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[upbeat music] [groans] [upbeat music]
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Ladies and gentlemen, uh,
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can I please have your attention? Can you dig it?
Jonah Goldberg
Greetings, dear listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of The Remnant Podcast, brought to you by The Dispatch and Dispatch Media. We have been trying to put this podcast together for an eternity. It feels longer than the wedding scene in The Deer Hunter. But the planets have a lo- have aligned, and so we have the great Adrian Wooldridge, who is the global business columnist at Bloomberg News. Previously, he was The Economist political editor, author of the Bagehot column, author of the Schumpeter column, Washington bureau chief, and author of the Lexington column. He went o- went to all the very fanciest of schools in the UK, and he is the author of a great many books, most recently, The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of American Liberalism. Adrian Wooldridge, welcome to The Remnant.
Adrian Wooldridge
Thank you for having me.
Jonah Goldberg
As you were warned, first question out of the boxes, what’s your book about?
Adrian Wooldridge
My book is about the lost genius of liberalism, and the argument essentially is to say that the, there was this incredibly rich, powerful, dynamic, self-adjusting, self-improving philosophy of the world that really starts in about the 18th century and continues to change, evolve over the years called liberalism. And this liberalism is very different from what many Americans mean when they say liberalism, by which they mean sort of left progressivism. But it’s also, in my view, a bit different from what classical liberals will say is liberalism, which by which they mean sort of the free markets unvarnished by government intervention. It’s a belief in, uh, freedom of debates, limitations on power, individual rights, individual self-improvement, um, that takes different forms with regard to the size of the state over the years. Sometimes it’s big state, sometimes it’s small state, but it is always about the individual acting to, um, make the best of their lives within a constitutional arrangement.
Jonah Goldberg
You have a very capacious-
Adrian Wooldridge
Yes
Jonah Goldberg
… sort of working definition of liberalism. You, having explored a lot of this for a book I’m working on, um, I have nothing but sympathy for the trickiness of nailing down what liberalism is. Um, in some ways, you know, the scholars of fascism used to call about, uh, u- used to, like Ernst Nolte and those guys, they would come up with the fascist negations and would come up with lists of things that fascism isn’t. [chuckles] And, and sometimes it’s easier to do the same thing with liberalism about what, what– It’s easier to spot what’s illiberal than what’s, what defines liberalism. But why don’t you just for the sake, for level setting, give your, I’m sure you’re practiced at this by now, your definition of liberalism.
Adrian Wooldridge
Yeah. S- uh, Steven Lukes, a philosopher, once wrote, um, a book on individualism, and he said that there were 48 different meanings of individualism, to which Isaiah Berlin replied, “Why so few?”
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Adrian Wooldridge
And I think, um, liberalism is a very difficult, it’s a very slippery word, and I have taken a capacious view of what liberalism means for a very important practical reason. That is that I want all centrists, all people of the, the, the, uh, of good faith, uh, in liberal institutions to unite together against threats to liberalism from both the left and the right. And I think that we can begin to see, um, what liberalism is, not by looking at ourselves and our own, you know, small differences, and I think a lot of what the 1990s was about in retrospect was the narcissism of small differences, but by looking at what Putin thinks, looking at what Xi thinks, and looking at our world compared with theirs. There are anti-liberal forces at the moment, uh, who want to negate, destroy, eradicate liberalism. And we, if we look at the world through their eyes, we can begin to see what is essential to liberalism and what is merely incidental. I would say that what is essential to liberalism is, first of all, individualism. That’s the most important thing. Liberalism starts with the individual and works upwards. And I don’t mean by individualism, just the individualism of the shopping mall, which I think some neoliberals have almost descended to. I mean individualism meaning responsibility for the individual, uh, self-reliance for the individual, self-improvement for the individual. It, l- the liberal tradition has always been about a very rugged conception of, of the individual, not just as a victim, not just as a shopper, but as somebody who fights for his own or her own corner and is engaged in a process of, of self-improvement, self-discovery. Secondly, I mean, um, having a very strict view of the importance of tolerance, tolerance of different views, willingness to listen to different views, and also tolerance of different sort of modes of life. So liberal tolerance is an epistemological thing. It says that we can’t know ultimate things with any certainty, so you can’t impose them on other people. But it also says that, uh, uh, good things in life may clash with each other, so you have to have room for pluralism, room for different ways of putting together these, the, the, the, these good things. So tolerance for individual disagreement, but also for, for group disagreement. And finally, limitations on powers. Individual liberals are by the, uh, of, uh, of their essence preoccupied by constitutions, which may not sound very exciting or very interesting, but are absolutely important because one of the most fundamental defects of man or something fundamental to his nature is, uh, a lust for power. And individuals, uh, liberals understand that and try and constrain power. Now, these things might sound sort of-I hate to say inane, but they may sound a bit obvious until we begin to look at the world at the moment and you see strongmen all around the world, uh, pushing at the restraints on power. You see ideologues, um, who are so convinced that they’re right about things that they’re not willing to listen to other sorts of people, and, you know, that’s very much the case, uh, not just with religious enthusiasts, uh, which was, were liberals original bête noire, but also with, with, with, with, with university ideologues. You know, university departments, supposedly the most civilized and educated people in the world, are very intolerant of views different from their, uh, different from their own. And individualism, um, I think is being eroded by all sorts of collective opinions and all sorts of authoritarian regimes who don’t see society as starting with the individual. So I think these three things are fundamental. They’re fundamental in terms of their importance at the moment. And I would say other things, which I’m sure we’ll debate, about the size, role, nature of the state and its balance w- with the market, those things can change, uh, at different times.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. So I mean, uh, you’re right to see, uh, where I go there. Like, I,
Jonah Goldberg
I have no problem,
Jonah Goldberg
at least for this conversation, with the idea that those three things that you listed are non-negotiable, right? That’s what I hear when you say they’re fundamental.
Adrian Wooldridge
Yeah, they’re, they’re non-negotiable, yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
The question that raises just something for me is, is why stop at three, right? I mean, like, as Isa- as you point out, Isaiah Berlin said, “Why stop at 48?” The checks and balances system, which we get as much from Montesquieu as we get from Madison, right, is a form of limited government, right? And part of the free market argument is that limited government isn’t just about the separation of powers, it’s about this far and no farther. W- is there a point… Like, so I’m a Burkean and a Hayekian. Those are my two, like, touchstones, and I know you’re not a socialist, and I know you’re not a communist, right? So at some point,
Jonah Goldberg
your principle about not interfering in the market has to get to a point where you say, “This far and no farther,” right? So don’t you have other nego- non-negotiable positions? They’re just, the, the trade-off point is further down the road rather than from the starting line.
Adrian Wooldridge
Well, what worries me and why I took these three things as being essential, partly ’cause I think that all good people should be willing, uh, should be, uh, say this far and no further when it comes to these three things. And I think in large juncture of the world, these three things are being violated by anti-liberal forces, and I wanted to draw, for practical reasons, the, uh, circle as wide as possible to include a wide group of people. Uh, but secondly, because I think that, uh, that we have, uh, had for the last 40 years, a sort of functioning liberal consensus, uh, which I associate with Tony Blair and I associate with Bill Clinton, which basically argues that liberalism is a sort of synthesis as, as a working system of, of politics. Is a sort of synthesis between a broadly free market approach to the economy and a broadly, uh, libertarian approach to public morality. So keep your hands off, off the, o- off the boardroom and off the bedroom.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Adrian Wooldridge
Or, you know, what David Brooks called the s- the, the, the sort of w- w- what we in Britain call the Lib Lab consensus and David Brooks call, calls sort of the Bobo consensus, bourgeois bohemian consensus. And that formed a sort of template which was quite widely adhered to, obviously by the center left, by the Blairites and the Clintonites, but to some extent by, by, by, by Bush. And I’m worried about a, a willingness amongst liberals not to go outside that sort of consensus, ’cause I think that consensus, it was good for a while. It generated, uh, w- as we threw off the s- the, the, sort of the burden of the, of the corporatist state in the 1970s, it generated growth. As we sort of embraced things like gay marriage, we, uh, liberated significant groups of people. But I think that sort of, that hands-off approach has generated more and more problems in, uh, more recently, or it’s blinded us to the solution to certain important problems. And I think the liberal order has been tested by its failure to deal with, uh, mass immigration and failure to assimilate those immigrants, by its failure to keep the, the streets clean and cre- keep drug addicts off the streets, uh, the streets, by its, uh, tolerance of social breakdown, and by its tolerance of certain forms of hyper capitalism. And I would say all of those things need to be dealt with within a liberal framework, because if we don’t do that,
Adrian Wooldridge
uh, um, put it quite as crudely as to say, if liberals don’t do it, fascists will do it for us. But you know what I mean. That, that, that-
Adrian Wooldridge
… if we don’t do that, the populists will do that. Also because I think in some ways, um, uh, too much tolerance of business, uh, certain business interests, is dysfunctional to s- uh, to society, just as too much tolerance for certain lifestyle choices dif- it’s different for society. So what I’m trying to do is not only lay out the, the fundamental conditions of what is a liberal society, but also to try and change the mixture of permission and, uh, lack of permission that, that, that constitutes the sort of the b- the blue- the blueprint of public policy.
Jonah Goldberg
There’s a rich tradition, as you know. I mean, you wrote a column called The Schumpeter Column, right? [laughs] And so there’s a rich tradition of analysis, whether it’s the cultural contradictions of capitalism with a Daniel Bell thesis, or whether it’s stuff by Christopher Lasch or stuff by Patrick Deneen. Um, you know, you can go, there’s a, there are different flavors, but the basic argument is that liberal democratic capitalism feeds off of stored up social capital, um, which is hard to replenish at the same rate at which it burns it down. One variant of that argument is, is that, look, I love David Brooks, longtime friend of mine. There were some analytical, I had some analytical problems with B- with the Bobo’s book, in part because I think the bohemian part of the formulation is-As a matter of instinct, culture, tradition, lifestyle, I’m not talking about gay marriage, but I’m talking about these sort of, uh, you know, shock the bourgeoisie tradition, which, you know, David admits somewhere in that book that he’s really just talking about romanticism, but everyone’s eyes glaze over when they hear the word romanticism, and he thought this would be better. And the institutional indulgence of this sort of transgressive romantic desire to dismantle the bourgeois order is
Jonah Goldberg
the danger of liberal tolerance taken too far. And I know from, I mean, just from the little I already did here, I mean, the little, you know, version you did here, but I also know from the book that you have some deep-seated criticisms of, of liberal. What is the limiting principle that someone could invoke to keep that from happening, right? To say, look, we want to be a welcoming country. We want to have assimilation. We want to have immigration. You know, my, my stated position on immigration for over 20 years, I used to be at National Review for 20 years, you know, was whenever I was asked, you know, what’s your preferred immigration policy? My standard answer was to have one.
Jonah Goldberg
And, you know, I would, if it’s a million a year, that’s fine by me. If it’s a moratorium for a little while, I’d rather not have it be a moratorium, but that’s better than chaos because that undermines confidence in the system. What is the, what is the limiting principle on, you know, universities teaching that the American founding was in 1619 and therefore the entire country is illegitimate in some way? The, the sort of corrosive view that there’s nothing inherently redeeming about liberalism.
Jonah Goldberg
Like you don’t want to ban that because that would be illiberal. But at the same time, how do you get people to sort of slap them awake and come to their senses on this kind of thing?
Adrian Wooldridge
Yeah, I mean, I think the, the, the issue of the sort of the cultural contradictions of capitalism or the, or the Patrick Deneen sort of position. I think Patrick Deneen is completely right to say that if you can consume your cultural capital, then liberalism can’t continue. That it does depend on a certain core of cultural capital that is commonly believed in and that, and that gives, uh, provides grist to institutions. But I don’t think he’s unique in saying that. I think that liberals have, have always seen that from, from, from the very sore, very first. My, my big criticism of Patrick Deneen is there’s nothing that he says in that book that is a good criticism of liberalism that hasn’t before been said by liberals. I mean, obviously the great, the greatest critic of, of liberal individualism is Tocqueville, who’s a liberal. Um, and I think John Stuart Mill, who’s a much more complicated and interesting thinker than, than many so-called classical liberals, Hayek and the rest of them, I think concede at least in their best known writings, um, is very, very worried in the middle of the 19th century about the destruction or by capitalism of the culture that created, created capitalism. And he believes along with Coleridge that what you need to do is create a sort of educated class, an elite, uh, that is in charge of transmitting cultural traditions through liberal education. Liberalism can’t exist without liberal education. This cultural elite plays the sort of role that the clergy plays, that it’s not preaching a narrow Christian doctrine, but it is preaching a broad sort of humanist doctrine that Christians could subscribe to, Muslims could subscribe to, all people of goodwill could subscribe to. But he thinks that this reinforcing of a cultural tradition is absolutely vital to the survival of, of liberalism. And one of the tragedies of, uh, our current culture, and here I agree with Patrick Deneen, is that the universities, which were supposed to play this role of upholding high culture and humanistic culture and transmitting doctrines about, about art, literature, character, uh, how we should live together, civic culture, have been taken over partly by people who just see everything as a research product to produce articles, sort of scientism, Germanic style scientism, but also partly people who see that their job is not just to criticize society, but to give it a good kicking. And I don’t think liberal, liberal social order can survive if it has an alienated intelligentsia whose role in life, who sees their role in life as to, you know, to, to, to criticize everything according to some, you know, preconceived ideological position, which is, which, which is, doesn’t have anything to do with renewing the bonds of, of society. So I do think that liberalism, a liberal social order, any social order, but a liberal social order is not just naturally self-renewing in the way that Hayek thinks it, sometimes thinks it is. It has to be renewed by a responsible, I suppose, intellectual class to some extent. Uh, and I think you’ll find that in Burke, you’ll find it in Tocqueville, you’ll find it in Mill, you’ll find it in, uh, well, obviously Coleridge, who’s, uh, more of a conservative than a liberal, but you find it reinstated over and over again. And I think we’ve lost that capacity to say that we, we need to do this. Now to your bigger question of what are the natural limits of what we can allow without becoming ourselves illiberal, well, I would point to Popper’s paradox of tolerance, that if you tolerate people who are intolerant themselves and indeed who see their role as testing the limits of toleration to destruction, then you have to say, no, you can’t do that. So I would say to, um, university academics who just teach, um, the destruction of society, well, no, you can’t do that. You’re, you’re part of a social contract, which allows, doesn’t allow you to do that. To people who come to Western countries, and Britain is much more subject to this than the United States is, who basically are so, uh, committed to a fundamentalist orthodox faith that they will not allow their children to listen to any other arguments, that they impose very restrictive dress sense, you know, burkas and the rest of it on their children. This is a big problem in, in, in Europe on, on young girls. I think that’s going beyond what a liberal society should freely, uh, permit. It’s not that I would ban burkas, but that I would ban people from forcing their children to wear burkas against their will, their daughters.
Jonah Goldberg
I often say that one of the, that America has been very, very lucky when it comes to immigration, in part because we were never this ethnically homogeneous entity, you know, the way that some people on the new right want to claim we were. But also the vast bulk of our immigrants
Jonah Goldberg
come from, you know, these days at least from just the, the Americas, and they’re,
Jonah Goldberg
they’re halfway bought into assimilation by the day they get here. And, and America’s also just better at assimilation than y- than Europe or the UK, but also just the, the challenge that you get from Muslim culture. There are some wonderful Muslim people who want to become British people and stay Muslim, and then there’s some wonderful… There are some less than wonderful people who have antipathy towards the system that they’ve immigrated to. And if there’s one thing that is going to arouse a populist backlash is newcomers coming telling you how crappy your country is.
Adrian Wooldridge
We have had a very large flow of immigrants from non-European countries, and paradoxically, or paradox is the right word, strangely, um, since Brexit, we’ve had a significant increase in the number of immigrants coming from non-Muslim count- uh, non-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, can you expl- I’ve heard different explanations for why that is. What i- what, what was your understanding of is it a bureaucratic-
Adrian Wooldridge
Partly that Boris Johnson was a have your cake and eat it person. He… And he saw Brexit as a way of making Britain more global rather than controlling its borders. Partly that we had the, uh, crisis with COVID, so we had lots and lots of job shortages which needed to be filled, uh, in very short order. And partly because we made it harder for Europeans to come to the country, so w- or to, you know, we weren’t part of a single market, a fl- single flow of labor. So we, I think, in two thou- uh, 2022 had nine hundred thousand immigrants come in, which was twice the amount that we’ve had before COVID. I mean, it was a huge surge in immigrants, most of whom came from non-European countries, from not very educated backgrounds, and
Adrian Wooldridge
will probably be difficult to assimilate. I don’t know the, the exact details, but I, I would suspect that they came from backgrounds which will make assimilation more difficult. So immigration has been going up from a very low base for, for lots of European countries and for, for, and for Britain in particular. It’s been go- very fast, um, with a lot of people coming from non-European societies, and Muslim societies are societies with very strong gods and a very, very distinctive way of believing and acting. It’s, you know, that doesn’t naturally easily melt into the, the, the secular society or Christian society around it. So if you look at what’s happened in, in Britain but also in much of Europe, the collapse of the center has been driven above all by perceptions that immigration is a problem and doesn’t work. Until we have a sense of control, it’s a lack of sense of control, a lack of emphasis on assimilation that has turned this in, in- into a crisis. But it’s a crisis that could put Marine Le Pen in power in France, that was responsible for illiberal democracy in Hungary, and that’s put, that’s put, uh, G- Giorgia Meloni in power in Italy. And it’s, it’s swept, it’s swept through Europe. And until liberals begin to realize that their bobo conception that immigration must be a good thing economically and must be a good thing culturally, and we should never do anything to criticize or control it, then until they do that, till they get over that, we will not have a centrist revival in Europe.
Jonah Goldberg
Um, I want to return to contemporary stuff, but I was planning on kicking that down the road a little bit. So I want to try something out on you. I get entirely why the, the, the, the story of liberalism that you’re telling, I, I learned a lot from it. I… It’s, it’s a perfectly valid way of looking at
Jonah Goldberg
the history. You know you’re getting it set up to the butt here, right?
Adrian Wooldridge
[laughs] Yeah.
Jonah Goldberg
So as my friend Yuval Levin likes to point out, in Democracy in America, de Tocqueville gives sort of a thousand-year history of liberalism without ever mentioning the Enlightenment, right? And there is this idea, the Deneen crowd has this idea that basically liberalism sprung forth from the brow of John Locke, and if you could just prove to people that Locke was wrong, all of a sudden liberalism falls apart, and I think that’s nonsense. You know, let, let’s take, let’s take one of your non-negotiables, the recognizing the individual. There’s a very strong argument, I’ve had several, you know, religious scholars on here to talk about this point, that that idea really begins in the Old Testament. This idea that, you know, under Hammurabi or whatever, you know, those kinds of rulers, it was perfectly rational or it’s perfectly normal that if a man killed somebody else’s son, the retribution should be they kill your son, right?
Adrian Wooldridge
Mm-hmm.
Jonah Goldberg
Which is a way of saying that
Jonah Goldberg
th- the son has no individual agency. He is just simply an extension of the corporate tribe family, right? And this notion of collective guilt, you kill 10 of ours, we kill 10 of yours, it doesn’t matter which 10 because you’re all interchangeable. This idea that we’re made in the image of God is the thing that starts to change this, right? Where all of a sudden each individual has moral dignity, whoever their parents were, whatever their lineage was, right? Or you take th- your non-negotiable on, um, separation of powers. Well, you know, whether it’s Saint Augustine’s City of Man and City of God, or it’s Jesus saying, “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” right? There’s… What I’m getting at is, you know, the old Frank Meyer fusionist argument is that fusionism was not a matter of Reaganite coalition building. Fusionism was a five-thousand-year-old tradition beginning in the, uh, with Greece, where two things were always in tension, freedom and order, right? And so part of it, and the, uh, reason I’m asking you this is ’cause I’m struggling with it myselfSo many of the theoretical
Jonah Goldberg
objections one can draw to your version of liberalism gets solved pretty quickly if you pull the lens back a little bit and say,
Jonah Goldberg
“This is Western civilization. This is how we do things in the West,” right? There’s a Western way of war. There’s a Western, you know, and, and in the, the West, like it or not, is liberal. Now, it’s not only liberal, but, you know, uh, there’s this wonderful essay by Dan Burns in the National Affairs where he talks about liberal- liberalism in theory and liberalism in practice, and there’s an enorm- all of the liberal democracies that we think of as liberal democracies, Western Europe, the United States,
Jonah Goldberg
they are in profound conflict in one way or another with liberal theory. Uh, federalism in the United States cannot be justified in Locke, you know, with reference to Locke or anything like that, neither or in, or in Hobbes or possibly in Mill. I’m less sure about that. And yet we’re a liberal country, and everyone says it’s fine. And maybe it’s because we’re holding the definitions of liberalism too tightly and trying to make it into a system, when in reality it’s a culture. It’s a set of pre-commitments that, you know, and so the Burkean sy- synthesis is actually more useful than certainly the Rawlsian, but also almost all of these hard no liberalism is a s- dogmatic body of ideas.
Adrian Wooldridge
Yeah. And I do try and argue in this, in this book that if we’re trying to define liberalism, and I, I, I’ve talked about my three non-negotiables, but the, but two of the proto-liberals I talk about, one is Hobbes, who, who is very clear a philosophical individualist, but two of the proto-liberals I talk about is, is, uh, Erasmus, whose notion of liberalism is really that it’s a, it’s a way of life. It’s a, it’s, it’s a set of manners, a way of behaving which puts tolerance and open-mindedness and discussion at the center o- of things. It’s a way of life before it’s a theory of the world. And I’d certainly say, say too much focus on Hobbes’ particular contract the- o- o- on Locke’s particular contract theory ignores that. And I’d also say Montesquieu, who’s incredibly interesting about this because Montesquieu doesn’t just talk about the division of powers, he talks about the spirit of the laws, and the spirit of the laws is a culture that, uh, defers to division of powers, defers to the importance of conversation and disagreement. So you can have division of powers. If you don’t have a culture of division of powers or a culture of democracy, it doesn’t work, and I think Montesquieu probably should’ve been quoted a bit more when America decided to im- impose democracy on the Middle East. You have to have a spirit of laws before you can have laws, uh, laws that work. However, let me go back to the issue of whether it is peculiarly a, a, a Western thing, uh, and say why I think it’s not. Was liberalism produced first within the context of Christian civilization, and does it owe a, a uniquely large amount to Christian civilization? I would argue that the answer to that is yes. Uh, and there’s a book by a man called, uh, Larry Siedentop, Larry Siedentop, called The Invention of the Individual, who, uh, outlines in great detail the way that liberal… He was a scholar of liberalism, but he go- goes back to, to, to the New, uh, the New Testament. He goes back through various theologians in the High Middle Ages and looks at the way these ideas of individualism, the, the, the, the irreducibility of the individual, the, the e- equality of all human beings are there in Christian culture. So I think that that’s right. But I would say is it uniquely and inevitably and only a Christian thing? I think that’s a very dangerous thing to say, partly because during the, the height of the Christian era, this notion of, uh, the individual, the rights, the, the, the uniqueness of the individual coexisted with a very group-oriented, very tradition-oriented culture. The Catholic Church was preaching that we were, in fact, unequal, that we should reconcile ourselves to our social, uh, positions, that, uh, that we should inherit our faith rather than choose it ourselves. And it took partly Protestantism and partly the Enlightenment to break up that carapace of traditional society and create a more individualistic society. So yes, there are roots for individualism in Christian culture, but no, Christian culture isn’t absolutely identical with, with, with, with liberalism. And secondly, I think it’s quite possible for Christian, uh, for liberal culture to flourish in other cultural contexts, in other religious contexts. I think those people who say that Islam or Islamic countries are irreducibly illiberal are making a very dangerous argument and an incorrect argument. There are plenty of pluralistic or less authoritarian versions of, uh, uh, of, uh, Islam, of which Indonesia would be one particular example. Turkey in, at various points in its history has been, and not now, but at various points in its history has been another, another example. Uh, India is a more complicated example, but I think the Mughal Empire was probably, in some ways, uh, a more tolerant sort of system, and many of the sort of the, the great preachers of tole- uh, of, of tolerance, um, in our culture, uh, such as Salman Rushdie, came from that sort of, that sort of Muslim background. Um, one of the things that, uh, I try and demonstrate in my book, when the British conquered and ruled India, um, John Stuart Mill worked for the East India Company, as did his father. You had a, a bunch of people who regarded themselves as liberal imperialists who ruled India. They were proud to be liberal, and they were proud to be imperialists. And one of the things that happened then was that a lot of the Indian intelligentsia took their liberalism, listened to their liberalism, read John Stuart Mill and said, “If these are ideas about representative government, limited powers and, uh, the importance of individualism apply to you people, the Westerners, why shouldn’t they apply to Indians as well?” And theyThey absorbed this, and when India became an independent country, it had a parliamentary, uh, system, it had a speaker, it had, you know, all the accoutrements of a parliamentary system. It had a separation of powers, all of those sort of things. And one thing that worries me about the sort of the fundamentalist approach, that it’s only the West that can have these things, is that it fits into the, sort of rhetoric of strong men such as Modi, who will say, “These are all Western traditions. We don’t need them. We should get rid of them because we have our own independent, different collec- traditions which are collectivists and anti-individualist,” and things like that. So I think liberalism may have been expressed first within the context of Christian cultures, the transition to, to liberal arguments may have been made, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a universal faith. Although not a universal faith, I think that should be i- i- imposed in a George Bush style manner on the rest of the world. You have to prepare the spirit of the laws to, to, to, to accept all of these great things like divisions of powers.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. Uh, so I, I have no major objection to that. I was not arguing for a… Well, I, I actually have no problem conceptually with the idea of Western superiority in this, not supremacy, but superiority, because I actually think the Western way is superior. But my point wasn’t to say that it’s only for Western countries. One of the, one of the reasons why I think the phrase cultural appropriation is so
Jonah Goldberg
blisteringly stupid, that culture is cultural appropriation, right?
Adrian Wooldridge
Of course it is. Yes.
Jonah Goldberg
Uh, we, we learned all sorts of stuff from the Chinese and the Japanese and, and, and I’m just naming non w- quote, unquote, “Western cultures” because it, it’s making the point, but, and they learn stuff from us, you know, and, and Japan was particularly good at it because part of their aesthetic was always about the perfection of imitativeness in some ways.
Adrian Wooldridge
That’s one, yeah, that’s one reason why I push back against a, a little bit about your notion of Western superiority because there are plenty of important things that we have learned from other civilizations.
Jonah Goldberg
I agree.
Adrian Wooldridge
I mean, the, the, the whole meritocratic system, the Chinese examination system, we imported that, that, the whole thing, um, from China and that was based on a very profound theory that individual differ in their abilities and the role of the, the, the state is to recognize and make the most of those, those differences.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, no, look, I, I think, I think we are, um, in violent agreement on the basic point.
Adrian Wooldridge
Yeah. [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
But the reason why I-
Adrian Wooldridge
Let’s find some disagreements
Jonah Goldberg
… but why, but, but the reason why I bring it up is that I think that one of the problems we get, like if we’re gonna s- strictly talk about liberalism as a theoretical framework, then I’ve got real disagreements with you. Like I, I, I’m not saying that
Jonah Goldberg
the state has to be a pure night watchman state-
Adrian Wooldridge
Mm-hmm
Jonah Goldberg
… but, um, I’m pretty absolutist on private property. I’m pretty absolutist on limited government in the economic sph- sphere to a certain extent. I, I’m very much with Adam Smith, you know, which is as, as my friend, as Dan Klein, as wrote a wonderful piece, it’s really Adam Smith who, not the Spanish liberals of, you know, uh, the liberales, but it was Adam Smith’s liberal policy that actually introduces the term liberal into the sort of political theory space. And you know, and Smith points out, he says, you know, seldom did two men of the same business meet in a pub where the, don’t, the conversation doesn’t quickly conspire against the public good and, um, you know, to raise prices or whatnot. And I agree with Smith as a matter of sociology, that’s exactly what happens.
Jonah Goldberg
But, and a lot of people on the left like to point that out, the problem is they don’t, they skip the part a couple paragraphs later where Smith says the only way that that becomes a problem is if you get the imprimatur of the state, right? Where you get the state coming in and recognizing monopolies or duopolies, recognizing guilds and associations that pick winners and losers in the marketplace. But anyway, my, my, my broader point is just simply that as a matter of liberal, if we’re gonna define liberal theory, you have your theory, your definition, I have mine, we’re gonna have some disagreements. If we take a step back and we say, “Look, this is a culture, this is a tradition, and one of the great things about our tradition is that we’re very tolerant of other traditions, but we only go so far.” And so like in the UK, I think it’s a political pain in the ass and d- very dangerous and fraught, but I have no problem theoretically, how you do it is a different matter, but I have no problem theoretically saying cousin marriage is just banned, right? One of the reasons why we get the nuclear family is because the Catholic Church got rid of cousin marriage, and we just simply say, look, sort of like Napier s- Na- Napier saying, you know, in our culture, we, we hang people who burn their wives. In our culture, [laughs] one of the things we do is, is we just don’t allow cousins to marry.
Adrian Wooldridge
Sure, and I think that’s right, and I think it’s, and it is a very significant problem in parts of, of Britain. But let’s find something that we do disagree about. Uh, we can agree to agree on cov- on, on, on cousin marriage.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Adrian Wooldridge
But let’s talk about the, uh, about the market here.
Jonah Goldberg
Okay.
Adrian Wooldridge
Um, Ad- Adam Smith in The Wealth of Nations, a lot of it is polemicizing, amongst other things, against the East India Company because of the size of the East India Company, because of the way that it’s intertwined with government and government permissions, and because it’s got a monopoly of trade. Where I begin to take, uh, th-
Adrian Wooldridge
th- issue with neoliberalism in this book is to say that there is a problem now with the tech companies, partly because of their size and partly because of the nature of what they are producing. The essence of a liberal society is that we have educated, self-conscious, self-improving individuals who can make sensible choices in their own short-term and long-term interests. And what we’re getting with the tech in companies is a fragmentation of attention spans, a reduction of people’s ability to, to, to read, write and think, a manipulation of information for profit, a, a breakdown of the very delicate culture of individualism that began, you know, in the 18th century with the, with the rise of a mass, mass reading public. So both in terms of the size of the, these tech companies and the nature of what they’re producing, I might take big… I, I’d be more inclined to take, uh, the same sort of position that the British government took with Jardine Matheson and its, and its opium peddling in the, in the, in the, in the middle of the 19th century or something like thatThere is a public good in breaking up these companies because they’re too powerful. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. It’s true of the private sector as well as the public sector, and because of the nature of what they’re purveying, and I think that is a big probably, it’s a break with neoliberal thinking, but it may be, uh, a point of disagreement between me and you.
Jonah Goldberg
At the margins it might be. I, look, I’ll put it this way. I don’t know what big business needs to be broken up. There are a lot of big tech guys who I, I’m not a fan of, but again, the Smith point, which is also sort of the Schumpeter point, is that monopolies don’t last so long as governments don’t protect them. And, and I, you know, one of my favorite examples of this is what they call the Blade Runner curse, where in the movie Blade Runner [laughs] they pro- prophesy that these corporations that were well known when the movie came out would be still running the Earth, you know, 50, uh, 80 years. And most of them are gone. Look, I, I know of nothing, you’re a closer student of this than I am, but I, I know of nothing in liberal theory, right? Forget liberal practice, because liberal practice, that’s a slam dunk. I know of nothing in liberal theory that supports the idea that kids need, need to be protected from all sorts of things, that they are not fully formed citizens. They have some rights, right? You can’t murder a kid. You can’t beat up a kid. There are all sorts of things you can’t do to children, but parents are the sovereigns of their children w- it, barring some real violation of the basic social contract about raising your kids. So I have n- I have zero problem for the re- some of the reasons you stipulate, uh, banning, uh, f- banning phones from schools. I’m fairly sympathetic to Jonathan Haidt. I’m very sympathetic to Jonathan Haidt’s stuff, you know, because, I mean, your whole point about how liberalism depends on liberal education, the premise of that is that we are not born natural liberals and have to be civilized into being, into being liberals, and I agree with that. That was the theme of my last book. I mean, I, I agree with that entirely. If, you know, as my friend Ramesh Ponnuru likes to say, if, if libertarianism is the greatest philosophy ever conceived of, it only has two shortcomings or two Achilles heels, uh, foreign policy and children.
Adrian Wooldridge
Children, absolutely.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, and if the two of them didn’t exist, it’s a very hard argument to say people can’t do what they wanna do, but we live in a society that has to perpetuate itself. And so I’m very sympath- sympathetic to all of that. My problem is, is I, for the same reason I wanna restrain government from policing speech to the maximum extent possible, I’m okay with local censorship in, to a certain extent. Not of political speech, but if a local community wants, prior to the internet when it was possible, wanted to ban porn in Peoria, I could not give a rat’s ass, right? If they had high community standards, it’s fine by me. Um, I’m a big believer in subsidiarity. But the same reason why I think the federal government should not be in the business of policing speech too tightly, if at all, is the same reason why I don’t think it should be policing the market too tightly, if at all. It should conform to the liberal notion that fraud is illegal, that deceit is illegal, that, you know, all sorts of things that are violations of,
Jonah Goldberg
of the social compact and are, are illegal and therefore can be policed, you know. But beyond that, the market should be allowed to be the market.
Adrian Wooldridge
How about algorithms that’s, uh, deliberately desi- designed either to deceive people or to excite emotions, make people m- make people lose emot- their emotional cool as a business model, not just as a-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. I, I’m very, I’m very sympathetic to the problem. I don’t know how you fix it, right? I really don’t, and I, I would like to fix it, and I’m open to fixing it. You know, one of the reasons my co-founder and I started The Dispatch is that we rejected so many of the people who were trying to what, what I call monetize dopamine hits. And it’s a huge, huge problem, but I, I, I don’t know how you fix it, right? And when I had-
Adrian Wooldridge
If you do through, uh, if, if, if, I think it’s Article 230, it’s called, of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, if you repealed that and allowed companies to be sued more over the content of what they’re producing, is that a liberal solution to, to this problem-
Jonah Goldberg
Uh, I don’t know. Well, you tell me-
Adrian Wooldridge
Or is it just a recipe for anarchy and, uh, and rich lawyers?
Jonah Goldberg
Do you think society would be greatly improved if I could sue what someone says in the … If someone comments about you in the Bloomberg comment section or in The Economist comment se- comment section, and then I can sue Bloomberg or The Economist for what some random commenter said in it? I don’t, I don’t think that’s a great idea.
Adrian Wooldridge
Yeah, yeah, that’s not a great idea. But, but I’m struggling with the fact that people have a business model or various business models
Adrian Wooldridge
which prioritize, um, things that erode our ability to be well-informed or self-controlled as citizens. And if you’re, if you become incredibly good at that, and it looks as though these, these businesses are getting better and better, and they have the most powerful technology the world has ever seen, do we just let it happen? Or do we try and do something about it, even if it violates one liberal principle in order to preserve another liberal principle?
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. And again, I, and this is where I’m a Burkean, right? I, like the essence of Burkeanism is every, even the best principles are only true to a point, right? And which is why is part of my objection to you having only three non-negotiables. Like, like, I would say they’re all non, they’re all fundamentals, but the, the limiting principle applies differently in different places, right? And so you and I would find a different compromise point this far and no farther on the market stuff, but I would agree with you on the free speech and the separation of power stuff. And I, I, I truly and sincerely struggle with, with this problem too. I don’t know that I trust the Trump administration with the Department of Extreme Tweeting, right? ‘Cause first of all, they would have to arrest their own president.
Adrian Wooldridge
The other thing I wanted to push you on, I mean, I, I, I see your problems, but, but what about the pollution of our information streams by foreign powers-
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I’m with you
Adrian Wooldridge
… which are deliberately spreading lies and, uh, a- and deceit, um-And lack of confidence in, in, in the system.
Jonah Goldberg
I think there’s a great place for compromise. I, I, there, uh, there I think I agree with you entirely. I have — We have banned foreign cover- governments from owning local television stations since the dawn of television, I think, or whenever that FCC was created. I, I was supportive of banning TikTok in the United States or forcing the sale of TikTok. I think Trump got bought on this. It is really interesting. It’s a story that w- I want someone at The Dispatch to look into, is that for years it was basically China and Russia that were doing the meddling in the United States, and all of a sudden, because of the power vacuum in the Middle East, it feels like Turkey is really upping its disinformation, you know, campaign inside the United States. Uh, it’s, it’s sort of like, you know,
Jonah Goldberg
in Animal House, “They can’t do that to our pledges. Only we can do that to our pledges,” [laughs] you know?
Adrian Wooldridge
What, what happens if foreign powers, uh, uh, seduce or gets domestic players to do their will? I mean, it just, it strikes me that this attempt to draw a f- a, a hard line, um, is, is very, very hard, that we have to in some way look to the public good, the health of the community, uh, to regulate, um, what’s going on. If what’s going on is so corrosive of the common good or of, uh, of the capacity of the individual to exercise control over themselves and get the information that they need to, to function as democratic citizens, that we have to tolerate a greater degree of interference than we would have done in the past. The nature of this technology is such that we need to elevate the cautionary principle to a pretty high level.
Jonah Goldberg
So, I mean, so what is your actual remedy?
Adrian Wooldridge
Well, that’s difficult.
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Adrian Wooldridge
And it would, it, it, it would depend in different, in, in, in different, uh, in different countries. For example, in Britain, um, having been, um, a great skeptic in the past, I would support public broadcasting. I would support the BBC because I think that, that having a, an organization that tries to produce, uh, high quality and fairly objective news and that gives us all something to agree on as a basis of discussion, um, is valuable and important. So I’ve g- you know, I’ve changed my position on public broadcasting, and I’m in favor of public broadcasting partly by living in the United States and seeing the combined effect of, uh, MSNBC and Sky.
Jonah Goldberg
Mm-hmm.
Adrian Wooldridge
Uh, not Sky, MSNBC, uh, and, uh-
Adrian Wooldridge
… and Fox, Fox News, because it seems to rob the public square of an agreed set of things to agree about. You know the old thing that, you know, we can, we all have our own opinions, but we don’t all have our own facts. Today, in the sort of media climate that you have in the United States, it strikes me that too many people have their own facts. I don’t want to legislate that you have to have the BBC, but I’ve become much more conservative about the role of public broadcasting institutions in, in, in, in disseminating the news, for example. I don’t want to shock you too much by saying that. [laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
No, no, like, I, like I, I, I, I, I, I think I still have some of my skepticism about the BBC. I think that one of the problems that you get with that approach is that the shortcomings of these elite sanctioned, credentialed things, every time they fall even slightly below their own standards, which I think you’ll concede BBC has done from time to time, [laughs] um, the erosion in public trust of elite institutions in generally is amplified in ways that I think are problematic. But I, I, like I, I think that’s a perfectly debatable decision I, position to have. I don’t, I don’t think it’s outrageous. I think the problem is, as someone who, who spent 20 years at National Review, where we took seriously this idea that we were supposed to play some role in policing the fever swamps and keeping-
Adrian Wooldridge
Yeah
Jonah Goldberg
… the crazies at bay-
Adrian Wooldridge
The crazies. Yep
Jonah Goldberg
… that, I think National Review, I mean, I say this all the time here, I think National Review still tries to do that. I mean, I might have my disagreements, but it’s, they’re at the margins. The problem with the whole gatekeeping model is that gates imply walls, and, um, it’s the walls that have come down. There’s still gatekeepers hanging around saying, you know, “You can’t go through here,” but the rise of social media, the balkanization of, of cable, and, and, and the decline of newspapers, in the old days, if Bill Buckley said you were too crazy to be on Firing Line, it also meant it was a signaling effect that meant you were also too crazy to be on Meet the Press, and that’s all gone, right? We have… It’s the erosion of institutions, like the parties are too weak. Um, there are, the, the, the model that you’re talking about with MSNBC or MS now and, um, and Fox is, is to find a sticky 5% of the market rather than a broad 50% of the market, and I don’t know how you put that genie back in the bottle.
Adrian Wooldridge
You talked about elite sanctioned institutions. I think one way of trying to put the genie back into the model, uh, into the bottle, is for the elites to be a little bit more self, self-confident, to say that there are good preferences and bad preferences. There’s good news and bad news. So editors shouldn’t, as they did at The New York Times, be bowing down to their staff and saying, “Whatever your preference are, it’s fine.” There is, there’s good journalism, there’s bad journalism. I think the elites need to be a bit more self-confident to preach certain values, to preach certain practices. Um, and I think that’s, uh, that’s not necessarily something that will fail in the, in the, in the marketplace. I think that, uh, self-confidence can work. I think people do realize that there is, uh, there are good values and bad values, and I think the, the way that universities or newspapers or broadcasting institutions have start- have lost that willingness to preach liberal values and liberal institutions has weakened them, and I think that the, the, a bit of preaching from that sort of thing needs to be, it needs to go on, and a little bit more self-confidence on the part of liberals, both in their values and in their willingness to say, “This far and no further.” I don’t think society can cohere if it’s just a pandemonium of different lifestyle choices.
Jonah Goldberg
I agree with that. I mean, I, one of my, uh, you know, it’s on the Remnant bingo card how often I talk about it, but, and, and I give credit to Barack Obama for calling it out, but the, the tendency toSay that doing well in school is acting white is one of the most poisonous ideas, and it’s, it’s not bad for white people per se, it’s bad [laughs] for non-white people because that’s the path, you know, and to success. And, and I, I agree with you, civilizational confidence is really, really important. I would love it if libertarians could have the wor- because libertarian is the, among the most uneuphonious labels in existence, and I would love it if we could just call libertarians liberals and we could call progressives progressives and, you know, and conservatives conservatives. But it’s gotten… The, the label industry has gotten so convoluted that it’s very difficult to have these conversations with people, and which is why in some ways I wanna broaden out to a higher level of abstraction because you just… I, I, I have just from bitter experience, you try to tell people what a liberal is and their eyes glaze over, and I’m like, “Well, you know, liberal arts doesn’t mean the Hasan Piker arts,” right? I mean, there’s something else going on there, and people just don’t wanna hear it.
Adrian Wooldridge
It’s particularly true in the United States, I’m afraid, where there was a very deliberate attempt to take the word liberal and appl- and turn it into a criticism, um, which had a certain justification in the sense that many people who regarded themselves as liberals were from a certain sort of social class and did have a tendency to, to look down on other people, and that was r- But I mean, I think it was a great word. The America is the world’s first and most successful liberal republic in the sense that it was founded on explicitly, uh, liberal principles, and there’s a sense in which it needs to be reclaimed, particularly now there is a group of people who call themselves post-liberals, who I think
Adrian Wooldridge
are, are, are pushing their arguments too far in the direction of authoritarianism.
Jonah Goldberg
All right, so I, I, I have to… I’ll just… I’ll, I’ll lose my decoder ring, my right-wing decoder ring, if I don’t ask you about this. You make the case that the New Deal fits within what you call liberalism, right? Happy to have a longer argument about the New Deal, but I found one of the most odious bits of presidential rhetoric, which that is beloved by a lot of people on the center left, was his 1944 economic Bill of Rights. The thing I really, uh, find unforgivable about it is that he says that if we return to the normalcy of the 1920s, we’ll be surrendering to fascism here at home that we’ve been fighting abroad, which I just think is just flat out wrong. But he also makes the case for positive rights, right? That you have a right to h- housing, you have a right to healthcare. Do you think that those are liberal views? Like the, like the just the assertive positive liberty stuff?
Adrian Wooldridge
To a certain extent. I think that’s the fourth characteristic of liberalism, which I try and talk about in this book, the three fundamental defining characteristics. The fourth characteristic is a certain adaptability and flexibility, particularly when it comes to the role of the state. So in the late 19th and early 20th century, when liberalism was firmly associated with laissez-faire doctrine and nothing more, you got the rise of a group of new liberals who said that in order for individuals to achieve their full potential, you had to have a rejigging of the relationship between the individual and the state, which included more compulsory education, uh, more welfare payments, more, more pension payments, uh, and more intervention of the state in the economy, uh, to break up big corporations and to interfere with the, the inheritance of private properties. But, but, but Teddy Roosevelt was particularly worried about the, the creation of gigantic fortunes which created a sort of American business aristocracy, and he thought that in order to s- to save one liberal principle, meritocracy, you had to sacrifice another liberal principle, which is 100% inheritance of, of your father’s goods. And, uh, FDR is a sort of continuation of that tradition of liberalism, uh, which emphasizes what Isaiah Berlin calls positive freedom, the freedom to do certain things rather than negative freedom, freedom from state interference. I think he went much too far with, with, with some of those things. I wouldn’t be very happy with a right to housing, uh, for example. Healthcare is a more complicated case. But I would say that there’s nothing fundamentally illiberal about adjusting the relationship between the state and the market, so long as what you are trying to do is achieve individual self-fulfillment. So if the argument for the state is a collectivist argument, that you must, uh, have a big state in order to achieve collectivist aims and subordinate the individual to certain collectivist goals, that’s illiberal. That’s socialism. But if the argument is to make it- individuals more freer to act as indivi- individuals because they’re more educated or more informed, or if they’re children because, you know, they have milk to, milk, milk or a school to go to, that is very much within the liberal tradition, I would say.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, I, I think that’s defensible. I, I think it runs again into the problem of holding too tight… Like, y- y- I’m sure you’ve been accused of this here, and, and I, I say this with love.
Adrian Wooldridge
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
But, like, there is a bit of a no true Scotsman problem here, right? Insofar as the good things that liberals did in the past is because liberals are good. And, like, I, I, I consider Abraham Lincoln one of the greatest heroes of the last 300 years. I think he was a liberal. I don’t think suspending habeas corpus was liberal. I don’t think that shutting down newspapers was liberal. But it was necessary, right? And to save-
Adrian Wooldridge
I think that’s correct. But wh- wh- why am I taking this sort of c- capacious and almost, um, self-adulatory view of liberalism? I’m doing it, uh, partly because a lot of people are, are badmouthing liberalism, but pa- but, but most importantly, because we as an institution, as, as a, as a society, are under attack
Adrian Wooldridge
by Putin, by Xi, by a lot of, um, authoritarian modernizing countries around the world-Um, liberalism is under attack in a way that it hasn’t been since the 1930s, and sometimes from intellectuals within our own tradition as, as in the 1930s. And I want to say, no, liberalism is a great thing. It’s, it has a great history. It can’t just be reduced to big government. It can’t just be reduced to, to, to, to, to free markets. It’s an incredibly rich, diverse, vital system of thinking, and any talk about let’s get rid of liberalism because post-liberalism is the way to go misses three hundred years of great thought.
Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. There I completely agree with you. So there, we’re on good … So I just one last question just-
Adrian Wooldridge
Yeah
Jonah Goldberg
… I, it’s-
Adrian Wooldridge
Yeah
Jonah Goldberg
… it’s, it’s British week on here.
Adrian Wooldridge
[laughs]
Jonah Goldberg
What is your sense of, of whether or not the, I mean, I, straight line predictions are disastrous and, and all the rest. How much damage has been done to the US-Briti- uh, UK alliance or the transatlantic alliance generally? Do you think it’s
Jonah Goldberg
… Do you think post-Trump it starts to heal or the trend will get worse but at a slower rate?
Adrian Wooldridge
Every, every, everything here is blamed on Trump. So the assumption is that when Trump’s gone, something that’s wonderful, which is the Ang- Anglo-American alliance, will resume in its previous undiluted form. So Trump, you know, is such a big figure that he, he absorbs a lot of the, the blame for, for, for everything. I think a lot depends on how we make history in, in, in a post-Trump period. If you in America get a very left-wing progressive government, um, which is possible, the left of the Democratic Party. I don’t, I think the left of the Democratic Party is a bit Trumpian in the sense that it doesn’t think that much about foreign policy.
Jonah Goldberg
It’s also a bit post-liberal.
Adrian Wooldridge
Yeah. It, it, it-
Jonah Goldberg
[laughs]
Adrian Wooldridge
… it, it, it thinks about America. It’s very America focused. So I think that will weaken the, the alliance. If it gets another version of Trump, if it gets J.D. Vance, then I think it will be strained even e- even further, and we’ll suddenly realize it wasn’t just Trump, it was something deeper than that. I think that the idea that there is a sort of Anglo-Saxon, Anglo-Saxon special relationship which will always survive is becoming weaker because of the nature of the population, uh, because you’re a global power and you look much, much more than you, you used to, to Asia and, you know, and, and Europe and Britain are s- are shrinking powers. I think they’re under strain, but I hope for civilizational reasons that, that, that, that, that we remain, you know, close.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. Uh, Adrian Wooldridge, thank you so much for being here. It was a real pleasure. I, I hope you’ll come back. Again, the book is Revolu- The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism, um, available wherever fine books are sold. Thank you again.
Adrian Wooldridge
Thank you very much.
Jonah Goldberg
All right. So Adrian Wooldridge has left the studio. I meant to ask him about one of the most
Jonah Goldberg
infuriating, unjustifiable, indefensible, um, extraneous letters in his last name. It’s, you know, his last name is W-O-O-L-D-R-I-D-G-E, and it drives me crazy, but it’s, it Wooldridge. It must be some ancient Gaelic or Scottish thing. I don’t know. But it is such an affront that it actually makes it easy for me to remember how to spell his last name. Anyway, um, I had a lot of fun talking to Adrian. Um, again, we agree on a great deal. It’s a very useful and interesting book. I’m not beating up on the guest after they leave. I was, I think I was fairly clear about this. I think he has a no true Scotsman problem insofar as liberali- you know, and I, again, his explanation is that liberalism needs some cheerleading, and I think he’s right. It does need some cheerleading, you know, and which was sort of the point of Suicide of the West, was that, you know, we need to be sort of tribal in our love of liberty. And you know, we recently had this episode about, um, Hannah Arendt on here that a lot of people liked. Part of the argument that, um, Berkowitz, the guy we had on to talk about it, that he was making has been really sticking with me for a while because it actually gels with a lot of things that I’ve thought about in different contexts. He made the case that politics will never settle truth claims per se, that it’s not, politics is not about truth, it’s about conversation, which is also a very Michael Oakeshott kind of way of thinking about things. And I’m not sure that politics can’t ever
Jonah Goldberg
be settled by truth claims or that truth isn’t essential to sort of liberal democratic, you know, norms and all that. But I think his broader, sort of more generic point about what Arendt’s point is, is right. And so in some ways, liberalism is sort of defined by the arguments it has rather than by the conclusions that it has. Uh, the reason I bring this up is that you can’t say that liberalism is a coherent
Jonah Goldberg
theory,
Jonah Goldberg
and when I say theory, I mean in the political science sense, right, in the political philosophy sense. You can’t say it’s an ideology, right? If
Jonah Goldberg
its most famous adherents all are in stark disagreement with each other over s- various key questions. Maybe not all questions, certainly not all issues, but like if the serious sort of Hayek libertarian, small government, free markets position is liberalism and so is the sort of John Dewey, FDR, heavily regulated markets, big government, positive rights stuff is liberalism too, then liberalism is conceptually kind of a mess as theory, and that’s one of the things I was trying to get to is that liberalism in practice is more of a culture, right? It’s more of how nation states,
Jonah Goldberg
liberal nation states actually live in practice, and there’s lots of stuff that liberal nation states do that is c- very hard, if not impossible, to reconcile with pure liberal theory. And that’s fine because nation states aren’t formed purely around theory.The theory, the creed, the idea informs the culture, but then the culture figures out how to deal with the ground truths in ways that, you know, don’t necessarily hold up to the platonic realm of ideals. I mean, one example I used was federalism. You know, Locke would have a huge problem with federalism, particularly the federalism of the Constitution prior to like the 14th Amendment. The idea that we don’t have a, that liberal states are blindingly neutral on religion is just not true. It’s not true. It was not true at the time of the American founding. It’s not true, you know, in the de Tocquevillian sense. You know, he called it, he called religion, Christianity, the first of America’s political institutions. My point being is like the hypocrisy issue is not relevant to me here. In fact, the hypocrisy issue is about, you know, not living up to the pure liberal theory. Living up to pure liberal theory is different than living up to your ideals. And you can’t do either, but they’re not the same thing. You know, the ideals of American culture, of Western culture are more religiously informed. They’re more culturally informed. They’re not purely about liberalism per se. The ideals of liberalism are
Jonah Goldberg
sort of structural in some ways. Anyway, this is stuff for another time. I just, you know, I’m working on a book that covers a lot of this stuff, and I think it’s interesting. But I don’t think Adrian’s sort of these things are non-negotiable and everything else there’s all of this room for necessarily works on paper, but it works in the book. You know, I mean, it works for what he wants it to work for. And he wants to make a certain argument about how this broad, forget the labels for a second, this broad approach is responsible for so much human progress, so much human liberty, so much prosperity, sort of like an argument I’ve made. And we need people to sort of rally to it. And if they don’t all agree on every single thing, that’s fine.
Jonah Goldberg
Because as Hannah Arendt said, it’s the trick is to have the conversation about this stuff and work out what is acceptable for society within the framework of our values. And I think this is a very useful book in that regard. I’m recording this from my new office at AEI, this big turmoil at home, which I’ll talk about more on the solo. And thank you all for listening, and I’ll see you next time.
Adrian Wooldridge
No, you won’t. This is a podcast.