A Debate with Curtis Yarvin

Summary

Podcast Summary: The Good Fight – “A Debate with Curtis Yarvin” (June 20, 2026)
Host: Yascha Mounk | Moderator: Roger Hearing
Guests: Curtis Yarvin (neoreactionary thinker), Minna Salami (feminist writer/philosopher)

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Episode Overview

This episode presents a robust debate on the viability and record of liberalism, pitting its post-Enlightenment defenders against contemporary critics. Host Yascha Mounk is joined by Curtis Yarvin, an advocate for monarchy and neoreaction, and Minna Salami, a feminist and social critic. The panel grapples with questions of neutrality, power, ideology, history, and political futures, with liberalism’s moral and practical record under tough scrutiny.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Myth of Neutral Liberalism

[03:42–07:16] Curtis Yarvin’s Critique:

• Argues that the idea of "liberal neutrality" is a myth.
• "Liberalism...is a fundamentally oligarchic idea because...we’re going to put the marketplace of ideas in charge of the government." (Curtis Yarvin, 03:50)
• Claims “the marketplace of ideas” ultimately puts intellectuals and habitual thinkers in control.
• Draws parallels between intellectual self-interest (ex: virologists with COVID research) and power in liberal institutions:
  “When you basically put intellectuals in charge of the government...you bias the marketplace of ideas.” (Yarvin, 04:51)
• Extends the analogy to foreign policy: “Expanding NATO to the east is gain of function research in foreign policy.” (Yarvin, 06:26)

[07:28–10:02] Yascha Mounk’s Defense:

• Refutes the idea that liberalism is oligarchy or intellectual rule.
• Traces liberal neutrality to the need for peace in pluralistic societies:
  “The alternative to neutrality is that it requires one person to be in charge and to impose their moral views, their view of what the good life is, on everybody else.” (Mounk, 07:54)
• Emphasizes restricting government to allow for plural forms of life and self-determination.
• Recognizes that liberalism isn’t always perfectly neutral in practice, but positions its core achievement as enabling self-determination in diverse societies.

[10:16–13:00] Minna Salami’s Perspective:

• Sees neutrality as a “huge mistake” and impossibility.
• Uses an analogy: for centuries, “we have been reading and interpreting the world and this kind of Euro patriarchal super story through this chapter titled the World According to White Men.” (Salami, 11:19)
• Concedes liberalism’s positive contributions, especially to feminism, while arguing it sits within a fundamentally biased project.
• “Liberalism is by no means neutral by any stretch of the imagination.” (Salami, 12:22)
• Asserts that claims to neutrality have masked continued power imbalances, especially along race and gender lines.

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2. Is Any Political Ideology Truly Neutral?

[13:00–13:42] Salami:

• No ideology can be neutral: “What makes a political ideology one is...it has a vision of what the world should be.” (Salami, 13:30)

[14:09–16:05] Mounk Clarifies:

• Liberalism chooses the core value of self-determination, not value-neutrality:
  “There’s all kinds of values that liberalism is based on. And the fundamental value...is the idea that we want individuals to be able to make their own choices.” (Mounk, 14:14)
• Reiterates that it’s not up to government to enforce a specific conception of the good life.

[16:14–17:28] Minna Salami & Curtis Yarvin:

• Salami: Theory vs. practice—liberal ideals are good in theory but historically have not been neutral in application.
• Yarvin: “I don’t believe that the concept of neutrality exists. And I think that it winds up very quickly disproving itself.” (Yarvin, 17:32)
• Invokes the Overton Window, questioning whether liberalism truly fosters open debate.

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3. The Overton Window and Freedom of Expression

[17:49–19:25]

• Yarvin argues the “Overton Window”—the range of acceptable ideas—has narrowed over the last century.
• Mounk counters that liberal societies offer far broader freedoms to dissent than authoritarian regimes, though he concedes recent declines in speech rights (e.g., arrests for online speech in the UK):
  “I’m very worried and saddened that in the United Kingdom now...over 10,000 people were arrested because of speech that they expressed online.” (Mounk, 18:56)

[19:29–21:24] Yarvin:

• Holds that ideals which “lead to their own corruption” may be fundamentally flawed.
• Cites Tocqueville’s observation of limited freedom of thought in 19th-century America, questioning the liberal record.

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4. Liberalism and Historical Injustice – Comparative Records

[21:24–23:15] Yasha Mounk:

• Rebuts “all bad things come from liberalism” accusation:
  “Look at the year 1800. Look at the year 1750. Before liberal thought actually had an influence...horrible, extreme forms of injustice and hierarchy.” (Mounk, 21:46)
• Credits liberalism for advances in free speech, abolition of slavery, women’s rights, etc.

[23:21–24:38] Yarvin:

• Pushes back on historical “rosiness”—doubts claims about pre-liberal society’s tyranny.
• Critiques the idea that feminism or Marxism is more “native” to Africa than liberalism; questions whether non-European societies were ideal alternatives.

[24:44–25:29] Minna Salami:

• Affirms Africa’s active role in feminist history:
  “Feminism, from its very inception, was an international women’s movement...feminism does not really belong to the West.” (Salami, 24:47)

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5. Freedom and Power: Monarchies vs. Liberal Orders

[25:35–27:09] Curtis Yarvin:

• Positions monarchy as an alternative to liberal democracy:
  “My picture of an ideal monarch...Frederick the Great had a really nice line about freedom. He’s like, ‘Freedom of speech? Totally down with that. My view of freedom of speech is: They say what they want and I do what I want.’” (Yarvin, 26:01)
• Argues that, paraphrasing Hobbes, talk of “freedom” is really a quest for power, and liberalism conflates the two.

[27:12–29:42] Yascha Mounk:

• Classical response: “Aristotle says that monarchy is the best form of government if you have one preeminent person who is full of virtue...The problem is…how can you make sure?”
• Emphasizes the dangers of unchecked power: “The deep insight of a liberal tradition is the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely.” (Mounk, 27:36)
• Advocates for structural limits—separation of powers, constitutionally enumerated rights—as essential to real freedom.

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6. The Failures and Accomplishments of Liberalism

[30:35–33:10] Minna Salami:

• Argues liberalism as practiced is about hierarchy, not freedom:
  “Probably a more fitting name for how liberalism has been practiced would be superiorism. There’s a kind of centering on hierarchy, on control, and a weaponization of rationality in order to justify those.” (Salami, 30:38)
• Emphasizes that liberalism has failed to live up to its own ideals and excludes whole societies/cultures.

[33:17–34:42] Yascha Mounk:

• Points out that, despite imperfections and failures—such as COVID responses—liberalism provides discursive standards for critique and reform.
• Suggests the only realistic alternative is to work to improve liberal societies, as neither pre-liberal nor hypothetical CEO/monarchical regimes offer viable improvement.

[34:54–36:01] Yarvin’s Counter-Example:

• Asserts that modern societies with expanding speech restrictions are less “liberal” than even early modern monarchies, e.g., Elizabeth I.

[36:11–36:59] Minna Salami:

• Offers feminism as the only ideology that “centers freedom in that way for everyone”—contrasts this with both liberalism and authoritarian/far-right alternatives.

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7. The Future – Is Liberalism’s Heyday Over?

[37:16–38:53] Curtis Yarvin:

• Differential diagnosis of liberalism:
  “Illiberalism evolves spontaneously out of liberalism, that it contains the seeds of its own negation.” (Yarvin, 38:46)
• Separates genuine “freedom of thought” from the empowerment of intellectual classes.

[39:57–41:14] Yasha Mounk:

• Sees liberalism as facing cyclical crises (industrialization, World Wars, current populist/authoritarian surge).
• “Each time liberalism found the resources within itself to reckon honestly with its shortcomings, to reformulate what a renewed liberalism for its time would look like...” (Mounk, 40:53)
• Argues for reform toward more equality and less elitism:
  “It needs to reform itself, absolutely, in a way that makes our current societies less driven by...a professional managerial class...and a society that lives up to ever closer to the ideal of...a true equal in society.” (Mounk, 41:14)

[43:23–45:35] Salami’s Closing Critique:

• Skeptical liberalism can survive given its “reluctance to face its own shadow.”
• Sees potential for liberalism to embrace feminist and decolonial critiques, but is not optimistic:
  “As we are moving to these authoritarian dictatorial regimes, I just think it is deeply unfortunate...we keep wanting to reproduce these absolute fantasies of liberalism being so progressive, instead of actually really contending with its blind spots.” (Salami, 44:17)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Curtis Yarvin:
  “When you basically put intellectuals in charge of the government...you bias the marketplace of ideas.” (04:51)
  “Free speech? Totally down with that. My view of freedom of speech is: They say what they want and I do what I want.” (26:01)
• Yascha Mounk:
  “The alternative to neutrality is that it requires one person to be in charge and to impose their moral views...on everybody else.” (07:54)
  “Liberalism…is the only way...that we can assure...each one of them can actually lead a self determined life.” (09:34)
• Minna Salami:
  “Liberalism is by no means neutral by any stretch of the imagination.” (12:22)
  “We have been reading and interpreting the world...through this chapter titled the World According to White Men.” (11:19)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [03:42–07:16]: Yarvin’s opening critique of liberalism as oligarchy/ideology of intellectuals.
• [07:28–10:02]: Mounk’s defense of liberal neutrality and practical limits.
• [10:16–13:00]: Salami’s analogy—liberalism as Euro-patriarchy, not neutral.
• [14:09–16:05]: Discussion over whether ideology or liberalism can be value-neutral.
• [17:49–19:25]: Overton Window and speech: shrinking space for dissent.
• [21:24–23:15]: Historical defense: liberalism’s role in the abolition of injustice.
• [25:56–27:09]: Monarchy, power, and freedom—Yarvin on Frederick the Great.
• [27:12–29:42]: Checks and balances as the liberal answer to power.
• [33:17–34:42]: Liberal responses to COVID and imperfect practice.
• [36:59–37:16]: Is liberalism’s heyday over? Framing the final question.
• [39:57–41:14]: Mounk on crisis, reform, and resilience of liberalism.
• [43:23–45:35]: Salami’s closing worries about liberalism’s future.

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Final Thoughts

• The debate highlighted an increasing anxiety about the future of liberal institutions, with Mounk urging continual reform, Salami emphasizing deep historical and structural biases, and Yarvin provocatively advocating alternatives outside the liberal-democratic paradigm.
• All sides interrogated the failures and strengths of liberalism, especially around freedom, neutrality, and whose interests are ultimately served.
• The broadest point of intersection: liberalism is at a crossroads and must reckon earnestly with its contradictions if it is to survive as a guiding political philosophy.

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Transcript

[Pepsi Advertiser]

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[Yasha Mounk]

You asked me to give you the record of liberalism and you asked me to give you the record of liberalism because the conjuring trip that both of you do is to look at all the bad elements in the world today and say all the bad things are because of liberalism, none of the good things are because of liberalism. And somehow the world was better at some other time. At least that's what Curtis seems to suggest. And that is just not the case.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And now the good fight with Jascha Monk.

[Podcast Host Introduction]

One of my favorite shows, the Flying Circus by Monty Python, likes to announce sketches for the words. And now for something completely different. That is the spirit of this episode of a podcast, which is actually a recording of a debate I had last September with a feminist called Minasalami and a certain aspiring king of the tech world and perhaps the political world called Curtis Yavin, the founder of the so called neoreactionary tradition. We discussed and debated about whether or not liberalism is in fact the right way to govern ourselves. A position that I defended and my distinguished co panelists attacked. Curtis and I had a number of interesting exchanges about what exactly a world ruled by a king CEO might actually look like. We didn't always see eye to eye, as you can imagine, but I think this episode will showcase in an interesting way a lot of the ideas that have a surprising amount of influence in the world today. As you know, normally we reserve a portion of this conversation to paying subscribers. I want to make sure that all of my listeners have access to the full episode today. But if you want to make sure that you can listen to all episodes of this podcast and to do so without ads, please support what we're doing here. Please go to writingdotashamonk.com and become a paying subscriber.

[Yasha Mounk]

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the only

[Curtis Yarvin]

freedom which deserves today. Please give a warm round of applause for your host, Roger Hearing.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Curtis Yarwin, described as the philosopher behind J.D. vance, argues that democracy is a failed experiment and should be replaced by monarchy. Expert on the challenges facing liberal Democracy in the 21st century, Yasha monk is a Political scientist and professor at Johns Hopkins University and writer and social critic and thought leader. Mina Salami is known for fusing feminism, philosophy and political thought. She's the author of of Can Feminism Be African? A warm welcome to all of them. Let's kick off with the question that I want to put to them and get their three minute answer. Was it a mistake to see liberalism as neutral and free of any perspective or worldview? Coates.

[Curtis Yarvin]

All right, so, you know, there's obviously a lot of ways to define the word liberal, but if we focus it down on the question that we're deciding here, the wind is very powerful. We're not blown away, assuming we're not blown away. If we focus it down on the question we're referring to. I would take liberalism as first of all, it's a fundamentally oligarchic idea because the idea is that we're going to put the marketplace of ideas in charge of the government. And the marketplace of ideas is of course fundamentally oligarchical because not everyone has ideas. You are basically saying we're going to put the intellectuals, the professional thinkers, the habitual thinkers in charge of deciding what the government is going to do. And that seemed like a very reasonable idea in the world where the ancient monarchies had passed away and where political democracy, in terms of let's put the politicians in charge of the government, which is actually the literal meaning of democracy, had proven a swamp of corruption, for example, in Gilded Age American politics. So, you know, this fundamentally aristocratic idea of let's put the marketplace of ideas in charge sort of came to the fore. And, you know, in 1900, at least in America, maybe not in Germany, but in America, the idea of having the professors, you know, set government policies seemed like a very weird idea. But it was pushed by, you know, great American intellectuals like, you know, Henry Adams, John Hay, people like that. And what they missed, I would say, is that they had this idea that you're going to put the marketplace of ideas, sort of the pure world of thought, this clear Alpine lake, and you're just going to run it, the waters of this lake, through the dirty, polluted sewer of politics. And we're going to just let politics be a ceremony like the old monarchies. And really it's intellectuals that are going to decide. And the problem is that power corrupts and there's no valve. And so actually, when you basically put intellectuals in charge of the government and you make intellectuals ideas matter, you bias the marketplace of ideas. And, you know, as an example of that, I'd like to Talk about something we all experienced, which is Covid, because Covid was, at least plausibly, if it was not the result of gain of function research, it was a remarkable coincidence that it happened where gain of function research was going on. And this research was clearly dangerous and imprudent. And in fact, even the Trump administration has been unable to kill gain of function research in virology. In fact, the replacement for Fauci is a guy who made his name by digging up the 1918 flu virus and reanimating it. So why are people interested in this? Why don't virologists, whose real interest should be to protect us from virology, from. From viruses. We need to be protected from virology. Why do we need to be protected from virology? We need to be protected from virology because once you're an intellectual driving government policy, you want virology to be more important. You want to get a grant to study virology. You want to say, these are dangerous viruses that matter. It is only a moment between that to say, oh, if I go and mutate a virus to show this could be very dangerous, then I'm going to get more grants, I'm going to be more important. I'm going to create more of an impact. And so you actually basically perform this kind of gain of function research in your specialty. So you would say. I would say expanding NATO to the east is gain of function research in foreign policy.

[7-Eleven Advertiser]

All right.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Goodness, I'm going to have to hold you there. We'll go back into lots of those areas. But let me do the three minutes, as it were, with Yasha. Same question. Was it a mistake to see liberalism as neutral and free of any perspective or worldview?

[Yasha Mounk]

Thanks for reminding me of a question, because I got a little bit confused there. But what we're talking about.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

We'll come back. We'll come back.

[Yasha Mounk]

Look, that was all very interesting. It had nothing to do with liberalism. Liberalism is not oligarchy. It's not the professors ruling things. It is a very concrete answer to a huge problem that we have in any society under modern circumstances, and which started in Europe in the early modern age, when you had Protestants and Catholics battling for decades and centuries over who should rule and whose religion should be followed. And the problem with thinking that the government should tell you how to live. The alternative to neutrality is that it requires one person to be in charge and to impose their moral views, their view of what the good life is on everybody else. And if you don't agree, if you're a Catholic in a Protestant country or Protestant in a Catholic country, then you either have to shut up and do violence to your most profound beliefs or you have to take up arms. And this is exactly what happened in early modern Europe. So why liberalism? Why is this idea of neutrality connected to liberalism? Because the answer is to say we can have a powerful government that does things like build roads and make sure that you don't starve and have an army so you don't get invaded by other countries. But we're going to limit it in key ways. And the reason to limit it is not that we don't care about religion, but we don't care about your deepest convictions, but we don't care about the duties you might have to other people, the way you might love your family and think that that's a key thing that is important to you in life. As some of the post liberals would argue it is because we recognize how fundamentally important that is to people. Because we want a government in which we're able to do things together where we need to maintain a modern state without anybody claiming for themselves the right to tell you how to live. Now, is liberalism always neutral? In practice, no. Sometimes countries have gone wrong. Sometimes it's true that there's a political class, that there's people who have more power than others, who have started to think perhaps we should actually make rules that go a little bit beyond that and that constrain people in one way or the other. And that's an aberration we have to fight against. But when you're asking yourself what is the profound and fundamental achievement of liberalism in modern age, and why is neutrality a deep moral ideal, not something that sounds kind of boring and weird and like you're giving up on judgment. It is because it's the only way in a society in which we have millions of people who have very, very different convictions from each other, but we can assure to the best of our abilities that each one of them can actually lead a self determined life.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Okay, thank you for that. Finally, let me put the same question a reminder what the question is. Was it a mistake to see liberalism as neutral and free of any perspective or worldview? Minna, your thoughts in three minutes.

[Minna Salami]

Was it a mistake to see liberalism as neutral? Well, if you are a liberal, which by the way, I am not, but if you are, then I think you should consider it to be a huge mistake. And I want to use an analogy to explain why I say this. So we're living in a global order, which I called europatriarchy. And imagine if we had a huge volume like an encyclopedic book. And we call this. The title of this book was the World. And the way that the book was structured was in different chapters according to demographics. So you might have a chapter titled the World According to White Men, the World According to People of Color, the World According to Women, and so on and so forth. For millennia, we have been reading and interpreting the world and this kind of Euro patriarchal super story through this chapter titled the World According to White Men in the analogy. Now in. Thank you. In this chapter, there are, as we know, many destructive, atrocious events. So there's slavery, there's colonialism, there's eugenics, there's witch hunts and so on. But there are also things that have been positive, things that have been advantageous to society at large. So there's the invention of modern science or modern universities. And liberalism, I would say, is one of the more advantageous inventions. As a feminist, which is the ideology that I subscribe to, I've definitely benefited from some of the legacies of liberalism within the feminist movement and discussions about rights and autonomy and the individual and so on. However, what this shows, what I'm intending to show with this analogy, is that no matter what positive gains have come from liberalism, and there are a few, they sit within this chapter, which is obviously a very biased one. So, no, liberalism is by no means neutral by any stretch of the imagination. And I think that it's a. It's a mistake, because this idea of neutrality in a world where liberalism is increasingly being challenged and disproven as a universal neutral theory or ideology, it speaks more to the absolute power that white men have held rather than to its neutrality. And this constant sort of chatter about how neutral liberalism is, it's sort of like trying to convince rational people that two plus two equals seven, you know, when it's obvious that it's not neutral. But we keep trying to say that, oh, liberalism is a neutral ideology.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Well, Miller, let me pick you up on that, because we're moving on to the main debate subjects, and it's rather appropriate to what you were saying, because the question is, can any political ideology be neutral or are they all necessarily partisan? And if I'm understanding what you're saying correctly, you're saying that liberalism has effectively been white male liberalism. But is it? Can any ideology be other than that? In a sense, would it always have the color of the people who control it or invent it?

[Minna Salami]

It's not that it would have the color of the people who invent it, necessarily. But per definition, a political ideology cannot be neutral. I mean, what makes a political ideology one is the fact that it has an idea of what the world is and the vision of what the world should be.

[7-Eleven Advertiser]

Right.

[Minna Salami]

So again, as a feminist, it means that I'm subscribing to a worldview about feminist ideas about justice or authority or property.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

So feminism isn't neutral.

[Minna Salami]

So it's not neutral. And likewise, liberalism is not neutral. So I think, you know, it's an impossibility. And so the question again is why we even constantly are having the conversation about whether something so obvious as the lack of neutrality actually exists.

[Yasha Mounk]

Okay, Yasha, well, let me clarify something very important here, because no liberal would say that the ideology is neutral between, for example, girls suffering female genital mutilation or being able to self determine between people being allowed to practice their faith freely or having to go to a particular church, a particular mosque, a particular synagogue, because that's what the government or their parents say. There's all kinds of values that liberalism is based on. And the fundamental value that it is based on is the idea that we want individuals to be able to make their own choices. And this doesn't mean that we assume that everybody thinks at the age of 18, oh my God, I have no attachments in the world, I'm going to reinvent my life completely. Some people might do that. Most people are going to continue to be parts of the families they're part of or the duties that implies the religious networks they're a part of, the nations they're a part of. But if they want to change, if they say, I don't want to go to the same church as my parents did, I don't want to have the same kind of marriage that my parents did, then they must be free to do that. And so we absolutely believe in the importance and the value of values like freedom and of keeping the peace in these big complex societies. But our answer as to how to do that is that we don't want a government that tells people how to live, though we think that there's a number of fundamental individual rights and liberties that citizens have to have versus the government so that the government doesn't think it's our job to tell people what the good life is, that they should follow this religion, that they should or should not have this kind of sexual relationship, that they should or should not follow these kind of values. So it's absolutely not true that liberals don't have values that shape the kind of policies that a state pursues. What is true is that the fundamental of those values is people need to have the freedom to self determine.

[7-Eleven Advertiser]

And.

[Yasha Mounk]

And that means it is not the job of the prime minister, of the king, of a president or of a CEO dictator to tell you how to lead your life.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Let me let Minna back in on that. And I want to bring Curtis. What I think Yasha is saying, I want to misinterpret him, but is that liberalism effectively allows all forms of thought and view and that's it. So would include feminism, would include everything else as well. It's not coloured in that sense by anything else.

[Yasha Mounk]

That's great. Liberal feminists.

[Minna Salami]

What I meant with the statement about color is that I don't think a color determines an ideology. So not all women are feminists, not all black people are black liberation activists and so on. But liberalism, I mean, the question about its neutrality is not strictly speaking about what its political philosophy is, but also how liberalism has been practiced throughout history. So when we look at the global order, which for a very long time has been dominated by liberalism, you know, all of the very grandiose ideas that you've presented, which sound great in theory, but that's hardly how, you know, liberalism on a global scale has been practiced. And that's where the neutrality.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Judge it by what it does rather than what it says. Curtis, let me bring you in on this because I don't think you are a liberal or you wouldn't count yourself as one. But do you think any ideology, even whatever ideal you have, can be neutral in that sense? Does it make any sense to refer to it or is everything partisan?

[Curtis Yarvin]

I have a question for Yasha.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Well, could you just answer that question first?

[Curtis Yarvin]

No, I don't believe that the concept of neutrality exists. And I think that it winds up very quickly disproving itself. I'd like to hear actually Yasha's perspective on something. It would be neat to hear you explain how the concept of the Overton window interacts with your ideals of liberalism.

[Minna Salami]

Okay.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

I mean, just to explain the overtoun window being the area in this theory which is actually of what is acceptable to talk about or.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Because my, my perception, my perception of the intellectual history of the 20th century is that the range of permiss, the overtone window has tremendously contracted over the last hundred years.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Okay, you've asked the question. Let me put it to Yasha briefly on that.

[Yasha Mounk]

Well, let me, let me answer both of these questions.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

All right? If you glance the one about the overton window first, and then we'll come back.

[Yasha Mounk]

So, look, I think that in liberal societies, we have much greater freedoms to express different views from what the government believes, from what the powerful people believe, than in virtually any other system in the world. I would much rather voice an unpopular opinion tonight here in London than I would in Beijing or in Caracas, in Venezuela, or in many, many other countries around the world. Which countries can you speak out freely and courageously, even if it's unpopular, without fear for your freedom and your career compared to democracy Now, I agree.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

One thing. I'll bring you back in a minute.

[Yasha Mounk]

I agree that unfortunately, over the last 10 or 20 years, many liberal democratic societies have become less liberal and have become less democratic because they have started to abridge those rights in ways that are very dangerous. I'm very worried and saddened that in the United Kingdom now, in 2023, over 10,000 people were arrested because of speech that they expressed online. That is a failure to live up to basic liberal principles, and I absolutely condemn it.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

I'll let Curtis come back and then we'll talk, as you wanted to, about what Minas had to say. Curtis.

[Curtis Yarvin]

So, you know, when you have an ideal, and every time the ideal is implemented it leads to its own corruption, then maybe there's something wrong with the ideal. When you say in the last 10 to. First of all, the idea of overweighting the present as an example is, I feel, an intellectual trick that should not be tolerated. We should compare our regime not only to the present, but also to the past. It's not the last 10 or 20 years. It's easily the last hundred years. And in fact, Tocqueville in Democracy in America says there is no country in the world that has as little freedom of thought as America. And he's referring to America literally 200 years ago.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Okay, okay, now.

[Yasha Mounk]

So now we've actually managed to combine.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Fine.

[Yasha Mounk]

Address the combination, which is fascinating, by the way, because it says a lot about this political moment and this debate. But somebody who supposedly is on the kind of feminist left and somebody who is on the tech CEO dictator, right, actually had.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

We'll get onto that.

[Yasha Mounk]

Exactly the same criticism of me.

[Minna Salami]

Actually, before you make that claim, I would very much like to intervene, please. Because I don't think that Curtis and I share very much in common at all. I think you do, except for the fact that perhaps, yes, we do have. We do want both to think about the historical legacy of liberalism, but for very different reasons, I suspect. So lest Curtis and I are put in the same camp I just want to say that my contention with liberalism is that there are actually some very dark ideologies that are influencing the world today because liberalism is experiencing a downfall. And that's why we're having this conversation. Western hegemony, however, is not. It is very alive. And there are dark ideologies that are seeking to perpetuate Western hegemony at the cost of people around the world.

[Curtis Yarvin]

And I speak at all.

[Minna Salami]

I'm going to finish my point. So what I want to say is that I actually, I believe that liberalism would benefit even though I'm not a liberal. But there's a necessity for liberals to actually contend with their past so that they can finally start to respond.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Okay, we've got the point on the history. You come back briefly on that and then I'll come to you.

[Yasha Mounk]

You asked me to give you the record of liberalism, and you asked me to give the record of liberalism because the conjuring trip that both of you do is to look at all the bad elements in the world today and say all the bad things are because of liberalism, none of the good things are because of liberalism, and somehow the world was better at some other time. At least that's what Curtis seems to suggest. And that is just not the case. Look at the year 1800. Look at the year 1750. Before liberal thought actually had an influence in the world. You had horrible, extreme forms of injustice and hierarchy all around the world. There was barely a place in the world where you could speak your mind freely, where you could print whatever book you wanted about censorship, where you could practice your faith as you wanted. Slavery was a practice not just in the United States, but across the Arab world, across huge swaths of the world. Women had no rights to political participation in virtually every society around the world. And then what happened? Well, societies are deeply imperfect and it takes a lot of fighting to improve them. And there's real injustices today. But actually, because of liberal political views, because of fighting for the values that every individual, irrespective of their race, creed, gender and so on, should be free to live their life as they wish, we now are much closer, far away, but much closer to the ideal of empowering people to lead in these self determined ways than were 200 years ago. But I'm willing to defend the record of liberalism any time of the day.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

All right, Yashabel, hold it there. And a last word on this particular bit. Curtis, you wanted to come back on,

[Curtis Yarvin]

you know, first of all, to Yasha. I'm quite sure that Jane Austen could not have imagined an England in which she could be arrested for her tweets.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

That's very hard to imagine. On several different.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Indeed, indeed. Or her novels. Or her novels. And, you know, I think the idea of, you know, I'm not sure Yasha is a historian or has studied history, but his vision of 18th century England as a place of, you know, domination, as though it was being run by Metternich or something, is. It seems very ahistorical to me. But I also find Amina's, you know, historical take relatively ahistorical because, you know, if I look at basically pre European societies. Let's take pre European societies in Africa for. For me, feminism and black nationalism and various sort of Marxist ideologies are all just as imported to Africa as liberalism. These are newer imports. Frantz Fanon was not an African. And when I look at basically African societies that are pre European and cultural and political traditions of. Look at the Kingdom of Benin, you know, do you really want to bring back the kingdom of Butler?

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

I think. I think that's an area perhaps that opens up vast areas of discussion to do with history and all kinds.

[Minna Salami]

I would like to.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Very briefly, because I do want to

[Minna Salami]

move on a bit, briefly respond, because both Yasha and Kurt have been making claims, put words in my mouth that I haven't said. I mean, I did point out that there are some positive advantages, you know, for one. And also with regard to Africa, I mean, there's this constant worldview by Westerners that positions Africans as though we, you know, are an asteroid in outer space. Like feminism, from its very inception was an international women's movement. And there were a lot of African women who in the early 20th century were actually traveling to Russia, to America and so on. So, you know, feminism does not really belong to the West. And yes, it was influenced by liberalism, but there's also been corresponding conversations about it in Africa.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

All right, we will open up another area of the argument. I know this can go on in all sorts of directions. I wanted to look at the theme of freedom, actually, because related to liberalism, does liberalism allow for the only freedom which deserves the name, and is it, as a result, the ideal political framework? I'm going to ask you first, Curtis, because freedom, if you dissociate it from liberalism, is it freedom what you're actually advocating, or are you saying that the freedom that we claim from liberalism isn't real?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Anyway, I would say that, you know, my ideal, you know, my picture of an ideal monarch comes. I think Frederick the Great comes as close to my Picture of that as there is. And Frederick the Great had a really nice line about freedom. He's like freedom of speech. Totally down with that. My view of freedom speeches, they say what they want and I do what I want.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

He was also a bloodthirsty conqueror in many ways. So I think we should have to put he.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Has he killed an awful lot of people or were you going back to the questioning the pragmatic sanction?

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

No, I'm simply saying he might not be an ideal monarch, but carry on.

[Curtis Yarvin]

I think he was an excellent monarch and I think he was an excellent monarch. And I think the idea of freedom, as Hobbes says, when people talk about freedom, they are not actually seeking the desolate freedom of the wild ass. They are seeking power. And the thing is when we say that liberalism, that is why you cannot separate the idea of liberalism from the idea of giving intellectuals power. They will sort of go around and around in a circle and basically kind of sort of never admit this in a way, but they are not interested in a Frederick the Great type world should they be? They should be.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Let me put. Yasha, what's your take on that?

[Yasha Mounk]

Well, look, Aristotle says that monarchy is the best form of government if you have one preeminent person who is full of virtue and will always rule in the interest of the general good. So perhaps I share that with Curtis. That sounds reasonable enough. The problem is how on earth can you make sure that this person who has absolute power, who the fate of all of us now depends on, is actually going to be the most virtual and the most competent and the most altruistic person. And the deep insight of a liberal tradition is the idea that absolute power corrupts absolutely. But first of all, if this is a hereditary monarchy, sometimes, perhaps for 25 years, you get lucky and somebody's really amazing and then they have an idiot son and then you're stuck being ruled by the idiot son. But even if they start off being really virtuous because there's no limits on their rule, because everybody's going around flattering them all day long, they're going to end up being really horrible rulers after five or ten because there's no freedom, essentially. Well, this is just to respond to

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

the idea, but freedom is part is at the core of that. If you don't have freedom, then when things go wrong, you can't do much about it.

[Yasha Mounk]

Yes. So you need limits on the government in order to make sure that when the government becomes abusive, as it always ends up doing limits. Let me just finish that's true. And then the question is, okay, what is the purpose of the government? What are the limits on what the government does, whoever is governing? And there I think the limits are incredibly important. Whether it is a monarch or whether it is a democratically elected government, you need limits. What the government is on. To echo what Curtis you have checks and balances to make sure that those institutions don't get to tell you how to live. And the key part of that is basic liberties that are guaranteed to individual citizens, like the liberty of speech, the liberty of assembly, the liberty of religion, and so on and so forth through through a Constitution.

[Curtis Yarvin]

Who enforces the Constitution? You've got a kind of passive voice there when you say are guaranteed.

[Yasha Mounk]

Well, the idea is that first of all you have those rights and then you have countervailing institutions. So the power is not all in one body. It is split in the United States, for example, between the President and the Senate and the House of Representatives, that you have perhaps a separation of powers between the federal level and the states. You make sure that not all power in here is in one person so that each branch jealously guards their own powers and make sure that nobody oversteps what the bounds of legitimate government are supposed to restrict.

[Curtis Yarvin]

The power of the Supreme Court

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[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

We're getting to that stage, I think, at the moment, aren't we, in the US we'll address that one later. Miller, let me bring you on this because I think it speaks to a lot of what you were saying about the way that liberalism has been and the areas in which it hasn't involved freedom. Do you see any connect, I mean, to that question, does liberalism allow for the only freedom that deserves the name or does it not?

[Minna Salami]

No, I don't think liberalism deserves the name. Probably a more fitting name for how liberalism has been practiced would be superiorism. There's a kind of centering on hierarchy, on control, and a weaponization of rationality in order to justify those. So the philosophy, the political ideology that has reigned over the global order for so long now sort of says, first of all, that I am different to you than that I am better than you, I control you, and I do so because it is rational for me to do that. And this has all been sort of contained by the idea that, oh, these are, you know, liberal enlightenment values and not freedom.

[Yasha Mounk]

May I ask a question this time, please? What society that is not liberal has done better on, that counts in the history of the world?

[Minna Salami]

I mean, you are sort of thinking of the world as it looks today, where we have these regional blocs, you know, that we can compare and pit against one another. But of course, there was a point in history, you know, where societies were far smaller, for instance, where you had city states which had all kind. I mean, you mentioned earlier that horrible forms of repression in some of them. And then in others, there was actually the fact that the imposition of the liberal order, which I agree, you know, has come with some. So many benefits. And in the world as it looks today, we do need to hold on to things like democracy and individual rights. Absolutely. But to ignore the fact that, I mean, people's entire cultures, knowledge systems, their rights were taken away from them in the name of liberalism and has continued until very modern history, is precisely why liberalism is becoming a kind of moot ideology at a time when actually it would be needed the most.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

So are you saying that because liberalism didn't achieve what it said it should it would do, that the ideals were there, but you're saying because it didn't achieve them in some cases, because it

[Minna Salami]

didn't even try to achieve them, because it was so unaware of its myopia and still is today. And, you know, we see in the past five years alone, we can see how, you know, with the COVID pandemic and then with these huge Black Lives Matter protests, and now with the absolute worst atrocity with what is happening in Gaza, you know, and people are still going on about how we need liberalism, where liberalism has shown in so many instances that it is not actually willing to perform the politics, the political ideology.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Is it liberalism that's a fault or the way in which it is offered or the false way?

[Minna Salami]

I mean, we can't distinguish between the two. At some point, you know, what it is and what it does are the same thing.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Sorry, Yasha, you want.

[Yasha Mounk]

Well, let me both have now brought up Covid another line of similarity. I think there are significant ways in which we overstep what the government should have done in Covid and there are some. Did liberal democracy do better on Covid or did China do better on Covid?

[Curtis Yarvin]

Well, liberal democracy.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Hang on one second.

[Yasha Mounk]

Did democracies do better on Covid or did Eurota and countries do better on Covid?

[Minna Salami]

Did democracies not.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Yeah, sure. I will bring you in two seconds.

[Yasha Mounk]

Democracies invented the vaccines that saved us

[Minna Salami]

from COVID and then imposed the vaccine apartheid. So this again, you know, shows the sort of. Yes, there was a vaccine apartheid that

[Yasha Mounk]

countries in the world were not allowed. That's a very, very simple choice you have today. Reality is messy. There are many ways in which our societies are imperfect. And part of the wonderful thing about liberal ideals is that they give you a standard by which to measure them and to say, we're surely important these ways, and you have to fight against that. But we have a choice either of fighting to recognize what is good in our societies relative to any other society in the history of the world and fighting to make it better, or we can go back to that mythical society before liberalism arrived that somehow had things right even for a minute. Couldn't name a single example. Or we can go to the future mythical society where there's going to be some CEO who's somehow going to be wonderful and competent and acting in your interests. I think we choose what we have.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

All right, all right, I will bring you in. Let me just bring Curtis in briefly. Do you take that view? Do you accept that view that things that can go wrong, which we've clearly demonstrated, I mean, necessarily undermine.

[Curtis Yarvin]

There's an interesting contrast in the way Yasha talks about monarchy and democracy, because when he talks about monarchy, he's like, how do you make this perfect? How do you assure that it is perfect? And when he talks about liberalism, he's like, well, it's messy. It's never going to be perfect. And if you look at sort of the history of. I mean, I find, say, a fair amount to criticize about Elizabeth I. I don't think she was perfect at all. But how would you make your point to Elizabeth I? That, you know, monarchy is terrible. I mean, she's a religious pluralist. She's a, you know. Did she ban a couple of plays? Yes, she did. Was she perfectly liberal? Yes, she was. No, she wasn't. But, you know, at the same time, like, the idea that, you know, the England in which you get arrested for tweets, which is the result of, you know, many centuries of, you know, going back to the English Civil War of rebellion against that old regime, seems to have Me to have resulted in a system which is much more illiberal than the Society of Elizabeth I. And I think that that's worth noting because when you see a thing contradict itself over that many centuries, some things may be kind of wrong.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Very few Catholic priests have been executed in this country. I think in the recent. Let me bring Mina in. The point you wanted to make about

[Minna Salami]

it was just a short point in response to what Yascha was saying, you know, that we can envision a world where liberalism still is relevant and how that would be a sort of a better world. And I just want to offer something else that we can also envision a world in which freedom really is something that is valued. And anti authoritarianism in whatever form it shows up, whether in liberalism or in far right ideology, is not the thing that we desire. And one of the ideologies, or perhaps the only ideology that centers freedom in that way for everyone is actually feminism. So it's not the case that liberalism, the way you rhetorically sort of bolstered liberalism as the ideology of the future. I think there are other.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

All right, let's move on a little bit to the last question. I do want to get this in. Is the heyday of liberalism over, and will it need to be modified for it to survive? Well, I don't think you want it to be modified, but do you think in where it's going in the future that the heyday is over? It's happening?

[Curtis Yarvin]

We can define liberalism in a lot of different ways. I think marketplaces of ideas are tremendously important. I think freedom of thought. Thought is tremendously important. I would say that, you know, as someone who is on the edge of the Overton Window or, you know, instead without it. And I want to again paint a stark difference between freedom and power, because the advocates of liberalism are constantly confusing these things. And actually freedom of thought and the attribution of power to the marketplace of ideas are not the same thing. And when you take power out of the marketplace of ideas and you let ideas contend solely on whether they are true or not and not whether they are powerful or not, I think you actually get much better ideas. And so Frederick the Great, for example, good friend of Voltaire's, did they have a few differences? They did. But was he comfortable with that level of freedom? He was. You constantly see the people that are fighting for liberalism. There's an episode in James II is overthrown in England because he basically tries to enforce religious toleration. He says, we're going to tolerate the dissenters and the Catholics and the dissenters who are really the philosophical ancestors of today's liberals, are like, no, you shouldn't tolerate Catholics. Don't tolerate us if you're going to tolerate Catholics. And so you constantly see that liberal, that illiberalism evolves spontaneously out of liberalism, that it contains the seeds of its

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

own negation, or possibly out of the incompetence of monarchs in the past who didn't manage to do it. I mean, you can see it up

[Curtis Yarvin]

second was a very confident monarch.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Gosh. Okay, let me ask you then, Yasha Heyday of Liberalism. Have we. Have we gone past it?

[Podcast Host Introduction]

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Good Fight. Normally I would now say, if you

[Yasha Mounk]

want to listen to the rest of

[Podcast Host Introduction]

this episode, please become a paying subscriber. But we decided to make the whole episode available for free to all listeners today. However, if you want to support what we do here, if you want to help us in the fight for the liberal ideas that I tried to defend in this discussion last September, if you want to have full access to all of our episodes about ads, Please go to writing.Damonk.com Listen, become a paying subscriber, and be sure to click on Set Up Podcast to get access to your own premium podcast feed. That's right, into dashamonk.com Listen. Thank you so much for your support.

[Yasha Mounk]

I don't think we have. I think when you look at the history of liberalism, liberalism encounters serious crises about every 75 or 100 years. So in the middle of the 19th century, there was a serious problem with the way that liberalism was conceived at the time, not really being up to the job of regulating an industrial society. And there was a real moment of crisis for liberalism in the middle of the 20th century. There was a moment in which fascism and communism were rising around the world, and it looked for a number of decades as though liberalism was in the past. This is one of the things that motivated von Mises at a time when it looked like even after World War II, we had all given up on liberalism. Yet I think liberalism is the ideology that helps to explain why the second half of the 20th century was so much better for so many nations around the world, including the global south, than in the first half of the 20th century. And now I think we're in the third big crisis of liberalism. And each time liberalism found the resources within itself to reckon honestly with its shortcomings, to reformulate what a renewed liberalism for its time would look like, and to allow us to therefore meet the challenges of the moment, backing on some

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

of what Minna was saying, though, about the way it hasn't worked in the past. Does it reform itself? Is that what you're saying?

[Yasha Mounk]

Yes, it needs to reform itself. It needs to reform itself, absolutely, in a way that makes our current societies less driven by the preferences of a professional managerial class that is imposing a lot of its values on ordinary people, as Curtis says, and a society that lives up to ever closer to the ideal of making sure that irrespective of what gender you have, irrespective of what ethnic group you come from, you are actually valued as a true equal in society, as Minnes says. But I think that it is absolutely liberalism, which means that on both of those points, we are better today than were in 1950, and we're a lot better today than were in 1850. I just want to say one thing because Curtis said, you know, you're talking about liberalism. You say, oh, there's some good things and some bad things. Then with dictators and monarchs, you just point to the bad things. When you look at how horrible life is today in North Korea, in Venezuela, in Zimbabwe, in many ways in so many societies around the world where you lack the basic liberal freedoms, you recognize that in politics, what you can achieve is always less perfect than the thing that you might suffer if the worst comes to pass. Think of the best society today or ever in history, you're not going to come up with something very convincing. That's what Milla couldn't answer my question earlier. Think of the worst society you might imagine living in. Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, all kinds of places. They are absolutely horrible. And so here's the difference. Liberalism has never been perfect, but for nearly all of its existence, it has allowed most people to. To have pretty decent lives. You look at the record of all of the alternatives, and for most of the years in which it actually ruled the world, it was a very, very bad system for most people. And that's why I choose liberalism any time of the day.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Okay, Minna, let me ask you. What do you. You criticize liberalism very strongly. Do you feel that it will survive? Do you think it needs to change, perhaps taking on board some of the things you said and that that might give it extra life, which might be a good thing? I don't know. What are your thoughts?

[Minna Salami]

I don't think that liberalism will survive because it is so reluctant to face its own shadow, in a way, and I think we're seeing evidence of that on this panel. And Yasha keeps somewhat smugly saying that I wasn't able to respond to the question of if there would have been other. I mean, we live. We've lived under patriarchal rule for millennia. So as a woman, there would be no other society that I would refer to and say, oh, that was better. And, yes, humanity has made progress in many regards and in some ways, thanks to liberalism. I grew up in Lagos in Nigeria under military dictatorship, so I'm by no means an advocate of monarchy or dictatorship or anything like that. And I do think that liberal values are important, but there's a huge blind spot that liberals are reluctant to deal with. And as we are moving to these authoritarian dictatorial regimes, I just think it is deeply unfortunate that even, you know, as we have sat here today, we keep wanting to reproduce these absolute fantasies of liberalism being so progressive. You know, instead of actually really contending with its blind spots, could you see

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

it in some way embracing feminism or being driven by feminism or moving in the ways that you wanted? Is that a combination?

[Minna Salami]

I could see that happening if we actually, you know, we're willing to contend with the issues that I and many decolonial and feminist thinkers have been raising against the liberal order. But as you know, as we're seeing, as I mentioned with. And by the way with COVID what I meant was that, you know, people were. It was very obvious that there was an inequality in who was receiving vaccines, who was receiving health care. You know, it was very class, very gendered, very racialized. So that was what I was referring to. And we're seeing the same now with Gaza once again. And that conversation is not happening among liberals. Instead, there's this constant pontific pontification of, you know, liberalism is the order that the world needs, will deal with the world as it is at present moment.

[Podcast Moderator (Roger Hearing)]

Okay, thank you. Thank you very much.

[Minna Salami]

Frank Macaulay sat.