The Plucky Remnant

Hello to folks previously subscribed to my Substack. I’ve moved to beehiiv. You don’t have to do anything to keep receiving updates, and you haven’t been added to anything new because of the move. Hopefully, you’ll also get fewer pushy notifications than Substack sends.

If you’re coming from Substack you’ll also notice another name change. Sorry about that. Here’s what’s up: I’d recently changed the name of my Substack to The Cheerful Remnant and then…well, the U.S. election. In the near version of the world where 7 November 2024 went another way, maybe The Cheerful Remnant made sense. But I’m not feeling it.

But that might leave you wondering about the “Remnant” part.

“The Remnant” is a folk story of the erstwhile libertarian movement (you can read the original unabridged version here, but for folks interested in the 20th-century liberty movement, it might be useful to know that it is part of the Foundation for Economic Education’s (FEE’s) influence on libertarianism).

The idea behind the Remnant is this: If you are someone who cares about ideas, there’s a job to be done in preserving an idea in its pure form. This means explaining and insisting on the idea, even while people are not ready to be convinced. When this job is done well, and an idea’s time comes, or when it can help expand our understanding, it will be there for people to pick it up.

At least, that’s how I remembered the Remnant. I re-read it a few weeks ago and found that I don’t care for Nock’s version.

In Nock’s telling, a Prophet of the Remnant, despite knowing that he will never see his ideas come to fruition or even the satisfaction of knowing people are listening, preaches a pure message for the benefit of a few great individuals who need to hear it. The message is kept alive until it can move the world again. The Prophet is not concerned with ordinary people. Nock claims that someone who tries to speak to the masses can only do it if they adulterate the true Message. This adulteration compromises the Message to broaden its audience, which undermines the whole endeavour.

I can remember the version of me that this appealed to, but today I find it self-aggrandizing and elitist. Dismissing the value of ordinary people in our ideas, society, and politics is, at best, misplaced. People are the point.

The Remnant gets some things right. The work of liberalism, democracy, and society does not stop mattering when we lose. It is when we lose that the work matters most. And it is worth talking to the world rather than assuming we know who will be our allies in the end.

What Nock’s Remnant gets wrong is his conception of it as an elite endeavour pushed forward by great men. It’s fine for some people to dedicate themselves to an idealized message, but the idea that it’s all that matters or that can be done is silly nonsense. We don’t only need a few people telling a perfect truth until the world decides it’s ready to listen. We need to make that world, too. We don’t need prophets. We don’t need purity.

We need to alleviate suffering now. We need to secure peace and freedom so that people can live the lives they want. We need to convince people to stand with us again, for each other and liberalism, against cruelty and tyranny. We stood together for these ideals, however imperfectly, before. It was not so very long ago.

And so it is not impossible.

Reminding myself that defending liberalism is both worthwhile and possible is in what I ground the pluckiness of my version of the Remnant. “Cheerful” isn’t tenacious enough for the task ahead.

My remnant takes from Ken White that every person can play an important part in what’s next, because

This work needed doing before the U.S. election, and it would have needed doing if the election had gone the other way.

During the Pandemic, I realized how unprepared so many people were to make concessions for each other that weren’t backed by force. We are nowhere near having built the sociability and institutions needed for as voluntary (and peaceful) a world as I imagine. And the pandemic, which broke everyone at least a little, only made it worse.

That realization was overwhelming. I second-guessed a lot. I consumed a broader range of information and viewpoints, challenging stuff I’d taken for granted. What I found wasn’t that I thought I’d been wrong after all about liberalism and the possibility of social individuals who can live together in peace. Instead, the ability to find that social and peaceful coexistence seems more important.

So I dug in and took stock of where I might do some good.

One thing I can do is write. Adam Gurri explains how and why that can be useful. I am also a co-founder of the Canadian educational charity The Institute for Liberal Studies, which is dedicated to improving understanding of the principles of liberalism, and also to creating spaces where they can interact with and learn from people with very different points of view.

Even if those things are not enough, they’re a start. We can scale up as more work presents itself.

Anyway. I’ll still be publishing in other outlets (and you can find me on Bluesky). This will still be a place where you can find my writing from all over. I hope it will also be a place for occasional shorter thoughts, and maybe one day from regular shorter thoughts.

I’m glad you’re here with me.

A quick request to those dedicated enough to read this far: I like the idea of eventually building up this space to a more conventional website, especially to link my writing and group it by theme. Doing this would require beehiiv’s paid service.

If you’d be willing to support my work to make that possible, reply to this email to let me know, so I’ll have a better idea of how I might want to grow this new space. Not something I want to commit to immediately, but it will help me plan.

(One of the things I like about beehiiv is that it’s a more conventional paid service. So, if I upgrade and turn on paid subscriptions, the money will go just to me. You’d know exactly what you’re supporting.)

Thanks so much!