Alexandre Lefebvre

Over the last couple of years, we've done

some

shows about the state of liberalism, political liberalism. And as you can guess, we haven't always been the most optimistic. We did one recently with Mr. End of History, Francis Fukuyama, in which we asked whether we're at the end of the history of liberalism. He has a new book out, or it was new last year. Liberalism and its discontents. Most people seem to be concerned with defending liberalism. Another show we did recently is with Leon Weaseltier, who is the editor of Liberty's Quarterly, who, as it happens, sponsored this show, a new quarterly on culture and politics.

And Leon, like so many other cultural figures, writers and thinkers, is defending liberalism against, of course, Trump and authoritarianism and all sorts of other things. We're doing a show today on liberalism, but I think

the

conversation will be a little more optimistic. My guest, Alexander Lefebvre, has a new book out, Liberalism as a Way of Life,

in

which he seems to present liberalism as so ubiquitous that we're all liberals, whether we know it or not. Alex

teaches

in Sydney. He's a philosopher, political philosopher. And the book is a really intriguing take, a very different kind of take on liberalism. Alex, congratulations on the book. Before we start, though, I'm going to be

very

academic with you, because we have to be when we talk about the L word. It gets thrown around in so many different contexts.

What,

for you, does liberalism mean? What does this word mean?

Such

a simple question, such a difficult answer. So thanks for having me on, Andrew. It's a pleasure to be here. So liberalism has a million and one definitions.

I

mean, broadly, the dictionary definition is that it's a social and political philosophy concerned about such things as individual rights, democracy and fairness. And I'm happy enough to go with that definition. But in my book, I try to suggest something else as well, which is that liberalism today is not just this political and legal ideology, but its ideals have spread to sort of every aspect of the wider background culture that you and I who live in liberal democracies, whether that's here in Australia or in Canada, where I'm born or in the United States, we all swim in these waters. So that's the take I present in my book.

I actually start with a strange sort of ally in the book, which is conservative critics of liberalism. So people who are typically friendly to liberalism, people who call themselves liberals, tend to think of it as a political and legal thing. Conservatives, though, see it as something much bigger, something much more omnivorous and omnipresent. And they see liberalism in the way I do, that it's sort of infiltrated or infected in their words, all aspects of our culture. And that's where I start with them. So I'm a fan of liberalism, but agree that it's much bigger than we tend to think about.

There

seems to be two definitions of liberalism, one which is polemical, perhaps some conservatives who are critical of liberalism, and then a more

strict

historical definition, which often starts in the 19th century with

John

Stuart Mill. Can those two co-exist?

So

that's a difficult question. I wonder if a polemical definition can ever really sit well with defenders. But

so

in the 19th century, liberalism had two kind of faces. There had two meanings. To be a liberal meant two things. On the one hand, it's someone who championed personal freedom, which is

what

we typically associate liberalism with today, the ability and the entitlement to determine how one lives by one's own turn. So, OK, that's one aspect. But the other aspect of what it meant to be liberal in the 19th century, as advanced by liberals themselves, was to be generous. And that's the word that's baked right into the word itself. So if we ask for a liberal serving of soup, we're not asking for a politically progressive soup, right? We're asking for an abundant, big portion of soup. So it's this quality of being free and generous that was at the heart of 19th century liberalism, as I understand it, with Mill as well. And in the 20th century

and

the polemics that started right from the 1930s but onwards, liberalism tends to be sometimes attacked and sometimes celebrated as a narrowly individual and individualistic doctrine. And so it would be difficult to square those two. On the one hand, this idea of being free and generous, on the other hand, being like an individual egoistic actor out hustling for their own thing.

What

about an etymology, Alex? Who invented the word? Where does it come from?

Yeah,

good question. So it's

a

so

by the standards of intellectual history, liberalism is a new thing. It's 200 years old. That's virtually a newborn in my field.

So

it was first started to be used in the modern sense that we use it. People designate themselves as liberals in the political sense in the early 19th century in response to Napoleon. First used in Spain in 1806, I believe. And then within a decade, it sort of spread with Napoleon.

And who invented it in Spain? Were they doing it as admirers of Napoleon, as critics?

Was

Napoleon defined as a liberal?

So

this is this is this is a tricky he hijacked that he never called himself a liberal.

He

sort of. OK, so short answer. No, the first people who called themselves liberals were an opposition party, sometimes political, sometimes guerrilla to Napoleon. And then Napoleon, though, had close advisers around him, in particular, the great early liberal Benjamin Constant, who called himself a full blown liberal. And the doctrine sort of made its way with Constant, Napoleon that way.

And

I know David Runciman, been on this show a couple of times. He's a big fan of

Constant,

sees him as a critical figure in the development of liberal thought.

Absolutely. Yeah. He reset our our ideas of what freedom means in in the modern era. And it's just a decisive intervention that he did.

So given Constant's centrality in all this, and given the fact that the word only arises at the beginning of the 19th century,

should

it be seen

as

something that comes out of political modernity that we could never have come to the word and the term and all the debates about it without the French and indeed the American revolutions?

A

hundred percent.

And something that is so important to kind of state up front about liberalism, just in terms of its history, but also in terms of its meaning and its future, is that so it's a 19th century. So historians love to hunt for the earliest possible examples of liberalism. And they go back to

John

Locke or Montesquieu or the Bible or some ancient source. But really, it's a 19th century thing. And the reason it's a 19th century thing is that it started as a reaction to and an attempted containment of democracy. So early liberals were really freaked out by the French Revolution and by democracy more generally. They were freaked out on the one hand by its excesses that, oh shit, Jacobins would come for us and our stuff would be taken and there would be that populist tyranny, the majority thing inside of it.

But

a lot of critics were also freaked out about the kind of deadening effect of democracy. So Tuckville is a really important figure for me. And he was really freaked out about democracy as something that like when cultural power starts to be wielded by the common man, he was worried it would just make us all mediocre, crappy individuals, only out for our own interests, our consumerism and all that. And so liberalism really started. Here's the point. Liberalism really started as a reaction to democracy, sometimes to oppose it, but more interestingly and more fruitfully as a way to kind of shape it and take it in promising and safe directions.

So all the institutions that we associate with liberalism are counter-majoritarian, right? So individual rights, division of powers, judicial neutrality, all of that stuff is meant to protect individuals from the consolidated power of popular will. So that's very interesting. So the term, short version, the term that we have liberal democracy today, that kind of nice little package that we think comes in like a picnic basket and it's gift wrapped and it's all together. That is a hard one, 200 year negotiation of democracy and liberalism, bending and adapting to one another to create this thing that we enjoy now, well, many of us enjoy now and often take for granted.

Are

you being entirely fair with Tocqueville? Because after all, he came to America, saw it as certainly the country of democracy and perhaps of liberalism

and

was in many ways somewhat of an admirer, recognizing it as the future and contrasting it positively with the inegalitarian, illiberal France that he came from.

I

don't

think,

okay,

good question. I don't think I'm being unfair. So I think he was, so you're right. He was just floored when he came.

I mean, you're presenting him

as a bit of an elitist and rather felt that.

Um,

the common man was ruining everything.

No.

So I get it. Okay. So Tocqueville came to America and he was blown away, but what he was especially impressed by was the United States, his ability to manage democracy and channel its forces, especially the force of equality, where people start to regard themselves as equals, want the same kind of stuff. Um, he thought that America managed that really well, and he saw that it tried to preserve all the kind of,

uh,

aspirations of an institutions of liberty. So he was really jazzed about the townships. If you want to get into the weeds about Tocqueville, but these little communities in New England where people would participate and hold offices and really care about their, their, their locality.

And

that for him was the perfect marriage of equality and freedom. It was a liberalized version of democracy.

But

when Tocqueville came to write volume two of democracy in America, and this was five years after he left America,

he

started to look a lot less rosy about democracy. He was like, Oh shit, this thing is just too powerful. And it's going to overwhelm all of the safeguards that liberalism might build against it. So volume two of democracy in America is a real bummer of a book. It's a really pessimistic text. Uh, so it's an interesting thing to look at when Tocqueville is in America and when he's not and how he interprets democracy.

Big

question.

What

about

Edmund

Burke in all this? I mean, most people associate Burke late 19th, early 20th century, uh, late 18th, early 19th century, uh, Irish political philosopher as the father of conservatism. But of course he was an admirer of the American revolution, great critic of the French revolution. Can he be equally described as the father or one of the fathers of modern liberalism? There seem to be many fathers. I don't know if there's a mother anyway.

Yeah, for

mother, I,

I

would say Wollstonecraft cause she's around the same era,

but she

leans more democratic than liberal. But anyways, put Wollstonecraft to the side, uh, Burke, if you, I mean, it would be a heterodox reading of Burke, but I don't think it's a wrong one. He, he, he was freaked out by the French revolution. Cause he was, it tried to sweep away all existing institutions and habits and marais. And he just thought that that would be bloodletting where the only things that would motivate individuals anymore, where it's a personal interest and then violence. And he actually

saw

pretty clearly. So he was all freaked out about the French revolution in the good days of the French revolution. This was like 1790 when like the queen and king were still alive. They'd just been marched back from Versailles, but he was freaking out and he saw very acutely where this thing was going to go,

um,

and spent the rest of his life railing against it. So he's a father of conservatives. Certainly. I guess if you want to talk about liberalism and the preservation of individual liberties in the face of democratic power, sure. Um, he would be one of those kinds of aristocratic liberals that we might like others, like Tuck Field is sort of that Burkhardt is another one, but there's a bunch of those kinds of guys like

that. I

know you describe yourself, your work generally, you've written a number of books as, uh, being interested in political ideas that inspire a rich and rewarding way of life. But when I think Alex of classic liberals, and again, that word is such a

plastic

one. It can be used in so many different ways. You know that better than I do. I think of

Ian

Foster or Orwell, particularly 20th century liberals who

saw

politics, a limited kind of politics, probably Isaiah Berlin as well,

as

being designed to protect

private

intellectual life. So

you

seem to be presenting liberalism as this ubiquitously political doctrine, but for some liberals, many liberals, Orwell, Forster, so many others, Berlin, um,

it's

not anti-political, but it's not

the

thing in itself. Politics isn't the thing in itself. Does that make sense?

Very

much. I think that's a very accurate reading of the mid-century moment of liberalism. Those are the so-called

Cold

War liberals. And they looked around and we're always talking about liberals being freaked out by something. That's not a wrong, uh, that's not a wrong painting of the vibe.

And

mid-century liberals were terrified of, uh, collectivism in all of its different guises that was rearing its head all across the world. Understandably so, right? Yeah, no, for sure. Yeah. It's not a criticism.

Yes. Nazi's Soviet

Union. And so what they wanted to do was create structures, institutions that would protect people from, um, from those kinds of governments. And so early liberals were, excuse me, Cold War liberals were really trying to reduce older liberal emphasis on the progressivism of liberalism, where the state would have tremendous powers to redistribute and allocate resources. And they were also really worried about the perfectionism of early liberals, liberalism in that the state would recommend a vision of the good life. And they said, hell no, we need,

we

don't, we don't need that stuff. What we really need is to be protected from, uh, from the powerful. And so they created, so you mentioned Orwell is a great example. Um,

uh,

Trilling, Judith Schlar, Isaiah Berlin, all of those thinkers, uh, kind of were capsulated recently in a book. Um, it's a very good book by Samuel Morin, the historian called Liberalism Against Itself.

Right. And so he talks about.

And his, uh, the, the review.

Yeah, there you go.

Suggests that, uh, I know what you're going to say, Alex. Um, good. The cold war is over. So it's time for liberals to get beyond Hitler and Stalin. Hey, you've done your research. Look,

so here's, so here's my, here's where I cut into the debate. I said, okay, fine. We can conceive of liberalism as this kind of political thing that creates structures to protect the weak from the strong. And that's, that's fine. But the conservative insight remains, which is that today liberal ideals and values have spread to all aspects of the background culture. And I can give you more concrete examples.

I want to get

to that. We're going to do that actually after the break.

Like, um,

perfect,

but I just want to explore your central

thesis. So go on.

Um,

but

very briefly, like, I think we acquire our liberalism now, not through civics lessons, but through Netflix, through dating apps, through the way we parent, through, uh, all social media, through all that, those HR codes at workplaces, all that stuff has been liberalized. And so I, for, so I'm, our cards on the table. I'm liberalism really got its mojo fully going,

I

think in the 1970s with the civil rights era. And that's when this spread started to happen.

I

was born in 79, I'm 44, and I've grown up in this liberal world. I don't know. I don't have. And so many people of my kind of generation

don't

have also an alternative or a different value set that they can describe themselves or act upon besides liberal ideas. And my book is trying to make the pitch to us to say, Hey, wait a minute, that might be enough. What if we just double down and take seriously these values that we swim in that are just kind of ubiquitous in our world and try to live them as a personal ethic. And my pitches is that can be pretty awesome.

So, and I don't want to throw too many other political philosophers into this because I'm making probably a bit of a pull of myself, but, um, is your analysis of liberalism then kind of, and again, we're going to bring up the I word here as ideology, sort of a Marxian notion, Gramsci notion of ideology, that it, it comes from everywhere from the state, from the media. And again, like fish swimming in the sea, we don't even know we're liberals. We don't even know we're capitalists. We simply are. Yeah.

I

think that's right. So I would actually go, uh, more forcefully than that. I would say, sure. I'm happy to say liberalism is an ideology in that way, but I would go further.

Uh,

so, but so is communism. So socialism, so is anarchism. All those steps are ideologies.

Well, that communism was never

success. I mean, the point I I'm guessing you're

making

is that

communism

was never a success. People reacted against it.

Yeah. So we're, we're,

we're

about to converge. I'm going to say that it's not merely ideological, it's

hegemonic,

um, which is to say that it has become indeed that water or whatever you want to call it. That greatest trick of the devil, where he makes everyone believe he doesn't exist.

Um,

that's what I think liberalism has,

but you're celebrating that you're not bemoaning it. You're, you're not critiquing, you're not critiquing it.

Yes. And no, I, I feel that

it's

not so much a celebration. It's a, this is the hand that a lot of people who don't have religion have been dealt. This is, this is our water. And so, um, yeah, so I'm, I'm in favor of liberalism, but it's more of a, the first part of the book at any rate is more of a descriptive endeavor to see where we stand as

not,

not liberals, but just people trying to make sense of this world who have been raised by its institutions and traditions and say, Hey, if you want to put your finger on where you get your kind of values and vibe from the thing you should be pointing to is liberalism. And so it's not pro or con. It's just sort of, well, it's definitely pro, but it's not, it's not aggressively pro. It's just saying, this is the state of play.

It's

everything. And so you can't really think I'm guessing you're suggesting you can't even think your way out of it, even if you want to one final question before we get to the break, and then we can explore your thesis a little bit more.

You

reviewed the book, I think by, um, Helena, uh, Rosenblatt,

uh,

the lost history of liberalism from ancient Rome to the 21st century.

I

haven't read it, but I can

guess

what she's arguing. Is that thesis conceivable, particularly in the way you're presenting it, that liberalism existed from antiquity and perhaps explains now our obsession

with

things like stoicism.

So yeah, I absolutely love that book. I give it my

three

thumbs up recommendation that both our books are published by Princeton. And I think Princeton should get a two for one package of our books because I think we're doing the same thing. I think she's trying to say, she's trying to show how liberalism was an ethic, an ethical and not just a political project in the 19th century. And I'm trying to say how liberalism is a ethical and political project in the 21st century. We're just doing different times. She's a historian. I'm not,

uh,

so we're doing different timelines, but her idea that, uh, the initial meaning of liberalism was free and generous. She traces that back to antiquity, but then looks at how it was recreated in the 19th century, in particular by, by France in France, um, she really puts her finger on exactly what I want to say. And I'm trying to revive that, not her, not 19th century, like, uh, answers and, and doctrines. I'm just trying to

suggest

that the impulse that animates that body of thought, which is how to be a free and generous person in our modern world is very much alive. And I'm trying to just

update,

as it were, that book for our own times.

We're

speaking with Alexander Lefebvre, author of a fascinating new book, Liberalism as a Way of Life. It's one of the New Yorker books of the year already for 2024. Um, he talks about liberalism as free and generous. Uh, nothing is really free in the world today. Perhaps academics don't always understand that, but everybody else does. I need to eat and I'm supported by Liberties, uh, uh, a quarterly of culture and politics, which as it happens is, is a quarterly in defense, I think of the culture and politics of liberalism edited by Leon Weaseltier. We're going to

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a short ad for Liberties and then we'll be back with the free and generous Alexander Lefebvre to talk more about liberalism as a way of life. Don't go away.

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you can subscribe to Liberties at libertiesjournal.com. You're going to have to pay for it, but it's well worth it. We're speaking with

Alexander

Lefebvre, the author of Liberalism as a Way of Life. Alex,

you

were born in Canada. You went to grad school at Johns Hopkins on the East Coast. You teach now in Sydney. You're part of the,

quote

unquote, liberal, coastal or global elites. You talk about everyone being free and generous.

I'm

not sure who you've been hanging out with. It seems as if everyone is lacking generosity. When was the last time you were on social media? What do you mean by the fact that we're all free and generous these days?

So,

all right, coming back hard after the break. I like it. So, I don't mean that we're all free and generous. I mean that the liberal ethic aspires for us to become free and generous individuals. And that can be the basis of a good life. But I'm not pretending that we're all like we can kick off our feet, turn on Netflix and that we're already there. So, I can talk more about why freedom and generosity are at the heart of a liberal ethic. But I really don't want to pretend that we live in

anything resembling. Well, okay, well, let

me, maybe I was, maybe it was a little bit of a hardball, I'm immediately after the break. But

in

an age where

neo

-authoritarianism is all the rage, maybe not in Australia, although you even have a party out there, but Trump in

the

US,

Putin

in Russia, Modi in India, blah, blah, blah. None of these people pride themselves on their political generosity. If anything,

their

politics and their increasingly populist politics is rooted in an absence of generosity, an explicit

absence

of generosity. And they're popular and liberals are struggling to cope with that, both conservative and progressive liberals. So, where does this generosity lie and who's really aspiring to be generous?

So, okay,

so there's a lot in that question.

I

don't think that these, this is so difficult. Okay, these authoritarian movements you're talking about are animated by a certain kind of generosity, I do think, but towards their own people. It's a closed kind of shop of generosity. So, I don't think that that's altogether fair.

All

right, let me, let me reset a sec. So, I think liberals are really, I'll speak bluntly. It's a, it's a radio.

You can, you

can say whatever you like.

Okay, cool.

I think liberals, yeah,

liberals suck at defending themselves. That's what I want to say. Liberals are truly awful at it. The first thing that liberals do, and it's the bad first move, is that they look at authoritarians and populace and they just kind of complain and criticize and say how nasty and mean and gross they are. So, we go low. They don't go high, but we go low as well. The second thing that liberals do badly, I think, is that they really, when they try to respond to these authoritarian challenges, they miss the pitch. They think that these authoritarians, they reply to these authoritarians like, oh, aren't liberal institutions valuable? Don't we need free speech? Don't we need individual rights?

Don't we need blah, blah, blah. And that's fine. We need those things. But those authoritarian movements are gaining steam around the world precisely because they make a values-based pitch for their regime. They're trying to promote a certain kind of ethos, a certain kind of sense of what it means to be a true American, a true Indian subject, a member of the Chinese Communist Party. And at the heart of all those worldviews isn't just kind of like domination and authority. It's a certain kind of value package that is specific to them and has real

human

goods at the heart of it. They're not my human goods, but they're human goods. And so what I think that liberalism needs to do is try to recognize, is recognize and forcefully assert that at the heart of our doctrine are real and meaningful human goods that can lead to not just good polity, but to good lives and to start fighting fire with fire in a sense, try to meet authoritarians at their own level of attack, if that makes sense.

But

your definition of generous seems very broad.

I

mean, everyone has. Even Donald Trump's generous towards himself

and

the people who love him. Who isn't generous? Has there ever been anyone in history who has had a complete absence of generosity?

No,

of course not.

So here let's let me let me be clear and specify what I mean by generosity. So at the heart of liberalism is this idea of fair fairness and equality of opportunity. And we have generosity baked all the all the way down into our wealth, social welfare, democratic institutions, things like socialized, but socialized medicine for every other OECD country,

things

like publicly funded education, redistributive taxation. All of that stuff is a measure of generosity, trying to ensure that it's not just me and mine that flourish in this world of ours, but all members of it. So that's one aspect of generosity that liberalism, I think, is at its heart and liberalism should very much commit to. So I'm a social democrat as far as my own ideology laws.

And

also, I think I think this is the only way forward, a certain kind of hermeneutic or interpretive generosity where we don't us liberals don't look at other ways of living in other creeds with contempt, because nothing will destabilize a country faster than

that. So

is your definition of liberalism or at least contemporary liberalism, is it

indistinguishable

from democratic socialism?

It's very we'd have to specify. But yeah, I mean, I think,

sure,

let me commit. Let me bite. Let me bite that bullet and say, yes, it is. That's my that's my read of it. So I'll be very brief here at the heart of the book is my main inspiration for it is the American philosopher John Rawls, and I tried to build a fun, lively account of what it means to live liberally. That's

not John Rawls.

John Rawls.

That was a joke. John Rawls. All

right. I know you write about.

All

right, too. All

right. And

John Rawls. There's John Rawls. The

Harvard philosophy.

That's right. The Borat threw me. OK, so at the heart of my book is Rawls. And so Rawls has is a kind of social democrat. But Rawls's starting point is very interesting. He basically looks around at his American society and tries to find out what its most fundamental moral commitments are. So he looks at things like the Constitution, political speeches, judicial decisions, political. Yeah. All those sorts of things in the public sphere. And he tries to sort of reverse engineer. He's like an anthropologist or like a flaneur, if you like. It's like, OK, what are we really seeing out here?

And he says that at the end of the day, when we look at all of our core institutions of liberal democracy, there's one core moral proposition that they enshrine, which is that society should be a fair system of cooperation from one generation to the next.

That

is at the root of it. And Rawls thinks that he's not telling,

excuse

me, he's not telling his readers new stuff. It's not like, oh, wow, John Rawls, I hadn't realized that. Rather,

he's counting

on his interlocutors and his readers saying, yeah, cool, I get that. That's how I see myself. That's how I see my society.

Right.

And it's on that basis, that more core moral idea of society being a fair system of cooperation, that he then builds this incredibly complicated political, economic, social, psychological edifice called a theory of justice, his major work that tries to flesh out for us, us lesser mortals, what it would mean to live in consistently liberal polities and live consistently liberal lives. So the point of all this is to suggest that, yeah, I'm a social Democrat and so is Rawls. But what they're doing, what I think I'm doing, is just scanning the culture and trying to see what are its publicly professed principles and from that devise a philosophy that would match it.

So I'm trying to imminently work out what a way of life based on liberal ideals is.

Yeah.

And Rawls featured very much an interesting piece on liberalism in the New Yorker in May, which was partly a review of your book and partly a review of the book by Daniel Chandler, Free and Equal. Daniel was on the show a few months ago. It sounds to me though, and again, excuse maybe the

vulgarity

of this question, is that you're appropriating

liberal,

just as you're critical of the Cold War liberals for their parochialism perhaps, in focusing on

the communism

and Nazism,

you're

just trying to collapse liberalism into Rawlsianism. I mean, for me Rawls is a,

and

I'm not a professional political philosopher, but he's fairly unreadable and technical. Is that what you, I mean, you're not going to acknowledge that's what you're trying to do, but Rawls is just one political thinker, isn't he? Are you suggesting that he is the sea and we're all swimming around him?

No.

I'm saying that what he did is he tried to figure out what, he was a very, I'll stick with the metaphor. He was a very early explorer of these waters and he tried to,

this

is going to make every, anyone who knows Rawls is going to freak out when I say this, but whatever, it's going to go with it. Rawls in a sense is a philosopher, but he's also like a cultural studies kind of guy in the sense that he's looking around at his world and seeing what's going on, what are its major propositions? So again, I'm just, I'm going to kind of revert to my previous answer. I don't want to say that Rawls is a very VIP, a very important philosopher and we have to take our lead from this guy.

I'm saying that he descriptively got something accurate about our societies and something, so he wrote in the 1970s when liberalism was really kind of much more just a political economic kind of doctrine, but we are 50 years down the track now. And my gambit in that is that what Rawls said back then is in fact more true because liberal ideals have spread to all aspects of our culture. I can give you some examples of what I mean so this sounds less artificial about how we are liberals deep down or you can lead the conversation where you prefer.

I'm

interested in talking a little bit more about Rawls. What is it he said that

makes

him so relevant? Is it

the

principle that

we're

never quite sure of what's going to happen to ourselves, so we establish a social net? Is that the core principle of Rawls? What did he say that hadn't been said before that makes him so quintessentially modern as a liberal?

Good. So

Rawls' great achievement is to reconcile two traditions of liberalism that

scholars

and pundits and everyone had kind of prima facie thought were just incommensurable.

So

on the one hand, you have the more freewheeling American libertarian kind of thing

and

so individual rights, that kind of thing. And on the other hand, you have the more European socialistic welfare kind of thing. And what Rawls tried to do, what Rawls achieved, I believe, in his work is to,

and

I use this in the kind of the fulsome sense, achieve a reconciliation between those two traditions in one integrated moral and political vision. So what did he say that was new? In a sense, nothing, but in a sense, everything. So Rawls' book is,

well,

I love this metaphor. One early reviewer likened a theory of justice, the book, to a Gothic cathedral, because it simultaneously is really simple in its plan, but extraordinarily intricate and finicky, in a sense, in its execution. And I think that's right. Rawls is, on the one hand, super, super simple, and on the other hand, super, super complicated. And so what I'm trying to do in the book, this is not, there's a million and one exegesis of Rawls, the world does not need more Rawls exegesis. There's libraries for that. What I'm trying to do is reanimate his moral vision of what it means to live freely and generously in our life.

So his core intuition is that society is a fair system of cooperation. And then he provides all of these ideas by which we can try to work that way into our own selves, into our own outlook. So the one you mentioned a second ago, kind of elliptically, but I think you alluded to it, was this idea of the original position and the fear of ignorance.

And

so what Rawls suggests, he's like, okay, everyone, let's try something. It's like, let's try, let's flag this up, let's flag this up the flagpole, see if it works. And he designs what he calls a thought experiment. I call it a spiritual exercise, because

I

think it's so much more than a thought experiment. But he asks us basically to try to step outside of ourselves, try to forget who we are for just a hot second and forget that, for example, I'm a white, heterosexual, Canadian, émigré, living in Australia, and he asks us to reflect on what we think a just society would be like from outside our own positionality. And so when I talk about generosity, that's something that I'm talking about. So it's so easy and it happens constantly, 24-7 tragically, that the rich and powerful game the laws and principles of justice in their favor.

There's all sorts of big and small ways by which the rich beget richness and the advantage to consolidate their strength. And what Rawls is trying to say is that, yeah, first of all, that's not morally cool. That's not like, that's kind of morally odious. But on the other hand, he's trying to say,

look,

look, everyone, that's a really shitty way to live. If you start to live like that, if you're always trying to game the tables in your favor, yet continue to kind of publicly profess principles of fairness, you're going to be a nasty little hypocrite who's going to be individualistic, likely materialistic, and live a kind of mediocre, crappy life. And that's his pitch to his reader, I believe, at the heart, that if you talk the talk but don't walk the walk of your liberal principles, you're in bad shape, spiritually speaking. You're just not going to be a happy person.

And so he's all about trying to show the moral vision of liberalism as not only a life that is happy and enjoyable, but a life that is worthy of happiness and worthy of enjoyment. And that's Rawls' pitch. And I try to follow him by giving him a little polish, a little pop culture. And I'm just trying to write out what that vision would be like. I think my book's original. Sorry, I'm making it sound like it's just footnotes to Rawls. He's one inspiration. But that's what I'm trying to do.

And

I assume it complements Chandler's book, Free and Equal, A Manifesto for a Just. It's no coincidence that two political philosophers are coming out with a reinvestigation, a rethinking of Rawls as the central figure in our age. Is it because of, and we go back to Tocqueville here, inequality? Alex, is the core problem, particularly in the United States, inequality? And is that the one that Rawls most

centrally

addresses with his veil of ignorance?

Yeah, I think so. First, I think that Dan Chandler and I, I think, are doing very similar projects. We're working out the same kind of intuition. He's kind of like, if we're a two-man band, he's on the political and economic drums. And I'm on the psychological and spiritual guitar, let's say. But I think we're doing the same kind of project. And I think the books complement each other nicely. It was nice to see them reviewed together by Gopnik. I think he got some, yeah, anyways, it's churlish to reply. I'm grateful for the review. Well,

tell us

why he was wrong. We'll get him on the show.

So,

yeah, so I don't think he was wrong so much. So his,

at

the end of the day,

I

think he thinks that Dan and I are too chill. Like we're too relaxed about the state of liberalism. We have, oh, shit, we have the barbarians. Yeah,

he said

that. He said that you didn't even care about the crisis.

Yeah.

Yeah. So I think that's wrong. I think we're just working in a different kind of, look, liberalism took 200 years to make itself hegemonic and to worm its way. Worms are, that's the critics' language. But, you know, to integrate itself into our common sense. It's going to take more than an election cycle for it to be displaced. What would really, for liberalism in my mind to truly be displaced is that people would cease to regard fairness as an appropriate social goal and as a personal ethic. If that happens,

I

think we're in deep trouble, but no single election cycle is going to

do that. But conservatives,

conservatives are critical of the idea of fairness. Many conservatives, particularly Trumpian conservatives, have an almost Leninist view of the world, or certainly a Machiavellian one. Thrasymachus comes to mind, where everyone's out for their own interests. That's just the nature of things.

So that's such an interesting point. And I want, I'm not fully qualified to talk. I'm working towards being qualified on this point. But so on the one hand...

Yeah, you're more qualified than me,

Alex. So don't worry.

Okay,

I'll let it, I'll let it fly then. On the one hand, I agree with you. And I think that a lot of conservatives today talk about politics like a zero-sum game, that it's a knife fight, and that to pretend otherwise is just you're being a chump. Okay.

On

the other hand, one of my personal obsessions is reading far-right American news, and I read Breitbart all the time.

And

in particular, I read the comment section.

That's why you lost

your hair, right?

What's that?

Yeah,

that's it. I had

this ponytail before I started all this.

No, I'm

teasing you. I shouldn't, I

shouldn't

stoop solo there. I'm not a generous liberal.

That's

all right. There's hope for you yet. Anyways, I go to Breitbart, and you look at, okay, look at the main plank of theirs is anti-immigration, right? And a lot of the anti-immigration rhetoric in the comments is just kind of straight up xenophobia. It's just nasty. Okay, fine.

I

would say maybe, I don't know, 40% of it is that. But the other 50% of comments about immigration and arguing for closed birders and deportation is based, at least prima facie, in a fairness-based argument. Their claim is that, hey, look,

illegal

immigrants came to this country. They're jumping the queue for social services. They didn't contribute it into this culture. They're not of us. Therefore, they shouldn't just get to jump the line and be entitled to the stuff that real Americans have pitched in all of these decades.

And

I disagree, but I recognize that as a fairness, moral-based argument. So on the one hand, Trumpists are very anti-fairness. On the one hand, they're very fairness for kind of people like them. So it's an interesting position with respect to that. Anyways, that was, sorry, that's an excursion.

And

in that sense, there are many, or some on the left, progressives, certainly members of labor unions who wouldn't disagree.

I

think so.

I think that's right. Yeah. So I think that, I mean, it's one of my favorite, and here I'm just kind of going, I'm going off piste here. But one of my favorite podcasts that I've listened to in a long, long time was Ezra Klein. Well, sorry, it's not you in this case, but it's Ezra Klein who did Patrick Dineen. So Patrick Dineen, while liberalism failed,

and

it's a very thunder and lightning kind of take that this whole liberal project is a sham and it's devouring itself alive and we have to move towards something radically different. And Ezra Klein is this great host for that because he's really wonky in the sense that he's very policy driven. He's very down in the details. And he just keeps on pressing. He's like trying to get behind the rhetoric of Dineen. He's like, what do you mean? What do you mean? What do

you

mean? And they're trying to get to specific policy prescriptions that they might disagree on. And at the end of this whole thing, Dineen, the whole radical project that he comes down to, it's like he wants publicly funded divorce counseling for couples struggling to keep their marriage together. And I'm being a bit facetious here, but shit, is that all we're talking about? Like when we get behind the fire and the brimstone and all this stuff of the culture wars, maybe there's more agreement than disagreement. And maybe it's just a media cycle and people trying to get likes and retweets

that

insist otherwise where rage into business.

Right. But you

bring up Dineen, of course, who is the poster boy of

anti

-liberal conservatism. But in your definition of this generosity,

I

mean,

if you

want to be kind, generous to Dineen, there's a spiritual generosity to his work, to his writing, to his life. So is Dineen for you, his work and his life, is he a liberal?

I

don't know. I mean, I think he would resist that label, particularly if you mean progressive by it.

But

I

I

find I find that he criticizes such a straw man version of liberalism

and

goes so intensely on the idea that the heart of liberalism is just individual free choice. And that individuals just want to work their way out and exit all the structures that are received or natural, whether that's families or churches or even gender and sex. And he thinks that liberalism is going to devour itself alive if it just if it puts kind of the atomic individual choice at its forefront. And I don't disagree. I mean, I don't want to I'm going to commit myself to things I don't want to. But let's say at a very

general

level, I don't disagree with that. I just think that no serious liberal describes liberalism that way. And that if we go to any serious liberal, it's always combined with relationality, with sociality, with appreciation of tradition. So I just don't know what he's criticizing. And I think he can get his project so strongly off the ground because he's reducing it to something that is instantly despicable

and untenable.

The

straw man thesis. I'm not sure I've done great justice to your book, Alex. I've been interrupting.

I

was getting into trouble for interruption. And

you

should take it as a compliment because I don't interrupt when someone bores me. But I think your thesis and this whole conversation is very interesting. But let's end with a reminder of what you're suggesting in liberalism as a way of life. As you say, you take a broader

cultural

analysis. You see it everywhere. You even bring Borat into it rather than

John

Rawls.

Perhaps

you might end by explaining why

Borat,

for example, the movie or some other of the stuff you've been watching on Netflix reflects your argument that liberalism is not just a way of life, but it is the way of life of the 2020s and onwards.

So

let me start a little bit abstract and I'll finish

with

a Boratian flair if I can manage it. Can you put

up the accent

on? I try. All right. So

at

the core of my book, I say liberalism is defined by three things, both in terms of politics as a personal ethic. Three big top end values that I think that if you want to be a liberal, you commit to.

Those

are an affirmation of personal freedom, an affirmation of fairness and an affirmation of reciprocity. So it's those three things, freedom, fairness, reciprocity, that I think makes up the core of a liberal politics and a liberal ethic.

Now,

what I try to do in the book is I try to show why it is good and awesome to live that way. The oldest question of political philosophy posed by Plato right in the Republic when it starts is why is it good to be just?

And

what Plato is saying is obviously awesome to live in a just society like, yeah, no doubt. But why is it good for you personally to be a just individual when you can just free ride on the justice of others? Wouldn't it be nice to chisel your taxes? Wouldn't it be nice to favor your kids above all else?

And of course, that's

why his whole theory of justice

comes

out of the conversation with Thrasymachus at the beginning. That's right. And so how does he

have to argue against Thrasymachus? He has to show that Thrasymachus is hero. The tyrant is, in fact, the most miserable sod you've ever seen in your life, that he is just a psychical disaster. And what Donald

Trump.

Yeah. And actually, there's been some. OK.

All right. All right. OK. The misery

of Trump.

That's

for someone else. But sure. Let's let's say yes. Actually, yes. I'll say yes. Just fully. OK. But what I try to do in my book is that, OK, you have these three top end values. I'm trying to show what are the existential lived spiritual benefits that follow from or flow from committing to those three main values. And in my book, I have a very clickbait title of a chapter, but I stand by it. It's called 17 Reasons to be Liberal. And there I enumerate all the awesome benefits, personal benefits that come from being liberal. And there are things like some some are more kind of philosophical sounding like impartiality and autonomy. But then I talk about fun and playfulness and irony and grace.

And I'm trying to think of all of them. Redemption I have in their tolerance. There's a whole package of things that I think come from living a liberal way of life. And I tried to show. So I think liberalism needs more heroes. And I tried to show liberal heroes in the book. And here I'm coming to the tail end with the pop culture. So the greatest liberal of all time, the GOAT of liberal all time in my books is Leslie Knope, the hero of parks and recreation. She is just this vivacious character who lives her liberalism publicly and privately and shows what a full bloodied. She's she's she's as good as the Christian Saints for me. I love that character. And I think it's inspiring.

Despite behind the silliness, there's real moral seriousness.

Now,

coming to Borat, who's the hero of? So Leslie is my hero. Who's the hero in Borat? This is tricky. And it's not Borat exactly. It's I find Borat this extraordinary movie about American tolerance, not American intolerance. Borat does some

truly

outrageous shit in that movie. He I think, you know,

literally,

of course, as well.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah. He brawls nude at a conference. He takes a shit and then presents it to his dinner host. He kidnaps Pamela Anderson. Like the list goes on. And sometimes you get you get xenophobes in Borat and that's fine. But most of the time, the American people around him are extraordinarily accommodating and generous and kind to him and ready to roll with him, trying to understand this crazy man that is before him. And that, I think, is a moment of liberal grace and of liberal likeness of rolling with this guy.

And I think that if that is I'm not saying let everything go, but I'm saying that's one instantiation of how a liberal way of life may be not just happy, but also, like Raul said, worthy of happiness, something good.