Taking the SubStack Plunge
After years writing on Blogspot and then Wordpress, I’ve decided to join SubStack. In “taking the plunge” I recognize that the pool is already pretty crowded. Why do we need one more voice trying to squeeze in among all the cacophony?
To be honest, we probably don’t. And yet I was influenced while reading Dan Pfeiffer’s new book, Battling the Big Lie: How Fox, Facebook, and the Maga Media are Destroying America. He does an exceptional job of outlining the communication infrastructure that has developed in support of conservative positions.
When it comes to solutions, he suggests that while it would be great to build progressive infrastructures, that will take time we don’t have as a society. The solution to disinformation and misinformation seems paradoxically to be more information. If more voices are sharing in a small-d democratic space, it can drive the social media algorithms into better place.
So I’m jumping in. I hope to write two to three times per week. I’ll focus on popular issues in politics, religion, higher education, and social media. For the intermediate future, I don’t plan on charging for the newsletter. We’ll see if that changes down the road. So please follow along as I try this new endeavor.
Here’s a quick thought about the recent Supreme Court Decisions (including the forthcoming Chevron decision which will likely upend the EPA). As I wrote on Twitter this morning, the conservatives on the court appear to searching for logic that will allow them to support conservative pro-Christian positions regardless of discontinuity with prior decisions.
In pondering this further, my mind went back to Thomas Frank’s 2007 What’s the Matter With Kansas. He argued that Republican candidates argued about culture wars to distract voters from their own economic interests. It hasn’t held up well. I liked the argument at first having lived in Kansas for five years in the early 90s.1
What Frank missed was that over the last 15 years the candidates began to believe their rhetoric. Or, to put in more in Maga terms, once the electorate expected culture wars, the candidates had to feed the base’s biases. Getting elected required promises of draconian legislation (as we’ve seen with abortion laws). As time went on, the pretend culture warriors decided that this was too hard. Now it’s the true believers (like Rep. Boebert who keeps my own state in the news) who are running and making changes to everyday lives. The Supreme Court seems to be playing to their worst instincts.
Obviously, the long-term strategy is for progressives to run for office to counter these trends. We need better communication infrastructure to try to keep a balanced (and fair!) argument in front of people.
We could wait for the Culture Warriors to overreach as they often do. But a lot of damage to our democracy will be done in the meantime.
So for now, I’ll jump in the pool and hope to make my small difference. I hope you’ll subscribe and give it a chance.
Once we moved to Oregon in the later part of the decade, I developed one of my best sociological and historical arguments. People who settled in Oregon were the brave iconoclasts who trekked across the country in the face of danger (we made a computer game about it!). People in Kansas were those who started across the country and then said, “I’m tired! Why don’t we open up a store for the people coming through.”