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

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00:14

Ben, let's talk a little bit about the founding.

00:17

I think the general sentiment among many evangelicals, especially those who are a little older, we'll say, is that everything is crazy.

00:29

We live in clown world.

00:31

But the problem is the wrong people are running the system, right? And if we got the right people in there, we if we just got Trump back in or something, we could really start reversing things.

00:44

And I think that younger conservatives and Christian conservatives in particular are more red pilled, as they say, on this.

00:54

And they're just 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.

01:05

It's just it's not something that is workable.

01:08

And 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.

01:25

I mean, it took thousands of years, but finally this happened.

01:28

And it's the only perfect system.

01:30

And departing from it is a very scary thing, because any deportation is going to wind up in some kind of an error.

01:38

That seems to be what the younger conservatives are somewhat up against.

01:42

And so I do want to have you talk a little bit about this idea that the founding is classical liberal.

01:50

It's an Enlightenment project.

01:52

It's about universal human rights.

01:54

And and I think that carries through the postwar period.

02:00

And that's like a main article of faith, if you will.

02:04

And then just real quick, I was reading some Mel Bradford this morning, which is always good, right? And he was talking about the Declaration of Independence.

02:12

It was very fascinating to me.

02:14

And 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.

02:22

It was not taken as it was in the 20th century, the second half of the 20th century.

02:28

And it wasn't viewed as this kind of call to an egalitarian call to make social arrangements equal.

02:37

It was more of a body politic that now exists that's been rejected by the king and denied their rights as British citizens.

02:44

They're saying we have just as much right as you do in Britain to govern our own affairs.

02:51

But you're dissolving our legislatures and you're making war on us.

02:54

And you're right.

02:55

So that's the rest of the documents.

02:57

So he has a different reading.

02:58

And I'm sure you're familiar with that.

03:00

But maybe help us out.

03:01

Why is the Declaration of Independence so platformed above every? I mean, we don't talk about the Fairfax Resolves or, you know, the Olive Branch petition or really anything else.

03:12

It's that one document and that one line, all men created equal, and that's read back into the Constitution.

03:17

And that becomes the basis for for everything.

03:22

Yeah, I mean, the reading of the the declaration and the Constitution throughout American history, especially the 20th century, is it's quite a trip.

03:32

And it's it's why you have so much debate among the scholarship today.

03:36

And if you try to go read the scholarship, you'll be busy the rest of your life.

03:38

There's been so much produced the last hundred years on it.

03:42

Yeah.

03:43

And I do think that, you know, the the response to progressive revolution in politics and government, the rise of the administrative state, the the growth of the welfare state and just the size and scope of government under FDR's administration and then under Lyndon B.

03:59

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 on to a natural rights only interpretation of the declaration as a way of saying.

04:18

You know, a rights based approach as the essential articulation of the American political experiment, which, you know, I know time and hate that word and I don't love it either, is is the way that we're going to put the brakes on these things that are getting out of control.

04:37

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 universal, universally applied polity.

04:47

So a rights based polity, because natural rights are the same for all human beings.

04:53

You know, you could you could technically have a democracy and previously communist Vietnam or something like that.

05:01

So it was in one sense this understanding of the declaration.

05:05

It was a an invention of conservatives themselves in a response to kind of a breakdown in the consensus of the of American polity and the way politics had functioned throughout the 18th, 19th century.

05:19

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

05:44

That's not going to work because the entire, you know, the entire bureaucracy and regime in Washington is set up to be anti-fragile to that kind of reform.

05:56

It has insulated itself and built a bulwark around itself such that it can it can withstand, you know, a Donald Trump and a J-6 protest.

06:09

It can rig elections to get away with it.

06:11

It can prosecute citizens as being domestic terrorists and get away with it.

06:15

And so but at the same time, we have to realize that one of the problems with liberalism is that it's anti-personal.

06:23

So it tries to be impersonal, neutral, based upon principles and kind of a a political system that will run of its own, kind of like a clock that 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.

06:44

And we won't have to ever touch it and we can all go about our lives.

06:47

And part of the response today is to say, no, actually, we do need enlightened statesmen.

06:52

We need we need to bring back statesmanship.

06:55

We need but we can't do that in the current system.

06:57

So, first of all, you have to deconstruct the current regime.

07:00

You have to permanently defeat the left.

07:02

Charles Haywood is really good about talking about that's our number one priority.

07:06

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.

07:18

They'll do selfless public acts of magnanimous generosity and liberality for the sake of the people that really rule for the good of all.

07:30

You do need a return of this kind of politics.

07:33

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.

07:43

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 nationhood was not actually the establishment of a constitution or form of government.

08:01

You needed that as well.

08:02

And then the Constitution replaced the articles.

08:05

And so I do think you can read the Declaration and the Constitution as two parts of a single whole polity.

08:11

That's maybe another discussion because it gets pretty technical.

08:15

But the point is that the founders understood that.

08:18

Politics always required personnel, 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.

08:43

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.

08:57

So you need the personnel.

08:59

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

09:22

These 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.

09:44

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.

09:59

But so, you know, to get back to that in a proper reading of the declaration in that context, you know, you have to overcome all of the abuses and the distortions and the absolute grotesque, just absurdities that are going on today.

10:14

And I think people see those absurdities.

10:16

And this is why you have a whole contingent of the new right that's kind of neo-Nietzschean.

10:19

They have this sense of like the natural order of things is there's an aristocracy.

10:23

Some people are just better than others.

10:25

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.

10:36

And so, you know, you understand the appeal of of kind of a natural aristocratic and Nietzschean way of thinking about things.

10:45

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 sweep it away before we can really get back to anything like like what the founders believed in.

11:00

Believe it or not, we've been going over an hour.

11:02

So there's three things, though.

11:03

I really wanted to cover before we ended.

11:06

And this is for either one of you.

11:09

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.

11:26

Let's start with that.

11:27

I don't know who wants to take that.

11:32

I can say something real fast.

11:33

I'll just say a couple of things.

11:35

One thing is that, you know, Burke was riding against the French Revolution and people like Thomas Paine who came to the defense of it.

11:44

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.

12:22

So he sees it as a as a perpetual revolution, and I think he's on to something there.

12:26

And we are experiencing this perpetual revolution in the 20th century and even today.

12:32

So there's there's a good critique there.

12:34

There's also the belief in Burke that, you know, you don't just have an autonomous reason.

12:42

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.

12:53

And they know how things ought to function.

12:56

In fact, reason is cultivated.

12:59

It's learned.

13:00

It's developed within a community, within a family.

13:04

It has to be exercised.

13:05

It has to be controlled.

13:07

It has to be corrected.

13:08

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.

13:18

I'll talk about England for now.

13:20

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.

13:32

So that that is like Burke's critique.

13:35

I do think there's something there.

13:36

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.

13:54

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't I can do that.

14:04

So how reasonable are human beings? What are the preconditions for reason? Burke was good about that.

14:10

And I think that's a really good critique that we could learn from him today.

14:14

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.

14:36

And so there's a willingness, I suppose, to use different methods and even maybe different forms of government, but to secure those things.

14:48

For example, just to pick to make it more concrete, you know, marriage is under attack today.

14:52

Right.

14:53

So the conservative would say we need to protect marriage at all costs.

14:58

Like this is a fundamental building block.

15:01

And it's not even just I mean, it's part of the creative order.

15:05

So I'm picking something that's not even necessarily particular.

15:07

That's a that's a universal for all societies.

15:11

But I think a conservative would be willing to step outside of like the Constitution.

15:17

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.

15:25

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.

15:34

That's where things get scary.

15:36

But that's that's a we can't compromise on that.

15:40

Right.

15:40

That's a non negotiable.

15:42

So that's how I guess I see conservative versus the neoliberal.

15:47

The neoliberal is going to die for this this universal system of democracy and ensuring that individual choice is maintained and furthered.

16:00

And they aren't willing to step outside of that at all.

16:03

Like that's that's their non negotiable in a way.

16:06

And conservatives, I think, are willing to say that's not we don't base society on individual choice.

16:13

We base it on actually it's not from the bottom up.

16:15

It's from the top down.

16:16

It's on the it's the providence of God.

16:18

It's the created order.

16:19

It's particular beautiful things that have been created over the course of centuries.

16:24

So I mean, am I getting at it? You think that the difference there, either one of you, I see heads nodding.

16:33

So I'm assuming I'll go for a time and I just go for it.

16:37

Yeah, I think I think especially now.

16:39

So, you know, again, to pick on the boomer cons, you know, the people which which I love boomers, we love them.

16:46

We love them.

16:47

We love.

16:47

I really do love boomers.

16:48

And some of my best friends are boomers.

16:50

And, you know, I know a lot of some of our dads are boomers.

16:54

That's right.

16:56

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 articulate it as they should be able to.

17:07

But they like their instincts are still pretty good.

17:10

But here's here's what I would say for for a lot of boomers just using it as a pejorative, that class, 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.

17:34

And this is not just a liberal, liberally structured society like a post-enlightenment.

17:39

This is any society.

17:41

This is any any society.

17:42

There are certain preconditions necessary for it to function.

17:47

Right.

17:47

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.

17:56

For most of history, that's that's been some kind of cultists.

18:00

Right.

18:00

That's been some sort of religion at some degree of abstraction.

18:04

But you need something like that.

18:07

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 to a proceduralism or whatever as the thing that must be maintained at all costs.

18:28

So you see this the best instantiation of this.

18:30

It's inevitable talk about him.

18:32

So we might as well now is David French, right.

18:34

David French says it's a blessing of liberty, which by which he means this this ability to mitigate conflict.

18:43

And so it is a live and let live sort of civil libertarian idea.

18:47

He uses those words about himself.

18:48

So I'm not being unfair.

18:51

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.

19:00

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

19:02

Oh, sorry.

19:03

The blessing of liberty is is a drag queen story hour.

19:06

That's right.

19:06

In a New Yorker interview at the time.

19:08

And is is basic.

19:10

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.

19:16

Twenty nineteen was this very now kind of infamous debate between Zohra Bhamari, who is a Catholic.

19:22

I'm not really sure what label he'd go by now.

19:24

But and David French over drag queen story hour.

19:27

And it's an interesting artifact to go look at now to get yourself.

19:32

But I won't get detained with it.

19:33

But, you know, David French thinks this is a blessing of liberty, meaning, you know, he doesn't like drag queen story hour.

19:39

He claims to be an evangelical Christian.

19:41

He's not going to go to them.

19:42

Right.

19:42

I don't think so.

19:44

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.

19:56

Right.

19:56

And so therefore, anyone who says, well, hold on, I want to discriminate here.

20:01

I don't like that.

20:02

I don't want it.

20:02

It's bad.

20:03

Now you've violated the entire identity of what the American experiment, again, is supposed to be.

20:09

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.

20:23

That's what you pursue, not the mere process.

20:25

And the process should be conducive to the attainment of those goods.

20:29

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.

20:46

The right doesn't is is just a mechanism to get you to those as a political society.

20:52

It's not something you just you just have for the fun of it.

20:55

And that's something that David French wouldn't wouldn't be able to grasp, maybe even intellectually.

20:59

And I think a lot of people would call themselves conservatives and are conservative in their values.

21:04

I can't believe I use that word.

21:05

I hate that word.

21:06

But they're conservative in their beliefs, values.

21:09

Yeah, still bought into this kind of thing.

21:12

So they'll want to defend the Constitution to them means this sort of procedural apparatus that never can be violated, even as it's violated right under their noses anyway.

21:23

And that's the hypocrisy that post-liberals like.

21:25

I remember Mike Pence a few years ago is right after Donald Trump won.

21:29

I don't remember this.

21:30

He went to Hamilton with his son, I think it was.

21:33

And they called him out like it like the actual actors started like, I don't know, the cursing out Trump or something.

21:40

I mean, they were they were saying whatever they were saying.

21:42

It was like really nasty in the crowd, I think, started like booing.

21:45

And I remember his reaction because he was on a talk show host.

21:48

He goes, I just stood there next to my son.

21:51

And I said, son, this is what free speech looks like.

21:54

Like I guess a positive thing like this is this is good.

21:57

It's good that they have you imagine.

21:59

Yeah.

22:00

Like this is what our men fought for.

22:02

And I'm thinking like my, you know, my grandpa didn't fight for that.

22:05

Like I'm pretty sure he did not fight for the right of the people to disrespect the vice president there.

22:10

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.

22:18

I've just quoted here's George Washington's rules about blasphemy in his army.

22:23

Right.

22:24

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.

22:39

So so we do need to get to this.

22:42

And I don't know whether you want to both take different parts of this.

22:45

But we got to talk a little bit about Hegel postmodernism and then Marxism and woke ism, because I think there's confusion on these three, I see a lot of people who are loyal to the liberal order.

23:00

They will start hurling accusations of Hegelianism and postmodernism and there's other things, too, in there.

23:09

But at anyone who wants to just question the order, right, that that were you're against universal rights.

23:15

That must mean you're you're you're some bad person.

23:18

And those are those two things specifically Hegel and postmodernism.

23:21

I wrote down that I wanted to talk about.

23:23

So either either one of you, I don't know who feels more equipped to deal with that.

23:28

Ben, you're a Hillsdale and so you're at Hegel.

23:30

You can now I'll talk about it.

23:34

Oh, I already took comps.

23:36

Yeah.

23:37

Comps are done, man.

23:38

Thankfully, I did talk about Hegel on my comps.

23:42

So, yeah, I mean, Hegel, his theory of the state is tied in with his entire dialectic, his philosophy of world history.

23:51

And if you if you read his lectures on the philosophy of world history and his actual history of the world.

23:58

Yeah, it's it's really interesting.

24:01

So, you know, yeah, if you if you if you question the constitutional order right now, you'll get late.

24:07

James Lindsay, you know, blasting you on Twitter for being part of this dialectic or something like that.

24:14

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.

24:24

And he and Helen Pluckrose and wrote those what was the the they wrote those fake articles.

24:32

And Peter Bogosian.

24:33

Yeah.

24:34

Yeah.

24:34

Peter Bogosian.

24:35

Yeah.

24:35

And, you know, in some ways, like he started this website called New Discourses and he's got an encyclopedia there.

24:41

And I've read through some of those articles.

24:43

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.

25:03

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.

25:19

And then you have a lot of Christians that, you know, they read his work and and they trust him on these things now.

25:25

Now they you know, they kind of worship his knowledge.

25:29

So anyway, well, OK, so on Hegel, you know, America was a founded way before Hegel's ideas came into vogue.

25:38

You know, Hegel definitely had this concept of progress.

25:41

He had this moral philosophy of a type of what is called historicism.

25:46

It's a type of historical relativism in which each each epoch is different in terms of its its values.

25:54

And no, it's it's it's moral principles.

25:57

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 our goal.

26:12

And that presiding over this is spirit or Geist.

26:15

This idea that is working and using providentially overseeing men and events to bring about kind of this 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.

26:38

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.

26:59

And they brought this German idealism and this Hegelian philosophy into America.

27:05

Now, that was a, you know, totally different than what the founders were talking about.

27:11

So, yes, you could say there's a reaction by Marx against Hegel.

27:18

You know, Marx, Hegel had an idealistic dialectic.

27:22

Marx had a material dialectic.

27:24

And, you know, you'd parse out how Marx's own dialectic was the antithesis of Hegel's thesis.

27:32

And Feuerbach was in the middle as the synthesis, thesis, antithesis, all that kind of stuff.

27:39

Anyway, you know, Marx was a reaction to that.

27:44

And so Marx had this focus on materialism and economic conditioning and environmentalism.

27:51

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.

28:18

So, yes, there is a stream of that.

28:20

But the idea that those of us who are studied the founding and we've studied the Puritans, that we're just Hegelian, that's lazy, it's stupid.

28:27

It's not Hegelian whatsoever.

28:30

So, you know, we 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 with Marxism and how it's been taken up and applied in the 60s and 70s by legal and racial scholars.

28:46

That's certainly appropriate to understand and to to see America's being influenced by that.

28:53

But that's not what those of us that are advocating for kind of a classic Puritan colonial and founding America are doing whatsoever.

29:03

So, well, if I could just go ahead to that real quick.

29:07

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 anywhere within this post-liberal conversation or Christian nationalism, whatever.

29:29

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 and all that 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 the sort of who would have been called in a way young Hegelians, mixing with many other things, the introduction of that into the Academy from a different stream and what that has wrought.

30:03

All of that is actually the we should say, you know, the erosion of the American order in many regards.

30:13

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 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.

30:35

And, you know, it's not it's not good history.

30:37

They're not really interested in the founding as it was, just as it's a convenient tool for them.

30:42

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.

30:52

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.

31:02

Neo post-industrial integralism or something like that that Michael Fallon came up with, I have no idea what any of it means.

31:08

But the fourth industrial fourth industrial, I don't know.

31:12

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.

31:34

So that's the weird irony.

31:36

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.

31:50

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

32:03

So it's a stupid exercise anyway.

32:05

You have to move forward.

32:07

But what we should do is recover older ideas, more stable ideas and reintroduce them according to with prudence, according to the context that we're now presented with.

32:16

So that's the that's the sort of schizophrenic nature of James Lindsay's critiques.

32:21

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.

32:26

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

32:37

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.

32:54

And it's either when there's actually on some issues, there are binary issues.

32:58

But on many issues, there there is a spectrum.

33:02

And I'm wondering kind of why Hegelianism doesn't get applied to neoliberalism.

33:08

Like, you know, you're advancing stage after stage, advancing towards a utopia where you're going to emancipate yourself from all the constraints.

33:17

I mean, it just seems like that would be a fair target, but it's not critically examined.

33:25

I think you touched on the Marxism a little bit already.

33:28

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.

33:40

And.

33:41

How that differs briefly with neoliberalism, I was on a podcast a few months ago.

33:49

Some of the guys from Enemies Within the Church, they have they have a podcast called the Wikipedia podcast, and they wanted to interview me on.

33:57

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.

34:14

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.

34:31

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.

34:38

So it's an old enemy when in reality, though, it's not really an old enemy.

34:43

It's in some ways it is, but in many ways, it's actually both newer and older than the Soviets.

34:51

And and so I just brought up like catchphrases like, you know, diversity is our strength.

34:56

You should be able to do anything you want as long as it doesn't harm others.

35:00

You can be anything that you want to be.

35:03

You know, we're a melting pot.

35:05

I mean, I just kept bringing up these kinds of catchphrases and saying, like, these have been around for a long time.

35:09

I was taught these as a kid.

35:11

And these are neoliberal assumptions.

35:13

These aren't from like a modern woke thing.

35:15

And it seems that those have naturally led to much of what we've seen in the social justice movement.

35:22

So I don't know if you agree with me that there's like both streams kind of converge or how you would view that.

35:28

But what would you see as the differences between the social justice movement and neoliberalism? Either one of you.

35:40

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

35:43

Yeah.

35:43

What would you see as the differences between the social justice movement, the modern version and then neoliberalism? Yeah, that's a good question.

35:53

I mean.

35:55

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 Taparelli, who is a Catholic social teacher.

36:10

And I think he used the phrase in the 1840s or 1830s, it is used once in the Federalist Papers, I did find that.

36:20

But, you know, justice, justice, of course, was always the preeminent social virtue that regulated men's relationships with each other and society is, you know, Madison says in Federalist 51, it's the end of the political order.

36:33

And in a limited way, of course, it is.

36:36

It's like if you have justice among men, you have peace and goodwill and right is done between man and man.

36:46

So one of the issues is that 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.

37:11

And then that was imported into America.

37:15

That was used as a way to combat a kind of individual conception of justice that at least modern liberals often focused on.

37:25

Classical liberals focused on that and then some modern liberals did.

37:28

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.

37:47

And this is this is something that they subjectively own within their very being and that they cannot be violated.

37:52

They're inviolable, they're inalienable or something like that.

37:55

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.

38:09

And so it's a collectivist concept that reacts against an individualistic idea of of justice within classical liberalism.

38:21

Now, I would say real quick that, you know, the concept of justice within liberalism broadly has a lot of different iterations and perspectives.

38:34

And so, you know, there's you could have a version of social justice within neoliberalism in the 20th century.

38:41

But yes, of course, like today, you know, social justice is 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 their identity in the group is reified to kind of be the entirety of who they are, the most important aspect of them.

39:04

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.

39:25

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.

39:33

So, yes, it's it's it's in many ways, I would say social justice is a.

39:38

It's a modern, you know.

39:42

I don't even know neoliberal post, I want to say, like post-Christian neo-Marxist virtue that's meant to replace the more classical understanding of justice.

39:54

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

39:59

Yeah, I would just I would just add to that, Ben, I thought that was good.

40:02

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.

40:37

And of course, critical race theory is the one everyone knows now.

40:40

And this is all been it keeps morphing and has different applications.

40:44

But that's really the central one.

40:46

And of course, the the to a lesser extent, the critical legal scholars and a greater extent, the race crits, you know, are critiquing liberalism.

40:58

Many of their critiques that you read, even some of their historical narratives about certain things are not bad.

41:05

They're not off there.

41:07

They're pointing putting their finger on something, which mainly is that the liberal order, we'd say neoliberal for our purposes, is is a facade.

41:17

It doesn't do the things it's claiming to do.

41:20

And so it's kind of a big a big lie, such as the liberal order is saying, as you're pointing out, John, diversities are strength.

41:28

We're a melting pot.

41:30

Equality is alive and well.

41:32

And it's the pursuit of our polity to get that as well as, you know, justice to all men.

41:36

And they're saying, well, that's not happening.

41:39

So these are either these are incomplete goals or they're being incompletely achieved or pursued.

41:48

And so that's where the radical kind of critique arises.

41:51

So you'd say, well, it wouldn't happen without neoliberalism.

41:55

But it's not itself neoliberalism.

41:57

It's a product only only by by reaction of neoliberalism.

42:02

And it's pulling in things that were already critiques, of course, of Western society.

42:08

That's the ammunition at their disposal and the particular place it happens doesn't really matter.

42:14

I mean, even Kimberly Crenshaw wrote about, like the fact that this happened first at law schools is irrelevant.

42:20

It just was where we could do it.

42:21

And so that they begin with critiquing anti-discrimination laws, just happenstance, they just found something they could insert themselves into to start getting at, you know, what's wrong with it, with American society and the liberal order.

42:35

And so a lot of post-liberals, I mean, you don't see, you know, a lot of the critical race theory stuff is pretty surface level and really not all that great, but you will see post-liberals making certain kind of critiques of liberalism, neoliberalism in a similar way and say, you know, look, one, except maybe going deeper, we might say, yeah, the society is not actually producing radical egalitarianism.

43:03

Also, egalitarianism is not a worthy pursuit.

43:06

So we might do both if you're a post-liberal.

43:08

Whereas the the, you know, the critical theorist would would say, you know, it's kind of where you need to burn it all down.

43:15

It's definitely the goal or it should be the goal that you can't achieve it under a liberal order.

43:19

So that's my best attempt at like trying to...

43:23

That's the difference between 1619 Project and 1776 Report, right? 1619 Project says we've never achieved the promise of America.

43:31

And the 1776 Report says basically we did with MLK and the civil rights movement.

43:37

We did.

43:37

And these people need to stop whining and complaining because we achieved it.

43:40

And, you know, it seems to me like these things naturally lead to one another.

43:44

You have in liberalism, the individual being the core unit and then expanding opportunity for that individual so he can participate in the market as a fundamental right and everything's part of the market.

43:56

I think we sum this up with the phrase equality of opportunity and making even through government funding.

44:03

And that was a lot of the civil rights stuff was was giving this opportunity to people who didn't have it.

44:09

But then this naturally led to equality of outcome, social justice, when we realized that the goals that were supposed to be accomplished from that equality of opportunity weren't happening.

44:21

The disparities still existed.

44:23

Some of them even got worse with more government funding.

44:26

So so it seems to me like there's definitely a cooperation here that goes unnoticed and the critics of social justice tend to kind of they either ignore that or they don't see it.

44:39

But their own ideas would naturally lead to the same moment that we're in now.

44:45

Right.

44:46

If they were able to have their way.

44:47

There's like a symbiosis or a dependence of the ideas and when they're not abstract and something like you mentioned, Christopher Caldwell's book earlier, you know, it's not the whole point of it, but it gets at this a lot or it really gives you a a narrative of how certain things have come about in a lot of this is homegrown and you don't need this radical German importation right to get to get to some of these ideas.

45:09

They just they just happen.

45:10

And I would point out to the you mentioning a sort of market rationale for political life that's predicated on the individual.

45:21

And his participation in politics can be thought of in a in a market rationale or maybe even reducible to the market itself.

45:31

And so when you have that sort of the sort of mind, the sort of, you know, whatever milieu for for a while in a country, it's no wonder that you essentially do reduce everyone to economic units and you can govern the society as as the equivalent of an economic zone.

45:54

And so when you come to something like immigration, the entire discussion for a long time, even on the in conservative circles, was pure economics.

46:05

And so if if if addition and the only debate was really like the addition of economic units, is it good or bad? And how many of them can we have? And and if you know, because this is all a sort of market rationale.

46:20

And so there's no you totally lose the ability, even as conservatives, to think about any other cultural considerations that would have, you know, and you're even incapable of reading like 19th and 20th century arguments about immigration as they were actually understood.

46:36

You only have this reaction of it's bigoted, it's awful.

46:40

And then that's what neoliberalism has taught you to think that way.

46:44

And of course, then the critical theorists come in and say, yeah, that is what it's all about.

46:49

It is just about ethnostate or whatever, you know, just so they do.

46:52

My whole point was a roundabout way of illustrating the what you're bringing up is there is a symbiosis between the two.

46:59

And to think you can simply shed the latest sort of genesis of it and go back to the this pure form, which is what people like James Lindsay want to do, who, by the way, along the way, has still affirmed some of the egalitarian results such as gay marriage and all these things.

47:17

And anyway, an abortion to think you can do that, even if it was desirable, is really stupid.

47:23

That's just not how these things work.

47:25

And if that means you're Hegelian because you see the guys in its operation, then fine, whatever.

47:32

But, you know, it just doesn't work that way.

47:34

So what we need to do is figure out what are the you know, what's a better conception of politics? I mean, even at the most basic level, you have to see the fractures and think, is this one you can say, was this always inevitable? Is the poison seed argument true? And how much overhaul do you need? Or to have we just, you know, radically misunderstood or been misled in so many very basic things that are indispensable to a healthy polity and the goal should be a healthy polity for particular people, can of worms there and then, you know.

48:12

So it's a real radical reorientation to two more classical conceptions of politics.

48:17

And I think post-liberalism in its best form, that's what it's it's trying to to get at in various ways.

48:23

And I would I would just add briefly there that, you know, with the return of politics in a post-liberal West, what we'll find is that these enduring questions of political stability and longevity have always been there.

48:37

And liberalism has sought to kind of appease the the uneasy conscience of Americans who are seeing the impending collapse of their society and, you know, try to paper over those things when, in fact, we need to face them.

48:53

We need to face the fact that maybe there is such a thing as regime change or what the ancients called anti-psychosis that no political order lasts forever.

49:02

What do you do? How should you arrange yourself? And then, you know, if that falls apart, what do you do then? I mean, the founders knew this very well.

49:11

They were facing these things, too.

49:13

So just being adults and being able to have these conversations and not just assume that things are always going to be progressing, always going to be getting better, there's always going to be more wealth and more, you know, liquidity or 401k that's going to be there for you or Social Security, which, of course, none of us are going to cash in on.

49:31

So being able to be adults and to have these conversations about political stability and longevity are really important, and I think that's a positive and a positive for the post-liberal discussion.

49:42

So, Ben, are you saying that Abraham Lincoln was wrong when he said this government of the people, by the people, for the people would never perish from the earth? You're saying that actually it will perish? It has perished.

49:52

It has perished.

49:54

Well, we should we should bring in before we before we wrap up for this one and maybe it's playing for next time, you know, we mentioned Fukuyama earlier or offhand.

50:03

Maybe I did it.

50:05

And something Ben just brought up really is a key post-war, post even communism, post post Iron Curtain idea, which is his end of history idea.

50:16

And so people will see the meme.

50:18

It's one of my favorite memes now where it's, you know, Photoshopped Fukuyama pointing a gun at the screen saying history will end, you know, or has ended, whichever way it goes.

50:27

And the whole point of that was, I mean, it takes a ton of flack and actually kind of admire him because he's just never given it up and keeps doubling down, which is, you know, takes a special kind of courage to do that.

50:37

But the point is that after the defeat of the Soviets, the collapse really of that, which again is a very economic assessment, right? The collapse of the Soviet economy is essentially what we're talking about.

50:49

And therefore their their competition for dominance globally.

50:53

After that, really, we had proven that a liberal order, the rules based society had triumphed and all that was left was cleanup.

51:02

Like everything else is kind of done.

51:03

We've solved the big questions that Ben is pointing out have come back with with a vengeance because we didn't actually solve them.

51:12

We swept them under the rug.

51:13

And what he meant when history was over was the solution was to stop caring about them.

51:19

It's indifference.

51:20

They don't matter.

51:21

And we figured out a way with our rules, our kind of procedures to make sure they don't creep back in.

51:27

And the problem is, as post-liberals and others would say, is you're trying to defy human nature, the nature of human interaction society.

51:36

You know, read Aristotle, whatever.

51:39

These are just this is just the way things work.

51:41

And, you know, read history before it ended.

51:44

And it's just the way things work.

51:45

So it was a very presumptuous, you know, sort of approach to things.

51:50

But for a while, it seemed like it was going to actually work and things were at least at a superficial level.

51:56

And I think, again, in the West, a lot of economic prosperity covered up even for the boomer generation, how how decayed the republic already was in Western society generally, because these things don't happen overnight.

52:09

This is a slow burn.

52:10

I know we definitely need to land the plane.

52:12

But I have to say, when I was in school a few years ago, I just it struck me as this Muslim society that I thought was traditional.

52:19

But in the main cities, of course, it's like being in New York.

52:23

It's not completely, but like it's secularized in some ways.

52:29

And it just struck me that it's at an earlier stage than New York City.

52:34

But it's the sexualization.

52:36

That's the first thing that hits you about these places.

52:38

And that seems to be those are like the missionaries of the liberal order are those who want to loosen sexual boundaries.

52:44

And, of course, multiculturalism bring in people that are unfamiliar and have them share in the body politic, it weakens the whole society.

52:56

And it's and I think that the lie is that this will make us stronger, that diversity is our strength, right? That this is going to actually be a very good thing.

53:07

But this is such a new, innovative approach to politics and society.

53:12

Like we haven't actually been doing this that long.

53:14

And so now that we're reaping some of the consequences, it just seems obvious.

53:19

But we do have to land the plane.

53:21

Let me just say in closing for everyone who's listening.

53:24

If you have questions, email me if you like this comment, please let us know that you liked it.

53:32

If you have questions, you can email me.

53:34

You can put comments on this video and we'll try our best in the next discussions to get to some of those.

53:40

Because eventually we do want to have in this series on liberalism, a Q&A time just to answer objections and questions and and all of that.

53:50

So I will say this because I thought about it during the discussion.

53:54

I didn't want to interrupt things.

53:55

Maybe we should have started with it, though.

53:58

The one of the things that seems unique to our moment and our parents generation as part of this in particular is that the catchphrase is that we are that I just talked about.

54:10

Diversity is our strength.

54:12

Just you can do anything you want.

54:14

It's not hurt anyone, my body, my choice, all that kind of stuff.

54:17

This has really taken root in the moments preceding World War two.

54:23

And the World War two, I think, became some of what of a founding moment, almost like a new founding that we saw this horrible thing that Germany did, that the Holocaust happened and the slogan was never again.

54:33

Never again would we do that.

54:35

And the things that have been blamed for that are traditional societies in the West and Christianity and and all these things that are under attack, this is, of course, if you look at Adorno's F scale, you'll find all of these things pretty much referenced there.

54:49

This is really, I think, part of the the new strain of liberalism that is has taken over our country after World War two.

54:58

And it's with that good intention of we need to get rid of Nazis.

55:03

But now that umbrella has has broadened to anyone who's even a traditional Christian is basically in that group now.

55:11

So so so hopefully we can talk about that a little more.

55:14

It's a unique pathological kind of obsession that we have today.

55:18

And it's unique to this current liberal order.

55:21

But I want to thank Ben and time and both of you guys for holding out with me for the last hour and 50 minutes.

55:30

And you guys are just really good at what you do.

55:33

And I appreciate it.

55:34

Thank you.

55:35

Thanks, John.

55:37

Lot of fun.