I talk with writer Alysia Ames about her coinage of the “Omnicause,” a tendency to absorb all left-of-center causes in one giant package deal.
We also talk about the challenges for advocates of liberalism in rural areas—a closely related issue, because if you’ve got to back every cause in order to promote any cause, you’re going to encounter a lot more resistance.
But first we talk about how women’s work in the household has historically been unaccounted for—in the most literal sense—and how the necessity of recognizing its value explains a lot about our current culture wars over gender, as well as the decline in fertility in the developed world
You can view the video of this conversation here.
Identity and Dogma
On a related note, I just posted at my personal newsletter an examination of the collapse of the Libertarian Party as it heads into a fractious convention that seems likely to wreck the whole party even more.
I lay the blame in part on the longstanding philosophical agnosticism of the libertarians, who in an effort to build a big tent ended up not having the intellectual guardrails to keep their movement from being co-opted by authoritarian nationalists. To be sure, the conservative movement arguably had more philosophical substance and still didn’t succeed in getting swept up in the mass hysteria of Trumpism. But at least they were trying.
It strikes me that this and the Omnicause are two sides of the same issue. Any cultural movement or political organization has to have some core of ideas and values—while also making accommodations for reasonable disagreement and heterodoxy. It has to have an identity without having a dogma.
The Libertarians and the Omnicause represent the two different ways a movement can fail at doing this.
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