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- [00:00]
Liz Bruinick
I get so many headaches every month. It could be chronic migraine, 15 or more headache days a month, each lasting four hours or more.
- [00:08]
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- [00:53]
Liz Bruinick
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- [01:20]
Yasha Monk
And now, the good fight with yasha monk.
- [01:29]
Jonathan Rauch
My name is Jonathan Rauch and I'm a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a columnist for Persuasion. I recently published a piece in Persuasion titled How to Boost Vaccine Uptake, which advocates paying Americans to take the COVID vaccine, including not only those still unvaccinated, but also those who have already received the jab. Let me explain why I think this is both essential and fair. After a flood of inoculations in the initial weeks and months of the domestic rollout, America's vaccine uptake has slowed to a trickle, with only just over a majority of Americans fully protected. In fact, despite its strong start at getting people fully vaccinated, the United States recently fell into last place among the G7 countries. Some of the holdouts are the noisy anti vax partisans you may see in the news. Many, though, have other, less strident reasons for neglecting the vaccine, like inconvenience, negative pressure from their peer community, worries about missing work, or just feeling they're young and safe. Studies, including a recent one by my Brookings colleague Robert Leighton and several of his colleagues, show that payments motivate precisely these groups to go and get the job. When offered compensation, the researchers find, unvaccinated people's self reported intention to receive the shot rose by 20 to 25 percentage points. That is an impressive effect. Lighten and company also find that as little as $200 is enough to effect this double digit increase, especially compared with other anti pandemic measures like lockdowns and medical care. Incentivizing vaccination is a bargain. It's important to do this fairly, which means paying everyone, including people who've already been vaccinated. No one should be penalized because they got vaccinated early and for all the right reasons. There's a further benefit too. Like it or not, we need mandates to get enough people vaccinated to prevent the virus from spreading. The level sometimes called herd immunity. Providing generous payments that show respect and appreciation can mitigate the backlash and resentment that are associated with mandates. As every parent knows, sticks always work better when accompanied by carrots. We should have started paying for vaccinations months ago, but it's not too late. Congress is working on a giant reconciliation bill. Vaccination payments should be in it I hope you read the piece and enjoy.
- [04:14]
Yasha Monk
Jonathan Rauch's piece called how to Boost Vaccine Uptake was published by Persuasion. To learn more about the community we're building at Persuasion and to get similar articles directly into your inbox, head to www. Persuasion.community My guest today is Liz Bruinick. Liz is a staff writer at the Atlantic. We had a really interesting conversation. We start off by talking a little bit, actually, about her personal faith and her personal life, but then quite quickly get into, I think, a deep and thorough conversation about liberalism and some of the critiques she has about liberalism, but also why it is that liberalism may nevertheless provide decent foundation for a society in which people have very, very different beliefs about things from the economy to religion. I really enjoyed this conversation. I hope you will too. Liz Bruinock, welcome to the podcast.
- [05:09]
Liz Bruinick
Thanks so much for having me on.
- [05:11]
Yasha Monk
So you're in a really interesting political space in the United States. You're an outspoken leftist. You strongly advocated for the election of Bernie Sanders in the democratic primaries in 2020 and so on. And at the same time, you're one of the favorite targets of a lot of the online left because you don't quite play by the book. How do you see yourself in this political moment?
- [05:30]
Liz Bruinick
Yeah, I am a Christian leftist that I think is a type of person who's fairly recognizable in Europe, Latin America, and even parts of Asia as a fairly familiar political type. This is, you know, the sort of Christian Democrat type figure who builds coalitional governments with socialist parties. Christian, of course, but also welfarist. And again, I mean, these are huge parties in the Nordic countries in Germany, historically, there have been parties of this kind even in the UK and other Anglophone countries that have been fairly successful. It's just that we don't have them in the United States. We have this sort of two party monopoly that's been reigning for a while though the commitments of the parties have kind of shifted back and forth over time. But it's unusual in the United States for a lot of reasons. And so I think it winds up being sort of unintelligible. But that's where I locate myself. I'm just a fairly straightforward Christian social Democrat.
- [06:28]
Yasha Monk
That's interesting to me. First of all, I thought that you would say socialist rather than social democrat. And then I think sort of, you seem to allude to two quite different political traditions here. When I think of that kind of tradition in Europe, I think of something like the cdu, the Christian Democratic Party in Germany, that certainly has a strong welfare state stance that helped to build the welfare state and believes in the welfare state, but that also is quite clearly on the side of free markets and capitalism. So it believes in welfare state capitalism. And then there's a kind of Christian left in Latin America that I associate more with something like liberation theology and so on, which is economically and in some other ways quite a lot more radical. So those to me look like two very different traditions, actually. And I guess I'd love to know, do you think you're one or the other or a mix of both?
- [07:13]
Liz Bruinick
Yeah. Fruit of the same tree, but. Right. Have gone off in radically different directions. It's difficult in the United States to call yourself really one or the other because in the United States we're so far from either one being a political reality. I often talk to my husband about this because he's similarly far left in such a way as to be essentially politically celibate in the United States. When you're a socialist in the United States, I mean, that's what it is. It's being politically celibate. I mean, you're fairly disempowered. And so it becomes sort of laughable, all of these arguments we have on the American left among this extremely tiny minority of people over who's a Leninist, who's a Trotskyist, who's actually operating in the vein of the honorable socialist tradition and who's a wrecker and so forth, because all of us are equally impotent in actual American politics.
- [08:04]
Yasha Monk
When I think of some of the frustrations that I have with the Democratic socialists of America with something like Bernie Sanders campaign, to me that's actually important because at times he talks a little bit like he just wants to be Denmark or Sweden. There are certain critiques of Denmark or Sweden, but I certainly think they're very attractive countries and that broadly speaking, the United States were to move a little bit further towards the welfare state policies of Denmark or Sweden, that would be a good thing. And I'm on board. But then at times it really is saying, but no, we're socialists in a deeper sense, and we're certainly not Bernie Sanders himself, but people who are part of a movement who defend the Cuban regime, who defend the Venezuelan regime. And there's a sort of strategic ambiguity about what socialism really means in that context. On one side it's sort of we just want a generous welfare state, and on the other side it's no, we want to end capitalism. And to me, those are two very, very different propositions. And so it doesn't seem entirely academic for movement to get clear about it. My frustration of it actually is that it isn't sufficiently clear about it many times.
- [09:01]
Liz Bruinick
Oh yeah, I mean, I do think clarity is worthwhile. I think it's difficult to kind of get the momentum you need to grind down to clarity in a movement when you're so far estranged from the levers of power. Right. Because what is the momentum you have to really force people to make these difficult choices? You can say it's harming the movement, it's making it difficult for us to gather converts, quote, unquote, that we have this kind of level of turmoil and unclarity. But it's difficult for us to gather converts because the chances of us actually having an actionable impact on politics is so infestationally small. I mean, that's the issue. And so in terms of clarity being worthwhile, I take your point there. And intellectually it's always better to be clear than unclear. Well, I think there are exceptions to that, but in this case in politics, it's better to be clear than unclear. And I would say that like my husband, there's a, I think in this household a market socialist impulse that's very strong with at least a short term agreement that a generous welfare state with an underlying market structure and a significant portion of the country's wealth that is democratically controlled without destroying the underlying market mechanism. That's the short term goal. So my husband tends to talk about sovereign wealth funds, or ways of setting aside portions of the country's wealth that have democratic elements as a way to kind of accomplish that without a kind of bloody Revolution or something along those lines. And I think that sounds both doable, peaceable and beneficial. And that's, I think, where we are. Some follow the noise. Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to AI. Every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
- [11:05]
Yasha Monk
so help listeners who may be a little less familiar with you, including some of our international listeners, understand some of the reasons why everything you said so far, which sounds like the left should be pretty happy with it and on board with it, nevertheless makes you a kind of controversial figure on the left in the United States, for lack of a better word. You know, it seems to me that part of this is your personal story, the fact that you're religious, that you had kids pretty young. I think there's a sort of weird allergic reaction to that in a way. But part of it is perhaps is also that you're not completely on board with every part of the cultural catechism at the moment. I hope you understand that.
- [11:42]
Liz Bruinick
Well, yes, it isn't as though everyone must agree with my politics. And I try not to assume that all of my critics simply respond to the aesthetics of who I am or something, because it's true that a lot of my critics are simply further left than I am. And there are those in the American left, as you mentioned, who are more traditional socialists and so forth, or those who kind of envision a much more revolutionary approach than, you know, sort of go operating through the typical democratic channels and preserving the peace. Peace is an enormous thing for me as a Christian right. I cannot get on board with what is explicitly marketed as, or envisioned to be sort of bloody revolution. I have a really hard time going there.
- [12:26]
Yasha Monk
And just to chime in for a second, I'm not a Christian, but I'm somebody who comes from a family that has been in the wrong place at the wrong time for many generations. And so, you know, I think my most small c conservative instinct is the recognition that the best the politics has achieved in the history of the world is far less significant than the worst that it has inflicted. And so while we should always strive for improvement, we need to have an awareness of just how horrible things can get when they go wrong.
- [12:55]
Liz Bruinick
Right. I mean, you know, so those things kind of occur to me and I just have a real problem getting on board with that sort of thing. So there are legitimate reasons to object to my politics, and I don't want to downplay that, but There are issues also with the cultural side of who I am. For international listeners, right? The United States is a really large country. The regional differences are difficult to overstate. I am and my husband are from Texas in the southern part of the United States. It's the best state. It's really almost the only one. We're from the northern part of Texas. We grew up around the block from each other. We went to the same gigantic public high school in North Texas where we met on our debate team. I was 16, he was 18. He was my debate team captain. And we sort of agreed right then and there that we were going to get married. This wasn't totally unusual in the culture where we were brought up. My mom and dad also met in high school in that same city and married when my mom was 18. Again, not totally atypical for where we were from, but we were smart kids. My husband won a full ride scholarship to the University of Oklahoma because he did so well on a standardized test that we take in the United States, the psat. He was a National Merit Scholar. I went to Brandeis, which is near Boston, way up on the East Coast. And he went to Boston University Law School, where he won another very large scholarship for public service because he wanted to do labor law. I won a Marshall Scholarship to go to Cambridge and study Christian theology. Got my master's in philosophy. And so the fact of the matter is that we were two people who came out of North Texas in this culture that's traditionally conservative. It's a red state, it's a Republican state. It's a very Christian area. Actually. We come from Tarrant county in Texas, which is the most reliably read county in Texas. Texas. And then we wind up on the east coast, which is this very blue, very liberal, very highly educated, not necessarily especially religious, especially in the professional classes place. And we just don't quite fit in. We got married as soon as we were done with our educations. We dated the whole time. My husband's the only person I've ever dated. We married when I was 23. I got pregnant when I was 24. We had our first baby when I was 25. We had our next when I was 28. Now I'm 30 and we've been married for seven years. This is just atypical for this area. And I think the degree to which I enjoy it and he enjoys it, that we like each other is. I think there's a kind of style in this part of the country of being kind of fashionably busy and frustrated. With your home life. And this is actually the part of my life I'm happiest with.
- [15:45]
Yasha Monk
Part of it, I think, is the way in which your personal life is objectively different from that of most people in our broadly sort of political and intellectual circles. Certainly having kids probably about a decade earlier than most people would, and so on. But I wonder whether part of it is just being vocal about it in the sense that, you know, something that really struck in my mind is something that a former guest of this podcast, David French, has said to me. We said, look, if I go to this conference we were at, which was mostly liberals, and I told them it would be good for America if most people got married at a relatively young age and had stable relationships and had two parent families and children, people would be really upset and say that this is moralistic and that it's imposing my morality on other people and perhaps even that it's somehow discriminatory of certain groups and so on. But when I look at what the attendees at this conference are actually doing in their lives, they are mostly married, they are in stable relationships. You know, there's an open bar and people can get as drunk as they want and they could have affairs, they're away from the families, but nobody does that. Everybody has one and a half drinks and then goes to bed at 11:30pm and their own bed. And so there is sort of an odd thing where actually I'm in France at the moment as I'm recording this. France is a pretty messy country in terms of the lives people lead, including the elites of a country lead. Pretty messy. America is a country in which actually the life that people lead in the elite often aren't all that messy. They are quite traditional. Most of the people I know don't have kids out of wedlock. They have pretty stable relationships. But the political sin is not living like that. It's taking joy in living like that and saying that that's a good thing.
- [17:30]
Liz Bruinick
Yeah, I mean, that sounds right. There's this long standing argument about preaching what you practice and so forth. Among the professional managerial class. One thing I will say is that, you know, the professional managerial class, when they do have kids, they settle down into these monogamous relationships, they have a glass of wine, they go to bed at 11:30, and they live these very stable, buttoned up lives that they wouldn't necessarily cop to. I think the difference between the lives that my peers live in the life that I live is like you say, we did it about a decade younger. And I think that time Disparity causes quite a bit of stress for a number of reasons. For one thing, you know, there's a scarcity problem, so there are all these impending issues. I don't know if you saw a recent Wall Street Journal article about the disparity between the number of men and women who are graduating from college at this point, but there is about a 20 point disparity between the number of men and women who are graduating from college. That means there are going to be many, many more female college graduates than male college graduates, which means women with higher earning potential, men with lower earning potential, which traditionally has put men at a disadvantage for marriage, which means you're going to have a professional managerial class where lots of professional women with high earning potential are either going to marry men with much lower earning potential or they're not going to marry at all. They're going to marry men who don't have college degrees. So you're going to have female lawyers and doctors marrying firemen and cops, or you're going to have female lawyers and doctors never getting married at all. And I think this delay thing where you wait until you're 30, 32 to get married and then you're 35, 36, 38, 40 when you have a baby, that was kind of the sweet spot where you got to do everything. You know, you got to graduate, you got to go to grad school, you got to have the career, you got to save up and kind of have your fun and your own identity and get really stable and comfortable. And both parties could bring a lot to the marriage. And then you combine households and you have a ton of money to start off with. And the only kind of loose end that you had to nail down very quickly was fertility, sort of the declining female fertility. This introduces a whole nother hitch into that life plan, which is now you're dealing with. While getting a male in there who is actually college educated and has a bunch of net worth and so forth to bring to the table is going to get increasingly difficult. And so there's this rush issue, why there's going to be a kind of time crunch which makes it more difficult to nail down your graduate studies and get your stuff together and do the things that you want to do, like travel and date and really figure out what you want in life before you get married, have all the net worth, have the baby, etc. So I think there's a huge amount of anxiety for young women who are educated and who want to lay out their lives neatly in this way. And I Think they're well aware of the challenges ahead of them. And, you know, having someone be like, just marry someone that you really like when you're really young and then, you know, kind of figure it out together as a unit is just really obnoxious. It just feels really obnoxious. My parents got married, and neither of them had gone to college. They hadn't even thought about it. My mom was working as, like, a bank teller. My dad was painting dorms, and they went to college while they were married. My dad graduated college the year I was born, you know, and that was how they made it work. And they. They did well for themselves later in life, but it was something that they did together. And so, again, to my husband and I, that was not an unusual life pattern that you support each other through these hurdles, as opposed to having everything to bring to the table. Kind of like nobility when you get married. Like, I have this enormous dowry, and it's like, no, you kind of get married without a pot to piss in, and then you. You build it all. But I think, you know, the fact that there's all this anxiety around what kind of life plan is going to be available causes this to be a very, very, very tense area for especially women. And so I think that, understandably, there's a lot of stress in the public discourse about it.
- [21:57]
Yasha Monk
That's very interesting. And, yeah, I think that there's a lot of interesting things in these findings that actually women are out competing men in high schools and therefore getting degrees at a higher rate. That both goes against the general narrative about what's happening in our society at the moment, but also helps to explain some of those gender dynamics and even some of the sort of reaction you might get on Twitter or something like that. I think that's right. We had a little bit of a chat before the interview, and you said it really annoys you when people liken wokeness to a religion, and it annoys you as a religious person. Explain first of all what the argument is that there is this sort of parallel between wokeness and religion and why it is that you don't buy that.
- [22:34]
Liz Bruinick
Yeah, I do get those requests, not infrequently. And there has been a huge amount of writing already on the proposed parallels between wokeness and religion. And it always strikes me as a little bit insulting when one comes to my inbox, because I guess there are kind of three ways you can make this argument. One is wokeness is like a religion because it's dogmatic and it's not subject to criticism. And you just blindly believe it like an idiot. Which, as a religious person, I feel like, you know, thanks. It's not precisely how I conceive of being religious. The other is that, well, wokeness fulfills some kind of need that religion fulfills for people. This is sort of the Durkheimian analysis of what religion is and what it's doing. Again, as a religious person, not precisely how I conceive of what the faith is, and also not totally certain that that's unique to either religion or wokeness. And then the last is that wokeness is supplanting. You know, sort of taking the place of religion in society or in lives of people who are heavily invested in it. And this is an argument frequently made by other religious people about wokeness. And I'm not sure that I agree with any of those analyses, but I disagree with them in different ways and to different degrees, I suppose.
- [23:59]
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- [24:29]
Yasha Monk
So the first one I sort of find easy to understand why it is like that. The second and third I'm a little bit more surprised by, because I've heard many quite religious people give versions of that analysis. And I think of both of those, I think the distinction between the Duke one and the supplanting one is interesting and subtle, but I think in the way that people tend to think about it, they run those two things together. And so there's a kind of account which, broadly speaking, says you need an ordering ideology in order to understand the world. You know, people have strong feelings of guilt and a way of trying to get a clean conscience about the world in a meaningful way. And what religious people who make this analogy would say is that religion does that in a meaningful way, right? It does that in a way that according to them, is rooted in truth. And that's rooted in a sort of whole complicated theology about why we should, in fact, feel guilty and how it is that we can gain some amount of forgiveness from that guilt and why that's a meaningful thing. And then they say that that then has positive side effects for society. But religious societies bind you to an institution that gives you moral rules, that incentivizes you to care for your neighbor and for the members of your community, and to do charity. And that the problem in their view of Wokeness is that it does prey on all of those instincts, but it does it precisely without the serious theology, without the tie to a meaningful community, without pushing people towards charitable work in quite the same way. So I guess I'd like to hear in a little bit more detail why it is that sort of, from a religious perspective, you don't buy that analogy or you find it even a little, perhaps insulting to religion?
- [26:05]
Liz Bruinick
Well, I think that, you know, the idea that Wokeness is meeting a certain need that religion also meets. I would put it this way. Religion as a concept is this epiphenomenon of liberalism or an epiphenomenon of the Enlightenment, because there needed to be this category of stuff that was exciting, excluded or sanded down if it was to be included whatsoever in the public political sphere, right? Because there were these things that were causing too many problems to be included fully and full bloodedly in politics, the Hundred Years War and so forth. And so in the case of metaphysical liberalism a la Rousseau, the idea is just to fully on transform religion into something that can cooperate with liberal democracy. And so what you do is you essentially just abolish all the religious institutions and the specificity and to speak clearly, Christianity, you take out all of the institutions and the organizations and you get to functionally private and entirely individualized and personally mediated spirituality. And that's really all that's left of it. This is the kind of moral therapeutic deism that people often complain about in Christian circles these days. And that's all that's left of the Christian tradition and the kind of metaphysical liberal tradition. If you want to tell me that Wokeness is similar to moral therapeutic deism, that's just a truism, that's just stating a fact, right? But that was done. That was something that people did, right? I mean, that was an intentional process that was carried out, that was a process of modifying previously existing traditions such that they would cooperate with liberal democracy. On the other hand, if you want to look at political liberalism, where these traditions theoretically keep their traditional forms, they're just excluded from public life. And if their thought wants to enter public life, it has to be translated into public reason, per Rawls, then this translation, you sort of transmogrify the ideas somehow that they then become pleasing or acceptable to other people who don't share the priors of the tradition. If you want to tell me that Wokeness is a religion in that respect, I have a much harder time imagining why. It just seems to be the argument in that case is, well, wokeness is an ideology that is functioning somewhat beyond reproach, or that it is not being adequately translated into public reason. Arguments are not being adequately fielded for the priors of Wokeness. That seems to be the claim of wokeness as a religion in the politically liberal context.
- [29:05]
Yasha Monk
For those of our listeners who may be less up on essentially the second big book by John Rawls, Political Liberalism and the Idea of Public Reason, let's unpack this a little bit. I mean, broadly speaking, the idea that rules has is that in a really diverse society, one of the ways in which we can all agree on a set of political rules is through something he calls the overlapping consensus. So you might believe in the rules of our democratic game because you're a secular and you're a social Democrat and you think they're good for that reason. And somebody else may believe in them because they're deeply rooted in a religious tradition that thinks that tolerance is important, and so therefore they're attracted to those rules. But importantly and controversially, Rose then also says that if you want to reach your fellow citizens and make a political claim, if you're running a political campaign or even just if you're having an argument on a podcast potentially, you should ideally formulate claims in ways that people from outside your own tradition can also understand. And that essentially ends up meaning in a kind of secular way. Now, I guess I have two questions. I mean, one of which is that that seems to me like one very particular, specific formulation of liberalism that I, as a strong liberal, I'm not sure I agree with. I think I probably don't. And so it seems to me a bit of a shorthand to take that as a definition of liberalism. But we'll get to that liberalism conversation in a moment. Perhaps. But the second is that that doesn't seem to me like the claim that people are making about wokeness. Right? They're not saying the problem of wokeness is that the people who are woke are based in this deep intellectual tradition in a way that perhaps a Christian might be. And really they just need to translate what they're saying into secular language in such a way that people who don't come from the woke tradition can understand what they're saying. That doesn't seem to be the criticism. The criticism seems to be that Wokeness fills some of the needs of religion. So perhaps it's mordochaiming in that sense, and that because it fills those needs, it gives people a sort of pretense of meaning and it allows them to believe in positions that actually aren't very well justified or aren't very rational, logically coherent, because it's so tempting a position. It seems to me like something like that. But I don't think the objection to wokeness as religion from the people who believe in met analogy, it's not, hey, you should translate what you're talking about. It's you fall into an intellectual and cultural trap by subscribing to the set of beliefs because it like fills some need in you you didn't realize you had, which is a slightly different criticism, I think.
- [31:46]
Liz Bruinick
To me, I think those two things sound very similar. It's just that they're, you know, the argument that one is just sort of describing the process by which you have come to making the statement that is inappropriate in the public sphere. Right. So I imagine that a lot of people, a lot of secular liberals, believe that I, a Catholic, simply believe what I believe because I have a fear of the unknown or something like that, and that it fulfills a lot of needs in me. You know, never mind that I, a Catholic, agree to live with many more mysteries that I willingly identify as mysteries and approach as mysteries and worship as such. But never mind all that. I think a lot of people believe that about religious people, that they have these needs and that's why they believe all these stupid things. But as long as we do our job and we come out in politics with arguments that are lies, really is what they are. You know, we make statements about why we want certain political things and we don't tell you our real reasons, we tell you other reasons that we think you will agree with. But that's how we're supposed to do public reason. What the WOKE stuff is, is that whatever their reasons are for having fallen into this kind of intellectual trap, they are making statements about what they want and what should happen politically, which are considered beyond reproach. You're not really allowed to criticize them without enduring a bunch of acrimony and attacks, as though you're criticizing someone's very religion, their very concept of right and wrong. And they're doing this, you know, from a position of unimpeachability, despite the fact that they have not made adequate arguments about the priors and about why the rest of society should agree with them. And so I do think it is similar in some way to almost imposing a kind of theocracy in that they're able to make moral claims. They're able to make sort of claims about moral fact and the impacts that those moral facts should have on politics without justifying them in the way that we expect people to justify those things and be subject to public criticism in a liberal democracy. I think that's part of the argument.
- [34:07]
Yasha Monk
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- [34:26]
Liz Bruinick
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- [34:38]
Yasha Monk
to say that I think that seems like the difference between the criticism that people make of wokeness and the way you originally read it, right? Which is to say that what John Rules talks about is a society in which he assumes that people have a radical diversity of substantive beliefs, a radical diversity of what he calls comprehensive doctrines. So some will be rooted in Catholicism or Protestantism, different forms of that. Some will be very secular. You know, the kinds of things that structure the lives is really radically different from each other. And so then when he is saying, hey, you know, as a Christian, you should be speaking in such a way that people who don't share these deep moral priors can get what you're talking about and they don't feel like, well, that's not applicable to me because I don't share those priors. So put your reasons forward in a secular way. His fear isn't really about something like theocracy, Right. His fear is about facilitating that kind of overlapping consensus, facilitating the conversation. And again, I think there's good reasons to be critical of asking citizens to falsify sort of the moral register in which they actually want to speak to that extent. And that's well taken. But I think when people criticize the Wokeness, it's more like they criticize what they regard fairly or unfairly as a kind of incipient theocracy. Their concern is not, hey, you speak too much from within your own values. And so I can't understand you, or that's making claims on me in an unfair way. It's no, you want to impose this set of views without allowing dissent in a way that feels more like I just have to defer because you have a high priest and I have no ability to contest what you're saying without serious risk to my social standing or my career or whatever it might be. And so again, that seems like quite a different way of worrying about wokeness as a religion.
- [36:28]
Liz Bruinick
Yeah. And my response would just be, one of the weaknesses of political liberalism is that it thinks about a diverse array of things as one thing. So when I said that, you know, liberalism kind of creates this category that is religion. And it's just things that are kind of too radioactive for politics. You know, things that compete with liberalism itself as the kind of moral register in which we do politics. And I will say the first time we met, I was bearish on liberalism. And the reason that I was down on it is because it's so in the air we breathe. It's hard to explain to a lot of Democrats in the United States, speaking strictly of the party here, the barriers they have to understanding what socialism is. There's beliefs about capitalism come from liberal theories of private property and ownership that come out of Locke and so forth. And you cannot get them to understand. They're just provisional beliefs. Right. They're not inherent in the universe. You don't have to believe what you believe about private property and theories of ownership. You can have the same functional political system with slightly different views of what dessert and property have in common. And you know how those two things are related. Those are bearish on liberalism at the time. How times have changed. The parts of liberalism that I have always been bullish on are the freedom of expression and the free inquiry. I'm a Christian. I have no problem with these things because I believe God is the truth. Truth will set you free. I don't have any problem with free inquiry and free expression because I believe that if you earnestly pursue the truth, you're only going to find God waiting for you. Just earnestly keep searching and that's all you'll find. Maybe you don't identify it as such, but that's what you actually happen upon. Right. This is Platonism and I'm a Christian Neoplatonist. You're just going to find the forms. Right? So I have no problem with that. But that is actually the kind of half of liberalism that's taken the hit. And the private property capitalism shit is stronger than ever. That part of liberalism is doing just fine while. While the freedom of expression, free inquiry part of liberalism is sort of crumbling. So. So now I Find myself in the weird position of kind of trying to say, you know, I feel like Nathan Hale in the Crucible, the guy who shows up gung ho at first to do witch hunting and then sort of by the last act is like, wait, this has gone way off the rails. People have to go nuts on the completely wrong part of liberalism. The part that does all the vicious exploitation and destruction of human life and the wanton immiseration of everyone. That part they let off scot free. It's the part that actually has led to tremendous amounts of progress that they have decided to attack. At any rate, this is where I would say, you know, you get this tradition of religion in liberalism and it's describing this thing that is, is too radioactive, too much of a challenge to liberalism itself to incorporate into politics. When you look at the context of the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries, you can easily understand why that was. It had been a huge albatross to Europe for such a long time. And you can see that the slow incorporation of liberal polities did change quite a bit of that for the better. And I do not believe the Catholic Church was blameless in this period, far from it. You can see, to put it lightly, a few excesses there. And the problem is that religions actually, everything that gets lumped into that category, these things do not actually necessarily have things in common.
- [40:28]
Yasha Monk
I think there's sort of three interrogations of liberalism on the table. One in which we agree and two in which we'll see to what extent we agree. So one is about free speech, free inquiry, and, and so on. And I think, you know, I'd love to hear your case for why that's important, but I think we're likely to agree on that. Then the second is about religion and how liberalism does or should treat religion. And I'm not sure to what extent we will disagree there, at least in my reading of liberalism. So I'd be interested in having it out. And then the third is the relationship between liberalism and, I guess, broadly speaking, capitalism or free markets, and what kind of version of it necessarily follows from liberalism. And again, I'm not sure about the extent of disagreement we're going to have there. So if you don't mind, why don't we go sort of one by one on that. So first of all, if you just want to make a brief case for what is it that you find attractive about the free speech, free inquiry part of liberalism?
- [41:21]
Liz Bruinick
Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, people are natural philosophers. I think we're made to search for meaning in the universe. And that epiphenomenon of that search is the creation of art and expression. I think we're naturally social, and the way that we express our sociality is largely by expression. And I just have a really hard time imagining a justification for at least using the power of the state, especially a concentrated, superpowered state such as we have now to punish expression. Tuku, now, now. I certainly think there are limits there. I believe there are just fucking worthless forms of expression. And there are forms of expression that have costs that are too high for the value of the thing being expressed. And these are the very typical examples you probably already have in your head. Fire in a crowded theater. You're expressing something completely worthless because there's not a fire. And it costs, you know, potentially a huge amount because you have the risk of people getting hurt or trampled or whatever, obscene materials, child pornography and so forth. I'm pretty firm on some of that stuff being banned and punished legally.
- [42:43]
Yasha Monk
Professor at Yale University seemed to accuse you of being essentially a Nazi for some outspoken criticism you had of an organization that defends some forms of sharp pornography earlier. We don't need to get into that. But in my mostly absence from Twitter, I noticed that remarkable cultural moment.
- [43:03]
Liz Bruinick
Yeah, there's an organization, it's called Prosthesia. Just in my very quick defense, the FBI put out an indictment or a complaint, I believe, in 2018, in which they mentioned arresting the proprietor of a website that exclusively published erotica detailing the rape, torture, and sometimes murder of children, including infants and toddlers. It was a small subscription only website. The FBI explained explicitly in that complaint that they had declined to publish the title of the website because they were using it to generate leads. They had credit card information because it was a subscription only website. Using that credit card information and the fact that pedophiles like to use the same usernames, board to board, website to website. They had been able to find lots of pedophiles who had actually been posting real child pornography on other websites and who had subscribed to that website using their credit card info. They'd been able to track these guys down and arrest them. That's why they didn't publish the name of the website. They wanted to continue generating those leads and placing these people who are committing actual felonies, including actual sexual abuse of children, under arrest. Prostasia, this website that I had criticized, which builds itself as a child protection agency, one week after the FBI filed this complaint in which the title of this website was sealed, congratulated themselves for their investigation and published the name of the website as if to tip off people who might be caught up in this FBI dragnet. That's a funny ass way to protect children, if you ask me. Getting in the way of an FBI investigation that was arresting people who were molesting children and posting child pornography. But I understand if a professor at Yale sees it differently, happy to debate them in person about this. I have sourcing within the FBI and have investigated this already. So very, very happy to debate them in person about the nature of this organization if they' like. I would love that.
- [44:56]
Yasha Monk
I prefer to go around calling people fascists.
- [45:00]
Liz Bruinick
Hey, hey.
- [45:01]
Yasha Monk
If said professor would like, I would be very, very happy to facilitate that. So we'll send an invitation after this conversation.
- [45:09]
Liz Bruinick
More than happy to defend my reputation. I mean, you know, again, this is free expression, right? I'm a journalist. This is what I do. A big part of my job centers around the possibility of free expression and free inquiry. I'm an investigative journalist. It is what I do. I rely quite heavily on laws that protect this kind of work. And I don't even mind that people can go around sort of willy nilly calling you a fascist or a Nazi because I do have faith that I can defend my reputation in the court of public opinion on issues like this. But I consider that to be the worthwhile and useful, very beneficial chunk of liberalism that has led to, you know, quite a bit of progress, not only in the sciences, but in literature, in the arts, in politics in general. I think the liberal etiquette, you know, there's a strain of stoicism in liberal manners of kind of using your intellect to control your emotions when you're having a conversation with someone. And it doesn't mean that you're across the board and at all times civil. Teresa Bajan, who's a great professor, I believe at Oxford, wrote a text called Mere Civility. It's a great book. And it's like, you don't have to be sort of cloyingly polite. There have certainly been harsh debates in liberal societies, but there's this acknowledgment that it stops short of attempts of total character assassination and violence. And I think those rules of conduct are, on the whole, good.
- [46:51]
Yasha Monk
And I will defend to the blood the liberty of Yale University professors to character assassinate you. But that doesn't mean that I have to respect them afterwards. Let's move to the second part of three things that I want us to get through on. Liberalism, and that's the role of religion. So look I agree that historically, one of the attempts of liberalism has been to try to help and deal with religious wars in Europe and the kind of real bloodshed you get when the idea is that everybody has to have a religion, for example, of the king or of a dictator in some parts of the world. And I think liberalism is very important at softening the impact of religion in those contexts. I also agree with you that there are countries today that in my mind, use liberalism in an attempt to downplay religion or to curtail the ability that religious people have to express themselves in the public sphere in a way that goes too far. I'm recording this in France. I actually have much admiration for France in many ways. But I do think that part of French secularism goes too far and how far it can curtail how religious people can appear in public and what kind of role it can give to religion in the public sphere. Having said that, you know, for me, the reason why I'm a liberal has a lot to do with religion, for I'm not a religious person. And that is that it starts with the really difficult puzzle that we face in the United States and in virtually every other democracy around the world now of how do you deal with genuine diversity of identity, of ethnicity and skin color, but also of religious belief, of what Rawls would call comprehensive doctrines. And to me, the best we can do is precisely to give people a set of liberal freedoms, not because we think that everybody is an individualist to whom the most important thing is just to follow the whims and their conscience. Not even because we think that most citizens are going to take an active choice at 18 to leave whatever community they grew up in and to run into the arms of some other religious or other community, but precisely because we know how important their beliefs are to so many people. And if you think about how you organize a society in which you can be a deep, devoted Christian and I can be an agnostic and somebody else can be a convinced atheist, that we can share polity and be compatriots in a meaningful way, I think you wind up with a liberal account of, of individual rights and so on, because that's what facilitates our respective ability to follow our conscience and to live up to the religious imperatives that many of our fellow citizens feel in a very deep way. So for me, there's a version of liberalism that isn't anti religious or that doesn't deny the prime role that religion has in the lives of many people. It actually flows from the recognition of its importance. And I guess I would want to know whether you'd be okay with that version of liberalism or what your criticism of it would be be.
- [49:56]
Liz Bruinick
I'm okay with that, yeah. I mean, I think we all get older and I mean, when I was younger, I don't know, I had hotter opinions on everything. I mean, what I can say is that I've seen this integralist thing fluff up on the Catholic right. And the integralist tendency is of course, this view that Catholics should accept nothing less than the full integration of the Catholic Church and the state and zero separation between church and state and so forth, and kind of a benevolent Gillesian diarchy with the Pope and the King ruling together. And you know, I've also reported deeply on the Catholic sex abuse crisis. These people can't run a fucking railroad, man. They're not going to be able to run a country. I mean, we can't run a country, but you know, we don't need to be mixing the chocolate and the peanut butter here is not going to be good. They have enough problems on their own. I think a Christian's job is to do the most amount of good they can with the dispensation they find themselves in. So I have begun to think what is the most good I can do in the dispensation I found myself in? I find myself in a rapidly polarizing liberal democracy that's becoming somewhat dysfunctional because of its brittleness in this state of polarization. And so my interest has become in trying to soften these chords that have become brittle between people making the, you know, raising the tensile strength of the relationships between citizens. As a journalist and a member of the press, which is an important estate in this society, and trying to do what I can to act against what I feel like is a fairly stupid and self perpetuating cycle of polarization that has to do with people losing face and trying to save face. And that's what I think the duty of Christians has to be at this point. The liberal democracy that we have is what we have. It's what we have. And liberal democracies are interesting. I mean, they're like, they are a little bit radioactive, right? In that when they are functional, they're safe. When they start to degrade, you don't know what you're gonna get. I don't really know what's going to happen if our liberal democracy, under the forces of this sort of polarization and brittleness that we are now encountering starts to degrade too much. But I don't want to find out. I Would like it to remain stable. I would like things to change politically. Like you said, I'm a Bernie bro. I think that having a stronger welfare state would be great. I think having higher social trust would be fantastic. I mean these are things that I deeply desire and I want peace. And I think, you know, the fact that those stated goals, if I tweeted out right now, you know, I want a generous welfare state, I want to abolish poverty, I want peace, I want forgiveness, I want high social trust and I want strong relationships between the citizenry that would piss people off and the
- [53:14]
Yasha Monk
last part of it would piss people off the most. Right. You wrote a great article recently on I think death shaming you called it.
- [53:21]
Liz Bruinick
Yes. Making fun of dead people for dying unvaccinated of COVID 19. Yeah, yeah.
- [53:27]
Yasha Monk
It was just really to me it's such a symptom of this moment, this sort of. You want your fellow citizens to be as dumb and as suffering as possible and you want to take joy in the misery. There's something in the culture at the moment about that, but I find just really deeply off putting. I want to make sure as we end this conversation to touch on the third aspect of liberalism we want to discuss, which is the economic one. And actually there I want to go back to the distinction we drew earlier. I think to me liberalism does imply under most realistic circumstances, some defense of private property because I wouldn't pass the state that owns all the means of production to preserve things like freedom of speech. If you have no employment options outside of the state, then criticizing the government is always going to be very difficult. And perhaps there's some theoretical country that can somehow sustain all those individual freedoms, but I take to be really crucial while also running the whole economy. It's been tried many times and it has gone wrong every time. And I'm very, very skeptical that it could ever work because I don't trust one institution to have that much power without starting to abuse it. So in that I suppose I do think that there is a connection between liberalism and a preservation of these part of a capitalist market economy. So if you had said that you are a true communist, I would say, okay, I see why that puts you at odds with liberalism. Now, the way you actually described your economic position, I don't necessarily see why that should be in contrast with liberalism. I mean, Sweden and Denmark are both liberal countries in a philosophical sense. I think you can have a very broad range of economic views as a philosophical liberal. You can be a libertarian, you can be somebody who wants an absolutely minimal welfare state. And I think that's a liberal position. And you can be somebody, and I would put myself more in that category, who wants a very robust welfare state and who wants to make sure that people are protected against the great misfortunes of life by the state while continuing to allow a robust market economy. And that, to me, is also a liberal position. So I guess my question is on that front, are you just sort of on the leftmost flank, economically speaking of liberalism, or do you really think that there's a deeper conflict between liberalism and the economic vision that's important to you?
- [55:41]
Liz Bruinick
So I do think that there are forms of liberalism that there is a very solid conflict between, especially sort of my metaphysical views about the nature of the ultimate destination of all goods, the meaning of creation and sort of teleology of everything, the sort of strong forms of liberalism that do posit sort of absolutist private property and the vision of. Of the ultimate destination of goods that I have as a Christian. There are conflicts there. But, you know, I think in the forms of liberalism that have taken shape, especially in the Nordic countries and in other parts of Europe, you know, again, ideologically, in the abstract, are there hard conflicts? Sure. In practice there are degrees. And are there tolerable degrees of compatibility? Yeah, I think so. As in the sort of mixed market socialist setup that I described earlier that my husband tends to think about his ideal. You know, you have elements of the economy that are democratically controlled, but you also have private property, and you have an underlying market structure that's still intact. And you have, interestingly, in the Scandinavian countries, I think you don't even have minimum wages. Those kinds of laws don't exist because you have a strong labor presence. And the wage levels are more or less controlled by labor. And those kinds of layers of social control where you do have democratic control of a certain element of the national wealth, and then you do have private property that's dispersed among the citizenry. And then you do have a strong presence of labor. That seems like a nice way to chop things up where even with a centralized state, there's not too much power concentrated in one sector, which is consonant with the sort of Catholic subsidiarity approach, but it also nicely satisfies, I think, the expectation of any socialist that, as you say, there are layers of protection for a person against the regular misfortunes and ups and downs of life. So to me, that seems ideal, and it doesn't aggravate too many of my ideological commitments. And again, I mean, I think part of politics is you come to the table with 100 things you want and only three that you really, really, really want to get. And that's basically the mindset I think you have to go into politics with.
- [58:11]
Yasha Monk
Well, whatever the exact right ideology to have, I take a lot of heart in this kind of conversation. I think there's many things we agree on. There's also very important things we disagree on. And I think we've made some real progress towards understanding each other's position in this conversation. And I wish that there was more spaces in our public discourse where it was possible to do that.
- [58:29]
Liz Bruinick
Yeah, same thing. Thanks so much for having me on. I really appreciate it.
- [58:33]
Yasha Monk
Thank you so much, Liz.
- [58:34]
Liz Bruinick
Thanks so much. Have a good one.
- [58:40]
Yasha Monk
Thank you so much for listening to the Good Fight. Lots of listeners have been spreading the word about the show. If you two have been enjoying the podcast, please be liked. Rate the show on itunes, tell your friends all about it, Share shared on Facebook or Twitter and finally, please mail suggestions for great guests or comments about the show to goodfightpodmail.com that's goodfightpodmail.com this
- [59:07]
Jonathan Rauch
recording carries a Creative Commons 4.0 International License.
- [59:11]
Yasha Monk
Thanks to Silent Partner for their song Chess Pieces.