Help Us Learn

We provide a lot of answers here, at Liberal Currents.

How should we rebuild after the Trump years? We have a whole print product devoted to answering that question.

How can we end the gerrymandering race to the bottom? Proportional representation

What kind of authoritarian is Trump? A personalist. 

We give you answers with a certain air of authority, but the truth is that we have built this plane while already hurtling through the air. From the very beginning, we have been learning as we went, continuing to ask questions like the ones above.

Some of these questions tied directly back to the current crisis. Others were larger, potentially applicable to the matter at hand, but indirectly. Just how does one build a mass party, and durable political movement, under 21st century conditions? Why are draconian immigration controls such a universal feature of the world we live in? Can we learn anything from the practicalities of how black liberals like Frederick Douglass fought slavery?

We have learned a great deal. We now know more than other political publications because we asked the questions they didn’t think to ask and we are still asking them. We do not believe we have all of the answers, and we are anxious to learn what flaws exist in the answers we believe we already have.

We will continue to put our best foot forward, to offer bold and well thought-out answers to problems of our times and more besides. And we will continue to publish people with answers that may differ from ours, may even challenge some of ours quite fundamentally.

To be a liberal is to use reason “to inch that much closer to correctness,” having the humility to remember “that what you believe now may, in turn, be wrong,” and yet the courage to “stand up for what you believe and do what you think is right” all the same.

Liberal democracy triumphs over its alternatives through its commitment to learning. Regular free and fair elections provide regular opportunities to correct mistakes. Freedom of the press, of speech, of assembly, provide both regular feedback from outside the government’s own internal processes and at the same time opportunities for citizens themselves to sate their own curiosity, their own personal desire to learn.

Liberal Currents is committed to being a publication—to being a community that learns. We want to win, we want more than anything to overcome the current crisis, but we also want to understand, and to get as close to the right answers as we can.

Consider becoming a paid member, if you are not already. In doing so, you will not only be supporting a community that strives to keep learning, but moving deeper within that community, putting yourself in a better position to help it keep learning. And hopefully learn a few things yourself as you do so.

Let’s fight the good fight and let’s also continue to build a community that best expresses the values we seek to protect.