Aaron Ross Powell’s Blog

Politics, culture, and philosophy through a radical liberal lens. Co-host of the Inner Life of Liberalism podcast.

The Ethics of Not Being Offended

Discomfort isn't harm. Treating it as harm burns the finite moral attention we need for the suffering that actually exists.

April 21, 2026

The Kids Aren’t Into Retro Tech Because of Surveillance Capitalism

Teenagers buying CDs aren't making a political statement. They just like CDs.

April 18, 2026

ReImagining Liberty Ends (And What's to Come)

After 101 episodes, it's time to move on to new projects.

April 05, 2026

Who Is AI Music For?

Google's music-making AI makes songs. I just can't figure out why anyone would listen to them.

March 26, 2026

The Inner Life of Liberalism

The practices that make your life better are the same ones that sustain a free society. It's time liberalism took that seriously.

March 20, 2026

Argumentation and Illumination: Two Ways Philosophy Works

Some philosophy works by proving a conclusion. Some works by making something visible you couldn't see before. Here's why the distinction matters.

March 14, 2026

ReImagining Liberty 098: The Practice and Inner Life of Liberalism (w/ Jason Canon)

A podcast conversation.

March 11, 2026

If You’ve Only Ever Played D&D, You’re Missing Out

Tabletop RPGs are story engines. Why would you want to tell only one kind of story?

February 11, 2026

The Faux-Sophistication of Doomer Despair

It's okay to feel despair in the moment. But it's dumb to insist we've already lost.

February 04, 2026

Trump is Governing a Country that Doesn't Exist—And Destroying One That Does

Cognitive decline and a curated information environment means Trump has no idea what's happening in the world outside his head.

January 27, 2026

The Regime Has No Defense Against a Good Neighbor

America’s political divide is between neighborliness and neighborhood pariahs, and neighborliness is winning.

January 25, 2026

ReImagining Liberty is taking a short break

A brief pause for the next big thing.

January 22, 2026

What Pete Hegseth’s Kettlebell Swings Tell Us About MAGA Ideology

MAGA is built on a fundamental lack of the internal protective quality that warns us when we are debasing ourselves.

January 12, 2026

My Favorite Movie of 2025

It's not the year's best movie, but Spinal Tap 2 brought me the most joy.

December 24, 2025

ReImagining Liberty 096: The Irrationality of Rationalists (w/ Samantha Hancox-Li)

A podcast conversation.

December 23, 2025

You Can't Escape the Algorithm

Chronological feeds won't fix social media

December 17, 2025

Spending Time with Spinal Tap (Again)

(Originally published September 22, 2025)

December 15, 2025

ReImagining Liberty 095: Adam Gurri on Opposition Meda versus Complicit Media

A podcast conversation.

December 12, 2025

MAGA is an Auto-Humiliation Movement

Trump is shameless, yes. But he also has a fetish for humiliating himself.

December 05, 2025

The End of the Showman Presidency

In Trump 1.0, he'd back down when he was unpopular. Now he doesn't.

December 02, 2025

The Answer to Student AI Writing Slop is Authorial Voice

LLMs are bad at sounding unique. So we should help young writers to develop their own unique prose style.

November 26, 2025

ReImagining Liberty 094: A New American Reconstruction

A conversation with Andy Craig and Shikha Dalmia

November 24, 2025

Why Elites Believe in Racial IQ Differences and Evolutionary Psych

Both help deflect critiques of elite status being less earned than elites want to think.

November 11, 2025

The “Likable”/“Unlikable” Political Realignment

American conservatism is a home for unlikeable people who’ve turned their unlinkability into a political project.

November 07, 2025

Most Americans Aren’t Fascists, and That’s a Big Problem for the GOP

When you let rot into your coalition, your entire coalition eventually turns rotten.

November 06, 2025

The Anti-Anti-Trans Election

Running against trans people failed and America proved itself a better place than the worst among us want it to be.

November 05, 2025

Leaflet, Blogging, and How to Fix Social Media

Decentralization, network overlap, and why we should all blog, too.

October 31, 2025

No Kings and Letting Ourselves Hope

There are more of us than there are of them. And we have decency on our side.

October 19, 2025

Why It Works to Call Them Weird Why It Works to Call Them Weird

Shifting political talk from policy to values

October 15, 2025

A Twitter Eulogy

(Originally published May 7, 2023)

October 11, 2025

You Haven’t Been Canceled. You’re Just Unlikable.

People don't like jerks. But jerks think people instead can't handle their ideas.

October 11, 2025

If Trump is So Unpopular, Why are Institutions Capitulating?

The American people can't stand Trump. His polling is abysmal. And yet private and public institutions capitulate. Why?

October 06, 2025

Two Kinds of Libertarians

Some libertarians oppose the state because it reinforces social hierarchies. Others because it threatens them. Only the former is worthy of the name.

October 04, 2025

Elite Complicity in the Rise of Fascism

America's elites downplay Trump's authoritarian fascism out of a corrupt sense of class consciousness and solidarity.

October 03, 2025

How to Be in a World on Fire

The values and perspectives our political moment demands of us.

October 02, 2025

Trumpism and the Status Anxiety of Abusers

The MAGA movement appeals to mediocre men who mistake the arrival of meritocracy for discrimination, and turn to abuse to reclaim dominance they never earned.

August 20, 2025

Silicon Valley’s Very Online Ideologues are in Model Collapse

The combination of exceptional wealth and a closed and uniform ideological and intellectual community wreaks havoc on one's epistemic psychology.

August 06, 2025

Roy Cooper, Prayer, and the Folly of Anti-Religious Collectivism

Roy Cooper's Senate campaign announcement, which included a mention of prayer, sparked backlash on social media from people who'd rather be bigots than understand another's faith.

July 29, 2025

Boys Are Falling Behind Girls Because Girls Aren't Being Held Back

Let’s not blame boys’ underperformance on women teachers.

July 26, 2025

Silicon Valley’s “996” Is About Power, not Productivity

The "996" work schedule reflects a troubling belief in sacrificing personal well-being for perceived productivity, driven more by power dynamics than actual efficiency.

July 23, 2025

AI and the Threat of Nostalgia Culture

The rise of AI-generated content risks overshadowing original creative works, potentially leading to a market collapse for writers and artists if consumers prefer nostalgia-driven remixes over new expressions, but the enduring human desire for innovation suggests that original art and writing will always have value.

July 14, 2025

An Inconsistent Approach to Viewpoint Diversity

If school choice is the answer to fights over curriculum in K-12 schools, it also needs to be the answer at universities. But culture war supporting libertarians don't tend to apply the argument that consistently.

July 08, 2025

If You Want to Win Political Arguments, Stop Being an Asshole

Political persuasion versus the urge to political domination.

June 30, 2025

Trump Promised Disaster. His Supporters Didn’t Believe Him.

Trump supporters talked themselves into believing his first-term failures meant he was bluffing. His second term is proving they were wrong about that.

March 05, 2025

Reign of the Competency Cosplayers

American politics suffers from a lack of genuine expertise, as leaders prioritize performative competence and tribal loyalty over actual knowledge and skill.

February 26, 2025

The GOP is now just grifters grifting each other

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson doesn’t know much about technology. To be fair, very few of his colleagues in Congress do either. Which is why Congress routinely misunderstands laws governing technology, or gets caught up in tech-focused moral panics.

February 24, 2025

Selling Out vs. Just Selling: The Weirdness of "Content" Monetization

What it means that we stopped caring so much about what we create and started caring only about whether we can sell it.

February 12, 2025

The Politics of "Unbiased" Conservative Search Engines

I occasionally run ads on this newsletter, but I don’t typically write about them. I’m going to do so today, however, because the advertiser my newsletter host’s ad network brought me is pretty weird. And its weirdness is a good way to talk about how the American right is constructing a politically correct parallel economy for themselves.

December 18, 2024

The Shaky Future of Trump's Personality Cult

Trump won't be around forever. And no one looks position to lead his movement without him.

December 09, 2024

Why, Despite the Numbers, Bluesky Feels Bigger than Threads

Meta’s Twitter alternative Threads is significantly bigger than Bluesky (even as Bluesky crosses the 20 million user mark). It feels quite a lot smaller, though, which contributes to why a lot of people prefer Bluesky over Threads. But why does it feel that way?

November 24, 2024

It's Okay if Your Social Media Platform is a Bubble

Trump’s election saw a renewed wave of users feeling X/Twitter, many of them heading instead to Bluesky. Bluesky, like Threads, has a “block first” culture: Rather than responding to abusive mentions or trollish behavior, users just block and move on. Bluesky also has a widely used “shared blocklists” feature that allows people to make lists of users (e.g., people with pro-Nazi phrases in their bios) and then others can subscribe to those lists and auto-block or mute anyone on them.

November 17, 2024

The Quillette Effect

Learning about ideologies exclusively from their opponents is a recipe for epistemic failure.

October 30, 2024

The GOP's Competence Gap

A couple of years into the Trump administration, I had a conversation with a Trump supporter who lived outside of the beltway. “I bet you people in DC can’t stand him,” he said. He was right. But not, I told him, entirely for the reasons he had in mind. Yes, Trump’s far-right populist politics were out of step with the heavy Democratic lean of Washington, DC, and out of step with even most DC conservatives. Lots of think tankers, advisors, and agency staffers thought his policies were bad.

October 30, 2024

Barriers in the Way of an Ethical Life

Ethics isn’t just something we know and understand, it’s something we do. As I wrote last week, the ethical life is a practice, aimed at changing our perspective about the world and ourselves so that we can be more accepting of their impermanence and inevitable change, and so more contented and likely to cause harm to ourselves and others.

October 29, 2024

AI and Theft: A Thought Experiment

You’re standing in front of a large box, maybe eight feet on a side. It’s unmarked except for two openings, each about the size of the return slot at the library. One is labeled “INPUT” and the other “OUTPUT.”

October 29, 2024

Actually, Trump Would Be Terrible for the Economy

Lots of people who ought to know better have put a lot of effort towards talking themselves into voting for Trump. One of the most common paths “Sure, I don’t like plenty about him, but…” takes is that, despite his faults, a Trump presidency would nonetheless be better for the economy, and for business, than a Harris presidency.

October 29, 2024

A Rorschach Test for the State of American Free Speech

If someone says that they feel more of a need to keep their views to themself than used to be the case, what does that tell you? Does it mean that society has grown more censorious? That free speech is on the outs? It’s easy to interpret it that way, especially if we’re on the lookout for such evidence. But these are precisely the situations when we should be most wary so as to avoid overinterpreting data to advance a narrative.

October 29, 2024

A Politics of Harmlessness

We should aim for harmlessness. No matter what else we set ourselves to throughout our lives, and no matter what other values and principles we might hold to, unpinning and informing it all must be a commitment to refrain from causing harm.

October 29, 2024

The Verge’s “Failure” is a Win for Everyone: Talent Networks as Networks

Becca Farsace is a talented young video producer who, until recently, worked for The Verge, a technology journalism website. She’s now gone solo, and put out a video explaining why. It’s worth watching. Farsace is open and honest about the challenges and loneliness of remote work, and the friction creative people can feel in large organizations. Her reasons for leaving The Verge are good ones.

August 29, 2024

Twitter/X as a Bubble for Bad Ethics

Twitter was always small compared to other social networks, even before Elon Musk got his hands on it. But it punched way above its weight in terms of the cultural center of mass. There were two reasons for it. First, while Facebook was where the ordinary folks hung out, and Instagram where you’d find the celebrities, Twitter was where journalists and “thought leaders” spent their time. Many of their conversations on the platform were downstream of more obscure corners of the Internet, like web forums and various sub-Reddits, but Twitter was where the big discussions that shaped the news happened, or at least the big conversations among the people who were responsible for everyone else’s picture of the news. Second, even if you weren’t a journalist or thought leader, if you were the sort of people who wanted to follow their conversations and lend your voice to them, Twitter’s where you went.

August 20, 2024

The Misuse of Meritocracy

An argument you see about “meritocracy,” one common among those on the ideological right, is that some groups, typically women, have a harder time understanding or accepting merit and meritocracy than others, typically men. If meritocracy is good, and if power should be awarded and wielded based on “merit,” then it is bad if control of power, within institutions and more broadly, shifts away from those who understand and appreciate meritocracy, and towards those who don’t.

August 19, 2024

Why the Right Lies About Cities

The right routinely tells untrue horror stories about the state of America’s cities because the state of America’s cities—thriving, dynamic, and inclusive centers of culture and engines of economic activity—serves as a dispositive rebuttal of a fundamental right-wing narrative: that “traditional” values (and hierarchies and power structures) are necessary for people to flourish.

July 15, 2024

The False Equivalence Trap

As America gets closer to putting an authoritarian back into power, and this time with the legwork done to genuinely dissolve our democracy and liberal institutions in the name of populism, nationalism, and right-wing grievance politics, lots of very serious people are maintaining a position that reactionary populism is not that bad or that the other guys aren’t any better. This is, by any objective measure, nonsense. But it’s compelling nonsense to plenty of quite smart people.

July 08, 2024

David Boaz: Liberty's North Star

David Boaz, executive vice president of the Cato Institute, passed away on June 7th. I wrote this tribute to him while he was in home hospice.

June 07, 2024

David Boaz: Liberty's North Star

The legacy of my boss, mentor, and friend.

June 01, 2024

The Necessary Virtue of Not Being an Asshole

I used to work with a guy who would throw temper tantrums in meetings. This happened often, because he found even minor challenges to his opinions enraging—and found controlling his rage so it wouldn’t lead to a tantrum impossible. He’d shout, stamp his feet, storm out of the room, and slam the door behind him.

March 27, 2024

Why Tech Bros Overestimate AI's Creative Abilities

The Internet Movie Database aggregates film reviews from critics, but also allows anyone to write a review themselves. These are occasionally amusing in a film snob way because there are people who will gush about the epoch-making brilliance of, for example, horror films that topped the box office for a single weekend and then vanished, both from the charts and cultural memory.

March 17, 2024

Against a Life of Moderation

Last Sunday, Aaron Bushnell set himself on fire, his death an act of protest against Israel’s actions in Gaza. This self-immolation provoked much conversation, as was its intent, and one entry into that discourse comes from Graeme Wood at The Atlantic. His claim is that self-immolation is bad as a form of protest, because it is ineffective and socially contagious, and also, if the act is to be carried out, it should only be in service of a particularly acute and worthy cause, and Aaron Bushnell’s was not.

February 28, 2024

Substack Doesn't Want You to Leave

Substack's business model is unsustainable—unless they lock all their writers in.

February 27, 2024

How to Talk Yourself into Defending Nonsense

If you spend enough time in online political spaces, particularly those populated by pundits and intellectuals, you’ll inevitably run across the phenomenon of an otherwise very smart and educated person arguing forcefully for obviously wrong, and often entirely nonsensical, claims. It’s perplexing, and typically a bit embarrassing, but the mechanism by which it happens is relatively straightforward. And it’s worth being aware of so that we can better catch ourselves before we head down a similar path.

February 25, 2024

How LEGO Can Teach Us About Meaning In Liberal Societies

A family parable about forging a sense of place and meaning—and what it says about the liberal project.

February 17, 2024

The Ideology of Hang-Ups

Often when I talk about social liberalism, and particularly when I push back on reactionary moral panics about LGBT issues, I hear some version of this reply: “Sure, a lot of the right-wing response to increasing tolerance is overblown. But don’t you think there is something we should be worried about when kids are going to drag queen story hours?” Or when gender fluidity is normalized. Or when people identify in other ways orthogonal to “traditional values.”

February 16, 2024

Liberalism and Sympathetic Joy

One way to defend liberal institutions is to argue that they are value neutral. Thus a liberal government protects the persons and property of its citizens, but doesn’t coerce them into a particular conception of the good life. Under a liberal regime, you can be a teetotaler or a lush, a Christian or a Muslim, a hedonist or an ascetic. Thus liberalism is desirable, in part, because it supports robust pluralism. We needn’t fight with one another about how to live, because some narrow range of society’s diverse preferences won’t be codified into law.

February 16, 2024

The Challenge of Committing to Liberty—and Meaning It

It’s easy to say you’re committed to liberty. To speak in the rhetoric of robust rights and freedoms, to celebrate free expression and free association, to talk about the benefits of free trade and private industry. It’s easy in large part because those things are clearly good, their opposite clearly bad. People don’t just want liberty, they deserve it. Liberalism isn’t preferable to authoritarianism because it works better and produces more, though it does. It’s preferable because it’s moral and authoritarianism is not. To commit to liberty is to commit to the right and the good over the unjust and the wrong.

October 25, 2023

Three Kinds of Conservatives

We tend to use “conservative” and “the right” interchangeably. Someone who is a conservative is also on the right, and someone on the right is a conservative. Synonyms by themselves aren’t a problem, but they sometimes obfuscate distinctions that can actually be helpful in thinking through thorny political issues. This is one of those instances. It’s true many who are “on the right” are also “conservative,” but it’s not necessary that one exists alongside the other. They are not, in fact, synonyms. But our conflation of multiple concepts under these few terms gets worse. Because conservatism doesn’t mean just one thing. Instead, it’s (at least) three, and while they frequently correlate, it’s not a necessary correlation. Teasing out these concepts—the right from conservatism, and the three kinds of conservatism from each other—gives us a clearer perspective on contemporary political culture.

October 18, 2023

Just One Fewer God?

Atheists can't make their case if they insist on straw-manning faith.

August 29, 2023

Surround Yourself With Those Who Are Admirable, and Distance Yourself From Those Who Aren’t.

The most overlooked—but most important—ingredient of an ethical life.

July 20, 2023

How Social Media Tricks our Brains—and Destroys our Politics

Social media makes your tiny corner feel like the whole world. That illusion is reshaping our politics.

June 15, 2023

Speaking Ill of the Dead

Pat Robertson, the evangelical leader who hated most of humanity, died today. He spent his career demonizing everyone who didn’t align with his narrow vision of Christian nationalism, blaming disfavored groups for natural disasters, defending genocidal dictators, and generally bending American conservatism and conservative politics towards ugliness and exclusion. His presence and his work made the world a worse place, and his legacy brought nothing of value. He should not be mourned or missed.

June 08, 2023

The Limits of Reason

Our brains have limits on what they can think and what tools they can bring to thinking.

June 06, 2023

(Anti-)Wokeism as a Rorschach Test

Liberal speech norms and deciding which ideas are worthy of engagement.

May 23, 2023

A Twitter Eulogy

This weekend I deleted my Twitter account. Which is a small thing, yes, but it’s 16 years of interactions, and 13,000 followers, and it wasn’t an easy decision. Not the least because, in those 16 years, I made real and important friends through Twitter. The platform meant a lot to me. So as my little commemoration, and moment of self-indulgence, I’m reprinting below a very short essay I wrote—originally as a Tweet thread—ages ago when one of those friends, who meant an awful lot to me, died unexpectedly. Five years later, I still miss him, and I hope this essay can give a sense of what it is Elon Musk has destroyed, and why social media, as many problems as it has, still matters—and still brings value.

May 07, 2023