What Is Heal the West All About?

A Defense of Liberalism

When Heal the West first started late last year, I wrote a post trying to describe what it was all about, and to articulate my mission statement and my reasons for founding the Substack. I stand by a lot of what I wrote (you can read the post here if you're curious), but my understanding of my mission has deepened and broadened since then; and I wanted to take another crack at explaining—to myself and to you all—what Heal the West is all about.

If you're new here, welcome. This post represents my current and best thoughts on what you can expect to find on this Substack. If you've been reading for awhile, and especially if you came from Reality's Last Stand, I hope this post will connect some dots in terms of what Heal the West is all about.

The north star of my life is to heal the West. What does that mean? In the context of this substack, it means preserving and rebuilding our liberal social contract. By "liberal" I don't mean "Progressive" or "leftist." I'm neither Progressive nor leftist; and while I consider myself to be politically heterodox, many of my instincts lean conservative or libertarian. What I mean by our liberal social contract is best summed up by James Lindsay and Helen Pluckrose in their book Cynical Theories.

"The main tenets of liberalism are political democracy, limitations on the powers of government, the development of universal human rights, legal equality for all adult citizens, freedom of expression, respect for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason, the separation of church and state, and freedom of religion."

Liberalism is the core and foundational idea upon which the United States was founded. I'm not here to argue about marginal tax rates or how much of a welfare state we need. While I have my disagreements with both men, I would consider the administrations of Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama to both fall under the banner of liberalism. Liberalism is a big tent. Here's how Lindsay and Pluckrose describe it.

"It must be noted that the general philosophical position that we call 'liberalism' is compatible with a wide range of positions on political, economic, and social questions, including both what Americans call 'liberal' (and Europeans call 'social-democratic') and moderate forms of what people in all countries call 'conservative.' This philosophical liberalism is opposed to authoritarian movements of all types, be they left-wing or right-wing, secular or theocratic. Liberalism is thus best thought of as a shared common ground, providing a framework for conflict resolution and one within which people with a variety of views on political, economic, and social questions can rationally debate the options for public policy."

A major threat to the liberal social contract is that more and more people are drawn to illiberalism. I go more in depth on this in the original mission statement, but broadly speaking I think the danger falls into three categories.

1) Folks on the left, especially younger Americans, are increasingly opposed to democracy and capitalism. Left-wing politicians increasingly want to pack the Supreme Court, change the Senate to enshrine a permanent majority, and abolish the Electoral College to make it harder for Republicans to win the presidency. Support for socialism is on the rise, and lots of folks on the left think that changing the rules of the game is justified if it means locking their political opponents out of power. Additionally, many Critical Theorists espouse a troubling opposition to liberal thinking and ideas like the universality of human rights.

2) On the right, conservatives have been banning books and engaging in cancel culture for decades. GOP politicians are increasingly trying to fight wokeism in ways that violate the First Amendment, and politicians like Senator Tim Scott (R-SC) are engaging in blatant election denialism and refusing to say whether or not they would certify the results of the 2024 election if Donald Trump lost. And, of course, Trump himself tried to stage a coup on January 6, 2021. 

3) All of this is driven by, and drives, a climate of affective (or toxic) polarization in which we increasingly fear and hate members of the other political tribe.

In Heal the West, we'll explore these threats. Sometimes we'll peel back the curtain and expose the illiberal impetus behind certain ideologies (such as Critical Race Theory and Queer Theory). As part of this, we'll explore why the core values of liberalism espoused by Lindsay and Pluckrose are good things that we should want to keep around. We'll also look at the downstream applications of some of these threats, for instance how affective polarization contributes to political illiberalism.

But we'll also go upstream to explore why people are being drawn towards illiberalism, with an eye towards addressing these root causes.  Right now, I see two upstream problems that I think are contributing to the demand for illiberalism.

1) Broken communities. In Bowling Alone, political scientist Robert Putnam makes a sweeping and exhaustively researched case that our communities have been systematically hollowed out over the past 30-50 years. Since this is a mission statement, I won't go into the data (if you haven't read the book, I explored some of the data here) but essentially: we're volunteering less, going to church less, socializing less, attending fewer block parties, and engaging with each other face-to-face less. What we are doing is watching more television. Putnam published his book in 2000, but I suspect that the rise of Netflix and social media has not reversed these trends. As Surgeon General Dr. Vivek A. Murthy wrote in 2023, we're in the midst of a "loneliness epidemic": "In recent years, about one-in-two adults in America reported experiencing loneliness. And that was before the COVID-19 pandemic cut off so many of us from friends, loved ones, and support systems, exacerbating loneliness and isolation."

How has the hollowing-out of our local communities contributed to an increasing desire for illiberalism? I think that when we're unhappy with our own lives, we're more likely to look for radical solutions outside of us. When we feel hard done by the current system, we're more open to radical alternatives to that system. We develop an anti-system bias.

I used to try to counter this anti-system bias by pointing out that most of us are living with a level of material prosperity that our ancestors couldn't dream of. I would point out that on a writer's income, I can afford a better iPhone than Steve Jobs could have bought; and that Generation Z is on track to be the wealthiest generation in human history. Those facts may be true, but they miss the mark. We're not unhappy because we feel poor. We're unhappy because we're lonely. We are social animals, after all. We did not evolve for screens and isolation. We evolved for community; and when we lose that community, we have an aching sense that something is missing. As Murthy writes, "Social connection is a fundamental human need, as essential to survival as food, water, and shelter."

A study published in The Journal of Socio-Economics highlights just how essential community is to our sense of happiness. The study looked at why 10,000 adults in England were happy or unhappy. The study found that, "Income only plays a small part in influencing our well-being." What mattered a lot more than material prosperity was social relationships. In fact, when it came to happiness, having a close friend contributed as much to a person's happiness as earning an extra $150,000 per year in income did.

When our sense of community breaks down, we become lonely. When we're lonely, we become unhappy. When we're unhappy, we assume that the system we live in must be partly to blame. We develop an anti-system bias, we lose our faith in liberalism, and we start to listen more to proponents of illiberal ideologies who promise that utopia and connection can only be found after we bulldoze the existing social order.

2) Broken spirituality. By "Broken spirituality" I don't mean that not enough people are Christian. I mean that too many of us, of all faiths and none, are living out of too much (that is, any) fear, guilt, and shame. By the same token, too many of us spend too few moments living out of a place of joy and love and peace and connectedness.

This matters because I think we could all be doing more to repair our communities and our country; more to preserve and rebuild the West. I know I could. But I don't, because I'm still trapped in cobwebs of fear, guilt, and shame. These negative emotions take up less space on my mental computer than they used to; but less space is not no space, and I still have less mental CPU than I should to make the lives of the people around me brighter. What's true for me might be true for you too. To the extent that the cobwebs of fear, guilt, and shame still hold us back, we are less able to invest in our communities than we could otherwise be. Less able to stand up for what we know to be true, to be the light in someone else's life. Less able to be the reason (or part of it) that someone likes their life and decides that liberalism has done pretty well by them; instead of that person falling into loneliness, despair, and anti-system bias.

If we ever lived fully out of joy, love, peace, and connectedness, not for moments at a time but 100% of the time… I think we could change the world. I think we could change the lives of everyone around us.

Heal the West isn't just a newsletter. We're all drowning in information, and I don't think we need more (or at least, that's not all we need). Instead, Heal the West is a community of practice. It's a place where we can all come together to work on these problems, to become the highest and best versions of ourselves…and to rebuild the West together.

(As an aside, I'm still working on how to make this more of a community of practice. Building trust and connection online isn't my skillset. If you have ideas to make this space more of a community, let me know).

If you believe (or are open to being persuaded) that liberalism is worth fighting for; if you believe (or are open to being persuaded) that repairing our broken communities and letting go of our fear, guilt, and shame can help us to do that; or if you're simply interested in becoming the highest and best version of yourself and you think that Heal the West might be one tool among many to help you get there…welcome. I'm honored that you're here.

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