What Ails the Left?

This week, Shadi and Sam sat down with Jonny Thakkar, an Assistant Professor in Political Science at Swarthmore College and one of the founding editors of the invaluable The Point magazine. In a recent essay in The Point, Jonny argues that the left’s organizing framework — reducing injustice and pursuing equality — is inherently negative and distributional, and therefore fails to inspire the kind of longing that drives political movements.

This is a topic that we’ve chewed over frequently here at Wisdom of Crowds. The conversation goes on to weigh whether liberalism can offer a genuine vision of the good life or whether it is structurally committed to a neutrality that empties politics of meaning. The group debates Rawlsian liberalism, Marx’s notion of human capacities, the appeal of the tech right’s futurism, as well as religion, autonomy, and whether the loss of a pre-modern sense of cosmic order is recoverable.

The episode ends without a tidy resolution, but with a shared sense that any politically viable vision of human flourishing must grapple seriously with what a good life actually looks like — not just what a just distribution of resources resembles.

Required Reading:

* “Beyond Equality,” by Jonny Thakkar (The Point).

* “Last Boys at the Beginning of History,” by Mana Afsari (The Point).

* Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (Amazon).

* Ross Douthat’s interview with Sen. Chris Murphy (NYT).

* The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, by Bernard Suits (Amazon).

* Laura Field interviewed by Sam and Christine (WoC).