Electability matters, except when it doesn't

Do liberals think we should compromise our principles or not?

Radley Balko speaks at a libertarian conference. PHOTO CREDIT: Gage Skidmore. Licensed under Creative Commons 2.0.

This is the age of pop-up think tanks so it’s hard to get much information on the so-called Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism — but there are more red flags here than at a Soviet parade. Blog called “The UnPopulist” which crows about how the “liberal-democratic movement…vanquished socialism and communism”? Check. Suspicious name-change to ISMA from the comically right-wing coded “Freedom Liberty Coalition,” which received six-figures from the Koch Network just a few years ago? Check. Six-figure funding from the libertarian Mercatus Center? Check. A 21st-century liberalism conference featuring Francis Fukuyama, Bill Kristol, Yascha Mounk, Steven Pinker, Derek Thompson, and Zack Beauchamp? Yup.

The discourse has been worked up over the past week over the revelation that some online influencers are getting paid by a Democratic aligned lobbying firm, but I’ve struggled to see how this is at all more sinister than what the ISMA is up to. I think that, in part, liberal journalists just care way more about financial transparency than about financial influence. As long as they’re at least semi-transparent about it no one is going to give ISMA a hard time for accepting six-figure grants from some of the most sinister libertarian modern American history. Liberalism hesitates to accept that even capital flows that are completely open to public scrutiny can still be sinister.