Understanding Liberalism: Part I - Post-liberalism, Classical Liberalism, and the Post-War Consensus

Welcome, everyone, to another edition of the Conversations That Matter podcast.

I'm your host, John Harris.

As always, I have two friends with me today.

I have Ben Crenshaw, who is a PhD candidate at Hillsdale College.

How you doing, Ben? I'm doing good, John.

How are you? Good.

And I got Tymon Klein, who is the Editor-in-Chief at American Reformer.

How are you doing, Tymon? Good, John.

Thanks for having us on.

Good.

Well, I'm so glad that you joined me.

We talked about this, I want to say, a week or two ago.

And the whole idea for this series on liberalism, classical liberalism, neoliberalism, and as it pertains to wokeness, and social justice, and Christian nationalism, and all these other isms and things is really, it seems to me, like in the both political and the Christian world, there is a big misunderstanding.

It seems like people are talking past each other, even today on Twitter.

Right now, as we speak, there's people that I think are talking, people I like, both talking past each other.

And there's been some terms slung around out there, boomer cons, one of them, that I've heard some people use to describe older people who don't understand exactly what's going on.

And of course, there's all kinds of terms and attempts to try to understand this disconnect.

But I've kind of come to the conclusion, and I'd love to hear what you guys think of this, that the main disagreements right now, whether that's like the G3 Christian nationalist controversy or other controversies, isn't so much paedo-baptism, or eschatology, or some of the things that get blamed for these things.

I think there's something actually much bigger going on.

And that is, we're in a moment in history where we are at the end of an era.

And most of us don't probably even realize we're living at the end of an era, but the assumptions of the liberal order that we've lived under are starting to be questioned, and they're crumbling.

And as a result, people who are loyal to that liberal order, even without knowing that they are, or at least aspects of it, are defensive of it against people who are openly questioning and trying to bring about something new.

Sometimes this gets called post-liberalism, but many of these people are trying to go back to things that are pre-liberal, or even earlier iterations of liberalism, for example.

So I'd love to get your take on this.

Maybe, Ben, you first.

I mean, do you see this as some of the main controversy, like broadly speaking, in both evangelicalism and in the political world? Oh, most definitely, yeah.

We could say, quote, unquote, liberalism, maybe liberal internationalism since the fall of the Soviet Union and communism in 89 and 90.

That kind of American-led international hegemony has just been something we all grew up with, at least those of us in the millennial generation.

And unless you were specifically studying it, or you knew what had come before, you just absorbed its basic principles, its ways of functioning, its outlook, its prognosis for the future, your basic understanding of conservatism was some kind of a Reagan revolution and Thatcher and England, and then Bush I and Bush II and your compassionate conservatism.

And that's what conservatism was.

That's what it meant to be an evangelical, a Christian in America, your moral majority in the 80s and 90s.

And that was kind of your horizon.

That's pretty much what you grew up with.

That's what you accepted.

And all that's blowing apart at the seams.

And so if that's all you have, you don't have an understanding of America in previous decades, let alone previous centuries, or going back to entire different epochs in Western and Greek and Roman history, then you're gonna be lost and kind of lashing out as the kind of tectonic plates shift underneath you.

So I do think that's a lot of what's going on here and just the inability to conceive of a different way of life, socially, politically, especially with the role of religion and politics in the state outside of this, even the past 30 years, basically, in its political principles and way of operation.

So I certainly think that there's a huge amount of it.

Tymon, I grew up with a Rush baby, right? My parents listened to Rush Limbaugh and then Sean Hannity would come on, of course.

And I always knew we were to the right of them as far as free market principles weren't enough for a society's morality and things like that.

But we appreciated them.

And I'm realizing now how ill-suited some of the framing that they had, that may have even been better suited for an earlier time, but how ill-suited some of the framing that they had is for our current time.

And so, I mean, do you relate to that? Did you grow up in that, like many evangelical kids? Yeah, I mean, actually, me and my wife, we just moved from the Northeast down to Florida recently when we were packing stuff up.

I actually found like the, can't remember if it was CDs or cassettes, but it was Rush Revere, right? Like where he's telling the story, which was great.

I obviously kept it, it's hilarious.

But yeah, I mean, I think that's the story, especially for evangelicals.

My parents are conservative and would have voted for Bush and all that.

I remember wearing my Bush Cheney shirt to high school just to spite people, couldn't even vote, but I'm gonna wear it.

And you just kind of knew where you stood, right? Like it was, in some ways, some of the people, the thinkers we're gonna get into that are lodging critiques of liberalism, that basic sort of situation, situating yourself in contrast to something else is not really changed for a lot of conservatives.

It's just other substantive things have changed.

So the alignment looks different.

But you knew where you stood and it was pretty easy.

Terms like liberty and freedom had some kind of content or meaning to you.

People could just say them in stump speeches.

We all knew what that meant.

In general, I think for a long time, the idea was, well, Democrats or Republicans, and again, you're thinking of things in purely almost electoral political frame, they're probably, they just have different ways of trying to achieve the good of the country, right? Like they just agree on the means and the methods and maybe some priorities.

A lot of that has just totally exploded as has been talked about for various reasons and causes we'll get into.

And those can all be debated.

It's probably a multifaceted reason.

And one of those has been pointed out is the collapse of this sort of rules-based international order that was constructed in the post-war period to serve us.

I mean, more or less, it's not the worst idea ever.

And for a long time, it worked.

And we could rely upon that.

So our expectations were framed by that, our expectations for prosperity and for political trajectory.

We could just go ahead and bring up Fukuyama since we'll do that a lot, I'm sure.

But all of our expectations were framed this way.

And it is really a progressive outlook on history in general, because it's gonna be linear.

It's going this way.

So expectations were high, those things, because of various failings internationally have been chipped away at.

And that may actually have started the whole cascade of critiques of liberalism really is the collapse, the slow demise of the international order.

And we're continuing to see that, right? It's increasingly chaotic.

But now I think the real turn and what's interested a lot of us is for this to really land domestically and for us to reassess these in a similar way, the expectations and the political imaginations of our polity on the ground.

And I'm reminded of George, speaking of the liberal international order, George Kennan's X-telegram from whenever that was, the 40s, very early on before really the Cold War started talking about the importance of domestic stability for your international policy.

And if you don't shore that up, you're going to fail.

And of course that's borne itself out.

So we're now though, just seeing a lot of the domestic failing, the same kind of order or rules-based order that formed our expectations politically, domestically is also collapsing.

And that's through just general dysfunction that people have been complaining about since the Bush era, that's fine.

But I think it's also more importantly and this is where religion is coming back into it for evangelicals who for a long time dutifully followed the rule of keeping that in many ways outside of the substantive claims of their religion outside of the political sphere, even if they were still a faithful witness and pursued certain good things.

And so the religious aspect has come back in as a thing that many of us and many people are arguing is can't be detached from the domestic political order, is informing all these things, whether you want it to or not.

And that's been very disruptive to reconsider.

But it's again, it's these atrophied kind of muscles that procedure sort of algorithmic life where it just ran itself allowed you to not exercise those muscles.

And now because of various disruptions we're kind of forced to do that again but it's equally disruptive to do that.

It's very shocking to people.

Yeah, well, Ben, my dad, I don't know if your dads do this but he'll fondly remember when Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill would get together in the White House and enjoy whatever they enjoyed together.

I don't know if they drank beer but they really had some Irish fellowship and they were across the political divide, obviously.

And there's this questioning of like, man, wouldn't it be good, right? If we could go back to that in some way, if there was someone who was willing to extend to the other side, the solid branch.

And then at the same time, I think there's this understanding that actually those are our enemies.

And so there's this conflict going on of remembering that in the past, recent past but also knowing that things aren't the same now.

And Tymon had mentioned post-liberal thinkers.

Ben, who are we talking about? Because I don't think a lot of evangelicals are even aware that there is another way of doing politics or a questioning of our political order.

They probably feel similar.

Like, can't we go back to Tip O'Neill and Ronald Reagan? Couldn't a Christian politician look like that and just maintain the order that we have? So, to answer that question, to go back to O'Neill and Reagan, one of the strengths of America is that there has been a kind of a legitimate opposition as well as technically termed in party politics.

When you study party politics in America, there's a legitimate opposition in which the other side is considered legitimate by yourself because usually you have some kind of shared end or some conception, a shared conception of where you're going and the disagreement is about the means to do so.

Now, I would say even at the time of Reagan's regime, that had broken down and really, you see a kind of a managerial and intelligence military takeover of American government in DC during Nixon's administration and his ouster because he challenged the powers that be there.

So, but the strength of American politics is that there has been quite a bit of back and forth, peaceful transfer of power between the two sides because each of them saw themselves as legitimate.

Now, when we talk about post-liberalism, I mean, that's in many ways, that's kind of been the quote unquote, liberal way of doing things is that, when the other side wins an election, supposedly this is the will of the people and you advocate office and this makes for peaceful transfer of power and continued prosperity and each side gets a turn.

But of course, what the Democrats want now is they want a single party rule eternally, permanently as they do in California and they want to enact that at the national stage.

So, it's not really about a legitimate opposition anymore because not only are the means of governing different, but the ends are different.

So, when the ends of the two parties are completely different like one of them says, this is what marriage is and this is what the family is and this is the foundation of politics and if your political order and your laws are destroying your foundations and you're gonna have a collapsed civilization and the other side says, no, the sexual permissibility and promiscuity of the individual is paramount above all and you can have plural marriages and you can mutilate children for your own sexual identity and so forth.

These are incompatible understandings of the good and so, what post-liberalism is saying is that we actually have the return of politics.

So, we're no longer enveloped in a single kind of agreed upon political hermeneutic or a horizon or principles, but we actually have to return to the very foundation of the political order, the very debate over about the goods or the ends that we're ordering and pursuing order toward or pursuing together and this is what the post-liberals are doing.

So, somebody like Patrick Deneen, Gladden Pappin, Adrian Vermeule, these guys, they kind of go by Catholic integralists and Tom can talk about integralism, but it's a way of reconceiving politics of actually the return of politics to America and to the West and liberalism has attempted to try to tamp that down for a long time because the return of politics fundamentally means a return of the friend-enemy distinction and therefore the return of violence.

At the end of the day, you have to be willing to conquer your enemies and you can't have an understanding of the good and a cooperative harmonious relation with citizens and their civil magistrates if you haven't first destroyed your enemies or at least conquered them or defended yourself from them and that's very threatening and of course, what we'll get into in maybe future podcasts is that a lot of the liberal politics in the early modern era was about trying to overcome the threat of violence and to find a kind of a lowest common denominator by which everybody could agree and so this kind of low common denominator has held us together for a long time and it's now fallen apart with these competing goods, these competing ends and so these post-liberal thinkers are saying, actually, we need to go back and we need to do politics from the very beginning and that means questioning all the assumptions of liberalism, new ends, a new role for religion and supernatural order, an appeal to divine revelation, a demotion of reason or a rethinking of kind of a rational politics and so forth.

So guys like Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, Charles Haywood, they all have different iterations.

You mean, Hazony's more of a Burkean and he's Jewish-Israeli by ethnicity and Haywood kind of is Eastern Orthodox and he has this philosophy called foundationalism.

Think time and you've probably read that whole manifesto and know a little bit more about it.

I think you did a podcast recently on it.

I haven't listened to that yet, but I need to.

So yeah, these guys, they're trying to rethink politics as politics, not as this kind of procedural party negotiation or balancing of interests within a fixed institutionalism.

Yeah, Tymon, what Ben just said, I would add to that maybe, I don't know if you mentioned Reno, Christopher Caldwell, LeGutko and then of course, Steven Wolf, I think is even part of this and I know Tymon at American Reformer, I think you published a few pieces from Steven Wolf and I don't want the topic of the podcast to be Steven, but this is obviously broader than just integralists.

So maybe briefly, could you just walk us through a little bit, I don't know, we can't get to every single post-liberal or questioning of the liberal order idea, but what are some of the major ones? Because you have your Christian nationalism, you have your integralism and then you have foundationalism Ben just mentioned.

Mm-hmm, yeah, and Ben's totally right about the, I think it's a great way to put it, if it's the return of politics proper, and we'll continue to define liberalism, but if we think of it as in the post-war period, essentially an attempt at conflict mitigation, right? That's the entire goal has been said to avoid violence and to avoid violence, you mentioned Reno, Reno is very good at this part of the thesis.

So this is one piece of the puzzle we can throw out on the board is, Reno's book, Return of the Strong Gods, his whole stick in that is these strong loves, the things that drive commitment, and yes, at some point can even lead to violence over those strong loves, are things like family, we could say tribe, broadly speaking, nation and religion, right? Like these are the strong loves that drive people to action.

And what liberalism in his thesis has done for 75 to 100 years, whatever, is to diminish as much as possible the affection for those things, because they're what can lead to violence based on the assessment of what happened in the violent 20th century, right? And the idea was all the strong stuff, all the things that post-liberals would now say are indispensable glues for society, but the liberal project was to say those, let's diminish the significance of those so that we diminish the likelihood of violence.

And so Reno is just, a lot of it's observational, but a lot of it is also aspirational of saying, actually, you can't have a coherent society without these strong loves, which yes, includes the threat of violence, but this is just because these loves are embedded in what it means to be human, and a good social order should be conducive to true anthropology.

So that's someone like Reno.

So Reno is, I don't know if we have a good label for him, but he's pointing out some problems and challenging liberal assumptions.

You would have the integralists, which Ben already mentioned and listed them.

I guess Chad Pecknold would be another one.

I think that's all of them.

They're ones that are wanting to in brief explicitly and sort of boldly assert their Catholicism as the key driving force for all other subordinate political decision-making assumptions, goals.

So they're just explicitly political Catholics, right? That's what they'll say.

And the adoption of integralism as a framework for that and expression of that is really from 19th century popes who were at the time critiquing a lot of things in America.

And that's where this term comes from in some of the encyclicals you read, lay that out.

But we could say this is from maybe someone like Pater Waldstein who articulates integralism very well, would just say that the key tenet for them is that politics can't be disconnected from the ends of life.

And the ends of life of people includes a supernatural or spiritual end.

Therefore politics has to consider its relationship to religion, ideally the true religion which for them is found in Rome, right? So that's integralism.

Stephen Wolfe, on the other hand, and to some extent myself, I mean, I've played around with the term integralism and different things but Stephen has a very clear project through his book.

And what Stephen's doing is not integralism, not only just because he's not Catholic because integralism in many ways is just trying to recover pre-modern ideas or assumptions about politics but also because Stephen is, he's explicitly trying to recover many priors of magisterial reform thought which I think is generally kind of classical political theory adjusted for ecclesiology as a Protestant.

But Stephen's also trying to not only put religion front and center, Christian nationalists, and he's trying to do that within a historic American context.

So he's wanting to recover some of their original understandings of the polity.

But at the same time, he's trying to think about these now very sticky topics that most people don't wanna get into such as what is the nature of a nation, right? Is proposition nation, is that sufficient? We used it to defeat communism.

Is it sufficient to hold everything together while it's fracturing? Is ethnicity relevant to nationhood? What do you think about immigration and assimilation on that same front? And so that's a problem that you don't see, it doesn't have to be as tackled as much in a pre-modern period because a lot of this stuff is just kind of permanently settled at the time.

But now these new questions have emerged that are pressing upon America as the post-war order breaks down.

And so Stephen integrates some of those questions to his project and tackles them and comes up with answers that no one's really liked.

So those are those camps that you raised all doing different things, all picking up on things started by Dineen, what I would say was one of the first intellectual volleys in this direction in 2018.

And then there's others that have come along.

So it's all kind of swirling around.

They're different, they're distinct, but they're noticing some of the same problems and trying to address them from different vantage points.

Yeah, very good.

That's helpful.

And Ben, Tymon actually asked me a while back, now it's probably a few months to do an article, which I still haven't written, but I need to, on defining a nation biblically.

Because I did a podcast on it and it occurred to me, I don't know if it was before or after the podcast, but certainly by the time Tymon had emailed me that this is not work that's being done by a lot of people.

And the people who are even trying to approach these questions are getting canceled, or at least there's a lot of shade thrown their way.

And I've been wondering about this, why? After living through 2020, which we all did, I think that most evangelical Christians who just want to open their Bible and they just wanna see what does the Bible say are onto the woke stuff, at least now.

I mean, they've fallen on one side or the other.

And if they fall on the other side, they're moving away from evangelicalism.

The ones who are staying true have not gone down the 2020 woke path.

But I think in the current fractures, something else is being revealed here.

And maybe it's the answer to the question I had, why aren't people doing work on that one question? There's others, but defining a nation or when is violence appropriate? Or, I don't know, there's so many questions.

So what do you think the compromise is, even though we haven't defined it yet, but what do you see as far as church or Christian or evangelical compromise on liberalism? So not the social justice of 2020, but on the liberalism maybe we all grew up with and didn't realize was a compromise.

Yeah, that's a good question.

I mean, liberalism is certainly, it focuses around the concept of liberty or freedom.

And so I think a lot of the compromise by a lot of evangelical Christians today is that a kind of secular state in the 20th century, both in America domestically and internationally, has redefined what freedom is.

And we might understand, we have our particular biblical definition of freedom or the kind of heavenly or eternal concept of true freedom.

But in terms of national politics or the definition of a nation or of a people, the compromise is just having accepted what a kind of a liberal and global politics has told us freedom is and how it must function and act within American polity.

And of course, this is, you just see something like G3's reaction to blasphemy laws in early America.

I mean, there's not even the ability, you don't even have the ability to read early blasphemy and speech and obscenity laws as being a legitimate aspect of the American polity and how it functioned in state law because it's just so far outside their Overton window because they've been compromised in accepting this kind of pluralistic and debased concept of freedom.

I mean, it's even hard for Christians to imagine that we could have a polity that say, turn the clock back on no fault divorce prior to 1970.

Oh my gosh, like that would be encroaching on people's freedom.

And so this, it really is almost in sense an idolization of freedom.

And I think in terms of the post-liberal thinkers like Dineen and Charles Haywood, they both are really good.

And even Hosoni is good at this at pointing out and they all kind of tend to agree in terms of the central idea of kind of what they call autonomous volunteerism.

This idea that there would be absolute and foundational political unit of kind of modern liberalism or the modern state is the individual.

And anything that violates the autonomy and the rights and the liberty of the individual, this is anathema.

This is contrary to the American founding.

This is contrary to the entire American way of life.

This is contrary to what has made us prosperous.

And I think so many evangelicals have bought into this and it's just, it's impossible for them to break out of that mold and to conceive of an America, an American founding, a declaration, a constitution, state laws, an entire way of life in the 17th, 18th and 19th century and even well into the 20th century that was different.

And so in many ways, I do think that this idolization of freedom, and of course for Baptists like G3 and others, they have this paranoia that if we go back to 17th or 18th century politics, if we go back to the Puritans or some kind of European throne and altar thing, then before long, they're gonna be whipped, they're gonna be dunked, they're gonna be driven out by some kind of religious establishment that's intolerant of Baptists who don't baptize their babies.

Of course, all that's ridiculous, but it just shows that even they believe that their function as a Baptist Christian, their witness, everything they do as a Christian within this American polity is dependent upon this kind of late 20th century, modern conception of liberty, of freedom, of libertas.

So I do think that that's a huge part of the compromise by evangelicals today.

I'll just, I'll leave it at that, I can go on.

Yeah, that was excellent.

You know, Tymon, if you go back and you just start tracing history, Western history from 1500, let's say, you could even go back before that, I guess, but middle ages to today.

I mean, you're gonna find that there's all sorts of things today we would not find acceptable that we have in stages done away with, right? Religious wars, of course, are horrible things, and the secular state is supposed to get rid of that.

And of course, arranged marriages and monarchies, also very evil, certain labor relationships, serfdom, slavery, these kinds of things, very, very horrible.

And the list goes on.

And then you get into the 20th century, and it seems like we're in a place now where we're trying to shed boundaries between nations, like even borders.

Right now, if you went to the Southern border of the United States right now, or the Southern border of places like Italy and France, you're going to find hordes of migrants coming over, which apparently, I've been told that using that phrase is racist or something, but whatever.

It's, I don't even know what to say about that, because it's just like you either open your eyes or you don't.

They're coming here at levels that are unsustainable, that this has never happened really before, as far as I know, in the history of the world.

Not like this, on this level.

So anyway, that happening as we speak seems to be one of the last pillars, I suppose, or most recent pillars to fall to an international order of sorts.

And the idea seems to be that this is all going to make for peace and prosperity, and it may be a utopia of some kind.

If we can just base everything on, as Ben just said, the individual, and what's in the individual's mind is the only thing that matters, not where they were born or the culture they're part of or any of those other factors.

So, that being said, when we go back to liberalism, you have neoliberalism, you have progressivism, you have classical liberalism, you have all these different things that I think we can get confused of.

I look at it this way, I don't know if you agree, is these are different stages of shedding the shared relationships that we've had with each other and these organic relationships that have developed over time.

We're emancipating from those things, emancipating ourselves in stages.

And so, that's how I line up liberalism, but I'd be curious to hear from you, kind of going from the present backwards, what do you see as the different stages of liberalism? Yeah, so I agree that I think that that's a useful framing for these stages that, even if people don't know where to put them on sort of a Venn diagram or a chart or something, phrases either in a pejorative way or positive way, such as progressive, such as neoliberal or neoconservative, often get thrown around at the same time.

And I agree that we could use this as sort of stages of, as you said, the shedding of unchosen bonds of natural boundaries, of natural distinctions, really of a previously for all the chaos of really any period in human history, were unquestioned restrictions on human activity, either collectively as a society, as a political unit or individually.

And that those two things also need to inform one another.

And you see this now in sort of a reverse order of as certain natural political boundaries, things that were taken as being natural and unavoidable, have been discarded, or something we'll get into with the post-liberal critique is, or have they actually? Can you actually discard these things? Can you actually, I don't know, eradicate violence from a society? Starting to not seem like you actually can, so therefore it may not be the right political goal.

Anyway, but as you at least ostensibly discard some of these restrictions, natural restrictions, or even prudential and convenient ones, we've gone to reverse order from the first, you could see easily the trajectory of borders to nations being discarded because what, the nation is merely a construct, right? Surely there's nothing really to it.

It doesn't spring, it springs out of the ether.

It's probably the work or the boundary set up by rich predatory white men to suit themselves, right? So if you have that explanation, it's no coincidence that you also have similar explanations being given for natural anthropological boundaries or restrictions that are givens, right? That maybe these can be altered also by a liberatory mindset and the emancipation of ourselves through, usually technology and advancements of these things, but so these are what post-liberals would refer to, of course, as delusional sort of commitments that liberalism has induced, doesn't mean that as we're gonna want to get into in our genealogy of key thinkers from the past, doesn't mean of course that they predicted that or that they wanted it, but post-liberals chart a narrative that a lot of these things are unavoidable logical conclusions of ideas implanted in the political consciousness a couple centuries ago or so.

And so I do think though that that progression is a helpful way to think about it or that those stages, as you said.

So if you began with, we can go into it in more detail, but if you begin with the sort of enlightenment period, which the thinkers that Ben lists, that's where they all begin, right? So we can quibble over that or talk about it, but they'll begin with this sort of 17th and 18th century as when the cancer, whatever that's metastasizing is introduced into Western political thought and emergent societies at the time.

And of course, as they would want to argue in some way, they all do it in a different way, that the logic of those ideas unfolds and produces new ideas, new children, as time goes on in response to certain material conditions, industrial revolution, whatever you wanna say, wars, civil war, in America, these types of things until you get to the next era.

I think we'd have on our list is the early 20th century, right? Which is also responding to certain conditions in America, specifically at this point is when America is slowly inching into having a more global effect in leadership, right? Already diplomatically.

And so what they start doing is now going to be reverse sort of exported.

That's become our main job in the global American empire as it emerged.

But so those ideas that are responsive in the progressive era that we might say to other conditions, but are building off of a foundation of liberalism, lead to further emancipation, further breaking of previously thought to be given boundaries.

And we can talk about some things, good, bad, ugly, whatever.

And some things that may have just been a necessity at the time for the sake of stability.

But the key point in thinking like a progressive is classical political ends, such as homogeneity, peace, tranquility, justice, these things are not actually your political goals.

So even if there are certain things that do affect peace and stability for a time, that's not actually why they're being performed.

It's really in the pursuit of further freedom, liberty, emancipation as now understood in that era.

And then what we've already cited after this sort of progressive era would be this sort of neoliberal stage that we're now either still living in or at the tail end of and coming into something else.

I guess you would say it's not like the prior stages are completely shred.

We can just mark by certain events and ideological developments, a sort of escalation of what came before.

So I think that maybe that's a roundabout way of getting at the question.

I do think that's a useful way to think about it because the logic of liberalism, as we're speaking of it now, actually demands a sort of progressive stage, segments of progression.

That's its goal.

That's how itself is operating if you were to give it like a hive mind.

So I think that is a useful framing.

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God bless.

I'm not sure if I'm saying his name right.

Legutko in The Demon in Democracy, he makes this point that when he left communism to the Western democratic world, there were so many similarities.

And one of them was this advance of society towards further enlightenment, emancipation, and ultimately a utopia of sorts.

And so there's a certain eschatology, and I'm not saying any of the Christian eschatological views.

In fact, people who share all those views or don't share them, they all sometimes will buy into this if they're loyal to the liberal order.

And so I think maybe a helpful place to go from here, Ben, would be classical liberalism, because some people still use this term.

Glenn Beck, even a few years ago, I remember, was trying to get all the conservatives to start using that term instead of conservative.

There's this understanding that classical liberalism is a good thing.

That's what we had at the founding of our country.

That's what the constitution is based upon.

And then there's the post-war consensus, right? And I think for a lot of neoliberals, they think that these things are related, which I would agree they are, that they're kind of the same thing.

There's an advancement maybe, but there are differences.

And I think it's helpful maybe to compare and contrast those things, just so Christians who are trying to understand this stuff biblically have their bearings and they know, at least broadly speaking, what we're dealing with.

Yeah, that's a good way to contrast it.

If you read someone like Dineen and the poison pill theory, in which the problems of liberalism that we've inherited today, conquests of nature, autonomous individualism, the breakdown of all family and social bonds, of high trust society, and so forth.

Yeah, this stuff started back with Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes and John Locke and the Enlightenment.

And they argue forcefully for that.

And there is an argument to be made there.

Now, of course, classical liberals who think of the American founding as being primarily Lockean, they'll contest that and they'll say, no, no, you have a classical liberal limited state and there's a whole philosophy here.

And usually it involves a lot of rights language.

And I'll talk about that in a second.

And then you have your modern liberalism.

And in between the two of these, you have the progressive revolution in political science in America, beginning in the 1880s and going through the 1920s, such as like Woodrow Wilson and Teddy Roosevelt and FDR and Herbert Crowley and Frank Goodenow and John Dewey and these guys, these both statesmen and philosophers who explicitly rejected the American founding and kind of the Lockean version of American founding, the idea that the mind is capable through reason of accessing universal and objective truths that can be applied to politics, that humans have limits and that we need checks and balances, a separation of branches in government.

And we need a mechanism such as representation and a bicameral legislature and extended sphere and the ambition, countering ambition in order to prevent any kind of coalescing of political power in a single head, either in the executive branch, it's inside of a legislature, which is how a parliamentary system works is what Woodrow Wilson wanted, or some kind of delegation of executive and legislative power to an administrative or bureaucratic organization, which is how kind of a German Hegelian system would work.

The progressives tried all kinds of things to overcome and destroy the American founding and at least a lot of the mechanisms that were put in place in the political principles that they believed in.

And that led to a kind of new vision, a new understanding of liberalism and the thought of John Dewey, which eventually emerged in the post-World War II era with a kind of scientific management and managerialism focus on technique.

Yes, of course, the progressives introduced this idea of progress.

So a classical liberal will make all of these distinctions to say, well, what we have now is a perversion and a rejection of an earlier political order.

And I think that they do make good arguments there.

The problem that Dineen and others and Heywood and others would point out is that actually if a Lockean interpretation of America itself is problematic and plants the seeds that then lead to some of the problems that we're dealing with today.

So the whole idea of a rights discourse, well, what is the check? What's the control on rights? Who says you have these kinds of rights, but not these rights? Like you have a right to property, but do you have a right to education? Well, who decides? And of course, this is the classical political problem of who rules and how many and for whom.

So who gets to decide these things? In the absence of a common religious, cultural and political inheritance, which is what you had at the time of the American founding, you need some kind of political sovereignty and authority to make these kinds of decisions.

And what you had basically with progressivism and liberalism, first liberalism and then neoliberalism in the 20th century was you had a new ruling class come up and say, we're gonna redefine these ideas.

We're gonna take the rights of property and we're gonna redefine them.

We're gonna take the rights of speech and redefine them or we're gonna extend them or we're gonna add new rights, like the right to be free from fear and want.

Well, gosh, I mean, if you had the right to be free from want, you have the right to everything.

And so there is a good critique in terms of classical liberals who kind of overemphasize rights.

It's like, you read someone like say, John Goodman at the Goodman Institute and his assessment of classical liberalism and the whole thing, the entire political philosophy is constructed in terms of just rights, positive rights versus negative rights, substantive rights versus procedural rights, rights that come from God, they don't come from the state.

And there's no other considerations.

It's like all of politics, all of communal life, constitution, law, everything comes down to rights language and rights analysis.

And there's no denying that the American founders understood, had a concept of natural rights and they talked about that.

But there was so many other elements that's missing.

And this is really the problem with classical liberalism is it misses all these other elements of America and in doing so, it kind of loses all of the internal controls and the ability to check abuses of classical liberalism.

So I do think there's a good critique there by the post-liberals.

I think one of the sticking points is that different classical liberal philosophers who of course in their time would not have seen themselves as classical liberalism, that wasn't really a term, but enlightenment thinkers, we should say maybe, they wanted to preserve elements of Christian civilization.

Most of them, if not, well, I don't wanna say all, but certainly most of them, and especially John Locke, I would say, and Thomas Hobbes.

But the thing is, if you look at Locke, Hobbes and Rousseau, they all have something in common that you just pointed at, I think, Ben.

And that is, for Locke, the civil magistrate's role was the establishment or the defense of life, liberty, property, to ensure that no man was subjected to the will of any other man.

Hobbes believed that seeking peace and defending oneself against the claims of others were fundamental laws of nature that legitimized the formation of the Leviathan state.

And of course, Rousseau wanted the social contract based upon mutual choice that protected people from the threats to individual freedom.

And so all three of these guys, though there's many differences, and I can look at some of them, and then John Locke used to be my favorite of the enlightenment guys.

Now I think it might be Hobbes because of his just dismal picture of human nature.

All three of them seem to, and maybe we could throw Montesquieu in there and whoever else you want, really prioritize individual rights.

And they don't seem to think of man as a social creature except for as a matter of survival, that man somehow has to form relationships.

But it's almost like it's a necessary evil.

It's not like God actually ordered us to grow up in an environment in which we have relationships and obligations and a community, which is how I think as a Christian, that's how we should approach those things.

So when we go to the ground level of this, the best case scenario, what we're looking at seems to be somewhat flawed from the get-go.

And maybe it was disguised at first, but we're reaping now the consequences.

You think, Timon, do you think that's a fair assessment? Yeah, in many ways, I think so.

And we can get into these guys that you just listed in more detail, because I think they are, rightly so, they receive a lot of attention.

The attention they receive, so I'm meaning Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau, the last one being certainly one of my least favorite people ever.

I just think he's a terrible person.

But Locke and Hobbes in particular seem to be focused on for the American founding, more so Locke, because you can find citations.

There's a couple issues we have even with the reception of those guys.

And I think one fault of the post-liberals, and it might be the converse fault of the classical liberals, as they call themselves now, that Ben was pointing out, is an inattention to how those people may have been received by the founders of this country.

So then if you go with the poison pill theory that was already raised by Ben, that we can attribute to Deneen, that's basically how he looks at it.

There are some historical problems there, because the way we read some of these guys and what we emphasize and what secondary literature has now emphasized in them, without attention to any of their own assumptions from their context, gives you a very different product than maybe an 18th century Protestant in New England reading them would have had.

And also, we kind of assume historically, because I really do think that the reason our approach to these things is the way it is for America's purposes, is because of 20th century progressive and neoliberal historians that kind of tell you what to pay attention to, tell you what the primary streams of influence are on the country and therefore what it is and therefore where we should go, right? All these things go together.

But if you can't kind of get out of your own mindset and read them as they would have been received, and in the sort of selective way they were read by the founding generation, just because you cite Vatel, Berlemanchi, or something like that, for one thing, doesn't mean you're endorsing the entire corpus or something, same with Locke and Hobbes.

And then this sort of emphasis on the individual in many ways and on rights, as Ben has highlighted, as you highlighted, John.

I do think that is there.

I do think it is an emphasis, and I do think it's also at the same time been overemphasized again by later people who read them.

For instance, I mean, I would agree with you, John, actually, if we have to pick a favorite, Enlightenment guy, Hobbes is my favorite as well.

Not because, necessarily because he's depressing, although that's a really good trait to have.

But also if you read, this is a curious thing about Hobbes that no one talks about, the whole second half of the book is about the Christian Commonwealth.

So to say this is this sort of Enlightenment, secular liberalism being introduced into the bloodstream of Western thought by this guy, now there were plenty of people while he was still alive that critiqued him to death.

There were other people that loved him, such as John Owen, or most of the Cromwellian parliamentarians, or all these people, and others who didn't for various reasons.

But it's very difficult to say that, we don't have to get inside Hobbes' own brain and heart.

It's very difficult to say though that this was not a Christian work given in a Christian society inside of Christendom.

Therefore, that changes your reading of some of these things, because for better or worse, so much could be assumed, and you can play with ideas when they're, from our perspective, would be massive homogeneity.

And my point in bringing that up is just, it's the same at the founding.

When you're 98% Protestant, and like six, whatever, Fisher's numbers he gives us in an Albion seat, it's like 65% just English, and then like everyone who's not English is probably British.

So it's like, and most of the people in like, New England are all from the same county, and back home, so it's just such homogeneity.

You have room to play with some ideas.

Now, the post-liberal critique that is good on this, so my point is that the poison pill thesis has problems to me, but what you can say is not enough was accounted for in terms of the maintenance of the society, meaning that the assumptions of our agreement, of our shared beliefs and orientations, because those were so thick at the time, you didn't provide mechanisms for basically reproduction of those things or control of them, constraint.

And so in this way, the poison pill thesis works in saying you didn't put the right things in place to maintain the necessary prerequisites for this kind of liberality, we might call it, with each other.

And I think that's a fair critique, and what offends classical liberals or people like that about this critique is this is the one that begins to lead you into reconsideration of very basic structural arrangements and things of this nature, which is like a no-go with, we're talking about Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity growing up.

It's good enough, even today, people like Mike Lee and Ted Cruz, they're just like, constitution, constitution, constitution, and every debate is over, and you've somehow communicated to everybody where you stand.

It actually has very little content, and these things, of course, are worthy of debate and consideration, but then what's required in order to talk about, well, what if any changes to the way we govern ourselves or the structure we have over us should be made? Well, this requires a consideration of who and what the nation is, and because you have to think about to preserve what, for what purposes, and that's another, as we've already brought up, another conversation you're not allowed to have.

Why? Because it's one of those conversations that brings in the sorts of loves and commitments that liberalism has said, these are gone because they're violent, right? So we're just back to the same issue we had before.

We can make all these, we can try to solve for different problems that post-liberal is saying, that's an issue, but like, all right, let's try to fix it.

Well, another one, we sort of jet off into this other issue.

So it is a major multifaceted sort of problem that a really, really big problem that we found ourselves in, and post-liberals are the ones tugging on some of those threads, not necessarily in an accelerationist fashion, but to try to make a go of it, I guess you could say.

And so I think it's needed in that way, even some of the critiques they make, not being as strong as others, all that notwithstanding, I think it's a necessary conversation to have.

This has been part one of our conversation on the liberal political tradition.

Thank you for watching or listening.

Part two is going to come out tomorrow and there will be a part three and likely a part four, possibly a part five.

So stay tuned as we continue this series and talk about questions and objections and all kinds of interesting things as we continue.