@patrickiber
Co-editor, Dissent Magazine. I teach history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. Write books about Cold War culture and propaganda. Have written for the set of all publications that are not members of themselves
People shouldn’t be mining history for “who is good and who is bad” today, they should be looking carefully at the ways people who cared about the things they care about today erred and triumphed
And I did! I'm a Harringtonian "left wing of the possible" guy, a politics with its own strengths and weaknesses, I don't even identify as a Cold War liberal. But the world is just too complicated to say "Cold War liberalism" is a trash misapprehension responsible for our present maladies
Two ways to accuse you of being a splitter now Bret
In my book on the cultural Cold War in Latin America I profiled both the pro- and anti-Communist groups and said "look, here is what they could see clearly given their commitments and here is what they could not" and I think that was a historical approach rather than a partisan one
And that's the shadow boxing that's happening under the a lot of the historical analysis; the least one can ask is that you should be able to see it
...while the lib+demsoc group looks at this posture and thinks "I can't work with these people, because they are persistently in denial about the problem of left-wing authoritarianism and misdiagnose my objections to it as service to power" or whatever
Ironically (or not) we're replicating, this time as farce, the divisions on the left of a few generations back, with the anti-liberal group minimizing the horrors of Stalinism and accusing the libs (including democratic socialists, apparently) of minimizing the horrors of capitalism ...
I haven't read the new volume on Cold War liberalism yet, but I'm with David that this conversation has gotten increasingly untethered from, you know, history
You can have all the structural conditions in the world and you still usually need one doofus in the middle who fails to grasp his predicament for things to really go topsy-turvy. Happy Saturday!
If you are looking for serious progressive FP folks the group to cultivate is Duss's shop at CIP, imo, I don't think the DSA IC or Quincy represents the party base at all
I mean one of @mikeduncan.bsky.social's big takeaways from years of writing the Revolutions pod is that the Great Man Theory of Historical Change is overrated but the Great Idiot Theory holds considerable explanatory power
where are the Herberts Marcuse of 2026
Bretts McGurk
Last clarification, by "we" in "we built" I don't just mean the U.S., I meant a broad set of international actors, and that is who should be doing the re-building for the future
Agreed, and would add that it's not just electing Democrats (although that's obviously required) but making clear that institutional change is necessary, not just electoral change
Agreed
I would accept the punishment as just
Yes, by "hope" I meant "design" - but absolutely, it's going to require the next U.S. leader, whenever that comes, to be enlightened about the limits of U.S. power, and for the limitations of Trump's approach to have become sadly clear to the world to an even greater degree than they are now
I don't know how to do this, to be clear. But just as I believe it is important to rethink U.S. domestic institutions we've got to use this moment to rethink what features we want in an international system and work towards them, starting now
Obviously this is going to require the U.S. to turn down the imperialism dials by a lot, but there's also going to need to be better international mechanisms for dealing with repressive states so you don't get a Fox News grandpa who decides "only I can fix it".
We built the United Nations, with all its flaws, with the hope of never having World War II again and we're going to have to build a new set of multilateral institutions with the hope of never having Donald J. Trump again
Hell yeah
That's true in some areas, and I think a major improvement over where things stood 10 years ago.
this argument is moot
How on earth did this happen
I know, that's what I'm asking about. I don't think it's going to come from federal funding in the US, and if it did go directly to the parties, the Dems wouldn't use it to create the people who could staff an AOC cabinet. So we are left with private philanthropy, which is a mixed bag
In the German system parties are attached to the institutions that will generate experts. But in the U.S. we have a different party structure with two big balloon coalitions, even if we have similar factions underneath the hood. What do you think needs to be done here to develop left expertise?
Paulo, would you believe that this guy is not very interested in anything that one might classify as a historical irony?
Hmm. Review-writing in process, otherwise I would
Guys did you know, and I quote, "[Crushing the communist left] has been particularly difficult given the proven ability, on the part of the communists, to address the most serious problems facing the working and oppressed masses of the world."