The midterm elections — together with contests in Brazil, Serbia, and to some degree even Israel — have changed the world. All of a sudden, the once-ascendant populist right is on the back foot; a seemingly exhausted liberalism is back in the game.
Why did this happen? Is it going to continue? And what comes next?
These are the kinds of questions I covered at Vox for over a decade; I even wrote a book about them. But I’ve recently realized there’s a better way to try to answer them — and I founded Public Reason to actually do it.
One thing that’s struck me over the years is how rare it is for ordinary voters anywhere to say they want to get rid of democracy.1 Despite mass discontent with the political status quo, polls show consistently high support for the basic principle of citizens choosing who rules them. Would-be authoritarians, knowing this, campaign as believers in democracy to avoid popular wrath.2
To sell themselves as democrats, these leaders and their allies construct an oft-complicated ideological scaffolding — a set of arguments, ideas, and concepts to justify their quest for power that, in at least some cases,3 the would-be authoritarians genuinely believe. We cannot understand the current crisis of democracy without taking these ideas, and the intellectuals who help develop them, seriously as agents of political change.
Liberal thinkers have, on the whole, proven surprisingly bad at this. In her recent book on far-right intellectuals, Laura Field observes that “if I’m right that the New Right puts Ideas First, liberals and the Democrats seem to put them last — having incubated them in an AI lab, tested them against a dozen polls, and assigned them to a celebrity to rehearse.”
Many liberals misidentified the roots of Trump’s support because they refused to take the cultural worldview of his base as deeply-held belief. They were caught flat-footed by the rise of an intellectually muscular postliberal right. And they have totally failed to train bright young liberals to engage in intellectual combat.
This inability to appreciate the political potency of ideas is a key reason why liberals have lacked a positive vision. It’s easy to stand against anti-democratic extremists; you can win elections largely by being their photo-negative. But developing a new idea of what you’re for that fits the times is harder. It requires serious ideological effort, and liberals have let their ideological muscles decay.
Public Reason exists to write about political ideas with the depth and seriousness they deserve. I want to show you the ideas that matter: to explain them, analyze them, and argue with them. In doing so, I hope to help you better understand the times we’re living in. And, ultimately, I aim to come up with some better ideas for thinking liberally about our world.
What Public Reason will do
Coverage of political ideas has a tendency to fall into one of two traps. Either it’s simplified to the point where it does violence to the ideas in question, or it’s so esoteric that it feels mostly irrelevant to the things people actually care about.
Public Reason aims to avoid both of those traps. My goal is to be relevant and rigorous in covering the site’s main interests: the state of democracy in the United States and the world more broadly, the critique of liberalism on both the left and the right, the fate of the liberal international order, and the underlying debates over fundamental political values.
Many outlets cover these topics through detailed policy analysis (say, a legal breakdown of the Trump DOJ’s attack on voting rights) or horse-race political analysis (say, whether moderate or progressive Democrats perform better at the ballot box). I’m not trying to do either of those things, at least not primarily.
Instead, Public Reason is built around the idea that the same readers who want a better understanding of the news of the day (like the midterms and the latest AI developments) are also interested in engaging with deeper, more fundamental political questions about ideology. To give you a sense of what Public Reason’s ideas-first approach looks like, here are some of the pieces I’ve planned for the early days:
A post-midterm assessment of whether Trump has already turned the United States into an authoritarian state
A close look at the internal debate on the right over the causes of its 2026 defeat
An examination of the ideological influences on Elon Musk and how they’ve shaped his alignment with the GOP and Trump
A critique of materialist approaches to thinking about politics
A look at the ideology of the leading AI labs, and how they’re encoding their beliefs into products that are shaping our future
An assessment of why liberal intellectuals are having so much trouble adjusting their worldview in light of the current crisis
A deep dive into the data on the (overstated) decline of morality in American public life
For the first month, all of Public Reason’s content will be available to everyone. After that, about half will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Paid subscribers will also be able to engage in our comment section, which I’m hoping to use as an active discussion forum with you all, and will get full access to the archives. The highest-tier subscribers — the “Most Reasonable” — will be able to join a monthly chat with me.
Why “Public Reason”
The name Public Reason is taken from John Rawls, the greatest political philosopher of the 20th century.
Rawls sees “public reason” as the rules and norms that should govern the way we engage with each other politically. At its strictest, public reason requires that we justify our fundamental laws by reference to values all citizens could reasonably be expected to endorse.4 You can’t just impose a constitutional structure on people based on sectarian political or theological beliefs; you need to make a colorable case for the system based on values (like equality and liberty) that citizens share.
The Rawlsian schema was designed for an idealized society, not the actual world we live in. And yet I find the ambition behind it inspirational. The notion that we owe a duty of justification to our fellow citizens, that part of what it means to live in a democracy is to engage with each other intellectually as equals, captures something important about who we should want to be.
That’s the spirit I want to bring to this site. I want to engage in rigorous argument and analysis — to make the case for my political and moral beliefs without compromise or hesitation. But I also want to do so in the fairest way possible: to see what’s reasonable about the beliefs of others, even those I deeply disagree with, and engage with them on terms that take them seriously as equal participants in a shared political project.
“The ideal of public reason does not often lead to a general agreement of views, nor should it,” Rawls writes in Political Liberalism.5 “Citizens learn and profit from conflict and argument, and when their arguments follow public reason, they instruct and deepen society’s political culture.”
Consider that Public Reason’s mission statement. I hope it’s one we can bring to life together.
Two books — Nancy Bermeo’s Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times and Larry Bartels’ Democracy Erodes from the Top — make this case very persuasively in the European context. But it applies pretty well to other cases I’m familiar with (like the US, Israel, Brazil, India, Venezuela, Turkey and South Korea).
Contrary to popular belief, authoritarians face very real political punishment when people realize their true intentions.
Quite a few elected authoritarians seem to be motivated by genuine ideological belief — I’d put Modi, Bolsonaro, Yoon Suk Yeol, Hugo Chavez, and even Netanyahu in this category to some degree. Trump may be more venal than anything else, but many of his deputies — like Stephen Miller, Russ Vought, and even Elon Musk — have clear ideological commitments. Viktor Orban was fundamentally a kleptocrat, but he built a pretty sophisticated ideological apparatus to defend his regime for a reason — it was important for winning support both among domestic and global elites.
You shouldn’t take “all” entirely literally. Rawls recognizes that there will always be some people who reject basic democratic principles, so he restricts the justificatory requirement to all “reasonable” citizens. Lots of disagreement among philosophers about how well this works (to put it mildly).
Not his most famous book, but the one I think is actually the best and most relevant to our times.
In addition to your planned posts listed above, I look forward to future posts canvassing various understandings of "liberal" in "public reason," and common identifying defining characteristics of those you consider liberal thinkers and intellectuals.