What classical liberals get wrong about the rest of the World | Alexandre Lefebvre

Liberals have this fatal error of wanting to see the whole world either as liberals or as liberals in waiting. As if all of these other ways of life, if they were just kind of like a little bit more enlightened or a little bit chiller or something like that, they would come to recognize the felicities of liberal freedom, etc. That's simply not true.

I'm

Bob Forsythe and this is Liberalism in Question. My guest today is Alexander Lefebvre, Professor of Politics and Philosophy at

the

University of Sydney and author of this book, Liberalism as a Way of Life.

Welcome

back, Alex.

Thank

you, Rob. Pleasure to be here.

Now, the reason I've asked Alex to join us is

that typically

we all think of illiberal societies

as

just societies run by bad people.

Whereas

Alex has got a project to try and understand what's really going on and has come up with, I think, some very interesting results.

What

made you start looking at the question of illiberal regime?

And

who do you have in mind?

So,

as you said, I'm a convinced liberal and I realized, though, that our stock might be falling these days and that there's all kinds of rivals and competitors that are gaining a lot of ground on us.

And

frankly, I wanted to see what the attraction was of these other regimes and these other alternatives on the table. And when I look at the standard account that my own team, as it were, gives of these non-liberal regimes, some of which are never been liberal. So, for example, China or some have been liberal and are perhaps moving in a non-liberal direction, such as the United States, India, Hungary up until a couple of months ago. But we'll see where that goes and Israel and I wanted to ask, well, I would I would say Israel is OK, I could take that again. We can come back to that question. That's not a that's not a pejorative necessarily. But we can come back to the to

the

question of of that. So and I want to ask what it is that makes these regimes attractive to so many people and the people on my team want to just understand these other places and these other ways of thinking and doing politics simply in terms of the bad stuff. So that the leaders of these regimes are simply animated by what we might call the goods of tyranny. So

consolidating

power, money, sex, younger mistresses, that kind of thing, and that that would account for how the regime hangs together.

And

when I look at those explanations, I don't want to deny the truth of at least part of it. And perhaps for a lot of the countries that I want to look at, maybe that's like to pull some number out of the air, 30 percent true. But there's no way that simply the negative stuff can account for the attractiveness nor the stability of these countries. So what I want to try to do is understand them through their ideals, through what they themselves are trying to promote. And I want to do so in collaboration, as it were, with those governments by working with elite insiders from them. So I'm taking trip after trip, spending a few months in the field, as it were.

I just came back from two months in Hungary. In December, I'm going for two months in China at a CCP allied think tank. And so I'm going to try to get the goods from the inside.

That's

a very liberal way to approach it, isn't it?

It takes a

liberal to do that.

Now, the

reason why I'm tweaking you, you wrote a paper entitled From Statecraft to Soulcraft, which was published in Noema, back in March. And in it, you have the rather remarkable statement.

The

major illiberal regimes, you write, do not lack

values

or ideals.

They

overflow with them.

Now,

that's

unexpected,

I think. True to normal Westerners. What do you mean overflow with them? Can

you

explain what's going on? Yeah, cool.

Okay, so let me put it this way. Let me try to describe a gigantic transformation that I think is happening worldwide. So today, liberals like to think that the way that we've organized states and societies is basically like the human default. It's just like that's what just naturally happens. And the basic liberal idea that people, I think, of the left and the right can basically agree on is that the point of liberalism is to provide as much freedom for individuals to live out their life as they choose within reasonable limits. So it's not for the state to tell us what the good life is, nor for the state to promote a certain model of what it means to flourish as a person.

Liberalism says, no, that's too controversial. We're going to let our citizens make that up for themselves. And that's the sort of liberal arrangement that we've been living under for a few hundred years. And that is hegemonic in the Western world. Now, that's fine and well. But that liberal perspective where you get to pick and choose your conception of the good life, that is a historical anomaly.

And when we look back in time, both within the Western tradition, but also in the non-Western tradition, the idea that the state and government and public power would take a leadership role in trying to establish what it means to be a good person, to flourish as an individual, that was like the primary tasks of government. And you look back to like this week, I'm teaching Aristotle here at the University of Sydney. And the politics first line is like basically, what is the state for, says Aristotle? And he answers, it's for the good life.

And

so this idea that states should promote particular visions of how to live is absolutely, it reigns throughout the history of Western thought. And what I see right now is perhaps a return to it. And these countries, when I say they overflow with values, I think they have very robust conceptions as to what it means to live, for example, as a good Hungarian, what it means to live as a good Chinese. And their value packages for those different countries are going to be totally different. I don't want to say they add up into one thing, but they're all willing to allow the state to take a more of a leadership role of trying to promote a certain way of life. And in this way, they are illiberal.

That's not a critical term at this point. That's a descriptive one.

So liberalism, as we understand it, or I understand it,

is

an historical anomaly.

Correct.

Absolutely. And yet it feels when you're living in a liberal society, that's natural.

That's

what we human do. We naturalize whatever is normal. We naturalize it and say that's just the way we are. But it's not. Liberalism at a historical genealogy comes out of the Reformation, and it comes out of an exhaustion of brutal warfare over confessional faiths. And basically, at some point, the European mind said, enough, we can't do this. And so they had to put down their arms,

create

a doctrine of tolerance, and slowly but surely that evolved into our kind of more robust system of pluralism that we have today. That's a lot of historical experience and lessons. And

I've seen some arguments that the deep roots do go back even further into medieval time.

But

it was the reality of irreducible pluralism, put it that way, about the good life,

about

how to be lived, I think, created the context in which liberalism becomes a solution to a problem.

That's

it. That's exactly right.

Yeah. However,

there

must be some things which the illiberal societies

champion

that liberalism can't really champion. There must be some goods

that

are attractive. You don't get with where you make freedom and free choice

a

key part of your society. You're going to miss something. What do you miss, Alex?

Yeah,

that's the question at the heart of this project, namely that I and you and I bet 90% of the listeners to this podcast think that liberalism champions really important human goods, things like freedom, fairness, tolerance, reciprocity. All that stuff is great. But I think we would be kidding ourselves to suggest that that encapsulates all possible human excellences and that people with a different way of life wouldn't look at the liberal package and essentially say, no, not for me. We want to privilege whatever it is that is at the core of that way of life. It could be things like the Chinese, for example, put harmony way up top of their value package. When I went to Hungary,

and

I'd be happy to talk more about this, in the Orban constitution, they built in three values that they said the country is for. Those are love, loyalty, and faith, all admirable values, but they're very thick, and they don't necessarily play nicely with the freedom and fairness of a liberal society. And so you would look at different regimes and different conceptions of the good life and just see that they park a different human excellence at their heart. And if you start to look at it that way, then the world that we live in is multipolar, not just in terms of kind of military might or economic clout, but in terms of civilizational values and orientation towards the highest good.

And that's what I think we're seeing roaring back into existence, is repudiation of the idea that liberal universalism, or that liberalism is universal, that it's for everyone, and these other traditions and civilizations reclaiming some of their traditional, but some of their core ethical values and using state power to promote it.

And I

remind a little bit of the work of Jonathan Haidt's book, The Righteous Mind, drawing attention to

liberal

sensibilities and others that can be ignored while it was. It's part of that

general

way of understanding that you're drawing around.

It is. Look, liberals can turn righteous, though, in the bad way that John Haidt is talking about.

Oh, yes.

And for sure, I mean, it's not religious. I mean, you just have to read one page of Hume to say this, but it's not religious perspectives alone that can be zealous. You can get some very zealous secularists as well. So, yes, so we can turn righteous as well. I think you can have moderate versions of these different creeds. But, yeah, that's right. So,

if there are certain values, what's the word values, too weak, but certain goods, certain perceived human goods that a liberal society provides, but there are others which

are

downgraded, which are not as present in that society, like you mentioned, harmony, filial piety, and so forth.

Is

it a choice? No one way of life, no one way of organized society can give you all the goods, so you've got to choose which goods you want?

That

is a deep truth, I believe, and one that a classical liberal that I know we're both fond of, Isaiah Berlin, would have agreed with. He has this wonderful line in his book, The Crooked Timber, where he says, quote, not all of the great goods can coexist, and meaning that there is no one way of life that can recover all human excellences in their full-throated sense. You can't just combine liberalism plus Christianity plus Buddhism plus Taoism plus whatever and assume that you can just have one dish that does it all.

Emphatically pursued, these ideals of different ways of life can be not only intention, but positively antagonistic, and so I don't want to say that there is a liberal mind, as it were, or a Chinese mind, but I do think that different cultures put different values at their heart and pursue them robustly, and that will lead to different conceptions of political power.

One

of the key points you make

is

that

these

illiberal societies are what you call teleological societies, they're aiming at a goal for people. Can you unpack that a little further?

Sure. So,

what I want to say is that we're living in a time of the return of teleology, when political power and states are understood in terms of a higher purpose. So, I don't want to say that liberals and liberal states don't have a telos or a purpose. They do, of course. For example, to maintain society as a free and fair system of cooperation. That's a goal, and that's a telos, but these other societies are putting a certain specific vision of human flourishing at their core and saying that we should use state resources to promote that. So, I can give you an example. So, I just spent two months in Hungary.

This was before the election, but I was hanging out with the Orban crowd at a think tank funded by Fidesz. They were very open-minded to invite a liberal like me, and they treated me very generously, and I got to talk to basically all of the regime elites except for Orban himself, because it was an election season, and they were super clear. They just wore this on their sleeve. They said, this state is, the Orban government believes in quote-unquote, this was their term, positive discrimination. Namely, that we believe that there are certain better ways of life for Hungarians to live, and we are going to channel resources to help make that reality.

And so, they had that around certain visions of the family, certain visions of nationalism, and certain visions of faith, and they are just all in. They're moving their chips into there, and I would just add right now that, look, Orban lost, and he lost by a lot. So, let's not kid ourselves. But I don't think he lost because of that stuff. He lost because the economy downturned, and there was pretty systemic corruption in his government. But it wasn't a repudiation of the Hungarian telos that cost him the election, and the new government, of course, is going to preserve all the family policies, and they've doubled down on the anti-immigration stuff.

So, in that sense, the telos of the Hungarian state, it doesn't matter if it's a liberal or if it's a post-liberal country. It seems to be the same.

Right.

Russia, for example. Is there a telos in the Russian Federation?

For

certain. So, I speak here, look, there's a telos in every single form of political association. I think that, like, I'm going to go to the example that always turns the temperature up to 11 needlessly, but National Socialists and the Nazis. I mean, every robust understanding of the Nazis that I've read, and I've read a lot, always try to identify what the ethical telos of that regime is. Hannah Arendt did that. Primo Levi did that. I forgot the name of the author, but it's called The Law of Blood, Nicholas something. All identifying the normative

core

of that regime that allows them to unleash state power in all kinds of destructive ways. And just to be super clear, for a liberal like me, it's much better or much less risky or dangerous if a state is simply a kleptocracy. Look, if all Orban or Putin wants to do is steal and plunder the public, that's not great, but I understand what that is, and it's a fairly limited form of violence. If, on the other hand, they want to pursue an idea of the good life with the highest conviction, then we are for liberals in very, very risky territory. I would add that the Soviet Union itself is perhaps the most aggressive version of this kind of teleology that human history has ever seen.

They posited a new conception of the human being. They called it homo Sovieticus, and they designed an education and censorship system that would follow you from cradle to grave in trying to promote a new kind of human being. All of those things have ethics and morals at their core, but that's what makes them dangerous.

Yes,

yes. In fact, it's the idealism that can, in extreme cases, justify the violence and terror.

Absolutely.

So there's gentle, and so when I went to Hungary, started to focus on Hungary.

It's

just that it's fresh in my mind, and also it's a case I know about. There I found the discrimination, as it were, was gentle and humane. It was positive discrimination, but you don't have violent repression. You don't have denial of rights. If people want to be gay, they can be gay privately, and the state's not going to interfere with that. But there will definitely be a de-platforming and a censorship of homosexuality in media and stuff like that. So there is a discrimination for sure. But when you transfer to another regime like a Russia where you have state violence used against certain ways of life, against political, against free speech, there is also a teleological normative core.

But there, it's much more nakedly and repressively enforced.

Now, part of the self-talk liberals have is that a liberal society is a generally pluralist society. It doesn't answer the questions, the big questions in life. It leaves those individuals. But you raise the fact that that may not be quite the case. It may be perhaps hiding from itself, liberalism, that it too is

in

a different way, but still doing the same kind of thing, as you use the language, as a society that's trying to be a perfectionist society.

That's right. This is very, very tricky terrain. And it's a point at which I find myself often in real sympathy with conservative critics. So liberals like to think that their liberal morality can be, as it were, just confined to the state, that our ideals of freedom and fairness and all that stuff can be basically hived off into a political morality where people think of themselves in that way as citizens. But when they go home and they kick back in the comfort of their living room, they can live any kind of life they want. And there's the public private life where conceptions of the good life can be privately pursued. Now, that's right. To some degree, the liberal state.

Look, the liberal state doesn't have things like like that won't tell you what to believe in terms of religion. It will not tell you to have a family, how many kids and the like. If you want to go do only fans, male or female, Albanese is not going to say a word about it and and the like. So there's not going to be that kind of like condemnation of the good life. But on the other hand,

the

values that are enshrined in the political sphere and liberalism have, I believe, disseminated and spread throughout into wider civil society of liberal states. This is the whole point of my liberalism as a way of life book that we live today and we swim in liberal waters so that when we we acquire our understanding and our sensibility as liberals, not through civics lessons or not by like parliamentary tours, but rather simply by watching Netflix, by watching Disney movies where princesses find their own path against all odds. By working in institutions like the University of Sydney with respectful codes of human resources and all that stuff.

So we're we're saturated, inundated 24 seven with liberal norms and morays. And so liberals like to play this cute game where we're saying, no, no, no, no, we're perfectly plural. But then conservatives will, I think, with some justice rear up on us and say, are you kidding me? You are a hegemony through and through and you prosecute your morality in the most aggressive ways through examples like cancel culture.

So

I have some sympathy with the idea that liberal states are also

sneakily

teleological,

though

I do think there is a real difference in kind and one liberals need to maintain that there is a difference between a state that is sneakily teleological and one that openly professes an official religion. They're not teleological. They're not

teleological. A difference

in quantity here, I think, is, in fact, also a difference in quality.

So

they are not all the same, despite they're

not all the same.

Yeah. No, they're not all the same. I want to say

why this

important because, you know, we had a conversation. We discussed that further. And I'm I'm actually convinced Christian to realize that when you do hold a strong view about the way the world is in a liberal society, you do feel that tension. You feel at times

it's

not as neutral as it looks. There are values out there. Every Disney every Disney movie

tells

you the way to feel yourself is to find yourself. That's that's the meaning of life. That's

it.

And you think that's not right.

All

right. Yeah. Yeah. So I definitely don't want to say that you have to be like a secular to be liberal. Not at all. But it's undeniable. I think that any any Christian who feels comfortable living in a liberal society has had their Christianity

shaped.

Yeah. In deep respects by liberalism. The two doctrines have had to make an accommodation with one another. And yeah, that's that's what I would say. So people who take a more kind of orthodox traditional Christianity. I I don't entirely sympathize, but I feel their pain that they're the core values of them would come into conflict pretty regularly with publicly professed.

And

although we can discuss this in a further podcast coming up again. But when you come from a society which does not have Western roots to it.

All

right. Wait. The Christian is a deeply mixed up right in historically liberalism. Yeah. It could be like Islam or even even even a Hindu country. You find the tension would be even greater.

I

imagine.

I

think that's right. Look that. So it's just for a liberal to say that it kind of war. It leads to claims of like you're Islamophobic or some some something with some pejorative like that. I just disagree. Because I think that the alt to not see it that like set aside for a second. Liberals have this fatal error of wanting to see the whole world either as liberals or as liberals in waiting. As if all of these other ways of life if they were just kind of like a little bit more enlightened or a little bit chiller or something like that. They would come to recognize the felicities of liberal freedom etc. That's simply not true.

And you have I think that just that just as a denial or oppression or a head in the sand of what genuine pluralism is. And if you want to point to Islam that has many ethical points of tension with liberalism. I'd be happy to affirm that.

Yeah. By the way that belief that people are really all liberals just need to be let free. Can at times lead to various outcomes.

Definitely. I mean look at Iraq War 2.

That was my example.

I thought if only we could let if only we could set them free they'd all naturally want to become liberals like we are. That's

right. That's

it.

Yeah.

Like look this is this is my thing in Hungary. Like what if which which seems more plausible that Hungary was ruled by an illiberal top-down leader. for

16

years. That or that Hungarians are perhaps a people with illiberal tendencies that elected that government. I mean in some sense a liberalism is not just an elite top-down repressive phenomenon. It's something that people claim for themselves.

Yeah. Yeah. What you said you think there's been a change developing. and I think the common feeling is that

liberalism

is in some sense

in

retreat. Is that fair?

Do

we say in retreat or? Sure. The question of my I put a question mark because it's very easy to get caught up in in small small scale issues and not realize that the bigger picture may not be nearly the same.

But

why is that? Why?

Why? Why

don't all the people want to buy it? Alex?

What's

wrong?

There

are so many. Okay. There's two reasons why people aren't buying liberalism. This is a good question.

The

first reason is is that I think liberals so often suck at liberalism. We are terrible representatives of liberalism and it depends if you're on the left or right side but both are at fault here. So for I'm kind of a center lefty kind of guy and I think that liberals have been ungenerous with their resources with their welfare policies with their taxation and have basically dream hoarded and pulled up the drawbridge about 15 20 years ago. So if for a society that prides itself on fairness to do that is not on.

Ditto if you're a society also that prides itself on the freewheeling exchange of ideas and that you come into to persecute cancel culture universities where conservative positions can't speak freely for fear of of sanction then you are not liberal. So the point is is on the one hand I think that liberals have so often been let down their ideals and become illiberal.

So

that's on the one hand liberals suck. On the other hand liberalism may be an unattractive value package for people with a different set of core commitments. So even if liberalism was at its best firing on all cylinders freedom and fairness killing it then as we said earlier some people is just not going to be attractive for them. And in that sense there's going to be a reassertion of different human excellences that is not going to be claiming liberal goods.

So

you're you're a pluralist about not just within liberalism but about liberalism if I put it that way.

Yes

I

am.

You

don't think there's one way of life which is more suited

to

humans

goes

with

the grain. I

think there I

think

within a very broad I think human beings can flourish in any number of ways and that

okay

let me put it this way let me answer this as a

sorry

let me answer this as a true liberal.

I

think that there is no highest good but I think that there is a worst evil. So this is something that people like Judith Schlar say Isaiah Berlin but they say liberalism has no sunum bonum but it definitely has a sunum malum highest worst evil rather than a highest good. And so if you live in a despotic country full of fear and terror obviously that's not okay. But once you kind of cleared a terrible minimal threshold then I think that no there is no single excellent way of life because what what shared criteria do we have that would be able to evaluate that. Like there's no one way of life that could adjudicate and rank all of these different versions simply because it's too pluralistic.

So yeah no I think that there are many ways to human flourish I think there's ways human flourishing can be stunted but I don't think there's a best way of life.

Your

project is going to your you're spending time in the in China coming up and I take it other places is this this is quite a serious project of yours. What's your purpose. What do

you

hope to achieve Alex in this in this exploration.

I'm

trying to so the so yeah so the book is going to be called the good life state so that the state is back in the business as it were of the good life. And I want to look at different countries who are trying to do that so Hungary for me was paradigmatic. And again, even if Orban was defeated doesn't really matter. It's that that phenomena is not going away. I'm going to China and I want to do India the United States and then I wanted to do Iran, but that is not going to happen. I also would like to do Russia, but I wouldn't feel safe there. So I have to find another case study something Middle Eastern probably. And what I

want to do enough

in there are enough non democracy in the Middle East to find something.

Yeah, that's right. It wouldn't be very. So Turkey would be one. As I said, Israel could be another.

And the

the point of it is so my audience isn't to talk to

Hungarians

or Indians or Chinese is to talk instead to liberals and to try them to try to get them to reorient their vision of what their rivals is. So it's not just the bad stuff because the way liberals talk and I'm thinking really eminent liberals like Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder, some of the most kind of platform and intelligent voices around. But that they systematically reduce our rivals to just either crooks or fools. And I just don't think that we can understand what liberalism is up against, nor do I think that we can reanimate what liberalism has to be about. Because then if it's really easy to be lazy if you see your rivals as bad in all kinds of ways.

And what we need, I think, is a liberalism that strives for moral and social ambition. And I think that seeing these other rivals as worthy projects of human excellences puts us on notice, puts us on attention to try to reclaim a truly morally aspirational liberalism, which is what I'm for. Because

often we're just sort of, we're the worst except for all the others.

That's

right. It's the Churchill thing. We suck less than everyone else sucks. And that just can't,

that's

not a line. That's true when everyone else is on their heels and when Western societies are doing great. But right now, who's going to pick up that line?

That's just

not, that's convincing no one.

Because

it could mean thinking about it. Singapore might be worth looking into.

Singapore would be the perfect, yeah, because so, yeah, it is perfect. So, so many countries are now becoming democratic without being liberal. Singapore is the opposite. It's liberal without being democratic. So it would be the perfect case study for kind of the other side. So, good idea. Just

happy

to

offer it. No, no, no, no, it's great.

And

so the purpose is to provide greater understanding both of what liberalism is as well as the world we're living in.

Correct.

And our rivals. And our rivals.

Can,

should, should liberals seek to persuade others in non-liberal societies to adopt liberalism? Sure. But

I think that

we're completely

tolerant.

No, okay. No, I don't think, liberals are, are not and definitely shouldn't be limitlessly tolerant. That's kind of harmful idiocy right there. But I think that, sure, we can try to change people's minds. But I have to, I think you have to realize, the liberals have to realize what we're up against when we're doing that. Because it's like, it's like the Bush fallacy that like you clear away a superstructure and you just have people clamoring for freedom waiting for you. But what these other regimes are showing is that they have a robust, serious and teleologically oriented moral education project that starts right from birth and last into adulthood.

And so when people are socialized in those particular ways and take on those human excellences, spreading the good word of liberalism is not, the problem of illiberal societies is not that they lack information about liberalism and not that they're like, oh shit, women could have rights or whatever that thing might be. They know all that stuff. And I think liberals should take it as an axiomatic starting point that the non-liberal world knows way, way more about us than we know about them.

Does

this raise a question about international bodies like the United Nations and so forth that seem to be proselytizing certain

human

values that often turned out to be liberal values rather than universal values?

So

that's the claim.

I

mean, the international bodies have all kinds of vulnerabilities right now, some around kind of institutional sludge. And so that's on the one hand. But on the other hand, yeah, sure, there's a big pushback against it. I mean, you saw a spark of this a long time ago.

So

if you remember, remember the Asian values conversation that happened in, I don't know, early 90s

about

whether or not human rights would be appropriate. And then you had like Lee Kuan Yew come out

and

say, no, we have our own Confucian thing on. Then the Chinese jumped on that as well. So what we have now is a more aggressive, more concerted way of looking at this. And you really have these different non-liberal regimes starting to organize, share intellectual resources. There's a whole think tank economy right now going on where kind of like you have like, I don't know, Claremont or

the

Heritage Foundation with all kinds of MOUs with think tanks all around the world.

And

so there's kind of this hive mind. I remember one of my Hungarian interlocutors said that what conservatives really need is a nationalist international.

So

the idea of an international community for nationalism. And yeah, if you think like that, then it's not that you immediately ditch the UN or ditch international commitments, but they have to be negotiated much more gently with the prerogatives of sovereignty.

My, it

might be late to ask this question, just thinking, if you're right, are there such things as

human

rights,

universal

human rights?

So

here I'm becoming, as I grow older, I'm becoming more and more of a, I guess, in this respect, a classical liberal where there's no highest good, but there are kind of base minimum treatments for how human beings ought to be treated that are compatible with a whole bunch of ways of life. And insofar as states are kind of clearing those minimal thresholds, then I think that

it's

not just wrong for liberals to intervene, but then it's deeply unstrategic. It looks condescending, it looks paternalistic, and effective reform won't come from scolding and tutting. More and more,

I

think that the only way to win this culture war,

the

only way through is for

different

worldviews, liberalism first and foremost, is simply to be

the

most attractive version of themselves.

There's

no proving these people wrong, there's no contradicting them, there's only trying to appeal

and

show the richness of our ideology and hope they come along.

And

unless you're attractive, there's no, there's no way forward.

Thank

you.

That's

Alexander Lefebvre from the University of Sydney

on

his new, on his new project,

looking

at liberal and liberal societies.

It

raises some significant challenges and issues, I think, for the whole liberal cause,

and

a very fitting

conversation

to have on liberalism in question.

Thanks

for watching. I'm Rob Ford.