Public Biography
Dr. Theresa Liang is a professor of political discourse at Northwestern University, where she directs the Program on Rhetoric and Democratic Contestation. Her research focuses on the structural mechanics of political debate — specifically, the conditions under which debates sustain themselves and the conditions under which they collapse.
Dr. Liang received her Ph.D. in political science from Yale University in 2012 and joined the Northwestern faculty in 2015. She is the author of The Argument Machine: How Political Debates Perpetuate Themselves (University of Chicago Press, 2022), which examines the self-reinforcing dynamics of ideological conflict and argues that most sustained political debates require not agreement but the performance of disagreement to continue functioning. The book was reviewed in The American Political Science Review as “a disturbing account of how much of our political life depends on people continuing to argue rather than resolving anything.”
Her most cited paper, “Adversarial Collapse: What Happens When One Side Stops Playing” (2024), theorized that certain political debates are structurally dependent on both parties maintaining opposed positions, and that the unilateral withdrawal of opposition by either side would cause the debate to become, in her terminology, “mechanically inert.” The paper was largely theoretical until March 2026.
Dr. Liang has been consulted by journalists, think tanks, and one confused Heritage Foundation working group on the phenomenon she now refers to as “the Kirkwood Capitulation,” a term the subject of the phenomenon has rejected.
She lives in Evanston, Illinois, and describes her field as “the study of why people keep arguing after they have stopped listening.”
Articles
- Transgender Rights Advocate Openly Admits She Doesn't Mind Pretending Men Are Women — She has been accused of pretending for years and has decided, after careful reflection, that she does not find it burdensome.
- Schaumburg Man Self-Identifies as a Woman So That, When She Points Out the Obvious, She Cannot Be Accused of Mansplaining — He has changed nothing about his daily life except his self-declared gender, a move he describes as 'essentially clerical.'