If history's social conservatives have always been wrong, why would we think today's are right?

Social conservatism reduces to two primary claims:

  1. The way we (meaning the social conservative) live now (or at some chosen point in the past) is the best way to live
  2. Deviations from that style of living (whether proposed, or by way of example of those choosing to live differently) are not improvements, but steps in the wrong direction, and potentially quite harmful ones

Social conservatism thus rejects social liberalization, or the increasing freedom of people to choose new ways to live, to express personal identities in increasingly diverse ways, and to achieve social acceptance in that diversity. The social conservative tells us to trust his judgement that the contemporary forces for social liberalization have either gone too far, or are asking us to go too far, and that if we continue along that path, we will regret it.

But the social conservative’s claim runs into a rather obvious problem: history. For there have been social conservatives before him, stretching back as far as we have historical records. And so in light of his claim now about this time social liberalism has gone too far, or threatens to do so, we can ask, “Were those prior generations of social conservatives right in their echoing claims?”

And there’s the rub. Because if we think back, to history’s cavalcade of social conservatives saying, “Now we’ve gone too far” or “Now is just the right about of social liberalism,” in every instance it’s turned out they were wrong. We didn’t have enough social liberalization a thousand years ago, or five-hundred, or even one-hundred. Every one of those points we can look back on and think it’s a good thing the forces of social liberalization won out, because we (or, at least, most of us) wouldn’t want to go back to that.

If that’s the case for every prior social conservative standing athwart his moment’s history and demanding the liberalization stop, why wouldn’t we assume that it’s the case for today’s social conservatives, as well?

Two Kinds of Moral Thinking

This post from several years back by Michael J. Sigrist at the blog of the American Philosophical Association gives what I think is the correct answer–or part of the correct answer–to a question that motivated a lot of my own thinking lately. Namely, study data seem to indicate that moral philosophers aren’t, by and large, any more ethical than the rest of us.

He subtly teases out what might be going on, but here’s the core of it:

There’s a kind of thinking that we do when we are trying to prove something, and then a kind of thinking we do when we are trying to do something or become a certain kind of person—when we are trying to forgive someone, or be more understanding, or become more confident in ourselves. Becoming a better person relies on thinking of the latter sort, whereas most work in professional ethics—even in practical ethics—is exclusive to the former.

I like this. It nicely gives clarity to a distinction I’ve been wrestling with regarding contemporary moral thinking often getting something wrong about morality. What I’d add on to Sigrist’s distinction, though, and so tie it into my parallel approach, is that ethics needs to be a practice. Even if we think about ethics in the right way (e.g., the “kind of thinking we do when we are trying to do something or become a certain kind of person”), “becoming” is active and requires more than thought. We need ethical training, in the same way a baseball pitcher can think about how to throw a slider, but also needs to get out and throw a ton of bad sliders before he can inch his way toward a good one.

This is one of the elements I like in Buddhist philosophy: meditative practice gives us tools for cultivating an ethical mindset and habits, and give us a way to practice them, so that we will be more naturally inclined towards ethics in the world–just as the pitcher who practices throwing will more naturally throw well when next called upon to do it when it matters.

I’m going to keep thinking about Sigrist’s essay, hopefully in the right way. And I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Why you should ditch social media for a (micro)blog

So this is new. I have a blog again, a place for me to write about topics that aren’t a neat fit for ReImagining Liberty, which is primarily about political philosophy and ethics. But the content of this new blog isn’t the point of this post. Rather, I want to talk about the nifty tech behind this blog, why I think technology like it is (or ought to be) the future of the social internet, and why you should set up something like this too.

Social media’s in an odd place at the moment. Two of the big three platforms (Facebook and Instagram) are still going gangbusters, but the third (Twitter) is shrinking, or doesn’t exist, or isn’t a place anyone should want to hang out, depending on your perspective. And Twitter was where a lot of us hung out, and where a lot of us built what felt like our primary social presence. So much for that.

What the collapse of Twitter into X–and then X further and further into the proverbial Nazi bar–made clear is that handing ownership of your Internet social presence over to a single organization not under your control will inevitably lead sooner or later to losing the posts and connections that made your identity, and the need to rebuild elsewhere. Twitter owned all of your tweets, all of your followers, all of your follows. And all of it lived not at a domain name you controlled, but at a domain you didn’t.

I deleted my Twitter account in May of 2023 and moved my social presence to a shifting combination of Threads, Bluesky, and Mastodon. And anything longer than 500 characters or 300 characters I publish at ReImagining Liberty.

But that’s not ideal. It’s a pain to cross-post to a bunch of social networks and to pay attention to replies from all of them in multiple places. And ReImagining Liberty really is narrowly focused, narrower than the range of topics I want to write longer posts about.

There used to be a better way. In the days before social media, those of us who wrote about the kind of stuff I do had blogs. We’d write blog posts, typically longer than 500 or 300 characters but typically shorter than the 1000 words or more common to contemporary email newsletters, we’d follow our friends' blogs, we’d leave comments and trackbacks/pingbacks, and we’d keep track of all of it in the lost and lamented Google Reader (or some other RSS feed reading tool).

Then social media came along, and with it the dopamine hit of posting fast and counting likes, and we ditched blogs and gave ownership of our social presence to platforms. Which are undeniably neat, at least in some ways, but carry the risk of shutting down, losing steam, or going Nazi bar.

Decentralized social media, like Bluesky and Mastodon (and, soon, Threads) improves this situation. But your presence still lives with someone else. You can migrate, yes, so if you don’t like Threads anymore you can take your followers to a Mastodon server. (Or, at least, you will be able to do this just as soon as Threads finishes rolling out its federation.) Bluesky makes it even easier. But regardless, you’re still posting somewhere that isn’t yours.

The Internet has long given us a place to call our own, though. It’s called a domain name. You can register one for just a few bucks a year, like I did with aaronrosspowell.com, and that can be your home forever, no matter what megacorporations come and go. Many services, including blogging tools and newsletter platforms, will let you point a domain at your site there. You should always do this, even if it costs a one-time fee to point it at your platform of choice. That way, if the platform goes away, or you decide you like hosting elsewhere, or, like Substack, your home runs into its own Nazi bar problems, moving doesn’t mean losing everything. Google still knows where you are. Links to your writing still work. You’re not locked in. In most cases, you can export your context from your old host, import it into your new one, and happily continue with the same point of presence you’ve always had.

But the problem with blogging and newsletters is that they’re not social media. And most of our internet conversations—most of the social web—happens today in the back and forth of things that look like tweets, not the things that look like blog posts. So even if you have your own blog, with your own domain, you’re missing out on much of the social presence and interactions unless you’re also on Bluesky, or Threads, or wherever else. And going to those places, in addition to a blog, puts us right back in the precarious and cumbersome spot we started at the top of this post.

In an ideal world, then, what we’d have is a single home, under our own control, with our own domain that can’t be taken from us, where we can write blog posts, but also things that look like tweets, and have those appear in all the others places, like Threads or Bluesky or wherever, and have it so if people reply to us in those places, we see the replies all gathered together in our home base, where we can respond and join the conversation. And if it’s even more ideal, when new social media platforms come along, we can, with just a few clicks, add them to our distribution and interaction system, too. In other words, this ideal world is one of “publish once, in a place we own, distribute everywhere, and interact with everyone.”

Sounds pretty neat, right? Well, it’s what you’re reading right now. aaronrosspowell.com is hosted on Micro.blog, which is 90% what you’d expect a blogging tool to be: write posts, publish them, have them appear on your website, where people can leave comments. (And, with an optional upgrade, subscribe to them via email.) If you write something less than 300 characters, Micro.blog will format it like a tweet. Write something longer and it’ll prompt you for a title and format it like a blog post.

But the magic, and the reason Micro.blog and services like it are the way the social web ought to work, comes in what it calls “Sources.” These are other platforms, including many social media platforms, Micro.blog can automatically syndicate everything you write to. And for many of them, it can pull back in replies so you can have a conversation without leaving the Micro.blog interface.

Here’s what it currently supports:

  • Medium
  • Mastodon
  • LinkedIn
  • Tumblr
  • Flickr
  • Bluesky
  • Nostr
  • Pixelfed
  • Threads

And it’ll pull in and let me reply to mentions from Mastodon and Bluesky, as well as follow people from both right inside the Micro.blog interface.

In practice, then, a tool like Micro.blog means you can focus your attention on your permanent Internet home, which lives at an address you own, while not giving up the social web. As new tools and platforms plug into the social web, your home will plug into those, as well.

Of course, Micro.blog might go out of business or become unusable, just like any other blogging and social web platform you could host with. But because all of the content, and address it lives at, are under your control, you can just take them to a new platform or self-hosted tool and have lost nothing.

This is exciting technology because it points to a more personal and robust future for the web by looking back at the way it used to be. We used to have our own websites, and they used to connect with each other through links and comments. Big social media platforms took those connections away from all of us and moved them under their own control. The lesson Twitter taught us is we need to be wary of this aggregation and ceding of ownership.

A return to socially connected (micro)blogging is how we make the Internet better and more future-proof, and more social, too.

What happens if Trump loses?

As we close in on the election, I’ve started seeing more conversations about what’ll happen to the GOP and the American right if Trump loses and we move into a Harris administration. The two common predictions seem to be

  1. Trumpism is here to stay, and the likelihood of a MAGA candidate winning in 2028, especially if that candidate lacks Trumps cognitive and personality deficiencies, is high. Thus, while four years of Harris is unquestionably better than another four years of Trump, democracy isn’t out of the woods, and could well be in just as precarious a spot in another four years as it is now.

  2. Trump’s loss will take the wind out of the MAGA sails, the old GOP will, over time, reassert itself, and we’ll return to something that looks like the Reagan or Paul Ryan Republicans. This might take a while, but especially once Trump either dies or is so far gone cognitively he can’t really communicate, those reform forces in the party will be able to assert themselves without fearing his wrath.

I’m not convinced either’s correct. A second loss will hurt Trump’s influence, and the cognitive decline we’ve seen recently is real and rapid enough that it will accelerate that. And, given that the MAGA movement is predominantly—though not entirely—a cult of personality, Trump being off the stage for one reason or another will sap far-right enthusiasm, and demotivate his most faithful voters. Thus a Trump loss is likely to weaken the fascist MAGA elements that currently control the GOP. This in turn will make the path to victory for a new MAGA candidate more difficult. Project 2025, which was written as a distillation of MAGA policy, is profoundly unpopular with voters, after all—including with Republican voters.

At the same time, though, the GOP is a party controlled by three forces: Trump, the far-right media ecosystem, and primaries. Remove Trump and the other two remain. Fox News isn’t going to ditch Jesse Watters for David French, even if Trump suffers a landslide loss. They know who their audience is and what it craves. Likewise, anyone who wants to run for higher office needs to survive a primary first, primary voters are the furthest right in the GOP, and many of the more moderate Republicans have left the party. If the people picking the candidates want populists and nationalist fascists, that’s what they’re going to get, and the only way the GOP can stop that is to abandon primaries. Which they’ll have a hard time doing, with the party leadership currently dominated by MAGA diehards.

If I had to guess, then, a Trump loss won’t leave us right where we are today, just with someone else other than Trump a coin-flip away, in 2028, from destroying American democracy. The far-right will be weakened. Nor will it mean the collapse of MAGA as the dominant force within the Republican Party. Instead, I think we end up with a Republican Party that stays MAGA, and maybe gets even worse, but finds it impossible to win the presidency, and has a harder and harder time controlling either branch of Congress. They’ll get some state level victories, and have total control of some parts of some states, but as a national party, the GOP will be both weak and unable to fix itself. From there, I’m not sure what happens. We’ve had parties disappear before, to be replaced with new ones. America’s electoral system structurally locks in two parties, but one of them doesn’t need to be the GOP.