TLP Weekend Edition (August 23-24, 2025)

What we're reading and checking out.

This week features a range of reading and listening pleasures for TLP subscribers focused on issues of pluralism and the wonderful literature and music of New Zealand. (Waiheke Island/Author photo)

🇺🇸 “Profiles in Pluralism: Americans who are keeping this country united,” new edition of The Catalyst. The summer issue of this journal from the George W. Bush Institute features a range of excellent essays on the subject of pluralism, a topic we cover a fair amount at TLP. Pluralism is basically the peaceful coexistence of people with different backgrounds, interests, beliefs, and life choices within a democratic system. In a seemingly contradictory time with massive partisan polarization and a strong desire for more unity and less division, “Profiles in Pluralism” offers positive ideas on the way forward:

The issue opens with Pearce Godwin, whose Listen First Coalition includes more than 500 organizations working to bridge divides. In “Understanding the Other,” Godwin argues that one big source of our problem today is that Democrats and Republicans imagine the other side to be much more extreme than it actually is. His advice? Start working together on common problems at the local level, where “cable news and social media caricatures of other people are much more likely to ring hollow.”

Nicole Bibbins Sedaca provides some much-needed historical perspective. In “The Right Way to Think About Diversity,” she reminds us that pluralism has been central to the American experiment from the beginning. Drawing on the writings of James Madison, she reminds us that strong institutions can allow different groups to compete fairly while preventing any one from dominating the others. And she calls for more “McCain moments,” after the late Sen. John McCain—instances in which U.S. leaders courageously put democratic values over partisan gain.

Chris Walsh makes this idea practical in “Pluralism Isn’t Purple.” Challenging today’s prevalent but unrealistic feel-good version of pluralism, in which both sides of the aisle are supposed to unite in a kumbaya moment, he argues that what we need instead is what he calls “separate-movie pluralism”—instances where opposing groups cooperate while maintaining their distinct beliefs. Anne Wicks also takes down the romantic version of pluralism in her essay, “Sparring for Success.” Wicks argues that pluralism is the “messy, sometimes bruising, central tenet of U.S. democracy” and provides the kind of friction our best leaders use to sharpen their decision-making.

In their interview with William McKenzie, Pastor Bob Roberts, and Imam Mohammed Magid provide plenty of examples of pluralism in action. The two clerics, who cofounded the Multi-Faith Neighbors Network, base their work and their friendship on several practical essentials: respect, listening, curiosity, and humility. Their efforts to help Afghan refugees—a project during which “mosques, churches, and synagogues opened their doors” to work together—shows how faith can bring us together, even when we believe different things.

In “Unity in the Trenches,” Jason Galui takes us inside America’s most successful pluralistic institution: the U.S. military. Galui, an Army veteran, argues that our Armed Forces are so strong precisely because they do such a good job of incorporating the diverse perspectives of every service member—a lived example of “out of many, one.”

While the U.S. military does problem-solving on a giant scale, Lawrence E. Adjah shows how pluralistic pragmatism can work on a much more personal level, fighting loneliness and polarization at the same time. In “Building Bridges in the Divided States of America,” he describes how his Family Dinner Foundation, which brings lonely people together for shared meals, has proven that “when you commit to showing up for someone’s crisis or celebration, political affiliation becomes secondary to human connection.”

The journalist and academic Mark Oppenheimer, in his conversation with William McKenzie, highlights another domain—houses of worship—where personal or spiritual connections can be more important than what we think about politics. Indeed, he argues, we don’t need to spend so much time thinking about our differences. “The strength of a pluralistic society,” he says, “is that those conversations don’t have to happen all the time.”

But sometimes they should, and Eboo Patel argues that college campuses are the best place to train Americans on how to talk about difference effectively and respectfully. Calling for universities to become “laboratories and launching pads for pluralism,” he lays out a vision for how they can do so. Finally, Knox Thames highlights another place where people can learn the tools of peaceful coexistence: sacred spaces, especially those where different faiths have shared the same ground for generations.

🏙️ "America's Best Cities (2025)," by Ipsos and Resonance Consultancy. This annual report breaks down the country's "Top 100" cities using a host of different metrics, including measurements like housing affordability, GDP, and air quality, as well as surveys asking Americans where they would most like to live or visit one day. Somewhat surprisingly (or unsurprisingly, depending on your assumptions about these things), the most popular cities include several of the country's largest and most expensive and some that are even losing population. Check out the full list to see where your metro area falls!

🟥 “A Bite-Sized Intro To DSA Factions,” by The Rose Garden. With a DSA member poised to take over America’s largest city, it’s time to get up to speed on this organization. Who are they? What do they believe? Well, a lot of things—and you truly can’t tell the players without a scorecard! Check out this very helpful guide from The Rose Garden Substack that covers the multiplicity of factions battling it out inside the organization, divided into Right, Center-Right, Center, Center-Left, and Left categories. Sample description of a “Center” (!) faction:

Bread and Roses (B&R or BnR)

• Type: Large caucus, >100 delegates, created 2019

• Ideology: Democratic road to socialism with Post-Trotskyist flavor

• TLDR: Organize militant unions + slow dirty break

• Summary: B&R strongly supports DSA's labor work, particularly the "rank and file" strategy for militant unions and "wall-to-wall" student union organizing, which build toward "organizing the working class as workers." B&R supports "tactical flexibility" on "ballot line" questions, with a majority hoping to "eventually split" the "Democratic Party coalition" in a slow "dirty break," and a minority opposed to "dirty break propagandism" that hurts "elect[ing] class-struggle candidates."

Points if you have any idea what a “slow dirty break” might be. Not radical enough for you? The guide has you covered. How about the comrades from this “Center-Left” faction?

Marxist Unity Group (MUG) ☭

• Type: Large caucus, >60 delegates, created 2021

• Ideology: Centrist Marxism with Kautskyist and Leninist flavor

• TLDR: Strict endorsee discipline + fight the Constitution

• Summary: MUG supports tribune electoralism (run "militant socialist candidates" who "refuse to join the Democratic Party caucus" or "endorse non-socialists," do "principled agitation," and unendorse & expel electeds who fail "tribune obligations"). MUG wants DSA to adopt a "revolutionary minimum-maximum program, their "fighting socialist program." MUG argues that DSA should pursue Marxist democratic republicanism ("fight the reactionary Constitution," agitate for a "working class revolution," and win a "plurinational democratic socialist republic").

They sound like a fun group. Bonus: if you’re a glutton for punishment and want to know more, the Rose Garden post provides a list of other guides to DSA factions and ideology. You too can be a scholar of DSA-ology—pluralism for radicals!

📚 This Mortal Boy, by Fiona Kidman. TLP’s Baltimore office just saw an excellent documentary in Auckland, The House Within, about one of New Zealand’s most esteemed and humane writers, Dame Fiona Kidman. Known primarily for her second-wave feminist writing in the 70’s and 80’s, her more recent books like This Mortal Boy from 2018 are historical fiction novels that explore topics related to strangers in society.

A novel based on real people and the real events that led to one of the last executions in New Zealand.

Albert Black, known as the ‘jukebox killer’, was only twenty when he was convicted of murdering another young man in a fight at a milk bar in Auckland on 26 July 1955. His crime fueled growing moral panic about teenagers, and he was to hang less than five months later, the second-to-last person to be executed in New Zealand.

But what really happened? Was this a love crime, was it a sign of juvenile delinquency? Or was this dark episode in our recent history more about our society’s reaction to outsiders?

Black’s final words, as the hangman covered his head, were, ‘I wish you all a Merry Christmas, gentlemen, and a prosperous New Year.’

This is his story.

🎸 Needles and Plastic: Flying Nun Records, 1981-1988, by Matthew Goody. Flying Nun is probably the best indie record label ever created. This book covers the founding years of the influential NZ label with more than 500 images and entries on every single record put out during this period. A music lover’s extravaganza!

Founded in 1981 by Roger Shepherd, Flying Nun Records unleashed an extraordinary wave of New Zealand music on listeners in Aotearoa and around the world—from The Clean to the Headless Chickens, Look Blue Go Purple to The Jean-Paul Sartre Experience.

Needles and Plastic is a fully illustrated account of the label, the bands and the songs from 1981–1988—the critical early years, when the label was based in Christchurch and getting records pressed in New Zealand.

Matthew Goody tells the story through the records themselves. In entries on over 140 records from The Clean’s ‘Tally Ho!’ 7" in 1981 to The Verlaines’ Bird-Dog LP in 1988, the book draws on years of research to reveal the stories of the bands, the recordings, the songs and the audience, with a host of characters contributing along the way—Shepherd, Chris Knox, Doug Hood, Hamish Kilgour, and many more.

In this remarkable tale of creativity and chaos, do-it-yourself innovation and extraordinary attempts at world domination, Needles and Plastic tells the inside story of one of New Zealand’s—and the world’s—great independent music labels.

TLP will be seeing Flying Nun legends The Bats next week in Geraldine during a family visit. Here’s one of our favorite old tunes “North By North” from the Christchurch band that has been together since 1982.

Editor’s note: The Liberal Patriot will resume publishing on September 2, 2025, after our annual end-of-summer break. Cheers!