344 | Adam Gurri on Liberal Democracy and How to Fight For It

It's possible to look at the course of history over the past few centuries and discern a movement toward increasing democracy, freedom, and individual rights -- "liberalism," in the political-philosophy sense of the term. But such movement isn't inevitable or irreversible, and in very recent times there have been both intellectual arguments explicitly pushing back against the liberal consensus, and political movements that are more openly nativist and authoritarian. I talk with Adam Gurri, the editor-in-chief of Liberal Currents https://www.liberalcurrents.com/, a web site that "publishes writers of diverse perspectives who share an unflinching commitment to freedom, pluralism, and democracy, in opposition to authoritarianism at home and around the world." Go to https://surfshark.com/mindscape or use code MINDSCAPE at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2026/02/16/344-adam-gurri-on-liberal-democracy-and-how-to-fight-for-it/ Support Mindscape on Patreon https://www.patreon.com/seanmcarroll. Adam Gurri received an M. A. in Economics from George Mason University. He is the co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Liberal Currents. Web site https://adamgurri.com/ Liberal Currents https://www.liberalcurrents.com/ Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/adamgurri.liberalcurrents.com

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:04Sean Carroll?

  Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I've been guessing that many Mindscape listeners grew up and/or live in some version of a liberal democracy. That is to say, some society where there was at least lip service given to the ideals of individual liberty and the right of different people to vote and create the government and pick their representatives, and some kind of equality of dignity of individual human beings. It all sounds good, right? It all sounds almost cliched. These are things that would be very, very hard to sort of really strongly object to, that we don't have many people out there.

• 1:49Sean Carroll?

  There are certainly some, but there aren't that many people out there who are saying, you know what? People are not created equal. Some people are just deserving of more in the world than others. You're beginning to hear more of those voices out there, but they're still in a minority. But when you think about it, this sort of liberal package, liberal in the broadest philosophical sense of the term. So not just liberal-conservative in the matter of contemporary US politics, but liberalism in the sense of these basic ideals of individualism, liberty, and so forth. It's an audacious idea because you're saying that people can be different. They can be radically opposed to each other in certain ways.

• 2:29Sean Carroll?

  In terms of certain values, in terms of certain thoughts about how people should live and the good life and things like that. And nevertheless, live together in harmony. Liberalism is a philosophy that is meant to be universal. It's meant to be for everyone. No matter what other things you believe, you can and arguably should give other people the rights and dignity that liberalism says they should have. And you could imagine at least thinking that countries or societies that don't have that are just wrong about it and should be fixed. So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that there is increasingly pushback against these ideas. On the one hand, they're cliched.

• 3:12Sean Carroll?

  We learn them hopefully when we're very, very young. On the other hand, they're not obvious and they need some defending. And there are voices out there that say, you know what? No, we shouldn't have the individual as the locus of rights and responsibilities. Maybe the community has rights and responsibilities. That sounds like, again, a pretty benign idea, but if you're saying it's the community that has rights and responsibilities over and above the individual, then you're saying the community can take away things that that individual wants to do or ways they want to live, and that's a slippery slope to some potentially very bad things. So it's important not just to think carefully about what liberalism says, but to put out

• 3:55Sean Carroll?

  the positive case for defending it. We had a very recent conversation with Cass Sunstein about pretty much this topic. He has a new book out called On Liberalism. And today's guest is going to cover related ground, but in a different way, with a slightly different angle. Sunstein's angle was mostly trying to emphasize the commonalities between people on what a contemporary political discourse would say are very different, Republicans and Democrats, or Labor and Conservatives in the UK, or whatever. Whereas... Rather than searching for the common ground, Adam Gurri, who is today's guest, is going

• 4:34Sean Carroll?

  to be more feisty, is going to say that liberals need to be able to stand up for themselves and recognize when certain people are not being very liberal, and trying to make intellectually the case that that's a mistake to not be liberal in the face of criticisms of liberalism, both from the right, where you want to inculcate some values and say like, nope, these values are just correct, and those are the values that everybody should have, that would be sort of a right-wing, anti-liberal position, or from the left, where you say like, no, making individuals the locus of things gives individuals the so-called right to live in poverty, or be discriminated against, or whatever, by giving the rights to other people,

• 5:18Sean Carroll?

  where you could be helping them more than the liberal order would necessarily do. So these are all non-trivial things. They shouldn't be in the background. They shouldn't be assumptions that we just make, or they shouldn't be things that we can deny, or can hear denied, without being able to offer the case for them, to give the arguments in favor of them. Adam is the founding editor of an online magazine called Liberal Currents, C-U-R-R-E-N-T-S, so you can go to liberalcurrents.com, and he's assembled a very impressive list of contributors and ideas, where they not only say, wow, things are pretty bad out there right now, that happens sometimes, that is going to happen if that's your cast of mind and you

• 6:02Sean Carroll?

  live in the modern world, but they try very hard to give positive thoughts, not just like, it'll be okay, don't worry, we're going to win, but here's what we should do, in a very down-to-earth, practical way, here's what we should do short-term to make things okay, but also, what could we aim for? How might we change the way that we choose our representatives, or the way that we organize our government, so that we protect... The rights of individuals even better than they are now. Wouldn't be hard to do it even better than we are now, but you know what I mean? So this is an important project. It's one that even if you personally don't agree with everything, that's okay. We can disagree with it, but we need to have the intellectual justification for these ideas out there.

• 6:46Sean Carroll?

  I mean, as Adam says, they want to have people who they disagree with, but who are good, who are good at making arguments. You know, there are some people, we do name some names, who are very popular in the discourse these days, whose arguments are just not that good. And you know, you want a better quality of enemy, basically. And maybe ideally you don't want any enemies at all, but if you're going to have enemies, they should be higher quality. So we need to have these discussions about what liberalism is, what it should be, what it can be, and how to get there. So let's go.

• 7:38Sean Carroll?

  Adam Gurri, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

• 7:40Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me.

• 7:42Sean Carroll?

  You know, usually, not all the time, but the typical Mindscape guest is a professor of some sort, you know, of various kinds of disciplines, but not always. And you're something different, you know, a founder of a magazine online. And of course, that's a perfectly important part of the ideas ecosystem, but it does let me, it makes you wonder about the difference. And you know, so what is it that made you think at some point, you know, what the world needs is an online magazine about liberalism?

• 8:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, part of it is that I was of a community of people who simply loves writing and thinking about ideas, period. Obviously, in my lifetime, I'm 40, just the idea of you get a blog, you get online, you know, you find your audience much more straightforward, even if you're not in the ideas industry. But what happened for Liberal Currents specifically is that in 2016, Donald Trump won the election, as we all know, obviously, I had a pre-existing group of people that we were all writing together with. And we sort of step back with, at the time, we were writing some fairly academic

• 8:57Speaker 03

  stuff in terms of, and when I say academic, I mean, kind of pejoratively, in the sense of, like, you know, it was continental philosophy and, like, it was, it was very abstract stuff. That wasn't really about politics, for example. Sure. So, Trump wins, and a group of us say, "We need to show focus." And also, there is not really a place that is just for liberalism. And we were, we're looking at what Jacobin Magazine was doing for socialism, which was interesting. Obviously, the situations for the two ideologies are quite different, but there are still reasons why the approach would be valid in each case.

• 9:37Speaker 03

  So for Jacobin, it was that socialism had become a pariah in American life, and also, after the Cold War, was just considered simply discredited. And, you know, they wanted to say, which I think is frankly legitimate, that socialism is a tradition of thought that has much more interesting depth to it than just what the Soviet Union did and made, sort of like, made the brand for a long time. Yeah. And Jacobin Magazine is going to be the contemporary home of serious thinking about socialism. That's great, right? That's great. That was, that was a political statement, I think, they launched around the time Bernie happened, and more people were sort of self-identifying and socialist openly.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  Smart, smart strategy, totally valid thing that they're doing. In our case, it was more like the opposite, in the sense that liberalism was so dominant and so successful for so long, that a lot of the core features of it, people had forgotten why we should care about them. They just became kind of assumptions in the background, undefended. And that was to the advantage of its enemies, who had to face those assumptions every day from a position of hostility, and so had to think about angles of attack, whereas we mostly felt like, "Well, we're well defended because we won. We won once and for all." You know, and a, a lot of things came to the fore. It wasn't just Trump, right?

• 11:04Speaker 03

  The, the trade relationship with China, for example, started raising a lot of questions. People talked about it from an economic point of view, but frankly, to, to my mind, the bigger issue is from a political point of view, you know, over... The 10-year period before Donald Trump, you started having China exercising its economic power to do things like make American film studios self-censor. You know, stuff like that, where it was, you know, this isn't just a purely economic relationship. There's a contest of ideologies going on here.

• 11:40Speaker 03

  And we have to actually think about what's the smart way to approach that, right? So there were a few areas like that. And long story short, we felt that having a magazine that was about bringing people back to basics for what is liberalism? Why did it win in the first place, you know, when it won? Why should we still care about it? Why should we want it now? And why is it something that we should be building towards in a future-facing way, rather than just looking back towards what it's done in the past?

• 12:09Sean Carroll?

  So I guess, maybe I should have asked this one first, but then, how are we defining the word liberalism here? Because it has different meanings and different contexts.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  It's funny, someone asked me what the most read things on liberal currents are. And to this day,

• 12:26Speaker 03

  the most read one was one that we launched in our first month in 2017 by Paul Kreider, that is simply called Principles of Liberalism. And the reason that it is our number one is because Google loves it. Like, it is, you know, like, it's like, what is liberalism again? And it pops up. And, you know, he gives a very sort of philosophical, he says, it's, you know, liberalism is defined in terms of the primacy of the individual liberty. So there's individual, the ingredients that go into it are individualism, obviously liberty. It's also universalist. So it's saying, this is, it's not, it's not kind of a conservative or communitarian, you know, particular communities have particular values.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  It's, this is, this is, this is, this is a value system for everybody.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  And then it's egalitarian, so it stresses individual equality.

• 13:21Speaker 03

  And it also commits to protecting pluralism, essentially, different ways of living. So like, that's one way of cutting it. There's a lot of, there's a lot of different ways. You can, as with any philosophy like this, you can sort of parse it. But the way that, I think what's nice about the way that Paul does it is liberalism is, I mean, we call it liberal currents because there's a bunch of different currents. There's a, it's a big tradition. And it spans from his different ideologies to the utilitarians with Bentham, who are extremely technocratic and calculative. To, you know, like your John Stuart Mill, who actually also, bad example because he was also utilitarian. But he's very humanistic in his approach. And, yeah, there's, I mean, there's a whole range of different types.

• 14:05Sean Carroll?

  But, but sorry, but in particular, it's not liberalism in the sense of liberals versus conservatives in contemporary US politics.

• 14:12Speaker 03

  Right. More and more today, it kind of is. But, you know, historically, a lot of conservatives were what Matt McManus, you know, a professor of political theory and one of our writers, calls right liberalism. So he doesn't even think liberalism is something you should put on the left-right spectrum, which I agree with.

• 14:32Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 14:33Speaker 03

  It's a particular set of ideas, which can be right-wing or left-wing. You know, it's hard for it to be right-wing if your society is not in some way a liberal society, right? If your society is not, if you're, if your society is Saudi Arabia, there's absolutely no way to be a right-wing liberal. Because you have to be fairly reformist. You have to be against the establishment in some way.

• 14:55Speaker 03

  But in America, it was pretty easy to be a right-wing liberal. You just said, the Bill of Rights is all we need. And anything more robust than that, or any interpretation of that that is more robust, we're against.

• 15:08Speaker 00

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• 16:16Sean Carroll?

  And there, like, I want to dig into this thing that you said, that because liberalism in this broad philosophical sense had become so much the dominant paradigm in the United States, we became less good at articulating the basic arguments for it. And therefore, there's more space for real arguments against it. You know, like, there's always been your authoritarians who want to seize power, but in the last 20 years or whatever, there's been more academic or serious work that is avowedly anti-liberal, especially, especially on the conservative side, I would say.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, but even, so, a lot of, you know, when you hear about the post-liberals or whatever they want to call themselves now, a lot of those are going back to better, more academic arguments from the 80s of the communitarians. And those guys were leftists. They were not right-wingers. But they were very critical of, especially, the individualist aspect of liberalism. And there was a very fruitful conversation there between... The communitarian critics and liberal theorists, you know, in the 80s and 90s around this. But that's like obscure academic stuff that didn't really reach the mainstream. The post-liberals are people who are mostly taking the critical side, the communitarian side, and putting a right-wing bent on it, which frankly is not that hard.

• 17:36Speaker 03

  And taking it mainstream, taking it to bigger audiences. Which is why I think you need places like Liberal Currents to take, because like I said, liberal theorists did respond to these arguments before, fairly decisively in my point of view. But again, the only people that are reading them were philosophers, not the general public.

• 17:55Sean Carroll?

  So who are the voices in the post-liberal sphere?

• 17:59Speaker 03

  Oh, you know, Deneen is the obvious one.

• 18:02Sean Carroll?

  Also, our audience don't know any of these nitpicks.

• 18:04Speaker 03

  Sorry, Patrick Deneen. He wrote Why Liberalism Failed in the first Trump administration, I think is when that book came out. There's Yoram Hazony, who is an Israeli, who is big in what he calls religious nationalism specifically.

• 18:21Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Of course, in America, that always means Christian nationalism, which is kind of a funny thing, because his is obviously not Christian nationalism.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  He actually, he's been around, both of these guys were big in the first Trump administration culturally. And we wrote about him specifically in like 2018 or 2019 or something, and he's only gotten bigger since, unfortunately. Yeah, so there's a few guys like this who want to say, well, we've proven that liberalism failed, and it's time to move on to the next thing, and the next thing is very much like the old things, you know? It's just reactionary nationalism.

• 19:00Sean Carroll?

  And when, yeah, when you say communitarianism in this sense, I remember a cover story in The New Republic when I was in undergraduate school on how communitarianism is the next big thing for liberals, for, you know, Democrats, I should say. But so the idea here would be, you know, we can't be these liberal autonomous individuals. We have to actually have a community with more or less shared ways of looking at the world?

• 19:26Speaker 03

  Right, so it's it's the idea that communities have rights rather than individuals. If if we're going to even talk about rights at all. And it's very slippery because so the the left communitarians don't want to say things like, well, obviously, a traditional patriarchal community could just do whatever the hell they want to women. They don't really want to say that. So they play a lot of games where they talk about sort of the the bad effects of just isolating individuals and leaving them to their own, you know. They they look at the negative side of what happens if there is not sufficient community support for an individual.

• 20:05Sean Carroll?

  Right.

• 20:05Speaker 03

  They also argue that there's not really any such thing as an individual per se. Everyone is formed in this social context, you know, humans are social animals. But, you know, when you're circling around to what's the positive prescription, frankly, the left communitarians get very squishy. Probably the one who is the most concrete, and also, in my opinion, the best, is Charles Taylor up in Canada. Because it's it's a little more like they have a lot more concrete ways of approaching it in Canada, right? And there's some more like specific issues that they they address that way. So with Taylor, it's like in Canadian pluralism, there's the role of of of Quebec relative to the rest of the country.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  But there's also the role of minorities in Quebec relative to the Quebec majority. And thinking about those different communities and what rights they have. And, you know, often rights given to the minorities within Quebec are going to come at the expense, at least perceived by like the Quebecois nationalists, come at the expense of the institutional things that keep the autonomy of of Quebec. So there's this tense balancing act. And of course, when people push for like a communitarian argument for self-determination so that Quebec could be independent or something, they sort of don't leave out the fact that there's a good

• 21:33Speaker 03

  there's a First Nation population within Quebec that absolutely would not want the territory they live in to go along with that independent Quebec, right?

• 21:40Sean Carroll?

  It's always a question of where you divide up the lines between the communities.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Right, exactly. So, you know, Jacob Levy, one of my guiding stars, a a big liberal theorist, he he he says, you know,

• 21:53Speaker 03

  He had a good line that was something along the lines of communitarians often make the mistake of thinking is implies ought. So like they'll describe that, you know, man is a socially situated animal or something. And then jump straight to, and this means that we ought to do this, this or that and the other. Without really building up the connection between the two. He said, whereas like Marxists and more stridently individualist liberals that aren't taking communitarian critiques into account. Tend to forget that ought implies can, you know, like.

• 22:28Sean Carroll?

  Yes. Well, so what about names like Curtis Yarvin and Peter Thiel and people we hear in the news?

• 22:35Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Yeah. So.

• 22:37Sean Carroll?

  Anti-liberal.

• 22:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, Curtis Yarvin, I don't, I mean, we can, we can open this can of worms, but so I like I said, I've been writing online for a long time on various things. And my, I went to GMU econ for my masters. And for those who do not know, GMU econ is like the beating heart of academic libertarianism in this country. So I was fairly exposed to that community. And that was sort of a big part of my online web on Twitter, say, to begin with. When Twitter was starting.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  And in 2014, everyone started talking about this group called the Neo Reactionaries that were, that were blogging about various topics. And the biggest guy was this guy who went by Mencius Moldbug that we later learned was this guy Curtis Yarvin. So I, I really, I wrote something I really wanted to say to libertarians, stop reading these people. Like, these guys are the enemy. They're not your friends. So I read a lot of Curtis Yarvin back then, and I do not recommend that, that exercise to anyone else. He is a terrible writer. He's a muddled thinker. But mostly, he's just, he's, he's just kind of like a contrarian, but like a contrarian to whatever would piss off a liberal, you know what I mean? So he, he.

• 23:58Speaker 03

  Or even some a liberal in the sense of a conservative, you know, right liberal of someone, someone who's a Republican, but believes in the American founding very strongly is most have historically, right? Curtis Yarvin thinks that the revolution was a mistake, for example, like that's, that's kind of, he's, he's, he's kind of a monarchist, but not really. Um, he's also a Silicon Valley type who wants something a little more technocratic than a monarch, kind of like a stakeholder government. I mean, it's ridiculous. It's not even worth taking seriously for five minutes. The fact that he's at all an influential character right now is just such a sad, sad statement about the like, you know, I really have very little respect for Patrick Deneen and Yoram Hazony, very, very little, but at least they are, they are, they have some intellectual credentials, not, not even

• 24:42Speaker 03

  like, they actually can write an intellectual argument, you know what I mean? Like the, these, these people that, that are sort of the, the court philosophers of people like Peter Thiel, um, in Silicon Valley are just not even thinkers, you know, they're just performers.

• 24:56Sean Carroll?

  It's a difficult, one, once again, the whole, you know, problem, the, the predicament of being a liberal is drawing lines between different groups, different rights, whatever. And one of the lines you have to draw is there's people who are influential, but sort of not academically very serious. And, and when do you engage with them versus when do you ignore them?

• 25:18Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, no, absolutely.

• 25:20Sean Carroll?

  And, and yeah, these people are definitely, uh, on the ascendant. There's, there's a lot of interestingly, you know, the relationship between Catholicism and a lot of this post-liberal tradition, right? Like a weird number of the leading voices are Catholic, sometimes very, very, you know, explicitly Catholic, like, you know, we should, we should have a Catholic society.

• 25:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah. No, there's, there's the integralists, as they're called, um, who just more or less believe that the church should run a country. Um, which is a very funny thing to say in America specifically, frankly, like, like in as much as we're a Christian country, we are.

• 25:56Sean Carroll?

  It would not be Catholic.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  Right. We're not Protestant historically, and now nowadays we're barely Protestant, right? Like we're evangelical, we're, we're Pentecostal.

• 26:05Sean Carroll?

  And does most of like the sentiment and then the sort of post-liberal side come from think, is it a practical thing? Like you think that, you know, power would be better exercised if it was more centralized? Or is it more sort of a fear of other people making choices you don't want them to make?

• 26:28Speaker 03

  Oh, gosh. So what do you mean? What is the motivation behind like a Patrick Deneen or like an Adrian Vermeule would be the integralist side? I mean, it varies because there is differences among this group, right? So if I were to point to one thing, and it is the thing where liberalism is the strongest, it's difference. Difference is difficult, right? Social difference. And of course, the communitarians claim that liberalism was not good at it, right? But the communitarian solution is often kind of like the reactionary solution, which is, all right, just give each group their own little space. But the

• 27:13Speaker 03

  libertarian, the liberal response to that is, that's not possible. Every partition in history has created an internal minority. Partition and independence are not actually solutions. There are things to be done in the most extreme of possible circumstances. And, you know, the war of independence in this country was, even though the population was much smaller, one of the bloodiest wars in our history, I think in total terms. Like it was a very, very bloody war. And partition in India and Pakistan, not exactly what I would call a success, right? There are some cases where it has worked in terms of creating a little more local, regional peace. The track record is not great, though. And most

• 27:58Speaker 03

  of the places where you actually end up with a little more homogeneity.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  In fact, are not things you want to replicate, like Germany, for example, or Poland, or Ukraine, right? Like, it's, you know, that's, they're not, they're not, they're not, they're not how-to manuals, nor should they be. But I worry that the actual people in power right now do think it's a how-to manual. When they, you know, when Trump last year said he wanted to be deporting 20 million people, that would be, by order of magnitude, the largest forced population transfer in human history ever. And every large-scale forced population transfer has involved death on an enormous scale. You know, and certainly like injury and, and, you know, malnutrition and things like that on an even larger scale.

• 28:49Sean Carroll?

  So the superficially sensible thing is the claim that, you know, there are communities that are different from each other and they have their values, and let's just let, let them each individually decide what their values are and maybe enforce those values within the communities. And the liberal wants to come along and say, no, individuals need to have rights no matter what the community is saying.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Yes, yes. So the nice synthesis that happened with the communitarian critique and the liberal response is you have to understand that communities do matter, that you have, you have to actually face that. And I think liberalism, as it originally was, you know, developed, understood that very well because they were mostly looking at different religious communities, you know, different national communities. You know, there's the Jewish communities, obviously, in there to some extent in terms of how liberals took it seriously, I mean.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  So liberalism has always understood this. I think liberalism in the late 20th century as a theoretical idea, sort of lost touch with that. And that's why it was vulnerable to a lot of these criticisms. But just, just taking the civil rights movement, for example. Everyone who was a liberal very clearly understood that the African American community in this country was a distinct community with distinct needs and problems that you needed to look at them as a whole and how they interacted with some of the other communities that were excluding them or whatever. And you needed to, there needed to be some redress.

• 30:27Speaker 03

  But the ultimate goal is that any individual in those communities can live equally with any individual in any of the other communities. That's how you, that's how you should measure success, in my view. I don't know how else you would measure success, frankly. And there's more, right? So this, the first difference is interradicable in the sense, in the group sense. So like I said, you, even if you have federalism or you have an independence movement, there's always an internal minority group. But even if you have just one group you're looking at, just looking within that group, there's people that don't feel they fit in or have to be coerced in some way in order to fit in with that group.

• 31:09Speaker 03

  And I don't think the group has the right to do that as a liberal. And I don't, I don't see why I should have to concede that to, you know, reactionaries and communitarians. I think that the best situation is one where if you really don't fit in with your, your small town community or your, your place of birth or your neighbors, you could move to a different neighborhood, you can move to a different town, you can move to a different city, you can get a different job, you can move out of your home. You know, there's a big part of what we care about at Liberal Currents is also housing and the, what it was called, the yes in my backyard side of things, or what I guess now is called abundance. But basically actually building enough housing and transit and things. And there was someone we like to quote, who said something along the lines of, the ideal

• 31:54Speaker 03

  is that any 18-year-old who is, you know, in a household that doesn't tolerate them, either because they're LGBTQ and they're not, or even if, you know, they've converted to... Christianity or some other religion and their parents are not that, and they don't feel comfortable there anymore, they should be able to afford on a fairly like average salary, you know, and they should be able to get a job that pays enough that they can

• 32:19Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 32:19Speaker 03

  move out to a place they can afford in a place that has transit and you know is a vibrant cultural center, essentially like the idea is actually allowing for this mobility of individuals. Um, yeah, sorry, I've gone on for a little while.

• 32:32Sean Carroll?

  Well, that does, that does bring up the sort of critique of liberalism from maybe it's more economic or maybe it's more from the left, but the idea that you're letting individuals do their thing and doing their thing might be living in poverty or just failing in their, in their lives.

• 32:48Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 32:49Sean Carroll?

  And that liberalism does, does not provide, you know, it talks a lot about freedom and liberty, but not about freedom from want or things like that.

• 32:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, but I mean, I think most 20th century liberals wanted to set a floor. Um, and frankly, I mean, there are probably people on the left that would dispute this, but I think they're wrong. I, I would put FDR and his whole cohort in, in the tradition of American liberalism.

• 33:12Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 03

  Um, and you know, I think the idea of freedom from want is a good one. Um, and the basic idea is just you're not actually free. Like there's, they're actually caring about effective freedom. Um, and from, from the beginning, I will say, this is something that I think people don't realize. Um, from the beginning, liberals have cared about both sort of rights in terms of just the formal like defending those, but also the kind of society that's produced. So the, you know, Jefferson and people were getting rid of primogeniture and entail, which were a specific kind of inheritance law, um, which, you know, why, why, if, if you care about property, what do you care about the way that it's inherited, right? That should just be between the people in theory, if you're just leaving people alone.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  Well, they cared because they didn't like the idea of intergenerational wealth. Um, they thought that that created a static society and they wanted a vibrant commercial society with a lot of mobility, um, mobility, both physically and, and socially. Um, so, uh, you know, I think it's this, it's this aspect of liberalism that is actually looking at the nature of the society that's created by the particular laws, um, and, and, uh, and rights, you know, in, in the law, um, that gets underestimated. Um, and that, that's, that's the part that needs to be emphasized. I think that, you know, sort of the neoliberal,

• 34:35Speaker 03

  Current of liberalism very much underemphasized that. They just said that if, well, to some extent, maybe it's less that they underestimated it, underemphasized it, is that they were very unrealistic about what you could do with just having free trade and, you know, freedom of contract and things like that. They thought that that would be enough to produce the kind of society that we want. Whereas I think many liberals throughout the 200, 300 years of liberalism have recognized that there has to be these sort of piecemeal interventions to make sure that things stay on the right track and are actually open.

• 35:12Speaker 00

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• 36:19Sean Carroll?

  It does raise questions about the relationship between liberalism as a political philosophy and economics, which is sort of mostly welfare state capitalism, as I understand it. But, you know, to what extent are the ideals of liberalism being distorted by economic inequality? By the fact that we have a lot of people who are not very well off and a lot of people who are super duper better than well off?

• 36:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think it's pretty clear that they are distorted. I mean, just looking at Elon Musk in the last year and a half alone, well, you know, if you want to go back to when he bought Twitter. And now we have, you know, Ellison looking to acquire WBD and things like that and just using his personal relationship with the president. So liberalism, one of the core pillars of liberalism is the rule of law. You just can't have any of the other things without it. And the more you have individuals who have levels of power on par with like a cabinet,

• 37:25Speaker 03

  you know, level of official in the government, the more, but they're not, you know, without the democratic accountability built into that, the more rule of law breaks down because they're sort of the over mighty subject, you know, they're too powerful for the law to constrain, both in terms of the resources they can marshal to defend themselves in court and things like that, or to move around their money so they don't get taxed, but also just because they know all the top people at that point and they have pull and those people need their backing in order to get power themselves. So it's definitely distorted. I mean, this isn't even a liberal point, right? This goes back to Machiavelli or further.

• 38:08Speaker 03

  But it's definitely, you can't have a functional liberal order and just let that go on. You have to do something about it, hopefully beforehand, but too late for that now.

• 38:18Sean Carroll?

  Can the something be as simple as an aggressive taxation system? Or does that have to be more dramatic than that?

• 38:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think it can be. It just depends, right? It can and should be. Sometimes the politics of that is hard, so you arrive at it through other means. So for example, Lincoln didn't actually, when Lincoln won office, the plan was not to abolish slavery. The plan was to pass a series of laws that made slavery as uneconomic as possible to grind it out so that it would eventually go away. And that was because he knew that he did not have the political support to end slavery until he actually was fighting a civil war about it, right? And similarly, like, again, if you already have the over mighty subjects, they're very powerful.

• 39:08Speaker 03

  You can build a coalition that can find angles to grind them down until they are weak enough for you to do more direct things. This is the way I would put it. And antitrust traditionally is one of those ways to go about it.

• 39:22Sean Carroll?

  Yeah. And you already mentioned the rule of law and its importance. And it's not just political influence that comes with money, but apparently, at least these days, almost complete impunity when it comes to obeying laws or not.

• 39:35Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 39:37Sean Carroll?

  That sounds like a harder thing to fix. I don't know.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  It is hard. I agree. Part of that is also the way that our court system works. It's really, we have, we have a very expensive court system. And, and we have a ton of protections that are supposed to be in there, you know, due process protections that in practice are very hard to actually fully get unless you have very good, very expensive lawyers. So that's part of it. But even then, you usually wouldn't get away with things like that.

• 40:11Speaker 03

  I think we are in a special circumstance where we have a president that will just pardon people and use, you know, use their powers that way.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  But that's, that's what happens. You know, you get, you, when, when you get, when you move towards oligarchy, you also move the country more towards the possibility of just a strong man, which then just, you know, you end up with a personalist system that is the complete opposite of rule of law.

• 40:36Sean Carroll?

  So is there some general principle, you think, that a functioning liberal society will have safeguards against too much economic inequality?

• 40:44Speaker 03

  It should, yeah, definitely. I mean, I think, I think it's a lot of, like, everything, so much is just contingent on the specifics of the era. So at this point.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  Obviously, we've gone through this technological revolution in the last 20, 30 years, and that's created some mega billionaires, right? It could be that however we muddle through this moment, in 30 years, there hasn't been an equivalent, you know, technological, business, industry shift that's created an equivalent class of people. So it, there was a similar moment at the end of the 19th century, right? Like, we call it the robber baron era, but I think people really underestimate how dramatic the change was at that time. It was much more dramatic than what we've seen in the last 30 years. There, there were, I, I, I'm trying to, there, there's, there's some numbers that were like, there was an industry where there were 10,000 different businesses, and it went down to

• 41:43Speaker 03

  like 100, and like, two of those accounted for 80% of the revenue, and also they were global businesses, right? So like, the, the changes that happened in like, the last 30 years of the 19th century were so world historic in nature, that, yeah, they produced a few people that were absolutely over mighty subjects. And we did ultimately do something about that, right? But it was a combination of some time went by, you know, so that we were, we were a little beyond that particular economic moment. And then also, we got a couple of presidents who were just willing to strongly enforce antitrust laws again, and show that the democratically elected government are the ones that are in charge here, you know, not a bunch of billionaires. Yeah.

• 42:26Sean Carroll?

  I did, half seriously, not even, less than half seriously, you know, almost jokingly, but provocatively, on Twitter years ago, I said, what if we just had a system where if you wanted to run for office, and, you know, hold an office in the, the federal government of the United States, you had to literally give up all of your wealth? And if you left office, you would get like, some payout, a few million dollars, to, you know, start yourself again. And that would, you know, prevent the incentive that we have now of people going into office to cash in, or to exert, but, but remarkably, to me, I guess I'm naive in some ways, that was one of my least popular tweets ever, like, you know, like, people hated the idea.

• 43:07Sean Carroll?

  They were absolutely outraged, like, oh, no one would ever run for office, because I guess they think that the only people who should run for office are already wealthy somehow.

• 43:15Speaker 03

  I know, what's up with that? Yeah, that's, that's, that's... No, there's, our system was already, I mean, I talked, I talked about how expensive the court system is, but how expensive it is to run for office, too. I mean, it does, it also filters out to a certain kind of person, both someone who is already somewhat affluent, but then also has to have backers that, that really, really are.

• 43:39Sean Carroll?

  Yep. So let's talk about, we, we, I wanted to get on the table, you know, the various critiques of liberalism, because that was in part what inspired you to start Liberal Currents. Let's, let's do a little bit better job at giving the positive.

• 43:51Speaker 03

  Let's do the positive.

• 43:52Sean Carroll?

  Yeah. All of a sudden, you do first your, your elevator pitch.

• 43:56Speaker 03

  Okay. So a lot of the criticisms of liberalism make a basic mistake in treating liberalism as if it's synonymous with the modern world. Patrick Deneen and all those people just do that. They think, oh, like, this, this commercial society, this mass society, this, you know, the pluralism, all of that, that's caused by liberalism. But it's not caused by liberalism. In the past 200, 300 years, the world has been utterly transformed. We call it the Industrial Revolution. Frankly, that's a misnomer. It's much more a revolution in science, technology,

• 44:34Speaker 03

  and production, period, of all kinds. And, you know, one aspect of it is that the average person, forget about how wealthy they are, because wealth is sort of, you could take different ways of measuring what wealth means, right? Depending on how you want to define it. The average person is more mobile physically. Like, we have cars, we have trains, we have airplanes. They are, they can communicate over wider distances. I mean, forget the internet. Telephones were revolutionary. Broadcast was revolutionary. And now, yes, we have the internet, and people have a phone, they can communicate with someone almost anywhere in the world instantly.

• 45:11Speaker 03

  A small group of private citizens is now capable of taking dramatic action of some kind. So it could it could be political action, it could be philanthropic action, it could be business, or it could be terrorism, right? It could it could it could be a number of insurgencies and things. The difficulty of governing a large populations, largest populations ever in history, right, at this point, you know, in most countries now, the smallest countries in the world, well, maybe not the smallest, the the average country size now is bigger than like some of the biggest countries, you know, four hundred years ago or something.

• 45:54Speaker 03

  So very, very difficult to govern these multi-million, hundred million, you know, population countries when very small groups of them can cause trouble for you. So what do you need, what what what does liberalism offer than that the others do not? There's a basic formula for build building in response responsiveness in the government to what the what the population is feeling. So democracy and freedom of the press and freedom of speech and freedom of association are things that actually force feedback loops into the into the government for for what various different groups are are feeling at the moment. They

• 46:38Speaker 03

  also allow organization, you know, to to change things in the government. If the government has grown stagnant, it allows the positive, this isn't just sort of reacting to the the trouble that can come from populations, they could populations also do creative things. We can tap talent on a broader level than ever before. So talented people who might have been left out before can organize themselves, run for office, or, you know, create large corporations and become influential.

• 47:08Speaker 03

  So you can harness sort of the creativeness of the general population as well through liberty. And then finally, you know, talking about this, the social difference aspect. I mean, the basic, because liberalism predates, as an idea, predates the industrial revolution. The basic idea is, one way that you achieve social peace is by allowing a level of letting people organize among themselves. Not, you don't enforce an official church line on things through the government, because that just isn't, you know, asking for civil war. You know, maybe they could do that in medieval Europe. Mostly what they did in medieval Europe is, there was an official church line and governments were too weak to enforce it anyway, so they could afford to say they were enforcing it because they couldn't.

• 47:53Speaker 03

  Now, now they are actually powerful enough to do so, but people are powerful enough to make trouble for them if they do do so. So liberalism and allowing for these, these individual rights is, is, is one way of achieving social peace, basically. And that, that is the basic elevator pitch of, there, there are particular challenges of modern society and liberal democracy specifically is by far the best one. It's no guarantee at all. You have to do the actual hard work of politics in the, in the, in that world and, and within a liberal democracy. Liberal democracies can fail, and some authoritarian systems have achieved a period of social peace as well and even prosperity.

• 48:35Speaker 03

  You know, again, nothing is guaranteed, but by far the best package is liberal democracy of rights, universal enfranchisement and, and democracy.

• 48:44Sean Carroll?

  That last point you made, you know, it reminds me of one of the things I'm thinking myself about these days, which is, there, there's something called econophysics, where you, you know, apply ideas from physics to economics and there's equilibria and entropy and things like that, but I think there should be more politico-physics. And I think that one of the great things about liberalism is, it's a bottom-up collective kind of thing. You have a bunch of people with crazy ideas running around bumping into each other, interacting, and that's actually a much better way to come up with good ideas and good arrangements than to have one wise person try to set everything down once and for all.

• 49:19Speaker 03

  Right, no, absolutely. I mean, the, the argument against dictatorship is just so easy. And it, and it is. What are the odds that you're gonna get the right guy? Yeah. The way that they're going to get power is not going to be neutral. We're not gonna pick them based on how wise they are. They're gonna, it's gonna be political, just like democracy is political. They're going to do it by having a patron network. In which case, they're, they're going to just be relying on that patron network and keeping it happy to stay in power, rather than the common good. Or they're gonna do it because they've consolidated control of the military. In which case, they're just the ones that are best at controlling the use of force. Not necessarily at doing, you know, making the country wealthy or something.

• 50:05Speaker 03

  And also, the longer that they're in the job, if they get worse at it, you know, if they, if they, if they're aging, there's no real mechanism for replacing them. And no one lives forever. So, you know, right? The, the arguments are easy. It, it's, it's, it's just a sign of how complacent we have gotten. That really and truly, some people have found the argument hard to find. When people look at even Putin, or, or, but, but especially China. They're like, oh, well, they've really got it figured out, actually. And it's like, no, I mean, Putin, first of all, if you look at Russia compared to Poland and how they fared after the Soviet Union, Poland has grown as fast as South Korea. Russia has not, to put it mildly. Russia's a lot better off than it was under the Soviet Union.

• 50:50Speaker 03

  They're, they're an actual net exporter of food now. Whereas, whereas the Soviet Union famously was terrible at agriculture. But they're still a very poor country. I mean, they're middle income, but, you know, they're not growing fast. And they're, they're a complete kleptocracy. And also, of course, now he's throwing them into the meat grinder of a pointless war.

• 51:09Speaker 03

  Then, then China, I mean, China's story, obviously, a little more inspirational in terms of how much it's grown over the last thirty, forty years.

• 51:17Speaker 03

  And one thing that they did have is an institutionalized mechanism for rotation in power. Not democracy, at least not mass democracy. But, but they had a method for the party to change leaders every few years. But that's broken down, as, as often happens in these systems. Xi used his terms to punish his enemies and reward his friends and give that, put them in a position of power to then be able to say, actually, we think he should have another term. And, you know, so it's, it's sort of like.

• 51:48Speaker 03

  Falling the center of gravity that happens in these systems back into a personalist system.

• 51:52Speaker 00

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• 52:29Speaker 04

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• 52:59Sean Carroll?

  One of the other unpopular tweets I put up back in the day was I had a poll. Would you prefer to have your country governed by, I proposed it in an intentionally provocative way, by the opinions of the mob or be led by a single wise benevolent person? And it was two-thirds a single person, right?

• 53:24Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 53:25Sean Carroll?

  And this is my Twitter feed. Like, this wasn't the end of the thing.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 53:29Sean Carroll?

  And I point out in a response, I'm like, you know, you people are not in favor of democracy. And people said, no, you said that they would be wise and benevolent. And I had to say, like, that's what they always say. It doesn't always turn out that way.

• 53:42Speaker 03

  Even if they are, I mean, look, so, speaking of right liberals, Friedrich Hayek, right? Friedrich Hayek, I think, deserves to be called a liberal. He really believed in a dynamic, open system. He was definitely a right one, right-wing one, in the sense that he was perfectly comfortable with social hierarchies that would develop in a system of just, you know, formal liberty. But he had very salient points about how little knowledge a single individual could even have. Um. So a very wise and benevolent ruler is still just one person and they depend upon uh their they a lot of things to to inform them, even if they even so what what typically

• 54:26Speaker 03

  happens with a dictator is they sandbag their own administrative apparatus because they're prioritizing uh avoiding a coup um and the people in their apparatus are the ones that are most likely to lead a coup against them. So they they prioritize playing the sides against each other over having it be effective. Um but even if the person was was wise and benevolent and didn't do that, um the apparatus itself um has will will have problems, right? If you don't have free speech, um and if you don't have, you know, if you if you don't have these open feedback mechanisms. Um. So ultimately, there's only so much that one person can do.

• 55:05Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 55:06Speaker 03

  And what happens? Let's say you had the best possible dictator. You know, people often put to point to uh, you know, Lee in in uh in Singapore, uh, which I question, but, you know, they've done, they've done okay, right? They've done all right economically, anyway. Um, they they only last one generation, right? They're they're they're only last one lifetime. What's what is that? What then comes next? Um, often what comes next in in actually halfway decent dictators is they establish the pathway to democracy because they know that even even even if you accept that they were a good dictator, which in most cases, it's not as simple as that, right? Um, because in order to stay in power, they had to do some ugly things. Um, but even if like on the scale of dictators, they

• 55:49Speaker 03

  were one of the less bad ones, um, and actually like did some things that helped the country. Um, if if they want their legacy to persist, they know that it's not about finding a successor. It's about finding a pathway to democracy after them that's stable.

• 56:03Sean Carroll?

  You you've already said a lot about this, but let's be super clear about the relationship between liberalism and democracy. You could have one without the other, but they're they're closely intertwined.

• 56:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, um, yeah, it's complicated, right? Um, there are definitely liberal strains that are kind of hostile to democracy. And to give the Hayek example again, he was kind of like bullish on Pinochet, right? Um, because there was this idea that, well, you'd have a dictator who just imposed economic rights and stuff on the country and then they'll be better off. Um, there's definitely liberals like that. I would never defend them, um, and they're, they're wrong and bad. Um, on the other hand, though, in order to have an actual functional democracy, you do need some liberalism. Um, in order for an election to be free and fair, you have to have freedom of the press. You have to have a degree of freedom of association so that opposition parties can organize. Otherwise, it's not democracy, in my opinion.

• 56:56Speaker 03

  Um, and, and I think, um, there, so, um, Shady Hamid, um, at the, at the Washington Post, and he's, he's a political scientist, I believe, um, he wrote a book about democracy, um, in which he made the argument against liberalism and democracy. He said, you could just have mere democracy, um, and because his focus is on the Middle East. And he, he felt that it was often unfair, that, that nascent democracies in the Middle East were held to unfair standards by Westerners because the people that were going to win were going to be Muslim Brotherhood types. And he said, we should just be comfortable with Muslim Brotherhood types winning, which I do agree with, by the way. Like, I do actually agree with that particular point.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  What I disagree with, with him on is the idea that you can disentangle that from liberalism. Um, you can have a Muslim Brotherhood, um, run democracy that is fairly illiberal on the whole, like in terms of like the policies that they have, but, um, you would need to allow women, for example, to have a degree of freedom of speech. Um, they would have to be enfranchised, um, on a secret ballot, um, so that their husbands wouldn't coerce them or something.

• 58:10Speaker 03

  And freedom of association on their own, forming women's organizations that I don't think societies like that would allow, frankly.

• 58:15Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 58:16Speaker 03

  I think, and if, and if they don't allow that, then they're not really a democracy. I mean, they're, they're an imperfect democracy, say, or they're a competitive autocracy of some kind. And, you know, that's probably better than a straight up democracy where the, the elections don't mean anything. But it's not great and it's not a democracy, not really. It's not free and fair elections. It's free elections for some, just like Jim, the Jim Crow South is free elections for some.

• 58:38Sean Carroll?

  This is always an issue though, for liberalism and democracy. They're both philosophies of pluralism, you know, in some way, letting people have different values, letting people vote for different candidates.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:52Sean Carroll?

  And they are vulnerable to handing over influence and power to anti-liberal, anti-democratic strains.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:02Sean Carroll?

  And what do you do about that?

• 59:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, everything has its failure mode, right? There's, there's, there's no perfect ideology. Again, to return to Jacob Levy, my guiding star, his big book was Rationalism, Pluralism and Freedom. And his, the, the idea of, between the, the first two of those names is there's, there's a liberalism that is rationalist in the sense of trying to impose a single way of liberalism on the whole country.

• 59:29Sean Carroll?

  Hmm.

• 59:30Speaker 03

  And there's a liberalism that is about pluralism specifically, not just allowing difference, but also actually like federalism and checks and balances versus, you know, like a more assertive liberalism. And the funny thing is that people think of libertarianism as being minimalist, but it's not. Libertarianism is absolutely a rationalism, which is why they like people like Pinochet.

• 59:52Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 59:53Speaker 03

  In as, in as much as they do, not to say that all libertarians do, right? But the libertarians that went for Pinochet, it's because libertarians often have a very rationalistic idea, which is that everyone should have Some categorical property rights, no matter where they are in the country, no matter who they are. And if some, if a dictator comes and imposes that on everybody, great, you know, that's, that's one way to do it. So that's why that's one failure mode of the rationalist strain. The pluralist strain says, no, like, you've got to have some buttresses against central power. You know, let's have federalism so that some things are administered at a level that's closer to people and more responsive to them likely.

• 1:00:35Speaker 03

  And also allows for some difference. You can have Quebec that, that has, you know, they mostly speak French. And you can have the rest of, of Canada that mostly speaks English in most contexts. And you can have, Quebec has some laws that are different. Louisiana here actually has civil law, for example, versus common law. You know, you, you can, you can have these like various differences at the legal level that are healthy for taking down the temperature of national politics. So, so that could be, since, since the, there's, you know, hundreds of million of, of people that are voting for and represented by the people in Washington.

• 1:01:20Speaker 03

  Having to decide for all of them on everything could, it's not just a matter of it's bad from an imposing power from the center perspective. It's also bad from a, well, there's some questions that we could let people make different choices on by having all these different jurisdictions where they have the, the option of having different choices, right? And so Levy's, Levy's conclusion, which I still believe very much, is that neither approach is correct. You need both and both have failure modes, right? So the rationalist fail, failure mode is very much just the enlightened dictator argument. The pluralist failure mode is the one that is most common in American history.

• 1:02:00Speaker 03

  Because especially before now, the main problem in American history were completely reactionary localities. So like Jim Crow was not really. A national problem, it was a national problem in terms of how our national government was was was constructed. But but Jim Crow was a majority of the country unpopular regime for a while before it was actually defeated. But that's because the the states and especially the localities had a lot of power to keep it that way. So plural, you know, pluralism in legality means you're potentially allowing, you know, just as I said, you can have a democracy.

• 1:02:40Speaker 03

  That's in theory, a Muslim Brotherhood democracy, even if they, you know, even if you give women, again, all the rights that they need to have. You could have a lot of illiberal laws that are passed anyway. Similarly, you can have, what what often happens is if you have fairly liberal laws at the national level. You can have a lot of state or local level things that are pretty illiberal. And frankly, a lot of problems to this day in America are local problems. Policing, when we talk about policing in this country, we have one of the most decentralized policing systems in the world. You know, the British, the French, they have national police. A lot of countries do.

• 1:03:22Speaker 03

  And when you have very decentralized policing, you get some places that are very professionalized, right? And you get other places that just are not. And also you get some places where someone is completely abusive as a cop and known to be and gets fired. And he just goes a few towns over and and takes up a job there, right? So it's more difficult to hold accountable, the variance is wider and the downside is very low. Yeah, so so that that essentially those are the failure modes on both ends.

• 1:03:49Sean Carroll?

  And the public school systems, you could say very similar things about, right?

• 1:03:53Speaker 03

  Oh, 100%, yeah, yeah, definitely. Yes, my my my personal belief is that we should move both of those things to the state level everywhere.

• 1:04:02Sean Carroll?

  I've said things like that myself. But, you know, the minority rights question is is a is a tricky one, I always think. Because, of course, I think that the standard liberal thing would be like, you know, human beings should get rights. They should have rights no matter what group they're in. One way at a practical political level of fighting for those rights is what has become known as identity politics. Which in some ways is not a liberal way of thinking about things. How do you think about the relationship between liberalism and identity politics?

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think. Just from a theoretical point of view, in as much as there are tensions, and I don't think there always are, because I think there's a lot of people that get lumped to identity politics as a label that are fairly straightforwardly liberal in what they're trying to do. But in as much as there is a tension, it's between left communitarianism and liberalism again. And it's treating some of the groups in identity politics as groups, rather than thinking about the individuals in them. But, yeah, I don't, I don't know, it hasn't, given the way that the country has been in the last 10 years, it hasn't been a big area of focus for me, frankly.

• 1:05:10Sean Carroll?

  Well, we're seeing, for instance, trans rights are treated very differently in different countries. I mean, there's, there are definitely examples where democratic elections can be leading to a group of people denying rights to a certain minority. I think, you know, the good liberal has to have a way of fighting against that.

• 1:05:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, I think, to return to the point about the tensions with democracy, I think the core value of democracy is not that it's going to guarantee you a liberal outcome, though, again, you need that sort of baseline level of liberalism for it to be a democracy at all. But the core value of democracy is it's a peaceful way to litigate these issues. It's a peaceful way to compete for power with people who aren't liberals. And that is why, so there's, I think, a lot of liberal philosophers tend to think about liberalism at a system level, and like, okay, here's the legal system we ought to have.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  But what, again, what I like about Levy in particular, but what needs to be said, too, is you can't just have a liberal system. You have to have liberals fighting for liberalism in the liberal system. You have to have people organizing in political parties that are liberal, pushing for a liberal agenda. You have to have people with magazines and newspapers and publications and podcasts and videos arguing for trans rights. You know, that's not gonna, people aren't gonna just buy that on their own, right?

• 1:06:40Sean Carroll?

  You have, I'm not gonna remember the exact quote, so you can fix it for me, but you have made the slightly contrarian take that professional politicians should have more influence.

• 1:06:54Speaker 03

  Yes, um, so even even more than professional politicians, I would say professional parties.

• 1:07:00Sean Carroll?

  Okay.

• 1:07:01Speaker 03

  But but but they go hand in hand, right? Our system is extremely candidate driven. And the way that I and and so we have the primary system, right? We have we have and the primary system is just wide open. And if we didn't have the primary system, we would not have Donald Trump. That's just 100% the case. No, no one in the Republican Party want wanted Donald Trump to be the nominee in 2016. They had no power to stop him.

• 1:07:25Sean Carroll?

  So what is the what's the alternative to the primary system for we Americans who just think it's the only?

• 1:07:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, 100%. So there's there's there's two basic things. One is just simply there's a there's a party organization that picks their candidates, period. Usually it's a little more complicated than that, but we'll just we'll just summarize it that way. There are primaries in other countries, but the only people that can vote in them are dues paying members of the party. So like the UK will labor, I think specifically switched to that model. Frankly, it hasn't gone too well for them.

• 1:07:55Sean Carroll?

  I was gonna say, yeah.

• 1:07:57Speaker 03

  But but that, you know, that's obviously much more restrictive than what we have, which is essentially an election before an election.

• 1:08:04Speaker 03

  So most most countries, the party organizations are quite strong because they have a lot more say in who actually runs under their banner.

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  Here, they're quite weak because they don't. And they're most in as much as there's party discipline, it's just because the the success of the politician rests a lot on the brand of the party and the loyalty of the partisan voters.

• 1:08:32Speaker 03

  And so you don't want to piss them off, so you sort of all align on the same general strategy. More or less in as much as there's discipline again. But, you know, obviously, your partisan voters in your state are going to be slightly different from my partisan voters in my state. And so that's why you get this sort of like disjunction and dysfunction where there's a lot every every every president fights with their own party, even when they're the majority party.

• 1:08:58Sean Carroll?

  Is this are you, you know, not not to put it too simplistically, you're you want more influence from smoke filled rooms?

• 1:09:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, here's the idea. The problem is, ours, our way of doing it is probably the best if you're not gonna have a competitive multi-party system. So, okay, to get into the weeds of this. Yeah. There, there is, thinking about legislature specifically for a moment, you can have your legislatures be one seat at a time that is voted for, and the person who gets the most votes wins. And that is not a very proportional way to do it, because there's gonna be a lot of people who voted for some, whose votes essentially don't, don't end up translating into anyone in office, right? They're, I forgot what they're called, like dead votes or something like that.

• 1:09:53Speaker 03

  But, you know, could be like forty, forty-five percent of people that vote or more that cast a vote, it does not actually correspond to someone who is in, in office afterwards.

• 1:10:06Speaker 03

  And the more people who run for it, the worse that it is, right? So, in a place that is run on that basis, that is not strictly two-party, it actually gets less democratic results than ours. So, Canada frequently has a, a party that controls the majority of, of their parliament that has gotten well less than fifty percent of the vote, like well less. Because there's, there's multiple parties that are, it's a spoiler effect, just like we see with presidents, right?

• 1:10:36Speaker 03

  So, so there's that. Alternatively, you can have multiple candidates that you're voting for, and

• 1:10:46Speaker 03

  there's a few ways you can do it, but I'll, I'll pick my favorite, which is the party list version. So, you could have, you, you could have, a voter could be faced with a different list of, a different set of parties. They, they could be shown the party rather than the candidate. And it says essentially that if you vote for this party, if we get one seat, this is the candidate that we'll get. If we get two seats, this will be the next candidate that goes on. So, it's a, so it's a list of candidates, and it goes from the top to the bottom based on what percent of the vote they get. But at the end of the day, Almost everyone's votes goes to some party that gets some seats in the legislature. So it's quite what they call proportional.

• 1:11:31Speaker 03

  And it results every single time in more than two parties. It's a multi-party system. So when I say I want things determined in a smoke-filled room, what I really want are strong party organizations that have to compete in an extremely competitive party system. So I want things determined by the voters, but I want the voters to be picking parties. Because frankly, I think they already are in most cases. And I think we should just institutionalize that better.

• 1:12:03Speaker 03

  I also like it, so why do I want the strong party part in particular? I like to describe it as if it's a union for politicians. So why do we like unions? Well, unions stop the one person, the one worker from getting a sweet deal with the employer in order to break solidarity with the rest. They enforce a certain discipline so that the deal that is made with the employer is the best for all the workers overall. Politicians and their interactions with interest groups is similar. We need, interest groups are not inherently bad. Interest groups represent real interests in our society. But what we don't want is for particular interest groups to overly dominate.

• 1:12:46Speaker 03

  And what happens in a very candidate-driven system is one candidate will have their interests that back them. And they're just, it's like non-negotiable for them. And then another candidate will have another set. And then this whole thing sort of becomes intractable. Whereas a strong political party can essentially negotiate with the interest groups in their faction, their coalition overall, to get the best overall arrangement for them, plus being able to actually win general elections. So you know, it's between the very active interest groups, because not all interests are well organized and represented, plus the electorate overall. They can actually perform that balancing act better than just cobbling together individual candidates after the fact.

• 1:13:30Sean Carroll?

  I do have this, on the one hand, feeling that we could certainly improve our political system, you know, both in how we vote and how we have representation, etc., but a complete fear that we should not touch the Constitution because if we actually tried to change it in the current climate, it would turn out to be a fiasco.

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, I'm glad you said that because, because one of the things that we do at Liberal Currents is we try and actually put good ideas into the world about that kind of thing. I don't know if, it's all right for me to mention, we have fundraiser going on right now.

• 1:14:08Sean Carroll?

  You can mention it, please, yeah.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, no.

• 1:14:10Sean Carroll?

  I do occasionally, Adam, have people on the show who want to sell their books, so.

• 1:14:14Speaker 03

  What? Crazy, crazy.

• 1:14:16Sean Carroll?

  You're doing the analogous thing.

• 1:14:17Speaker 03

  So, one of the things that we hope to do, if we're fully funded, is this project that we call the Reconstruction Papers. And the idea of this project is that liberals have spent the last 10 years mostly being anti-Trump and anti-MAGA, and sort of, in as much as they're for things, they're very defensively for things. So, we're defending our public health institutions, we're defending our research institutions in the university, we're defending the civil service. But we need to move beyond that and actually have a positive vision for not just what we're going to repair after Trump, but now that Trump has made a mess of everything, let's step back and make some things better. And

• 1:14:59Speaker 03

  many of those things are, can be made better legislatively and, you know, through having the right president. But there are some things that would require amendments. And so the Reconstruction Papers is sort of going to cover all of it, and frankly, not just the political, legislative, and, and legal stuff, and constitutional stuff, but even thinking about, how do we rethink our approach to the media industry? How do we, how can we, how can we heal civil society to be a little better at handling threats like this than it was? So, you know, we're going to reach out to a lot of subject matter experts across a lot of areas and say, how do we redo? Higher education, how do we make it better? How do we avoid this situation we found ourselves stuck in where tuitions were exploding and student debt was exploding?

• 1:15:43Speaker 03

  But actually, like, the situation, the institution itself was really, like, straining under the pressure, even while getting all that money. You know, what, how do we, how, you know, what's, what's, what's the path now forward after Trump has taken a hammer to it? Higher education was one example. Executive accountability is one, where it's more passing new laws and amendments. But we want to actually create a collection of this that would be handed out to people that would hopefully one day be in a position to influence, you know, what was being done.

• 1:16:12Sean Carroll?

  That's actually a great segue, because one thing I didn't want to neglect talking about is the role of education, and in particular, civic education. I'm actually on a committee at Johns Hopkins, where it was my employer, to rethink civic education. Like, we're, the faculty and administration has come to the conclusion that a lot of students just don't have the background assumptions about democracy and liberalism that you think that someone going up in our society should have. And is this our responsibility to fix it? Is there, is it possible to fix it? You have this wonderful quote, I like that you, you don't shy away from the hot takes. I think you wrote a whole article about why hot takes are good. So, I'll read this quote.

• 1:16:56Sean Carroll?

  "A liberal society cannot survive unless liberal values are broadly held by the electorate." Is that something that our education system should concern itself with?

• 1:17:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, I think so. And maybe the more minimal version of that, because that is a pretty strong statement, right? But I definitely think you need, it brought, it depends on what you mean by broad, like, how broad are we talking?

• 1:17:18Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:19Speaker 03

  Obviously, there's always going to be conservatives. Also, there's like, how liberal, like, there's some people that are fairly liberal, there's others that are not as, you know, not as liberal on trans rights, right? Like, but they are for freedom of speech and democracy and things like that. Anyway, setting that aside, a good, a good book on this topic, in terms of what we need to do as a society, is the political theorist Kevin Elliott's Democracy for Busy People. And his basic point is that it's, education definitely is one, but that there's a number of things we need to do just to make sure that people are actually politically integrated in this country.

• 1:17:54Sean Carroll?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:55Speaker 03

  So it's not even, it's not even just, like... Larger level knowledge about democracy and civic responsibility and things. But actually, like, just getting people actually engaged, which is not a matter of persuasion. He says it's a matter of institutions. It's a matter of actually like committing to do to do that. And for, you know, one of his examples is actually having mandatory voting and things like that. Just like actually like having have getting people in the practice of participating in politics in a way. That is fairly like a lot, a lot of things that are that just get built into their their lives.

• 1:18:30Sean Carroll?

  What do you think about mandatory voting?

• 1:18:32Speaker 03

  I have grown increasingly for it. And one of the arguments that he makes is that it's really unhealthy for a society to have a large disengaged segment, because even if you think it's OK for people to choose that, they can't actually commit to always choosing that. And what ends up happening is they become disengaged and they become very ignorant about some basic things about politics and the country. And then a demagogue comes along and mobilizes them. And all of a sudden, you have, I mean, that's basically what happened with Trump in a lot of ways. It's he engaged, he mobilized a lot of non-voters. And that's, that's a dangerous situation.

• 1:19:16Speaker 03

  Essentially, the, the, the high level way of putting that is disengaged non-voters are a bomb waiting to go off for a society. And, and so, you know, mandatory voting is just a phrase. What it actually means in practice is usually either you pay people for showing up or you tax them for not not going, which, you know, from a fiscal perspective is pretty equivalent. Maybe psychologically, people prefer the idea of I can turn down getting the money. That's fine, then politically do that. But anyway, like, actually, like,

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  Having a day off on on on election days, paying people some nominal amount that for someone who's poor might actually mean a lot to go to the polls. And just generally making it easier and doing things to positively encourage going to the polls. I'm 100% for now. I mean, after looking at how things have played out in my lifetime, definitely.

• 1:20:08Sean Carroll?

  I was mostly against mandatory voting. Maybe I'm just gonna say the same thing you did, but I've been impressed empirically over and over again with conditions under which people were handed responsibility and rose to the occasion, right? Like treated really seriously and maybe the country as a whole would do that, a little bit more anyway.

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, no, I used to be kind of like, like I said, I went to GMU. I was like a grumpy 20 something libertarian who thought mandatory voting and jury duty was evil. Don't really feel that way now. I also think, again, calling it mandatory voting makes it much scarier sounding than it actually is.

• 1:20:44Sean Carroll?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:20:45Speaker 03

  Like, giving someone a little money or a very modest fine is not really a big deal, in my opinion. And and if that's all it takes to encourage extremely high levels of voter participation, then we should absolutely do it.

• 1:20:59Sean Carroll?

  Which brings us to sort of the final thing I want to talk about, which are the practical considerations here. I mean, as you're saying these wonderful things about, let's give people 10 bucks to vote and that that means something to poor people, it doesn't really mean anything to rich people. That means there's a whole large political party, United States, who doesn't want it to happen, right?

• 1:21:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:21:20Sean Carroll?

  I mean, it's easy in this day and age to be a little despairing about the political situation. And one of the great things about liberal currents is the fighting spirit is absolutely there. Tell me a little bit about how you feel about the push and pull between just complaining about how terrible things are and keeping up the ability to say, no, we're gonna keep working to make it better.

• 1:21:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think we have more than enough complaining about how bad things are. I mean, If that's all you're doing, you know, obviously, we publish plenty of pieces that are explaining how bad things are, you know, so that people really understand it because it's often more subtle than it appears in a headline. And that's fine and necessary. You have to actually understand the problem in order to think of positive solutions. But overall, especially the last year and a half, we're very focused on let's look ahead. And like the reconstruction papers is sort of the ultimate version of that idea. But in general, thinking about both things we can do for a longer term, but also things

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  we could do right now. So I'll publish things that I don't necessarily think are going to get picked up, but just to show that we should be thinking along these lines. So for example, when Trump was going after a bunch of law firms and they were caving and making deals with him, I wrote just a quick thing, just not very long, a few hundred words, that said, the organizations that have the power to stop this are state bar associations. Because the entire calculus for not fighting in court is that these law firms are afraid they're going to go out of business if they fight the federal government. And if a state bar association says, if you make a deal, we will interpret that as a violation of your oath and disbar you, then that's 100% guarantee that not fighting will put you

• 1:23:12Speaker 03

  out of business, and it shifts the calculus, right? Did I think that state bars were going to take up that argument? No. But I think you have to keep putting out these ideas to show that we have levers, you know, we have levers to fight now, and then there's no reason to despair about what we can do in the future. The fact, I mean, I'm frankly still a little frustrated with national Democrats about their stance, given everything that's happened. A little bit, yeah. But, you know, the fact that Trump is doing what he's doing, his administration is doing what they're doing now so brazenly, I think really does create the possibility of a future democratic trifecta that is willing to do what it takes. And then at that point, it's a matter of making sure they know what it will take, what they should do.

• 1:23:55Speaker 03

  So, you know, we have to encourage them, we have to encourage them both through persuasion and through primaring to become Democrats that will do what it takes. And then we have to develop the right ideas for them to take hold of. But those ideas, they're our ideas, they absolutely are viable. I mean, that's what we're publishing every day.

• 1:24:15Sean Carroll?

  It is fascinating to me because I think it's very hard to study, you know, how ideas get taken up, right?

• 1:24:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:22Sean Carroll?

  We all know that there's various conservative think tanks and education programs and societies that, that over the very last 50 years have been super successful at creating a cadre of true believers. And it doesn't seem, from my perspective, to be exactly the same thing on the more liberal side.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:43Sean Carroll?

  But we, every little bit helps, I guess.

• 1:24:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess so.

• 1:24:48Sean Carroll?

  Good. Well, I'm glad that you had that optimistic take on what we can be doing. I do hope that we remove a lot of gold foil from the White House when we get the trifecta in there. And good luck with the fundraiser. I think Liberal Currents is doing a great job. Adam Gury, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape Podcast.

• 1:25:02Speaker 03

  Yes, thank you so much.

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