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 are 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.

The End of the Liberal Era

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, you know, 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, you know, your basic understanding of conservatism was some kind of Reagan revolution and Thatcher and England and then, you know, Bush 1 and Bush 2 and your compassionate conservatism.

And that was, 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, 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 and 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, you know, Greek and Roman history, then you're going to, you're going to be, you're going to be lost and kind of lashing out as the, 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, you know, even 1990s, 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 like 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, I can't remember if it was CDs or cassettes, but it was Rush Revere, right?

Like where he told 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 going to 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 going to 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.

You know, they're probably they just have different ways of trying to achieve the good of the country, right? They just agree on the means and the methods and maybe some priorities. A lot of that is 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, you know, the collapse of this sort of rules based international order that served that was constructed in the post-war period to serve to serve us.

I mean, more or less, it's not 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 and said, we'll do that a lot. I'm sure that all of our expectations were framed this way. And it's you know, it's it is really a progressive outlook on history in general because it's going to be linear.

It's going this way very, you know, 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 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 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, you know, I'm reminded of speaking of the liberal international order, you know, George Kennan's X telegram from whenever that was, the 40s, you know, very early on before really the Cold War started talking about, you know, the 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 we 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 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, you know, is can't be detached from the domestic political order, you know, is informing all these things, whether you want it to or not.

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

And now, because of various disruptions, we're we're kind of forced to do that again. But it's equally disruptive to do that. It's very shocking to people.

So, yeah, well, Ben, you know, my dad, I don't know if your dad's 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, you know, but they really had some some Irish fellowship and they were across the the political divide, obviously. And there is 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, this olive 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, but recent past, but also knowing that things aren't the same now.

And Tymon had mentioned post-liberal thinkers. Ben, who is 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 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, you know, to answer that question, to go back to O 'Neill and Reagan, you know, 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. And I would say even 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 and 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, you know, 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 the 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 going to have a collapsed civilization and the other side says, no, you know, the 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 hermeneutic, political hermeneutic or 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 to order 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, you know, 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.

And 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 and appeal to divine revelation, a demotion of reason or rethinking of kind of a rational politics and so forth.

So guys like Patrick Deneen, Yoram Hazony, Charles Haywood, they all have different iterations. Hazony is more of a Burkean, he's Jewish-Israeli by ethnicity. And Haywood kind of is Eastern Orthodox, and he has this philosophy called foundationalism think time.

And you probably have 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. I need to. 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.

Postliberalism, Integralism, and Christian Nationalism

Yeah, you know, Tymon, what Ben just said, I would add to that maybe, I don't know if you mentioned, if you mentioned Reno, Christopher Caldwell, LeGutko, and then, of course, Stephen Wolfe, I think, is even part of this.

And I know, Tymon, at American Reformer, I think you published a few pieces from Stephen Wolfe, and I don't want the topic of the podcast to be Stephen, 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, you know, I think it's a great way to put it, if it's the return of politics proper, you know, if we think of, and we'll continue to define liberalism, but if we think of it as in the post-war period, you know, essentially an attempt at a conflict mitigation, right?

That's the entire goal, as Ben said, to avoid violence. And to avoid violence, you know, you mentioned Reno. Reno is very good at this part of a thesis. So this is one piece of the puzzle we can throw out on the board is, you know, Reno's book, Return of the Strong Gods, his whole, you know, shtick in that is these strong loves, the things that drive commitment, and yes, you know, at some point can even lead to violence over those strong loves, are things like family, you know, we could say tribe, broadly speaking, nation, and religion, right?

Like these are the strong loves that drive people to action. And what liberalism on his, in his thesis has done for, you know, 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, you know, post liberals would now say are indispensable glues for society. But the liberal project was to say those, let's, 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 all of it, a lot of it is also aspirational of saying, actually, you can't have a coherent society without these strong loves, which includes the threat of violence, but this is just because they're, these loves are embedded in what it means to be human and a good social order should, you know, be conducive to true anthropology.

So that's, that's someone like Reno. So Reno is, you know, I don't know if we have a good label for him, but he's pointing out some problems and, and talking, you know, 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, that's all of them. You know, they're ones that are wanting to, in brief, explicitly and sort of boldly assert their Catholicism as the, the key driving force for all other, you know, subordinate political decision-making assumptions, you know, 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. And some of the encyclicals you read, you know, lay that out, but the, we could say this is from, you know, maybe someone like Pater Waldstein who articulates integralism very well.

You know, would you 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, is found in Rome, right?

So that's integralism. Stephen Wolf, on the other hand, you know, and to some extent myself, I mean, I've played around with the term integralism and different things, but Stephen has a very clear, you know, 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, you know, he's explicitly trying to recover many priors of magisterial reform thought, which I think is generally kind of classical political theory adjusted for, you know, ecclesiology as a Protestant.

But Stephen's also trying to not only put religion front and center, Christian, you know, nationalist, 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, you know, these now very sticky topics that most people don't want to get into, such as what is the nature of a nation, right? Is proposition nation, is that sufficient?

You know, we used it to defeat communism. Can we, is it sufficient to hold everything together while it's fracturing? You know, is ethnicity relevant to nationhood? You know, what do you think about immigration and assimilation on that same front?

And so that's a problem that you don't see, you know, 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 in the post, 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, you know, no one's really liked. But so those are those camps that you raised, all doing different things, all picking up on things started by Dineen.

What, you know, I'd say was one of the first intellectual volleys in this direction in 2018. And then, you know, 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. 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 want to see what does the Bible say, are on to 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.

Freedom, the Individual, and the Liberal 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 it's 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 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, turned 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 a sense an idolization of freedom. And I think in terms of the post-liberal thinkers like Deneen 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 the absolute and foundational political unit of every 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 18th, 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 going to be whipped, they're going to be dunked, they're going to be driven out by some kind of religious establishment that's intolerant of Baptists who don't baptize their babies.

Of course, I mean, all that's ridiculous, but it just shows that even they believe that they're very kind of, 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.

Classical Liberalism and the Post-War Consensus

Yeah, that was excellent. 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 going to 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.

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 maybe 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. 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 at 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 a 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, you know, 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, you know, 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 going to 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know, whatever that's metastasizing is introduced into Western political thought and emergent societies at the time.

And of course, as you they would want to argue in some way, they're all they all do it in a different way that they're 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 want to say, wars, civil war, these these types of 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 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 that are building off of a foundation of liberalism lead to further emancipation, further breaking of, you know, previously thought to be given boundaries.

And we can we can talk about some things good, bad, you know, 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 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, you know, further freedom, liberty, emancipation, as now understood in that era.

And then, you know, what we've already cited after this sort of progressive era would be, you know, 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, you know, what's 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 state stage, you know, 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.

The Poison Pill Theory and the Limits of Rights-Based Politics

Hey, everyone, just a quick word about Fox and Sons coffee. Before we continue the podcast, many of you probably know that I'm more of a tea drinker myself, but my wife loves coffee. And when Stephen Fox reached out to me, he's a listener to this podcast about his product, I thought if my wife likes it, then it's definitely got to be good because she well, let's put it this way.

She calls me a barbecue snob because I'm really picky on what constitutes good barbecue. If that's true, then she's definitely a coffee snob because it's got to be good for her. And let me tell you, Fox and Sons coffee doesn't stay around that long when it's in my house.

So this is the Tanzania Peabody. She loves this mix. And there's several mixes. If you go to their website, it's at Fox and Sons dot com. Fox and Sons dot com. And while you're there, you can read about their story.

It's actually, it's pretty heartwarming. Stephen, who is the founder of the company, talks about how sharing time with his dad over a cup of coffee meant so much to him growing up. And I know he's not alone in that.

Many people have those experiences and coffee just brings about those memories. It's a cherished tradition in many households. And so part of his company and what he wants to do is actually honoring the memory of his father.