The Ahistorical, Amaterial Mind: Liberalism’s Sickness

June 30, 2026

Rudolf Prikryl

A Puzzle

Liberal intellectuals and statesmen once knew how to think historically. The architects of the post-1945 order understood that they were operating in a period of systemic transformation. They studied how orders collapse and reconstitute. They thought in terms of decades, not news cycles.

What happened? Why do the professionals staffing contemporary liberal institutions seem incapable of the same kind of thinking? Why do they respond to obvious systemic crisis with denial, nostalgia, and procedural hand-wringing?

The conventional answer points to post-Cold War triumphalism. Fukuyama’s “End of History” gave permission to stop thinking historically. If liberal-democratic capitalism is the terminus of human development, the task becomes technical management, not understanding how orders rise and fall.

This is true but incomplete. Liberals roused themselves from interwar complacency to fight fascism, and from postwar exhaustion to contain communism. Why can’t they rouse themselves again?

The answer lies in an asymmetry: liberalism responds differently to challenges from the left than to challenges from the right. It has historically been more capable of engaging left challenges—and more prone to confusion, paralysis, and catastrophic misjudgment when facing the right. Understanding this asymmetry is essential for the left, not because liberals can be converted through better explanation, but because their likely behavior under crisis conditions will shape the terrain on which the left must fight.

The Asymmetry

The Cold War represented an existential threat, but it was a threat liberals could process. Not primarily through intellectual engagement—the actual record is more red-baiting and union-busting than careful reading of Capital. Modernization theory was less a serious response to Marx than an alternative story for Third World elites. But the left challenge was materially legible: it could actually redistribute property. When workers could plausibly look east, capital had to compromise.

This legibility activated liberalism’s core function. Liberalism is, at bottom, the political form of capitalism—the arrangement that legitimates property relations through procedural consent. Its threat-detection system is calibrated accordingly. A movement that might take property triggers immediate response: concession if possible, repression if necessary, but always engagement. Liberals didn't need to understand Marxism deeply; they needed to understand that the left could take what they had.

And crucially, liberals could position themselves as the reasonable center. Between communist revolution and fascist reaction, liberal democracy offered a middle path. This triangulation gave liberalism strategic clarity and moral confidence.

The interwar period tells a different story. Facing fascism, liberalism floundered. Weimar’s liberals couldn’t stop Hitler. French liberals watched the Third Republic collapse. British liberals pursued appeasement. The pattern was consistent: failure to understand the threat, inadequate response, catastrophe.

The conceptual dimension is real. Fascism didn't play by liberal rules. It rejected Enlightenment premises rather than arguing within them. Against liberal universalism, it posed blood and soil. Against rational argument, myth and will. Against material interest, vitalist struggle. Liberals kept looking for the “real” interests behind fascist movements, assuming Hitler could be negotiated with because they couldn't imagine a politics that wasn't about negotiation.

But the material dimension matters more. Fascism didn't threaten property the way communism did—it promised to protect property while redirecting popular rage toward scapegoats. Liberalism’s alarm system is tuned for redistributive threats. A movement that threatens order without threatening property doesn’t trigger the same response. The signal doesn't register as danger; it registers as noise, or as a negotiating partner with unusual tactics, or as a problem that will resolve itself.

The victory over fascism required liberalism to temporarily become something other than itself: alliance with Stalin, total mobilization, strategic bombing, nuclear weapons. And it required the left. European fascism was defeated primarily by the Red Army. The New Deal coalition that mobilized American power depended on labor militancy that liberals had spent decades suppressing. Liberalism didn’t defeat fascism; liberalism survived fascism by outsourcing the fighting.

Why Liberals Think This Way

The ahistorical mindset isn’t a failure of intelligence or education. It’s a structural feature of class position. Understanding this requires disaggregating “liberals” into distinct strata with different material situations and different relationships to historical thinking.

The credential-dependent stratum—academics, lawyers, doctors, policy professionals—have built their lives around the premise that expertise matters, that procedures work, that institutions function as advertised. Their market position depends on certifications and specialized knowledge that only have value within a stable institutional order. Historical thinking is threatening to them because it reveals these arrangements as contingent—as things that rose and can fall. The tenured professor who acknowledges that universities are historically-specific institutions facing potential obsolescence has undermined the foundation of her own position. The constitutional lawyer who recognizes that legal frameworks are expressions of power rather than neutral procedures has called into question his entire career.

This isn’t cowardice or stupidity. It’s rational defense of material interest, operating largely below the level of conscious calculation. The ahistorical mindset feels like common sense because the alternative is vertigo. If orders rise and fall, if institutions that seem permanent can collapse within years, if credentials can become worthless—then what? Better to assume continuity, to treat disruptions as temporary, to believe that norms will reassert themselves. The cost of being wrong about continuity is abstract and future; the cost of being wrong about discontinuity is immediate professional dysfunction.

The institutionally-embedded stratum—civil servants, NGO professionals, foundation staff, party operatives, journalists at major outlets—face an even more direct constraint. Their careers exist inside the frameworks they would need to critique. The State Department analyst doesn’t get promoted for arguing that American hegemony is ending. The foundation program officer doesn’t get renewed for funding research that concludes philanthropy is a mechanism of class control. The Democratic Party staffer doesn’t advance by questioning whether the party serves its stated constituents.

This produces a specific kind of cognitive limitation. It’s not that these people can’t think critically—many are quite sharp within their domains. It’s that critical thinking about the foundations of their domain is professionally suicidal. The reproduction of their positions requires the reproduction of the frameworks justifying those positions. So they develop sophisticated analysis of how to achieve goals within existing structures while remaining incapable of questioning whether those structures will persist or whether those goals are the right ones.

The culturally-liberal bourgeoisie—the actually wealthy liberals, tech executives who vote Democrat, finance professionals with progressive social views—are different again. Their liberalism is primarily cultural rather than political-economic: tolerance on social issues, cosmopolitan consumption patterns, discomfort with overt bigotry. They’re not confused about power; they exercise it daily. Their “ahistorical” posture is often strategic performance—expressing bewilderment at right-wing movements while ensuring their material interests are protected regardless of who governs. They can afford to be ahistorical about politics because their wealth insulates them from political outcomes. Markets will clear; assets will appreciate; the right lawyers will be retained.

When this stratum engages in historical thinking, it tends toward the self-serving: narratives of progress that culminate in their own success, technological determinism that treats current arrangements as inevitable, “great man” stories featuring entrepreneurs and innovators. History becomes a just-so story explaining why things are as they are, not a field of contingency revealing how things might be otherwise.

The precariously-liberal stratum—adjuncts, junior associates, entry-level professionals, freelancers with graduate degrees—presents the most complex picture. They’ve absorbed liberal frameworks through extended education. They identify with the credential-dependent and institutionally-embedded strata above them. But they haven’t received the material payoff. The adjunct teaching four classes for poverty wages holds the same PhD as the tenured professor; the associate drowning in billable hours shares credentials with the partner. They’ve been promised admission to a professional class that is, for many of them, foreclosed.

This stratum is ideologically liberal but materially proletarian, or close to it. Their ahistorical thinking has a desperate quality: if they acknowledged that the professional path they’ve sacrificed for is a historical artifact in decline, they’d have to confront years of wasted investment. Easier to believe the tenure-track job will materialize, the partnership will come through, the industry will stabilize. Their liberalism is partly genuine conviction and partly sunk-cost fallacy.

Why Conversion Is the Wrong Frame

The left often approaches liberals as people holding incorrect beliefs who might be convinced through better arguments. This misunderstands what liberalism is. Liberal ideology isn’t a mistake to be corrected; it's an expression of class position. You don’t convert the bourgeoisie to socialism by explaining surplus value more clearly. You don't convert the professionally-invested to historical thinking by assigning them better books.

This doesn’t mean liberals are enemies in the same sense as fascists or that no individual liberal ever changes political orientation. It means that persuasion is not the strategic task. The question isn’t how to make liberals think historically. The questions are:

Which strata will defect under what conditions? The precariously-liberal are experiencing the same immiseration as the broader working class, but filtered through frameworks that direct their anger toward cultural enemies (right-wing bigots, Trump voters, the uneducated) rather than structural ones (capital, the property system, the class relations that produced their precarity). They could be recruited to the left—but only with analysis that makes sense of their experience without requiring them to first admit their professional aspirations were always a fantasy. The message must be: the system isn’t failing because the wrong people are running it; the system is working exactly as designed, and you were told a story about meritocracy that was never true.

Which will ally with the right when forced to choose? The credential-dependent stratum is the most psychologically attached to liberal frameworks because those frameworks validate their existence. They may find the right more palatable than the left even when the right is objectively worse for them, because the right at least maintains some hierarchy of merit. The left threatens the premise of their position—that expertise and credentials should govern. A vulgar right-wing populism that attacks “elites” while preserving capitalism is less threatening than a left that would democratize expertise and subordinate professional authority to collective decision-making.

Which can be neutralized without being converted? The institutionally-embedded stratum probably can't be won over but might be induced to stand aside. Their defining characteristic is institutional loyalty rather than ideological commitment. They’ll follow whoever controls the institutions. Under a left government, they’d process paperwork for socialized medicine with the same diligence they currently process it for private insurance. Their liberalism is largely habitual and careerist; they’re not going to man barricades for procedural norms. The goal is to ensure they don’t man barricades against the left either—to make clear that their institutional positions will survive a transition, that there’s a place for competent administrators in any complex society.

Which are genuinely dangerous? The culturally-liberal bourgeoisie will fund reaction when their property is threatened, regardless of their positions on social issues. They already do: the same Silicon Valley executives who rainbow their logos fund politicians gutting labor law; the same Wall Street donors who support marriage equality bankroll campaigns against financial regulation. Their liberalism costs them nothing and commits them to nothing. When the choice sharpens, they will choose property and find ways to narrate it as progressive.

The Real Threat: Liberal-Right Alliance

The Weimar precedent is invoked so often it has become cliché, but its specific lesson is frequently missed. The point isn’t just that liberals are unreliable allies—it’s that liberals under simultaneous pressure from left and right will actively deploy the right against the left.

The SPD faced challenges from both directions: Spartacists and Freikorps, communists and Nazis. Their response was to deploy the right against the left. Gustav Noske, the SPD defense minister, called in the Freikorps—the proto-fascist paramilitaries—to crush the January 1919 uprising. Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered by soldiers operating under nominal Social Democratic authority. The party of the working class drowned the working-class revolution in blood.

This wasn’t betrayal in the simple sense of leaders abandoning principles for personal gain. It was structural. The SPD had built an organization—unions, cooperatives, newspapers, elected officials—whose existence depended on the continuation of the system being reformed. Revolution threatened not just capitalism but everything they’d constructed within capitalism. When forced to choose between revolution and preservation, they chose preservation. They had to. Their material existence demanded it.

And they told themselves stories about why this was the responsible choice. The Spartacists were adventurists, putschists, agents of chaos. The mature position was to defend democratic institutions against extremism of both varieties. They could contain the right afterward, once order was restored. They were the reasonable center, protecting civilization from barbarism.

The Freikorps became the SA. The “reasonable center” held until it didn’t. By 1933, the institutional position the SPD had preserved at such cost—the unions, the cooperatives, the elected officials—was swept away regardless. They had traded revolutionary possibility for a few more years of institutional existence, and then lost even that.

The logic is already visible today. Watch how liberals respond to any genuinely redistributive threat—not the merely rhetorical redistribution of progressive politicians working within the Democratic coalition, but actual challenges to property relations. The response is immediate: this is irresponsible, this is divisive, this alienates moderates, this hands victory to the right. The left is always the proximate enemy, even when the right holds power. This isn’t hypocrisy; it’s liberalism functioning as designed.

Watch too how liberals “adapt” to right-wing pressure. They adopt harder borders while maintaining humanitarian rhetoric. They expand the security state while expressing concern about civil liberties. They move rightward on economic policy while emphasizing cultural progressivism. They call this strategic realism, meeting voters where they are, not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. What they’re doing is incorporating enough nationalist energy to remain viable while preserving the property relations that matter.

If a genuine left challenge emerges alongside the current right one—if economic crisis produces movements that actually threaten property—expect liberal “adaptation” to accelerate. The security apparatus built for counterterrorism is available for domestic deployment. The techniques of surveillance and infiltration refined against Muslims can be applied to labor organizers. The laws passed against protesters blocking pipelines can criminalize picket lines. Liberals will deploy these tools against the left while telling themselves they're defending democracy against extremism. They will be Noske again, because the structural logic that made Noske hasn't changed.

What Actually Happened in Weimar

The conventional narrative of “the KPD refused to ally with the SPD and this enabled Hitler” is largely a liberal and Trotskyist construction that obscures more than it reveals. Understanding what actually happened is essential, because the wrong lessons lead to strategic errors.

The KPD did attempt united front approaches, particularly “from below”: appeals to SPD rank-and-file workers for joint action against fascism, bypassing the leadership they correctly identified as unreliable. These weren’t hypothetical; they were actual organizing efforts throughout the early 1930s.

The SPD leadership rejected these overtures repeatedly and consistently. The SPD's “Iron Front,” formed in 1931, was explicitly directed against both Nazis and Communists—the famous three arrows symbolizing opposition to monarchy, fascism, and communism as equivalent threats. When the KPD proposed joint action, SPD leadership refused. When the KPD called for a general strike after the Prussian coup in July 1932—when von Papen simply dismissed the elected SPD government of Prussia, the largest German state—the SPD and the SPD-aligned unions declined to participate. They accepted the coup rather than risk confrontation. The SPD’s position was that the KPD was at least as dangerous as the Nazis, possibly more so—and from the perspective of SPD’s institutional interests, this wasn't entirely irrational. A Nazi government might destroy the SPD; a successful communist revolution certainly would.

So the “social fascism” thesis of the KPD’s position that social democracy was the moderate wing of fascism was not simply Stalinist ultraleftism conjured from nowhere. It was a distorted, polemically excessive response to the actual behavior of the SPD: the murder of Luxemburg and Liebknecht, the repeated suppression of worker uprisings, the consistent refusal of anti-fascist alliance, the acceptance of the Prussian coup, the evident preference of SPD leadership for bourgeois order over working-class unity. The analysis contained a kernel of truth wrapped in sectarian overstatement.

But if the KPD was largely correct about the SPD leadership, what was the error?

The timing problem. By 1930-1933, the strategic options had already narrowed catastrophically. The decisive moments were earlier: 1918-1919, when the revolutionary wave was crushed with SPD collaboration and the revolutionary left was decapitated; the early 1920s, when the KPD might have built deeper roots in the working class; the relative stability of 1924-1929, when both parties consolidated positions that would prove inadequate to the crisis. By the time the Nazis were surging, the left was fighting on terrain already shaped by a decade of defeats and missed opportunities. No tactical adjustment in 1932 could compensate for the strategic failures of 1919.

The “from below” limitation. The united front from below was theoretically sound—appeal to workers over the heads of treacherous leaders—but practically insufficient. SPD workers were genuinely bound to their organizations: the unions, the cooperatives, the cultural associations, the party itself. These institutional ties were material, not just ideological. The SPD worker had a union card, a credit union account, a spot at the workers’ athletic club, funeral benefits for his family. Asking them to break with SPD leadership meant asking them to abandon the concrete organizational infrastructure of their lives for the abstract promise of class unity. The KPD offered analysis; the SPD offered institutions. In a crisis, institutions usually win.

This points to the deeper failure. The KPD never built institutional depth comparable to the SPD. They had members, they had voters, they had newspapers—but they didn't have the dense network of organizations that integrated workers’ daily lives. The SPD’s institutional weight meant that even workers who agreed with KPD analysis often couldn’t act on it. Their material existence was bound up with organizations whose leadership opposed joint action.

The Comintern constraint. The KPD was not an autonomous actor. Its strategy was substantially determined by Moscow, and Moscow’s priorities were not identical to those of the German working class. The “Third Period” ultra-leftism that produced the social fascism line served Soviet foreign policy interests (or what Stalin perceived as such) as much as German revolutionary strategy. The KPD leadership that might have pursued more flexible tactics was constrained by organizational discipline to a line set elsewhere. This doesn’t excuse the errors—Thälmann was a true believer, not merely a reluctant follower of directives—but it does mean the KPD’s choices cannot be analyzed as if they were freely made strategic decisions by an autonomous organization.

The structural asymmetry. Here’s the harder truth: even optimal left strategy might not have been enough. The Nazi movement had resources the left couldn’t match—capitalist funding, conservative elite tolerance, a state apparatus that was already sympathetic, a message that promised transformation without threatening property. The left was fighting on two fronts: against fascism and against the bourgeois order that kept generating fascism. The Nazis only had to fight on one front, and they had the tacit (and often explicit) support of forces that would never support the left.

A KPD-SPD alliance, even if achieved over the objections of SPD leadership, would have faced the combined opposition of capital, the military, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the conservative parties, and the President. It might have delayed Hitler; whether it could have prevented some form of authoritarian resolution to the crisis of German capitalism is much less clear. The bourgeoisie needed a solution to the labor movement; if not Hitler, then something else.

The actual lesson. The error wasn’t “refusing alliance with liberals” as the liberals refused alliance and couldn’t be trusted anyway. The error wasn’t “sectarianism” as the sectarianism was partly a response to real betrayals and real structural divergence.

The lesson is darker: by the time the crisis was acute, the left had already lost. The defeat was baked in by 1919, when the SPD crushed the revolution and the revolutionary left was decapitated. Everything after was rearguard action, an attempt to rebuild capacity that had been destroyed at the decisive moment. The KPD in 1932 was trying to win a battle in a war that had already been decided a decade earlier.

The left didn’t lose because of wrong tactics in 1932. They lost because they never recovered from 1919, never built the institutional depth that would have made their choices in 1932 matter, never developed the capacity that would have made liberal betrayal survivable.

The error to avoid isn’t “refusing alliance with liberals.” It’s arriving at the crisis without sufficient independent power, so that liberal choices become decisive. The KPD needed SPD cooperation because the KPD wasn’t strong enough alone. That was the failure—not the failure to achieve alliance, but the failure to make alliance unnecessary.

The Present Rhyme

Today’s right challenge shares structural features with the interwar period. The contemporary right is not primarily arguing about how to organize society—it’s rejecting the terms of the argument. Against procedural legitimacy, it poses the will of the people. Against expert knowledge, populist instinct. Against progress, narratives of decline and restoration.

And it doesn’t threaten property. Trumpism promises restoration while delivering upward redistribution. This explains liberal paralysis as much as conceptual illegibility: the threat doesn't register because it's not the kind of threat liberalism evolved to detect. Liberals keep trying to fact-check movements that aren't making factual claims, appealing to norms against opponents who are explicitly norm-breaking, expecting institutional guardrails to hold against people who regard institutions as enemy territory.

The strategic incoherence follows. Is Trumpism a policy agenda? A psychological aberration? A Russian operation? A demographic spasm? Liberals have tried all frames without committing to any, because none capture what's actually happening: a rejection of the liberal order itself, not a negotiating position within it.

The newly precarious professional strata of laid-off tech workers, defunded academics, terminated federal employees are experiencing something they didn’t expect. Their material assumptions have shattered. In theory, this creates openings for the left, which has an analysis of why their precarity is structural rather than personal.

But these strata retain class instincts often hostile to genuine left politics. They want the system reformed to work for them again; they rarely want it dismantled. They resent billionaires above but fear the masses below. The right is better positioned to capture them precisely because it offers an explanation that doesn’t require questioning their previous position: you were fine until they—immigrants, DEI, the woke—ruined it. The left’s explanation requires recognizing that their comfort was built on arrangements that were never sustainable and were never just. The right offers restoration; the left offers transformation. For people who remember comfort and want it back, restoration is easier.

What Follows

The Weimar lesson, properly understood, isn’t about tactical choices in the final crisis. It’s about the decade before. The German left in 1932 had limited options because of what had and hadn't been built in 1919-1929. The question for any left facing a similar conjuncture is whether the capacity exists before the crisis sharpens—because once it sharpens, the range of possibility has already been determined.

This reframes the strategic task. The goal is not to win liberals over, nor to achieve alliance with liberal institutions, nor to convince liberal leaders to make different choices than their class position demands. The goal is to build left capacity sufficient to make liberal choices less consequential.

What does this mean concretely?

Institutional depth, not just mobilization. The KPD could mobilize; the SPD had institutions. When a crisis came, institutions held their members even against those members’ political instincts. A left that can turn out protesters but can’t provide material benefits—mutual aid, job networks, legal defense, social insurance, the infrastructure of daily life—will find its supporters peeled away by organizations that can. The SPD worker who agreed with the KPD still had his union card in his pocket. What does the contemporary left offer that’s comparably binding?

Independent capacity, not coalition dependence. The KPD’s strategic options in 1932 depended on SPD cooperation because the KPD wasn’t strong enough alone. This dependency was the fruit of the 1919 defeat and the failure to rebuild sufficiently in the decade following. A left that requires liberal cooperation to achieve its goals has already ceded the decisive question. The task is to build power that can operate regardless of liberal choices—not because liberals are irrelevant, but because their predictable defection must be survivable.

Class composition, not just class rhetoric. The KPD’s base was substantially the unemployed and the precariously employed. The SPD’s base was the organized working class with stable jobs—precisely the workers with the most to lose from disruption and the most invested in institutional continuity. A left whose composition skews toward the most desperate will find it difficult to sustain organization; a left whose composition skews toward the comfortable will find it difficult to sustain radicalism. The strategic task is to organize workers who have enough stability to sustain long-term commitment but enough grievance to sustain radical politics. In contemporary terms: not those who want the system to work for them again, but the working class—including newly proletarianized professionals—who are discovering the system never will.

Preparation for suppression. If a genuine left challenge emerges, liberals will attempt to suppress it. This is not paranoia; it is the lesson of every historical instance of left advance. The legal infrastructure is already in place: domestic terrorism statutes, material support laws, conspiracy charges, civil asset forfeiture, the entire apparatus developed for the War on Terror now available for domestic deployment. A left that hasn’t prepared for this—that hasn’t developed secure communications, legal defense capacity, resilience against infiltration, the ability to sustain organization under pressure—will be destroyed in the early stages of any serious confrontation. The Spartacists were crushed in part because they were organizationally immature, easy to decapitate. Don’t be easy to decapitate.

Longer timelines, greater urgency. This seems contradictory but isn’t. The Weimar left’s tragedy was that the decisive period was 1919-1929, but they didn’t fully recognize this until 1932-1933, when options had foreclosed. The work that needed to be done in the relatively stable period wasn’t done with sufficient intensity; when the crisis arrived, there wasn’t time to compensate. The lesson is that the non-crisis period is precisely when crisis preparation must happen, and it must happen with urgency disproportionate to the apparent stability. By the time the crisis is obvious, the outcome is largely determined. The question is always: what would we need to have built, and have we built it?

Conclusion

The managerial and professional strata staffing liberal institutions have lost the ability to think historically and materially at exactly the moment when such thinking is most necessary. This is structural, not personal—the product of class positions that assumed permanence and rewarded those who shared that assumption.

Understanding why liberals think as they do is useful for the left, but not because liberals can be educated out of their limitations. They can’t. Their ahistorical mindset is load-bearing; abandoning it would collapse the psychological and professional structures they’ve built their lives around. The point of understanding is strategic: to predict how different liberal strata will behave under pressure, to identify which can be recruited and which must be defeated, to anticipate the liberal-right alliance that history suggests is coming.

The Weimar precedent, properly understood, offers no comfort. The left didn’t lose because of tactical errors in the final crisis. They lost because the capacity that would have made different tactics possible was destroyed in 1919 and never rebuilt. By the time the crisis was acute, the outcome was largely determined.

The question for the contemporary left is not what to do when the crisis arrives—though that matters—but whether the capacity is being built now that would make different outcomes possible. Whether the institutions exist that could bind members through the crisis. Whether the organizational depth exists that could survive liberal defection and state suppression. Whether the class composition is right. Whether the preparation has been done.

History is moving again. Liberals will respond as their class position demands: confusion and paralysis before the right, alliance with the right against the left. The left that expects otherwise, that hopes for liberal allies in the decisive moment, is preparing to relive Weimar. The left that understands this, that builds accordingly, that arrives at the crisis with independent capacity rather than coalition dependency: that left has a chance.

Not a guarantee. The structural asymmetries that doomed Weimar exist today: the right can promise transformation without threatening property; the left cannot. Capital will fund reaction; it will not fund revolution. The state apparatus is hostile; it will not be neutral. These asymmetries may prove insurmountable regardless of what the left builds.

But the absence of guarantees is not an argument for passivity. It is an argument for building as if the outcome depended on it because it does, even if building well is necessary but not sufficient. The alternative is to arrive at the crisis with nothing, to watch liberals make the choices liberals always make, to be destroyed in the early rounds of a fight that was lost before it began.

The work is organizational, institutional, material. It is not primarily intellectual, not primarily about convincing anyone of anything. The liberals will not be convinced. The question is whether, when they defect, it matters.