Prof Alexandre Lefebvre - Defending Liberalism from the New Right

Well,

Professor Alexandre Lefebvre, welcome to the NACOTN Australia podcast.

Thanks

for having me.

We

met recently at a gathering

in

Melbourne to discuss immigration, and it was all very nice and civil in a very liberal way. And I was listening to you, and I recognised that you were very familiar with national conservatism and post-liberal critiques

in

a way that many others aren't in Australia. And yet, you are ultimately a defender of liberalism, aren't you? What makes you a liberal, and what do you mean by liberalism?

So, at a very basic level, I think liberalism means a commitment to a handful of concepts that I think a lot of Aussies sign up for. So, the idea of a fair go is basically our national motto, reciprocity, personal freedom. And taken together, while liberals might not be great at honouring that stuff, that, at least in principle, I think is a pretty attractive set of values to base a country on. And maybe also, as I argue, we can get into this, to base a life on, like a personal life on. But that's what I would say, if I have to go in minimal core, it's those things.

Yeah,

I mean, the way you talk about liberalism in your book, Liberalism as a Way of Life,

there's

a sort of ethical, spiritual dimension to it all. It's not just a political philosophy. It's sort of part of your soul. That's the sort of case you're making. Are you turning liberalism into a type of religion?

That's a fair question. The question has punch because the word religion has so much charge. So, let me say yes and then walk it back in a sense. But just to be clear, I'm not trying to turn liberalism into a religion. I'm saying, effectively, it is a religion or pragmatically operates as if it were a religion for a whole bunch of people. So, very briefly, the way I start my book is by saying that, look, in 2020, I wrote in 2024, whatever, 2026, in countries like Australia, the United States, basically the Western world writ large, a whole bunch of people are seculars now. On a census, they would tick the no religion box.

And so, where would those people who tick the no box claim to get their values from? And what's so tricky, I think, is that people are really bad at answering that question. If you're religious, they're really, it's no problem. It's an easy question to answer. You say, oh, it's my Christianity. Oh, it's my Judaism. It's whatever. It's my church, my tradition. But seculars are just, like, out to lunch about the question. And it catches them by surprise. They're like, my family, my friends, my mom. You know, that's wrong. Of course, it's true. But there has to be some broader set of kind of structural, cultural influences.

And what I'm trying to say is that the most economical label that most people living in the kinds of worlds that we do should point to is liberalism. And that gives them their moral compass. And it gives them their, as my teen daughter would say, their vibe. And so when I say it's a religion, what I mean is that it is the center of one's spiritual and moral world. I don't want to say it's

transcendent.

I don't believe it is. And whether or not people pursue it with kind of, like, dogmatic zeal, that's up to the liberal in question. So I don't want to make all those associations with religion as an intensifier. But the general, just to your question, yeah, I'll bite the bullet. Sure.

Yeah.

I mean, there's a sort of, there's an evangelical nature to some liberals. You go back to the 19th century and the Cobden and Bright's and the free traders. They did sort of think that they were bringing about a better world. It was more than simply, we'll get cheaper goods. It

was universal

peace and happiness. And this is, and does it

not

sort of, in some ways,

compete

with or displace,

you

know, some of the older, more traditional religions? I mean, what's its relation with Christianity really like, liberalism?

Okay, let me,

great, gigantic question. We'll go back and forth on this for a few rounds, I'm sure. Okay, so the first thing is, since this is the National Conservatism Podcast, look, I'm going to bring up the kind of, the contemporary OG of the movement,

which is

Yoramazoni.

And

he makes what I think is a very recognizable and fair, it's polemical, but I think it's fair distinction between ideologies that he calls nationalistic on the one hand, or ideologies that he calls imperialistic on the others. And by imperialistic, that's just a hard, critical term for what he means by universalism. And a whole bunch of ideologies are universal. They believe that the doctrines, the principles should apply to all human beings on earth. Christianity, Hazoni wants to say it's not, because he looks only at the Reformation and the national rebellions of Reformation. But Christianity, I think, is a universal religion. Islam is. And there's others.

Liberalism, I think, is universal as well. I mean, look at the idea of human rights. The idea there is that there should be a same set of standards that apply to all four corners of the world. So,

so

that's the first thing that I would answer to that, the evangelical spirit. And because it's universalizing, this is something like, I'm on a conservative podcast, so I'm getting my conservatism on. But Burke saw that so clearly, right? He titled his great book, Reflections on the Revolution in France, because he saw that those principles were exportable. And so, sequels to that book would be like, Reflections on the Revolution in Germany, or, oh shit, Reflections on the Revolution in England. And I think that that captures something true. And whether or not liberals can responsibly practice their imperialism is one question.

But whether or not it's imperialistic in the Hazoni sense, I think it is.

Where

do you trace the origins of the liberalism that you adhere to? Is it, I think, I remember you saying somewhere in a podcast, you know, I think the term was used in

the

early 19th century, at least in England, and then appropriated by Napoleon or other people, unfairly. Is

that right? Yeah,

Napoleon is like, he hoovered up anything that was useful to him. But, oh, so short version, the word liberal is super old, and it goes back all the way to, it's a Latin word, it goes back to the Roman Republic and Empire. And it becomes, it is a central term in Western ethics and politics for a long, long time. So, it had a meaning in the Roman Republic of being willing to give your, not just your life and not just your money, but also your talents towards the greater good. Christianity,

it

gets reinvented. The word liberal is used in the King James Bible like a dozen times. It means how we treat the poor. So, generosity, almsgiving, that sort of stuff. And then, though, liberalism as an ideology and the kind that we would recognize it is a 19th century invention. And what's so amazing and interesting to me is that it is born in rebellion and reaction against democracy in particular. So, you had, yeah, this is something that we today think that liberalism and democracy are like, they just go together. Liberal democracy, we have that hyphen, it's like case closed. But the first liberals were all, let me speak plainly, it's a podcast, scared shitless by the French Revolution.

And what they feared was kind of unrestrained populism, the murderous kind, the property seizing kind, the dissolve the church kind. And what they did is they then tried to set up institutions and cultural habits that would be counter-majoritarian. So, if you just go in your head and think of all the main kind of keynote liberal institutions, things like individual rights, division of powers, judicial neutrality, all those things are purposely anti-majoritarian.

And so, the

early liberals wanted to like stop democracy. And then the next gen, like Tuckville, for example, is like, we can't stop this thing. This thing is a freaking juggernaut. And so, what they did, tried then to do is to steer and educate and like temper around the rough edges around democracy. So, that's where the origin come from. So, let me plug a book that I love. A friend of mine wrote a book called The Lost History of Liberalism. And she does this twin look where liberalism is, sorry, it's Helena Rosenblatt, published in 2018. And she says, on the one hand, super old word, on the other hand, super new word.

And what we have to do to understand the two is to see how the old and new are being reinvented with one another.

I mean,

I

always say, taking from your work, you talk about liberalism being the water that we all swim in. I think that is the recognition of that, as I think you also recognize, is more true on those, the critics of liberalism than the proponents of liberalism. And these days, I find, especially in Australia, because we've got the odd thing of actually having a center-right party called the Liberal Party, which is unique in the Anglosphere, for a center-right party to be called liberal. But the vast majority of leaders of that party, I would say, are liberal in the Gladstonian sense. And they don't really understand what a Disraeli and a Gladston were arguing about. They

use those terms. Can you outline that

quickly?

What's that?

Can

you outline the Gladstonian?

Well, I

say, I've said this in articles and stuff, that Gladston, summarized, was obviously a free trader, right? Disraeli was much more skeptical of free trade. Gladston had this moral crusading foreign policy. Gladston was much more skeptical of foreign crusade interventions abroad. Gladston, I mean, immigration wasn't the same issue, but Gladston definitely thought what held Ireland and, you know, these little nations of the British Isles together were a shared sense of values, where Disraeli talked about, you know, well, he used the term race, but he really meant a people, the nations that are defined by people.

And so, I think the majority of, you know, if you're talking about a Tony Abbott or Angus Taylor, they're all in a, John Howard, they're all in a sense Gladstonian liberals in the same way that was the end of the 19th century.

You

know, those guys were, you know, obviously different geopolitical circumstances, nothing's ever the same, but that's the sort of ideology that they adhere to. So, when Disraeli, I quote this all the time in those early days, saw liberalism at its early stages in the early 19th century, he said things like

the

tone of tendency of liberalism is to attack the institutions of a country under the name of reform and to make war on the manners and customs of the people under the pretext of progress. I think he would fit right in with Patrick Deneen and Yorofa Zoni and Adrian Vermeule and all the contemporary critics of liberalism, right?

That's interesting. Listen, I'm willing to defer to, let's just take your account as right, I'm not being skeptical, you know more about that axis than I do. But let's say you're right, then that does sound, on your terms, it does sound like the new right would be more in that Disraeli lineage than the Gladstone. But the big difference, I think, would be is that liberalism, it has had 150 years to work its dark magic for people like you, its magic, whatever, to work its way through the bloodstream of the culture. So when Disraeli would say that it's

threatening

and attacking the customs, someone like a Deneen or Vermeule or the contemporary new right would say that

it's

a hegemony. I mean, it's already come, it's devoured the inside of our culture and replaced it with its own moraise. So that's why, like, that's why I think, I, Deneen's, the title of Deneen's book, I think, is very provocative. And I think from a certain perspective, it's correct, Regime Change.

That's his second book, right? That's his second book, well, he's written about

it. Yeah, but the first, the first recent one, I guess, is most famous,

the

one that Obama retweeted and stuff, was... Why Liberson Felt. Why Liberson Felt, sorry, yeah. And then the second one's Regime Change. Sorry to interrupt, just like, making... You're not as, you know, au fait with it all as probably we

are. So

I guess what I would say is that the regime, the liberal regime, capital R, capital L, wasn't in place in the 19th century. There's no way it could have been. Religious morays were still attached. Perhaps they were moving progressive. But they certainly weren't, there wasn't the kind of rollback of secularism that there is today. So I think that the threat that the new right sees is something that Disraeli might have glimpsed on this account, but wasn't quite there. And so that's where I try to enter the debate. And

not

to brag or self-incriminate, I don't know which of this is this, but I'm like the one liberal that I think the new right likes in some measure, because I'm very clear about the hegemony of liberalism. I'm just like, for liberals to pretend that it's just a political discourse about procedure and neutrality, like that's just bullshit. Like it's just, it has absolutely taken over universities, media, and become kind of an omnisphere. And I like it, I like those values, but I totally get the criticism that it feels like the blob or something like that.

What's the best arguments that you've heard from,

I

hate the term new right, really, because it's so broad, but from people like Dineen and Vermeule Hazoni, that's made you

think

about your original position a bit more with respect to liberalism?

I

don't think it, I don't think it made me change my position with respect to liberalism. I just think that, look, if I can be a bit arrogant, I guess the word, I just think

we're

both drawing bright lines that exist. I think we're just looking at, we're like game recognizing game, like we're on different sides

of it, but we're

seeing the same thing.

So

that's what I want

to

see. It's like sometimes you get like, I won't go to that. So what I think is interesting, very interesting and powerful about the new right is that it's no longer an intra-liberal debate. So look, when you, for example, attack Abbott, not attack, but you know, the way you framed Abbott and Taylor, what you're saying is that basically these guys are running a liberal argument against left liberals. And they might actually probably be left liberals themselves, they just don't fully own it. And so what I think is very difficult in our current cultural moment is to tell when we're having an argument within liberalism and then when we're having an argument from liberalism towards something else.

And the new right, I think, is doing that. And what I think their most powerful claim is, is that, and this is what I'm working on right now, is that I think liberalism has a lot of great worthy human excellences and it can enable a certain kind of human flourishing. But I think it can't, it does certainly crowd out fundamental virtues and values that other traditions put at the core of their tradition. So, like the idea of Christianity and selfless love, agathic love, unworldliness, all that stuff, like we can say that Christians don't live up to that, that's fine, but that's not what I want to say. Those values

cannot

inhabit a liberal universe comfortably, maybe even at all. It turns into like what Rob Dreher calls therapeutic deism, like basically some mishmash between, like some like

moralistic, moralistic, therapeutic

deism. Moralistic

deism, yeah,

yeah,

that's right.

And

whatever that

is. Therapeutic

deism, yeah.

And that's

right. I think that to be, to be a comfortable Christian today, you've had to mate your bones with Christianity, with liberalism. You've had to come to some accommodation or reconciliation with liberalism. And it's, I think it's a correct critical position to point out that liberalism does not allow authentic, in this case, Christian virtues to flourish.

Yeah, I

mean, liberalism, it's such a slippery little word, really, because often it smuggles in things like freedom or tolerance and virtues, which I don't think political conservators would think are bad things. They would just say liberalism is a much more totalizing ideology, which tends to sort of overall, if there's ever a clash between

some

sort of communitarian element and an individual freedom, they would always

prejudice

individual freedom or sort of assess any law as to where,

according

to the metric of where, does this increase individual freedom or not? And it's sort of unconcerned

with

the nation and what holds a nation together, which is much more on the conservative line. Let

me

just call you, I think there's something useful here. So what I think is,

is

that all right? Yeah, okay. What

I think is

core to what we're saying here is, like, they go too hard on individual freedom. That sounds too abstract to me. Let me put it this way. But at the back, at core to the liberal doctrine is that everyone has a right of exit in of the groups and communities they're part of. So

if

you are in an unhappy marriage, you have a right to exit. If your religion is no longer doing it for you, you have a right to exit. If your job is not good, you have a right to exit. If you want to push it, you can argue. If your gender is not cutting it for you, you can exit, right? But this idea is that there's a liberal moral psychology that's like a little freaking hamster wheel in the back of every liberal's head that can say,

with

good moral reason sometimes, I can bail from this. I can go fuck it and pull the plug.

And

that's just not individual freedom, like in an abstract sense. That's a constant calculation going on in every person socialized in this world's head. And the kind of more emphatic new right people would say, look, there's a way of inhabiting the world in which our relationships and our commitments, both secular and religious, are not discretionary. They're not to be negotiated and chosen all the time. And I think that once you start getting that headspace, it's a totally different ethics, religion, politics.

And so that's what I'm trying to say, that this new right is trying to think of what our modern traditions would be like if we were to dial back the moral psychology of liberalism that has, for them, infected all of it.

Yeah,

I just think they ask different questions, liberals and conservatives. Conservatives ask, what can we do to hold this society and nation together, whereas liberals sort of assume that it'll hold together and it doesn't really matter that much anyway, and ask how can we maximize individual freedom or individual happiness or individual choice or whatever you want to, whatever sort of other spin you want to put on it. But, I mean, just sort of boring out,

isn't

that a flaw in the sort of liberalism, at least, that has been practiced since the sort of end of history 90s, where there has been this assumption that, you know, nation states' borders don't matter, that it doesn't matter whether China produces all your automotive cars or your industrial base moves there. And there should be no sort of limitation on the free movement of people, because people are basically all the same, that they share the same values, or at least they can be taught them. I mean, there's no real, what role is there for the nation in the liberalism that you espouse?

Yeah,

so I'm probably not, I think I'm more on the conservative side on this, so because I see liberalism as such a thick set of cultural, moral, psychological commitments, I do think that it takes, it takes a nation to breed a liberal, like you can't, liberals like to make this assumption, which is totally fatal to their foreign policy, to their industrial, that everyone in the world is either a liberal or a liberal in waiting. And I just

think that's

a disastrous assumption. I think that it's a highly specific, highly acculturated, weird position to use the whatever, white, whatever, enlightened, you know, that thing.

Yeah,

and so, listen, obviously I don't think either of us are going to go for kind of like a blood and soil kind of thing, that's not on the map, certainly in any kind of respectful conversation. But the idea that communities have to be bound by traditions and inheritances, I think is deeply true, and I think liberalism is a tradition and an inheritance. So I think, kind of Burke's style, that we need to protect those traditions and inheritance, and unrestrained immigration would be a danger to them.

Yeah. Which countries at the moment do you consider most liberal, according to your definition, or is there kind of an exemplar of where you're

most,

the liberal society you,

you,

you,

you want to say Denmark

or something?

I don't know. Or I was thinking potentially Australia, in a sense. I mean, you do have that, that scene at the beginning of one of your books where it was Coogee Beach, right? Or Coogee, however

you say it,

apart from Sydney. Yeah. Which is, I don't know, fairly free and, and open and all the rest of it.

Yeah,

look, so it's difficult for me to answer that, because I think that there's different liberal traditions and different liberal emphases. So some liberalisms are more kind of, let's say, I'm just caricaturing here, but let's say American style, libertarian, more freedom-centric. Other traditions, more kind of European, are more socialistic. And the term liberal socialism, for me, is not at all an oxymoron. And the two greatest liberal thinkers of the last two centuries, both concluded by landing on liberal socialism as their preferred political option. J.S. Mill on the one hand, John Rawls on the other hand. Both of them, that's what they argued for.

So,

so to point to the one true liberal state, it doesn't really make sense. If you're having more kind of like a freedom-loving libertarian stuff, then you would point to, I don't know, not the United States right now, because it's obviously an unstable society for reasons. But you could point to more individualistic kind of societies. But if you're more solidaristic, you could point to the Nordic countries. So I don't know. I think there's different flavors of it all over the world. It's not a satisfying answer, but Australia would be fine for me. I would be satisfied enough with that.

What about just in history?

Are

there periods, you know, because societies who have always, I mean, to varying degrees, use the liberal label. Was the United States more liberal in the 19th century than it was in the 60s? Or how do you quantify what liberalism

is?

Well,

America

is just a basket case. So America was an apartheid democracy up until the mid-20th century. So until the civil rights movement, you had either formal slavery or informal apartheid discrimination through Jim Crow stuff. So I wouldn't point to any, I wouldn't point to America as a good paragon for any of these things. I think, listen, I think that any tradition that,

2000

Australia, you want to answer 2000s Australia, any tradition that try, any political system that tries to synthesize fairness on the one hand and freedom on the other hand, acknowledging that there's going to be trade-offs, deficiencies, da, da, da. If they're trying to do that earnestly, then I think in a full-throated sense, we could say that's a liberal country.

Is

it sustainable if you get a, you

know,

particularly liberal time? Does it not have within it the sort of seeds of its own unraveling?

I

mean, look, that's the Denean thesis that is just kind of inherently uncontradictory, excuse me, inherently contradictory. We'll eventually kind of like eat the traditions that gave rise to it. I don't know. Look, my book, Liberalism is a Way of Life, is,

Denean

and Co. want to say that liberalism is fatally flawed. I want to say that liberals are fatally flawed. And in particular, I want to say that liberals, by and large, suck at liberalism. And that we don't live up to the core demands of our creed, particularly around fairness. So the word liberal, this is the older history, meant two things. Like in the Latin, it means free on the one hand, but it also means generous. And I think liberals have really forgotten that generosity bit. They've forgotten it. I don't even mean primarily with their wallets or with social provision. I mean, especially interpretive generosity.

Like, I mean, there's no one more likely to cancel you these days than kind of an aggressive, progressive liberal. And I think that that is a tendency that isn't inherent in the tradition. It's just that we forgot one half of our moral calling, which is try to,

I

mean, liberalism is a species of Christianity. Try to live charitably. And I think that's a core part of it. And I think that, look, if you're asking a thousand years from now, well, liberalism, I don't know. But what I do know is that if liberalism got their game on and started to honor their values, it would be way more stable than it is right now. Because nothing is going to cause people to defect away from liberalism than being the kind of like asshole, sanctimonious, cancelling squad that liberals often are. That's just going to burn us.

Well, there's plenty of conservatives who are like that, too. So never fear.

Yeah,

but no, I don't think so. Like, I'm on Twitter and Blue Sky. There's no one. And Blue Sky is so much meaner. Like, there's no

doubt. Yeah, interesting.

Yeah, I'm not on a blue sky. I mean,

there is that,

in my mind, there's that 1960s

librarian

liberalism, which encourages sort of civics and is 12 angry men and Sidney Poitier is coming to dinner. That type of fair-minded debate, you know, I disagree with what you say, but I agree with your right to say it. But that does seem to have been lost in recent times in the days of sort of cancellation, identity politics and everything else. I mean, how do you explain that evolution? Who's responsible for that?

I think

this

is a very deep, very important question that I have to reflect on. But here's my take. What I really don't want to say is that it's just like a pathology of liberals or that liberals suck, like their personality is somehow flawed. I really don't want to say that. I want to say that maybe there were good motivations in the evolution or development of the liberal tradition that led liberals to kind of fail in the way that they're failing right now. So, for example, one of the things that contemporary progressive liberalism is really focused on is the idea of justice and harm. And it wants to try to reduce harm, but also remediate, reconcile, recompense, what's the word I'm looking for?

Compensate injustices. And what I'm trying to say is that, look, if your mindset is really about structural injustice, about being woke in the non-polemical sense, like alive to systemic inequalities around, then most of the time, if that is how you look at the world, and it's not a wrong approach, you're going to be

pissed

off a lot of the time because you're going to be constantly seeing deficiency, harm, violence, and you're going to attack that. You're going to attack people. And so what I'm trying to fumble my way towards is that liberal ungenerosity wasn't just because, like, the tap water liberalism started drinking was bad. It was certain developments in the doctrine that lent a certain flavor that then got us to the kind of position that we are today. And I think particularly a focus, like, so we were just at this conference, and it was a center-right-ish kind of gathering in Melbourne. And one of the shared grievances, ironically, one of

the

shared grievances I heard around the room was is that basically kids today are just taught in school right from go that this country is one of dominance and exploitation and violence. And, like, that's partially true, for sure. But when it starts to be the way in which we capture what Australia or what the West was, then I think we're going to move towards the ungenerous psychologies and unattractive psychologies that you and I are worried about, I think, for different reasons.

Yeah,

look, you know, you're a professor of philosophy in Sydney, and I've heard you talk very fluently on, you

know,

Aristotle and Plato and all the rest of it.

But people

from that time, in Plato and Aristotle's time,

did

they have

a

liberal frame of mind, or at least some of them? Or is, I'm just trying to work out, I mean, you talk about liberalists and its origins in Roman times, but

did they

have, like, the germ of what we call liberalism today, or is it something else entirely?

It

depends how specific you want to be.

Look,

if you mean liberalism as open-minded inquiry, then, yeah, Socrates is the goat, right? I mean, that's how he rolls. But on the other hand, Plato and Socrates did invent the first totalitarian regime where, like, all sex was arranged by lottery, kids were swapped out, like, it's fucking wild. Like, you get to book three

and

four of the Republic, and that is, I mean, Karl Popper identified it as the first proto-totalitarian work for a reason. And then Aristotle was chiller, he didn't have his foot on the gas quite as much, but he still says, book one, politics, that the whole point of the state, the polis, is to promote the good life. No liberal, very few liberals, I think, would agree to those kinds of statements today because we think that we should be able to come to our own conception of how we want to live. So I guess if you want to be very abstract and use the word liberal as kind of mean good guy, then sure.

But in any of their policy prescriptions, even putting aside the question of kind of the exclusion of women and slaves, I just think that they are, that Greek thought is illiberal in a very interesting way, which is why, of course, it is being turned to and appealed to so much nowadays. I mean, Aristotle, the one thing that I'm seeing behind the Anglosphere and New Right is the common good constitutionalism stuff, which is,

you

just go, bang, Aristotle, bang, Augustine, bang, Aquinas. And it's this lineup of the three A's, now that I say it out loud. And yeah, so that's an anti-liberal recovery of a tradition. So I think it's unhelpful, I'm not, sorry, I don't need to be critical. I think it's unhelpful to call the Greeks or early Christians liberals. I just, I don't think it, I don't think,

it doesn't

shed light on our current moment and how that word is being

used. So

it's a modern political philosophy.

I

mean, you're in the train of writing a

new book. A modern

political sensibility. It's just different. It's like,

did you

read,

we're

going to, I'm just going to go off track. Did you read Emily Watson's review of the, of Chris Nolan's

today? I've seen,

I've seen snippets of her bagging it. But I actually

planned

to read it because I thought she, you know, she, having not familiar with her work and having just sort of sipped a little bit from the Twitter stream about people bagging some of her translations. I, I, I saw, thought she was a particular type, but her, her, yeah, she's,

I

mean,

I

mean,

that's one of the delicious

ironies that she's

coming

out

as

the,

yeah,

it's the delicious irony. She's coming out as the greatest anti-woke critic of her time. Where

basically

she's just trying to say that the psychology of kind of like

Jason

Bourne as, as Odysseus is just not what Odysseus was

in the

text that she, she works so long on.

Yeah, she, she, she, she gets the Greek ancient mind more than Christopher Nolan does. That's clear. Or any of the American actors that were in that film is clear. You are, you are writing this new book, the good life state politics after liberalism, which I guess kind of assumes. Liberalism is on its way out a little bit. Maybe you can explain, cause you, and you've been, as I understand, or you've been in Hungary for a while and you, you, you, you've either been or going to China. That's, that's interesting, right? I find that very interesting. What, what have you learnt in your travels not to sort of give the book away in its entirety?

No,

I'm not, I'm not going to give away the farm. I, I have no farm to give yet. I'm writing it. Um, the super short version is, I just think that the oldest

tendency

of political philosophy is back. And that was what I just said with Aristotle, that before liberalism, it was just, it was so obvious, you wouldn't say it out loud, that the point of the state was to help people or to bring people to live a good life. You have that in theocracies, you have that in ancient republics. You also have that cross-culturally, like Confucianism is all about a kind of moral virtue politics. And liberals like to think that this idea that we all get to make up our own life, our own sexuality, our own professions, our own idea of what's good and great in the world.

And

that's on the individual. Look, I may think that that, I do think that that's great and decent and necessary, but I, historically, you have to acknowledge that it's a freaking unicorn. I mean, it is so unique in time and space for about 200 years. And so what I'm trying to do is I'm saying that, look, all the countries that are either never been liberal or, and, or else kind of pushing back and, and overcoming liberalism. Maybe they're all united by this recovery or this insistence on getting the state back in the business of

teaching,

telling, sometimes enforcing what a good life would be. Some countries do this very aggressively and very crudely, like the most, the most striking one, it's not contemporary, but would be the Soviet Union. It had an idea of, to invent the Homo Sovieticus, this kind of new man that would be solidaristic in outlook. And it took, it took an apparatus, let's say, to, to try to achieve that ethical end. So I went to, so the countries I'm going to do, and they look on paper, nothing alike, but I'm saying that this, it's this, it's

this,

it's this shared movement. So it's going to be Hungary, China, India, Israel, and the United States. And I want, and I could do others. I just, it's a, it's a book. I could, I wanted to do Singapore as, I was thinking about doing Spain. There's other options. But those are, that's, that's my pitch. And so when I went to, I can talk more about Hungary. We can bounce back and forth. What I felt I saw in Hungary was a state trying to do that as non-repressively as it could. It had a sense as to, like, I, I think Orban lost because the regime got fat, got corrupt. And 16 years is a really good run for any government, much less to hold supermajorities that whole time, even if they game it.

And I acknowledge all that. But what they tried to do in their way was to incentivize and honor and fund certain ways of life that they thought more worthy for Hungarians. So they had that, they had that family policy that, from the outside, just looks insane, right? So they don't, they don't want many immigrants. So then, like all other Western countries, they have a birth crisis. So they need Hungarians to have more kids. So they put as much money as, more money than their defense budget into trying to incentivize Hungarians to have kids.

And it kind of worked, kind of didn't, but it was really a model for a certain vision of the family, young, many children, heterosexual, preferably pious. And it didn't say, it didn't lock up or imprison gays. It's sort of, it didn't allow full freedom of expression. That's true. But it was kind of the good life state as non-repressively practiced as I think is possible. And that's what I tried to understand from the insiders of those regimes. So I talked to some folks that I think, you know, Phil Kington, for example.

Yeah, sure. Rod

Dreher.

Yeah,

I know. And then a bunch of,

a

bunch of Hungarians. Actually, I spoke to some Hungarians.

Yeah.

How much do you think liberalism is a product of a very individualistic Northern European type of culture? So that, and it's not, while you might have like individual liberals in China or Japan or God knows where else, it's, they're very much the exception to the rule. And so what we're talking about here is really the characteristics of a people rather than a political ideology, which can be, you know, exported hither and yon.

Yep.

No, I agree with that. I would say that that's right. I would say, like, one of my very favorite books is Charles Taylor's A Secular Age. And, or if I, a version I know less well, it's just right there, though, is Tom Holland's Dominion. But the thesis of both of those books is that kind of Western secular liberalism emerges out of a series of internal developments within Western Christianity, particularly the Reformed Church, individualization of faith, all that stuff. And so that liberalism is individualistic, I think, is true, but I think that that is an inheritance of a Christian tradition that for hundreds of years since the Reformation had started pivoting in those kinds of directions.

So, so, so, so,

yeah,

so I would agree with what you said, where I would hedge a little bit is, is that because liberalism is kind of the dominant, I think, global culture, and because you get it, you know, you, you, you swim in it, to use my metaphor, the moment you turn on Netflix, that it's not such a miracle, for example, for you to have liberals in China or in Japan or in Saudi Arabia. I mean, they're beaming into firewalls and all, but they're beaming into a global culture. So I don't think it's as miraculous as that.

But yeah, I definitely think that nations have cultures, not all of them are individualistic, and not of them, not all of them would be good soil to plant, at least straight away, liberal institutions.

I mean, you'd have to be

a neocon to think otherwise. Like, that's just like the Iraq war. Like, what the hell? Like,

what

would, like, read, what, I've never talked about this, but one of my, one of my personal, burns of irony is that Paul Wolfelitz, who basically planned the second Iraq war, was a student of Leo Strauss and took fucking seminars on Montesquieu with Strauss. And Montesquieu's number one point of his philosophy is that every regime is specific, and what goes for this regime, you can't transport to that regime. And I just wish dude had listened, because it would have saved so much life and treasure and geopolitical stability to just take one freaking page out of Montesquieu.

Yeah, it

was the spirit of the age at that time. It's hard to think back to

it, really. It was the spirit of the

age.

Yeah. I mean, do you think that

part

of the explanation for why we've got these more nationalistic countries in,

say,

India or China or elsewhere, is because of the retreat of the Western dominance, in a sense. So they're reverting to what they were prior to,

you

know, the expansion of West and its liberalism back in the 19th century.

I don't think, I'd

have to hear more. I don't think, I don't think anyone reverts to anything. I think people reinvent in light of new challenges. So I think of like Modi as a very kind of modern government, but just trying to recover a certain, re-pivot India towards a Hindu nationalist version of it. Ditto Xi Jinping. I mean, you can't imagine a more modern country is just somehow done a combination,

at

least at elite levels, of Leninism plus Confucianism. So I don't know. We just get reinventions and recreations all the time. I do think that liberalism has lost, this is the most obvious thing, lost a lot of its shine in the last 30 years. And that certain,

the

Overton window has just shifted dramatically for what is now possible. Look at what possible and plausible in our culture. So like, how did Pauline Hanson become possible when five years ago, that was just simply out of the question. It requires an explanation for why certain things that had always been there ignite and become

permissible

in conversation once more. I'm

not saying

it's impermissible. That's not what I'm trying to say.

Yeah, I get it.

Yeah, you get it. Yeah,

but surely these, the emergency, even in the Anglosphere of these, of these insurgent, quote unquote, new right parties is partly because that people are dissatisfied with the existing liberal hegemony,

right? A hundred

percent, for sure.

Yeah.

So what does a liberal do in that circumstance?

But yeah, listen, still

there's two paths. Path number one is you go with the new right and say, fuck it, we're going to overthrow some version of that. If we're going to, we're going to move towards Christian integralism, we're going to re

-temporalize

the Catholic church. Okay, so that's non-liberal. Fine.

Yeah.

On the other hand, liberals like me are like, liberalism, let's do it. Let's try it. Let's, let's do this thing. So that would be the other option to give people a reason. So if you think that the dissatisfactions that spring up because of liberalism are just intrinsic, like no matter how well this thing ran, there would be. It would just eventually lose favor. I don't think that. I just think, yeah, that's, that's what I would say. So I think that if, if Australia is a country of, of a fair go, and yet right now in my part of Sydney, 50% of parents send their kids to private schools that cost 30, 40 grand a year. Average house is 1.5 million, dah, dah, dah, dah. What do

you,

I mean, you know, all the stats as well as I do. Well, then we're not, we're not even, it's just risible. We're not pretending that this is a fair go. So for me, I'm a, that's why I'm a liberal socialist. I'm like, so the, the recent reforms that the Albanese government announced for me, those are a good thing. And that's trying to do something

consistent

with, so it might be gotten details wrong, capital gains tax on small business. But by and large, the impulse, I think, was right. And that's what I would try to do. Because I just think that there's so much that's good in this Australian, let's say, world of ours, that, let's say I'm conservative in that way. Let's kind of play the hand we're dealt and hope it's not irremediable.

Where

do you stand on things like, you know, the red Toryism or blue labour? Right. Yeah. Is that, you know, which, which tries, I mean, I think it's actually just more traditional political conservatism, which is actually quite favourable to workers' rights. And obviously, um, Disraelian in the sense that I described before.

Or,

but is that, is that something that, I don't know, have liberals really engaged with those guys fully in the way they should?

Because

it certainly focuses

on the common welfare of, of, of, of the people. And it certainly recognises the flaws in the, the current, the,

some

of the,

the,

the issues you described there, the inequality and everything else, right?

Yeah. No. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Liberals, people attack liberals for being individualistic. Maybe we are. But the idea of fairness is an inherently relational and egalitarian concept. So,

yeah.

So, I mean, give me those things that you were just talking about and we can work with that.

What

is, what is liberalism?

Does

it, liberalism

need

to fight against something or escape from existing strict structures? If so, what, what, what is, I feel like that's sort of, it's animating spirit in some ways. What, what

is it? I think that's right.

Yeah.

Yeah. And what does it need, what is it trying to break down or, you know, escape from now or redefine now?

I

think you're right. This is a great point. But isn't that true of everything? Like, doesn't everything become fat and sclerotic if it just has 20 years of kind of like unopposed? It just, it's just barnacles grows on stuff. So, but I definitely think that we see that so vividly because liberalism has been dominant for so long that we see the periodic crises and then liberalism reinvent itself and find another 10, 15 years of good time.

And

so like from the new deal, for example, towards the kind of like, so, I mean, that was the new deal was a panic response because communism was about to take over the United States because people were about to burn down their commitment to the system. So, and you step with some sort of like life support for it, new deal.

So, you

have liberalism rising to the occasion against the Soviet Union and winning that fight. That was extraordinary. But yeah, it gets fat. But what doesn't? Honestly, Dan, do you have a doctrine that can coast for a long time?

No. And I think some of the most successful movements, I think we've lost the sort of

the

ability to form big coalitions of sometimes contradictory aspects. You mentioned the new deal. I always say, you know, that was made up of Southern segregationists, Boston Brahmins, prairie populists, Jewish intellectuals, you know, the whole, that if you, what do they actually, but they, in some sense, they were in favor of looking after the little guy. And then with Reagan later on, you had, you know, women in tennis shoes in Florida and the Californian Hollywood actors and Jewish intellectuals and New England. You know, so it

was,

it's just funny how these coalitions form and get more comfortable with,

with

compromising with each other in some, some aspect. And I feel like,

I don't know. I

think you're under something. I think that's really right and deep. I think the one, I think the thing Trump is X extraordinary at, and I don't think he gets enough acknowledgement for it. Something actually has only pointed out that he is the best coalition builder basically existed for like people that would be repulsed. Like you take

an

integralist like Vermeule and a libertarian or whatever the hell that guy is, like Peter Thiel, and you put

them in a

room, like there's just no common ground between them.

And

yet somehow Trump has created a movement where these different groups will honor each other, agree not to talk about their differences too intensely and basically hang tough. And liberals are, liberals can't even figure out what candidate right now in Maine to run

to try to

reclaim.

I

think liberals are awful because they insist on purity tests.

I

mean, some do conservatives, but liberals really do. And if you insist on purity tests, then coalitional capacity is, is,

yeah. I

think, I think if your political philosophy becomes too doctrinaire, it becomes brittle and its appeal lacks. This is sort of one of my final questions, but

how

I'm sort of wondering how much political philosophy really matters in this sense, like during COVID, I was very surprised at how, you know, some self-described classical liberals were all in favor of lockdowns. And then there were other people who, you know, were much more, I wouldn't have suspected to be on my way of thinking that nevertheless were, this is all nuts. And, you know, just the reactions of people in many ways didn't

fit

their type. And so I'm sort of wondering whether, like at some point, it's just, you know,

political

philosophy has its limits to describing the way people will react to certain circumstances.

I

don't know. I mean, I hear you. On the other hand, I hear you say like newsflash, people are hypocrites. Like, oh, in the crisis, Christians didn't live up to

love.

Not even hypocritical, but they're just sort of like,

I

don't know, unpredictable, I guess. Oh,

I

see. Yeah. See, okay. That's more, that's interesting. Yeah. That they broke in ways that, that they, that were surprising maybe to themselves.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I had, I had a lot of friends who are, you know, would be much more kind of left in, you know, very, very broad sense, but they,

you

know, and then there was some, you know, rusted on,

like,

you know, Scott Morrison was evangelical Christian was still to this day.

He

says he did a fantastic job. You know, it's just, it was just interesting.

I mean,

I don't

understand

all that, but it's just an interesting, the way people reacted didn't necessarily fit

in

the,

with

how they describe themselves politically.

I

mean, what political philosophy can't do, I mean,

I

know that philosophy can't do anything. What we can do is try to systematize and clarify intuitions that people have and show them competitions of values, show them where they may be inconsistent on a point. But, I mean, to go back to Hume, those aren't, reasons never motivate desires, right? So, it's, it's, what you're talking about is whether ideologies, it seems to me like your question is more aptly phrased, does ideology really motivate people? Because often when chips are down, they should turn left and they turn right. Yeah,

they don't always

act in ways that their professed ideological labels would, you know, predict in some ways, yeah.

Yeah, no, I think that's, I think that's right, but I think that that's just,

I

think you've

got a human

problem, not a political philosophy problem.

No, no, no, I don't think it's a problem. I sort of think it's a good thing in a way.

Yeah, okay.

Reduced to their, to their labels and stuff. Final question then, I really enjoy this and I really enjoyed meeting you in person and getting to know you better, but, and I think at that conference in Melbourne, not to disclose anything, but I do think, you know, you are tapped into the sort of new right in a way that the mainstream liberals are not yet fully in Australia, right? But, but what are you working, I mean, you're finishing this book, but what are you hoping to achieve, you know, academically and other, in the years ahead?

Are

you hoping to move the sort of needle in a particular direction or are

you

hoping to raise the next generation of, of confident liberals or God knows what?

The, I'd

love, you're asking me a pie in the sky question, which is good. Um, if I could do anything, if I could, may

I

have one wish is that people would become more charitable with their attention and their, um, interpretation. So, I mean, I'm a, I spend half of my life reading and writing and then the other half, um, teaching. And for me, the greatest joy in teaching philosophy and political philosophy too, is that you get to set yourself aside. Like you become a knowledge, you don't matter and you try to inhabit someone else's really deep mind in as thorough a way as you can explore it. Um, and don't, we always teach critical thinking to students. I think we need to teach charitable thinking about how to, um, try to sit in someone's shoes and try to understand that as much as they can.

And,

and so that's what I love. If so, I find my, I mean, I'm a pretty successful academic, but I find that my teaching is going to be way more impactful than my research will ever be because I get to kind of like, hopefully initiate students generation. I'm going to be, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a lifer. I'm a long time. So I get to do this kind of generational teaching and try to overcome the, the, the TikTok world for a moment and try not, not that it's an evil, but that to get people to like dwell. So that's what I want to do. And this is my, my ambition. You say, you say, once I've done the book, I'm just starting the book. So this is going

to

be a long time, but that's my ambition with the book too, to try to get

liberals

to see other moral worlds, not to affirm them. Cause obviously many of those other moral worlds are repugnant for liberals. Um, but to see them as human creations with human attractions, and then try to engage our, um, opponents, quote unquote, in a more responsible way.

I, I

guess, sorry, I'm finding my way to answer here. And the last thing I'll say is this, is that

what

I want to try to do in my work on the new right and conservatives and non-liberal thinkers is to be able to describe the, what I'm, their ideologies and their worlds in terms that they recognize.

And I

find that liberals and conservatives most often fail that test. I love a lot of conservative authors, but one I don't like very much is Patrick Deneen, in particular, um, why liberalism failed. I just find it's caricatural.

I

find that like, I'm a full-blooded liberal. And when I read that, I just don't see myself. I don't recognize something that I would have attachment to. And so that fails, not just a moral test, but a descriptive or representational one. And so, um, to that extent, so, and I definitely think other new right figures are clear that by miles and they're great.

I

just think that

that,

for example, is something I want to avoid. Or when I read on take, since I'm punching up here, uh, like someone on the left, like Anne Applebaum or Timothy Snyder, when I hear them describe the worlds of the right, it just feels like it's a cartoon. And, um, that's what I want to try to do is recover moral complexity that doesn't apologize, but that at least describes. Um,

so that, that is my

mission. And

yeah,

that's fantastic.

If I can,

if I can infect that disposition, that's what I want.

I recognize that in you. And it also, I mean, people, it's hard to properly engage with someone on, you know, whatever, Anne Applebaum or, you say, Patrick Deneen, I'm much, I'm fairly quite generous when I met him in person, but, but it's,

but

it's,

but it's,

but

it's,

but it's, but it's,

but

it's when they're not describing your position faithfully, you know, you do, it does, it does create bad blood in a way. Cause you're not, no, no, no, that's not actually what I'm, I'm, I'm, I'm

saying

you're welcome to disagree, but please understand it.

And

it's the motivations and it's fullness because

it's

not just a kind of,

it's

not just

emotions

and it's not just a dull thought through kind of,

I

don't know, disposition or something. Yeah. Hey, Alex, I really appreciate it. I really appreciate you. Um, I'm going to drop all your, your books and articles and like links in the, in the show notes that people can check you out and, um, and look forward to keeping me in touch as we go forward. Um, great fun on it. Thanks, Dan. Bye.