Understanding Liberalism: Part II - The Founding, Social Justice, and Some Objections

The American Founding, Natural Rights, and the Declaration

Ben, let's talk a little bit about the founding. I think the general sentiment among many evangelicals, especially those who are a little older, we'll say is that everything is crazy. We live in clown world, but the problem is the wrong people are running the system, right?

If we got the right people in there, if we just got Trump back in or something, we could really start reversing things. I think that younger conservatives and Christian conservatives in particular are more red-pilled, as they say, on this.

They think that there's actually a flaw, perhaps, in that maybe the system is ill-suited for the environment, that it's like clothes that don't fit anymore. It's not something that is workable. This idea that the founding is this ethnogenesis moment in which, for the first time in human history, the American experiment was born in which these innovative, universal ideals were finally applied to a people.

It took thousands of years, but finally this happened. It's the only perfect system, and departing from it is a very scary thing, because any departation is going to wind up in some kind of an error. That seems to be what the younger conservatives are somewhat up against.

I do want to have you talk a little bit about this idea that the founding is classical liberal. It's an enlightenment project. It's about universal human rights. I think that carries through the post-war period.

That's a main article of faith, if you will. Then just real quick, I was reading some Mel Bradford this morning, which is always good. He was talking about the Declaration of Independence. It was very fascinating to me.

He said in the first century after the Declaration of Independence was adopted or so, it was not taken the way it was, and he was writing in probably the 80s. It was not taken as it was in the 20th century, the second half of the 20th century.

It wasn't viewed as an egalitarian call to make social arrangements equal. It was more of a body politic that now exists that's been rejected by the king and denied their rights as British citizens. They're saying, we have just as much right as you do in Britain to govern our own affairs, but you're dissolving our legislatures, and you're making war on us.

That's the rest of the document. He has a different reading, and I'm sure you're familiar with that. Maybe help us out. Why is the Declaration of Independence so platformed above every We don't talk about the Fairfax Resolves, or the Olive Branch petition, or really anything else.

It's that one document and that one line, all men created equal, and that's read back into the Constitution, and that becomes the basis for everything. Yeah.

I mean, the reading of the Declaration and the Constitution throughout American history, especially the 20th century, it's quite a trip, and it's why you have so much debate among the scholarship today, and if you try to go read the scholarship, you'll be busy the rest of your life.

There's been so much produced the last 100 years on it. Yeah, and I do think that the response to progressive revolution in politics and government, the rise of the administrative state, the growth of the welfare state, and just the size and scope of government under FDR's administration, and then under Lyndon B. Johnson, what you had is you had conservatives who responded, the conservative movement, Buckley and others, who responded to this Hayek, by kind of latching onto a natural rights only interpretation of the Declaration as a way of saying, a rights-based approach as the essential articulation of the American political experiment, which I know Timon hates that word and I don't love it either, is the way that we're going to put the brakes on these things that are getting out of control, and it's how we're going to also at the same time defeat communism abroad because we're going to export this kind of universally applied polity, so a rights-based polity, because natural rights are the same for all human beings, you could technically have a democracy in previously communist Vietnam or something like that.

So it was in one sense, this understanding of the Declaration, it was an invention of conservatives themselves in a response to kind of a breakdown in the consensus of American polity and the way politics had functioned throughout the 18th, 19th century.

And I do think, going back to the younger generations, millennials and Gen Xers' response to the problems in American politics and culture today, they're right in the sense that we're foolish and naive to just look for the next great politician who's going to drain the swamp.

That's not going to work because the entire bureaucracy and regime in Washington is set up to be anti-fragile to that kind of reform. It has insulated itself and built a bulwark around itself such that it can withstand a Donald Trump and a J6 protest, it can rig elections and get away with it, it can prosecute citizens as being domestic terrorists and get away with it.

But at the same time, we have to realize that one of the problems with liberalism is that it's anti-personal. So it tries to be impersonal, neutral, based upon principles and kind of a political system that will run of its own, kind of like a clock.

You just wind it up and it'll go if you have the right policies and the right technocrats and the right departments and the right institutions in place, and it'll just run on its own and we won't have to ever touch it and we can all go about our lives.

And part of the response today is to say, no, actually, we do need enlightened statesmen. We need to bring back statesmanship, but we can't do that in the current system. So first of all, you have to deconstruct the current regime, you have to permanently defeat the left.

Charles Haywood is really good about talking about that's our number one priority. And then once you do that, then you have to go back to true politics, which requires magnanimous, virtuous statesmen who are selfless and capable of leading others in an honorable way.

They'll do selfless public acts of magnanimous generosity and liberality for the sake of the people. They really rule for the good of all. You do need a return of this kind of politics. Now, what you find in the American founding and in the Declaration and then later in the Constitution, my own view on this is that there's not necessarily a conflict between the Declaration and the Constitution.

In fact, the Continental Congress, the same exact time that they commissioned a committee to write the Declaration, they commissioned a committee to write the Articles of Confederation because they understood that a Declaration of Independence from Great Britain to establish First Nationhood was not actually the establishment of a constitution or form of government.

You needed that as well. And then the Constitution replaced the Articles. And so I do think you can read the Declaration and the Constitution as two parts of a single whole polity. That's maybe another discussion because it gets pretty technical.

But the point is that the founders understood that politics always required personnel. So you needed good leaders like George Washington and John Adams and others. And you also needed a virtuous citizenry.

And you need a polity that is oriented toward and conducive toward cultivating and then maintaining a virtuous citizenry. If you're really going to have Republican government in which the people are electing their own officials and hopefully those officials are channeling the good interests of the people and then maybe transforming them into a refined and enlarged view that is good for everybody.

So you need the personnel. But at the same time, Madison in Federalist 10 and 51 in the Federalist Papers talks about these auxiliary precautions of separation of powers and checks and balances and representation and bicameral legislature and independent judiciary in an enlarged sphere, meaning a large republic, not a very small republic that Monoskiu talks about.

These are buttresses that will help such things as education and morality and religion that had in the classical Greek world been the mainstays, the main ways that it had kind of cultivated a virtuous and selfless public.

So you do have both advances, progress in a very limited way in terms of an understanding of a political science without having lost the emphasis on morality and education and religion and personnel. But so to get back to that in a proper reading of the declaration in that context, you have to overcome all of the abuses and the distortions and the absolute grotesque absurdities that are going on today.

And I think people see those absurdities. And this is why you have a whole contingent of the new right. That's kind of neo-Nietzschean. They have this sense of like the natural order of things is there's an aristocracy.

Some people are just better than others. And that's better than having these like stupid nincompoops like Fauci, you know, forcing, you know, face masks and vaccines on us and and such. And so, you know, you understand the appeal of of kind of a natural aristocratic and Nietzschean way of thinking about things.

I don't I don't think that's the solution per se. But you have to deconstruct what's going on now and kind of swipe it away before we can really get back to anything like like what the founders believed in.

Burkean Conservatism, Liberal Proceduralism, and the Return of Politics

Believe it or not, we've been going over an hour. So there's three things, though, I really wanted to cover before we ended. And this is for either one of you. I wanted to talk about conservatism a little bit and how that contrasts Burkian conservatism or paleo conservatism, they call it now, with with this more liberal, neoliberal approach that many of us assume on both sides of the political aisle.

Let's start with that. I don't know who wants to take that.

I can say something real fast. I'll just say a couple of things. One thing is that, you know, Burke was writing against the French Revolution and people like Thomas Paine who came to the defense of it.

And Burke is you know, he doesn't want a kind of utopian political thought such as rights or natural rights or something like that, because this creates a dissatisfaction among people instead of being grateful for what they've inherited.

From their ancestors, they look toward a kind of perfect articulation of total freedom or prosperity or whatever it may be. And then they construct their kind of year zero regime on that basis to achieve the impossible.

So he sees it as a as a perpetual revolution. And I think he's on to something there. And we are experiencing this perpetual revolution in the 20th century and even today. So there's there's a good critique there.

There's also the belief in Burke that, you know, you don't just have an autonomous reason. A person isn't just born with perfect functioning, rational capacities, and then they just stare up to heaven and boom, they're hit with the objective truth about the world and they know how things ought to function.

In fact, reason is cultivated. It's learned. It's developed within a community, within a family. It has to be exercised. It has to be controlled. It has to be corrected. And that reason, like within within the span of a century's long political project, which is going on in Europe, I mean, mostly in England, I'll talk about England for now, that the you know, the institutions that the British had worked out were reasonable because of this different approach and understanding of reasons, development and its perfection.

So that that is like Burke's critique. I do think there's something there. And I think what we're experiencing today is the fact that, yeah, most people aren't very reasonable and they're easily swayed and they're easily taught, educated, cultivated and indoctrinated even into the belief that, you know, like I can have an identity, whatever I choose.

If I wake up tomorrow and I decide that I want to be a cat or I want to be a different gender or sexual, you know, binary or something like that, I can I can do that. So how reasonable are human beings?

What are the preconditions for reason? Burke was good about that. And I think that's a really good critique that we could learn from him today.

Would you say without camping too long on this, that the conservative approach has been more to meet threats that are that would that would impose themselves on local particular societies, trust that has been built up over the course of centuries in some cases.

And so there's a willingness, I suppose, to use different methods and even maybe different forms of government, but to secure those things. For example, just to pick to make it more concrete, you know, marriage is under attack today.

Right. So the conservative would say we need to protect marriage at all costs. Like this is a fundamental building block. And it's not even just I mean, it's part of the created order. So I'm picking something that's not even necessarily particular.

That's a that's a universal for all societies. But I think a conservative would be willing to step outside of like the Constitution. Let's say let's let's say right now, because we're here, the Supreme Court says the Constitution says that we can profane marriage.

I think the true conservative says then we need to if that's where the people are at, then we're willing to adopt maybe a different system. That's where things get scary. But that's that's a we can't compromise on that.

Right. That's a non-negotiable. So that's how I guess I see conservative versus the neoliberal. The neoliberal is going to die for this this universal system of democracy and ensuring that individual choice is maintained and furthered.

And they aren't willing to step outside of that at all. Like that's that's their non-negotiable in a way. And conservatives, I think, are willing to say that's not we don't base society on individual choice.

We base it on actually it's not from the bottom up. It's from the top down. It's on the it's the providence of God. It's the created order. It's particular beautiful things that have been created over the course of centuries.

So am I getting at it? You think that the difference there? Either one of you, I see heads nodding. So I'm assuming go for it time.

And I just go for it. Yeah, I think I think especially now. So, you know, again, to pick on the boomer cons, you know, the people which which I love boomers. We love them. We love them. We love I really do love boomers.

And some of my best friends are boomers. And, you know, I know a lot of some of our dads are boomers. I always say my my goal is just to be like more boomer than the boomers, like boomers. Now at this stage, they know something's wrong and they're angry, but they're just not prepared to like articulate it as they should be able to.

But they like their instincts are still pretty good. But here's here's what I would say for for a lot of boomers just using it as a pejorative, that class of like that generation that we blame a lot of bills on fairly and unfairly.

But the again, I think something I raised earlier is I think the recognition that there are certain preconditions, certain pre commitments necessary for. And this is not just a liberal, liberally structured society like a post-enlightenment.

This is any society. This is any any society. There are certain preconditions necessary for it to function. Right. And the question is the extent to which you will exert political energy to maintain those preconditions because they're the lifeblood of your society.

For most of history, that's that's been some kind of cultists. Right. That's been some sort of religion at some degree of abstraction. But you need something like that. And I think what a problem, a sort of another psyop that was performed on a lot of boomers and they were susceptible to it is for, quote, unquote, conservatives or, quote, unquote, classical liberals to actually buy into the commitment to a, you know, to a proceduralism or whatever as the thing that must be maintained at all costs.

So you see this, the best instantiation of this, it's inevitable talk about him. So we might as well now is David French. Right. David French says it's a blessing of liberty, which by which he means this this ability to mitigate conflict and disorder.

It is a live and let live sort of civil libertarian idea. He uses those words about himself. So I'm not being unfair. And that is the thing I'm talking about, of like the willingness to to throw everything else out the window as long as we maintain the process the right.

Way. You didn't say what the blessing of liberty was.

I want to say the blessing of liberty is is a drag queen story hour. That's right. A New Yorker interview at the time. And is is basic. You know, that's something else people could watch if they want to get up to speed is, you know, Pat Dineen's book was twenty eighteen.

Twenty nineteen was this very now kind of infamous debate between Sourabh Amari, who is a Catholic. I'm not really sure what label he'd go by now. But and David French over drag queen story hour. And it's an interesting artifact to go look at now to get yourself.

But I won't get detained with it. But, you know, David French thinks this is a blessing of liberty, meaning, you know, he doesn't like drag queen story hour. He claims to be an evangelical Christian. He's not going to go to them.

Right. I don't think so. But this is like an inevitable, not even consequence because he's calling it a blessing. It's like this is just what you have to accept if you want to live in the great American experiment.

Right. And so therefore, anyone who says, well, hold on, I want to discriminate here. I don't like that. I don't want it. It's bad. Now you've violated the entire identity of what the American experiment, again, is supposed to be.

Therefore, you are committing a sort of seditious act by proposing, well, hold on. I actually think there's that political society, even if we have a degree of liberality, should be oriented towards certain substantive goods.

That's what you pursue, not the mere process. And the process should be conducive to the attainment of those goods. And actually, the great blessing of liberty we have is something like you see in the Massachusetts Constitution, where it's like the whole point of the right of assembly is for the purpose of deliberating on the common good, which are the higher ends.

Right. That's the whole point. The right doesn't is is just a mechanism to get you to those as a political society. It's not something you just you just have for the fun of it. And that's something that David French wouldn't wouldn't be able to grasp, maybe even intellectually.

And I think a lot of people would call themselves conservatives and are conservative in their values. I can't believe I use that word. I hate that word, but they're conservative. Beliefs, values, yeah, you know, still bought into this kind of thing.

So they'll want to defend, you know, the Constitution to them means the sort of procedural apparatus that, you know, never can be violated, even as it's violated right under their noses anyway. And that's the hypocrisy that post-liberals like.

I remember Mike Pence a few years ago is right after Donald Trump won. I don't remember this. He went to Hamilton with his son, I think it was, and they called him out like it's like the actual actors started like, I don't know, the cursing out Trump or something.

I mean, they were they were saying whatever they were saying. It was like really nasty. And the crowd, I think, started like booing. And I remember his reaction because he was on a talk show host. He goes, I just stood there next to my son.

And I said, son, this is what free speech looks like, like as a positive thing. Like this is this is good. It's good that they have you imagine. Yeah. Like this is what our men fought for. And I'm thinking like my, you know, my grandpa didn't fight for that.

Like I'm pretty sure he did not fight for the right of the people to disrespect the vice president there. But but but, you know, recently online, this has all come up with just quoting, which is what I've done on my Twitter a few times.

I've just quoted. Here's George Washington's rules about blasphemy in his army. Right. And I'm being called by so-called conservatives, not not trying to make it personal, but I but people are trying to make out like I am some kind of a authoritarian, fascistic type like I'm just like, it's George Washington.

Hegel, Marx, and the Critique of the Liberal Order

So so we do need to get to this. And I don't know whether you want to both take different parts of this, but we got to talk a little bit about Hegel, postmodernism and then Marxism and wokeism, because I think there's confusion on these three.

I see a lot of people who are loyal to the liberal order. They will start hurling accusations of Hegelianism and postmodernism and authority. There's other things, too, in there. But at anyone who wants to just question the order, right, that that we're you're against universal rights, that must mean you're you're you're some bad person.

And those are those two things specifically Hegel and postmodernism. I wrote down that I wanted to talk about. So either either one of you, I don't know who feels more equipped to deal with.

That. Ben, you're a Hillsdalean, so you're up on Hegel.

You can now I'll talk about it. Oh, I already took comps. Yeah, your comps are done, man. Thankfully, I did talk about Hegel in my comps. So, yeah, I mean, Hegel, his theory of the state is tied in with his entire dialectic, his philosophy of world history.

And if you if you read his lectures on the philosophy of world history and his actual history of the world, yeah, it's a it's really interesting. So, you know, yeah, if you if you if you question the constitutional order right now, you'll get late James Lindsay, you know, blasting you on Twitter for being part of this dialectic or something like that.

And, you know, it's, you know, a couple of years ago when he was critiquing the kind of crazy, rabid, woke idea ideas that were coming out of the academy. And he and Helen Pluckrose and wrote those. What was the they wrote those fake articles?

I think Peter Bogosian. Yeah, yeah, Peter Bogosian. Yeah. And, you know, in some ways, like and he started this website called New Discourses, and he's got an encyclopedia there. And I've read through some of those articles.

And I think in some ways, like he he he did some good work on kind of expositing the the language and the ideas behind critical theory, critical race theory, critical legal theory, critical queer theory.

But it's it's, you know, he's kind of gone down the rabbit hole where, you know, if if if you try to go back to the American founding now and like, you know, the the role of religion and state polity or blasphemy laws or something like that, then suddenly you're a Hegelian and you want to bring back authoritarianism.

And then you have a lot of Christians that, you know, they read his work and and they trust him on these things now. And now they you know, they kind of worship his knowledge. So anyway, well, OK, so on Hegel, you know, America was a founded way before Hegel's ideas came into vogue.

You know, Hegel definitely had this concept of progress. He had this moral philosophy of a type of, you know, it's called historicism. It's a type of historical relativism in which each each epoch is different in terms of its its values time.

And now it's it's it's moral principles. And so every every epoch, however, is justified in whatever horrible abuses or evils that take place, because it's a necessary stage in the kind of progressive outworking of history for a perfect zenith or or goal.

And that presiding over this is spirit or geist, this idea that is working and using providentially overseeing men and events to bring about kind of this perfect outworking of its own realization of of objectivity and freedom as it's presented through political actors, specifically in the German Prussian state.

And so you do get this kind of bureaucracy, the idealization and use of bureaucracy, this progress, this historical relativism that works itself into it comes into American politics through, you know, Johns Hopkins University, where Wilson was and other progressives were educated.

And they brought this German idealism and this Hegelian philosophy into America. Now, that was a, you know, totally different than what the founders were talking about. So, yes, you could say there's a reaction by Marx against Hegel.

You know, Marx, Hegel had an idealistic dialectic. Marx had a material dialectic. And, you know, you'd parse out how Marx's own dialectic was the antithesis of Hegel's thesis and that Feuerbach was in the middle as the synthesis, thesis, antithesis, all that kind of stuff.

Anyway, you know, Marx was a reaction to that. And so Marx had this focus on materialism and economic conditioning and environmentalism. And yes, these things definitely play a role in influencing American culture, American academy, intellectual leaders like John Dewey and Sigmund Freud and others in the 20th century.

And the theories, psychological theories, behavioralism, all of these things go into a new science of politics that comes out of, you know, basically the American Political Science Association as it was founded in the late 19th century.

So, yes, there is a stream of that. But the idea that those of us who are studied the founding and we've studied the Puritans, we're just Hegelian, that's lazy. It's stupid. It's not Hegelian whatsoever.

So, you know, we've got to understand what Hegelianism and Marxism is, how it evolved, the change, you know, through the Frankfurt School and Gramsci and others with Marxism and how it's been taken up and applied in the 60s and 70s by legal and racial scholars.

That's certainly appropriate to understand and to see America's being influenced by that. But that's not what those of us that are advocating for kind of a classic Puritan, colonial and founding America are doing whatsoever.

So, well, if I could just add to that real quick. I mean, what's what's funny, you know, with with Lindsay in particular, since we're talking about, you know, he's the one usually lobbying these charges of Hegelianism or worse things, I'm sure at us at the anyone broadly conceived as being, you know, anywhere within this post liberal conversation or Christian nationalism, whatever.

What's funny is, you know, as has been just mentioned, the process of the introduction of Hegelianism proper into the American Academy and after that, I mean, all the on the, you know, by the mid 20th century or so.

And then the introduction of what everyone now, you know, Lindsay's favorite topic, of course, the Frankfurt School and those sort of, you know, who would have been called in a way young Hegelians, you know, mixing with many other things.

The introduction of that into the Academy from a different stream and what that is wrought, all of that is actually the we should say, you know, the erosion of the American order in many regards. It is it is sowed unrest and bad thought.

But also many of the scholars that would have been broadly conceived as being in the, you know, idealist camp in the American Academy are some of the exact people that and even just actual Marxists are some of the exact people that produce so much of the bad scholarship about the American founding to really fuel their own their own trajectory.

And, you know, it's not it's not good history. They're not really interested in the founding as it was just as it's a convenient tool for them. And it's that kind of those narratives that come out of the 20th Century Academy that have constructed the narrative of what political nirvana is for James Lindsay.

And then it's violation of that is what earns you the charge of being called a Hegelian authoritarian fascist or whatever he comes up with. Neo post-industrial integralism or something like that that Michael Fallon came up with.

I have no idea what any of it means, but the fourth industrial. I don't know. Anyway, so the point is, though, that his worldview of like what the baseline is, is actually constructed by the people he thinks he's critiquing and that these turn around, turning around and accusing us of being because he doesn't recognize the vision or the narrative that we're producing because it was essentially covered in many ways by many scholars.

So that's the weird irony. And all James Lindsay wants is a sort of neoliberalism, a neoliberalism of the post-war order as fully flowered basically probably whenever he was a teenager or a kid. So like the 80s and 90s.

And that's what he wants, which, of course, a good post liberal would simply say, well, one, I think all that was terrible. Two, you can't simply return to the preconditions for the present ever because you'll just end up back there.

So it's a stupid exercise anyway. You have to move forward. But what we should do is recover older ideas, more stable ideas and reintroduce them according to, you know, with prudence, according to the context that we're now presented with.

So that's the that's the sort of schizophrenic nature of James Lindsay's critiques. One, he doesn't really know what he's talking about and has no familiarity with any of the source material we're engaging with.

But two, his his critique or his like insults against us are really self-defeating because of the narrative that, you know, Ben laid out of how this stuff got into the American bloodstream.

Well, it strikes me as very ideological, not just him, but many who who critique people who want to step outside of the neoliberal frame, because it's like they can only think in like very simple, abstract binaries.

And it's either when there's actually on some issues, there are binary issues, but on many issues there there is a spectrum. And I'm wondering kind of why Hegelianism doesn't get applied to neoliberalism, like, you know, you're advancing stage after stage, advancing towards a utopia where you're going to emancipate yourself from all the constraints.

I mean, it just seems like that would be a fair target, but it's not critically examined. I think you touched on the Marxism a little bit already, but I think we need to talk about social justice, at least the most current iteration of it, as expressed by BLM and the Me Too movement and environmental justice and all the rest of it.

And how that differs briefly with neoliberalism, I was on a podcast a few months ago, some of the guys from Enemies Within the Church, they have they have a podcast called The Wokipedia Podcast, and they wanted to interview me on why, whether social justice was influenced by liberalism or classical liberalism.

And at the time, I mean, I think I handled myself OK, but I was still trying to think through this myself, which is really what has led to our discussion here today. And in the course of that conversation, it just became evident to me that there's a whole lot of Christians who through 2020, because and I think this was right in so many ways, we were told we got a Marxist revolution in front of us, which we kind of did, that that's the only way that they can think about it.

And it's a Cold War era kind of like this is these are the Russians coming back through our academy to now deceive us. So it's an old enemy when in reality, though, it's not really an old enemy. It's in some ways it is, but in many ways it's actually both newer and older than the Soviets.

And and so I just brought up like catchphrases like, you know, diversity is our strength. You should be able to do anything you want as long as it doesn't harm others. You can be anything that you want to be.

You know, we're a melting pot. I mean, I just kept bringing up these kinds of catchphrases and saying, like, these have been around for a long time. I was taught these as a kid and these are neoliberal assumptions.

These aren't from like a modern woke thing. And it seems that those have naturally led to much of what we've seen in the social justice movement. So I don't know if you agree with me that there's like a both streams kind of converge or how you would view that.

But what would you see as the differences between the social justice movement and neoliberalism?

Either one of you. Sorry, you cut out there for a second, John. Just say say the question one more time.

Yeah. What would you see as the differences between the social justice movement, the modern version, and then neoliberalism?

Social Justice, Critical Theory, and Neoliberal Assumptions

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, in some sense, you know, the whole the whole concept of social justice, it didn't really even appear until the 19th century, introduced by, as far as I could tell, Luigi Tapparelli, who is a Catholic social teacher.

And I think he used the phrase in the 1840s or 1830s. It is used once in the Federalist Papers. I did find that. But, you know, justice, justice, of course, was always the preeminent social virtue that regulated men's relationships with each other and society.

It is, you know, Madison says in Federalist 51, it's the end of the political order. And in a limited way, of course, it is. It's like if you have justice among men, you have, you know, peace and goodwill and, you know, right is done between man and man.

So one of the issues is that, you know, neoliberalism has focused on kind of a very myopic or individualistic interpretation of justice and social justice as it was later taken up in the British context by British socialists and employed in a more collective way.

And then that was, you know, imported into America. That was used as a way to combat a kind of individual conception of justice that at least modern liberals often focused on. Classical liberals focused on that.

And then some modern liberals did. And then you have people like John Dewey who would say, actually, you know, justice requires not some, you know, conception of the individual in a pre-political state of nature where they have these rights and liberties endowed upon them by God.

And this is something that they subjectively own within their very being and that they cannot be violated. They're inviolable, they're inalienable or something like that. But the individuals, you know, to do justice to them is an act of society that shapes them toward, you know, a vision, a progressive vision that society has.

And so it's a collectivist concept that reacts against an individualistic idea of justice within classical liberalism. Now, I would say real quick that, you know, the concept of justice within liberalism broadly has a lot of different iterations and perspectives.

And so, you know, you could have a version of social justice within, you know, neoliberalism in the 20th century. But yes, of course, like today, you know, social justice has taken on this kind of, you know, in the post-war era, it's been this radical focus on these disadvantaged minority groups whose, you know, their identity in the group is reified to kind of be the entirety of who they are, the most important aspect of them.

And, you know, it's this, of course, we could do this neo-Marxist, cultural Marxist analysis in which it is a kind of, you know, cultural, racial, gender application of conflict theory taken away from the economic and material sphere that Marx originally worked in.

And social justice requires this kind of balancing of the scales among, you know, whites versus blacks or the rich versus the poor and so forth. So, yes, it's in many ways, I would say social justice is a modern, you know, I don't even know, it's a neoliberal post, I want to say like post-Christian, neo-Marxist virtue that's meant to replace the more classical understanding of justice.

And it's certainly the kind of justice that I think that the American founders would have understood.

Yeah, I would just, I would just add to that, Ben, I thought that was good. The, like for John's, John like wrestling with, you know, really, you know, any of our periodization is just approximately, we're just, and artificial in some ways, but trying to, trying to wrestle with like, what's, what's a product of what, you know, how does this come about?

I think, you know, the, of course, the people were, the ideas we're dealing with most now that are most recognizable to people are things that are iterations of the 70s, 80s and 90s is when they really come into the academy.