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Kevin M. Schultz, "Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History" (U Chicago Press, 2025)
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A
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B
Hello, everyone. Welcome to another episode of New Books Network. This is your host, Morteza Hajizadeh from Critical Theory Channel. Today, I'm honored to be speaking with Dr. Kevin Schultz about a recent book that is published with Cambria with Chicago University Press. The book is called why Everyone Hates White Liberals, including white liberals. Dr. Kevin Schultz is professor and chair of History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. He's the author of Buckley and Mailer and Tri Faith America. And this is a very topical subject, liberalism. Kevin, welcome to New Books Network.
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C
Thanks. Thanks for having me. And thanks for all the work you do introducing your listeners to new books. I really, really appreciate that.
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B
Thank you. Such a great book. And I really like the COVID because anyone who picks up the book can see themselves in the COVID as well. I don't know if it was intentional or not, but before we start talking.
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C
About the book, yes, that's how it was designed.
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B
There you go. I actually didn't notice it until I wanted to read the book and say, well, this is an interesting design. But anyway, so I do encourage our listeners to get the book. It's a very readable book and quite an interesting and creative design as well for the COVID Anyhow, can you just very, very briefly introduce yourself your field of expertise and then tell us why you decided to write this book. How did the idea of the book came to you, the idea that everyone hates white liberals, including white liberals?
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C
Yeah, of course. But I feel like we have to go back first and explain what the book is to those who are listening, what the COVID looks like, which I gotta say, was not my idea. Props to the University of Chicago Press who came up with it. But it says in big block letters why everyone hates white liberals, including white liberals. But it looks like grayscale on your computer. But in reality it's more like an aluminum foil that is a mirror image. So when you hold it up, you sort of see your own face in there. I guess they were assuming that white liberals would be the predominant buyers of the book. But it is this very clever way to think about, actually one of the thesis of the book which we'll get into, which is this sort of amorphic and amoebic definition of what a liberal is and how a liberal, at least in the United States, no longer owns their own ability to define what it is a liberal is. So that's sort of one of the ways we were toying with the COVID But yeah, so, so that's, I love the COVID It wasn't my idea, but I, I, when I saw it, I thought it was just fantastic. It stands out in bookstores. So anyhow, I appreciate you bringing that up and I will be sure to tell the people at University of Chicago Press, they would love to hear that. As for your question, though, how did I come to write this book? Look, it was sort of the bringing together of current day politics and things I was seeing in my everyday life, along with my historical expertise, sort of bringing these two things together. So like most people around the world, and especially in the United States where I'm based, I'm based in Chicago myself, at the University of Illinois, Chicago, we were seeing political polarization. We were seeing Republicans and Democrats sort of talking past each other, unwilling to engage with each other. There was fewer than, not fewer than ever, but a declining number of bipartisan bills passed in Congress. The right and the left in the United States really seemed to be talking past each other and able to work together on the common good. And then I realized too that this polarization was not just political, but it was determining where people were moving, what neighborhoods they were living in. It determined what clubs they joined and what kind of extracurricular activities they did outside of work. It even predicted sort of what kind of work they would do. And in addition, and one of the things that really struck me Was some of the dating apps would have things like, would you date across the aisle? If you're a Republican, would you date a Democrat? If you were a Democrat, would you date a Republican? And I thought there was something really stark about the polarization that we were seeing. And what I was recognizing sort of as a citizen of the United States and as a citizen of the world, was that these two sides were sort of so polarized that they were really rejecting the center. They were rejecting the notion that Americans, which is of course, where I am and what I study Americans have a lot in common actually. And they actually, on issue by issue, you can go through abortion rights, gun safety, things like that, economic distribution models, and Americans, 60, 70% of Americans will basically agree on these issues. But nobody really knows it because all we hear are the two polar extremes on the left and the right, and the center has disappeared. So this was sort of the contemporary question that I was really engaging with and worried about. And then I tied that up to my previous works, which you sort of mentioned. My first book was called Tri Faith America. And it was how in the 1920s and 1930s, a bunch of Jews, mostly rabbis, but not all rabbis, Catholics, some priests, and Protestants, Protestants, Catholics and Jews all came together to sort of try and create a new vision, a new understanding of what the United States was in the midst of the 1920s. United States, where you had anti immigration people trying to close our borders, we where you had massed vigilantes trying to impose martial law in certain areas and keep certain populations from having access to the ballot box, where you used to have expansive economic disparities, inequalities of wealth. And of course, I'm talking about the 1920s in this period. And it was the Klan that were the people who were wearing masks at the time. The Klan in the 1920s was the largest social movement in American history. And there was all these successful demands that we close our borders and end immigration, which had been rapid since the pogroms started in 1881, but even, of course, before then, throughout 19th century American history. So how do you craft a vision that counters this? And so my first book was telling that story, and my second book picked up in the 1950s, 60s and 70s when that vision started to crumble and fall apart. And in both of those previous books, what this centrist position was called in the United States was liberalism. It sat in between communism on the left and sort of authoritarian fascism on the right. And Americans believed in the grand liberal tradition. They believed in something called liberal, the liberal way of life, the American way of life, they called it liberalism. And one of the great finds in my book that I was really excited about was when I found the speech in 1932 that Franklin Delano Roosevelt coined the phrase liberalism in the American political context. It was a surprise to me to discover that although there had been some usages of the word liberal and liberalism in previous decades in American history, it wasn't a prominent part of our discourse at all. In Europe, of course, it had been. There had been liberal parties in Spain and in Sweden since 1809, and of course in Britain in the middle decades of the 19th century you get the British Liberal Party, but in the United States it is not a thing at all. There are some bump ups of people talking about liberal parties and things like that, but it's never a predominant theme until 1932 when FDR has to defend what we now know of as the New Deal. But of course, he was running for president at the time and hadn't coined it quite as such. And people were saying, oh, this is just communism, this is just socialism that you're plotting. And he wanted to say, no, I actually want to shore up capitalism, I actually want to regulate capitalism and save capitalism from itself. And so he ends up with his proposal of banking regulations, of redistribution, economic redistribution, things like that. And he calls this sort of centrist tradition liberalism. I found the speech in 1932 when he first named it Rex Tugwell. One of his advisors said, how did you come up with this? And he sort of shrugged his shoulders and said, does it matter that much? And we never really got a great answer. Of course he knew the European tradition, he knew what he was pulling from. But he also had this very famous political sense of what would work and what wouldn't work. And he recognized that it would work. And he didn't want to sort of anchor himself to another philosophy at the time. So he went in 1932 and stuck with it. And it became the key phrase to describe sort of the economic regulated economy that he proposed that we call the New Deal now. And he brought it forward into the 1930s, of course, when he was president, into the 1940s, into the 1950s. Eisenhower inherited the liberal tradition and on into the 1960s. It wasn't seen as part of being the radical left, it wasn't seen as being part of the radical right. It was this grand centrist tradition. So to get back to the very original question which you asked, how did I come to this book? I was curious to take our own times when There seemed to be no way to talk about this centrist tradition that we actually have in the United States. There was a grand impoverishment of language to describe what this common policy, common sensibility was. And I had located it back in historical times, you know, 100 years ago, basically, and a few decades since then, and it was called liberal. So the book became sort of, where did this word liberal come from? Where does liberalism come from? And how do we, from the 1960s, 70s, 80s on, of course, into today, generally, as a population, come to hate liberals and have all sorts of terrible things to say about liberals? And we want to own the libs, and we want to dunk on the libs. And liberalism is really a bad word. So the book, in some ways, is kind of a word history, talking about how the word changed meanings and how people sort of put all this baggage onto this word when people were trying to call themselves this stuff. But rather than a word history, or I guess I should say, in addition to a word history, it's also a history of sort of the attack on the centrist tradition in American political history. That and how from the 1960s, the latter half of the 1960s, all the way to today, there have been various groups that are trying to widen their lanes on the left or widen their lanes on the right and disparage this grand centrist tradition.
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B
It was a fascinating introduction. You unpacked a lot of. I mean, you touched upon a lot of important points, and you actually covered some of the questions I had ahead, and you brought up new questions to my mind as well. Well, I don't know now where to go, where to take it from here, because you. So in a way. So I'll definitely want to ask the question that just popped up in my mind as well. But before going. So in a way, I think I love the way you introduced. The book is the history of the world. And I really love that phrase used in the book, rhetorical assassination, to describe the decline of liberalism. And you describe it as rhetorical assassination. And you're absolutely right, because I've done a lot of podcasts on liberalism. I've spoken with Alexander Lefebvre, who's based in Australia, Matthew McManus and a number of other people. The only person I couldn't talk to is Patrick Deneen. He originally accepted, but then he declined because he didn't like the questions I sent. But he's very amorphous. It's the term liberalism. These days, at least when I talk with my friends, I'm able to Define liberalism, that centrist position that you mentioned. But when it comes to practice, especially in the past 50 years, it's something completely different. And again, it depends where you take it in Australia, as you mentioned earlier, or in America. But let me ask you another question here, which is about the title of the book. What do you mean by why did you use the word white liberal in this book? And what does it tell us about the American political identity? Because I guess it's a very divisive term. When you start using white liberal, you can see where backlash might come from.
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C
Yeah. So it carries extra baggage today. So why I used it was partly, to be frank, it's a marketing term because it is such a hot button phrase, especially coming from the right in the United States today, to refer to white liberals. Liberals would have worked just as well. But adding the white to the title allowed me to talk about a really important section of the book. So to answer the question that I posed in my introduction, which is, how do we all come to hate white liberals? I talked briefly about this period in the 30s, 40s, and 50s when it defined this centrist tradition and when white liberals were imposing higher taxes, when they were creating a wide middle class, when they were using government to do things that they thought were beneficial to the broadest stretch of American population. And before I go on, I want to say that I will talk about this later. This book is not a celebration of liberalism, although it acknowledges that liberalism brought about many good things. But it also takes a lot of time to talk about what liberalism did wrong and where liberals made mistakes. So it's not just a celebration of a return to a kind of liberalism, as I think you'll know when you finish the book. You see that I don't end with that call at all. So it is something that I get into about what are the unique problems with liberalism that invite people to hate it so much. But I want to get back to your question about white liberals. So to get at the central question is what happens to this grand centrist tradition? And the arresting line that I'm sure everybody loves, if you love, we'll see. But I call it an assassination. And there wasn't just one shooter, but there were multiple shooters. So the first couple chapters of the book sort of to talk about and unpack these various critiques of liberalism in America. And I think I spend so much time doing it in the beginning because they really lay the foundation for the criticisms that your friends and my friends today have against liberals. So the first attack that we really see, historically in the United States comes from the right. It's about exactly the same time as those on the left, but we have to start somewhere. So we'll start with the right. And this is where you get folks like William F. Buckley, Jr. Who's known as the patron saint of the American right. Whitaker Chambers jumps in here, eventually Richard Nixon and Kevin Phillips, these guys will come in a little bit later, and they basically are looking for an enemy to bring together the various strands of what is a really quiet conservative movement. In the 1940s and especially the 1950s, it had been weighed down by sort of overt antisemitism, by overt racism. William F. Buckley sort wants to shave off some of the harsher edges of conservatism and redefine a conservative movement. And rather than build something that is constructive, that has a strict policy plan, what he wants to do is build a movement of conservatives in opposition to liberals. So his whole movement isn't to advocate for the Cold War, although that's a part of it. It isn't to advocate for lower taxes, although that's a part of it. It isn't to advocate for a return to Christian values, although that's a part of it. Instead, it's to oppose liberals, which he defines as challenging all of those components of conservatism. So his big manifesto of 1959, which still to this day his whole career, is the sort of most complete telling of what the conservative movement is. 1959. And it's titled Up From Liberalism. So of course he's stealing the title up from a 19th century book, up from Slavery. Right? But he's not paying attribute to the author of Up From Slavery, but he's comparing 19th century chattel slavery with 20th century, mid 20th century liberalism. He's saying they're the same thing, right? So you get these attacks on the right, and the attack is really simple. Liberals don't know what they're doing and they're going to bring about socialism and communism. They're the gateway drug to this far left revolution that they're going to bring in. And so in order to defeat them, we need to defeat liberalism. Otherwise we're going to bring about communism. At the exact same time the right is making this argument. You get people on the left that are trying to assassinate liberalism too. You get people like Saul Alinsky, the great organizer from Chicago. You get people like Irving Howe, the great first editor of Dissent magazine. You get all these really prominent leftists in the United States, and they say liberalism is basically not bringing about socialism at all, because we're socialists and we hate the liberals or Democratic socialists, what they call themselves or social Democrats, and what liberals instead are doing is sort of they're capitalism's beard. The liberals are. They're the ones who are protecting capitalism, making it nice. Their vision of liberalism is not to bring about, you know, a Moscow apartment, but instead they're building suburbs. They're creating this sort of placid, Bland vision of 1950s America. And so what liberals are to the left, which starts in the 1950s, 1950s, is basically the group of people that are foreclosing radical possibilities in American politics. And so they hate liberals, too. Of course, we see this today with Bernie Sanders and aoc, and all of these people are sort of attacking this liberal position. They're still around. And now to finally get to your question, another group of people that were attacking liberals in this period, although they come a little bit later and a little bit earlier, I should say, is black civil rights advocates. You look at people like James Baldwin or Gwendolyn Brooks or Lorraine Hansberry and of course, Martin Luther King Jr. And they all see this moment from, say, the end of World War II, 1945, when the United States might live up to its creed of equality. And they started hoping that the white liberal is going to join with the black liberal advocates and bring about true equality for black Americans. They see this possibility, and they've got some good reason for this. They see Brown v. Board of Education, the Supreme Court case that. That tries to end segregation in public schools. There is a lot of action pushing towards racial equality in the United States. And so, of course, James Baldwin ends his classic book the Fire Next Time with a plea that maybe now at this time, the white liberal and the black liberal can hold hands and create our nation. What a great phraseology he had. And create our nation. But if they fail this time, all hell is going to bring loose. And this is where the title of the book comes around. It'll be the Fire Next Time. Right? So he sort of predicts this. And by 1960, late 1963, you can actually chart it month by month in 63 on into 64 wide numbers of black moderate leaders. Lorraine Hansberry, James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, they start giving up on the white liberal. They're not actually about bringing about true equality for America's black population. And so starting in 1964, 65, 66, you get all of these black leaders who are pushing back against white liberals. So this image of the white liberal as being somebody who doesn't live up to their promises. Who is a nimby, which is a phrase that we have in the United States that says not in my backyard. So we'll bring about true equality in Birmingham, Alabama or Jackson, Mississippi. But if you're going to bring that up to Chicago or New York, we don't want that in our backyard. So white liberals get imagined to be something quite different than the right sees them, something quite different than the left sees them. But all these people who are all talk and no substance. And this phrase white liberal really picks up steam in the black critique in the 19, middle of the middle decade, middle years of the 1960s and into the late 1960s and into the 70s. And it becomes the catchphrase that people start using for it. So I could have used liberal. But in order to sort of broaden the book and look at who these people who are attacking this liberal centrist tradition, I wanted to include white liberal because like so many other cases in American history, sort of the black civil rights advocates are the first ones who make these arguments. And then you get a number of minoritized population. The women's movement, the Chicano movement, the American Indian movement, the gay rights movement, the Palestinian rights movement movement. They all excoriate and hate white liberals for not being radical enough to live up to their own creed. So that's sort of why I use that in the title, because it allowed me to open up this critique and see all of these people who are assassinating, as I like to call it. Although I gotta be careful with this rise of political violence we've had in the United States. I realize that's a charged word, but that's the phrase I used when I wrote the book and published it a couple months ago. And so this assassination came from sort of multiple, multiple angles and multiple shooters. And then I, you know, to push this metaphor even farther and surely this, this is too far. I like to call it a sort of circular firing squad where they all shoot liberalism, which is in the center, and they end up going on to shoot themselves as well. And so that might be, you know, again, it's, I, it's a terrible metaphor to use in these days when political violence has been rising so rapidly. But that, that's sort of how I imagined telling this story.
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B
Yeah, and I guess you've been very clever in using the frame in terms, because when you read the book, you do see why you have chosen the word white liberal here when again, you brought up a lot of other questions to my mind. I'm not going to let them pile up. I'm going to ask them anyhow. One thing you mentioned about black liberalism, actually, I've ordered a book on black liberalism in America. I think it was a recent book published by Princeton. I haven't received the book yet. It. But I do understand that even John Rawls, who is a deeply respected figure from both the centuries, the left, I don't know about the far right, if they like him or not, but at least they haven't kind of mocked him that much that I haven't seen. But they don't like him, apparently. But I guess he was also criticized for being sort of silent during civil rights movements. And when you mentioned white liberals, I was reminded of that famous interview that I think was Malcolm X. Right. He particularly said liberals, that white liberals. He's a fox, that case. He was. And also James Baldwin as well, as you mentioned, we're very critical of liberals who didn't really support their cause. But the question I had here, I think we can see why everybody. Well, why everybody hates liberals maybe because they have this reputation for being a hypocrite. And we are talking about what we call liberalism today in the United States, part Europe or Canada maybe as well. They don't live up to the standard they said or the values. And I guess you mentioned the Palestine, the conflict between Palestine and Israel, I guess, has brought this to surface as well. There is a lot of talk about how to support human rights, but you can see how Israel is supported by all those governments. There's another academic, I think, whom I'm sure you know, Jason Hickel, I guess he's more radical in his critique of liberalism. But after Trump was elected, he said liberalism is dead. And he came up with this formula, which I have some sympathy with, but I'm keen to know your thoughts. He said that liberals have all these great values, human rights, liberty. At the same time they have a commitment to capitalism. But when these two come into conflict, they take the side of the capital. That's why liberalism usually gives way to fascism. I don't think you can call it the current government of United States fascist, if you want to be very academic about it. There are elements of that. But do you agree that. And he said that liberalism is dead. Right. And he has also crushed any socialist alternatives, such as Bernie Sanders, maybe, even if I don't think even the left would call him really socialist. But anyhow, what do you think of the fact. Do you agree with the way he has formulated the current state of liberalism, that it Gives way to fascism and usually takes the side of, of capital rather than ordinary people.
- [25:48]
C
Okay, good question. So in the book, this goes back to sort of the word history aspect of this book. And I talk about how words change meaning over time. I mean, any of our listeners, any of us could come up with a word and we could study its history over 500 years and see how it's changed meaning and how different populations have introduced new meanings. And then that word has slowly changed. You know, think of a stupid word like cool, which actually used to mean cool and still means that, but it also means other things as well. I could come up with a hundred words off the top of my head that shift meaning over time. And liberal, of course, is a weighted baggage, a weighted word that has so much baggage on it that it has shifted meaning over time as well. And so a part of what I say in this book, and I firmly believe this, is that if you. The word liberal has become sort of a Rorschach test. So if you tell me what you think a liberal is, I'll actually tell you what your politics are. So your understanding of what a liberal is tells me more about you than it tells me about liberals. And partly this is a great strength and a great weakness of liberalism as a concept. So just to do a little pocket 500 year history of the word liberalism, Liberalism comes from the word liber, which is Latin for free. So that's what its core is, it's freedom. Right. So how do we build societies that are free? Well, in order to be free as an individual, we need to be free from the constraints in our society. So In Shakespeare's time, 5, 600 years ago, liberal meant to be sort of broad minded and generous in spirit. And so many of the listeners here probably had a liberal arts education, which of course was the opposite of a vocational education where you train just plumbing to become a plumber. But a liberal arts education meant a broad thing where you were going to benefit from learning philosophy and poetry and literature and political science and basic mathematics, things like this. So let's have this broad understanding. That's what the word liberal meant during Shakespeare's time. Then it got added to be in the, basically the 16th, 17th and into the 18th century. It meant to be free of sort of religious prejudice. It meant to be in favor of religious liberalism or religious tolerance was a phrase they used all the time. And this became a route because the Catholic church was sort of a strong yoke that seemed to be denying individual freedom and individual expression. So here is this Thing that is denying freedom. And so liberals are going to rally against that thing. They're going to rally against any sort of predominant view of how people, individuals can have a relationship with, with their God or gods. And so liberals are going to be for religious freedom and religious tolerance. Then in the 18th century, who is it that is sort of restraining freedom? It's kings and queens. So you get the liberals pushing for the revolutions in the United States and in France. And this is when you get the addition of this kind of political language of individual rights, of civil rights, of the fact that we might want to be governed, have a say in who governs us, and have an opportunity to reject those that we don't deem to be being fair. So the liberals are those who are pushing against monarchs and kings and queens and things like this. So liberalism, I want to reiterate here before I go to this next step, is this spirit of freedom. And it has changed its own sort of emphasis depending on who it is that is repressing that freedom. This brings us to the 19th century when it seems like these kings and queens are having this monarchical power. So not only do people want political freedoms, but they also want economic freedoms. They don't want to be beholden to royal monopolies and things like that. So they envision the liberals do these sort of mom and pop shop small capitalism as a way of empowering individuals to be more free. So this is, you know, to pause for a second at your question. This is where liberalism gets yoked to this capitalist endeavor. Those liberals go back to John Locke's pronouncement from a little bit prior to this, where he adds property to the conception of what liberal is. Of course, John Locke never used the phrase liberalism, or if he did, he used it very few times. And he certainly didn't call his overarching philosophy liberalism. That was not language that he used, but language that was imposed later in time. So in this 19th century moment, free market capitalism gets yoked to liberalism not as a founding principle of what liberalism should be, which is individual freedom, but as a way, a tool that people could use to further express their individual freedom. Now, if you fast forward to this last stage in the late 19th century and in FDR's time, the people that were actually constraining individuals were no longer the yoke of the Catholic Church. It was no longer kings and queens and their monopolies. But now it was the oligarchs. Now it was the JP Morgans and the John D. Rockefellers. And so liberals changed from embracing capitalism. But saying what liberalism has to be now in order to expand individual freedoms is actually a restraint on capitalism, the use of the state to regulate and control capitalism. This happened in Britain, in the British Labour Party, before it happened with fdr, which is sort of one of the reasons FDR brought the word liberalism as the key phrase, because he was tapping into this British tradition. But of course, the Brits from the 1880s onward were talking about restraining the power of the oligarchs, restraining the power of the big rich capitalists, because those were the ones who were denying individual freedoms. Those were the ones that were denying individual liberties. So liberalism has shifted meanings, you know, every couple hundred years. And there's this sense that this 19th century sort of vision of liberalism, which is an embrace of free market capitalism, people like to call it classical liberalism, even though there are iterations of liberalism that goes before that, we could say is actually more classical than that vision. But they like to use this phrase because it sounds lofty and mighty. But it is just this one chapter that came before our most recent chapter in the meaning of the word. So there are countries where the Liberal Party came about in the 19th century, Australia you mentioned, but also in Britain and in other places where the Liberal Party is now seen to be the sort of more conservative, more free market, more economically minded, more we, shall we say, late stage capitalist or neoliberal kind of party. But in the United States, liberalism as a party came later than it did in those other places. And so liberalism had shifted meaning. So now the American understanding of what liberalism is, is different than it in other parts of the world. It's kind of fascinating. Whenever I do these interviews with British people or French people or Danish people, they have a very different understanding of what liberalism is. And in the United States, it means more akin to maybe what a Labour Party would have been in those places. Not necessarily a socialist party, but definitely something that would be more to the left than in England in the way they understand what the liberals are. So I think we need to understand those shifting moments and when liberal parties emerge in various geographies and how they were then their roots dug into those chronologies. And that's why the United States has this very distinct vision that is different than other people. So I would, to get back to your question, I would kind of reject that notion that it is necessarily married to capitalism, because I would then ask, what is capitalism? Is it embrace of markets? Are there regulations to capitalism? Is there a certain kind of floor that is, is a component of capitalism? Is democratic socialism. However we want to define that something that comes out of the liberal tradition. I think we're watching something really fascinating right now in this very moment where we're seeing like Zoran Mandami is this candidate for New York City mayor and he's trying to take the endorsement of the Democratic Socialist Party of the United States, which he sort of has danced with, let's say, and take the Democratic Party centrists which have danced from the liberal tradition and marry these two things. And because liberalism has shifted and now saying it's liberalism is to oppose the oligarchs because the oligarchs are denying. What is liberalism all about? Freedom. Right. That's its root word. So there is this Venn diagram where the socialists and the liberal tradition overlap in where they want to expand individual rights and individual freedoms. And I think we're watching right now certain Democratic Party politicians especially trying to operate in that, that gray area of the Venn diagram.
- [34:42]
B
Well, I'll ask you at the end. I want to know if you're optimistic about that path or not. Because at least what we have seen in the past 20 years maybe was that the Democratic Party, they more or less were the centuries market oriented party and the consequence was unfortunate to the rise of the far right. One of the consequences, I can't say it was the only reason, but one of the reasons. But anyhow, there are a couple other questions that want to ask. And by the way, I love the way you kind of laid out the history of the word liberalism. And I think it's quite important for people to understand that before just jumping into what liberalism means because a lot of it is, as you mentioned, is sort of convoluted and it's politically charged ideology depends which side of politics it comes from. And there was a wonderful book, the Hidden History of Liberalism, if I'm not mistaken, the Hidden Story or of Lost History of Liberalism.
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C
Lost, yeah, Lost History of Liberalism. Elena Roosevelt.
- [35:40]
B
Yeah, that's right, yeah. Which beautiful. And I really love the chapter. I think the last two chapters are about the United States and puts it into perspective how this whole world evolved in France, in Germany, how it traveled to United States from German socialists and how it changed. So I think it's quite important for people to understand that. Let me ask you about the conservative attack on liberalism. Like I mentioned, I did want try to talk to Patrick Deneen, but after I guess Trump was elected and JD Vance and the defense or war secretary, I don't remember his name now they're all close friends with him. I think he was too busy with the other media requests for interviews that he didn't respond.
- [36:22]
C
He was afraid of you. He was afraid of you, maybe because.
- [36:25]
B
I'm guessing he didn't like the questions either. When I first saw the question, I thought I didn't know Patrick Denim myself was why. I thought that it was a. Yeah, it was a critique of liberalism, but I thought it was a progressive critique of liberalism, but I didn't really agree with some of the ideas he had in the book. Anyhow, conservatives attack liberalism, but they rarely. They don't really define it. I mean, they attack. They don't define conservatives on what they want, but they attack what they don't want. Can you talk about this kind of trend of conservatives attacking liberal? What angle do they, let's say, go for when they want to attack liberalism? And do they give us an alternative? That alternative to liberalism is this conservatism, and this is what it means, this is what we want. Do they come up with that, let's say, definition of conservatism?
- [37:18]
C
So, look, I think there are some smart conservatives critiques of liberalism that are out there, and Patrick Dineen sometimes makes them and sometimes, in my opinion, doesn't make them. But I think there is a valid argument, or at least I think there's a valid argument and definitely a discussion to be had about from a conservative perspective. If you see conservatism in this way, and a lot of religious conservatives do, coming maybe out of a Catholic tradition, in some ways that liberalism is too individualistic and that my focus on individual freedom, of course, the root word of liberalism is free, right? And my concern about individual freedom denies the things that I have to give up to be a member of a community. Now, I think that's a really important critique of liberalism. And I actually think that liberals and people who would call themselves liberals for the last hundred years would counter that argument. They would disagree with that characterization and they would say, and Eleanor Roosevelt, I have her quoted in here as saying this, so this goes back a hundred years ago, saying that that's a false definition of what liberalism is, but liberalism is nonetheless a way in which we can govern. That is a balance between too much individual freedom, be that libertarianism or be that sort of an authoritarian sensibility.
- [38:46]
A
And.
- [38:47]
C
On the other hand, a communal, overly communal sensitive sensibility which is sort of embodied by communism and liberalism is this sort of sense of individual freedom while acknowledging the social necessity that we have in order to succeed. So we live in a large society. We live In a complex society, we live in a society that is interconnected and that we need to have collective endeavors in order to succeed. So to give a very few nuts and bolts examples, we need roads to get to the store, we need roads to get to the hospital, we need roads to get to our public schools. And should the roads be pay per use on an individual basis? Or does that create a society that denies too many people their individual freedom because it only rewards rich people? Well, most people say yes. So let's have public roads that we pay taxes into. We give up a little bit of our freedom in order to have public roads, public schools, the same thing. We all benefit by having an educated population, at least economically and at least socially. Maybe some party of the, some political parties benefit by having less educated populations. But as a society in general, we all made this deal that we're going to be willing to contribute some of our revenue to the commonweal. We're going to give up some of our own individuals freedoms so that other people can succeed too. Because in the long run it raises the whole level of our, of our life. So, so, so this is a valid critique of conservatives that conservatives sometimes, but most of the times do not make about liberalism. And I think liberalism would have a valid answer. And I think that's a rich conversation. Patrick Deneen has made that conversation. Christopher Caldwell has made that argument about liberal. There's a strong Catholic critique of liberalism as being overly individualistic. And I think that' important conversation to have. However, I think that's a very small subset of the conservative critique of liberalism. I think in general, the more popular understanding of what liberals are is weak and wimpy socialists who are going to take from people who earn their money and give to people who don't deserve it. And they're going to create a population of people, usually in their imagination, minoritized people, black and brown people who are then going to suck on the teat of the government and not have to do their own individualistic things. And so they can therefore sort of ride on the coattails of the earners in American life. And in addition, liberalism is going to reward those people and create a whole infrastructure that is premised on rewarding diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, DEI efforts is going to sort of champion woke ideology. And so I think that critique that I was talking about, that is a valid and interesting critique, is a very small portion of the conservative critique, maybe 15%, but the rest of the 85% of critique that is of liberalism that we see in the popular Imagination today doesn't have that kind of sort of sophisticated language. And instead all they want to do is, is. There was a T shirt I saw when I was driving my kids down to spring break to visit their grandparents in Florida. We stopped at this gas station, and at this gas station there was a wall of sort of Trump supporting T shirts. And one of them said, I oil my guns with liberal tears. It was all about dunking on the liberals as these soft people. And the guy who took over for Rush Limbaugh's radio spot, of course, Rush Limbaugh is the greatest great famous radio host who mainstreamed a lot of these conservative ideas and then attack on political correctness and things like that. When he died of cancer, the guy who took over his slot was a guy named Don Bongino. And he made it his whole career to attack the liberals. And he just said, the liberals are wiping their butts with the Constitution. They're bringing about fascism. He used all this evocative language and the liberals were destroying America. Of course, Don Bongan, Dom Bongino is no longer doing podcasting and radio work. He's now the deputy director of the FBI as appointed by the current president. So he's mainstreamed that view of what liberals supposedly are. Of course, I know no liberal who would agree to their definition of the term. So it is sort of this fictionalized specter that is more useful in rallying their troops to go out and fight vote.
- [43:22]
B
You're right. Yeah. And I guess that's a common strategy with a lot of depends on what ideology you're against. Instead of defining it, you just attack it from what it doesn't represent. And the funny thing is that, you know, sometimes, you know, some, some public intellectuals, like Jordan Peterson, for example, is always, you know, criticizing the left because they're, and he considers them to be the culprits pre or to be responsible for the death of liberal values. But when you listen to him, what is the liberal value according to you? And a lot of times he's against those liberal values or what liberalism, that centrist position actually advocates. There's another question I have. You did talk about why even the Left, especially in 1950s and 60s, you touched upon that earlier. So I'll leave it to you if you want to expand it or not, why they were against liberalism. But the question I have is that liberals in that centrist tradition, it owes a lot to. I want to know if I'm right or wrong. So I'll leave it to you. You are the historian. I Think, and some people I've spoken with, they believe that it owes a lot to socialism. All those progressive values, most of them come from those socialist tradition. Otherwise liberalism would be that made European man who owns land. But those rights that they advocated doesn't really extend to women or minorities or people of non European identity. Do you think, do you agree that the centrist tradition of liberalism owes a lot or has received a lot from socialist tradition in terms of all those progressive values? And if yes, how can we bring these two closer together? You know, the left, left and the centrist liberals?
- [45:15]
C
I mean, so the answer is simple. And the answer is yes, right, That a lot of the more progressive legislation that has been passed by the 20th century liberals was pushed, demanded and came out of the socialist tradition. And I would say a lot of the more staunchly capitalistic components that were put into the liberal tradition were pushed by the right. And I would say that a lot of the Civil Rights act that were passed in the 1960s were pushed by civil rights activists. So I think one of the key components of liberalism, and you talked about liberal values and how Jordan Peterson says that we're not with them, but then he doesn't practice them. One of the key liberal values is it's sort of of willingness to entertain claims that maybe there are structures in our society that are denying people their individual freedoms. And if that case is made successfully, liberalism has this great ability to morph and include those critiques. So is it all entirely black civil rights advocates credit that we got the Civil Rights act of 1964, the Voting Rights act of 1965, the Fair Housing act of 1968. So sure, yes, civil rights activists forced white liberals who were sitting in the halls of Congress to write these laws. But that also doesn't mean that the white liberals who are sitting in Congress didn't then write those laws. So there is this sort of relationship between the pushes and pulls of society. And one of liberalism's great sort of components is its ability to expand its own understanding of who gets to define where, what freedom is and how freedoms are being denied and what the role of a liberal government should do. So I think the answer is yes. And this is one of the things that my book has been critiqued about, and especially from the left, is that they think that I don't say what I just said. They think that I don't give, say the left enough credit for bringing about the New Deal. And the only reason that that FDR passed the New Deal was because he was afraid that socialists and communists were going to overthrow the entire capitalist order. I think the story is actually historically and far more complicated than just that simple narrative. But I think the historians on the left have criticized my book for saying that some civil rights advocates say that I don't give enough credit to the black civil rights advocates for pushing this legislation. I don't think that I do, but I do take their criticism. I think that they're right, that those people do deserve, whether they're socialists or whether they're black civil rights advocates from the 1950s, 60s, whether they're women who are pushing for women's rights activism, they do deserve credit for bringing these issues up. And then what happens is a complicated dance with liberals who are governing within our democratic society. And so I absolutely think they deserve credit, But I don't think they can say they brought about a socialist revolution. And I'm denying the socialist revolution because I want to favor this agenda instead. I don't think that's true either. And that's how I traditionally push back against those criticisms. Let me say one other thing, since you sort of brought it up twice already. I do think that the United States has passed its most progressive legislation in the 1930s, in the 1960s, perhaps we're seeing a future of that coming down the pike now. When the far left out of the socialist tradition, traditionally in the United States, called democratic socialist or social democracy, when that tradition has combined with the liberal centrist tradition to push legislation, when they're in opposition to each other like they were in the 1950s, then the sort of liberal centrist tradition has fewer voters, has less energy, has less mobility, and then they're more susceptible to critiques from the right. But when, like in the 1930s, in some component of the early 1960s, especially the mid-1960s, especially when those two traditions can sort of find common ground and fight together, the United States actually passes a lot of progressive legislation. Of course, the socialists are never happy with all that gets passed because they always want more. But nonetheless, they have combined together. I think right now we're seeing a moment where we've got the energy of the left is really coming from the Bernie Sanders, the aoc, the democratic socialist tradition. That's where the energy is coming. You'll see in the New York Times Magazine, Timothy Schenk, a historian, is talking about sort of what I talk about a little bit in the book. But the challenge now is not to sort of ameliorate the centrist tradition, but instead for liberal centers, is what Timothy Schenck calls for. To embrace this far left critique. And the way to move forward is to dunk on the oligarchs, to push the country further to the left as a way that the left and the center can collaborate against the sort of Trumpist right. So I think they're very historically accurate in saying that that is the way forward. You asked if I was hopeful that there was going to be a counter to this. I actually am hopeful means I'm pushing for it. And I don't want to play my political cards here, but I will say there are some historical signs that these two components are coming together and finding more common ground. And the common ground is in opposition to both the sort of rising authoritarian challenge of the Trump administration. I think we see that especially in critiques of ice, the no Kings rally, of course, which taps into the liberal tradition of the 18th century of we're going to be against kings and we're going to stand for a different kind of liberalism. And especially I think in the way that Trump has proposed sort of messing with the composition of the House of Congress so that he can ensure Republican majorities against Democratic will. I think that's really provoking a lot of energy. And then the other aspect of what's provoking energy is the indisputable economic inequality, rise of economic inequality. And I think those two factors are sort of forging together a lot of this energy from the center and the left. Whether the Democratic Party is competent enough to take advantage of that is sort of an open question. I see Mamdami is sort of, sort of trying to find a pathway and trying to find language to get to my book. You know, why everyone hates white liberals. This tradition used to be called liberalism. And there's sort of this search for a way to describe this tradition. Not just a word that can replace liberalism, but also a set of policies that will embody this vision that people can believe in.
- [52:11]
B
Let me ask another question about why liberalism is. Usually one of the accusations against the liberals is that there are these elite university educated people who are out of touch with reality, with working class people. And I do see some legitimacy in this narrative. Not in terms of mocking it, but being out of touch with the working class people. And that's why the people like Trump or those working class people can better communicate or can better identify with the like likes of Trump or Boris Johnson, all those right wing populist figures. And I think it was a criticism that even David, God forgot his name, the famous anarchist who passed away a few years ago, David Graeber David Graeber.
- [52:58]
C
Thank you.
- [52:58]
B
Yeah, even David Graeber had that Liberals all these market centuries here, university educated, and I think that century liberal tradition has sort of of lost the battle of ideas when it comes to winning the hearts and minds of the working class people. What do you think of this idea and you discuss it in the book, that how cultural mockery helped conservatives to shape liberals as these elites who are out of top. Do you see any legitimacy to this argument and why is it so widespread?
- [53:33]
C
Yeah, I mean, I appreciate you bringing this question up. So how the book book moves forward might be the best way to talk about it. So I described these sort of three attacks from the left, from the right, and from civil rights advocates that all sort of bubbled up and hit a peak moment in the middle 1960s. And so by the late 1960s and into the 1970s, there are very few politicians who are eager to call themselves liberals. There are very few people defending what had previously been known as the liberal tradition. And without any defenders. People started to, you said culture of mockery coming from my book. They started to mock liberals for being out of touch. They started to say that liberals were not actually acting in the best interest of the common man like they were in the 1930s. Now, in some ways there is some truth to their arguments. So again, I want to stress that I do criticize liberals in my book throughout for bearing some of the responsibility for this criticism. Look, in the 1930s, when liberalism became this interest tradition as named by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it was in the depths of the Great Depression. And so the policies he was putting forward were economic policies that were trying to raise poor people out of poverty. They're trying to put people to work, trying to set up economic jobs programs and trying to create Social Security so that older people when they came to retirement age wouldn't be destitute. He was really trying to set an economic floor where all Americans could not fall below so that we wouldn't have as much poverty in the United States. Of course, during the Great depression, there was 25% unemployment nationwide in cities like Detroit, heavy manufacturing cities. Chicago unemployment reached 50%. So this is an incredibly economically depressed time. That's why we call it the Great Depression, of course, Course. And so his liberalism was a very much an economic, a very quantitative kind of liberalism to put people back to work. Liberalism shifts course in the 1950s and 1960s, in part because the Great Depression is over, the United States had spent its way out of it. The federal government had raised taxes on the rich, had Started investing in defense industries in World War II economy. And in that huge infusion of money and of capital from the federal government, all of a sudden middle class jobs opened up, up. And by the 1950s, in the United States, we have the richest society that humankind has ever seen. And we have the fattest middle class that the United States has ever had in the 1950s and into the 1960s. So liberalism no longer needs to be an economic, quantitative kind of thing. And so liberalism shifts in the 50s and 60s to be what I call qualitative liberalism. Where now liberalism is trying to put people through college. It's trying to beautify roads and create environmental protection acts. It's definitely trying to increase the quality of life. So there is a shift from quantitative liberalism to qualitative liberalism. And in this, I think there's a lot of working class people who feel like they haven't quite taken Ben. Taken all the benefits of this quantitative liberalism. Where are the jobs programs? Where's the economic leveling that's going on? In that exact moment where that critique rises up, you get a very astute collection of Republican politicians and political activists. Kevin Phillips is this great political theorist and activist. He wrote his PhD dissertation in the late 1960s. It had to do with voting patterns. And what he saw was the rise of what we today call the white working class resentment against liberals because their policies were no longer centered on the white working class. He goes and knocks on the door of the 1968 Richard Nixon campaign. And they answer the door, a guy named Pat Buchanan, and says, you're hired. And the book gets published the next year in 1969, called the emerging Republican Majority. And that book becomes the playbook for Republican Party politics ever since. And the roadmap is we don't even need to win New York or California or Seattle or San Francisco. We don't even need to win these parts. We can form an electoral coalition of the south, south and the Midwest by making fun of liberal elites in the Northeast and the West Coast. And we have enough electoral votes, that emerging Republican majority, and this becomes the playbook. It's not just the solid south because he binds it to the Midwest. And if you look at electoral maps from 1968 until today, you can see this Republican agenda from the south and the Midwest. That's where the focus is. And the game plan is not just to race bait, although that's a small, quiet part of it, dog whistle politics, but also to mock liberals for their supposed elitism. Shortly after that, you get things like the limousine Liberal, which is a political phrase targeted by John Lindsay, who is this New York mayor in the late 1960s, early 1970s. And he was this super rich guy, 6 foot 5, quarterback, good looks, great head of hair. If you ever see a picture of him, his hair is amazing. And he would drive in on his limousine, and then he would come in and give a speech about how we needed to have all these poverty programs in black communities and how we needed to raise the level of public education in Harlem. And then he would get in his limousine and drive to his Upper west side apartment, and he would just sort of put a mockery to these liberal values. And writer after writer after writer attacked liberals for not really believing in what they say, but instead being these elitists who would hide behind the ivory tower and promote these liberal values while they themselves were secure in their economic situation. And to fast forward to Trump, you know, this is why we see Trump having such success attacking universities. This has been sort of the first arm of his attack. Attack. We've also seen him successfully attack journalists in journalism, because this is the first line of his attack. It's important for us to remember, though, we want to sort of see Trump as this sort of moment, and I think there are some good reason for that. But this critique goes back and predates Donald Trump by several decades, starting in the 1960s and going in the 1970s. You know, one of the key books that we talk about is what's the Matter With Kansas, Right. This great book that tries to understand why Kansans continually vote against their economic best interest, and instead of doing that, they elect all these Republicans. His answer when he writes that book is that it's a cultural politics that get sort of prioritized. I think it's more complicated than just that answer. But that book comes out in the early 2000s or mid 2000. 2000 off. So Thomas Frank, the author of that book, is writing about what we now see as Trumpism before Trump had even entered into the political arena.
- [60:34]
B
Really enjoying this conversation. And I'm sure the listeners who are listening have stayed with us, Antina, and are asking one question. We're talking about everything except the elephant in the room, neoliberalism. And. And that's, again, an important part of your book. Well, we're not going to go into the definition of neoliberalism, but I guess people know what we mean by neoliberalism. People like Milton Friedman, Hayek. How do you think neoliberalism reshape conservatism and also liberal politics? Because A lot of those, I think Hayek, he didn't consider himself to be a conservative. And he wrote in his book, a chapter of his book is, why am I not a conservative? But what do you think the impact of neoliberalism was on the decline of this centrist liberal tradition in the United States? And what happened? What were some of the consequences when everybody, the politicians of this, including Democrats, both in the United States and England, started replacing those civic liberal values with. With market logic? So maybe two parts of the question. The impact of neoliberalism on liberal tradition and replacement of those liberal values with market logic.
- [61:55]
C
Yeah, so this is chapter seven of the book. And it was really very tricky to sort of disentangle the word neoliberal from different meanings. And one of the things that I discovered, really much to my surprise, Gary Gersel talks a little bit about it in his book the Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order. But I sort of unpack it a little bit more robustly, is that in the late 1970s and 1980s, neoliberalism as a phrase emerges simultaneously in two places with two slightly different meanings. One is successful, and it talks about what you are talking about, and the other one is actually more successful, but it gives up the phrase neoliberal. The one that is more successful is neo dash liberal. Instead of a single word, neoliberal, there's a dash between the neo and the liberal. And that comes from a bunch of Democratic politicians, Bill Bradley, these politicians of the 1970s and 1980s, this younger generation of Democratic Party politicians who are tired of losing elections. You know, there are several presidential elections where The Democrats lose 49 states to one. And so they want to bring about a new vision of what liberalism is. They don't think liberalism is broken as an ideal. They think liberalism is broken as a system of policies. So they want to rearrange the policies. They say manufacturing is basically dead. So we need to reimagine what liberalism looks like with a new economic base. We need to invest in technology, we need to invest in Silicon Valley kinds of economies. They adopt this language of neoliberalism. Charlie Peters is a journalist in Washington, D.C. in this era, he had come out of the 1960s liberal tradition. He'd worked in the Teach for America. He was a founder of Teach for America and the AmeriCorps concept. So he came out of this sort of Kennedy Johnson liberal tradition, and he wanted to revamp liberalism for a new age. And he calls them the neo dash liberals. They all hate the name. And when Gary Hart loses his attempt to be the Democratic nominee in 1984. They basically give up the name neoliberal. They call themselves the New Democrats, and they then also join the Democratic National Committee, the dnc, and they get joined by the likes of politicians with names like William Jefferson Clinton, also known as Bill Clinton. Joseph Biden is a member for a while, Al Gore. So these neo dash liberals actually become some of the key figures of the Democratic Party for the last 40, 45 years. So that's one strand of neo dash liberalism. At the other time, you get the other vision of liberalism, of neoliberalism, which you're sort of talking about, which is sort of our commonsensical understanding, which signifies basically a form of politics that prioritizes the global flow of capitalism regardless of national boundaries. And in addition to that, so you imagine free markets independent of any national boundaries. And in addition to that, a sense that economic considerations need to be paramount when we're deciding all sorts of policy issues, economic issues, education issues, how many children to have. What we really need to make those decisions is an economic sensibility that drives our morality. So this is sort of this new version of what neoliberalism is. If it's good for the pocketbook, it's gotta be good, so we have to promote it. That's sort of how we understand neoliberalism today. And it infuses its vision into all sorts of politics of austerity. You know, what is austerity? It's a way that we can control our budgets and balance the budget. Because balancing budgets seem to be the most important thing in this neoliberal economy where economic values are the most important, important values. This, of course, comes about in the 80s and 90s. It is a Republican vision in the beginning. And I would say that as the Democratic Party is trying to find its way out of its sort of doldrums in the 70s, 80s and 90s. You really want to know what's the matter with Kansas? Partly it has to do with the cultural issues and the rise of abortion politics and rise of pornography and legalizing drugs and this kind of thing. But the other part is these sort of working class, the white working class people, the farmers in these rural states. They have been sort of taught that liberals are just going to spend and do these policy benefits, take your tax dollars and give it to people who are not necessarily worthy of it. And the liberals struggle to redefine a new economic vision. And the Republicans say, let's unleash capitalism. That's your way out. So the Democrats don't really have an answer. The Republicans have an answer. That's probably not a great answer. It's neoliberalism writ large. But these people who are sort of hurting want some sort of way to imagine their way out of it. And so that's one other reason why they joined the Republican Party. At least the Republicans have a vision. It's this business friendly ethos that is, that is prioritizing neoliberal politics. One magic trick that happens, this is fascinating to me, is that even though this is a Republican politic in origin, sort of non union, nothing is going to slow the flow of capitalism. We're going to have free markets, we're going to have these NAFTA sort of economies that are going to prioritize the flow of capital and the flow of goods and the flow of workers to their cheapest places, regardless of what happens in the United States to the steel workers in Pennsylvania or something like that. This, then the demo, then the Democrats sort of say, okay, we need to embrace some of this economic responsibility. And in that moment, the Republican Party then places all of the blame for neoliberalism on the Democrats. And so right now we see so sort of the paying the price of neoliberal politics. It's not a Democrat, it's not Reagan who's paying the price, but Bill Clinton and he's the one who signed NAFTA even though it was George Bush who negotiated NAFTA to. They don't want to talk about that. You're working class and you're angry. It was the Democrats who did this stuff to you. So Democrats now not only have to carry the albatross of this sort of tax and spend liberalism, but also the response which is called neoliberalism. And they can't get out from under the albatross of liberalism. Which is why I end my book by saying it's time for the left and time for the center to give up this language of revitalizing the liberal or border. You get people who I like Eric Alterman or Adam Gopnik, who I struggle with sometimes, and they're saying we need to return to a fighting liberalism. And my response to that would be no, you're just playing into the sort of rhetorical trap that has already been set for you by those on the right who once you start calling yourself a liberal, they've already sort of of develop the neural pathways in the American voter's brain that signifies what this means is you're a tax and spend and you're not going to care for the white working class. So I think that the Mamdames and the Sanders and even Gavin Newsoms need to come up with a new way if they want to have a fighting chance to combat MAGA America, they need to come up with a new way to revitalize their ideas.
- [69:28]
B
I love the point you made just a minute ago about how the Republicans negotiate all these new liberal, let's say deals of free market and then the Democrats end up signing it and then the Democrats are the ones who are blank and they get I guess this pejorative term the globalist. They call them the globalists. They are all in cahoot to destroy America. The funny thing is that again I think before, I don't know if we were recording it or before the interview I mentioned and that in Australia a month ago there was this march for Australia which was an anti masam immigration march which ended up to be something else. But there were a couple of people who were, you know, they're random YouTubers who interview people there. They were interviewing a couple of those there and they said well they're bringing a lot of immigrants into the country, they're selling the resources and they hated the labor government that is in place in Australia. And they said we need to remove Albanese was the Australian prime Minister. But I said well all the things you're saying, they were the liberals who actually did all those things. And now it's Albo, the labor leader who is, well he's of course like the Democrats in the United States. Yeah, he has to go with some level of those economic policies but he's getting blamed for the things the liberals did which is, and it's ironic, I sometimes say that I do have something in common with all those conspiracy theorists who are out there in the street. Street. We know what the problem is. But they blame the minorities, they blame the immigrants, they don't really blame the people who brought about those things. And they get tricked, I would say get tricked into this rhetorical game that you just mentioned. I have a lot of other questions but I tried just to end up with two which are close, I know but. And it's I guess to pick up from where you left. The term post liberalism is gaining traction and it's not a new thing, I guess John gray said it 20, some 25 years ago. Patrick Deneen talks about post liberalism from a very conservative perspective. Liberals talk about post liberalism Question I have. And again what you mentioned here, what is the alternative? There's no point in saying let's Fight back for this century's traditional liberalism of what is an alternative as a political identity and a way forward. And you also argue that we should retire the word liberalism as a political term, which again, comes to that semantics of it. But what is the alternative to that and where should we go? That's the first question. And I ask the second one. You've talked about Mamdani a couple of times. And I do feel whenever I get disappointed, I still look at this progressive side of politics and I get more optimistic. What Mamdani is doing is, I guess, the same thing that the socialists, the leftists, the centuries did in 1960s and 70s community building, engaging with their communities, which is a way forward. And you can see how the billionaires are also marching up against him. But having been successful, hopefully they won't be. And are you optimistic about the future? Let's say so. Two questions.
- [72:31]
C
Let me say from a historical perspective, I am optimistic for the future, but I think it's going to be a rough road there. And I think it is going to be a rough road there in part because of where we started, which is that we are so polarized here in the United States and throughout the world. And I think that there are a lot of easy answers that are put forward by a lot of people on the right. Again, I sort of drew a division. I said there are some really interesting, thoughtful people on the right. They're not necessarily the ones who are governing right now. So this isn't just a blanket smear against the right. I actually think the right and the left engaging with one another is the way forward. I find it really troubling in the United States, especially where you have someone like Donald Trump who's done some good things and done some horrible things. But I think that what's troubling is, is one of the things that's troubling is he's openly calling for divisiveness. You know, he, Charlie Kirk's it's not a funeral, because that's not what it was, because his parents weren't even there. But at the political rally that was surrounding Charlie Kirk, he, you know, denied one of these most human and brave things that I've seen in a long time, which was Charlie Kirk's wife forgiving the shooter. And he said, no, I can't forgive. I hate the enemy. Enemy, and these people need to be eradicated. And this is, you know, this is sort of an opposition that frightens me, if that's the stance that we're going to take. But I Am hopeful on two other accounts besides the historical one. So let me give you four reasons why I'm slightly hopeful. The historical one is that, you know, there is a time after this, but I think it'll be rough getting there. Secondly, history shows us that when the left and the center or find some common ground and coalesce, we do have this dynamic uptick in progressive legislation. And I think a lot of those progressive legislation that we could see would be protections of the democratic system, which we have now seen so many ways that they've been sort of taken advantage of that we didn't even know that they needed protections. So I can see that coming. A third reason I'm optimistic is here's a simple fact. In the United States, one third of the United States voted for Donald Trump. The voting age population, 1/3 of the United States voted for Kamala Harris, and one third of the United States didn't vote at all. Okay? So there are some electoral college reasons why people didn't vote. My state's going to be red anyway, so why do I need to go vote? My state's going to be blue anyway, so why do I need to go vote? I'm just going to stay home.
- [75:17]
B
Home.
- [75:17]
C
But there's also a possibility that a third of those people are going to be cajoled into voting or exercised into voting, depending on, you know, if Trump does overreach as much as the left predicts he will, then there's going to be this rising Democratic roar. Small D Democratic roar, not Democratic Party capital D, but a small D Democratic roar, pushing him out. Here's the fourth reason I'm optimistic in polls, poll after poll of Americans feelings about issue after issue, Americans actually agree more than they disagree. So let me put some meat on the bones of that statement. If you look at Gallup polls on abortion rights in the United States, they started taking. These polls were really sophisticated. They started in 1973 after the Supreme Court case of Roe v. Wade aid, which legalized abortion in the United States, overturning laws in 46 states around the country. And so Gallup started polling Americans. And what they found is actually shockingly consistent over the last 50 plus years of polling, which is something you don't really see in polls. But what they found was that just under 60%, so between 50 and 60%, 58% of the American population believes that abortion should be legal in the United States during the first trimester, and then it should be illegal in after that, except in cases where the life of the mother or the life of the child is at risk. And from 1973 to today that has been historically consistent. 60% of the American population believes. I'm not telling you that that's what you should believe. Believe. I'm not telling you that that's what I believe. I'm telling you that's what the vast majority of Americans actually believe. And that's been historically consistent. When I teach that to my students, they say that can't be true. I never hear about those people. I hear pro life and I hear pro choice. What do you mean 60% of Americans believe this sort of centrist view. It's like a bell curve where you have this big fat bell of opinion in the middle. And these two extremes, very low at the end. And the low apparent parts are amplified by social media, they're amplified by your algorithm, they're amplified by newspaper headlines. But in reality we don't really hear about this big centrist middle. Okay, let's take a different issue. Economic redistribution. How do Americans feel about wealth inequality? Well, again we see this bell curve where the vast majority of Americans believe that there should be greater economic redistribution. There should be poverty programs in place that has a floor upon which Americans should not fall between. There should be be excessive taxes on whatever the number is. If you make more than $20 million a year. If you're a billionaire, whatever that number is varies. But there's this huge 60% of the American population. I'm actually working on a piece called the 60% because it hovers between 55 and 60% of Americans believe basically there should be some economic redistribution. Okay, let's take another issue. Gun safety laws. There is this huge centrist position on gun safety law laws that you never hear about because you have the wildly two A people, second amendment rights people and you have people who oppose them. But in fact there is sensible gun safety laws that the vast majority of Americans believe. I could go. Healthcare is another issue. I could talk about Getting rid of the electoral college is another issue that the vast majority. So I could take issue after issue after issue and say on these numerous issues there is this bell curve of American belief. Belief where they actually have more common ground and the rise and amplification of the extremes actually plays into politicians hands. The electoral college might be a big part of this. Citizens v. United, the Supreme Court case that allowed corporate dollars into political campaigns could also be a part of this. But nonetheless there is this grand centrist tradition and that centrist tradition still exists. And that also gives me hope in some ways that we Won't succumb to the extremes of either pole. How'd I do? Was that a good answer?
- [79:25]
B
That was good because normally it ends on a very negative, pessimistic tone that things aren't good. And I'm not a visionary person. I can't read the future. Always try to relate the topics that I discussed to the present times and see how people see the future. And a lot of people don't like that questions. And for all the right reasons. It's not rosy. But I do agree with you. Because if we look at history, it seems that we are repeating the same pattern we had 100 years ago. And I do agree that it's going to be a rough ride ahead, but I hope it's not going to be as rough as the Second World War and horrible things that happened. But on the other hand, as you mentioned, you see, I do like to make this comment because this book is more or less focuses on America, mostly focuses on America. I do like to make this comment that. That especially with non Americans, there's this tendency to draw a black and white picture. It's either the great. I mean, it's either the great imperial great in a negative sense, I mean, or there is this kind of right wing, that it's the exceptional country. But when you look at the history, it's a very complicated country, has a lot of wonderful, brilliant episodes in history. You mentioned some of them in the book. You know, FDR are labor unions, labor movements. So it has a lot of potentials at the same time. Yes, it has its dark moments as well. But I guess it's this symbiosis that. What I feel is that I always. I studied English literature for my master's, I studied American literature and I really, really love all that creative energy that came in the United to the states, 1960s, 70s. And I do see the potential. So I'm not in the habit of drawing a black and white picture. But I think this is what if there is something that makes America great? It's this diversity of ideas, it's this multiplicity of ideologies. And as you've rightly mentioned, whenever the left and the right come together, great things could happen for which there have been a lot of wonderful examples in the past. So I'm sort of optimistic as well. But it's a matter of time. Yeah, well, I was already convinced. Right, right. Because when, okay, we have a reading group with our friends and there's this tendency just to say it's the end of America and all that Sort of things. But I said, well, look, it's complicated. If you look at the history, it's complicated. You can't. And again, you made a wonderful point that only one third of Americans voted for Trump. There were two thirds who didn't. And there are different reasons. And even from that one third who did, I'm sure there are a lot of people don't agree with some of his politics. Maybe they were just sick and tired of the same status quo that. That is the working class people that we talked about. And I'm sure not everybody there agrees with his extreme politics there, because there are a lot of Christians there who follow that tradition of helping others.
- [82:17]
C
Church has a great history. Socialism in church has a great history.
- [82:20]
B
Of helping refugees, helping the poor, helping the black people. It's still there. So that's why I'm always sort of critical of my friends. Well, no, you can't just. Just come up with a monolithic picture of the United States. It's more complicated than that. And that's the source of. And I'm more or less on the left sometimes. I'm not for the neoliberalism, but I'm for that classic centrist liberal tradition, for that socialist liberal tradition, let's say. And I do feel that there is a lot of energy there that can be leveraged and we can be optimistic and people like you can write and talk about it. I don't have much of a power. I can create podcasts to spread the word and talk to friends. So hopefully good things will come out of it. Yeah.
- [83:08]
C
Yeah, you're doing a good job of it, so I really appreciate the work that you're doing.
- [83:11]
B
Thank you, Kevin. Thank you very much for this conversation. This is such a wonderful book. University books are sometimes difficult. Not this one. I think it's a very accessible history book. And the title, well, if there are, well, white people out there who don't like the title, it's just a marketing ploy, as you mentioned. I'm sure you'll find a lot in the comment that you agree with why Everyone Hates white liberals, including. Including white liberals. Published by Chicago University Press. Thank you very much for your time to speak with us.
- [83:43]
C
Yeah, thanks for having me.