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From unsolved mysteries to unexplained phenomena, from comedy gold to relationship fails, Amazon Music's got the most ad free top podcasts included with prime because the only thing that should interrupt your listening is, well, nothing. Download the Amazon Music app today. At vrbo, we understand that even the best of plans sometimes need a little support. So we plan for the plot twists. Every booking is automatically backed by our VRBO Care guarantee, giving you confidence from the very start. Whenever you need help, it's ready before your stay through the moments in between and after your trip. Because a great trip starts with peace of mind and maybe a good playlist. But we've got the peace of mind part covered. Welcome to the Compact Podcast. Today we'll discuss the expiration of Obamacare subsidies, the fate of Warner Brothers, and Ashley's weekend. Among the post liberals, joined by Ashley Frawley, of course, and by Jeff Schoellenberger and I'm Matthew Schmitz. So Republicans seem determined not to extend the Obamacare subsidies that came into effect in the wake of the pandemic. If they were extended, they would cost 350 billion over the next decade, according to government estimates. There's a fair bit of controversy around these. There's a perception that there's a good deal of fraud in the system. If you look at the numbers, many more people have been signed up for these subsidized plans who aren't making any claims. That number has gone from 20% of all plans, people who aren't making any claims, to 35%, possibly evidence that insurers are signing up people who have insurance elsewhere, maybe without their knowledge, so that they can get money in from the government to cover this premium, but they know they'll never have to pay anything out. So there are issues with the system. But there is also a fair deal of anxiety among Republican lawmakers that by failing to extend these subsidies, they're going to face an electoral bloodbath in the midterms. Jeff, what have you made of the debate?
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So I think I'm maybe repeating myself from a previous episode, but overall I think this is a revelation of the major weaknesses of the two major parties. On the Democratic side, I would say you really have Democrats playing the role of the conservatives here in the sense that they're attempting to prop up the system as it currently exists, which unfortunately is increasingly unstable and seems likely to collapse under its own weight. I would say this was was true of Obamacare as originally conceived, that attempted to resolve this contradiction generated by the system itself, which was that the way that insurance is provided leaves a great deal of leeway in the hands of the insurance industry. And you know, I think, I mean, we saw this around the kind of Luigi Mania thing that, you know, I wouldn't want to to make make excuses for or do apologetics for the insurance industry, but I do think the way that the insurance industry is, is set up as sort of the, the villain in this whole situation is, is overly simplistic. You know, the insurance industry is responding to incentives that are created by the system. It's also dealing with the fact that there, there's also a great deal of, of terrible behavior on the part of, of hospitals and private health care providers. And so that the whole system is, is full of, of corruption and of perverse incentives. And the way the Democrats set up Obamacare and the thing that they're attempting to do right now is, is essentially shield some portion of the public from the worst effects of these, these defects of the system itself as it's, as it's been kind of constructed in this, in this very ad hoc manner over the past, you know, roughly 100 years at this point. And so they're, they're, they're attempting to, you know, use subsidies essentially to mitigate the worst effects of, of this system on, on consumers by reducing their out of pocket costs and liabilities. And that's really how the, the whole system was set up in the first place. And you know, the, the real problem is that there's plenty to, to criticize in that approach. Um, you know, I think when, when you hear some Republicans say, well, you know, they just want to protect the insurance industry and help it continue to be profitable. I mean, there is a truth to that. But you know, the problem is that if you, if you didn't do that, that would have pretty catastrophic effects for a lot of people and that, that wouldn't be great either. So I, at least, you know, immediate term I think, you know, unfortunately the system is, is so screwed up that probably the only way to, to produce anything better would, would actually be to, to essentially kind of euthanize it in some, in some form and, and allow something else to replace it. But obviously there are too many vested interests for that to really be imaginable. So the, the better option, or sorry, not the better option, but probably the only option is for some sort of catastrophe to occur that will, you know, force a new system to be constructed. But you know, what we don't see on the Republican side is any, is any will or vision for, for doing that. You know, again, confirming my point that this is essentially the, the Democrats, you know, Obamacare thing is essentially a conservative project of sort of rescuing and propping up the system. Famously, it was based on a blueprint initially devised by the Heritage foundation and then implemented by Mitt Romney in, on the state level in Massachusetts. So it really has a kind of, you know, concert, even sort of conservative movement genesis. And you know what? I think what you've seen on the Republican side from the beginning is just a kind of sheer nihilism around the entire, around the entire situation. And you know, that there's sort of
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a
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B
complete, you know, and the political incentives make that probably a sensible approach in some respects because the system has many, has many downsides and people are often going to be mad about it. And so if you can simply channel people's anger and direct it at the other side, then, you know, you'll probably get some short term political benefits from that. But I'd say overall, just the situation is very, very depressing because it seems that the, on the Democratic side, you know, all you have is a will to, you know, protect this kind of cobbled together system which is an attempt to, you know, sort of patch the massive leaks in what is a completely broken structure. And then on the other side, on the other side you have a, a sensible willingness to just kind of see the whole thing burned down. But, but not really because, you know, the, the, there are obviously plenty of things that the, the, the other side would like to defend about the current system as well, particularly the prerogatives of, of private medical providers. So you know, that's, it's, it's just a very, it's a very depressing situation and I think shows the fundamental kind of lack of vision and, and willingness to actually do anything serious on the part of both parties. And I fear that we will, we will see not, not the, the euthanization that I proposed of, of the American healthcare system or a sort of crash and burn, but just a slow decay accompanied by more of this sort of pointless drama at various inflection points.
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C
It's interesting that you should say that perhaps the best thing to do would be to euthanize and replace the system. But it seems like that's kind of what's happening. You have this kind of, well, slow decline followed by euthanasia via a kind of main, well, a kind of, by allowing a kind of crisis to occur. Now, please correct me because I'm sure that you know, but more about this than I do, but from my read it seems like the Republican side kind of has some vision of a kind of lukewarm neoliberalism where you, you know, encourage savings via these health savings accounts, and that's going to create these market incentives and you allow for this collapse of the existing system, which is dependent on subsidies, and the turmoil that will result from that is the necessary kind of shock that out of which will come these, these proper undistorted price signals. Because, you know, the subsidies distort the prices and people aren't really paying the real costs. And that means that providers charge more, knowing that the government's just going to step in and fill this gap. So the idea is you remove these subsidies and then the true price of insurance becomes visible and then consumers will shop around, you know the story, and this increases competition, and then the prices will come down and the market will correct itself. And the kind of the horror that people are talking about resulting not just in terms of people losing their coverage, but also job losses in sectors that have become dependent on these subsidies, is like the sort of like Pinochet shock doctrine thing, out of which will come, you know, we have to have this pain and out of which will come a market correction. So it seems like people are using this sort of like basic price signal theory that, you know, will, that supposedly will produce the outcome. But of course, and the typical critique of this, I think is correct that it's not the case that people shop around when they're like dealing with their bone sticking out of their knee.
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B
I mean, the interesting thing is all of that whole theory was already in Obamacare. So I mean, the irony is that Obamacare itself was essentially a kind of descendant of exactly these sorts of theories and was heavily based on them. And so, you know, that, that sort of. And, and so then of course, you know, once it was put in place, it was accused of being socialism and so on, but you know, it was, it was essentially a kind of. Yeah, it was, it was a subsidized. But, but I mean, the pro, you know, part of the problem here is that the whole system is, you know, it's, it's so incentivized and subsidized in various ways already that there's no way that it can just kind of be converted into some sort of pure market, even if that were desirable in this context. But it's basically impossible because unless you're going to get rid of the other structures that, I mean, you know, the one fundamental one being the tax benefits that go to employer provided insurance, which already means that A large share of the, of American health insurance is, is essentially kind of shielded from direct consumer competition because people aren't buying their own health plans, their employers. So, you know, the employers are buying the health plans on their behalf. But this isn't some kind of market in which individuals are, are sort of shopping for the best options. And so then the market is very small because it's only people who don't have the, who don't have employer provided insurance or you know, are not on Medicare or Medicaid. So you know, I suppose if you wanted to get rid of all of those things which take up a huge portion of the, the American sort of healthcare market, then maybe you could have some kind of pure, you know, price signal, you know, sort of pure Hayekian equilibrium could be established or something. But you know, everybody, everybody just sort of pretends that. I mean, that's the other bizarre thing about this debate is that, you know, the thing that was defined by the Republicans as socialized medicine is actually sort of the least like the Obamacare segment of things is in a way sort of the least like socialized medicine of all the aspects of the American system. So, you know, and they all, they all have these kind of bizarre public, private, you know, I've had to deal with like Medicare Medicaid stuff for a parent and you know, that it's all this kind of strange outsourcing into various kinds of private, I mean, so, so actually there are all these kind of, you know, despite it being quote unquote socialized, like there are all these attempts to introduce price signals through these Medicare Advantage plans which as far as I can tell, at least in my experience on, on someone else's behalf and from what I've read about it, you know, Medicare Advantage, which you know, is where you bought, you buy a private plan that sort of manages your Medicare is just a complete and utter scam. And you know, that's one of these ideas where you know, in theory you're shopping for your Medicare Advantage plan and somehow that's going to make everything more, you know, more competitive and, and thereby supposedly improve the products. It's all just complete garbage and a total scam. And then, you know, similarly with Medicaid, it's heavily, I mean that operates on the state level largely, but then there as well, you have to kind of shop for these, you know, there are these sort of outsourced private providers that you have to get your Medicaid through. So it's all, you know, there have been attempts over and over again. To reform it in this way. And as far as I can tell, it's just a complete boondoggle. Now, you know, for the pure sort of, you know, the pure libertarians among us, I think they would have a reasonable case that none of this actually really is a market. It's all completely distorted. But, you know, the idea that by taking away these subsidies, you're making it more market like is, is clearly absurd. You know, leaving aside whether that would be desirable in the first place, it's just not. It's just not what's actually happening. But yeah, I mean, that is certainly the, the claim that the, the Republicans have always made for what they're, what they're doing. But then when people actually, you know, Democrats in particular, actually implement the plans that they them, you know, that their own think tanks have come up with, then they say, oh, well, that's socialized medicine.
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So, yeah, that's a very interesting situation. Yeah, because that's really the only kind of cosmology that's going is this like that understanding of economics is the only thing that's, that anyone can use. So even when you have these like, libertarians that put forward this stuff and you go, oh, these are ideologues. That's crazy. But the only response uses the exact same understanding of the world and how things work. It's like we're, we're trying to navigate, I don't know, space travel using a pre Copernican system or something like that. That's often what it feels like. And everybody knows that the economics don't work, but there's nothing else. There's no, there's no alternative. So we wind up in these like, crazy kinds of, you know, remember if you ever look at like the way astronomy used to look before, they have, like, they have to do all this crazy gymnastics to kind of make the numbers work. And there's all these things that's kind of what we're dealing with in society where we've just got like, no, no, it all works. We have this system over here and this system over here and all these different diagrams, all very convoluted. But there's no way, there's no coherent way to respond to this. And this is what we have. This is a problem just across Western countries where, you know, after the death of really existing socialism, we're all just fighting. We're all just using crappy libertarian economics. Like, we're all just. Welfare economics is the only thing that's
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left essentially, after the announcement of a merger between Netflix And Warner Brothers. Paramount initiated a hostile takeover bid directed at Warner Brothers. So the question is now being debated. What's better? Should Warner Brothers merge with Netflix? Should it be taken over by Paramount? Paramount is run by the Ellison family, which is close to Donald Trump. Jared Kushner is involved in the Paramount takeover bid. And we know that the Orange man is bad. Trump is bad. So maybe the Netflix merger is good. People are trying to sort through these questions, figuring out where the political enmities and proper alignments lie. Jeff Ashley, what do you make of it? Which side do you favor? Should Paramount gut Warner Brothers, or should Netflix do the same? All right, I'll weigh in since someone else wants to.
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No, I was going to. I just wanted to say something about Animaniacs, and I was about to be like, no, that's not an appropriate thing to say.
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That's not appropriate. So we're not going to let you do that. And look, I think that neither bit is good, and both should be resisted by antitrust regulators. I think there's a very clear argument for antitrust in this situation, because consolidation, whether it's with Paramount or with Netflix, is going to tend toward Monopoly. It's going to reduce the number of an already very limited set of power players in Hollywood or in the filmmaking industry. And that'll have bad effects in two clear ways. One, it will reduce competition for the services of filmmakers, whatever, screenwriters, actors, all this. And so that that'll mean that wages are lower in that industry and it'll be harder for people to make a living doing it. I think that's bad. But maybe most crucially, from the consumer's perspective, it will just limit the distinct entities out there that are working up ideas that are competing directly against each other to produce excellence. So I think there's a really good argument for having a variety of companies doing this and that when you have that, you are going to get a better result for the consumers. So that's the kind of the fundamental argument for why it would be a good thing if this merger didn't go through. Tim Wu, the legal scholar who works on antitrust, I think, has convincingly argued that just as a matter of law, either merger would be illegal. Now, law has to be interpreted, and elections happen. The GOP was elected, and, you know, their regulators are going to look on such things more kindly, rumors of a populist GOP notwithstanding. They're going to look on it more kindly than Democratic regulators would have done. I'm not sure that Lina Khan is coming in to Save us from this merger, which I regard as a bad thing. But I hope somehow your wrench is thrown in the gears and it doesn't go through. That's where I am.
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So a few stray remarks. One, one thing that's kind of interesting and this came up in this meta antitrust decision that happened recently, and I believe Wu has brought it up, Tim Wu, who Matthew just mentioned, is that, you know, there is a weird way that all these companies are increasingly going to claim that they're all that, you know, whether they're a social media site or a video, you know, whether they're HBO or meta or TikTok or whatever, basically all of them are increasingly claiming, well, we just, you know, where we all just do video. And so as long as there are multiple sites, you know, putting out video content, then that means there's competition. So it doesn't matter if Netflix, HBO merge into one because they're all just, you know, everybody's just. And increasingly all websites are just going to become, you know, probably within a few years, primarily purveyors of AI Slop videos. So as long as we have competition among AI Slo videos, then I guess that means we have a competitive market is the argument that they seem to be settling on. And so it doesn't matter if all the streaming services merge into one because they're still competing with TikTok and Snapchat or whatever. So the weird thing is that I will make one consumer related case in favor of the merger, which is don't
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do it, Jeff, don't do it.
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The most awful thing about the streaming era is the absurdity of having to have all these different subscriptions in order to access video. And, and the fact that, you know, all this IP these films, you know, which. And this, you know, kind of, it does bring me back to the world of the sort of Napster enthusiasts and all these people who thought that, you know, because I mean, in effect the distribution mechanisms of something like film were completely broken, in theory by the rise of digital media. There was no particular reason you had to have physical distribution networks that were monopolized by say, movie theaters. And therefore it was all just data and it could all just be streamed. And so, you know, all these kind of middlemen could be cut out. And instead what we have in the streaming era is this bizarre situation where like you bookmark some film on HBO that you want to watch and then by the time you want to watch it, oop, it's not on HBO anymore, it's on Paramount or it's on Hulu or whatever. And so then you have to subscribe to that if you want to see it or, you know, you have to pay for the rental on prime or whatever. And so this whole situation is so absurd and stupid because there's no, you know, at least with the older system there were actual, you know, reasons of sort of capital investment and you know, physical distribution structure infrastructure that needed to exist that might have justified this sort these sort of, you know, monopolization of certain content by certain companies and purveyors. But now it's just pure, it's, it's just kind of pure like holding hostage of, of culture by these nefarious entities that, you know, are, are free to kind of incred. And so so on the downside, of course, the less competition, the freer they will feel to keep jacking up their subscription prices and, and do other things. But at the same time, you know, maybe if you get Netflix and HBO to merge, then at least you don't have to subscribe to both of them, for God's sake. But although I'm sure, I'm sure that's, that's too optimistic, they'd still find some justification for double charging you. So that's going to explain a really good argument.
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A
But yeah, yeah, but I guess my point not a good argument and I'm
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going to explain it's completely wrong consumer.
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A
So, you know, counter to the lies promoted here by Jeff, there's a very easy solution to this. All you have to do is buy a Blu Ray player and I recommend getting you can find online very easily these modified region free Blu Ray players. That's a good thing to do because I know that our compact listeners are discerning people, connoisseurs not just of the great golden age of American cinema, but also foreign films.
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B
And so you get as, as I believe you told me recently you had to pay a tariff on or you were unable to obtain a foreign film because of the destruction contributors said they wouldn't pay the tariff
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is a pro terror publication. So we're not going to get into my own Trump has also personal, personal
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struggle has also has also promised it at various points he's made these posts saying he's going to place 100% tariffs on all foreign films or foreign made films.
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So yeah, that would be yeah, compacts final break with Trump is going to come on this issue, I'm sure. But in terms of Jeff's deplorable argument, if you buy a Blu Ray player then you get the Blu Rays you can watch whatever you want. And by possessing that physical media, will it further clutter your probably already overpacked house? Yes, it will. But on the upside, you'll have probably a better image quality. You won't have these out of interruptions from streaming. The image will be superior. The mere act of going out and buying a film that you want to watch will help you think more deliberately about your entertainment choices. It will return in a small way, the film as events, not just as a kind of TikTok slop in a glorified way that you're streaming on your tv. But now you may not be able to watch White Lotus or whatever as it comes out, the latest HBO thing. So you'll be behind the times, but you will be able to encounter in the fullest way the, the. The riches of our filmic tradition. So that's, that's why Jeff's clearly wrong.
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And. Well, I'm gonna put it.
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I am, I am. I am gonna get that Blu Ray. I am gonna get it.
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I've.
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I found a workaround, but it's very. It's. It's annoying. It's like the ussr Annoying and costly.
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B
Well, but I was gonna say you
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can get Levi's, just not very easily.
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But. But I was gonna say, you know, I think a slight. A way to twist your argument against you, which, I mean, I, I agree. I have a Blu Ray player. Some of my favorite films that I own Blu Rays of are products of the Moscow Film Institute, such as the great films of Andrei Tarkovsky.
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Yeah.
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Takar shook War and Peace. So perhaps what we need is a sort of Ellison, you know, mega film, sort of Maga, you know, maga Film Institute.
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So super. You're saying basically that the absolutely staggering achievement of Medarchuk's War and Peace, you know, organized with like the entire Red army as extras.
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B
Yeah.
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Filming these Napoleonic battles. That, that's an argument for basically super centralization.
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Yeah, I think we can do that once. Once we have a kind of, you know, Ellison controlled, you know, with. With of course, the government taking a, you know, 25% stake in it. So sort of semi nationalized, you know, mega, mega Hollywood conglomerate that can put out glorious works of patriotic history and tribute. So that's, I think, the upside of this development.
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A
And what if the Moscow Film Institute did War and Peace so brilliantly? Really? What stories, what books or what events would. The Golden Age Film Institute, the Trump Institute of Film, what would it take up?
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What's first on the list? I don't know. I mean, I think we need a really grand Moby Dick on film. That's where I would start,
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C
man. I had this whole thing prepared on Monopoly and like tendencies within capitalism. I was not ready for this.
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A
You had your chance, but you were thinking about Animaniacs.
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C
That's what I was gonna say is that, you know, part of me is like, this is great because I really want to see Animaniacs again and share that with my kids. And like Looney Tiny Toons. These were like great, like 90s shows and they're on Warner Brothers. But I will, because I have your ear now. I am going to say you can't do anything about this. It's going to happen. That's. It's just a natural tendency. You can do all sorts of things to break up monopolies, but it's going to happen. That's. Capitalism works in the form of many best in the form of many small capitals, but its own internal drives and tendencies lead to monopoly. And there is a rational kernel to this in that I ironically won't be like the ussr where I have to try and find like counterfeit Blu Rays of the movie that I bought on Amazon prime that I have to pay a stupid subscription to continue to see, even though I bought the stupid movie in that, you know, eventually this leads to a breakdown of the market. And as Mark said, it moves from, from markets to administration. I mean, that's, that's kind of what's happening here. Eventually you're going to have one big system you're all going to subscribe to and it won't be very profitable. We're all screwed in terms of profit, but we have the freedom of information. That is the tendency to which everything is going now the way to get there is horribly destructive. And we haven't really figured that bit out. But the, but that is the sort of irresistible tendency. Competition leads to consolidation. That's just, that's. That's. That's been the tendency. And, and history has borne this out. Like you try to break down these telecom monopolies in the 80s and it's led to today's telecom oligopolies. Like, that's. It's like asking water not to flow downhill. There's the. No matter how much antitrust stuff you have, this is a tendency that is deep within capitalism. It's been. Right, I'm not like, I sound like a raging Marxist, and I am, but this was something recognized, you know, in, in 18th and 19th centuries, more or less, as a tendency endemic within the system. It's only been denied really in the last hundred, 150 years, 120 something years. But it is, you know, it's something that we have to contend with. And I say follow it through. Have courage. Have courage to see this through to what could be good for humans, which is that I don't want to have to pay 15 different subscriptions for stuff that I bought. It's not right. And it's a. It is a. It blocks access to technology, which is great. I love to be able to just think of something and be able to go and watch it. That's great. I do miss Blockbuster. I won't. I won't listen, lie. But yeah, to be able to think of things that you remembered when. In your childhood and be like, show that to my kids right now. Fantastic.
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I asked Jeff what kind of historical events or story should be adapted for film. I think we don't have good enough Revolutionary War films in terms of the, you know, the episode or the narrative. Yeah, I don't have that, you know, kind of front of mind or at the tip of my tongue. But certainly we could use some better Revolutionary War films. That's necessary. I'd also. I think we could use a much better Alamo film. There's a kind of John Wayne Alamo. It's really not very good. Keep in mind, you know, the Dartrek War and Peace was not the first War and Peace. It was a response to an American version. So you kind of keep doing these things until you get them right. Civil War worth revisiting. Maybe a better adaptation of Jeff Scharres book Killer Angels. Maybe you could do something like the Battle of Shiloh. Shelby Foote wrote a book on that, something in that vein. But maybe mining some of those familiar, pretty familiar historical episodes. Otherwise, I don't know, maybe Andrew. Andrew Jackson, kind of. Yeah, just a kind of narrative of his life, his young life, you know, dueling, fighting wars against Indian tribes, fighting against the British, always hating the British. So, yeah, I guess those are my three suggestions. Pretty vague ones. So, Ashley, you're the international woman of mystery, but we got to see you this week in New York, Jeff and I, because you were here for a conference on post liberalism. And post liberalism is really a term that a lot of people have been talking about in the New York Times. The distinguished columnist David French said that post liberalism bears the blame, a great share of the blame for the rise of Nick Fuentes, the Gruper streamer. Others, like Ross Douthat said that post liberalism might not be the main culprit behind his rise. Can you just tell us what post liberalism is and why people are arguing about it right now?
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C
Well, yeah, that's kind of the issue, right? What is post liberalism? Because I went into this conference and to prepare for it, I had read, you know, well, I'd read some time ago, but why Liberalism Failed. And then I was reading Adrian Pabst work, and I went into it, like, arguing against this idea that you could take all these values and from the past that have been lost, that liberalism has ostensibly destroyed, and use them as a fix or even an enchantment of the present. And I was really shocked because, particularly reading Pabs stuff, I was like, this is the stuff that I wrote about in my first two books. I. I didn't realize that this was essentially a. For a form of, like, a repackaging of what had been sold in therapeutic form 15, 20 years ago, which is like, oh, you know, our current, you know, pursuit of economic growth and money at all costs, what has destroyed the values and virtues of society, what we really need is to enchant the present by refounding the true meaning of happiness. Or they would go to Aristotle and, you know, in English, eudaimonia, this idea of, like, flourishing. We need to refound human flourishing. And then it had this sort of psychologized side to it, which was positive psychology, which was like, oh, we found the true science of happiness. We're going to teach this in schools. Somehow it's going to fix everything. And as I was reading, you know, why Liberalism Failed in particular, I was like, oh, gosh, this is the same thing. And so I went into the conference, sort of warning people, you can't do that. It's a fantasy. You can't. Like, there. It evades the question of why these, you know, nobody wakes up in the morning, like, I'm going to be a jerk. And if you ask people, even if you ask the elites and rich and people in government, is money the most important thing, they'll say no. And it's a straw man to say that governments pursue economic growth at the expense of everything else. And in fact, most policies explicitly geared to pursue economic growth have failed. It's not like it's a faucet you can turn on and off at will. And, you know, the development of measures of economic growth had a very specific thing behind them, which was the. The Great Depression. They needed to figure out, like, what the heck happened here? Like, we need some measures for why people are suddenly in this state of horror. And in Poverty, like, why did like a quarter of the population lose their jobs or unemployed? You know, so you needed to have these kinds of measures to understand things. And people just started confusing the measure for the thing, like, as though the pursuit of economic growth started there. It's not true. So I came in here and sort of guns blazing to this conference and explaining all this, why this is wrong. And then I realized, I, I suppose I spoke too early in the day that actually post liberalism has become this kind of grab bag of all these different ideologies and viewpoints that don't fit neatly into our kind of what has become of our political alignments. So I know people call me post left sometimes, and that's kind of another one of these weird. Or like you have like, oh, right, post left, post liberals and so on. We're sort of, we have, we're, we're undertaking this enormous political realignment. We don't quite know where people sit. So I think a lot people get tossed into this post liberal framework. But a lot of the most interesting people speaking completely disavowed the post liberal label, which I thought was interesting. A lot of people who get called post liberal disavowed it. So what is post liberalism then? Is it, Is it that? Is it this kind of, this idea that, oh, liberalism has gone too far and this idea of unfettered freedom needs to be questioned and we need to bring in virtues and values? Is that what it is? Because that's what I thought it was. Or is it off the wall kind of people who are difficult to place? Is it blue labor? Is it people like me? I mean, I, I don't think so, because I started my speech by saying I am a. I'm not a post liberal. I'm a liberal. I'm liberal in the way that only a Marxist can be a liberal. In the sense that I see the value of the classical liberal tradition. I just don't think that capitalism can ultimately deliver. I don't think it's just this forever. I think that there's a development toward things, there's a destruction and production that happens within society. And you have to kind of understand the motors of that and follow them through and why liberalism negates itself. You have to understand that. And I think what winds up happening is. Well, we've talked about this, Jeff and I, and I recommend listeners, if you haven't yet, to go and look at our sort of series of podcasts on the crisis of liberalism. But you have this kind of contradiction and you have these kind of Contradictions that open up within liberal democratic societies. And the one that I started that series with, I tried to put forward as a key one, was the split between economic and political liberalism. And I think what a lot of. So economic liberalism, you know, if you have political liberalism, like, you know, rights and the belief in the reason and rationality of man and blah, blah, blah, eventually and democracy, eventually people are going to want a say over the stuff that really matters in their lives, which is the economy. They're going to want to say in things that really they can't within capitalism. So economic liberalism will wind up dampening down and try to destroy democracy to a certain extent to get what it wants, or it will try to insulate the economics from democracy. And then political liberalism is kind of similar in that it becomes incompatible with the economic structures of society. You know, I'm. I'm freer now as a woman than I would be, you know, three or 400 years ago or 800 years ago or a thousand years ago, because I don't have to spend my day pounding millet. But just like anybody else, I am not fully free because I still have to sell my labor power to a capitalist, just like, you know, everybody has to do, unless you are a capitalist or living off of one or living off the state via other people who work. So you have this kind of these, these sort of contradictions that open up. And I think what people wind up doing is because they can't see the way through all of this, they wind up kind of asking to arrest one or both. So as I said, economic liberals will try to arrest democracy, political liberals will try to arrest economics. And actually, I mentioned earlier that across our political spectrum, it's like, you know, it's just crazy libertarianism or welfare economics. And I didn't mean to say they were the same thing or like polar opposites. It's kind of like we have this libertarian economics with welfare patches. That's kind of the extent of it. So the question is like, how much do you arrest things? How much do you patch things? Where do the patches go? And so on. And I think I feel like some of post liberalism is like arresting both. Like, it's like not just one or the other, but both. Like, let's. Let's both question economic growth and so on and talk about its deleterious effects on the human soul, and let's question the 10, the like things like even democracy. So it's very interesting, but as I said, it's very difficult to paint this whole movement with what's the phrase I'm looking for. It's difficult to kind of say it's all one thing when it's become this kind of bucket into which you can put all these different people who have something in common. But you know, in that they, maybe they resist wokeness or they see that something is not right. But when we actually kind of sat down together and, and sort of like put all of our cards on the table, I realized that there's just. There's a lot to this. And I will say probably the most interesting thread were the Catholics. And I started to think, and I will have to think this much more deeply than I'm about to say, so please bear with me here. But I really started to get the idea that Catholicism is like the last bastion of classical liberalism in a way. Some of these sort of classical liberal values because it combines a sense of progress, a centering of man universalism, with a necessary kind of restraint on. Because as I talked about in my review of Andrew Doyle's book and a point that Andrew Doyle makes in that book, the End of Woke, he says that the problem with both post liberals and liberals is, is that they confuse liberty with license and they don't understand the core thing that freedom isn't. Freedom is enabled by your discipline, your self discipline. Which is why a lot of Enlightenment thinkers were positive about Christianity because they thought that it would. And the family, because it thought it would put. They thought it would put a necessary temper on some of the basest elements of our nature and allow freedom to kind of flourish. But, you know, so much of liberalism has been tainted by confusion and the socialist strands tainted by the experience of the ussr. I almost felt like Catholicism had emerged as the last bastion for these. Quite contrary to what any. Anybody's intentions, as the last bastion of some of these classical liberal values, which I found super interesting because it kind of emerged at the time of like mass coinage, which is universal. Anyway. So, yeah, those are my kind of thoughts about this. So I don't know. Please correct me where I've. Where I've gone wrong on this.
- [47:04]
B
Ashley, perhaps you should affiliate yourself with the Acton Institute, a. Oh, no. Catholic entity that is devoted to the position that classical liberalism and the teachings of the Catholic Church are one and the same. As I understand it. I'm just. And. And which happens to be. Which happens to be run by a gentleman who is the, the brother of a, an actor who played a major character in the Sopranos. But that's a whole other story.
- [47:39]
C
I mean, it could be that it's
- [47:40]
B
not a. Darren Mason have better, better things to. To say on this.
- [47:45]
A
Yeah, we're looking forward to the forthcoming merger between Compact and Acton. It's going to be great.
- [47:53]
C
Yeah. I mean it could be that it's not at all necessary to go back to Catholicism, but I just found that interesting because the people who were speaking from that perspective sounded the most classically liberal to me, ironically.
- [48:05]
A
Yeah, I think it's not altogether surprising that you had that reaction. There are a lot of ironies in these discussions and it can be hard to keep track of what these labels mean or what work they're doing. Are we in a post liberal moment? I tend to think we are. Just because the development of our economy and society has moved beyond what I think of as the classically liberal order of a bourgeois society of smallholders and owners who are also operating their capital concerns. We went through a managerial revolution. We have also the merging of. Of sensibly private enterprise and the public state through the process of what the political scientist Howard, we are calls creeping corporatism. We had In World War I the war industries Board that coordinated capital, labor and governments toward national ends. And the New Deal, something like that system emerged more permanently. So we have, you know, in America lots of things like, you know, administrative procedures where environmental groups and business lobbies and labor unions are consulted in a rulemaking procedure that has really big implications for the way our society and economy function. But that rulemaking process is corporatist. It's not liberal. It's not about liberal individuals who are voting right. It's about the consultation of corporate bodies through a non democratic process. So things like that have. There's been an economic transformation in our system. And one way I understand debates over post liberalism is as an effort to come to terms with that and to ask if we can articulate an ethos that corresponds with this kind of non classically liberal form of social organization. That said, I have, I'd say quite a bit of sympathy with the Catholics Ashley is hearing from who seem to be defending classically liberal values. Because if something like due process and if political liberties are understood as classically liberal, those are something that I would see real value in defending. So things that I wouldn't want to set aside anyway. We'll see where the post liberal discussions join if they can recruit the post leftists. Not really, but the person people call post left, Ashley Frawley to their cause.
- [50:53]
C
I was just gonna say, I mean like Catholicism was proto liberal. So there's that. I mean there's obvious reasons why it gave over into liberalism and I think became developed within that. But, you know, the point of departure is the point of deter return in a higher form. So it could be that we're kind of reaching beyond liberalism while trying to maintain some of its most powerful revolutionary thrust. So, you know, it could be that we're trying to do that. We're trying to come to terms with where we are now by kind of, you know, taking stock of where where we came from. And I think that's powerful. And I definitely agree we're in a post liberal moment. Where we go from here, I don't know where I go from here. I don't know either.
- [51:38]
A
Well, to find out, subscribe to Compact so you can read Ashley's next piece and we can learn more about her ideological trajectory. Go to compactmag.com subscribe. Thanks for listening,
- [51:58]
C
Sam.