinating discussion that goes behind, and well beyond, the conventional wisdom and clichés of gun violence coverage. You'll hear about the real people involved, the real costs — and some real solutions.

American democracy is more fragile than many of us ever imagined. But we’ve been neglecting and abusing it so much that maybe the bigger surprise is that it’s lasted as long as it has. A lot of that damage can still be fixed, though—as long as we don’t let the whole thing fall apart first. Spencer's guest Vinz Koller has great insights on what's gone wrong and how we can repair it. Vinz is a political scientist who advises governments on effective policy. He’s long been active in politics, working on multiple national and local campaigns. And he’s been a member of the Electoral College three times for California’s 20th Congressional District. Vinz sees all too clearly how bad things have gotten—but the solutions he proposes offer real hope.

Even with Trump out of office, the Republican Party's leaders and media enablers appear determined to keep on living in a world of lies — a place where democracy can't live. As host Spencer Critchley says, it's like life under Soviet domination as described by writers such as Vaclav Havel and Czeslaw Milsoz: "Everything is a lie, everyone knows it's a lie, and everyone goes along with the lie anyway." It consists of the continuing Big Lie of a "stolen election," plus endless others, such as the daily right-wing media "scamdal:" what you get when you build a scandal out of a scam. Ultimately, the liars are harmed as much as the lied-to, as Socrates long ago warned us: Having so many evils, will not the most miserable of men be still more miserable in a public station? Master of others when he is not master of himself... wanting all things, and never able to satisfy his desires; always in fear and distraction, like the State of which he is the representative. His jealous, hateful, faithless temper grows worse with command; is more and more faithless, envious, and unrighteous — the most wretched of men, a misery to himself and to others. (Plato, The Republic.) Sound familiar? The Eighth Circle of Hell: Fraud. Painting by Sandro Botticelli, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Spencer Critchley hosts a Zoom-based "Ask Anything" discussion covering the chaos in the Republican Party, how we can both believe in tolerance and make clear moral judgments about something like the Capitol riot, whether better education would be enough to save democracy, what we can learn from other countries that have had to deal with shameful periods in their histories, and what reconciliation might look like. You can find the video version of the conversation at: spencercritchley.com/2021/state-of-democracy-online-discussion

This time, host Spencer Critchley talks about the psychology of sedition, Trumpism as Freudian dream logic, and the apparent belief of Capitol rioters that they were in a movie. Excerpt: In dream logic, the Capitol riot was the start of a patriotic revolution led by Trump. And it was an anti-American plot led by Antifa and BLM. Dream logic not only doesn’t have to make sense, it destroys sense — and thereby destroys all constraints. If you want to live in a world of dream logic, the more flagrant the lie, the better. A lie isn’t a shield, it’s a weapon. When Trump makes everything a lie, he makes everything true.

Spencer Critchley talks about: Why we can’t “just move on” after the Capitol riot - or everything else that’s happened over the past four years. The circle of shared moral values that must encompass democracy and how each of us can and must defend it — starting by simply speaking up. Lessons from other countries, especially about the consequences of silence: Germany, South Africa, Northern Ireland, and France.

Just about the only thing many of us are thinking about these days is the endangered state of American democracy, especially since the attempted coup on Jan. 6. In this episode, Spencer Critchley offers some of his thoughts, and invites you to share yours. You can do that at these links: Twitter: @scritchley Facebook: spencer.critchley.page dastardlycleverness.com spencercritchley.com Photo: Tyler Merbler, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Zach Friend is an author and a public policy and communications expert who has worked for Barack Obama and John Kerry’s presidential campaigns, the White House Council of Economic Advisers, the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the Democratic National Committee. He’s been featured on and quoted by CNN, ABC, CBS, MSNBC, Fox News, and many others. In this episode, Zach and host Spencer Critchley talk about not just what’s happening now, but what it all means for where politics is going.

The Lincoln Project is made up of top Republican political consultants who are aiming attack ads at a Republican president. We find out why and how from the Lincoln Project's Mike Madrid. Mike is an expert on Latino voting trends, based on work starting with his master’s thesis at Georgetown University. He’s the former press secretary for the California Assembly Republican leader and the former political director for the California Republican Party. He’s been named as one of America’s Most Influential Hispanics by Hispanic Business Magazine. And Mike Madrid is a co-founder of the Lincoln Project. That’s a group of top Republican consultants working to help elect Democrat Joe Biden, because they believe our Republican president is a threat to democracy itself. Other members of the Lincoln Project include John McCain presidential campaign manager Steve Schmidt, attack ad expert Rick Wilson, and lawyer George Conway, the husband of President Trump’s senior adviser Kelly Anne Conway.

As a county supervisor in Santa Cruz County, California, Ryan Coonerty is having to cope with two historic challenges: the national coronavirus pandemic and the catastrophic western wildfires. Both disasters have hit his community hard. In this episode, host Spencer Critchley talks with him about leadership in a time of crisis — or crises.

Social marketing uses the persuasion techniques normally used to sell potato chips, fashion, detergent, cars, and endless other consumer products, but for social good campaigns. Knowing how to do social marketing right is important to nonprofits, socially responsible corporations, and all other purpose-driven organizations — but all too often, it's done wrong. You hear a lot about "sharing information," "educating the public," and "conducting outreach." None of these is likely to have much effect on people's beliefs and behaviors, which are what count in creating social change. In this episode, Spencer Critchley teaches you a five-step model for social marketing that has impact. You can find a video version at dastardlycleverness.com, and on our YouTube channel.

The election of Donald Trump shocked America and the world — and that included Dastardly Cleverness host Spencer Critchley. But Spencer believes now that we should have seen him coming, like we should have seen the approach of this hyper-partisan crisis of democracy we're going through. He's written a book about it, called Patriots of Two Nations: Why Trump Was Inevitable & What Happens Next, available now at Amazon.com. We hear an excerpt from it in this episode. In the book, Spencer explains why Trump or someone like him has been on his way since this country's beginning. The Founders thought they could design a new kind of nation, one based on the Enlightenment triumph of reason. But many Americans rejected the Enlightenment, and many of them still do. So the United States has never been truly united: it’s divided not just by race and class, but by culture and worldview. Supporters and opponents of Trump see America, loyalty, and even truth very differently. Uniting those nations is going to require that they finally learn to understand each other. I think that might still be possible. For the sake of democracy, it has to be.

Brent Colburn’s experience goes back to the Al Gore presidential campaign in 2000, through Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004, both Obama campaigns, FEMA, Homeland Security, HUD, and to the Pentagon, where he was in charge of communications for the Defense Department. After that, he led communications for Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan’s Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and he is now the Vice President for Communications and Public Affairs at Princeton University. Along the way he was a fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. In this episode, we hear Brent's insights on how we should deal with the coronavirus crisis, and what he’s learned from dealing with other high-stakes crises during his career.

A big reason why Donald Trump won in 2016 — and why he may win again in 2020 — is that Republicans now seem to get social media, email, and the rest of the online world better than Democrats do, even though Democrats like Howard Dean and Barack Obama were online pioneers. In this episode, Mark Barker and Jordan Ruden of Craft & Commerce give fascinating insights into how Democrats lost their lead, how Republicans took it over, and what it means for how we all communicate, whether we’re in politics or not.

Host Spencer Critchley talks with Tracy Palandjian, the co-founder and CEO of Social Finance, a nonprofit dedicated to using capital to drive social progress. So far, it has helped direct more than $100 million toward challenges in criminal justice, early childhood education, workforce development, health and homelessness. Social Finance uses the Pay for Success model. At its most basic, that means funding promising social good projects with money from investors, who only get paid pack if the project succeeds. But it also involves a lot more than money: clearly defined outcomes, data-driven decisions, cross-sector partnerships, and strong governance and accountability.