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00:00:51.320Not something I do all that often, but I thought the title of the video was interesting.
00:00:57.160It was talking about how liberalism was in some form of crisis, and we needed to understand it at a historical level.
00:01:05.440We need to put liberalism in its historical context so we can better grasp why liberalism is currently in the situation that it's in.
00:01:14.260Now, in case you don't know, Ezra Klein is a New York Times columnist, is pretty much everything you'd expect.
00:01:22.000And it was interesting for me, though, when they talked about the the history of liberalism, because normally when you're talking to a liberal, they're not even aware that there is history.
00:01:34.340You know, they they know that there was World War Two and slavery and Jim Crow and the civil rights movement.
00:01:40.880And that was about it. Like that's about as much as as any liberal will grasp when it comes to history, because history is very, very dangerous to the left.
00:01:49.320progressives have to be very wary about actual investigations into history. Because if you read
00:01:56.200enough history, if you look deep enough into the past, you start to discover that the worldview
00:02:01.660that has been carefully curated by the liberal left is just radically incorrect. And even the
00:02:08.220worldview that has been curated by much of mainstream conservatism is very incorrect.
00:02:13.380And when you look at history, you'll see that there are these very, very different forces
00:02:18.840acting upon humans, very different belief systems, radically different from what we think of today.
00:02:26.200And if you look deep enough into the past, you will slowly start to discover that much of what
00:02:32.500we think of as history, much of what we try to understand as like our political lineage
00:02:37.120is completely incorrect. And so I was interested to see what would these two liberals think about
00:02:44.020this like uh what what would two people who are trying to understand history and liberalism and
00:02:50.240tradition what would that look like would they would they glaze over different parts would they
00:02:55.200make things up and it turns out that really Ezra Klein is having a crisis of faith in this discussion
00:03:01.980he understands that at the root uh he believes in something that is very different from previous
00:03:08.540versions of liberalism and he wants to like tie this together because he thinks ultimately like
00:03:13.740this is an issue but also he hates most of the history like both of these people really hate
00:03:20.420uh the the history that they're discussing so he has this woman on i think it's like helena
00:03:25.580rosenbaum or something like that and they're supposed to go over her book because she's a
00:03:30.340historian and we we want to understand what's going on in the past with liberalism and uh you
00:03:36.880know the whole podcast is always like it's like an hour an hour and a half there's no way i could
00:03:42.080cover it all in one of my episodes so i cut it down but but as always i encourage you to go listen
00:03:47.180to the whole thing at the very least you can kind of get inside the mind of the new york times
00:03:52.380liberal which i think is actually rather valuable uh that's one thing the left doesn't have a theory
00:03:57.500of mind for the right they don't understand how we think they don't understand what we value
00:04:01.600it doesn't make sense to them on a fundamental level and they're not particularly interested
00:04:05.460in understanding that they don't have to they live in a world that is ruled by progressivism
00:04:10.600and leftism and so conservatives are just swept away as some kind of silly uh you know thing out
00:04:15.940of time but ultimately i think it's important for us to understand what they are thinking how they
00:04:22.080are processing this because it reveals to us the inner workings of the people who are you know
00:04:27.340frankly coordinating against us on a regular basis and if we can grasp you know where these
00:04:32.380tensions are then we might find different weaknesses that can be exploited different
00:04:36.480strategic moments, maybe even if you find the right liberal arguments that could ultimately
00:04:41.180compel them to change their mind, though I wouldn't bet on that too often. I'm not a big
00:04:46.040marketplace of ideas guy, but people do change their mind. I've certainly changed my mind on
00:04:49.380arguments. So it's always worth having that particular trick in your bag in case the person
00:04:54.360you're discussing these things with actually does have a hope of kind of learning something and
00:05:00.160changing that said let's go ahead and dive into uh this video and i'll stop and i'll explain as we
00:05:07.260go so we live in this moment when illiberalism is winning when illiberalism is in power i don't
00:05:14.800think anybody really argues that what so we start off with trump is being and mean and bad and he's
00:05:22.160an authoritarian and he's illiberal now that'll be very interesting because of course in many ways
00:05:27.340Trump is a very liberal president. He is somebody who is relatively socially liberal when it comes
00:05:33.920to, you know, conservative standards. Yes, he's talked about abortion some and, you know, he has
00:05:40.260won some victories there. You know, he will kind of make certain noises about Christianity, but
00:05:46.200he's not a doctrinaire Christian. He's certainly not a faithful Christian, certainly not someone
00:05:50.260who seems overly interested in that kind of stuff. So, you know, Trump is the first guy to
00:05:56.160like wave the lgbtq flag at the republican convention so we're not talking about a guy
00:06:01.420who's like deeply uh you know convicted when it comes to like conservative uh right-wing or
00:06:07.040reactionary morality and even when you look at the different measures that trump is taking
00:06:12.800ezra klein only sees them as illiberal because he disagrees with them when joe biden was doing
00:06:18.940this stuff when joe biden's locking up j6ers locking up abortion protesters you know uh you0.54
00:06:24.040know locking away his possible you know only real political challenger in Donald Trump or0.51
00:06:29.740attempting to uh through ridiculous government prosecutions Ezra Klein has nothing to say he
00:06:34.960has nothing to say about that fact are those authoritarian actions well if Donald Trump does
00:06:40.700them of course they are but if Joe Biden doesn't he's a liberal he's a liberal in good standing
00:06:45.460so Ezra Klein doesn't really care about the the terrible authoritarianism of Donald Trump
00:06:51.360it in fact only impacts him because it's his enemy when his ally is doing it when his friends
00:06:56.740are doing it it's fine he's not going to bring anything up he's certainly not going to say
00:07:00.500this is some kind of indication that we're becoming illiberal okay the war in iran you
00:07:04.820say that's illiberal well obviously hillary clinton was celebrating celebrating the death
00:07:09.680of momar qaddafi again like i i think that ezra klein is very very careful with when he finds
00:07:15.980problems with use of government force against people who disagree but yeah obviously that's
00:07:21.980exactly what we'd expect has surprised me about it is how weak liberalism has felt in response
00:07:27.920i'm a liberal i'm a like a professional liberal one involved in liberal politics
00:07:32.920and i don't think at this moment i could tell you what liberalism's vision is so i mean this part
00:07:40.400is honest so this part is interesting and and this is why i did find the episode interesting
00:07:44.680if not ridiculous like most of it as you'll see is ridiculous but editor klein recognizes that
00:07:49.740there is like a floundering of liberalism and we'll get to why here in a second you know this
00:07:55.480is a guy who came up with the abundance uh discussion we're going to make everything
00:07:59.040abundant and you know people will then have material stuff and that's going to fix our
00:08:03.220that's our vision of of liberalism which you know i mean in a lot of ways it's just like
00:08:08.700half-hearted capitalism you know kind of just conceding that fact uh but really he understands
00:08:14.000that liberalism has become very hollow. It seems at some level to have burned out a lot of its
00:08:19.780kind of passion in 2020 and the George Floyd riots. It felt like while liberalism was triumphant
00:08:28.860in a way, like we can control these streets, we can lock these people down, we can close the
00:08:33.140churches, we can really censor all of our opponents on the internet. At the same time,
00:08:39.020It seemed to have reached this culmination and this euphoric moment, and then it didn't go anywhere. It didn't do anything. It didn't unlock what comes next. And so this is very concerning to Ezra Klein because, of course, in his mind, liberalism means progress. It means we should always be moving towards some end, right?
00:08:57.860And so if there is no continued vision for where we should be going, liberalism is going to flounder, which I think is true.
00:09:06.240Like, liberalism is an eternal revolution.
00:09:09.060And so if we're not finding something new to kind of revolt over, if there's no next version of the revolution, liberalism kind of falls on its face.
00:09:20.980In some way, I feel liberalism never really recovered from the Obama era when it had this grand victory in electing America's first black president, when it had this thoughtful, deliberate and frankly, quite popular liberal leader.
00:09:37.200And then it ended in Donald Trump twice.
00:09:41.560Yeah, I mean, and this is kind of it, right?
00:09:43.840Like they think of this idea of progress.
00:09:46.560Once you achieve the thing, we elected a black man to the White House. There you go. We're just only going to become more leftist, more progressive from here. That's just how history works. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards liberalism, except it doesn't because Donald Trump disproves that.
00:10:07.180Right. Like after Obama, where did the American people go? Did they find someone even more liberal than Obama? Did they find someone at least tangentially as liberal as Obama? No, they went to someone like Donald Trump, who's a direct repudiation of that.
00:10:21.380There had been no permanent victory of liberalism achieved there. There was this desire to run away from much of what had been done in the name of liberalism. And there's not some holy moment that once Jesus Obama was elected into the White House and a black man finally sat in the big chair, it didn't bring about any of the things that liberals wanted at the end of the day, or at least not sufficiently because it is the eternal revolution, right?
00:10:50.780And so if you run into this moment where Trump gets elected and then after Joe Biden, who is a disaster in all kinds of levels, I think at this point, there's probably very few liberals that want to own the Obama or rather the Biden presidency, even though they were all championing it up until the very end.0.53
00:11:08.460At this point, then Trump reenters. And so what does that say? What does that mean about the momentum of the left?
00:11:15.880You know, we now because of the Trump administration's kind of current internal struggles, struggles with its own base, kind of distractions with foreign wars and these things, we forget like how devastating a loss the liberals took when Trump was elected, that how much they were completely demoralized by that, how much they were spiraling.
00:11:37.400And so Ezra Klein recognizes that, yeah, you might currently have some outbursts from Antifa, some momentum because Trump hasn't been doing so well, inflation, Epstein, all this stuff. But ultimately, there is still a break in the liberal narrative by Trump's election. People did want the mass deportations. They did want the things that Trump was ultimately offering.
00:12:01.760They wanted to see him back in the White House, despite all of the propaganda that had been spewed about him.
00:13:02.480He hasn't had enough deportations.0.61
00:13:04.560He didn't release the Epstein files when he was supposed to.0.52
00:13:07.720He didn't take some of the actions that they were hoping he would.
00:13:11.620Now, of course, there are leftists that just always hate Trump.
00:13:14.000But for that kind of centrist coalition, the Maha guys, the libertarians that came over, and then much of the new right, those kind of things, if there's any disagreement with Trump, it's not on Trump going too far, being too Trump.
00:13:29.140Their argument is Trump is not Trump enough.
00:13:31.380Trump did not continue through with what we thought he was going to do.
00:13:35.080So I think Klein is kind of hoping that it's a wholesale, you know, rejection of Trump and his promises, when in fact, I think it is simply, if anything, a current desire to see more of what Trump promised and see it fulfilled.
00:13:50.220liberalism has moral imagination again a liberalism that stands for more than not this
00:13:56.800and so i've been on this sort of esoteric personal quest reading all these books in the liberal canon
00:14:04.400reading all these histories of liberalism trying to think through like what in this very very long
00:14:10.240tradition is valuable for us right now being liberal really was not just all right so this
00:14:16.480the author that he brings on uh yeah i cut the whole intro because they go on and on about all
00:14:21.280the books she's written that kind of thing not super useful but she wrote this book about the
00:14:24.680history of liberalism uh and that's that's what he's diving into here about um believing in a
00:14:31.220certain or working towards a certain political design it wasn't just about a constitutional
00:14:35.320form it wasn't just about individual rights it was actually more about moral development and about
00:14:41.880certain character development that they felt was so very important and that a good constitution
00:14:51.920should promote. And many of them thought that, yes, rights are important, but they're important
00:14:57.200because they allow us to actually accomplish our obligations. They're very much concerned with
00:15:07.680establishing a good morally good regime so what this historian does is like really gross and ugly0.98
00:15:18.120and dumb uh but it's gonna it's gonna work on the new york times people because they don't they0.97
00:15:22.600don't know any history liberals don't know history they don't they have no clue there's no context0.99
00:15:26.320for anything she's saying so they're just going to nod along as your client is like completely
00:15:30.040blown away yeah liberalism really was in the ancient world having civic virtue and achieve
00:15:36.420like that is not what liberalism is it's not what liberalism means what they're doing is they're
00:15:41.720going to take liberalism and they're going to expand it to mean any positive pro-social virtue
00:15:47.640so everything that is like be a good person how you know contribute to your community build up
00:15:54.540you know a well of this like social capital that's all liberalism now none of the people
00:16:01.480in the ancient world thought anything like that like that's complete bastardization of what they
00:16:06.800thought in any way shape or form though there is some truth here which is important so she's going
00:16:12.520back and she's talking about ancient societies you know the greeks the romans the ones that we
00:16:17.600think of as foundational to many of our western uh understandings of the world she won't say that
00:16:22.900of course because they're not going to talk about the western tradition they're not going to
00:16:26.200delineate that as a specific important different tradition because of course they would just want
00:16:31.840to globalize this they're all they're all just global communists at the end of the day and so
00:16:35.740like that that's what they're really looking for and so they're not gonna like pull out why this
00:16:41.840tradition looks different than other traditions they're not going to explore that they're just
00:16:46.380going to kind of be like well this is a thing that happened in the ancients but the the point
00:16:51.000here at least stands, it's true that to the degree you cared about liberty in the ancient
00:16:59.720world, when you're looking at the Greeks or the Romans and their city states, the reason you
00:17:03.840would talk about liberty, the liberty is to do the right thing. It's to live as God wanted or
00:17:10.640the gods wanted, depending on the society. It's to be a good citizen. It's to have the freedom
00:17:16.460to cultivate a high level of moral character so they were oriented towards a collective
00:17:23.480understanding of the good and this is something that's going to be really really hard for klein
00:17:29.360and rosenbaum to like ultimately a rosenplatt i keep i keep forgetting what her last name was
00:17:34.020um but but uh it's gonna be really hard for them to grasp because they don't believe that you
00:17:40.860should have like a cohesive society they think and they go and they go on to this at length in
00:17:47.520the full podcast again i don't have the whole thing in here because it's just too long but in
00:17:51.500the full podcast they go on at length about how important it is to have like this radical diversity
00:17:57.480where you uh you know put up with everything you put up with different religions and viewpoints and
00:18:02.880and and people from you know all these other countries and everything and they never get to
00:18:07.460the fact that like the reason the ancients were able to orient themselves towards this virtue
00:18:12.620is that they had a relatively uh you know homogeneous society they had a relatively
00:18:19.740cohesive understanding of who they are what they believe they have the same religion they came from
00:18:25.940the same lineage they came from the same traditions and this allowed them to then understand what
00:18:31.460liberty meant inside their tradition and this is going to be again the failing of these guys over
00:18:37.060and over again they're going to talk about like the roots of western civilization they're going
00:18:42.500to color them as liberal even though again like nothing in the roman or greek uh you know
00:18:50.040understanding uh was anything close to like progressive liberalism much less even classical1.00
00:18:56.000liberalism like we're talking about societies where you know oftentimes women had little to
00:19:00.880no rights certainly couldn't vote uh only a certain percentage of the population could vote at all
00:19:05.720uh you know the slavery patriarchy all kinds of stuff you know all these hierarchies that left
00:19:12.460hate these are rampant and heavily baked in to the understanding of what the good was like if
00:19:18.120you're talking about the ancients and their pursuit of virtue inside society they're going to be
00:19:23.820pursuing like how to own the most slaves and build cool things with them and like you know like like
00:19:30.420like how to marry your daughter off for political and social advantage like these are all things
00:19:36.420that they would think of as virtuous things are orienting themselves towards like and and there's
00:19:42.080just no acknowledge of the there's no acknowledgement of that anywhere except to say that they hate it
00:19:47.900even though they're like trying to tie things to this history so i decided to trace the word and
00:19:55.180the meaning of the word all the way back to ancient Rome, which is liberal in ancient Rome.
00:20:01.080The root of the word is liber, right? And the word liber, yes, it means free, but it also means
00:20:07.140generous, which I thought was so very, very interesting. So if liberal were really the
00:20:12.080qualities of freedom, lovingness, and generosity expected of a citizen, liberalitas was the noun
00:20:20.140that went went with it um so this was an attitude that was expected of citizens in rome when you are
00:20:28.320devoted to the commonwealth to the common good well so again just this this one two step of like
00:20:35.940well liberalism was being generous with your money and then liberty is freedom these are not the same
00:20:42.300thing right so you know there there there's not some like obvious correlation but of course we
00:20:47.220want to make a just so story where the Rome, the Romans, when they talk about liberty, they had
00:20:52.280the idea of basically the democratic party in 20, you know, 2005, like that's, these are the same
00:20:59.660thing, whether or not at all, again, the Roman version of liberty would have meant the ability
00:21:05.960to live towards virtue. Yes. But what virtues, right? It's not that the liberty itself is the
00:21:12.920virtue it's that it you know you it's a virtue but it's not the overall identity of the virtues
00:21:19.040it's one among many and they all orient towards you towards a vision of the good that both of
00:21:24.660these people would find absolutely abysmal and so trying to root the history of her political
00:21:30.480ideology in ancient robe is just so radically and comically a historical that it's amazing that like
00:21:37.640like i again i know these people are biased i know they're ignorant but it's just wild how like no
00:21:43.400one sat down like you really want to you want to try to make that move like she obviously published
00:21:48.540a book doing this so i don't know if she she knows what she's doing is a lie she should she's
00:21:53.400a historian but what does the left-wing historian do with all that inconvenient knowledge i don't
00:21:58.500know one thing that was a bit of an epiphany reading a book for me i think a lot of things
00:22:04.360are missing in modern liberalism. My interest in doing this episode and more that I think are going
00:22:08.760to come is trying to figure out why liberalism feels so exhausted at a moment that it is so
00:22:14.900needed, and why so many of the books I read about it, some of the defenses I read of it,
00:22:20.520are so arid. They have no blood in them. But one thing that was interesting here
00:22:29.680was this idea that liberalism is built on a virtue,
00:22:33.980not a political philosophy, right, liberality.
00:35:49.120But they had that ideal and they talked about it. And they designed an educational system, a liberal arts education that was supposed to cultivate these virtues, this liberality in elite boys. But there was a lot expected of the elite as well.
00:36:13.780so again hatred of these people well they weren't perfect they didn't do all the things that we
00:36:18.800modern progressives know are the right thing to do so again hatred for the virtue but also a
00:36:24.280recognition that there had to be this cultivation but again you notice that she says these liberal
00:36:31.840virtues no liberalism was one of the virtues it was not the entire set of virtues they're trying
00:36:42.240to take every virtue and put it under generosity. They're trying to turn it into an ideology again
00:36:50.500and again. They're trying to fuse it to a political identity. But this is a complete rewriting of
00:36:56.780history. It is a radical modern frame for a historical phenomenon that simply did not exist
00:37:04.420in that day. There is nothing about the Roman understanding of virtue that was in its totality
00:37:11.600liberal that is just incorrect at every level but they keep insinuating that it was however
00:37:18.160they are going to talk about a you know the cultivation of that virtue through a liberal
00:37:24.160education which was again they wouldn't have called it a liberal education this is an ideological
00:37:30.040understanding however they did understand the romans that you did have to cultivate
00:37:35.220a certain set of virtues not liberality not liberalism as a system but you did have to
00:37:41.760cultivate a set of virtues amongst liberalism being one that you ultimately needed to have the
00:37:48.960elites follow and much was expected of them they didn't they didn't just cultivate these virtues
00:37:53.780and have their position and that was it no like there was a lot of expectation if you were going
00:37:58.780to hold this power hold this wealth hold this position in society you had to meet very high
00:38:04.040expectations you know so i i don't think it was just mere you know hypocrisy and that um they're
00:38:11.720an elite but they had obligations is what are the habits what is a kind of education what is a form
00:38:17.260of personal development needed to instill the virtues that will be necessary to hold together
00:38:25.560complex societies what so that was good phrasing this is this this is the correct frame right
00:38:34.220what are the virtues that you need to cultivate to hold together society possibly even complex
00:38:39.880societies he didn't say the liberal virtues this time though that's what he means but again that
00:38:46.280would be the correct framing is to say there are a whole set of virtues in which generosity is one
00:38:51.600that you need to ultimately bind a society together to make it function and you should
00:38:57.620look to cultivate those as a society there should be a civilization wide effort to find worthy
00:39:03.720people to elevate this but again while klein at moments hits on truth hits on the correct
00:39:09.700understanding the correct frame most of the time he's subverting it into an ideological understanding
00:39:14.760is needed to hold together a country or even a city is not easy. I actually think this helps
00:39:23.300explain one reason liberals have always been so shocked and repulsed by Donald Trump himself,
00:39:33.840not just Trumpism or the Republican Party, but him, which is quite deep in the liberal theory
00:39:40.220and inheritance, I'm not even sure people totally realize
00:40:01.320Their people are almost separate from anything he believes,1.00
00:40:05.860like a profound challenge to what liberalism,
00:40:08.740what liberalism believes of how you make a society work i think in many ways he is proving that there
00:40:14.520was something um important in that but but this question so of course they hate trump right like
00:40:22.140that's that's the whole mission here is to hate trump and they say okay well trump is crass and
00:40:28.080the way he treats people talks to people that that offends my liberal sensibilities and that's why
00:40:33.000he's so terrible like apart from anything he believes or does just his mannerisms are illiberal
00:40:38.560And that's the problem, because he's so, you know, caustic. He's so not careful with his language. He does not feel aristocratic. All right. So fair, like Trump is brash. He is bold. Many people love that about Trump. But it's it's fair to say that Trump does not act like normal politicians. He does not carry himself with an air of decorum. He says what he means. He gets right to it. He's very uncareful with his language. Right now, again, a lot of people like that.
00:41:06.520a lot of people hate it but they're pretending like trump is somehow unique in this way which
00:41:11.460is of course not the case at all look at the left right now was jasmine crockett aristocratic
00:41:18.040is aoc aristocratic careful with her language cautious about how she treats people or addresses
00:41:26.740people ilhan omar are these people careful with their language no they're around saying1.00
00:41:33.240white people are stupid they're they're you know we should eliminate whiteness uh we know the the1.00
00:41:38.740patriarchy is evil uh you know red state americans are stupid and ugly uh they're all racist they1.00
00:41:44.960all this stuff right like that's how they live their lives yeah they run around uh you know1.00
00:41:49.600using like ridiculous vernacular uh you know assaulting people verbally like all this stuff
00:41:55.620and and it's like oh but trump came up with this no like again you can feel how you want about0.88
00:42:00.480Trump's behavior, his mannerisms, but pretend like it's a one-sided deal, like Trump is some
00:42:06.280kind of unique force and the right has embraced this crude, completely illiberal, completely
00:42:12.520unvirtuous guy who up there is in no way aristocratic. Well, you have too. You have
00:42:20.280embraced and celebrate that behavior. So at the very least, you could say this is a general
00:42:25.740breakdown for our society but trying to point to trump as if he is somehow uniquely an avatar of
00:42:31.760this is insane of how do you instill in a society the virtues necessary to make a society work
00:42:39.180understanding that as an actually hard problem yeah i think there's juice in that today yeah
00:42:44.560no absolutely and um the the fact that they're elitists i mean i think it was i think you
00:42:50.700mentioned that liberals throughout their history have tended to be elitist, but they demanded a
00:42:57.500lot. There were a lot of obligations and they took that extremely seriously. There's a section
00:43:02.880in my book where I talk about Lincoln and how much he was admired by liberals who are very
00:43:09.800worried about this problem of elites, you know, perhaps not being able to show people how to
00:43:16.740behave and to be the kind of leaders that a liberal society needs. And they thought, you know,
00:43:21.380at that point, they thought maybe a liberal democracy would fail. There was no real example
00:43:26.580of it lasting. You know, would the American example, this exceptional example, actually
00:43:32.400work? And Lincoln showed that he could, and he did it in this beautiful way that kind of
00:43:39.720made people optimistic about liberal democracy. He
00:43:46.740what i'm sorry i'm sorry what are you talking about abraham lincoln saved liberal democracy
00:43:55.440by having the bloodiest war in american history on american soil he saved liberal democracy
00:44:04.640by putting the south under military occupation by suspending the constitution by having the
00:44:13.360constitution basically rewritten at gunpoint the idea that abraham lincoln was this you know
00:44:21.120completely liberal leader who inspired people to to really re-embrace liberal democracy no he shot
00:44:28.140people who disagreed with him like that was the plan again you can feel how you want about that
00:44:33.360you can say ultimately that kept the union together uh slavery and whatever right but like
00:44:38.340this is again radically a historical you're just gonna gloss over the entire civil war
00:44:45.200the suspension of habeas corpus the burning of the south the military occupation of reconstruction
00:44:52.660and we're gonna say that abraham lincoln saved liberal democracy the 14th amendment
00:46:02.900The purpose of the liberal arts education is really to form leaders, to form freedom-loving and moral leaders and giving them the tools, rhetoric and history and some science for sure.
00:46:16.300But it's supposed to train citizens, really, through engagement with the classics.
00:46:21.940In the early times, there was a lot of emphasis on being able to speak in public.
00:46:28.780they wouldn't have thought of this as a liberal arts education but again like you know we're
00:46:33.380taking all of the modern ideology and we're forcing it down onto history we can't actually
00:46:38.440treat history as it was we have to view it through the lens of our modern ideology we're trying to
00:46:44.020ultimately justify even though we hate all of the historical figures and we gotta stop every few
00:46:49.180minutes to remind you about that but she says here well they read the classics okay well guess who's
00:46:54.000really against reading the classics right now liberals we're banning the classics we're0.61
00:47:00.100replacing with books by like a black woman from the 1980s the the past is too white remember0.93
00:47:07.860the the authors of the past are too european too white too male we have to get rid of all of those
00:47:15.880books even when we go back to something like the odyssey or the iliad we need new translations by0.98
00:47:21.460radical feminists and those are the ones we're going to follow because even the past can't be0.55
00:47:27.080authentic it must be re-viewed through this liberal feminist modern lens so even in even if1.00
00:47:36.580we're going to grant her that this was a liberal education which it was not but even if we're going
00:47:40.960to grant that like incredibly modern premise she rejects it the left rejects it they're adamantly
00:47:46.560against it get rid of shakespeare bring me more poetry from you know sub-saharan africa that's
00:47:54.300liberalism today has nothing to do with looking at the classics and why do you look at the classics
00:47:59.640by the way why are the classics important oh because they teach you about your people
00:48:04.060your history the beliefs of your tribe your descendant that you're descended from
00:48:11.020it's your tradition and they never bring that in they want to they want to link things to the
00:48:19.000liberal tradition but they don't want to actually engage in it because the people of the past are
00:48:24.280dirty and racist and believe in hierarchy and patriarchy and all these things like um to speak
00:48:29.780in a convincing way in public and this is all really to convince people to become citizens0.88
00:48:36.120and to do the right thing it sounds terribly idealistic and i don't always want to again
00:48:40.960idealize them or say these people were were perfect in every way far from it but the ideas
00:48:46.300were pretty beautiful and i think we could we could uh learn something from them at what again
00:48:51.340gotta stop gotta stop every 10 minutes or so and say actually remember yeah these people were we're
00:48:58.160we're talking about the history we're trying to connect it to the tradition but all the people0.98
00:49:02.560in the tradition were terrible people they were all racist they were all evil they were all sexist1.00
00:49:07.940They were all transphobic. They didn't peer into the future and see the trans surgery and know that in their heart men could become women. So we have to decry them, even though we're trying to connect this. And again, that's the beauty of this whole exercise.0.99
00:49:21.880ezra klein desperately sees a weakness in liberalism he desperately sees a failure of
00:49:28.520liberalism but he is committed to the modern practice of burning your ancestors at the stake
00:49:34.780and so he hates these people and so does she even though they're the very people they're trying to0.93
00:49:40.580stand on top of again we're trying to build on the shoulders of giants while chopping them off at the
00:49:44.520knees point in your view did the strand of liberal thinking that was about the cultivation
00:49:52.740and disciplining of the self oh drop out definitely it happened during uh the the cold war let's say
00:50:01.820i mean this is uh and it's that's pretty recent in in the history that i describe in my book right
00:50:07.040but this idea of disciplining the self or the we're talking about the collectivity about your
00:50:12.580duties about um any government or state making and getting involved in forming citizens a public
00:50:20.540education system that forms citizens started to have a a scary kind of ring to it when you've
00:50:26.740seen fascism and communism and i liberals uh wanted to show like oh we're not that we're not
00:50:35.320going in that direction uh this is so important and so revealing okay so this is the post-war
00:50:41.900consensus that's what they're talking about this is basically the liberal inverted version of rr
00:50:48.180reno's return of the strong gods when reno explains that after the cold war everyone was
00:50:53.300so worried about these ideas of collectivity and fascism and all these and communism and all these
00:50:57.820things that you had to banish the idea of having a national identity of having a history of having
00:51:03.120a shared faith of having a shared identity you had to scatter everybody to the wind because you
00:51:08.380didn't want to look like those other forms of government you didn't want to summon the ideas
00:51:12.740of a mustache man from the 1930s that was what was so important that you had to stop and so it was
00:51:20.060important to after the cold war become radical individualists if we can't collectivize behind
00:51:26.000some kind of shared identity as americans because that'll make us look too much like nazis well then
00:51:31.880the only other option is to become as radically individual as possible and that's what they're
00:51:36.780doing here again they want this fruit of having a cohesive social identity but they want to destroy
00:51:44.340everything that makes it real they want to destroy the roots the foundation that allows for that
00:51:52.160collective understanding of the good that you can orient people towards that you can train them
00:51:56.500towards but they they want to destroy everything that makes it real and so they're desperately
00:52:02.300trying to construct the like edifice of a cohesive society on just this foundation of sand that are
00:52:11.080really rubble that they destroyed they want to take a sledgehammer to this collective identity
00:52:16.620tradition understanding but they ultimately want the fruits of it and so they they're desperate to
00:52:23.620solve this problem but they have cut themselves off from all possible solutions they want virtue
00:52:30.120they want a society oriented towards the good but they also want to destroy everything that
00:52:36.860would drive people to understand why they should care about their neighbor why they should care
00:52:41.980about the collective continuance of their society they want the tradition but they want to destroy
00:52:47.140everything that came before them in the tradition it's insane it's it's fatal but it's fascinating
00:52:54.160to watch because they don't get it ezra klein is never going to grasp this he can't grasp it if he
00:52:59.220grasp it, it would destroy his worldview. I'm sure that's the same with her here.
00:53:03.980We are not about the state forming citizens. We are about individual rights, about property
00:53:11.540rights in particular. And I think that really gave probably the impetus to something that was
00:53:17.860probably happening already. There's a real feeling among the religious that liberals look down on
00:53:22.000them, you know, among evangelical Christians and others that they won't even, that they try to use
00:53:27.920a state to change their behavior that, you know, you can't even refuse to bake a cake for a couple
00:53:35.400that is getting married of the same sex. And so there is this critique of liberalism that you see
00:53:42.440throughout the ages, which is that liberals are tolerant of everything but what they consider to
00:53:47.760be the intolerant. And if they consider you to be intolerant, backwards, bigoted, then they will
00:53:52.900bring the full force of the state if they control it down upon your head and it creates backlashes
00:53:59.980but it is this very hard problem like this paradox of tolerance how do you tolerate people who don't
00:54:05.240want to be tolerant how do you then not become intolerant yeah can you trace a bit of that
00:54:10.360so they're just walking right into carl schmidt's critique of liberalism that liberalism for all of
00:54:19.280its words about tolerance and multiculturalism and the toleration of the other, the acceptance
00:54:30.300of others, for all of their words about neutrality and letting people be individuals and having
00:54:36.060rights and doing what they want to do. Ultimately, behind all of that, liberalism has a worldview.
00:54:41.640It has an interest. It has a friend-enemy distinction. It has people who it believes
00:54:46.500should be in society the way that society should operate. So there are no neutral institutions.
00:54:52.940There is no liberal society that allows people to be tolerant and free. It never exists. It's
00:54:59.100simply a ruse. It's a guise. It's a layer of deception over the actual ideology that is
00:55:06.660operating underneath, the actual belief system, the set of interests that are operating underneath.
00:55:10.880And so when you buy into this idea that liberalism is somehow navigating these interests, you're blinding yourself to the fact that ultimately liberalism has its own interests, that the people behind it are the ones that are deciding where should we go and what we should do.
00:55:25.740and they will drop the hammer on you the minute you fall afoul of that so it can never resolve
00:55:30.860this problem liberalism can never ever fix this because it's not true liberalism is never about
00:55:37.480diversity it's never about tolerance it's never about respect for others and klein acknowledges0.68
00:55:42.880this we can't have these evangelicals out there not baking gay cakes not in our tolerant society0.86
00:55:49.260that's intolerant because we don't tolerate christians in our tolerant society we only0.99
00:55:53.940tolerate homosexuals sodomy is the only thing we tolerate not not adherence to the word of god0.99
00:56:00.500that's liberalism to klein because that's his real religion that's his actual set of beliefs0.99
00:56:07.780that is his true political theology but he needs to hide it behind this veneer of liberalism again
00:56:13.800carl schmidt tears this to shreds it in in uh you know uh his books it's it's fascinating to watch
00:56:21.020I don't know if they ever solved that problem.
00:56:23.040They were very, I mean, one has to, if you really try to understand the world from their
00:56:30.620perspective, you know, it was really hard to be a liberal most of the time.
00:56:34.380There were such formidable obstacles, such strong enemies, and such intolerance of their
00:56:42.100It was really serious stuff to think of the Catholic Church coming back into power, the
00:56:49.540counter revolutionaries you know what what would happen to you so do you tolerate them do you allow
00:56:55.000them to use the free press to uh to uh attack constitutional government at what point do you
00:57:04.160censor we struggle with this today um and and they certainly did then there is interest so again
00:57:11.380there is no answer to this they have no answer oh well yeah if people start writing stuff you
00:57:17.340disagree with you censor them end of story that's the solution i guess we're struggling with a
00:57:25.320little bit like but ultimately it's so hard to be a liberal and that you know if you let these
00:57:29.080people get into power they're going to crush everything so again even when they go back
00:57:32.820historically they just make the same justifications for what they did during covet what they do as
00:57:37.040soon as they get back into power again today it's that they would become radically intolerant of
00:57:43.600anyone who is not their version of tolerance there is no such thing as liberalism that's what they're
00:57:49.240revealing liberalism is a lie it is a ruse it is an impossible way for society to operate if you
00:57:56.280want a cohesive understanding of the good you must draw lines you must gatekeep you must decide what
00:58:02.980is good and you must ban what is bad you must encourage the good and you must discourage the
00:58:08.260bad that's what it looks like to have a cohesive society to achieve the things that they want
00:58:13.420You must do these things. You must draw these lines, these batteries. You must be intolerant. So the liberalism that they so extol must behave as an intolerant force to create what the real society is, which is just this radical progressive leftism. It's not tolerant in any way, shape, or form.
00:58:30.280Interesting argumentation over how much to think of the American founders as inside the American liberal tradition, as in tension with what later becomes a liberal tradition, right?
00:58:40.120They're obviously claimed by all sides here.
00:58:42.800How do you think about the founding and with its profound internal contradictions around freedom and human bondage?
00:58:51.740I've become more and more interested in American political thought and institutions and history. Unfortunately, because of the way disciplines and concentrations work, I'm more of an expert on European history. But what I've read about the founding and about the founding fathers and what was going on there just fills me with enormous respect and gratitude.
00:59:15.820so this is funny because like she starts by saying i don't really know much about the american
00:59:21.360founding because i'm an academic and because of disciplines i only know my discipline which is
00:59:27.180true it's kind of weird when i talk to uh college professors they're very very smart they're
00:59:33.240oftentimes brilliant but they're very narrow like they're siloed they don't have anything outside of
00:59:38.680their specialization so when you try to bring in broader topics even when it comes to political
00:59:43.440theory of philosophy they they've only read democracy in america and they know it like the
00:59:48.520bible they know it the the back of their hand they could quote it chapter and verse but if you ask
00:59:53.100them how it interacts with anything else they're just like oh i don't know it's not my specialization
00:59:56.440so she for some reason ezra klein brought on a woman who specializes entirely in european
01:00:03.200understandings of history so she doesn't know anything about the american founding but she's
01:00:07.140trying to talk about american liberalism and again this is the problem is they don't treat it as it's
01:00:13.420own discrete tradition they try to universalize it whatever is true about liberalism in you know
01:00:19.140germany or france has to be true in america well no actually not at all liberalism is very different
01:00:26.120in fact question if they're even related in in you know totally but like she only knows the
01:00:33.460european side and so she's just like fumbling around i think i like the founders i think i'm
01:00:37.620supposed to say this and you'll see where it goes in a second and i think you know you know for for
01:00:42.920the wonderful work that they did, being both thinkers and actors. And Frankl and Jefferson
01:00:49.960came to Paris and were very much interested also in French matters and vice versa. The American
01:00:56.660Constitution influenced early liberals because, you know, they thought it was an amazing, amazing
01:01:03.400document. And maybe that's the thing that's so wonderful is to see exactly those things coming
01:01:12.520together the ideas and the practices coming together in the in the founding fathers to
01:01:17.240produce this amazing document that's a very glittering answer but but i think a critic of
01:01:22.200liberalism would say that what good is your liberalism if it can include slavery in its
01:01:30.040founding constitution or in more of the european case what good is your liberalism if it is so
01:01:35.840interwoven with colonialism and i mean there were many you know people who certainly believed in
01:01:42.200many liberal ideas we're talking about here who made space for both of those practices within
01:01:47.500their liberalism right um well i don't mean to again idealize these um out of proportion these
01:01:55.000people these are early liberals and liberals whoops whoops sorry sorry i didn't mean to praise
01:02:01.520the founding fathers my mistake fine immediately goes to it right oh i see you said there was
01:02:08.480something good about the american founding fathers will have you considered slavery gotcha
01:02:14.020remember we're never allowed to go more than 10 minutes without saying how evil and racist and1.00
01:02:20.200stupid and patriarchal and sexist and homophobic everyone before us was because we're trying to1.00
01:02:26.440connect liberalism to a tradition but we hate every single person in that tradition and think1.00
01:02:31.340they were evil and to be fair this is not just a liberal thing it's not just a leftist thing it's
01:02:37.820not just a progressive thing this is what a lot of conservatives believe this is what joel barry
01:02:42.220believes he can't stop calling the founders racist when he's confronted with their words
01:02:46.340because like he believes the same thing yeah there were some good ideas in the past but the founders
01:02:51.460were a bunch of like evil racists and only once their beliefs were perfected by martin luther
01:02:57.040king jr did we actually have real american values the constitution was actually always pointing
01:03:04.920towards martin luther king jr the the founders were not honorable wise men who knew exactly what
01:03:11.980they were talking about no they were flawed racist and yeah maybe they wrote down some nice stuff but
01:03:18.080ultimately like their values had could not be realized until the the deified civil rights
01:03:25.680movement brought them into the modern day that's what so many conservatives believe what they'll
01:03:32.440say out loud and there's not a lot of space between them and Ezra Klein here and uh Helena
01:03:38.600I believe her name is like the only difference is that uh the the conservatives will remember
01:03:43.600that they're supposed to say but like George Washington's a good guy somewhere in between
01:03:47.060that right like the only difference is that the hatred rip dripping from Ezra Klein is a little1.00
01:03:52.520more obvious as we're like conservatives are supposed to be like well they were just stupid1.00
01:03:57.060and ignorant and in the past and wrong but as we're like Ezra Klein and liberals can be like1.00
01:04:01.840oh, no, they were evil. Right. But otherwise, they have the same story. It's the same progressive0.99
01:04:06.440story. Many conservatives are just progressives in this sense. They've never been perfect. They
01:04:11.900often suffer from the same prejudices, the prejudices of their time. There are
01:04:17.240exclusions. But how did they grapple with this? I mean, we've talked a lot about freedom here.
01:04:22.700How did they grapple with this? How did they grapple with this? I think there were,
01:04:28.040I mean, other people can speak more intelligently about the U.S. Constitution and the slavery within the document and say that this is really a question also of compromise.
01:04:37.200It's a horrible thing to imagine, but I think there was debates going on there and politics going on that are unseemly today.
01:04:45.920And you have John Stuart Mill seeing absolutely atrocious things about how despotism is okay when you're dealing with barbarians or something, talking about British imperialism in India.
01:04:59.520You have Tocqueville, who was okay, apparently, with burning silos in Algeria.
01:05:09.460But at the same time, these people were then from within, this was not a liberal position, I would say. This is, as many people were saying, you are betraying your own principles. And conservatives were also for, perhaps even more so for colonialism, imperialism.
01:05:28.500I'm it's horrible to say, but racism was rampant. Sexism was rampant. If anyone was against it, if we can, we don't you know, they were liberals. It was kind of they thought that Napoleon would.
01:05:43.940so again she's trapped here because she wants to revere some aspects of liberalism but then she
01:05:51.920notes that these titans of liberalism you know people who i think of as radically liberal like
01:05:58.780john stewart mill or a guy who's certainly championed democracy in america alexis de
01:06:03.660toqueville these people when it came down to it they seem to value liberalism for their people
01:06:12.560but they didn't care about liberalism in India or you know North Africa it's like yeah what does
01:06:20.300that mean oh it means liberalism even in the you know tradition you're trying to connect it to was
01:06:27.880always particular to its people whether you're John Stuart Mill or you're Alexis de Tocqueville
01:06:35.380you thought liberalism applied to your people not everyone not to the Indians not to the people
01:06:42.520of Algeria. You're actually fine with treating them differently because that's how everyone
01:06:48.060understood the world. It was not a universal understanding or application of liberalism,
01:06:53.320but they don't grasp that. They don't think that's, they think they can remove that element
01:06:58.040of liberalism and keep the rest and keep it functional, but you can't because all the things
01:07:03.360that you were talking about, about cultivating virtue and having a civic mindedness, they require
01:07:08.220an idea of exclusive community. You can't be generous to everyone. You cannot be mindful of
01:07:18.280orienting yourself towards the good of everyone because their goods are different and in conflict.
01:07:24.140The world is not one universal place with one universal good. It is a place with many different
01:07:29.140cultures and peoples with different goods and different needs, and many of them are directly
01:07:33.100in conflict with each other but liberalism doesn't address this unless you understand it
01:07:39.000as something that only applies to the people around you my buddy carl benjamin has a great
01:07:45.480phrase liberalism is the sharia law of the british it is the way they live their lives
01:07:51.580is what they believe and when you apply it just to them it seems to work but when you try to
01:07:58.120universalize it when you try to take it to all these other nations and peoples who are no way
01:08:02.120connected you know it seems to work in other places that are connected to the anglos but when
01:08:07.080you take it to a bunch of people who aren't in any way anglo don't have the history don't have
01:08:10.460the tradition liberalism doesn't seem to work there which is why liberalism was always elite
01:08:15.620and always bound by an identity a people a place a country a nation instead of being applied to
01:08:24.440everyone even its greatest champions did not see liberalism in this way and ezra klein and his
01:08:31.540guests keep running into this problem over and over and over again and they just hand wave it
01:08:36.420because they can't deal with it because if they did it would collapse their entire worldview0.94
01:08:40.220yeah there's a world where liberalism works it's where it applies to like a bunch of anglos or
01:08:47.940maybe people descended from anglos who have that culture and have that tradition and have that
01:08:52.160understanding maybe there's even like a french version but it only applies to the french it's
01:08:57.480not universal you can't just put it on everyone and that's why all these liberal heroes keep
01:09:01.660falling short for you because they understood something about liberalism that you don't it's1.00
01:09:06.080not that they were stupid or that they were wrong or they were you know ignorant it's that you are1.00
01:09:11.960you want to cut history off at the knees and then you want to build on it and it fails every single1.00
01:09:17.240time come and save the revolution so there was a lot of hope that this charismatic figure
01:09:22.880who claimed to want to save the revolution,
01:09:46.360to divert attention to what he was doing at home.
01:09:50.220He gave gifts to people. He lined the pockets of his friends. He flattered people, gave them power, but at the same time that he amassed power in his own hands.
01:10:07.660This was profoundly demoralizing to the early liberals that I'm talking about who had this lofty notion of what a freer, better, more moral, more humane world would look like.
01:10:26.080They learned that you needed certain safeguards in place.
01:10:29.240This is really when you get like liberalism as a constitutional way of thinking, balance of power, separations of powers, individual rights, freedom, how important freedom of press is, how important freedom of religion is.
01:10:46.160Napoleon used religion, you know, to buttress his power.
01:10:51.120So all of these constitutional ideas really came together then.
01:10:56.540and they so they want to complain about napoleon and they want to complain about napoleon because
01:11:01.860obviously they want him to be trump like you'll see even more clearly in just a minute here why
01:11:06.900that's true but the complaint but again the point she's making here is wildly a historical
01:11:11.700she is not a historian or if she is and this is what passes for his uh history departments
01:11:17.240in the united states then it's time to throw the entire university system into the blender
01:11:21.440like just burn it down salt the earth be done with it raise them to the ground salt the earth
01:11:26.060it's over okay so the french invented separations of powers now in liberalism after napoleon
01:11:35.800no not even close not even close baron de montesquieu was writing about separation of
01:11:43.820powers 100 like at least 100 years before this happened it was in the constitution because
01:11:48.620baron de montesquieu was writing about it right like that's the point that the french were already
01:11:56.660seeing this but and you know where baron montesquieu got this you already saw the separation
01:12:01.180powers you know why he idealized this idea these restrictions on government because he was admiring
01:12:06.440the british government which put some of their power in the king and some of the power in
01:12:10.560parliament and some of the power you know you know in the church and all these places and that these
01:12:14.760things seem to balance each other like that's what he was excited about so the idea that the
01:12:20.800french didn't know about this before napoleon came to power is insane ahistorical entirely
01:12:27.960but also it excludes once again the idea that these things already existed
01:12:33.640in the english government and that's where moscue was drawing them from
01:12:38.480they were bound to a specific tradition he was admiring a specific tradition
01:12:44.500from a specific people so once again she is entirely rewriting history ignoring the founding
01:12:51.220of america the fact that a frenchman had already wrote about these ideas and that's where americans
01:12:56.320got the idea for the constitution in the first place the idea that those ideas came from the
01:13:01.500british who had been practicing them for a long time but again we can't contextualize any of this
01:13:07.940we can't tell any real history and again ezra klein is just nodding along because he doesn't1.00
01:13:12.220know anything about history these people are idiots or they're liars maybe they know all1.00
01:13:19.200these things maybe klein knows all these things maybe she knows all these things maybe they're1.00
01:13:23.200all just putting on the show for their readers and they know they're idiots but either way the0.99
01:13:29.260point is this is supposed to be a discussion about the historical tradition of liberalism0.99
01:13:33.780and at no point has there been any real history here
01:13:37.300outside of the whole virtue is oriented towards the good stuff you know that i i praised at the0.77
01:13:43.680beginning i was glad that they got into other than that this has just been a farce it's ridiculous
01:13:48.820you know it happened again and again over the course of the 19th century that you have these
01:13:54.940very clever charismatic figures who could speak directly to the people i understand you i represent
01:14:02.860you it i don't need these we don't need these representative institutions we don't i because i
01:14:08.100speaks directly to you i am you sort of i mean that's what a demagogue does and that's what
01:14:12.960populism is right is that you don't need the intermediaries so of course we hate populism
01:14:19.320right we love democracy but we hate populism why oh well are they the same thing no no no
01:14:25.540populism is very different populism is when the leader speaks to the people and goes around all
01:14:30.060these mediating institutions. Oh, you mean all the things that will manipulate and control the
01:14:35.020process in your favor. That's why you hate Trump. That's why you hate the idea of populism,
01:14:39.880because it's going to bypass all those institutions of control that you have set up in your favor to
01:14:45.800make sure that your elite class rules. And that's why you hate populism. That's why you hate the
01:14:50.580idea of right-wing populism, especially, because that's going to allow people to circumvent
01:14:56.360all of the ideology all of the indoctrination all of the legalese everything else that you've
01:15:02.420wrapped your system of control in and it's going to allow them to directly address the problems
01:15:07.000of the people and there's nothing worse for liberal rule than the people actually getting
01:15:13.080someone who cares about them actually getting somebody who wants to do something for the people
01:15:17.720that's the worst possible thing all right guys i'm going to stop there like i said this is an
01:15:22.720hour long plus conversation so if you want to watch the whole thing for context by all means
01:15:27.540please do so it's over on the new york times uh or or i think ezra klein's youtube channel that
01:15:32.660kind of thing uh so you can go check that out i do think it's a fascinating look into the mind
01:15:37.400of the liberal these people trying to reconstruct this alternative history that justifies what
01:15:41.660they're trying to do uh but i understand i watched it so you don't have to you don't have to do that
01:15:47.280but again if you if you want to grasp it and get the full context by all means please do
01:15:51.060let's head over to the questions of the people here