Should we have a liberal democracy or an authoritarian cult of personality?
By 
Views differ:
Social scientists distinguish between two kinds of polarization, ideological and affective. Ideological polarization occurs when people move further apart in their political beliefs and preferences. But affective polarization, which is the true scourge, takes place when your politics become a core feature of your identity, leading you to have negative feelings toward those who disagree with you. . . .
Perhaps the biggest cost of this self-sorting is the dampening effect on debate and critical thinking. Even at the most progressive universities the student body isn’t truly politically homogeneous: Yale may have about nine solidly liberal students for every one conservative, judging from data collected in 2025 by the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, but over a quarter of Yale students characterize their politics as more middle of the road. Those disagreements could, in theory, become the basis for productive conversations that sharpen minds and cultivate political tolerance.
This is from an op-ed about how we need to make colleges and universities places that are more tolerant of a variety of political viewpoints. As Karl Popper probably didn’t say, seriously wtf homes?
In theory, toleration of a variety of political viewpoints is desirable in a university setting. In practice — and we are very much talking about practice here Mr. Iverson — the government of the United States of America is currently controlled by a political movement that is opposed in principle to critical thinking. This is a truth that far from being universally acknowledged continues to be reflexively denied by “moderate” right wingers, reactionary. centrists, and even the liberals of every stripe (but I repeat myself).
Here’s a course description for a new class I’ve developed over the last couple of years at the University of Colorado Law School:
Special Topics: American Law in Crisis
The focus of American Law in Crisis will be various issues at the center of the current crisis in American law and politics, and in particular the current assault on liberal democracy and the rule of law
One topic we will examine in some depth is extent to which the American legal and political systems are being pushed toward some variety of authoritarian Christianist nationalism, with potentially fascistic overtones.
Related to this, we will look at the Supreme Court’s current legitimacy crisis, including reform proposals to curtail the Court’s power within the contemporary American legal and political system.
We will consider the implications for the legal system of various prosecutions and civil actions in which Donald Trump is or was a criminal and civil defendant, and the effect of the Supreme Court’s recent decision, granting him broad-based immunity against criminal prosecution, both while he is in office, and in perpetuity afterwards.
We will look at what the political scientist Juan Linz has called “the perils of presidentialism,” in the context of the contemporary American legal and political scene: that is, the historical tendency of presidential systems in the Americas to break down because of competing claims of ultimate sovereignty between the executive and legislative branches.
We will compare the social crises of America in the late 1960s and those of today, and will focus on the issue of the extent to which today’s issues represent some sort of fundamental threat to social and political national stability.
We will analyze the rise of a self-conscious white identity politics in America, and the implications this has for the American legal and political systems.
We will look at the crisis of legal meaning that is one possible outcome of the current explosion of artificial intelligence technologies, that are playing an increasingly prominent role in the legal system.
The class will also follow the most current political developments, and in particular the scheduled 2026 midterm elections, using them as a backdrop for discussing the larger issues that the ongoing political and legal crisis in America raises regarding the topics covered in the course.
Class discussion will be informal, and sensitive to pursuing those themes and topics that seem most important under the circumstances: those circumstances being the political and legal crisis currently faced by the American system of law and government.
The readings for the class will be eclectic, and designed to inspire genuine engagement.
They will include books such as Kristen Luker’s Abortion and Politics of Motherhood, and Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of Fascism, along with essays such as Joan Didion’s “The White Album,” Umberto Eco’s “Ur-Fascism,” Rick Perlstein’s “The Long Con,” and Ta-Nehisi Coates’, “The First White President.”
This class is going to be taught from the perspective and organizing principle that liberal democracy and the rule of law are desirable, and an at least crypto-fascistic ethno-nationalist authoritarian cult of personality is bad.
But here’s the thing: I understand, unlike apparently our opinion writer above, that people genuinely disagree about this! I also understand that there’s no way of arguing people out of their fundamental political identities and commitments, and an anti-fascist class isn’t going to make a fascist any less fascist, or at least that’s highly unlikely. Understanding what’s going on in the American legal system right now requires understanding that we are currently in a struggle over the most fundamental political questions, and there’s no way to understand that without grappling with what those questions actually are, such as is liberal democracy a good thing? Again, that people — lots of very real people right here right now in America in 2026 — actually disagree about this in the most fundamental possible way is something that all our sanewashing guardians of the guardrails absolutely refuse to acknowledge.
Thus the first reading in this class is going to be this.