It sounds to me that it is not their opponents writ large who are the ones that are unreachable by persuasion. If this attitude is widespread among the educated youth, then that worries me deeply. To the best of my knowledge, revolutions generally don't begin amongst the working class. They tend to begin with disgruntled elites, propelled by the justifications of intellectuals. Despite all of our current problems, those problems pale in comparison to the horrors that widespread political violence brings. Just ask Lebanon.
At what point and how does speech intersect with knowledge and truth? Our world and the college campus - often the factory of fantasies - is filled with monstrous hoaxes, dogma and inventions. Do these students ever entertain the notion that they might be wrong? They need a lesson in knowledge as much or more than a lecture on free speech. A short history tour of the 1930’s intellectual glorification of communism would be a good start.
Good work. I don’t think we can underestimate the harm our two-party system has done to trust in our society. It’s not just been beautiful empty words, but good words and even intents twisted. No offense, but even your argument could be twisted to compliance unto death.
I hope we don’t cross this line (there’s no uncrossing it or where it ends), but if we do, I hope we’re prepared to see clearly our own actions.
Maybe have them read “On Killing” by Dave Grossman and see if they want to be killers after that. It’s strikes me that they probably don’t know violence like they think they do.
The students seem to be asking you to escalate. You're trying to persuade them that persuasion matters, and they're saying no, only force matters. Therefore, they are asking you to resort to force.
They are asking to live in a world where everything is settled by brute force. Maybe that's because they think in such a world they would always win? But that is unlikely. Maybe they should calculate, coldly, whether it's worth gambling on a such a zero-sum world, or if they'd consider negotiations in persuasion where the results will definitely not be ideal, but have a chance of being not-as-bad as Nothing Short of Total War?
I think this mindset has become commonplace and its violence made less obvious as a consequence of social gatekeeping: especially online you can choose who you see and don't see -- who EXISTS and who doesn't exist. People who have the wrong perspectives are removed, blocked, muted, or disappeared. But the IRL version of that is horrific. And what you do with people who don't think you're human is you show them that you're human. Demonstrate humanity.
I'd also argue that the reason you do not resort to becoming a monster is because your "decency" your "soul" your "character" -- whatever you want to call it -- matters.
Mao Zedong said all power comes from the barrel of a gun. All government power, perhaps, but moral suasion can be potent without the threat of violence.
Marxian thought seems to be endemic these days, in matters far removed from economics; although true Marxists would say they are all related, and I would disagree. I hate "package deal" politics, whether MAGA or the Omnicause.
The key is to find out what the moral fulcrum is to stick your Archimedes' lever upon to use nonviolent persuasion.
I still maintain that authority has an accountability problem: authority tends towards unaccountability. This goes for the authorities governing both sides--ICE as well as their opponents. The heckler's veto is being supported by some authority. Something is holding that up. And that something will be difficult to impossible to hold accountable. We're seeing some amount of accountability for ICE, although there was resistance to that accountability at first and it remains to be seen whether that accountability will be sufficient. There is an unfortunate tendency for supporters of a particular authority to take a "FAFO" approach to that authority's abuses, as if the abuse of that authority is a feature and not a bug.
That might be a clue; if your power is dependent on the people in authority, then that can change quickly and to your detriment--especially when accountability is lacking. Think of your worst political enemy, and imagine if they were allowed to define "hate speech" and the bounds of acceptable discourse, enforceable at the point of a gun. Hence the need to adhere to classical principles to prevent a Hobbesian "nasty, brutish, and short" endgame.
I've said this before: the endgame of "cancel culture" is not the subduing of one side. It is Mutually Assured Destruction.
Do you ever do a reductio ad absurdum in class to show your students who attitudes like their were shared by the young people who supported Hitler and the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s? Do you ever ask them what's wrong with "Might makes right?" Could they answer you if you did, or would they agree?
I found both parts of this series genuinely compelling, and I want to engage with the argument seriously rather than dismissively. I think you're right that your students are drawing the wrong conclusion, but I think you may be underdiagnosing why.
Your case rests on Chenoweth's research, which is strong. But Chenoweth studied campaigns against regimes where, however brutal the suppression, there remained a shared underlying reality that people could converge on once the regime fell. The epistemic commons was suppressed, but it still existed.
What we're facing now is fundamentally different. We are not dealing with a shared reality that one side is suppressing. We are dealing with parallel realities that are algorithmically generated, financially incentivized, and self-reinforcing. Significant portions of the American political landscape, MAGA, the tech-oligarch class, the Project 2025 architects, are not operating within a democratic framework they interpret differently. They are operating outside it, with the explicit or functional goal of dismantling deliberative self-governance.
Your students sense this, even if they articulate it poorly. When they say "persuasion assumes the other side is reachable," they're not just being impatient. They're identifying a genuine structural problem: persuasion requires a shared epistemic ground on which arguments can land. What is the strategic play when that ground has been fractured, not by censorship, but by the industrial-scale manufacture of alternative realities?
Chenoweth's loyalty-shift mechanism, where institutional pillars defect from the regime, depends on those pillars being able to recognize what is actually happening. How does that mechanism function when the information environment has already reframed defection as betrayal and compliance as patriotism?
I'm not asking this rhetorically. I genuinely want to know what you think the play is. Because I agree with you that abandoning persuasion leads somewhere catastrophic. But telling students to keep talking while the epistemic infrastructure that makes talking meaningful is being dismantled around them, that feels like it needs a stronger answer than "I'll walk back into the room next week."
What does disciplined nonviolent resistance look like when the fight isn't over policy, but over shared reality itself?
I think you're right to identify algorithmic bubbles and lack of shared reality. But even before we had those, persuasion was never about hitting somebody over the head with facts until they agree with you. Rather, it was about meeting someone where they are and gently persuading them from there. Our algorithmic bubbles go both ways -- not only are we not exposed to ideas from outside our bubble, we can't even articulate the basics of what people in a different bubble value or think. This may not have been your intent, but the three problem audiences you identify in your comment are all left-coded nomenclature. Someone on the right reading your comment is likely to dismiss it based on that nomenclature alone. I think the only solution to our polarization is to climb inside each other's heads in a very real way.
Long response, only because I find this compelling, beg pardon:
The nomenclature point is fair. Tribal signals in an argument about tribalism are self-defeating. Taken seriously.
But I want to push on something your framing consistently avoids, because I think it's where the argument actually lives.
You locate the problem in how students have been taught, safetyism, the conflation of disagreement with injury, a campus culture that trained students for moral emergency rather than democratic conflict. That diagnosis isn't wrong. But it's incomplete in a way that matters, because it treats the cultural symptom while leaving the structural cause unexamined.
Ask a different question: why would anyone, student or otherwise, believe that legitimate channels produce legitimate results? Not as a theoretical proposition, but as an inference from forty years of observable outcomes. Post-Reagan economics systematically hollowed out the conditions under which ordinary people could build stable lives, while concentrating wealth at a scale not seen since the Gilded Age. 2008 wiped out the savings and homes of millions of ordinary people, and not one architect of that collapse faced meaningful legal consequence. Corporate extraction continues without accountability. The legal system demonstrably operates differently depending on your resources. Elites across the political spectrum have demonstrated, repeatedly and visibly, that they live outside the consequences of their own decisions.
Your students aren't drawing irrational conclusions from that record. They're pattern-matching accurately against a system that has spent four decades signaling, through its actual outcomes rather than its stated values, that persuasion and democratic participation produce results for some people and not others. When you call that loss of faith a cultural problem rooted in bad pedagogy, you're diagnosing the fever as the disease.
And here's the question your framework hasn't answered: if Chenoweth's mechanisms were functioning, if nonviolent pressure, institutional recognition, and loyalty shifts operate the way the historical data suggests, how did we get here? There were movements. There was organizing. There was litigation, journalism, electoral campaigns, sustained nonviolent pressure across decades. The wealth concentration continued. The institutional capture accelerated. The legal asymmetries deepened. Either the mechanisms were weaker than the data suggested in this specific context, or they were neutralized faster than they could be activated by actors who had the most to lose from them working. The people who believed the corrective mechanisms would always self-activate simply didn't account for the possibility that those mechanisms could be captured. That's not a student problem. That's a systems problem.
You suggest meeting people where they are as the path through our polarization. I want to take that seriously, because it's the right instinct when the conditions for it exist. But consider what it actually requires in practice. How do you meet someone where they are when where they are is the conviction that equality itself is contrary to divine order, that the nation has a racial and religious destiny that supersedes democratic deliberation? Or when where they are is the conclusion that democratic deliberation is itself a mechanism of oppression, that participating in elections and institutional processes doesn't reform the system but legitimizes it? In both cases, the shared premise your technique requires has been placed outside the conversation before it begins. Meeting them there doesn't lead to a bridge. It leads to a place where your own standing in the deliberation is the contested object.
There's a global dimension here worth naming too. For most of the 20th century, the American democratic experiment, however imperfect, however mythologized , functioned as a convergence point. A reference frame. Dissidents under authoritarian regimes could point somewhere. Populations under repression had a conceptual alternative to measure against. Defecting institutional pillars had somewhere to defect toward, both practically and imaginatively. That reference point made every authoritarian's job harder, and it made Chenoweth's loyalty-shift mechanism more powerful than the data alone can capture. When that reference point is actively dismantled, not just tarnished but structurally destroyed, you don't lose American soft power. You lose the shared imaginative ground that made democratic alternatives conceivable for people inside captured information environments. What's replaced it isn't a competing universal framework. It's tribally specific cosmologies with no cross-tribal convergence point, each financially maintained and algorithmically reinforced by actors with strong incentives to keep them separate.
I want to be precise about what I'm not arguing. I'm not arguing your students are right about violence. The Chenoweth data on that remains compelling regardless of everything else I've raised. And I'm not arguing persuasion has no value. I'm arguing that your framework is optimized for conditions that the system itself has spent decades eroding, a functioning epistemic commons, institutional pillars capable of recognizing reality, and a population that has sufficient evidence that legitimate channels work to keep investing in them.
The most honest version of the historical record adds one more uncomfortable layer. The changes we point to as persuasion's great victories didn't eliminate the underlying belief structures. They suppressed or reframed them. We're watching those beliefs resurge now in institutional forms that would have seemed impossible twenty years ago. Which raises the question: how much of what looked like successful persuasion was actually a shift in what was socially and legally permissible, with the underlying architecture of those beliefs intact the entire time, waiting for the conditions under which they could return?
The students you're worried about are not the cause of democratic erosion. They are its product. The tribalism you're watching isn't a temporary regression that better pedagogy can reverse. It's a rational, if dangerous, response to a system that demonstrably stopped working for most people while continuing to work extremely well for a small number of people who successfully insulated themselves from accountability.
The question isn't why students have lost faith in persuasion. The question is what evidence they were supposed to be drawing on to maintain it. And the harder question, one none of us have answered, including me, is what comes next when the fight isn't over policy or power, but over whether shared reality itself can be recovered.
Your reply is incredibly thoughtful. I appreciate you taking the time to type that up. We clearly agree on the "what," even if we differ on the "why." (Also, a quick level-set since you mentioned "your students": I'm not the OP nor am I a teacher -- just some idiot on the internet, though I hope my reply does yours justice.)
Pattern-matching vs pedagogy:
"Your students aren't drawing irrational conclusions from that record. They're pattern-matching accurately against a system that has spent four decades signaling [...] that persuasion and democratic participation produce results for some people and not others."
This is an exceptionally well-stated point. The reason I don't think my focus on pedagogy is "diagnosing the fever as the disease" is because it is so, so easy to misidentify the true culprit in systemic problems across the many overlapping complex systems that make up our modern world -- a problem made worse by a small number of influential players in that system who purposefully game it for clicks, votes, or to intentionally sow discord.
I am continually and repeatedly struck in life by how unprepared we are as a populace to cast informed votes on topics that each require a great deal of education to understand even the basics. We've moved from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, yet most of the electorate (and even many of the educators) lack a functional understanding of statistics, economics, international relations, or law.
Polarization:
I'm wary of terms like "shared reality" or "same set of facts". There are very few real "raw facts" because most raw data also needs statistical analysis or touches on personal values or prioritization.
There is a causal overlap between the system problems discussed below and polarization. The "bubbles go both ways" from my previous comment is an example of someone not being "informed" enough, but on a personal level instead of an educational level. A kind of "ideological turing test". If someone from "Team Left" cannot explain the worldview of someone from "Team Right" in a way that the person on the Right would agree to (or vice versa) then it can very much seem like that person is being unreasonable. (Marriage counselors often face this exact same problem.) While truly unreasonable people do exist, they are a tiny pathological minority. Most of the divide comes from a lack of basic understanding, which then leads to frustration, which then leads to anger and harsh words, which then leads to dismissing the person as unreasonable, which finally increases polarization further. (The "own the libs" phenomenon is a perfect example of a third-order escalation in this dance.)
This is one area where I would want and expect an educational environment to help with a bottom-up solution -- everybody should take a debate class where they have to win a contest using an idea they don't hold! :-)
Systemic problems:
My priors are that I believe our systemic problems are bottom-up, not top-down. Your point about elites living outside the consequences of their decisions is spot-on and we agree on the dire consequences of 2008, but we seem to disagree on the catalyst. (I'm avoiding my opinion on that catalyst here to keep my point focused, but I'm happy to dive into specifics later on request.)
The failures you cited -- 2008, the legal asymmetries, and general instability -- all stem from we, the voters, weren't engaged or informed enough to see through the spin and rampant blame misdirection, so we never demanded specific accountability. Popular anger was high, but it was undirected and impotent because we lacked the technical literacy to demand the right kind of prosecutions or reforms. You asked, "How did we get here?" My answer is that a "bottom-up" failure (an uninformed or distracted public) is exactly what allows powerful people to rig the game. The "top-down" corruption you're describing is the result, not the cause. The corrective mechanisms have been captured because we voters lack the sophistication to even ask the right questions, let alone vote the bums out.
The students we're discussing are all three: the product, the unwitting engine, and the victim of this ongoing erosion.
Persuasion vs shifting Overton window:
"How much of what looked like successful persuasion was actually a shift in what was socially and legally permissible, with the underlying architecture of those beliefs intact the entire time, waiting for the conditions under which they could return?"
Fascinating question. Short answer is I have no idea, just a few gut-reactions, but would love to explore that independently of these other topics. Another time perhaps.
> The strategic logic could not compete with a deeper mood: that speech is merely performative, and that power yields only to force or coercion.
There is a rich irony here. In rejecting pragmatic effectiveness in favor of taboo-violating actions, your students choose an action which they perceive as powerful but is actually impotent.
Superficially meaningful but ultimately hollow actions are definitionally performative.
Violence, done for political purposes, is no more or less a performance than is speech.
Although I agree with this essay, but also feel a great deal of empathy for these students (being only a few years older).
I think this sentiment is best expressed in el gato Malo's most recent essay regarding soft power Vs hard power.
America (and by extension, the rest of the Anglosphere) has just witnessed a "soft power" movement get well out of hand, and are now witnessing the transition to a hard power world, as such there is a great deal of trepidation about what comes next.
Whether these institutions can be reformed and America once again return to a (truth-seeking) soft power status quo remains to be seen.
Was it really a soft power world, or just folds of fine drapery hiding weakness and foolishness? Open borders, demilitarization, mass migration of incompatible cultures, net zero?
Highly recommend the essay I mention (on "bad cattititude" publication) as he goes into more detail about how soft power taken to extremes becomes an internalised contradiction.
It sounds to me that it is not their opponents writ large who are the ones that are unreachable by persuasion. If this attitude is widespread among the educated youth, then that worries me deeply. To the best of my knowledge, revolutions generally don't begin amongst the working class. They tend to begin with disgruntled elites, propelled by the justifications of intellectuals. Despite all of our current problems, those problems pale in comparison to the horrors that widespread political violence brings. Just ask Lebanon.
At what point and how does speech intersect with knowledge and truth? Our world and the college campus - often the factory of fantasies - is filled with monstrous hoaxes, dogma and inventions. Do these students ever entertain the notion that they might be wrong? They need a lesson in knowledge as much or more than a lecture on free speech. A short history tour of the 1930’s intellectual glorification of communism would be a good start.
Good work. I don’t think we can underestimate the harm our two-party system has done to trust in our society. It’s not just been beautiful empty words, but good words and even intents twisted. No offense, but even your argument could be twisted to compliance unto death.
I hope we don’t cross this line (there’s no uncrossing it or where it ends), but if we do, I hope we’re prepared to see clearly our own actions.
Maybe have them read “On Killing” by Dave Grossman and see if they want to be killers after that. It’s strikes me that they probably don’t know violence like they think they do.
The students seem to be asking you to escalate. You're trying to persuade them that persuasion matters, and they're saying no, only force matters. Therefore, they are asking you to resort to force.
They are asking to live in a world where everything is settled by brute force. Maybe that's because they think in such a world they would always win? But that is unlikely. Maybe they should calculate, coldly, whether it's worth gambling on a such a zero-sum world, or if they'd consider negotiations in persuasion where the results will definitely not be ideal, but have a chance of being not-as-bad as Nothing Short of Total War?
I think this mindset has become commonplace and its violence made less obvious as a consequence of social gatekeeping: especially online you can choose who you see and don't see -- who EXISTS and who doesn't exist. People who have the wrong perspectives are removed, blocked, muted, or disappeared. But the IRL version of that is horrific. And what you do with people who don't think you're human is you show them that you're human. Demonstrate humanity.
I'd also argue that the reason you do not resort to becoming a monster is because your "decency" your "soul" your "character" -- whatever you want to call it -- matters.
Mao Zedong said all power comes from the barrel of a gun. All government power, perhaps, but moral suasion can be potent without the threat of violence.
Marxian thought seems to be endemic these days, in matters far removed from economics; although true Marxists would say they are all related, and I would disagree. I hate "package deal" politics, whether MAGA or the Omnicause.
The key is to find out what the moral fulcrum is to stick your Archimedes' lever upon to use nonviolent persuasion.
I still maintain that authority has an accountability problem: authority tends towards unaccountability. This goes for the authorities governing both sides--ICE as well as their opponents. The heckler's veto is being supported by some authority. Something is holding that up. And that something will be difficult to impossible to hold accountable. We're seeing some amount of accountability for ICE, although there was resistance to that accountability at first and it remains to be seen whether that accountability will be sufficient. There is an unfortunate tendency for supporters of a particular authority to take a "FAFO" approach to that authority's abuses, as if the abuse of that authority is a feature and not a bug.
That might be a clue; if your power is dependent on the people in authority, then that can change quickly and to your detriment--especially when accountability is lacking. Think of your worst political enemy, and imagine if they were allowed to define "hate speech" and the bounds of acceptable discourse, enforceable at the point of a gun. Hence the need to adhere to classical principles to prevent a Hobbesian "nasty, brutish, and short" endgame.
I've said this before: the endgame of "cancel culture" is not the subduing of one side. It is Mutually Assured Destruction.
Do you ever do a reductio ad absurdum in class to show your students who attitudes like their were shared by the young people who supported Hitler and the Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s? Do you ever ask them what's wrong with "Might makes right?" Could they answer you if you did, or would they agree?
I found both parts of this series genuinely compelling, and I want to engage with the argument seriously rather than dismissively. I think you're right that your students are drawing the wrong conclusion, but I think you may be underdiagnosing why.
Your case rests on Chenoweth's research, which is strong. But Chenoweth studied campaigns against regimes where, however brutal the suppression, there remained a shared underlying reality that people could converge on once the regime fell. The epistemic commons was suppressed, but it still existed.
What we're facing now is fundamentally different. We are not dealing with a shared reality that one side is suppressing. We are dealing with parallel realities that are algorithmically generated, financially incentivized, and self-reinforcing. Significant portions of the American political landscape, MAGA, the tech-oligarch class, the Project 2025 architects, are not operating within a democratic framework they interpret differently. They are operating outside it, with the explicit or functional goal of dismantling deliberative self-governance.
Your students sense this, even if they articulate it poorly. When they say "persuasion assumes the other side is reachable," they're not just being impatient. They're identifying a genuine structural problem: persuasion requires a shared epistemic ground on which arguments can land. What is the strategic play when that ground has been fractured, not by censorship, but by the industrial-scale manufacture of alternative realities?
Chenoweth's loyalty-shift mechanism, where institutional pillars defect from the regime, depends on those pillars being able to recognize what is actually happening. How does that mechanism function when the information environment has already reframed defection as betrayal and compliance as patriotism?
I'm not asking this rhetorically. I genuinely want to know what you think the play is. Because I agree with you that abandoning persuasion leads somewhere catastrophic. But telling students to keep talking while the epistemic infrastructure that makes talking meaningful is being dismantled around them, that feels like it needs a stronger answer than "I'll walk back into the room next week."
What does disciplined nonviolent resistance look like when the fight isn't over policy, but over shared reality itself?
I think you're right to identify algorithmic bubbles and lack of shared reality. But even before we had those, persuasion was never about hitting somebody over the head with facts until they agree with you. Rather, it was about meeting someone where they are and gently persuading them from there. Our algorithmic bubbles go both ways -- not only are we not exposed to ideas from outside our bubble, we can't even articulate the basics of what people in a different bubble value or think. This may not have been your intent, but the three problem audiences you identify in your comment are all left-coded nomenclature. Someone on the right reading your comment is likely to dismiss it based on that nomenclature alone. I think the only solution to our polarization is to climb inside each other's heads in a very real way.
Long response, only because I find this compelling, beg pardon:
The nomenclature point is fair. Tribal signals in an argument about tribalism are self-defeating. Taken seriously.
But I want to push on something your framing consistently avoids, because I think it's where the argument actually lives.
You locate the problem in how students have been taught, safetyism, the conflation of disagreement with injury, a campus culture that trained students for moral emergency rather than democratic conflict. That diagnosis isn't wrong. But it's incomplete in a way that matters, because it treats the cultural symptom while leaving the structural cause unexamined.
Ask a different question: why would anyone, student or otherwise, believe that legitimate channels produce legitimate results? Not as a theoretical proposition, but as an inference from forty years of observable outcomes. Post-Reagan economics systematically hollowed out the conditions under which ordinary people could build stable lives, while concentrating wealth at a scale not seen since the Gilded Age. 2008 wiped out the savings and homes of millions of ordinary people, and not one architect of that collapse faced meaningful legal consequence. Corporate extraction continues without accountability. The legal system demonstrably operates differently depending on your resources. Elites across the political spectrum have demonstrated, repeatedly and visibly, that they live outside the consequences of their own decisions.
Your students aren't drawing irrational conclusions from that record. They're pattern-matching accurately against a system that has spent four decades signaling, through its actual outcomes rather than its stated values, that persuasion and democratic participation produce results for some people and not others. When you call that loss of faith a cultural problem rooted in bad pedagogy, you're diagnosing the fever as the disease.
And here's the question your framework hasn't answered: if Chenoweth's mechanisms were functioning, if nonviolent pressure, institutional recognition, and loyalty shifts operate the way the historical data suggests, how did we get here? There were movements. There was organizing. There was litigation, journalism, electoral campaigns, sustained nonviolent pressure across decades. The wealth concentration continued. The institutional capture accelerated. The legal asymmetries deepened. Either the mechanisms were weaker than the data suggested in this specific context, or they were neutralized faster than they could be activated by actors who had the most to lose from them working. The people who believed the corrective mechanisms would always self-activate simply didn't account for the possibility that those mechanisms could be captured. That's not a student problem. That's a systems problem.
You suggest meeting people where they are as the path through our polarization. I want to take that seriously, because it's the right instinct when the conditions for it exist. But consider what it actually requires in practice. How do you meet someone where they are when where they are is the conviction that equality itself is contrary to divine order, that the nation has a racial and religious destiny that supersedes democratic deliberation? Or when where they are is the conclusion that democratic deliberation is itself a mechanism of oppression, that participating in elections and institutional processes doesn't reform the system but legitimizes it? In both cases, the shared premise your technique requires has been placed outside the conversation before it begins. Meeting them there doesn't lead to a bridge. It leads to a place where your own standing in the deliberation is the contested object.
There's a global dimension here worth naming too. For most of the 20th century, the American democratic experiment, however imperfect, however mythologized , functioned as a convergence point. A reference frame. Dissidents under authoritarian regimes could point somewhere. Populations under repression had a conceptual alternative to measure against. Defecting institutional pillars had somewhere to defect toward, both practically and imaginatively. That reference point made every authoritarian's job harder, and it made Chenoweth's loyalty-shift mechanism more powerful than the data alone can capture. When that reference point is actively dismantled, not just tarnished but structurally destroyed, you don't lose American soft power. You lose the shared imaginative ground that made democratic alternatives conceivable for people inside captured information environments. What's replaced it isn't a competing universal framework. It's tribally specific cosmologies with no cross-tribal convergence point, each financially maintained and algorithmically reinforced by actors with strong incentives to keep them separate.
I want to be precise about what I'm not arguing. I'm not arguing your students are right about violence. The Chenoweth data on that remains compelling regardless of everything else I've raised. And I'm not arguing persuasion has no value. I'm arguing that your framework is optimized for conditions that the system itself has spent decades eroding, a functioning epistemic commons, institutional pillars capable of recognizing reality, and a population that has sufficient evidence that legitimate channels work to keep investing in them.
The most honest version of the historical record adds one more uncomfortable layer. The changes we point to as persuasion's great victories didn't eliminate the underlying belief structures. They suppressed or reframed them. We're watching those beliefs resurge now in institutional forms that would have seemed impossible twenty years ago. Which raises the question: how much of what looked like successful persuasion was actually a shift in what was socially and legally permissible, with the underlying architecture of those beliefs intact the entire time, waiting for the conditions under which they could return?
The students you're worried about are not the cause of democratic erosion. They are its product. The tribalism you're watching isn't a temporary regression that better pedagogy can reverse. It's a rational, if dangerous, response to a system that demonstrably stopped working for most people while continuing to work extremely well for a small number of people who successfully insulated themselves from accountability.
The question isn't why students have lost faith in persuasion. The question is what evidence they were supposed to be drawing on to maintain it. And the harder question, one none of us have answered, including me, is what comes next when the fight isn't over policy or power, but over whether shared reality itself can be recovered.
Your reply is incredibly thoughtful. I appreciate you taking the time to type that up. We clearly agree on the "what," even if we differ on the "why." (Also, a quick level-set since you mentioned "your students": I'm not the OP nor am I a teacher -- just some idiot on the internet, though I hope my reply does yours justice.)
Pattern-matching vs pedagogy:
"Your students aren't drawing irrational conclusions from that record. They're pattern-matching accurately against a system that has spent four decades signaling [...] that persuasion and democratic participation produce results for some people and not others."
This is an exceptionally well-stated point. The reason I don't think my focus on pedagogy is "diagnosing the fever as the disease" is because it is so, so easy to misidentify the true culprit in systemic problems across the many overlapping complex systems that make up our modern world -- a problem made worse by a small number of influential players in that system who purposefully game it for clicks, votes, or to intentionally sow discord.
I am continually and repeatedly struck in life by how unprepared we are as a populace to cast informed votes on topics that each require a great deal of education to understand even the basics. We've moved from the Industrial Age to the Information Age, yet most of the electorate (and even many of the educators) lack a functional understanding of statistics, economics, international relations, or law.
Polarization:
I'm wary of terms like "shared reality" or "same set of facts". There are very few real "raw facts" because most raw data also needs statistical analysis or touches on personal values or prioritization.
There is a causal overlap between the system problems discussed below and polarization. The "bubbles go both ways" from my previous comment is an example of someone not being "informed" enough, but on a personal level instead of an educational level. A kind of "ideological turing test". If someone from "Team Left" cannot explain the worldview of someone from "Team Right" in a way that the person on the Right would agree to (or vice versa) then it can very much seem like that person is being unreasonable. (Marriage counselors often face this exact same problem.) While truly unreasonable people do exist, they are a tiny pathological minority. Most of the divide comes from a lack of basic understanding, which then leads to frustration, which then leads to anger and harsh words, which then leads to dismissing the person as unreasonable, which finally increases polarization further. (The "own the libs" phenomenon is a perfect example of a third-order escalation in this dance.)
This is one area where I would want and expect an educational environment to help with a bottom-up solution -- everybody should take a debate class where they have to win a contest using an idea they don't hold! :-)
Systemic problems:
My priors are that I believe our systemic problems are bottom-up, not top-down. Your point about elites living outside the consequences of their decisions is spot-on and we agree on the dire consequences of 2008, but we seem to disagree on the catalyst. (I'm avoiding my opinion on that catalyst here to keep my point focused, but I'm happy to dive into specifics later on request.)
The failures you cited -- 2008, the legal asymmetries, and general instability -- all stem from we, the voters, weren't engaged or informed enough to see through the spin and rampant blame misdirection, so we never demanded specific accountability. Popular anger was high, but it was undirected and impotent because we lacked the technical literacy to demand the right kind of prosecutions or reforms. You asked, "How did we get here?" My answer is that a "bottom-up" failure (an uninformed or distracted public) is exactly what allows powerful people to rig the game. The "top-down" corruption you're describing is the result, not the cause. The corrective mechanisms have been captured because we voters lack the sophistication to even ask the right questions, let alone vote the bums out.
The students we're discussing are all three: the product, the unwitting engine, and the victim of this ongoing erosion.
Persuasion vs shifting Overton window:
"How much of what looked like successful persuasion was actually a shift in what was socially and legally permissible, with the underlying architecture of those beliefs intact the entire time, waiting for the conditions under which they could return?"
Fascinating question. Short answer is I have no idea, just a few gut-reactions, but would love to explore that independently of these other topics. Another time perhaps.
> The strategic logic could not compete with a deeper mood: that speech is merely performative, and that power yields only to force or coercion.
There is a rich irony here. In rejecting pragmatic effectiveness in favor of taboo-violating actions, your students choose an action which they perceive as powerful but is actually impotent.
Superficially meaningful but ultimately hollow actions are definitionally performative.
Violence, done for political purposes, is no more or less a performance than is speech.
Although I agree with this essay, but also feel a great deal of empathy for these students (being only a few years older).
I think this sentiment is best expressed in el gato Malo's most recent essay regarding soft power Vs hard power.
America (and by extension, the rest of the Anglosphere) has just witnessed a "soft power" movement get well out of hand, and are now witnessing the transition to a hard power world, as such there is a great deal of trepidation about what comes next.
Whether these institutions can be reformed and America once again return to a (truth-seeking) soft power status quo remains to be seen.
Was it really a soft power world, or just folds of fine drapery hiding weakness and foolishness? Open borders, demilitarization, mass migration of incompatible cultures, net zero?
Highly recommend the essay I mention (on "bad cattititude" publication) as he goes into more detail about how soft power taken to extremes becomes an internalised contradiction.