Loading summary
Transcript81 lines
- [00:00]
Adrian Wooldridge
There are certain things that you can't do and remain a liberal. So you can say let's privatise something. You can say let's have the state taking it over in certain ways. But what you can't do is say let's get rid of the division of powers. Let's get rid of the toleration of alternative beliefs about the world. Let's get rid of the individual as being the ultimate measure of society.
- [00:36]
Galen Drew
Hello and welcome to the GD Politics Podcast. I'm Galen Drew. I hope everyone is recovering nicely from their July 4th hangovers at 250. Hell, at 35, those things aren't single day affairs anymore. Today's episode is a conversation I had with Adrian Wooldridge about his new book, the Revolutionary the Lost Genius of Liberalism. To be honest, I had intended to air this conversation in the run up to our semi quincentennial. After all, the Declaration of Independence may well be the most famous liberal document ever written. But as the calendar worked out, our last episode before the fourth was a paid episode and I thought this conversation was a worthwhile listen for the wider GD universe. Although of course, if you appreciate this podcast, as always, I encourage you to go become a paid subscriber at GDPolitics to in any case, I'm publishing it now for folks to chew on as we return from the weekend's celebrations. The word liberal gets thrown around a lot.
- [01:35]
It's used to poke fun at the
- [01:37]
left resistance libs, or chastise the right neo libs. And in American politics today, it's not clear what it even means anymore. Adrian clearly defines liberalism and lays out a forceful case for why it's a worthwhile view today, despite some of its failures. We talk about who can be a liberal, according to Adrian, both socialists and nationalists, but not populists. We discuss where the ideas came from, how they developed over the centuries, and how liberalism addresses the challenges of today. It was an enlightening pun intended conversation, and I hope you appreciate it too. Adrian is the global Business columnist at Bloomberg and was previously the political editor
- [02:16]
at the the Economist. Here he is. Adrian Wooldridge, welcome to the podcast.
- [02:22]
Adrian Wooldridge
Thank you for having me.
- [02:23]
Galen Drew
Let's start with the basics. What is liberalism?
- [02:27]
Adrian Wooldridge
A very big question. A very big question. It's a difficult question to answer. In general, it's a particularly difficult question to answer with an American audience in mind, because liberalism is a term that's quite often been demonized by the right, by the Republicans who say that it's a term which is means essentially Squishy leftists. And then a lot of more right wing people, classical liberals, as they call themselves, have responded to that by saying, well, they're the true liberals, they're the classical liberals of the 19th century. And I don't think either group is right. I think that you can have big government liberalism of the sort that LBJ had in the 1960s that was a form of liberalism. I think you can have what Friedman and Hyatt would call classical liberalism, small government, big market liberalism. But neither of those two things is the essence of liberalism over the centuries. The essence of liberalism over the centuries lies in three things. One is individualism, the idea that the individual is the starting point of all political theory and that you work upwards from the individual and outwards from the individual. Rather than Marxism, which would say the collective, or conservatism, which would say tradition is the essence. The second is skepticism about, about authority, about metaphysical things, the idea that we must agree to disagree about ultimate meanings in life and that leads on necessarily to pluralism, the idea that you should have lots of different communities pursuing different ends in life. And thirdly is worry about power, the concentration of power. And liberals are identified with an emphasis on constitutions, on constraints on power, on rights, for individuals, against the sovereign. So those three things I would say are the essence of liberalism. You can be a big government liberal, you can be a small government liberal, but you can't be a liberal who believes in imposing a single faith on the community.
- [04:33]
Galen Drew
Yeah. In the book you talk about, you open with the wide spectrum of what liberalism can mean. And so I want to put some bounds around it. You say liberalism is more than the narrow set of axioms associated with limited government and free markets, but it's also less than the sum of what self described liberals do. Where are the bounds?
- [04:55]
Adrian Wooldridge
One reason why I have such a broad definition of liberalism is that liberalism is under serious attack at the moment from people who define themselves self consciously as not being liberal. I mean, obviously Xi and Putin, but also other people within the west who regard themselves as not liberal. So I think we need to draw the boundaries fairly broadly so that all people, whether they're right leaning or left leaning in conventional politics, can draw together to say this is what we will defend and this is what we believe, and we won't go beyond this, we won't compromise on these values. But as I say, the notions of individualism, of tolerance, of constraints on power, they might sound banal or very broadly conceived. We do see them, all of those things being eroded within Western Societies, we see strongmen rulers like President Trump eroding constraints on his power. We see university departments over ruling notions of freedom of speech, of diversity of opinion, and imposing homogenous beliefs or expecting homogenous beliefs. And we see individualism as a philosophy being degraded into the notion that individualism is just about a shopping mall, about just choosing things. So I don't think that these three definitional things I've chosen are, are necessarily as vague and meaningless as you might imply.
- [06:28]
Galen Drew
Yeah, I mean, let me ask bluntly, can populism be liberal?
- [06:32]
Adrian Wooldridge
No, populism can't be liberal because populism is based on the notion that the problem with power is who has it. That power is not in itself a problem. Who has it is the problem. So as long as the good people have power and the bad people are thrown out of power, then politics is problems solve themselves. So populists tend to say the people are good, the elites are bad. And they tend to say the problem with populists when they have power is that they don't have enough of it. You know, they need to have more and more of it in order to impose their vision on the world. And what I would say is that, and what liberalism would say is that power is the fundamental problem in politics, that you should always have a regime that limits power, that ascribes limits constitutional bounds to it, and also certain rights to individuals that can't be over ridden by the government. And I think populism always tends to undermine that.
- [07:35]
Galen Drew
Okay, let's try from the other side. Can a socialist be a liberal?
- [07:39]
Adrian Wooldridge
Yes, I would say absolutely. Many people who are on the left, many people who Americans would regard as socialists. After all, in the American view, if you have a national health service, you're a socialist. I think you can be.
- [07:53]
Galen Drew
Well, are you not?
- [07:55]
Adrian Wooldridge
Well, let me say that no, not necessarily. I think that the difference is the question of individualism. That if your notion of government action is constrained by the idea that you're trying to give individuals power over their lives and power over their futures, then that is a liberal idea. If you're a collectivist and you say that the individual must be fitted into a general pattern of collective action and collective salvation almost, then that version of socialism, the collectivist view of socialism, is absolutely illiberal, but something that makes room for a certain role of the state. If the role of the state is to give people control over their lives and to allow them to define themselves in certain ways, I think that is compatible with, with liberalism. So when I go to the National Health Service, which I do. I'm not surrendering control over my life to some, some, some great authority. I don't have to take the doctor's advice. You know, it's, it's, it's free to do that. And I think if you have a system whereby the government that runs the National Health Service says you can't have any alternatives, you can't have any private medicine or anything like that, then that is illiberal, definitely. But simply providing a public service for use with taxpayers money is not necessarily a liberal.
- [09:24]
Galen Drew
All right, let me try one more and then I promise I'll move on to more complicated questions. Can a nationalist be a liberal?
- [09:31]
Adrian Wooldridge
Oh, absolutely. And one of the interesting things about nationalism in the 19th century is that nationalism was overwhelmingly a liberal movement. That it was the essence of liberalism in Germany and in Italy to be in favor of the nation state as a self determining entity and against sort of empires, big governments that tried to, or big sort of conglomerations of power that tried to fit, fit nations under their heels. So nationalism, liberal nationalism was a very real powerful thing. And I think that there are certain sort of libertarians who said that anything that constrains the right of the individual to move wherever he wants or to identify with any country that he wants is illiberal. I would not accept that view of liberalism for two reasons. Firstly, because I think, you know, it's, it's perfectly reasonable to set constraints on, on people. But secondly is if you have complete freedom of movement in the world, then you will unleash illiberal forces which will bring the whole thing crashing down.
- [10:36]
Galen Drew
All right, as a nonpartisan pluralist here on the GD Politics podcast, I want to challenge this from two opposing sides of the political spectrum. So let's challenge it. First, from the conservative side they would say, okay, liberalism begins with the individual. And then we end up with atomization, loneliness, family breakdown, declining religion, declining trust. So did liberalism liberate people from oppressive communities or did it dissolve the communities that people need?
- [11:06]
Adrian Wooldridge
I think that's the most serious and profound problem that liberals have to grapple with. And I take that criticism very seriously. And it's a criticism that is at the heart of people like Patrick Dineen and the sort of so called post liberals who are probing liberalism. And the post liberal argument is ultimately liberalism destroys itself because it unglues society, reduces us to the level of atomized individuals, and creates a world that is not really worth living in. However, I would say that the greatest criticism of that sort of view of liberalism has been made by liberals themselves. The greatest critic of individualism as atomization is Tocqueville in Democracy in America. And he says that, look, this is a real danger that liberals face, but liberalism in itself is capable of generating the necessary antibodies to that. And he talks in America about self governing communities, you know, the habit of voluntary association, the habit of, you know, the town square, town meetings, towns looking after their own future. So he says that if people are allowed freedom to determine their own lives, they won't just retreat within their own tiny narrow circles. They will quite often spontaneously form communities and bonds with other people. That's quite an optimistic view, and Tocqueville was not necessarily an optimistic person. But I would say there's also another sort of tradition within liberalism, which is a sort of elite notion of liberalism which says that in a world where you are getting atomization from individualism and in a world where religion as a bonding mechanism is dying, liberal communities have to take deliberate measures through what they would call liberal education to create a new cultural glue to put society back together. So I think that it is a valid critique. It's a critique though that is anticipated by liberals themselves and that has liberal solutions to it. So we don't need to accept the post liberal solution to it.
- [13:15]
Galen Drew
I mean, what is a concrete example of using liberal education as a bonding glue for society?
- [13:23]
Adrian Wooldridge
Well, in the late 19th century, the universities, obviously Oxford and Cambridge, but also American universities that model themselves on that tried to create a self effacing governing class that took seriously its social responsibilities in terms of restraining its own spending, restraining its own noblesse oblige was part of it. And that was a very significant cultural movement because it was almost the billionaires were saying, well, their sons could destroy themselves, they had so much money that they could destroy themselves, so they had to go to boarding schools, have cold showers, be taught the values of classical culture, classical civilization, in order to be socially responsible. And that did pay a very important role in bonding society together. And a lot of those people, a classic example would be Teddy Roosevelt who comes along and says the country needs to break up the great concentrations of wealth. People who are born with privilege need to become public servants and we need to transmit the values of virtue, of a cultural tradition based on virtue. So that sense of things, and I know it sounds very antiquated and old fashioned, but it made a big difference to the way society ran both in the United States and in and in Britain in the 19th century. So the gentlemanly culture of social responsibility was Part of it.
- [14:52]
Galen Drew
I want to get more into how that all developed. But first, let's challenge this idea of liberalism from the left. So, yeah, in this version of the critique, liberalism says it begins with the individual. But people don't actually experience the world as disembodied individuals. They experience it through race, class, gender, geography, family, wealth, neighborhood schools, an inherited advantage. Why isn't liberal individualism too thin a theory for the real world?
- [15:20]
Adrian Wooldridge
It depends what you mean by all of those constraints or formative things that you've talked about. I think it is definitely the case that opportunities are constrained by all these sorts of structural factors, and we need to take that into account in allocating opportunities for individuals. But I think if you're saying, and the left in America in particular does say this quite a lot, that what constitutes the individual, what is what constitutes our identity, is our racial identity, our class identity, or our sexual identity or our gender identity. And there is nothing more to us than that. That is the essence of who and what we are. I think that's an extremely deceptive notion, partly because I think it denies agency, it denies freedom, it denies moral autonomy, and partly because I don't think it is a. An accurate description of the world, because I think individuals are to a significant extent, captains of their own fate, that they do determine their identities. Frederick Douglass was born a slave and became one of the most educated and eloquent people of his generation. Social mobility is a reality in capitalist society. Some people are born poor and become rich, some people are born rich and become poor. It's not enough of a reality, in my opinion. But are natures as human beings are not purely determined by these structural factors. They're influenced by them, but they do not constitute what is the essence of us. In fact, what constitutes the essence of us is our autonomy, our ability to shape our lives according to our wills.
- [16:58]
Galen Drew
And so would you say that view of the world is illiberal?
- [17:01]
Adrian Wooldridge
Absolutely. Absolutely. I would say it's a liberal. I would say, strangely enough, liberalism comes along in the 18th century, let's say broadly in the 18th century, as a critique of a world in which you inherit your position, you do what your father does, or your future in the world is determined by your gender. You are a function of society, you are a functionary in a structured society. And liberalism comes along and says, hey, hold on a bit. That's not right. Individuals should be able to determine their fates, choose their beliefs. Some individuals want to live one life, other individuals want to live another life, and you should allow them to do that as much as they can. And what we have now on the left is a mirror image of that world, except that the instead of putting aristocrats at the top and regular people at the bottom, it almost inverts that pyramid and says that there are certain groups of people who have been so oppressed in the past and whose identities are so damaged by that oppression that they should be given special collective privileges.
- [18:08]
Galen Drew
Let's talk about the part of your title that might get people curious about what you mean. Which is the revolutionary center. I don't think the center is generally a word that makes people leap to their feet in modern politics. What is revolutionary about the center and what specific center do you mean?
- [18:26]
Adrian Wooldridge
Sure, I mean by the center, probably what you would call right wing Democrats or left wing Republicans in the United States. I mean people who would have great worries about Trumpism on the one hand, or AOC style Democratic politics on the other hand, and quite a lot of independence would, I think, be classified as centrists. What I mean by revolutionary is the following. That liberalism arrives in the world, as I said broadly in the 18th century, as a radical critique of the status quo. The status quo is collectivist. We are born to this or that position, and it's based on orthodoxy. We have certain beliefs because that is the belief of the community. And in order to be a fully, fully fledged member of that community, we must share those beliefs. And liberalism says no. We are individuals. We choose our fates and we choose our beliefs. And that is a fundamental revolution in human history. We should never forget that liberalism enters the world as a radical challenge to every pattern of belief that we've seen before that. Now the great weakness of liberalism is that it triumphs and becomes the establishment, that those beliefs which start out as radical and revolutionary become because of success, the status quo. But whenever liberalism has become the status quo in the past, whenever it's in danger of becoming an orthodoxy, and whenever the liberal elite is intention of becoming a ruling alliance class, it has always subverted and revolutionized itself from within. And I think we need that. We need to do that again. I could go through the list of examples of that if you'd want. It might take a bit of time.
- [20:07]
Galen Drew
Yeah, I do want to eventually get into what a liberal policy platform for today might look like or what even the liberal constituency is. But first I want to drill down on this center idea because I think people think of Susan Collins, for example, who is not particularly popular in America, is constantly concerned. But like not a paragon of action et Cetera. So is the center a place on the ideological spectrum or is it a way of thinking? Because I think you described it as a place on the ideological spectrum. But in reading your book I got the sense that it was more a way of thinking in that it understands that the world is complex and needs to negotiate between competing priorities, ideas and things like that.
- [20:51]
Adrian Wooldridge
I would say you've absolutely nailed it. It is a way of thinking or it's a sort of sensibility about the world. And the first sort of proto liberal I talk about in my book as sort of the first sort of proto liberal hero is Erasmus. And Erasmus comes along at a time when you have a huge surge in popular enthusiasm for Martin Luther leading to the Reformation, saying we must purify the church and we must completely change the way the church goes. And then in reaction to that you get the Counter Reformation saying we must reestablish, assert the authority of the Catholic Church. And Erasmus stands for what he calls the via media, which is let's not get over enthusiastic in one direction or the other. Let's try and sort this out through debate, through compromise, through institutional reform rather than destroying the church or defending the church as the status quo. And I think liberals always and centrists have always got this idea that you have to be worried about, about too much enthusiasm and certainly about enthusiasm that turns into closed mindedness about the other side. So you know, the great dis about liberals is liberals are so broad minded that they can't even agree with themselves. But I think that is a sort of approach to the world which says we must debate, we must discuss, we can never grasp the full truth. So we must always leave room open for compromise. So that is absolutely the beginning of the liberal style. And when we talk about centrism as a form of liberalism, the term centrism comes from the French national assembly after the French Revolution whereby the people who liked the ancien regime and wanted to restore the ancien regime sat on the right. The people who wanted to tear things down even more than they had already been torn down sat on the left. And the people who said, well, let's try and compromise or let's try and reach some sort of non bloody solution to the problem of politics sat in the center. And that has tended to be the case ever since.
- [22:58]
Galen Drew
So it doesn't necessarily mean splitting the baby, so to speak, between the two sides.
- [23:03]
Adrian Wooldridge
I personally here we have a sort of contradiction. Liberals will say that we have to compromise and they would say that we have to be open to discussion. And that can lead to a politics of splitting the baby. Absolutely. And it can lead to the politics of the mushy middle. And the problem with people like Susan Collins might well be that they're identified with those positions. But I would say that you should be willing to compromise, you should be willing to negotiate, but there are certain fundamental things that you cannot compromise over without ceasing to be a liberal. As I say, they are individualism, tolerance, and worry about concentrations of power. So there are certain principles. And you know, Karl Popper, one of the great sort of defenders of the liberal order, talks about the paradox of tolerance. And what he means by the paradox of tolerance is that if you. You tolerate indefinitely intolerant people, then you will be on the losing side of history because you'll eventually be ruled out. And I think there are certain boundaries that we need to draw.
- [24:10]
Galen Drew
You preempted my next question, which is literally, I'll read it as I've written it. What does liberalism do with people who use liberal freedoms to destroy liberal institutions?
- [24:20]
Adrian Wooldridge
That's obviously the most difficult of all questions. And we see it being played out in Europe at the moment with the AfD in Germany, because with the AfD in Germany, a lot of people who liberal will say that they should not be given any platform whatsoever and they should be frozen out of politics completely. And that argument, which is based, you know, on. On Germany's terrible past, is that there are certain arguments that are so toxic and terrible that they can't be mentioned in polite society and should be pushed to one side. The argument against that is that the only way to civilize parties of the extreme right or the extreme left, is to share power with them. Because in the process of sharing power, they become more open to the recognition that compromises have to be made, that governing is quite difficult. And I would say that it's hard to make a definitive judgment on this. And it's very much the case that Germany has a peculiar history that needs to be respected. But in countries where what were once regarded as unacceptable, parties of the rights, where they have been bought into governing coalitions, they have tended to become more modern, moderate and more restrained. I would say the Sweden Democrats, which are part of the. The governing coalition in Sweden, which is a party that started off with very unpleasant Nazi roots, has become a more. Not respectable party, but a more responsible party. That responsibility has come with government. And Giorgia Meloni, who is denounced, well, she comes from fascist roots. You know, her party was a descendant of a Mussolini supporting party. Has been a. Has become a much more respectable politician. So I'd say the. I can't think of a fixed principle other than that what's happened in practice is that responsibility imposes a certain restraint on people.
- [26:16]
Galen Drew
I mean, is there ever a point at which liberals say this is untouchable, we won't engage, we're shutting government down because you see an impulse, at least on the left in the United States to be more absolute in rejection of. Of certain principles. And those principles are ones that you reject in the book as illiberal, but you're describing a sort of accommodation. At what point does liberalism say this cannot be accommodated in any way?
- [26:42]
Adrian Wooldridge
I think if you go around demanding the death of people because they belong to certain racial groups, that can't be accommodated. That is outside the scope of freedom of speech, particularly if you're shouting it through a microphone or publishing it on the Internet where it's public. That needs to be limited. But I think there are two big problems here. One is the tendency on the right, on the Trumpian right, to declare emergencies. We are confronted with an emergency, so we must close down regular procedures that tends to feed upon itself. And the other on the left is that we must cancel people because their ideas are so toxic they will poison the surrounding environment. I think we should err on the side of not pulling those levers except in very clear, demanding, circumst.
- [27:32]
Galen Drew
I want to take a little trip through history. So you describe liberals origin story as beginning in the 18th century as a response, I think, to economic stagnation and religious war. How does that evolve into becoming the
- [27:48]
Adrian Wooldridge
establishment by a century of extraordinary struggle? I mean, in the 17th century you have had religious wars which killed a third of the population of what is now Germany over absolute religious claims. And you also had, right up until the beginning of the 18th century, a fairly stagnant economy in which you don't have much economic growth and society essentially replicates itself over the generations. And what happens is two things. One is people get so sick of religious wars and the toll that they take that they say we must agree to disagree about fundamental metaphysical questions. And one of the great monuments to that, of course, is the United States with the disestablishment of the church. And the second thing is that society begins to become more productive. You get productivity increases piling on each other year after year after year after year. And so social mobility and geographical mob become more of a possibility. You get the invention of the steam engine, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So Society goes from being largely static to being largely mobile and more and more willing to tolerate differences in belief. And that creates a space for, for liberalism, because liberalism is the declaration that we should assume that individuals are responsible for their lives and individuals can craft their own ideological, intellectual, religious identities. And that is those ideas triumph. It takes some time. There is a, a backlash from the autocratic states across Europe, from the Catholic Church, but it becomes the default option. So if you Fast forward to 1900, that is the default option. That is the ruling ideology and the ruling class.
- [29:49]
Galen Drew
Why does it succeed?
- [29:51]
Adrian Wooldridge
Because it deals with the real problems of the real world. Because it solves the problem of religious differences by dialing down politics, and because it addresses the fact that society is increasingly mobile. What I try and show in my book is that liberalism is not just a faculty exercise of philosophers. It's not just a bunch of philosophers sitting around a table and saying what is a just society? It's people collectively, intellectuals collectively, trying to address the real problems of the world. What happens by about 1900, you've solved these problems of religious identity, you've solved these problems of social mobility, of adjusting to a world where mobility is the governing assumption of society. But there are still problems left. There's a problem of trade union organizations demanding more say in societies. There's a problem of over mighty businesses. There's the problem of the rise of power of Germany, which is based on a very illiberal model of the way society is basically coming, of the coming of the First World War and things like that. And so a group of liberals who call themselves not very originally new liberals say, say we have to rethink laissez faire orthodoxy. We have to rethink the idea that the best liberal position is just to have a free market, just to let and have meritocracy. And we have to make more role for the state as an enabler, not as an agent of collective identity or wisdom, but as an enabler of people to break up giant companies, which Teddy Roosevelt does, to create ladders of educational opportunity, as Roosevelt and lots of people in Britain do. And to some extent to play a bigger role in providing some welfare payments, more in Britain than the United States, but some welfare payments and looking after regulation, looking after the fact, you know, contaminated meat and things like that. So the state has to take a more active role. So that is a classic example of liberalism engaged in a revolution against itself. One version of liberalism, laissez faire do nothingism, is replaced by another version and I think the classic sort of middle of the road centrist revolutionary. That paradox that you've referred to is Teddy Roosevelt, because Teddy Roosevelt is a liberal, is a revolutionary by temperament, but a liberal by faith and belief and a member of the ruling establishment and changes the nature of the ruling beliefs in the United States to an extraordinary degree.
- [32:26]
Galen Drew
Very quickly we get to a place in the 20th century where liberalism is credited with saving the free world essentially from totalitarianism. But before we get to that, before we sort sort of pat ourselves on the backs here, I want to talk about colonialism, which sort of is going on at the same time as the rest of these developments in Europe. And so these liberal societies ultimately coexisted with slavery, empire, exclusion of women, you know, property restrictions, racial hierarchy, colonial violence, all of, all of these critiques. And oftentimes liberalism is aligned with the idea of empire. You know, sort of we're bringing law, markets, rights, education, civilization to these, you know, places in the global south and whatnot. How does liberalism contend with that question or problem?
- [33:21]
Adrian Wooldridge
Yeah, I mean, I think that a lot of today's liberals contend with that problem by simply ignoring it. And I think that's not a legitimate thing to do. Because liberal imperialists weren't just imperialists by accident. They regarded themselves as liberal imperialists. There was a coherent group of people who thought that both liberalism and empire came as part of a single package, that many of the most articulate and vigorous exponents of imperialism were self defined liberals. John Stuart Mill worked for the East India Company. His father, James Mill worked for the East India Company. There were a group of people in the early 20th century who celebrated the necessity of imperialism by saying that we in the west needed to impose higher cultural values on the rest of the world. And strangely enough, some of these liberal imperialists were very, very progressive at home, demanding women's rights and expansion of the vote and things like that, whilst also being acting like autocrats abroad. So imperialism wasn't just something that came in because of a few weird reactionaries. It was something that came in because of the workings out of liberalism in itself. The liberal idea of progress, the liberal idea of different groups being prepared to enter the world of and political democracy at different speeds over time. So it is not an Achilles heel, but it is something that is fundamental to liberalism at a certain stage in society. Does this mean that liberalism is totally soaked in the blood of imperialism? I think it doesn't for many reasons. The first is that for every liberal imperialist, there was also a liberal anti imperialist. There were liberals who said that imperialism was a terrible thing. Secondly, and more importantly, that when liberal imperialists ruled India, for example, a lot of Indians, the Brahmin elite in particular, read all these liberal ideas. They read John Stuart Mill in particular and said, wait a minute, this doesn't make any sense. You're saying that we should have the rights of men, the rights of women, democracy, the rule of law, and you're denying it to us. And so it was precisely these subject nations or these subject peoples who looked at liberalism and said, we understand the liberal arguments and we think it should apply to us. And so when, when India declares independence after the Second World War, they set up exactly the same sort of liberal regime that they read about in the liberal imperialists. They set up rule of law, set up democracy. They even have a speaker in parliament like the speaker here. So they say that liberalism should be a universal faith. You can't have all of it. So liberalism, far from being just a justification of power, was in this case a justification for overthrowing an illiberal imperial regime.
- [36:28]
Galen Drew
GD Politics is powered by you, the listeners.
- [36:31]
If you enjoy the show, the data
- [36:33]
driven analysis, the genuine curiosity and lack of partisan being, yes and yes, sometimes the silliness too, please consider becoming a paid subscriber@gdpolitics.com paid subscribers help make the podcast possible, and they also get twice the number of episodes and access to the paid subscriber chat where you can
- [36:52]
send me whatever questions you've got.
- [36:54]
Independent political media only works if the people who value it support it. So if GD Politics is part of your week, head to GDPolitics.com and become a paid subscriber. That's GDPolitics.com I so appreciate it.
- [37:09]
Adrian Wooldridge
Thank you.
- [37:10]
Galen Drew
You've described some key moments in history where there are liberals on both sides of history in a sense, because as you describe liberalism, it's broad enough to encompass a whole lot of ideas and people arguing for different policies and practices throughout history. Of course, the 20th century is an example when there are not liberals on both sides of history. And I think that it's so of liberalism's crowning achievement is World War II and then the Cold War. And to preview the place where we get sort of once liberalism, quote, unquote, wins, it becomes entrenched in the sort of decay that accompanies all of that sets in. Before we get to that, I'll let you indulge for a moment, sort of how do you understand the victory of liberalism in the 20th century?
- [38:01]
Adrian Wooldridge
The victory of liberalism. And let me be indulgent here because it's very easy to forget how extraordinary this renaissance in liberalism was and how much the world owes to it. And again, I keep going back to these post liberals and post liberals who are saying liberalism is this terrible thing which we're overcoming without recognizing the extraordinary genius and achievement of this set of beliefs. In the 1930s, we lived in a world which is eerily similar to the world that we live in today. You had strong men ruling. You had autocratic regimes governing more and more of the world. You had the number of democracies declining not just because of Hitler, but because of Mussolini and Franco and Salazar in Portugal. You had a world in which intellectuals were losing confidence in liberalism. They thought it was yesterday's belief. Even, you know, Walter Lippman starts talking about how Hitler has, you know, is defining the future, is taking very, very firm decisions and is solving problems which liberals can only dither over. You had a decay of liberalism and an idea that it was yesterday's, yesterday's set of, set of beliefs and that the new beliefs of the future would be Stalin or Hitler, Mussolini, collectivist beliefs, beliefs that were bigger than just the petty concerns of self interested individuals. And that goes, you know, a long way. I mean, you know, you have lots of people in Britain who want to compromise with Hitler. In the very late 1930s. You have America very reluctant to enter the, enter the war. War takes a lot of persuasion and you have a lot of people who think that the Soviet Union is a wonderful thing. And then by the mid, you know, by the end of the Second World War, you have a whole blueprint in place for a different kind of society. You have the beverage Report in, in Britain on the welfare state. You have Keynesian economics and you have, you know, the international, the transatlantic alliance which begins to be forged in the 1942, you know, before, even before America is, is really entering the. So you have an extraordinarily rapid reconfiguration of liberalism. And then after the Second World War, that plays itself out over decades of very rapid economic growth, very impressive stability, sustained opposition to the expansionism of the Soviet Union and a degree of fulfillment for regular ordinary working people which is quite, quite, quite astonishing. And when that begins to look as though it's about to run out of steam, as it does in the late 1970s because of too much government action, too much collective action, too much spending on welfare and things like that, you get another breath of life coming from the neoliberals, from the free market people who say that we must sort of change the balance between the state and the market and another 20 or 30 years of Liberal dynamism generated by that. So it's an extraordinary, extraordinary achievement of both renewal from the horrors of the 1930s and self renewal from the stagnation of the 1970s.
- [41:14]
Galen Drew
You describe both parts of the post war era as liberal. So the immediate post war era of welfare states, unions, public investment, industrial policy, lots of regulation, and then also sort of the Reagan revolution of deregulation and freer markets and things like that. For people who, you know, I know you've already described it once, but for people who are like, okay, what do I even make of this? You know, if both of those competing visions of the world are liberalism, okay, then we're either all liberals or none of us are liberals. Or like, when at least do you know which model to employ for, for the time that you're in if you want to be sort of a good liberal?
- [42:02]
Adrian Wooldridge
I think that what I'm trying to say is that liberalism is a solution to a set of problems. And whether it's a small government solution or a big government solution, whether it's a pro market solution or a pro government intervention solution is a secondary thing. Depends on the circumstances. I think it was perfectly right after 1945 for the government to take a more active role in reconstruction. I think it was perfectly right in the late 1970s for the government to be pulling back from what liberalism had become, partly because liberalism had decayed and partly because you had a new set of technological innovations which demanded a different sort of set of economic policies. But there are certain things that you can't do, do and remain a liberal. So you can say, let's privatize something. You can say, let's have the state taking it over in, in certain ways. But what you can't do is say, let's get rid of the division of powers. Let's get rid of the tolerance toleration of alternative beliefs about the world. Let's get rid of the individual as being the ultimate measure of society. So there's certain things that you can't compromise on. And the reason I'm insisting on this is that we now face a world in which the liberal model that was put in place after the 1980s is beginning to fall apart. So we face the question, how can we repair it whilst preserving what is best in liberalism and not compromising fundamental liberal principles? So I'm trying to say, you know, these are the constraints within which we must work. We definitely need a revelation in terms of certain fundamental ways of running and regulating society. But we don't need a revolution which opens the door, in my opinion, to Donald Trump.
- [44:01]
Galen Drew
So 1989 is probably the crowning moment for liberalism in most people's lifetimes, a year before I was born. So I've only lived in the sort of aftermath of what liberalism achieved. And in my lifetime, three sort of moments stand out as really damaging the liberal brand in that post triumphal moment, which is the war in Iraq, the financial crisis, and more broadly, globalization's uneven effects, you know, hollowing out parts of, well, both of our countries and that pattern repeated across, across developed economies. Are those specifically liberal failures? I mean, maybe we'll get into maybe if they are, what, what to do about it. But you think of Iraq, the sort of the idea of team America, world police spreading democracy, you know, these high ideals, the financial crisis, deregulation, and then globalization, again, a sort of deregulation.
- [45:05]
Adrian Wooldridge
They are specifically liberal problems. They are problems of liberal overreach, problems of liberal over self confidence. But they stem from certain very fundamental liberal assumptions. So I think any liberal that tries to say they were just mistakes outside the liberal paradigm is kidding themselves. And I think just as any liberal who tries to say that imperialism were just mistakes outside the liberal paradigm is kidding themselves, we need as liberals, if we're going to revive revived liberal order, we need to take ownership of those mistakes. The Iraq war was, you know, there were many people at the time said it was all a war for oil and things like that. But I think that Bush was genuine in believing that the best way to solve the problem of the war on terror was to spread democracy around the world. That that was the way that terrorism was a response to a lack of, of liberal democratic order. And once we had a liberal democratic order universalized, then that would solve those problems. I think that that was a belief of great naivety and it was a belief that failed to accept the extent to which liberalism needs to be rooted in a certain soil, in a certain culture. You can't just impose democracy on a society that is unprepared for it. You know, it's a result of a lot of institutional changes over a long period of time. The global financial crisis was created partly by bankers, greed and the rest of it, but also by the notion that, you know, efficient markets will allocate money more efficiently. A real vigorous faith in deregulation and the hollowing out of a lot of our countries was, you know, it was the China shock to a significant extent. But again, the China shock was based upon first of all underestimating the ex, you know, the, the growth of China, but also the belief that China would become a regular nation if you allowed it to grow. It would become a democratic, free market society rather than a mercantilist society. This was liberal naivety, liberal optimism. And I think liberals, liberals need to be a lot more cautious and pessimistic in the future.
- [47:32]
Galen Drew
You describe other ways in which liberalism decays, which is managerial liberalism to a certain extent. The bureaucratic officials, the Davos panels, global institutions. You talk about the ways in which meritocracy becomes perverted, where the liberal elite establishes regulations that keep them in power and doesn't make them accountable in a way that liberalism would suggest that they should be. So all of that is part of the era of liberal decay as well. But I want to get to the point in this conversation where we talk about dealing with today's problems from a liberal perspective. So I won't go too far down that rabbit hole. And there's a lot of different sort of angles that we can talk about. There's, you know, the global order as we, as we speak, the war or not war in Iran is still playing out. You know, we in the United States, and I know you in Britain as well, have had lots of debates about immigration, lots of debates about free speech, lots of debates about meritocracy and social mobility. And then, of course, there's finally the Trump question for liberals. So I want to get through as much as we can, and maybe let's start with the international order. What does a liberal perspective of, on today's international order look like? Can the more Machiavellian or sort of might is right perspective of the Trump administration be liberal? Is it necessarily a strong NATO? What is the liberal solution to today's international order?
- [49:12]
Adrian Wooldridge
Well, I think the great question of the international order is solved essentially by the. We talked about imperialism before, but the notion of a liberal hegemony, that is that I think if you have a global power that is capable of keeping the sea lanes open, capable of keeping global commerce functioning, that is capable of being the sort of the Leviathan of the world, the world is better off. We had the British performing that role in the 19th century. We had the Americans performing that role after the Second World War, and that reduces the overall incidence of, of wars, and it provides a global good, which is public order. But that hegemon needs to be hedged around with rules and with institutions so that everything is not just determined by the hegemon, but is negotiated with other players, middle powers and the rest of them, and which has a sort of global legal framework. I think that we worked pretty well within that framework after 1930, 40, after 1945, with America, America as the global hegemon, but the United nations and various other institutions, a whole network of institutions taking on very specific roles within that. It was an annoying order. America paid too much for it. Other countries were free riders. The World Trade Organization, the rest of it became sort of, particularly the United nations, became a bit out of control, a bit unruly. But I think that world, world or all of those inconveniences was a price worth paying for a stable world order. And the world order that the Trumpists want to replace it with, which is America. American power, unconstrained or civilizational alliances based on dislike of non Western civilizations. It's not clear exactly what they want is a much more unstable social order. And I think, think that, you know, America sees itself as now confronted by the might of China and trying to do things to make sure that it can constrain the rise of China. I think it was in a much safer position when it was embedded within global institutions than it is now. Even though those global institutions were annoying, you know, it meant that China was basically isolated with three quarters of the world probably siding with America. I think that's. It's probably less the case case.
- [51:38]
Galen Drew
Now, what does liberalism do about immigration? Because I think that the conventional view is that it means not open borders per se, but a quote unquote, liberal attitude towards immigration, which is open to asylum seekers and the like, which has caused an enormous backlash across the West. I think I can preempt at this point what you might say, which is that liberalism can be both, both pro large scale immigration and against large scale immigration, as long as it maintains certain ideals. So how does liberalism address this very moment?
- [52:13]
Adrian Wooldridge
Absolutely. So what happened after the 1980s was you get two sorts of liberalism combining together in a sort of uneasy synthesis. One of those sorts of liberalism is neoliberalism, the free market. The other form of liberalism is sort of social liberalism, progressive left wing liberalism. And they're bought together very much by Bill Clinton, who is on both, you know, both a social progressive and a neoliberal in his policies. And where these two ideas come together in the most perfect form is over immigration, because immigration is good on the business side. It provides businesses with lots of workers and people with lots of employees. And for social progressives, it's good on the social progressive side because it's nice to be nice to people. It's nice to bring in immigrants. You want multiculturalism, you want flourishing of lots of different cultures, and you want a signal that you're not very happy with the old Anglo Saxon Protestant version of the United States. And so it be, you know, liberal immigration policy, which meant not quite open borders, but being very friendly to immigration, very friendly to asylum teachers, was something that united Clinton, united Reagan, united Bush, who's George W. Bush, who was very, very pro immigration, Texan approach to things. And I think that has outlived its welcome both in the United States and in Europe. And this enthusiasm of the Bobo elites, the bourgeois bohemian elites, for immigration has driven away huge numbers of working class voters, particularly white working class, but not exclusively white working class voters. And if you look at the travails of left liberal parties in Europe, Europe, they're primarily driven by the immigration question because it divides knowledge workers, who tend to be pro immigration, from manual white manual workers who tend to be anti immigration. And I think the only way that the centrist politicians can restabilize their position and reclaim popular support is by having a much tougher policy on immigration. And by a tougher policy on immigration, I mean two things. One is that you only accept people into your, your country if they're to the net benefit of that country. So you exercise control. You say, where are labor market weaknesses? What sort of people does the future labour market mean? And quite often what it means is more educated people, but also assimilation. You have to be say that you can only come to this country if you accept certain western or liberal or however you want to frame them values and live by those values, rather than, you know, having a multicultural hotspot. If you have those two things, then you're perfectly welcome to have to having flows of people, you know, a society which makes room for immigrants. But if you go against both those principles, or even just one of those principles, you will raise such popular unease that you will get a populist winning as Trump has won in the United States and as Nigel Farage may well win in the next election in this country.
- [55:22]
Galen Drew
Is this an ideal liberal policy or is this just being politically practical, given how politics has evolved?
- [55:30]
Adrian Wooldridge
I think it's both. Because I think that one of the things that I try and argue in my book is that liberalism must always be an adjustment to the world as it is. It must be a problem solving philosophy. But secondly, I think that providing a stable, stable government, a stable society, a set of rules that people can collectively live by, is essential to liberalism. I would say liberalism is very different from libertarianism. It isn't just anarchists. It isn't just letting individuals do what they want. It is also a recipe for social cohesion within. It's a recipe for rule governed societies. And a society that doesn't govern the flow of people from outside is not a rule. Government, Society, society.
- [56:17]
Galen Drew
How does liberalism address economic opportunity today?
- [56:22]
Adrian Wooldridge
Well, I think.
- [56:23]
Galen Drew
Yeah, actually I'll just leave it at that. If that's enough of a prompt, go for it.
- [56:27]
Adrian Wooldridge
No, no, no, that's a massive prompt because I think it's a really interesting question. I think the fundamental thing, the defining thing about liberalism is individualism. And what individualism should do is provide opportunities to individuals on the basis of their merits, their ability and their effort combined. And I think that that means providing a ladder of opportunity. It means providing opportunities, providing free education at high school, at primary school and subsidized education for certain people at university level. It doesn't just mean, you know, letting the market play. It, it involves a certain degree of intervention. It involves making up for past injustices to certain groups of society. If you have poverty or concentrated in certain groups of society, you need to focus some resources on that group to make up for that, that past problem. But it doesn't mean treating people as nothing more than members of certain groups. So it has to be. Affirmative action is obviously the great problem in the United States. And I think affirmative action that is geared to providing opportun is to individuals, particularly individuals who suffer from lack of, of social opportunity from poor schools and things like that is absolutely right. But just giving a certain number of places to people on the basis of their group identity is not liberal.
- [58:02]
Galen Drew
How does liberalism deal with tech? Because on one hand, tech companies are innovative, disruptive, anti bureaucratic, global, global, very liberal in some ways. But they also concentrate power form monopolies in some instances, arguably allegedly, and then go on to manipulate attention and, and, and all the like. And now we're on the cusp. We're already in a new era of artificial intelligence where some liberals would say let it rip. Other liberal. I don't, I don't know how you would categorize them, but maybe other liberals would say say halt all of the data center construction right now. Now that we're entering this new era in which liberalism will, you know, as you, as you sort of present it need to solve new problems.
- [58:53]
Adrian Wooldridge
Absolutely. I would say that from the 1980s onwards in the rebirth of liberalism after the rather collectivist 1970s, the assumption was basically that markets are good and business is good. And we shouldn't regulate, regulate wherever we can get out of the way of business. That's a good thing. And that was the era of Microsoft and Apple and all sorts of great tech revolutions. And after that, Google and the rest. Now I think there's a case for being much more business skeptical when it comes to big tech for two reasons. One is concentration of power. Because these companies are either monopolies or verging towards monopolies. They have an extraordinary degree of power of the sort that we haven't seen since the late 19th century. And I think that Lord Axon once said power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. And I think that's true of the private sector as well as the public sector. So we should be worried about private sector concentrations of power as well as public sector concentrations of power. But secondly is the nature of these businesses. These businesses depend, not depend, they depend on making money out of information, information. But they that often lead, leads to spreading emotional contagions, to fragmenting our attentions, to making us addicted to certain technologies or to our machines essentially and reducing our power as individuals to get information, to control our lives, to be rational. It's like people not quite peddling opium, but it's a sort of peddling of opium. It makes people addicted to stimuli provided by machines.
- [60:39]
Galen Drew
All right, here's my final question, which is a practical one. If liberalism is going to succeed in the face of illiberalism today, it needs a constituency, it needs to win. What is today's constituency for liberalism? Because I think, I think, you know, the audience for this conversation is certainly not a large enough audience to win in a broad, diverse political landscape. Right. We've had a pretty high brow, academic, nerdy conversation about philosophical ideas. Don't worry, listeners, I'm aware of that. So what does a, maybe not populist, but popular liberalism look like?
- [61:26]
Adrian Wooldridge
I would say it's a discontented center. I think there are a large number of people at this, in the, the center of politics who feel almost disenfranchised by the fact that most of the emotional and some of the intellectual energy in politics is going to the far right and the far left. Those people on the far right and the far left are enthusiasts. They feel the wind is in their sails. And the people in the center feel disempowered by that. They feel underserved by their politicians. They feel as though they're sort of, they have this albatross of elder elderly Democrats or elderly liberal Republican people who have lost their, their relevance to the world. But they want to have a new generation of political champions. And I would point to the, the very, I think independence, the largest political group in the United States now. I think that they're fastest growing, although
- [62:16]
Galen Drew
with caveats because, yeah, a lot of them align with one party or the
- [62:19]
Adrian Wooldridge
other, but they're aligned with that party partly their independence, because they don't like the direction of those parties. So they would say, I'm an independent Republican. I don't rather vote for a soft Republican than Trumpist Republican. So I think they are, a lot of them are centrists and a lot of them would vote for my recipe of a radical center that's focused on problems. So they don't tend to, they don't want all this sort of virtue by category that you get on the far left. They don't want the nastiness of Trumpism, but they want a sort of muscular centrism. I think there is a constituency there and we just wait a, waiting for, for somebody to come along. And I'm older than you. I can remember the days when we were despairing about the Democratic Party and the seven dwarves and the rest of it. We said they'll never have a great leader again. It's all, all about it now. We then you got, you know, Clinton coming along for all his faults, great talented politician who revitalized the center as it, as it then was. So I haven't given up hope that somebody of that, of that quality, I wouldn't say that character, but of that quality will come along and change the nature of politics. America's a big country and it does 10 generate itself.
- [63:28]
Galen Drew
I my follow up question would be then sort of what do we make of centrist politicians like Emel Macron? But I think we need to save that for another day. Unless.
- [63:40]
Adrian Wooldridge
No, no, Macron is fascinating, but let's talk about him some other time.
- [63:44]
Galen Drew
Let's get back together for the French election.
- [63:46]
Adrian Wooldridge
Okay, let's do that. That's a great idea. Thank you.
- [63:49]
Galen Drew
All right, sounds good. Adrian, thank you so much for joining me today. I really appreciate, appreciated it.
- [63:53]
Adrian Wooldridge
No, no, thank you. Thank you. That was great.
- [63:55]
Galen Drew
My name is Galen Droock. Remember to become a subscriber to this
- [63:58]
podcast@gdpolitics.com and wherever you get your podcasts. Paid subscribers get about twice the number of episodes. You can also join in our paid subscriber chat and pass along questions for
- [64:07]
us to discuss on the show.
- [64:09]
And you ensure that we can keep making a podcast that prioritizes curiosity, rigor and a sense of humor. Also, be a friend of the POD and go give us a five star rating. Wherever you are, listen to podcasts, maybe even tell a friend about us.
- [64:20]
Thanks for listening and we will see you soon.