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Hello everybody, this is Marshall Poe, rnb, the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a survey service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:49]
C
Liberalism is one of those words that can mean, as Humpty Dumpty claimed, anything you like. It can mean Adam Smith's invisible hand or undergraduates jazz hands. To the American right, libs are censorious nationalizers, there to be owned. For the European left, neoliberals are brutal Thatcherites, the iron fist in the velvet glove. Before we've even managed to define what liberalism is, it seems we've moved beyond it in the form of post liberalism itself. Taking many forms, some on the left, some on the right. Post liberalism has found a high profile champion in American Vice President J.D. vance, and for some of them, an Eden in Viktor Orban's Hungary. But what is it? Does it stand for something or just against liberalism? Does it provide a future for the right or the left? To answer this question, two British political scientists, Matt Sleet and Paul Kelly, have written new books. I'll be talking to Paul Kelly about his Against Post why Family, Faith and Flag is a Dead end for the left. In my next podcast today, I'm talking to Matt Sleet about post liberalism, published today by Polity, which focuses on the right and on the us. Matt Sleet is a reader in political theory at Sheffield University's School of Sociological Studies, Politics and International Relations. I'm Tim Jones and This is the 242 podcast with new books in European politics. I'm ashamed to admit that until I read your book, I didn't know there was such a thing, a distinct thing as post liberal political philosophy. I'd heard of post liberalism, but I'd assumed it was a descriptor for any kind of anti liberal thinking that could be national conservatism, traditional conservatism, or even blue Labourism. So now we've established it does have its own tradition, a recent tradition. Could you set out what it is and its origins?
- [03:42]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing to say is that you wouldn't be alone in not knowing that post liberalism is its own thing, so to speak. I mean, it has been used in the media and by commentators for several years now as precisely that sort of big bucket umbrella term that you say that sort of covers a plurality of quite different groups and individuals from the National Conservatives, Claremont Institute type, certain individuals like Curtis Yarvin, Bronze Age pervert, people like that. I think. Actually, I don't like that term very much. The term New right, which you've also just used, I think is a much better term actually, to capture this, not least because one of the groups within that big bucket call themselves post liberals. So it complicates matters greatly. They consider themselves as engaged in a common endeavor of promoting post liberal ideas. They call themselves post Liberals, have substacks called post liberal order and so on. So there are a group who call themselves post Liberals. There are still even amongst those post liberals disagreements about what post liberalism is. The group that I'm most interested in for my book can be distinguished, I think, by a certain political theory or commitment to a certain political theory which is distinguished by two pillars. I think one is, and this I think is just common to everyone on the New Right. But this is a radical and wholesale rejection of liberalism as a philosophy and as a form of politics and in all its forms. I'm sure we'll come back to. And liberalism here is understood as the philosophy which puts the maximization of individual freedom as its sort of key principle or key value. So I think that's common to everybody on the New Right, this sort of wholesale rejection of liberalism. And that obviously begs the question or raises the question, well, what's the alternative vision of politics that they want to put in liberalism's place? And this is what I think distinguishes post liberalism from other positions on the New right. Post liberals want a politics that gives primacy to the common good rather than to individual freedom. I think that commitment to the common good is what really distinguishes post liberalism, and that justifies a politics with several other features. One is that politics is going to be perfectionist, to use a sort of term from political theory. That's to say post liberals tend to think that the role of politics is to guide people in living well and provide the conditions for them to flourish, as determined by what they think the common good is. Whereas they think liberals are sort of morally neutral or don't really care what choices people make about how to live. Both liberals think that politics really should have a role in guiding people to live well. It's a politics that's confessional in the sense of the state, they believe should officially recognize and endorse Christianity and probably Catholicism, particularly as the true religion. And so if you ask the question, well, what is the common good? Or where does the common good come from? They're going to point towards, or they're going to derive that notion of the good life from Christianity. It's a politic, that statist. And this is really interesting, and I'm sure we're going to come back to this in distinguishing post liberalism not just on the New right, but from the old right in many ways as well. Because whereas usually you might associate conservatism with the right, with small government, post liberals believe that promotion of the common good requires a strong and highly interventionist state, especially in areas. So it's big state politics. This especially in those areas where liberals have tended to believe they ought to be beyond state interference. And indeed conservatives have for a long time as well, such as the family, questions of personal morality, and maybe most importantly, the market as well. And then finally, it's a politics that's elitist. Now, post liberals think that elitism is sort of an inherent part of politics. You can't escape having elites, but they think that the liberal elite need to be replaced by a better elite. So a post liberal elite who are committed to furthering the common Good. So that's what I think post liberalism is. I mean, the key figures that associate with this sort of post liberalism are Adrian Vermeul of Harvard, Patrick Deneen of Notre Dame. They're really the two post liberals who I think are most prominent as thinkers and as public thinkers and sort of the main focus of my book in many ways. But there are other figures like Chad Pecknold, Gladim Papin, Sohrab Amari, at least until very recently. And I think it's worth also noting that JD Vance, the current Vice President of the United States, has described himself as of the post liberal. Right. You know, he is actually good friends with several of the post liberals, including Patrick Deneen, and he draws on several intellectual influences. It's quite clear he's very online, as they say. That doesn't necessarily make for a very coherent worldview. But nevertheless, I think it's true that post liberalism is particularly important in Vance's worldview. That really helps justify why I focus on this sort of post liberalism and these thinkers. Because politically, I think there really is a moment here where these ideas have made their way into the very highest political offices of the land.
- [09:02]
C
The tradition. This new tradition seems to be very American, but also very Catholic. And J.D. vance himself is a recent Catholic convert, and one of the two. I forget whether it's Deneen or Vermeule is a recent Catholic convert. Yeah, Vermeul. I mean, you outlined the thinking of that. You have a chapter on each of them in the book. They're very close, but they're also slightly different. Could you outline how different Deneen and Vermeul are?
- [09:27]
A
Let me start by saying that I do distinguish between other forms of post liberalism in the book. And there is a British tradition of post liberalism, but it is very different. Not just geographically speaking, but they tend to be Anglicans. They tend not completely exclusively to be on the political left. They are associated with a political theology called radical orthodoxy. And maybe most importantly for my purposes, they don't really want to reject liberalism wholesale in the same way as the American post liberals do. They're very closely associated with Blue Labour. In fact, Maurice Glassman is very often called a post liberal and sometimes uses the term himself. So there is an influence there of post liberalism in Britain and on the left. And so I don't want to ignore that. I do discuss it a little in the book, but certainly for the reasons I said a moment ago, in terms of real political importance and also the sort of the radical nature of its rejection of liberalism Meant that I wanted to focus specifically on the American post, liberals. You're right that Deneen and Vermeule are very different, and they're very different characters. I really wanted to try and bring that out in the book. Part of what I think is central to understanding why they're different is that actually they want quite different things. Ultimately, I think Deneen, when you really boil down to it, when you really get down to it, he's a fairly familiar sort of conservative figure. That's to say I think he is committed to things that plenty on the American right have been committed to over the decades. They might not always have gotten to power, but they've been a sort of constituency, an influential constituency on the right. So he wants more religion in public life. He wants to return to traditional gender roles, traditional family. He wants sort of moral media. He wants to strengthen local communities. He wants greater restrictions on abortion laws and so on. He's very socially conservative in a way that I think is actually pretty familiar on the right. Where he's unfamiliar is his economic commitments to big states, to intervening in markets and so on. But he's also unfamiliarized thinking, and this is what makes interpreting him slightly difficult. He's also unfamiliar just in the Fire and the rhetoric of how he discusses liberalism and the vehemence in which he wants to reject it. That I think is pretty unusual. But I think what it does, in a sense, is misleads or has misled many readers to actually think that he wants something much more radical than he actually really does. So, for example, he'll say something along the lines of separating church and state was one of the greatest mistakes liberalism ever made, which might make you think, okay, he's going to suggest that church and state should be unified again. Turns out he thinks nothing of the sort. He just thinks religion should, again, as I say, religion should have more of a place in public life. Equally, he'll say that religious freedom is one of the central positions of what he called defensive crouch conservatism, which might lead you to believe that he's against religious pluralism. But again, there's nothing of the sort in Denis. But then shift to Vermeul. And yes, Vermeule is committed to a position called integralism, which does mean that the church should have priority over the state. So where Deneen sort of talks the talk, in a certain sense, he doesn't then walk the walk, whereas Vemuel really does walk them walk. He's very coy for mule, but he probably is committed to, for example, Certain offices being excluded to people of not having the right faith and so on. This sort of integralist society that he seems to want would make distinctions between people and civic rights on the basis of religious beliefs and so on. The mules worldview. Vermual's alternative is much more radical in that sense from Deneen's. And that despite maybe a similar sort of rhetoric, I think that political difference is really important and really meaningful.
- [13:44]
C
Of course, it's not their job to be politically calculating. That's the job of people like J.D. vance. But it seems to me they're making a political mistake in thinking that these ideas are popular. And in fact, you touch on the question of coercion late in the book, that you think they underestimate the need for coercion to get what they want and what they believe people want.
- [14:05]
A
Again, this is one of the differences, I think, between Deneen and Vermeule. I mean, Deneen says things like, people want this. We're working classes or normal people or common people use these sort of terms interchangeably, that they already want post liberalism, right? They already have post liberal values. The liberal elite are ignoring that and pursuing the liberal agenda. You know, the working classes, they already know what a good life consists in, in some sense, and they really, that's what they really want. I mean, why he thinks that is is not clear. I mean, all the polling points to people not wanting more religion in, in public life and so on amongst, I should say, his fellow Catholics. It really is not clear that empirically speaking, people do want post liberalism. To Vermeule's credit, I think he understands that people don't want post liberalism, don't hold post liberal values, but he puts that down to the corrupting influence of liberalism itself. He's pretty disparaging really, about people's beliefs and people's reasoning. And his view is, well, yeah, okay, people don't yet want post liberalism, but if we could get power, people's beliefs are pretty malleable, can be changed pretty easily, and via power, we would re educate them into having the right values, wanting the right goods to live the right sort of lives. You know, there might be some coercion involved in order to do that, but eventually, and they're always sure that it will work out as they want, eventually people will come to thank the post liberals essentially for having guided them towards the light. So I think there's a sort of an honesty about that on Vermual's part, to his credit, in a sense. But it does make the question of coercion much more central, I think, to his theory in a way that isn't true of Deneen's, because again, I just don't think the politics requires. I mean, the politics. I mean, they might not be mainstream, so to speak, but they're also not radical. And I really probably would not require the use of coercion to achieve.
- [16:16]
C
Coming away from the grubby politics and back to the foundational theories. One of the things I learned very early on from the book was that, yeah, like most Europeans, I get exasperated by Americans use of the word liberal to mean on the left. And in many European countries, liberals are considered to be the right of the right. And today we have people like Javier Millet, who's considered to be the right of the right, but is actually much more libertarian than, you know, anything that Dineen or Verd recognize. This was very interesting to me in the book, really, their definition of all liberalism being bad because it's all about centralization of the individual to the point where they even have continuity to what we would now call woke the idea that you could be so individual and this permanent revolution so permanent that you can even change what your sex was at birth, for example. Is this something that is unique to these two thinkers or is this generalized across post liberalism?
- [17:13]
A
No, it's held, I think, by all the sort of post liberals that I'm interested in. The American post liberals, I think that's right. Again, more complicated for the British post liberals. But I certainly think that that notion of liberalism as a sort of completely stable, continuous philosophical set of ideas that mean even classical liberalism with its commitment to economic freedom is not that different essentially from more recent progressive identity forms of liberal politics, which focuses on the freedom of choice around issues of identity, gender, and so on. But they're essentially variations on a theme that I think is common to all of the post liberals as a sort of diagnostic of what's gone wrong with modern society. It's really important for them strategically, I think, and I think it has to be strategically because it's just not philosophically or historically plausible in the slightest. But strategically, I think it's very important that for them, liberalism is a singular, coherent thing, that it is hegemonic, and it's been hegemonic for about 400, 500 years, and it alone is the cause of all of our social ills. Those historical and social claims, I think, are common to all the post liberals. And I think, as I say, it's really important for their political strategy. They convince their readers that that's the case.
- [18:44]
C
That is historical nonsense, as you point out in the book. I think you can hold these beliefs as strongly as you like, but you can't change history. One of your biggest problems with the tradition is that they seem to caricature liberalism in order to establish post liberalism. Could you set up that argument?
- [19:02]
A
I should say I'm not the first to make this point. I mean, anyone who knows anything about liberalism will see the caricature that's being used here. Nevertheless, there's several aspects to this. One is that if you think liberalism is simply the maximization of individual freedom, so the removal of all obstacles to individual will to choice, a disregard, therefore, for the nature of what people choose, what we today often call negative freedom. If you think that commitment is the core of liberalism, then you find yourself in a very weird position that there have been very few liberals throughout history, because even exemplar liberals, so people that they themselves take to be exemplar liberals. John Locke, he thought no such thing. He famously made a definition between liberty and license, for instance. He did not think freedom, true freedom, was just a freedom to do whatever you wanted. They don't talk about Immanuel Kant, interestingly, actually, but he's another exemplar liberal, or taken to be as such today. And he likewise thought that liberty was just not. Was not the freedom to do whatever you wanted. It had to be the freedom to live according to rational law. That position can't even be that easily attributed to John Stuart Mill, actually another exemplar liberal. So even if you just sort of focus on those who are undeniably central to liberal tradition. So regardless of where you sit on the liberal tradition yourself, you know, really no one ever held that position, or very, very few, I should say, have ever held that sort of position. And anyone who did, you would not think were sort of, you know, indicative of liberalism itself. So it does deeply caricature liberalism. It also leaned out an awful lot from the liberal tradition. In the book I discuss, for example, who are called social liberals or new liberals of the late Victorian era, who shared an awful lot, actually, with what sort of politics post liberals want. They wanted a perfectionist politics. They wanted a politics directed towards the common good. They were worried about excessive individualism and freedom and its effects in the economic sphere. They wanted a stronger state that could interfere and take on the vested interests of the market and so on. It's just that their idea, the common good, was a much more liberal one. Post liberals don't talk about those Now, I should say they're not alone in that. Liberals quite often don't talk about those people either. But there are a great number of liberals, and as I say, including those sort of exemplar liberals who really cannot be plausibly said to hold the views that they attribute to being definitional of liberalism itself.
- [21:41]
C
And those social liberals, where would they be today? Would they be centre left social democrats?
- [21:46]
A
That would probably be right, yeah.
- [21:48]
C
What purposes served by their caricature of liberalism and also just of history, is it? Well, you seem to imply that it's designed to provoke confrontation.
- [21:59]
A
I think that's right. I think it's political. As I say, what they want to do is to force the reader into making a binary choice. If liberalism is just one thing, if liberalism is the sole cause of every social ill we now have. Right. So if liberalism and liberalism alone is the problem, then not only can it not be the case that a different liberalism, a different form of liberalism gives us the answer, which is what many liberals say today. You know, those who are critical of, for example, identity liberalism, like Fukuyama and Mark Lear and people like that have said, yes, there was this liberalism, but actually we need to go back to this other sort of liberalism, or Moyn Sangamoin has said the same in return from perfectionist liberalism. If all liberalism is sort of tainted, it's all the same thing, then it can't be that a different liberalism is the way forward. So what post liberals want to do is to force the readers into a choice. If liberalism is the cause of all our problems, then only a non liberal alternative is going to get us out of this. And that also has the effect of ruling out any sort of sense of compromise with liberals. I mean, liberals are just not people you can do deals with in part because they're also so morally corrupted. And that speaks, I think, also to your point about trying to agitate. I think that's also part of it. They do especially Vermule is committed to a sort of Schmidtian politics, a politics inspired by Carl Schmitt that does view politics as an us and them friend and enemy activity central to which is knowing who your friends are and who your enemies are, sort of agitating people to take strong positions. He's part and parcel of what it is to do politics for them. I think it's important for readers to know that when they're reading Deneen and Vimy Ord and all the others, that there is a political sort of purpose to the way they present liberalism. These are professors of Political theory and constitutional law at some of the best universities in America. I am pretty confident that they know that some of their readings of liberalism and particular thinkers are not quite accurate. They.
- [24:15]
C
I mean, the problem with that friend enemy framework is it's a philosophy designed for struggle and for campaigning to get to your end. But it's not a philosophy for government. Well, first of all, you have to define what the common good is. And it can't just be you who defines that. It has to be a number of people. It has to be a coalition that could potentially include the equivalent of Maurice Glassman coming from the left. Do you think there is a viable program of government to be achieved through post liberalism that isn't just a campaigning tool?
- [24:46]
A
I don't, because it assumes a homogeneity that I just think is impossible in modern societies. As you sort of say, the question of who defines a common good is going to be central. I mean, it's such a basic question, you know, what you do in disagreements about that, as you almost inevitably have, are just questions they don't really ever address. The mule is quite happy to sort of say, well, you know, what the common good might require or differ in different societies in different circumstances and so on. But it's not quite clear what happens to people who don't have the right sort of religious beliefs, who are committed to, even in the broadest terms, that sort of view of the common good and so on. So insofar as it might provide a framework for governance, it's going to be a highly coercive and repressive one. It's very difficult to know how it couldn't be in a certain sense. Now, again, Ramuel's answer to that is, well, if the post liberals get power, we'll make society more homogenous, which I don't think that should attract many people, especially anyone who's got a liberal bone left in their body. I think the problem with Deneen's position is just as we said before, people just don't want these. They don't want this had these sorts of values that he attributes to them. And so it's just quite unclear how that sort of government could possibly work in a pluralistic society. But again, I think this is problematic for lots of different groups on the new right. One important difference, I think, between post liberalism and national conservatism is that national conservatives like Yo Ram Hazoni, well, what on to say Christianity is part of the great American tradition or British tradition. It's fundamental to our social lives, US our identity and so on. We really need to discover that in order to get to rediscover our sense of belonging, our sense of community. So Christianity is sort of instrumental in that sense, instrumentally used. And of course, probably no other country is the charge of being unpatriotic so damaging to one's political prospects in America. Right. And lots of people have said this is un American about post liberalism. And, you know, if something's un American, yeah, this could be difficult for you to do well in the democratic process. But for post liberals, that's really important, is that Christianity isn't appealed to because it's part of the American tradition. It's appealed to because it's true for them. And the for them is important there. Right. And so whereas I think national conservatism might have something going for it in that sort of appeal to nationalism, which does have a more widespread appeal and could form, I think, does form in some cases, the basis of a platform for governance, a system of values and general framework which is literally alien to great swathes of a society, but in which the governors say, well, no, this is true. Whenever you think about it again, that does not strike me as a basis for a platform for governance in complex pluralistic societies like our own.
- [28:00]
C
Of course, I guess some of them would argue that it has worked in government, it's worked in Hungary. But I'd say the problem there is that it's gone hand in hand with kleptocracy, illiberalism, and I'm not so sure how attached to the kind of illiberalism that is needed to make this work. J.D. vance would be, for example, I'm surprised they're so focused on Orban and Hungary and so little focused on Kaczynski and Poland, which is in some ways a better Catholic, not liberal, but more liberal model than, and less kleptocratic model than Hungary. But they never talk about that.
- [28:37]
A
The difficulty with Poland as an example for them, I think, is it is so homogenous. I mean, I can't remember the percentage now, but a great number, a very high percentage of them, are Catholic, which I guess does make a sort of perfectionist politics maybe somewhat easier or more appropriate for those societies. Their attachment to Orban is strange in many ways. One way in which Deneen is also sort of stands out a little bit, is that his praise for Orban is always somewhat muted. He'll sort of say, yes, you know, Orban is a great example. But then the things he'll speak about are actually quite Specific, I mean he's for example, been in favour of policies intended to make it easier to have families or larger families. He's not said anything about what he's done relation to the press, for example, making it harder for his opponents to get elected. So he's less full throated in his enthusiasm for Orban than some of the other post liberals. Indeed, Gladon Papin has gone out to work in in Hungary actually and is much more passionate defender of Hungary. But yes, it's often very striking. It's not just post liberals. Even those on the new right, people like Rod Draha for example, often writes in quite gushing terms about Orban and how great Hungary is and how he's not even illiberal actually how they're better in doing better in terms of free speech and so on than the rest of us.
- [30:06]
C
Your final chapter covers what you call liberal perfectionism and how liberals could try to meet post liberals halfway. Could you explain that? Because as you said, perfectionism seems to be a term of art in political science, which I didn't know. What is it that liberals can do to address some of the issues raised by post liberals?
- [30:27]
A
This is a suggestion made by people like Samuel Morin and Ellen Cahan. The way to address populists and indeed post liberals specifically, I mean Khan Moyn's last book was in a sense addressed to responding to Deneen is that they need to return to perfectionist liberalism and liberalism that's imbued with this idea of having a quite strong view about what the good life is, how it can provide the conditions for people to live. Well, I'm not sure the idea is that doing that would allow liberals to sort of meet halfway with post liberals. If what's meant by that is a sense compromise, you know, we give a bit, you give a bit and we can then live together. I think the idea is, well, especially in what Alan Cahan's take is that the problem right now is that post liberals are talking about their view of what the good life is. And liberals say they don't have a view of the good life is at all. And so they're not even talking about the same thing. They're like ships passing at night. And the one great advantage of liberalism becoming or sort of being honest about its moral commitments is going to be that they're at least talking about the same thing. They can have a conversation in that sense. That's one great advantage, it's claimed. And also this isn't implausible or anything. There's a sort of respect shown to your opponent when you're sort of talking to them on their own terms. You know, if you're talking about the common good and I'm saying I don't have a view of the common good, then you know, I'm not talking to you in a respectful sort of way. I'm not taking you seriously as a fellow citizen or something like that. I think that's the view that, you know, at least we'd be talking about the same thing. At least the dialogue would have a more respectful character if liberalism became perfectionist. Again, that's always struck me as deeply implausible as a sort of response. Not least because, well, sometimes when you are, even when you are talking about the same thing, that can just make your differences more obvious to you and more acute. But also for liberals to turn around and say, okay, yes, we do have sort of substantive moral commitments that we're committed to putting into practice and provided conditions for. So yeah, fair cop, governor, you know, we are actually perfectionists as well. Put your cards on the table. There's a sort of honesty to that and a sort of self understanding that might be, I think, welcome, very welcome actually. But post liberals will just say, well we've always been saying this. We've always said you've had a substantive view of the good, that human beings flourish best when they are left to make their own choices. We've always said you're perfectionist. So it won't be telling post liberals anything they don't already know in that regard. And I should say I have a certain sort of sympathy for the post liberal interpretation of liberalism in that regard. So just so I said there might be sort of an honesty to it, a sort of increase, an increase in self awareness that might be welcomed on the liberals part, but whether it actually achieve anything politically in how liberals respond to their critics like post liberalism. I'm very skeptical, very skeptical indeed. And all of that of course is putting aside the question of whether it's even philosophically or morally coherent to think that you could have a liberal perfectionism today. And that I'm skeptical about also the reason I discuss. But yeah, as a sort of political strategy for liberalism, I really have my doubts.
- [33:55]
C
Do you think liberalism though could be more robust and more appealing to the population at large rather than meeting post liberals halfway if it stood up for itself more, if it defined what its central beliefs are, which are not. Is not just being neutral about society, but actually believes that society should. All societies should be free, the individual should be as free as possible, unless that freedom encroaches upon other people's freedoms. And this is a way of tapping into what started out as liberalism. For example, a good example to me would be the beginnings of the Dutch far right with pimfortin 20 years ago, who came from a sort of extreme liberal position, and then he and the people who followed him developed into a much more traditional conservative or national conservative position. But it didn't have to go that way. If liberalism had stood up for itself, had become something more than neutral, then it could have appealed more to society at large, but also fended off some of this, this new rightism.
- [34:59]
A
Part of the reason why I'm unclear about that is it relates to another mistake that I think post liberals make, which is I think post liberals mistake the philosophy of liberalism as sort of described in the corridors of academia as what liberalism actually looks like out there in the real world. Let's say they mistake what John Rawls writes in Theory of Justice as what politics has been like since the 1970s. And I think everyone, political theorists particularly, lament the lack of actual influence that political theorists have had in contemporary politics. And I think just as a description of liberal politics over the last 50 years or so, the idea that they've been morally neutral. I'm just not sure I buy that. If you take in particular maybe the more recent sort of progressive politics, maybe at its zenith a few years ago, it seems that liberals were quite openly saying there are some moral views one should hold, and there's some moral views one shouldn't hold about equality and freedom, identity and so on, in ways that are perfectionist and were quite strident and so on. So I think there's a question there about actually existing liberalism and whether it's right to characterize that as morally neutral. And I really am not sure it is. And if that's the case, well, then there's just a question of whether liberals need to get back to other beliefs and hold them more stridently and put them into practice. And that possibility I do accept people like Daniel Chandler, his book Free and Equal, for example, and Alexander Le Favre, Liberalism as a Way of Life. You know, they have been exploring, like, if you really are a liberal, these are sort of things you should be committed to. And they're actually quite radical. And they're the ways that they might, as you say, help alleviate certain economic or social problems and therefore maybe defuse the populist challenge. And I'm open to all of that, but that isn't a shift from sort of Neutral liberalism to perfectionist liberalism. I think that's the wrong way to think about that. People shouldn't sort of buy their own stories about, they tell about liberalism and should be more truthful about how actual existing liberalism has been working.
- [37:18]
C
So let's finish with the outlook for post liberalism. If JD Vance gets nowhere and the most recent spate of elections in the US suggest that they may be living on borrowed time, if blue laborism is discredited by this current Labour government, do you think this tradition will peter out and the future on the right? Are we going to return to something more like or neoliberal conservatism or something more like Ozone's national conservatism?
- [37:47]
A
I think one big change that post liberalism has played a significant part in is shifting the right away from a view in which politics is downstream from culture. For a long, long time, the sort of overall conservative strategy has been to focus on culture, change the culture, shift that in a rightward direction, and then the political benefits would then follow. I think what post liberals have played their part in, but I think it's true of many on the new right as well, is sort of expressing a certain impatience now with that view, or actually sort of calling it out as naive. And that what you must do, what the right strategy should be, is to capture power with different views about how you might do that or where power lies. But you capture political power and you use that to change society. That, I think in America especially, but maybe in different ways here, is going to be something like a more permanent change for the right. I think my view is that that's here to stay. The idea that the state can be put to conservative ends, substantive, moral conservative ends. I think that is a shift that will be with us for a while now. Unthinkable, probably 10, 15 years ago. Absolutely unthinkable. It really is quite amazing how radically this has shifted. But I think that is going to be with us for a while, for better or for worse. I don't think there's much of a prospect of a post liberal platform, at least not in a democratic sense. I just don't think it's going to really prosper in any election. Maybe it has a slightly more potential in America where religion does play more of a role in politics than here. But still, I really don't think. My view is. I really don't think there is a future. But that general idea of politics now as a vehicle for realizing culturally, socially conservative ends, I think that's here to stay. And I think in America not quite here, but in America, the idea of the right as, or the government is able to stand up to markets, not necessarily name the common good, but nevertheless to stand up to markets for our end. You might want to, to, you might want to pursue that also, I think, has now changed. So that sort of worship of markets, I think, has changed. And again, I think post liberalism has been really quite influential in that regard. But other general sort of political theory or worldview. No, I don't think, I don't think the world is going to be post liberal, but we may still live in a world that post liberalism has some part to play. Heavy made SA.