When Ideology Becomes Dogma

On The Argument and more.

There’s been a lot of rightful pushback against the new self-described liberal Substack outlet The Argument. Founded by former Atlantic opinion writer Jerusalem Demsas and stacked with popular centrist-liberal pundits like Matt Yglesias and Abundance co-author Derek Thompson, the publication makes no apologies for being a defender of liberalism. What’s striking, though, is how openly it embraces ideology. While most outlets have biases or some centering mission, The Argument defines itself as seeking to “make a positive, combative case for liberalism through rigorous, persuasive journalism.”

That puts it in an interesting position. For an outlet that claims to be defending liberal values, beginning so righteously convinced of its own ideology is, ironically, quite illiberal. And it reveals what I believe The Argument really is: fodder for a neoliberal order that—aside from its staunchest defenders—most people can see has fueled the global surge in right-populism. These types of outlets should be held accountable for what they are: propaganda for a dying status quo, underwritten by the capitalist class they serve as loyal foot soldiers. That isn’t journalism; it’s platforming. Most damningly, it isn’t critical thinking.

Despite sounding hot-headed in my critique, I think humility matters. Over the past year, I’ve been on a disorienting journey, disavowing nearly everything I was taught to believe about politics. It has felt a bit like taking the red pill in The Matrix. It’s truly destabilizing.

For me, this break has come with financial uncertainty, the loss of professional relationships, and a deep sense of unease and anger. But I wouldn’t trade it to go back. Once you step outside a dogmatic worldview, there’s a clarity that brings with it a new kind of freedom — the freedom to challenge power, and to read and connect with other thinkers who have been doing the same, often thanklessly, for decades. Some of whom, it would have previously been seen as taboo to even converse with.

It’s from this position that I understand why The Argument feels like common sense to its founders. I’ve been inside that orbit — living in Washington, D.C. or New York City, attending one swanky happy hour after another, where journalists, lobbyists, and staffers bask in their shared status as part of the powerful elite. You are there to uphold the neoliberal order, even if it doesn’t feel like ideology (which is precisely what makes it so dangerous). You become convinced you’re on the “better side” of a broken system. Centrist incrementalism is the name of the game, and nothing else is politically fathomable. That is how you survive — and climb — in this system.

So of course a project like this new outlet doesn’t register to them as propaganda, but rather as the obvious and necessary “defense of democracy.” I remember buying into the same tropes they are parroting about the left: quietly admitting it held the morally superior position, but dismissing it as idealistic nonsense that would only aid the enemy and tear Democrats apart. I truly believed that.

What felt like pragmatism to me then, I now recognize as dogma — a worldview that narrows the field of vision until only one politics is imaginable and is defended with religious fervor. That is the danger. When ideology hardens into dogma, it doesn’t just govern how elites talk among themselves; it sets the limits of debate for everyone else, closing off real alternatives and manifesting in multi-million-dollar ventures to shore up a status quo most Americans have lost faith in.

It is here that I’ve come to the unsettling realization that penetrating a worldview like this from the outside is far harder than I once thought. When you’re inside the liberal bubble (or any bubble), you don’t feel constrained by dogma but anchored by reason. That’s the tension that makes it so difficult.

And this is exactly why critical thinking matters. The challenge isn’t simply to disagree with The Argument’s policy views point by point, but to recognize how the ideology itself hides in plain sight, masquerading as neutrality. The Argument is not just defending a worldview, it is defending the very idea that its worldview is the rational, responsible baseline from which all debate must proceed. Once that frame is so ingrained in its believers, dissent is no longer disagreement but extremism. And once disagreement is cast as extremism, you lose sight of the very reason you claim to defend.

The real tragedy is that this becomes branded as journalism. But journalism so married to ideology can only reinforce it; it cannot interrogate power.

And when ideology is disguised as common sense, it doesn’t just consume elites — it gets to police the imagination of everyone else, a psychological mechanism of control, all under the guise of reason and “liberal” values.

The question, then, is not whether we agree with The Argument’s defense of liberalism, but whether we can even see it for what it is: a political project dressed up as neutrality. Because once you understand this, you no longer see eye to eye with its defenders.

What would it take for The Argument’s writers to look honestly at their own role in propping up a system built on financialization, debt, and pain? Getting out of D.C.? Losing the prestige of their identities, their financial security, their proximity to power? I don’t know. And honestly, it’s not something we should count on.

Does that mean those of us outside their bubble shouldn’t try to argue with them in good faith? I’m not sure of that either. Maybe we should. But if we do, we should enter those debates clear-eyed about what’s at stake: not persuading them point by point, but exposing the dogma that underwrites their “common sense.”

This work is hard, but it’s also liberating — because once you see dogma for what it is, you begin to recover the possibility that real debate does exist, and with it, maybe even the possibility of real change.