Taking the red pill: In conversations surrounding online extremism, we tend to assume that vulnerable young men may easily be distinguished from the extremists who radicalize them. But the latest essay in The Harper Review’s spring issue argues that this model of radicalization fails to acknowledge how the internet’s culture of irony and permissiveness toward offensive and “edgy” statements allows extremist content to permeate the mainstream. William Moursund analyzes the history of white nationalism and neo-Nazism online, concluding that we may never be able to address the threat of extremism until we recognize how radical thought is latent in virtually all political discourse on the internet.
On converting to Straussianism: The latest entrant into The Harper Review’s spring debate over the proposition “We should tell children the truth” is writer and former University of Chicago assistant professor Blake Smith. There’s great thrill in viewing oneself as a member of the select few who possess “‘the Truth’ in its majestic singularity,” and may choose whether or not to communicate it to younger minds, Smith writes. But instead of giving in to the allure of the Truth, we must recognize that acknowledging our own uncertainty is the first step to living and thinking together in the most meaningful and generative way.
Mormon socialism: According to a 2016 Pew survey, members of the Church of Latter-Day Saints are the most politically conservative religious group in America. But this has not always been the case. As Gus Breslauer writes in Jacobin, Mormon society, emerging out of the Second Great Awakening, embraced “radical forms of equality.” Mormon leaders encouraged (and sometimes coerced) members to follow “divinely ordained” collectivist programs such as egalitarian living, cooperative farming, and high tithing for welfare projects, with some communities even abolishing private ownership of land and factories. However, Mormon egalitarianism became a barrier to social acceptance and full citizenship, so the Church lurched rightward to meet a conservative American society. But despite its current iron-red reputation, Utah has one of the lowest rates of income inequality in America and one of the highest of volunteerism, a legacy of its communitarian past.
Owning the illiberals: Historians have often challenged liberalism from the left and the right, while continuously characterizing America as a fundamentally liberal nation. Historian Steven Hahn’s new book Illiberal America disputes this idea. In a recent review of the book for The New Republic, political historian Julian Zelizer writes about Hahn’s depiction of America’s illiberal foundation and its influence in shaping American political life. Hahn draws from a long list of illiberal domestic policies and logics, from 18th-century corporal punishment to the 21st-century great replacement theory. Addressing the elephant in the room, Zelizer argues that Hahn’s writing should “stimulate a new look at liberalism itself.” Instead of viewing liberalism as a given, we must recognize the intentional efforts that keep it alive.
Faithless: What happens without belief? Where does pure intellectualism take us? In an essay for First Things magazine, acclaimed Russian literature scholar Gary Saul Morson turns toward the cultural and political history of Russia, the perennial “extreme case,” to venture an answer to these questions. Morson explains how the Western ideas of atheism and materialism, mixed with a disdain for complexity, not only caused moral blindness in communist Russia but also led to a disposition toward total, unprecedented, and even nonsensical evil. Morson writes that some—whether prescient like Dostoevsky or reflective like Solzhenitsyn—understood this danger and saw the way out through belief in the transcendent. We in the West, Morson concludes, would be wise to listen to these Russian prescriptions.