Persuasion just passed a remarkable milestone: We now have over 50,000 subscribers.
Those of you reading this live in all 50 states. You are based in countries including Sweden and Turkey, Mexico and South Korea. You are truck drivers and CEOs, students and professors. You are proud atheists and devout Christians, Marxists and social conservatives. It means so much to me, to the whole editorial team, and to our wonderful writers, that you choose to spend a part of your day thinking about the world with us.
When I founded Persuasion in 2020, a big part of the motivation was to push back against what I saw as a new spirit of censoriousness and an unhealthy valorization of group identity on my own side of the political spectrum. We have continued to cover this beat as well as anyone, publishing wonderful contributions from John McWhorter and Coleman Hughes, from Emily Yoffe and Jonathan Rauch, from Keira Bell and William Deresiewicz, from Jonathan Haidt and Rob Henderson.
But over the course of the last three and a half years, my understanding of the purpose of Persuasion has subtly shifted. Back then, mainstream publications virtually never dared to criticize the new orthodoxies of what, in my book on the topic, I call the “identity synthesis.” The worldview of Robin DiAngelo and Ibram X. Kendi reigned supreme. Today, leading publications continue to publish plenty of shoddy work inspired by their ideas; but they do also make place for the kinds of criticisms which we were among the first to publish.
There has, in those years, also been a broader shift in the life of letters, both in America and around the world. As most democracies continued to polarize, the imperative only grew for pundits and reporters, and even for social scientists and “public intellectuals,” to put their reflections in the service of a political goal (and all too often a nakedly party-political one at that).
Writers, ever-conscious of the most-read lists which virtually all of their publications now make freely accessible on their websites, are particularly aware of the incentives this creates. On any one day, they can make it on that list by writing about how dangerous Donald Trump is (or, if they write for a right-leaning publication, assailing Joe Biden’s competence). At the limit, there is a bit of space for mild challenges to the conventional wisdom of their respective political bubbles; occasionally, writers are able to get a bit of traction, much of it consisting of hate clicks, by pointing out an obvious intellectual weakness in their own tribe’s orthodoxy du jour. But anything which doesn’t directly engage with the partisan talking points which animate the latest political controversy, whether by endorsing or by half-heartedly questioning them, simply gets ignored.
Before 2016, high-brow magazines still carried many articles that were interesting because they told a great story or introduced a fascinating person. Some reviewers still assessed books on how novel or aesthetically pleasing they were. Today, that world has, for the most part, vanished. From the latest op-ed responding to headline news to magazines founded on the art of storytelling to reviews supposedly focused on literary criticism, the deadly combination of polarization and algorithmic logic has narrowed the space in each of these for independent thinking. (Watch out for a longer article on this subject in our pages, which should make its way to you in the coming weeks.)
So, even though each of us at Persuasion also has strong political values—and I personally will not hesitate when I am asked to make my depressing choice between Joe Biden and Donald Trump this November—we are trying to recover a bit of that space. Along with fulsome defenses of philosophically liberal principles and ideas; along with articles analyzing the crassness and cravenness of the MAGA movement; along with criticisms of the left-identitarianism that has conquered so many of our institutions; along with primers on undercovered events taking place across the world; we are also determined to publish articles that are interesting or moving, surprising or countercultural—and perhaps, when we really get it right, all of those at once.
It is a testament to the transformative power of digital platforms that this is possible at all. Persuasion is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and we do get some charitable donations. But most of the income that pays for our full-time staff, the fees we pay our authors and all the other costs of running a magazine come from our paying subscribers. And even though the number of people who receive our content keeps on growing, fewer than one in twenty of you currently choose to make a financial contribution—in part because we are, so long as it remains possible, determined not to put any of our content behind a paywall.
So if you value what we do, and you want us to keep going, there is a simple thing that you can do: Please become a paying member of Persuasion today. Please help us to keep this project going.
Thank you.
Yascha
P.S. I leave you with a small selection of our articles from the past year—one that, I believe, reflects the breadth and the depth of what we publish.
P.P.S. If becoming a paying member doesn’t work for you, you can also make a tax-deductible charitable donation to Persuasion to support our work.
“America’s Families Are Not Okay” by Ann Bauer
“Larry Summers on What Went Wrong on College Campuses” (podcast)
“The Fire Next Time” by Kevin Carroll
“Why AI Will Never Rival Human Creativity” by William Deresiewicz
“Humane Liberalism Begins with Autonomy” by Emily Chamlee-Wright
“When Populism Succeeds” by Quico Toro
“Why So Many Elites Feel Like Losers” by Freddie DeBoer
“Conservatism’s Path Not Taken” by Tyler Syck
“The New Antisemitism” by Tomer Persico
“Rob Henderson on Foster Care, Social Class and the New American Elite” (podcast)
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