About a year ago, I started publishing draft chapters of my book in progress, The Liberal Backbone. It hit me lately that the draft is done – I realized that with the latest chapters I'd started writing a second book. That one will be on alienation, which I think deserves a book of its own.

So I'm calling it. I'm going to switch to editing The Liberal Backbone — and, no doubt, editing some more, and then, more.

To make time for it, I'll be cutting back on the frequency of podcast episodes for a while.

For this one, I want to sum up why I think it's so crucially important for the lost liberal backbone to be restored. In a nutshell: the future of democracy depends on it.

— Spencer

Liberals think of rhetoric as something you cut through to get to the substance. But in politics, rhetoric is the substance.

Politics is the art of persuading people. If you can't persuade them, you can't get anything done.

That doesn't mean you have to lie to them.

Yes, Donald Trump uses rhetoric, like all con artists. But so did Barack Obama, like Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, and Cicero did. All saw rhetoric as a tool for moral work.

You can speak poetically and still speak truth — deeper truth, if you do it well.

If liberals want to stop losing, they need to re-learn how.

Here's where to start.

Full transcription and links at dastardlycleverness.com.

Escape from the iron cage of alienation appears to be impossible: You'll never think of a way out, because it's thinking that locks you in.

Unless you discover a different way to think.

This episode: a dive inside the mind of a musician.