"Liberalism as a Way of Life": Alexandre Lefebvre in conversation with Helena Rosenblatt

Hello,

everyone.

I'm

delighted to be here. Thank you for that introduction. And I must start by apologizing for my croaky voice. I'm just recovering from a bout of laryngitis.

And

I hope it's not too awful to listen to me.

I

just didn't want to miss this opportunity to

talk

about this book, which I just think is terrific. And I'm very much looking forward to this conversation. So like Anthony said, I'm just going to

try

to summarize the book, which is very hard to summarize because it's so rich.

But

from my point of view, and for the

for

the sake of today's discussion, I'll just say as as

and

then and then I'll ask, I'll ask Alex some questions.

And

we'll have a little conversation before opening it up to you all listeners for Q&A.

So

as as Anthony just said, you know, we are all hearing about how liberalism is in crisis, whether it's the elections in Europe that we just heard about read about or the rise of authoritarian regimes around the world,

or

even, you know, what we hear in in academic books, which are now defending liberalism or or attacking liberalism. Not just academic books, but also newspaper articles.

I

mean, we're just hearing all over the place again and again,

the

crisis of liberalism, and it's being attacked.

Now,

this is a wonderful defense of liberalism. Alex is defending and giving a very robust

defense,

but he does this in a very original way, which I appreciate. And it's what he does,

basically,

is

he

doesn't actually focus so much or talk that much about political and constitutional principles,

the

way many others do and talk about, for example, they talk, for example, about how very important it is

to

to have an independent judiciary balance of powers,

freedom

of speech, all the individual rights and liberties.

Of

course, I believe he believes in those things. And those are very important principles. But really, what he talks about is morals, liberal morals, liberal values and virtues. And, and he defends them strongly.

That's

super interesting, because

normally,

it's conservatives that talk about that talk about morals, I find and that's I think that's a bit of a shame that liberals can seem to have kind of abandoned that,

that

side of things. And in my book,

and in my book,

I talk about that as well. So, and he said, and so it's conservatives who often actually say that

liberal

morals are what's wrong with the world. You know, if you look at someone like Patrick Deneen, for example, I mean, liberalism as a moral system is just responsible for all the corruption,

and

all the degradation in the world. Well, Alex does something very different. I mean, he says, No, no, no, that's what's great about liberalism. And we know that we,

This

is not something, this is something we have within us, something we learn from our culture. It's we know what these moral, beautiful principles are. They're all around us. As he says, it's the water we swim in. They're embedded in the political culture. And what we need to do is double down on them, not give up on them, not be ashamed of them, not feel defensive about them. We need to double down on them. Now, what are some of these values? He takes a lot from, by the way, from John Rawls, who he's very much a fan of,

and

perhaps a disciple of.

And

so he talks about what some of these values are really a belief in fairness, in reciprocity, in something he calls a horizontal ethics.

These

may be things that he wants, he can expound upon in our, in our Q&A.

But

these are, he takes from Jonathan Rawls, this idea that, that liberalism is a,

or

should be a system of, what is it, of fair, a system of fair cooperation, right? Something like that. A system of fair cooperation. And that's really what it stands for. And that's a beautiful thing. Now, he's not a Pollyanna-ish thinker, our dear friend Alex. So he realizes that the world is not a great place always. It's, although these, we know these values, we believe in these values, all of us here, I'm sure my audience believes in fairness, in toleration, in equality, in equality of opportunity. We all believe in these things, and these are liberal principles and values, but we don't live up to them.

Instead,

we live in a state of liberal-dom. And here, Alex takes,

is

inspired by Kierkegaard's notion of Christendom. In other words, we're kind of hypocritical, we're lazy, we're conflicted, we're ambivalent, and we don't really live up to our own values.

So,

this is where it gets really, really interesting, because,

well,

I should really have said that when he says this is all around us, that these values are there in our culture, and we imbibe them, and we see them everywhere,

he

gives us some very interesting examples of this. And this is where this book becomes also fun reading. I should have said at the outset that not only is this a compelling argument and a thought-provoking argument, but it's a fun read. And so, I really urge you, this is the kind of book you really enjoy reading. It's not your normal academic, dry argument. It's, no, it's truly fun. And I'll tell you, I'll give you a few examples. So, he says, he gives examples, of course, from, not of course, but from ancient, from classics, the classics.

But

also, he talks about Dave Chappelle, his comedy.

He

talks about the wonderful TV show Parks and Recreation, and the character Leslie Knope.

He

talks about Sacha Baron Cohen, and all about how these figures actually somewhat counterintuitively represent or

kind

of disseminate liberal morals. And then we go then, and I'm about to finish up here, another very interesting and important part of the book, then. All of this leads to where Alex has crafted some, what he calls spiritual exercises.

And

this is then, these are then ways

to

help us,

each

one of us,

become

the liberals we want to be, or that we say,

or

espouse and practice

the

virtues and values that we know are the right values and that we believe in.

And this

is where he does something very interesting with John Rawls. And I'm not a John Rawls expert, and I think Alex is going to have some

time

to explain, perhaps better than I am right now, how much of this is John Rawls and how much is his interpretation of John Rawls.

But

anyway,

one

of the exercises is just to,

to

imagine ourselves to actually take the original position, John Rawls position, you know,

think

it through, become, take that position. In other words, imagine ourselves

in

a position where our social status, our talents,

all

our advantages are gone, we don't have them.

And

imagine moral questions from that point of view. And that's how we will connect up

with

these liberal principles and understand the decisions we have to make and hopefully act accordingly.

I

hope I'm making sense here. And Alex will have a chance to tell us whether I got his, his, his, his book right. If I read it right, there's a lot more in there. But that's what I really took out, took from it and really appreciated. Let me see if I've forgotten something very important. I don't think so. So I'm going to move on to a couple of questions. I think we'll take them one by one. I see that I've been quite speedy here. So we have some time. I would first like to just ask you. The book is very cheerful about liberalism, really, not liberal dumb, but liberalism.

It

makes us good people. It makes us happy.

It's

a good way of living, you say.

Okay. And,

but then something funny happens. And that's like, you begin, you begin the book

with

this story about

your

first Christmas in Sydney. And it's a fun story. Very well written.

And

it's all about, you know, you're Canadian. So you used to go to Christmas in Canada.

But

this was for once you decided to stay in Sydney on Christmas Eve. It's hot. It's, it's a very strange place for someone who's used to a white Christmas. You took your family to the beach.

And

what did you find there?

But

this gigantic party, people dancing, people singing, and a lot of drinking,

a

lot of merriment, but also it sounded like kind of revelry and slightly out of control, but very happy.

And

wonderful, wonderful. And you had a good time with your family and you went home.

And

then you find out the day after that the beach is full of garbage left behind by these wonderful

party

goers.

So

I'm just wondering, are you actually just picking out the good part of liberalism? Isn't that, you know, a critic of liberalism would say, yeah, there you go. Those people just made a mess

and

then didn't clean it up.

You

know, are you picking out just the good things? And to follow up on that one,

you

give us examples of liberal values. I mentioned before, Dave Chappelle, of all people.

And

so maybe you want to explain that a little bit better because you call Dave Chappelle's

comedy

and you give an example of one. And I love Dave Chappelle, by the way, I think he's hilarious.

You

call it a homily, which is like a sermon,

if

I'm not mistaken. And you actually call his, this joke, a kind of homily about liberal values. And I mean, it is so obscene. It's obscene. I doubt, I don't know if you watch this with your daughter, but I don't, I certainly know my granddaughters. And I myself go like this many, many times. And I do think he goes over the top. Is that also, that, that you don't talk about, you don't talk about that side of liberalism. And I realize why you don't, because you want us to love liberalism. And so I'm going to let you answer just that, my first question.

I didn't expect to lead with Dave Chappelle, but, but I may have to. Thank you so much for generously. You asked if you summarize my book adequately, perfectly. It was kind and generous and accurate. So thank you very, very much. Thank you for powering through with your laryngitis. And last of all, I just wanted to say, well, not so much to you, but to the kind people listening in, is that how much my book,

I

want to say reprises and builds off and learns from your own. So Helena wrote a absolutely wonderful book.

I

don't, this isn't just a light table talk. It's really a terrific book that I love and learn so much from. The Lost History of Liberalism. And the reason I love it so much and learn so much from it is that it's about the 19th century, principally liberalism and when liberalism was born. And that's the time when people started calling themselves liberal. And she makes the terrific move, the book is based on this, to try to draw our attention to just how much the founders of liberalism saw it, not just as a political kind of doctrine,

doctrine,

but as an ethical kind of doctrine. And in particular, one that combined the two, two qualities of character being free on the one hand, which is what we all associate with liberalism, but then this other more kind of forgotten, but no less important dimension, which is being generous. And the word liberal of course combines both liberty and liberality. So it's that twin face of being free and being generous that I pulled from her book. And in a sense, I'm just trying to brush up the account for the 21st century in the world that we live in today. So was that an accurate description of your book?

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much.

Yeah.

And I was joking that I think Princeton University Press should offer a two for one Groupon or some such to divide both of us together in a

perfect

stocking stuffer kind of thing. All right. So you asked me, so Helen,

I

said this already, you can hear it from my voice, I imagine. I'm not Australian. I live here. I love it. But I'm from Canada.

And

she describes how I opened the book, which is the scene of revelry at my local beach and was just nuts. And my first, so the, the, a few readers of drafts, but also the published version have thought that I'm describing like a liberal utopia with this crazy excessive party on Christmas day. I'm really not. That was a,

that

moment was clarifying for me. That's all. And my first thought when I came, so I'm, as you said, I'm used to this white, calm, low key Christmas. I'm Canadian. You bundle up. And here I go to this beach and it's just, it's just off the hook party. And my first thought when I went down there was Sydney is the most godless place I've ever been seen, lived in, been. And I don't mean godless as like depraved or wicked. I mean, godless as in God absent in some sense that people carry on and navigate their lives without, I mean, a lot of people carry on and live their lives without an overarching religious framework. And my question to us, to those people, I'm unchurched,

a

great many people in my world are, in Australia, it's like 40%. And I want to ask where we get our values from and where we get our kind of moral sensibility from what tradition do we draw that? So that's the big question that opens the book is where do you get, to post-minded readers and to anyone listening here, if they're interested, is where do you get your values from if you're not church? That's a really hard question to answer. People who have a religion is, no, it's easy peasy.

You

just go, boom, my church, boom, my faith. And that settles that. But for the unchurched like us, like, mm

-hmm.

And so I'm trying to put my finger on that thing that is,

that

might be the organizing tradition of who we are. And if your top line values are things like tolerance, freedom, fairness, irony, that sort of thing. I think that's a liberal package. And I think that it, that if that's the case, and those are really your main commitments, then you might be what I call liberal deep down.

And

so that's what the book is about. About half of it is spent describing our liberal world as it's saturated with liberal values. Helena mentioned this earlier. I think conservatives are really correct about something, which is the scope of liberalism.

People

who identify as liberals think about it as a political thing, which is fine. I just think it's too narrow and doesn't, isn't faithful to what, or accurate as to what liberalism has become today. Whereas conservatives see it as this kind of many tentacled monsters that reaching into all aspects of life, whether that's the workplace, parenting, every kind of entertainment, the media, universities. And

I

disagree with their value judgment on it. They think it's politically disastrous and psychologically noxious, but in terms of scope, I'm like, yeah, I think that's pretty accurate. And so my book is written for people who kind of have been raised in this world and try to,

try

to see what their values are. So, sorry, that's the long way to get into this. Am I just picking out the good things about liberalism? That's a great question. So, I'll try to answer it as economically as I can.

I

am a little Pollyanna.

I

am, let

me put

it this way, I am a little bit of a TV evangelist for liberalism. I get that and I get why a reader would come away thinking I'm a bit of a huckster or something like that, or a shill. A shill is the right word I'm looking for here. So, what I'm trying to do is, in the books, I'm trying to say that there are certain kind of key values of liberalism and identify three in particular. One is personal freedom, one is fairness, and the third is reciprocity. And I'm trying to say that, look, if you talk the talk and say that you're a liberal, then you have to live up to these values. But then I try to identify all the great reasons why you might want to live up to those values.

It's a really old question of political philosophy.

It's

like, why be just? And I'm trying to offer my reader reasons as to why they might want to be liberal in the robust way I distrust. So, in a very click-baity title of a chapter, I say 17 reasons to be liberal. And I give 17 kind of qualities of character, this is embarrassing, but I printed them out, and I have them here, and we can go back to them if you, so I don't carry this around, you know,

I

don't

bust

this out just anywhere. And so, I identify the kinds of

qualities

of character that I think can, and pleasures and joys and happinesses that can come from being liberal. And they range from

kind

of classic things like becoming more impartial and being autonomous, but to more kind of like felt ones, like being playful, being grateful, being cheerful, and all those things. So, yeah, I am sort of trying to hype liberalism in a sense, but I want to be very clear that I think liberalism isn't great at everything, and I think that any worldview is going to have a key cluster of

values

and of qualities at their heart. And liberalism has the ones I've enumerated, but other ways of life, a Christian way of life is going to be totally different. A Christian way of life is going to put things like

fellowship,

love, charity, devotion, self-sacrifice. Those things are going to be at its core, and liberalism is not great at that. So, I'll wind up here. So, I just want to try to mark out what liberalism is good at, but I don't want to say that it's the best of all ways of life. It just has a distinctive value package. Okay.

Okay. I'm sorry.

But

what you said, so this follows on that, because when you say that liberals,

that

it's about, that liberals believe in fairness and reciprocity,

I

mean, wouldn't conservatives say they believe in that too?

I

mean, and so,

is

it really,

do

we disagree on those moral values, or is it just that we disagree in how we think about implementing those or actualizing those? I mean, libertarians, if you ask libertarians, do you care about the poor? Do you feel for the poor? They all say yes. Do you believe in fairness? Yes. They just have another way of getting there than we do, or am I wrong?

You're

not wrong. I think that's right. I think that at a very general level, fairness, at an unspecified level as to what fairness might mean, I think you're quite right. And I think different ideologies that seem kind of either at

the

fringes of liberalism or maybe even illiberal can claim fairness and really in good faith can claim the concept of fairness. They'll just specify it in their own way. So I think like libertarians, for example, are not just, or like neoliberals in some sense, are not just about like profit and corporate growth. They have a really strong vision of fairness. They think that the market allocates dessert and merit much more fairly than any government office or bureaucrat. And there's a moral vision animating that.

So how is it a distinctly liberal value?

So

I think that where I try to do the philosophical work here is I specify in what sense fairness might be actualized in our society in a way that's consistent with our self-conception. So I go, so I have cards on the table. I'm a social democratic kind of guy, kind of center left. I'm sure a lot of people in this audience are. Helen,

I

believe you are as well, if I'm not mistaken. And so one of the, as Helen mentioned, the main inspirations for the book is Rawls. And Rawls has this tremendously complicated philosophy, but it starts from a very simple place. He looks around at his own society, USA, 1970s, and then he updates it. And he's like, okay, if

we

look at the main kind of public documents,

court

decisions, political speeches, like what's the vibe? What are the main values that it's trying to enshrine? And that's the one you mentioned in your opening remarks that he says, look, at the end of the day, our baseline moral commitments living in a liberal democracy is that society should be a fair system of cooperation from one generation to the next. And then he creates this crazy complicated political philosophy to try to flesh that out and make it consistent.

It

says, look, if you see yourself in this kind of fair kind of way, here's what we have to do on our political side. And then here's what we have to do in our kind of personal side.

And

I think that that's a very compelling, consistent vision of what it means to live fairly. And that is my philosophical leading light. But I think it would be possible to write libertarianism as a way of life, equally focused on fairness, but there's going to be a different

quality

to that life. So then I think the project then becomes, listen, this is,

in

a sense, the book is, it's going to,

it

sounds like I'm really all in for it. I'm trying to dial down in some sense that the culture wars and the temperature by trying to recognize, I don't do this much work, but I think the book definitely goes there, about trying to find out the philosophical and moral commitments in common between so-called conservatives and liberals, and try to find a way forward that identifies our points of agreement and disagreement.

Well,

hold your horses.

Because

you say, not once, but several times in this book,

that

you are writing for liberals and not for liberal critics.

You

say, and you say, through and through liberals, I think you're for, you say, and you say that,

you

do say you don't have to be an atheist to appreciate this book, you can be a religious person,

but

you kind of hint that it's a book for people like you, like liberals who are on the fence, I think you say at one point.

Okay,

so if you're, why, why wouldn't you want conservatives to read your book, or is that just a, is that just a teaser to get, you

know?

Okay, that's a good point. So I do, I do, I, so

the

book is aimed at a particular interlocutor, and it's these kind of fair weather liberals like me, maybe like you, maybe who you have to, you have to ask yourself. But as

they

talk to talk, but so often don't walk the walk. And I'm trying to say, here's a bunch of reasons as to why you might want to follow through. So I'm not trying to exclude conservatives. And I hope my book is illuminating as to what liberalism has become. And particularly for an insider's perspective as to how liberals like feel about their liberalism and about themselves. But the book is really written as, I mean, I lean into this. It's kind of a self-help book for liberals. And I'm trying to identify reasons for liberals to commit to who they are. So that's, that, does that make sense?

Absolutely. Absolutely. I understand that and appreciate it. So, so talk a little bit about your use of, and your reading of Rawls.

You

say at one point that your reading is not orthodox. You say you have an unorthodox position on Rawls. So have you, have you yet, I know your book is out, has not been out for very long. Have you already received some sort of

feedback

from other Rawls experts? Or what do you mean when you say your, your, your take of Rawls is unorthodox?

Yeah.

Okay. That's good. Um, so I had, don't, don't worry.

I

had some, um, I had some dedicated Rawls proofreaders that were,

uh,

to, to, to make sure my, cause they, they are a, um, uh, persnickety bunch, let's put it that way. They, they love their saint. So, uh, and you could feel a library, libraries are filled with, uh, commentary on Rawls. So I did try to get it right. What I'm trying to do with Rawls is that, so a lot of the direction that Rawls went in is kind of this, uh, uh, friend kid was joking to me. It's, but it's kind of bone dry proceduralism that the later Rawlsian project is all about establishing an inclusivist political framework so that people with different conceptions of the good life can all, um, flourish together and can all agree on the same set of, uh, political principles.

And that's totally cool.

I,

I, I admire that vision.

I

think it's crucial. I'm definitely a pluralist. I do not think that the state should promote a liberal way of life through kind of public funding or through its pulpit or, or whatever. So I'm, I'm down with that. I just try, I just think that that's no longer accurate of the world that we live in, that liberal, the, the horse is bolted and liberal values have just kind of flooded the background culture. And so that that, when a more staid reserve conception of liberalism just doesn't fit our world that we live in.

So what then I tried to do about with Rawls is, uh, try to find those moments in his text where he develops a more full throated version as to what it might mean to be a liberal person. And something about Rawls that you may or may not know is that he, when he was like, when he was a kid, when he was a young man, he wanted to be a theologian.

Uh,

he entered, he's a prince and he wrote it published about 10 years ago.

It

was like released, uh, his undergraduate thesis, which for a 21 year old is like, oh my God, that's good. Uh, it's called on sin and faith.

And

yeah, he was about to go into the ministry until the second world war where he served as a soldier and then lost his faith for, um,

um,

for comprehensible reasons. But in a sense, Rawls never gave up on the theological vision that he had set out in, as a young man, he just secularized it in really important ways. Particularly his notion of a kind of a relational theology that he turned into a relational theory of liberalism,

um,

and, uh, generosity and no charity. And especially his, his,

his

dyed in the wool hatred of notions of moral dessert that were entitled to stuff because of our accomplishments or worse because of our social position. He didn't go outside of any of that. And so what I'm trying to do in his text is trying to find those moments where I think you can recover or

build

up, boost up a Rawls that speaks to us, an existential Rawls. Rawls as an existentialist. And that's what I'm trying to do. And I'm trying to make him a bit more of a humane thinker rather than the very technical analytic book of philosophy that he's often read as. I think there's a beating heart there is what I'm trying to say.

So that, that's, um, that's excellent. That makes a lot of sense. I,

I

really appreciated, uh, another book,

uh,

on Rawls, which, or, or, which discussed Rawls, which is the Eric Nelson book, which is a wonderful book, but it's like very different from yours because it's a very difficult read. I actually reviewed it. Um, but it's also well worth, um, one's, uh, some time, a lot of effort to get through it, but it was well worth the time.

It

talks about, um, his, um, his theological, uh, proclivities,

uh, um,

early on and how they influenced his, um, secular views later on.

Um,

but I, it reminds me of two things, um, two things, and that is you say that our values come from liberalism,

but

liberalism comes from something. And this is when you're talking about,

um,

that, um, that Rawlsianism is kind of like a secular religion in some ways is liberalism, not also some kind of secular, secularized Christianity, maybe

I

think

Judeo

-Christianity, I should say.

Sure.

Historically. Absolutely. I think that's, that's absolutely true. Liberalism, it's not just one fine day. This doctrine was created. Um, it was worked out of a series of, uh, developments within Christianity. I think that's my reading of it. I'm a big, big believer in Charles Taylor's account in a secular age about how we came to, it's not like we woke up one fine day and became secular. Secularism happens as a series of intra theological developments that happened within Christianity, particularly reform Christianity about the individualization of faith, the level, leveling of hierarchies, all that stuff. And then it worked its way towards atheism, towards secularism.

And so I definitely think that liberalism, um, is a secularized version of Christianity. But the more pointy question comes is, does religion, does liberal, is first, is liberalism a religion? And second, does liberalism need religion in order to really satisfy the God-sized hole in each of our human hearts? So let me take them in turn, whether liberalism is a religion. I just, like, at the end of the book, I say, okay, kinda, maybe, yeah, that's sort of where I land. And the reason why is I just don't want to commit to the word religion. I just think it has too much historic freight. I think it's likely to be misleading to what I want to say.

So I don't think that liberalism has transcendence, which is crucial to so many different religions. Um, and I don't think liberalism has very much to say on deep metaphysical questions of the soul, of, of the meaning of it all, and, uh, that sort of stuff. But I do want to say two things.

First, that liberalism has achieved as comprehensive a vision of moral, um, and psychological life as any religion, and that it can stand on its own two feet, and that liberalism has shaped us in a lot of important ways where I think the kind of deep questions that religious believers think that are intrinsic to the human conditions and need to be asked, and that haunt us at night when we close our eyes, I think that liberals in some sense have,

this,

this sounds too quick, but have become passé in a sense for liberalism. We've been raised in a culture that no longer poses those questions. And most of the time we don't ask liberals and liberals all the way down, I think don't ask themselves those sorts of capital D, deep questions. And this is something that I get a lot of pushback from interlockers. I've had a couple of podcasts last week where the, they just can't believe that liberalism can satisfy a three-dimensional human being that the, what I'm talking about as a liberal deep down can actually be someone who's not just shallow or preening or, or just kind of like

spending

their time on their phone or what have you. So

I, and

I disagree. I think that, that, that not everyone feels that transcendent itch. I know I don't. And I don't think that it is the, it is the, the, the, the, the,

the

necessary and sufficient condition for the, for a serious moral and life or joyful moral life.

Does

that kind of

answer

the question? The question is gigantic.

Well, no, terrific. There's so much to talk about, but I wonder if this is the moment, Anthony, when we should allow some

people

in the audience to ask questions.

What

do you say? What do you think? Sure thing. Yeah. I mean, there's a couple that have come in already and I haven't sent out the little notification saying, please send in your questions. And normally what we find is they, they tend to come in only after the

Q

and A has started. So let's see what's

come

in. So the first one that's come in from an anonymous attendee,

he

says,

we

live in a time when different ideologies seem to be combining in unexpected ways, e.g. eco-fascism, which obviously takes kind of ecological thinking, which you think comes a very left one thing, fascism, which is

fascism.

Can we envisage a quote authoritarian liberalism, which say adopts many of the values you espouse while moving in many other different directions? Um, and then at what point can we say for sure that something that may claim to be a form of liberalism definitely is not. Thank you. So Alex, do you want to have a first go at that? And then Helena can either respond directly to the question or to Alex's response.

I'd

love to actually to hear, uh, I can start, but I'd love to hear Helena's view on this because I think that she's actually better on this particular question, sorry, not to set you up, but it's a great question. Anyway, let me start, let me say why I say that is, um, so something that Helena is great at in her book, but also a lot of historians are really kind of converging on consensus. here is that liberalism emerges as a response or a reaction to democracy and that the package of liberal democracy that today we take for granted as if it's like one happy picnic basket that you just get one,

you

get the other is actually a 200 year, um, long negotiation between two ideologies that may pull in opposite direction. Namely democracy as a crassie is ruled by the people and liberalism started in a kind of a freak out against the French revolution and against all kinds of worries of democracy. And it tried to, so if you list, in fact, if you list all the most direct way to put this, list the most important liberal, uh, institutions,

individual

rights, judicial neutrality, division of powers, you can go on. All of them are explicitly and intentionally counter-majoritarian.

Um,

so in some very important way, liberalism was born as a counteraction to, uh, democracy. And I think it's settled into some sort of reasonably stable relationship now. So the question as to whether there can be a liberal authoritarianism, I definitely think there can be a liberal authoritarianism. Uh, Helena can come back to me. She may disagree.

All right. Well,

I'll just, I'll,

I'll

just, for the sake of argument, I will just disagree with you completely.

So I agree

with, I agree with everything you said about liberalism being, um, conceived against, um, sort of a safeguard,

um,

to channel or stop or tame, uh, confine democracy, but it was also conceived

as

a response to authoritarianism. I

mean, it

was anti-authoritarian from the very beginning,

it

was reaction against Napoleon's despotism and the despotism of the terror. Right. So, um, so both, uh, liberals were frightened of, uh, of forces from above and forces from below. Um, and, uh, and so I, I just don't see how,

how

there can be a liberal authoritarianism. I mean, it's a contradiction in terms to me. Unless you define liberalism as, for example, just economic freedom.

So

you see that in the world today.

I

mean, you can see it to a certain extent, I'm not an expert on this, so I may mess this up, but like in China, or maybe, um, was it Chile, these places where you have a dictator

who

passes, you know, um, free market reforms. So if you, if you define liberalism as just economic liberalism,

as

libertarianism,

um,

then yeah, but that's not how, when I see liberalism being, I mean, I'm with you and that it means these, these core, also constitutional and political principles that we haven't really talked about here, but that are also essential to liberalism. So, nope.

Okay.

Let me come back. Okay. Good. Perfect. Let me come back to you very briefly though. Okay. What about the whole, like, okay. I'm not, I'm not advocating for authoritarian liberalism. Let me be super duper clear. That's not my jam.

Um,

but I'm saying it can, I think it can go that way. So what about aristocratic liberalism?

Uh,

that kind of, um, can phenomenon, or like, you can point to like specific thinkers that might fall into this, whether Burkhardt or Nietzsche or different kinds of people, or we can just say Singapore or countries that like, like that, that move towards kind of a technocratic meritocratic sort of, uh, liberalism without too much worry about the democratic component of it.

Well,

yeah.

Um,

yeah. I think that early liberals were aristocratic,

uh,

in orientation. Um, they feared,

they

feared the people. They thought of them as irrational and prone to violence. They'd seen what happened during the terror, during the revolution. They thought the poor, but they look at, look, you know, it was

how

much poverty there was, how little literacy there was. So I'm not going to excuse that. But

if

you look at the,

the

world they lived in, we can perhaps understand

why,

um, they did not want to give the vote, for example, to everyone, um, but only to an elite of property owners, uh, and property they thought was the scent was one way of, of, of locating that, of identifying that elite. Um, and property, the idea goes,

um,

the idea is that property will give you the time to think about things

beyond

yourself

and

will allow you to educate yourself. While if you don't have part of your dirt poor, all you're thinking about is surviving. How can you think about large, big issues anyway? Well,

uh,

so yeah, aristocratic liberalism. Um, but they, the liberals accept a democracy very late. They, it was pushed, it was pushed on them.

Um,

I mean that most, it was really devised to kind of tame and channel, um, democracy, if you will pop popular sovereignty.

They

were for, I would say, but it had to be, uh, then represented by an elite. Um, that would, but there was a lot expected of that elite, right? And that's where your morals come in.

And

this, you know, that elites were, had a duty, uh, and

it

sounds naive to us today. And it just speaks to our cynicism in a way that we, that we don't talk more about these moral values and these duties that people like you and me, like, uh, we're all part of the elite.

Um,

we're very lucky people. We have money and education and can sit around and have these lovely discussions.

Um,

but much was expected of, of elites like that. If you read, you know, if you read the early liberals of all, so many of them, and this is where you're so right as well. So many of them were moralists, really. We forget that they were not just about procedures, constitutions and constitutions were there to promote, you know, to, I mean, forms of government, you chose a form of government that would enable,

um,

moral citizens to emerge.

Uh,

I agree. I'm glad we had a moment of disagreement though. That's, uh, good for engagement.

Oh,

you

gotta disagree. Sometimes

it's

so much fun. Okay. So let's, let's move on to the next question. This is from, I mean,

I

guess we'll just quickly touch on Clifton's question. It's a variation on the theme of when can someone claim to be a liberal when they believe certain things that don't seem. But he's basically asking, can I still be a liberal if I believe in certain extreme policies, for example, the death penalty? Um, I guess maybe the idea is, do you have to be liberal across the board or can you have little, um, devious, um, authoritarian or, um, death penalty mongering sensibilities in the midst of

it? Okay,

right. Okay. Uh, so

listen,

I don't, I don't have a litmus test as to whether people are true liberals or not. And it's not for me to adjudicate that. And I think that so many of the discussions that we have today,

um,

in, in, in academia, but especially in kind of the

journal

in the, in, in the public sphere is, uh, intra liberal conversations as to what it means to be liberal. Um, so I don't want to say that supporting, I mean, I'm not a supporter of capital punishment, but I don't, I don't immediately say that's illiberal. I, that's a, that's a discussion about retribution. I mean, there's a whole thing to go on there.

Um, so

yeah, so that's what I would say to that.

I

just, it's so difficult to know where the real disagreements

are

in our culture. I think now,

um,

especially in the U S context, like one of my favorite podcasts of all time was, uh, recently like a year ago, maybe Patrick Dineen went on Ezra Klein and Patrick Dineen is all fricking fire and thunder and brimstone. And let's tear this whole shit down

and

okay, fine. But then Ezra is a really, uh, sorry, I don't know the guy. I listen to him so often. Ezra,

uh,

Ezra Klein is really, he's a wonky guy, right? He's a, he's a details guy and he likes policy and,

and

he gets into the weeds and he's like, he just pushes, he just

pushes

past the, uh, all the rhetoric. He's like, really, what do you want? What do you want? What do you want? What in terms of policy? And at the end of the day, the big policy disagreement between Ezra Klein and Patrick Dineen is that Patrick Dineen wants, um, uh, divorce counseling to be nationally subsidized so that families might have a better shot at staying together.

And

I'm like, dude, is this what this is about? Is this why the Republic might fail because of this policy prescription? So when you get down to, to, to the details, I don't know how much we disagree about stuff. Or if we disagree, then it's, it's something local that we can have a conversation about. So I don't know. It's very tricky. That's a digression, but

I

don't know. You want to take it?

Um, no, I think you did a, you, you did a good job of it. But there we get to the problem of

which

you don't really deal with. Do you? Um,

how

do we define

what

it means to be liberal? I mean,

I

don't either in my book. I mean, we both say that it,

that

it fundamentally has something to do with

freedom

and generosity. And in my book, I talk about how

these

two concepts have been,

um,

re sort of conceptualized what that really means in terms of actual policies, how this has changed over time. Yeah. So that early on liberals were, uh, looking, you know, fighting for civil equality, for example, thinking that this was giving freedom to everyone. And I'll, and it's generous because, for example, nobility are giving up their tie, their special privileges. And, and then later on, you have a move towards more government intervention in the economy. Um, um, which was not really part of the agenda earlier on. And that's also to, to allow for freedom, um, of, for, for example, more freedom for workers, um, and more generosity towards them.

So, so what it means to be liberal, there is a core to it, right? And I, I think with you that there's a moral core to it, but then how, then there's a debate even among liberals about

like

how, so what does that mean in terms of policies we agree with? Do we, I, I bet you can get, you know, five liberals in a room on the death penalty and they'll have five different views on, on it.

Um,

and some may be very conflicted. So that's a particularly hard question to answer. Um,

I

don't know what we do about that. Maybe that's what one of the problems liberals have is we argue with each other so much.

We're

so, we're so open to debate.

Uh,

it's beautiful, but sometimes it weakens us maybe.

Thank

you. So I've noticed a lot of questions are sort of suddenly flying in. Um,

so

I thought I'd take this one from

Chris,

who mentioned something called the quote, no true Scotsman fallacy. I don't know what that is, but maybe it's well known enough. But basically Chris suggests that it's the idea that we can distill liberal or like the idea of the fallacy is that we can distill something in this case liberalism down to all its essential. Generative and positive elements while one of the issues this is that in practice liberal society seem to have been vulnerable to other creeping elements that undermine and erode those liberal values. not only nascent anti-democratic movements, but also problematic technocracy, neoliberalism and inequality. So, um, Alex, do you want to have a shot at that one?

Yeah.

So, okay. So there's two directions of answer to that. So, okay. So how did

I

mention this? Uh, one of, one of the concepts of the book I'm proud of, uh, if I may say it's a launch. Why not? I'll own it. Is this idea of Christendom with Kierkegaard. So Christendom in Danish literally means playing at Christianity. It's like Christian ish. That's what that word means. Kristen head in Danish.

And

that's what I want to say that we inhabit in, uh, liberalism, that kind of play acting at liberalism that we talk the talk. We don't walk the walk

now.

And I call that thing liberal. So then there's two paths that we have to kind of pursue simultaneously. On the one hand, there's the kind of political path of reform and how we bring about through collective action through all kinds of political engagements.

The

kinds of policies and principles and laws, et cetera, that would be consistent with our liberal values. Now, I don't talk about that too much in my book because there's libraries of good proposals written on that. A book that I'm being reviewed with, uh, often now is, uh, Daniel Chandler's book, Free and Equal. And he's also a, he's a Rawlsian like me. Um, but he goes the political path. I like the book a lot. It's great, but he goes the political path and tries to give all kinds of policies, suggestions, prescriptions as to what it might mean to live in a free and equal society.

So if that's the question that's being posed about how we bring our societies towards liberalism rather than liberal-dom, I really recommend you go read Dan Chandler's book. It's great. My question is different. It's how do we overcome liberal-dom in ourselves? That's what I'm trying to address. How do these kind of wishy-washy, fairweather, Sunday-loving, uh, liberals really kind of take their own shit seriously and double down on it? How do we extirpate all those anti-liberal qualities in ourselves? Not because we want doctrinal purity, but because I want to say that not living up to your liberal values is like shooting yourself in the foot.

It's like pretending to be Christian when you're not, and you deny yourself the very goods that your way of life is designed to generate.

So

I'm trying to give a very hard-nosed sell as to the platonic question. Why be just? My question is why be liberal? And I try to figure that out. So it's an intrapersonal discussion that I'm trying to have with the reader to engage with themselves. I'm not suggesting policy. That's not what this book is.

Helena,

do you want to

get

into that? Well,

I found myself, I found myself going, I don't want to take up somebody else's time because we,

but,

um,

I

find myself going back to your first story.

Um,

just in my mind, you know, about the beach, going to the beach and the revel and the mess that they left. I forgot to say, and I don't think you, you said that, that the point is that the next morning, yeah, they found all this garbage, but the whole neighborhood, everybody went on to the beach

and

clear and, and, and,

and,

um, cleaned up, you know, got rid of all the garbage. Right.

So, except for the Irish backpackers, they got the hell out of there.

Well,

yeah.

So

I'm just wondering, um, it's a slight joke. Was it the same people, you know?

I mean, we didn't have ideas. Did they, did they go

home, do a Rawlsian, you know, spiritual exercise,

and

then go

back and clean up the pit?

Huh?

That's

the only explanation. Yeah.

They did

the original.

Yes. Okay.

So, um, question from Sarah. Sarah kind of, I think sounds like someone who's a,

a potential,

um, good reader of your, your book, Alex, in the sense that she describes self as a millennial who's raised religious, but no longer religious, finds herself looking for morals and values by joining. The environmental movement has dabbled in a bit of humanism and philosophy.

And

so the question is, can liberalism help us move away from capitalism by valuing nature and human connection to nature over property ownership and profit? And I thought I'd just link that in with a question that's coming from Haley, which is really just this question about the reach of liberalism, which plays into Sarah's question. Um,

um,

um, Haley says that Rawls was clear that, um, he didn't think liberalism should reach beyond the realm of politics, that beyond politics is an individual's business, not his. So, um, maybe you could bring those two questions together because one's about the legitimate reach of, of liberalism and the others about how liberalism can help

us in those matters. The

second question is kind of very addressable. They're both great questions. The first one's big. So the second one though is, um, I, so my work doesn't, uh, I depart from Rawls' later philosophy, which is what you're actually describing. Sarah, was it?

I

think it was Sarah. What Sarah was describing in her question, which is about that liberalism should be a political thing. But Rawls' project when he later on in his life was trying to build these inclusivist frameworks for a plural society. And that's totally cool. And I admire that and that's great, but that's not my issue in my book. Mine is how to, how should people who are comprehensive liberals, liberals all the way down, how should we best live our life? And for that Rawls actually asked that questions and developed it in great psychological and philosophical depth in a theory of justice.

The third part there, he develops a moral psychology, which is why we should want to be just individuals. And according to the sense of justice that he, uh, exposits in his book. And there, I think Rawls is posing exactly the question I want to pose. He said, whoa, we can't ask that question anymore because it doesn't include everyone. And that's true, but I'm not trying to include, I'm not trying to exclude anyone, but I'm not speaking to people. I'm not trying to reach the Muslim, the Christian, the Jew. I'm not speaking to them to try to get them to live the liberal way of life.

I'm saying people who don't have those beautiful religions and who are kind of like kind of stuck with what this world has given them. Where do we find our spiritual center? And I find that liberalism, the answer's in the room. The true Scotsman is within us, as the question said. Um, and that's what I tried to do in the book. So I find my work is consonant with a part of the project that Rawls ditched, but I don't need to ditch it. Uh, I don't have the good reasons to ditch it. So that's, sorry, that went on a little long, but I hope that's clear. The other question is fantastic. Okay. Um,

I

think I love liberalism. Love it. I think liberalism is one of the main impediments to saving the world from climate change. I really strongly believe that in my bones. I think that liberalism is really bad in particular at one thing, which is collective action problems, which is that if we give individuals freedom to do their own thing, in a sense, which is at the heart of liberalism, it becomes very difficult to demand, demand self-sacrifice from individuals who are not, um, uh, who are not playing on the same program. So like, if you take your vacation to Hawaii, fuck it, I'm going to take my vacation to Hawaii. If you drive an SUV, fuck it, I'm going to buy an SUV.

And it's very difficult to remain consistently within a liberal framework and to demand people to make those kinds of sacrifices. We have to get them to voluntarily do that. And liberalism is really bad at that. So liberalism does great things. I think for the particular problem of climate change, it's, it's,

it's, uh,

an obstacle. Um, yeah. And whether or not it can learn from indigenous perspective, that's a very interesting.

I

mean, that's a very live perspective, especially writing from Australia, where that is, um, a colonial country still unreconciled. Um, and there's endeavors to do that. I'm not altogether. I, I, I admire it. I just not particularly sanguine that a whole lot of first nations worldviews can be built into liberalism.

Um,

I feel I'm not, I'm not cause I don't think they should. I just think that they, they repel each other in important ways. That's what I would say. But Helena, did you?

No, no, I think you did. Did great. Uh, you did great. I'm not sure I have much to add to that. I would say, uh, if I understood correctly something about, um, uh, being anti-capitalist or finding

a

way to combat capitalism. I may be

miss

miss remembering what the question said, but I don't think liberalism

has

ever been anti-capitalist. Um, I think it's been about again, taming it or, um, making it work for more people, regulating it, um, making it as fair as possible.

Um,

so

yeah,

so, so that's, that's just what I wanted to say on that one.

I

would love someone to write a book, Helena, pinging Helena Rosenblatt, but with the title, something like liberalism without capitalism. I think that would be a very interesting thought exercise as to whether that could be done. And I know you don't want to put liberalism, uh, say it starts with Locke, but Locke is a fateful moment for that when he really, uh, twine, entwines, uh, all kinds of personal natural rights with property rights. And I think that's a very fateful move that became important, Scottish enlightenment, et cetera, et cetera. And I wonder if recover a vision of liberalism without wonder what that would even mean.

Yeah. Nice

thing to think about.

Yes.

Someone, someone do the work.

Mind spinning. Awesome. So we're pretty much at time. there's been loads of really great questions, which we're not going to be able to get to. Aubrey Hicks asks about, um, where does the fight against white supremacy live in liberalism? Catherine Scherer asks a question that's probably more relevant to Helena about the history of enslavers in the development of liberalism. Um, Jay Cohen asks about, um, whether conservatives are operating with a very different definition of freedom and how do we reconcile the idea? There's another one from cheese iPhone. That's a bit too long tree, but I thought we'd give the last word to Dave Chappelle because that's where

we

started. And Bunmi has just asked, can you talk about Dave Chappelle? So do you just want us to give one minute about the role of Dave? Because I felt like it was introduced by Helena,

but

maybe

Dave Chappelle

angle.

Come

on. Come

on.

Tell us, tell us.

Okay. I'm not

sanitized. You can sanitize the

joke.

I can't, uh, I can sanitize the joke. Uh,

not,

not, not on my, not for me. I mean, it's just, if it makes you feel,

I can go like

this.

I

can go like this.

Okay. No, no, no. Okay. So, uh, check, check it out. Anyway, look, if you get the book, look up the Dave Chappelle joke. It's a great joke. It's about tolerance and it's about Dave Chappelle. Okay. I'll do the, I'll do the bit. Uh, Dave Chappelle meets up with an old high school friend of his, who is a really rowdy dude. And he learns later on that this guy was gay. And, um, anyways, they meet up together by chance and Chappelle out of the blue without having seen this guy for 15, 20 years. He said, Hey man, I heard you was gay. What's up with that? And then the guy gives a long answer and Chappelle's bored because he initiated this conversation. He just wanted a yes or no answer.

But this guy gave him like a full throated authentically human answer. And he's like looking at his watch and he wants to get out of the conversation. And he says something very definitive to get the, to make it stop. And he says, um, everyone fucks funny to someone. And that's the thing. And then the guy gets really incensed. He's like, what are

you

saying? You saying I fuck funny? And then Dave Chappelle starts to talk about his own, this is the sanitized part. He talks about his own foot fetish and how he makes, he makes sweet love to women's feet. And that's the point that he gets to in his joke. Everyone fucks funny to someone. And the, why it's, why it's a liberal homily, I think I call it

is

because it's perspective. So we have this idea that, uh, in liberalism, we have this piety, which is just bullshit. No one actually believes it, but we say it that all difference is good difference. That the way you have sex, the way you raise your kids is as good and noble and beautiful as me. And it's on this basis, we can all kumbaya and get along. And Chappelle has the same conclusion that we should respect other people's choices. But out of acknowledgement of just how weird and gross other people are. So it's like a mutual misrecognition of each other and a mutual absurdization of each other. And we're like, yeah, dude, I can roll with that.

And that's the basis of a kind of liberal tolerance for the real world. One in which we kind of like wink, wink, and are kind of grossed out by each other. And I think that's a more, so I try to say that Chappelle has this really kind of, uh, that all of comedy right now is basically that joke. It's all making fun at ourselves, looking at ourselves from different perspectives, switching out of ourselves. And that's just the state of any Netflix special now is liberal through and through. Some of them are more obvious about it, like Hannah Gadsby. But like, look at Chappelle, look at Taylor Tomlinson, look at any of the top critics who are not critic comics right now.

And it's just all liberal stuff. And that's the water we swim in. So

that's

how you made me do it. And I did it. Thank you.

Excellent.