4 Comments
May 25Liked by Daniel Oppenheimer

I always enjoy hearing a more nuanced conversation on pragmatism, so thank you for that. I also appreciate that James understands that progressives and conservatives (generally speaking) are motivated by different values. That's a few steps ahead of the way most partisans analyze the other side.

That said, James' descriptions of what conservative values actually are sometimes runs into the problem of progressive condescension. For example, I'm not sure most conservatives would describe one of their values as "upholding white male supremacy." This raises an interesting issue that even when someone has the desire to understand the other side (again, an admirable and rare quality) one must be careful not to shoehorn their own values into the analysis as that itself could come off as dismissive. Easier said than done, though Jon Haidt is an example of someone who toes the line decently.

I know when you guys talked about the current state of racism and violence it was sort of a side point, but it's connected to what I'm saying. James likely accepts some claims that draw from critical theory/postmodernism, like that society is composed of systems of power that disadvantage some and advantage others. Or more explicit claims from CRT about the eternal presence of systemic racism and the need to continue with our "racial reckoning."

Just like with a MAGA person in the other direction, unquestioned background values like this can lead people like James to either miss or ignore important counterarguments that challenge those deep values - like the fact that the amount of unarmed black men killed each year by the police is very low and that progressives sometimes overestimate it by a factor of 1000 (see here: https://www.skeptic.com/research-center/reports/Research-Report-CUPES-007.pdf), or more complex arguments that system racism and its effects are overexaggerated (I'm thinking here of people like John McWhorter).

Anyway, James if you read this correct me if I got anything wrong (or Daniel for that matter), but that's what came to me after listening to the podcast.

Anyway,

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I have complicated feelings about all this. I do think there are some genuinely toxic strains in the MAGA worldview -- male supremacy, racism, etc. -- which I don't think you can easily separate from contemporary conservatism. That said, I also agree with you that those strains are exaggerated and misrepresented in a lot of contemporary left wing writing, and

there's a lot more going on in conservatism that doesn't involve race and sex at all, and if we reduce conservatism to the parts of it that are easiest to disdain than we're not really doing the task that James said we should be doing, which is to empathetically engage with opposing and conflicting worldviews.

I'm not sure where James gets his ideas on male and white supremacy from. When I think about where my ideas on race are coming from, I go to more non-academic left liberal writers and thinkers like James Baldwin, MLK, Ralph Ellison, Leslie Fiedler, Albert Murray, etc. And then certainly McWhorter and Loury in more recent years. I'm not as deeply read on sex and gender; when I was in college I always read Katha Pollitt in The Nation, and that probably had a big influence on me.

To put it back on you, though, who do you turn to in order to better understand the racism and sexism on the right? Loury and McWhorter are great on the dysfunctions on the left when it comes to these issues, but not so interested in, or interesting on, the dysfunctions on the right. I don't know how you look at 2024 conservatism and not see a lot of incredibly fucked up thinking in this realm.

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May 24Liked by Daniel Oppenheimer

Daniel,

I've shared some offline feedback with you before and you encouraged me to post publicly in the spirit of being transparent with your audience, so I'm doing that here:

I've observed that when a guest shares a theory or an idea, your approach isn't to ask a series of guided questions of them to take you and the audience to a deeper understanding of the theory; it's to work out the theory out loud on your own. You find the logical connection, you extend the argument and its implications. That's how I think as well. It's hands on, active learning. And we as the audience learn by observing your own process of working it through.

With your podcast guests, I sometimes find this to be distracting. There were times in this episode when I heard you go through this. He proposed an idea. You then worked it through in a sort of "tell me if I'm thinking about this correctly". But then you were a few minutes in to a monologue and missed a cue when your guest started to add something. And chances are, he, the expert, could have provided a simple elegant, digested response to what you were working through in your mind (which admittedly, on first draft, can be a bit clunky). This brought my attention away from your guest, or even better, the fun banter between you all.

I hesitate to share this, because I don't know if this attribute can be teased apart from what I find so refreshing about your podcast, which is that you show up as a thinker, an equal, a sparring partner, and not just an interviewer. The last 30 minutes of this episode is what few people can do as well as you can: tell your guest "I disagree!" and then have a playful but substantive conversation about contemporary politics.

N of one here.

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I'll have to ponder this, and maybe discuss more offline. Sometimes I think my intervention is a deliberate effort to be a stand-in for the listener, so if I fear the guest is too technical or making too many assumptions about what the listener already knows then I step in to try to make it more accessible. But sometimes it's probably what you say, which is that I simply don't understand as well as I might and I'd be better off letting the guest go.

Another thought I've had, vis a vis you final point, is that one of the structural problems in general, and I've noticed this on other podcasts, is that the best stuff often comes toward the end when we're loose and comfortable with each other and have gotten the basic stuff out of the way, but I've probably lost a lot of listeners already by that point! I think a lot of podcasters deal with this problem by having an initial, breezier segment that's separate from the main interview or discussion. I may play around with this in the future, maybe start with a 10 minute back and forth with one of my regulars that touches on more topical issues, and then go to the main thing which is some less topical subject. But I'd need to be able to turn it around more quickly so that I'm actually topical.

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