The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Realpolitik #41 ｜ Liberalism： How We Got Here with Connor Tomlinson

00:00:00.000 Hello, and welcome to a special episode of RealPolitik. I am your host, Firas Maudad,

00:00:05.820 and I am joined today by Conor Tomlinson. And it is going to be, I think, an interesting

00:00:11.580 conversation about liberalism, how did we get here, and maybe how do we get out of this.

00:00:19.960 The question that I want to start with, basically, I want to challenge you, maybe in a way,

00:00:26.100 and ask you to give a steel man case for liberalism because i think this is the fairest

00:00:33.440 way to try to slowly critique it and maybe explore some of its actual intellectual or

00:00:41.340 spiritual roots i dare say so why don't we try to start off with that

00:00:47.000 one of the most interesting cases that i've heard is actually contained

00:00:53.560 in Bernard Yack's book

00:00:55.600 Nationalism and the Moral Psychology of Community

00:00:58.140 which is

00:00:59.380 liberals are concerned

00:01:01.640 rightly

00:01:03.040 with misuse of state power

00:01:05.120 and so they don't want to concentrate

00:01:07.060 the executive functions of the sovereign

00:01:10.120 in one single place

00:01:12.920 instead they want

00:01:14.080 checks and balances

00:01:16.300 they want to diffuse power

00:01:18.360 throughout institutions that can

00:01:20.300 represent

00:01:21.360 different values different interests that can all counteract one another and this will mitigate

00:01:29.540 the risk of centralizing your power in one sovereign authority that could turn tyrannical

00:01:36.380 and it's not like history isn't replete with examples of that and rather than

00:01:44.660 worry about the unreliable proper instruction of rulers in a moral culture, in instilling

00:01:57.960 in them a conscience, a sincere religious belief. They impose restraints upon themselves

00:02:04.820 because they have virtue. Instead, they want to pursue a secure guarantee that it is not

00:02:12.520 down to the personal virtues or vices of a ruler as to whether or not governance is good and just

00:02:19.100 and that's an understandable um pursuit i i again i don't necessarily agree with it but i think

00:02:28.060 that's the strongest case for liberalism based on procedure and the reason they're concerned about

00:02:34.820 tyranny is because of the confiscation of rights the unfair treatment according to the law um the

00:02:40.180 law that applies double standards based on who it favors and who it fears and again it's not like

00:02:46.420 there aren't insufficient examples of that so they want to ensure that those administrating the law

00:02:53.400 do not apply their own personal preferences and prejudices to the law and so they hope to create

00:03:02.280 a culture of neutrality in institutions that allows by matter of procedure good governance

00:03:10.380 that's a that is a case but i can see a a few holes with it that i you and i might agree on

00:03:19.060 um rather than relying on the virtue of one man which is rare enough

00:03:24.660 it must rely on a very wide range of public virtue

00:03:29.080 and it must rely on this not turning into some kind of tyranny of those who have captured

00:03:37.980 institutions yeah there's a quote by the post-war german jurist wolfgang bachenfurder

00:03:44.160 where and i'm gonna butcher it um because i'm translating it but it's essentially a liberal

00:03:49.960 democratic society can now cannot guarantee the givens upon which it rests essentially yes so um

00:03:56.980 christopher lash in uh revolt of the elites wrote about this if you want a in in the american

00:04:04.020 context if you want a republic you need a strong civic culture the the sort of attitudes that the

00:04:10.260 tocqueville found were being disseminated through um civic society the church when he was touring

00:04:15.260 america and which which have waned through urbanization through um the orchestrated

00:04:21.440 breaking up of communities via redistricting and civil rights through various economic shocks

00:04:26.300 so if you if you if you want a uh if you want to diffuse power from one virtuous or vicious

00:04:35.880 sovereign across institutions then you need to have all those people in those institutions buying

00:04:42.540 into the culture that acts as the givens that guarantee the laws that allow them to be neutral

00:04:49.000 suppositions the problem is the moment you think they're neutral you then take them for granted

00:04:52.820 exactly and so you stop upholding the culture and you you you eat away at all the foundations

00:04:58.000 and so for example in the american context the constitution just becomes a document over uh

00:05:02.980 people that that that have completely incoherent incompatible conceptions of what the good is

00:05:08.700 squabble over because they're redefining things like equality um so if you if if you if you take

00:05:16.060 the foundations for liberal institutions for granted they will no longer be neutral they will

00:05:20.640 instead be ideologically captured or you will import a bunch of people from a society to whom

00:05:25.060 uh the i agree with tom holland here the sort of um internalized protestant givens in liberalism

00:05:32.440 are not second nature and so they'll just turn it into weapons to expropriate property from white 1.00

00:05:38.340 people and give it to their own clan. It becomes a political football. It becomes a question of

00:05:42.780 demographics. It becomes a question of ethnic bargaining. It fails when the underlying virtue

00:05:50.660 of a society fails. And so you end up in a weird situation where you assume that there is a

00:05:58.660 mechanism to enforce virtue on society, which does not in fact exist because you've opted for

00:06:05.920 very liberal set of institutions so in a sense it is self-corrosive it's absolutely guaranteed

00:06:12.220 when and i deliberately left the blank slate out of the steel man because i know

00:06:16.000 well okay not all liberals say they believe in the blank slate i can sort of hear stelios

00:06:21.280 screaming at me through the wall um but in the case of for example stephen pinker you know he

00:06:25.280 wrote the book against the blank slate and then he writes enlightenment now which is based on the

00:06:29.600 premise that economic prosperity and the liberal rule of law can make pretty much every country

00:06:35.780 into a functioning western which means that there's a shared human nature baked into it anyway

00:06:40.500 the idea of the blank slate means that all culture and religion is some sort of cosmetic artifice

00:06:49.920 that is a deviation from the original source it's almost a sign of deterioration

00:06:54.120 so the the the job of the liberal state is actually to diminish um substantive cultural

00:07:00.000 differences and reduce them down to you know whether or not you you skip lunch a couple of

00:07:05.060 times a year or what clothing you wear or what food you eat at a buffet and render all of the

00:07:11.560 questions about metaphysics good and evil death and the afterlife down to um something you can

00:07:18.620 outsource to our shared values this is where you get the incoherent rhetoric we were discussing

00:07:22.200 off air of the liberal state treating religion like race where it's like okay you can have our

00:07:29.440 shared values aside from religion even the religion is the the progenitor of those values

00:07:34.760 and often religions come from ethnic groups which are tribes which are families or families and

00:07:39.320 religion comes from ancestor worship and then as the families expand through intermarriage the the

00:07:45.120 gods start becoming um gods of abstract concepts like fire water or even the city-state itself

00:07:51.520 and so if you and those familial religions generate the values that then become encoded

00:07:58.380 in the culture that is second nature to the families that pass it down and so if you disrupt

00:08:03.760 the chain of familial transmission of culture through mass migration if you presume that all

00:08:10.500 of your culture is a set of neutral universal values and do not uh promulgate the particular

00:08:18.440 culture that undergirds those values then you disrupt the the the chain of transmitting values

00:08:24.840 transmitting culture and then you basically take society apart and liberalism cannot do anything 1.00

00:08:29.760 other than this because at root it believes all human beings are blank slates yes so the starting

00:08:34.800 position is everything is artificial and in order to minimize um conflict in sort of hobsian

00:08:43.220 conception in order to maximize equality in the russoian conception in order to maximize autonomy

00:08:48.400 in the lockian conception we have to minimize cultural differences we have to compartmentalize

00:08:53.460 religion and then you know john lennon's imagined results and you see this in in in the modern

00:08:58.460 language of even uh reform which is one of my favorite examples to bring up gwayne towler who

00:09:04.280 is the longtime confidant of nigel farage he's the guy for the people that remember the clacton

00:09:08.840 rally held the boombox on his head and then got sacked by zia yusuf he wrote on his sub stack

00:09:13.280 recently that um reform uk is engaging with its muslim candidates because we need anglican muslims

00:09:18.760 much like we have Anglican Christians.

00:09:20.680 We do Anglican Jews, Hindus, and Sikhs.

00:09:22.840 And this means you sincerely believe in your faith,

00:09:25.880 but you keep it private.

00:09:26.860 Yes.

00:09:27.120 And it's like, okay, one,

00:09:28.460 you're presuming that all of these faiths

00:09:30.260 have an original human nature source point,

00:09:33.200 which is we're all exactly the same,

00:09:36.140 and these are just cosmetic add-ons.

00:09:37.580 And number two, you presume all of these faiths

00:09:39.480 buy into the liberal Protestant assumptions

00:09:42.780 that you're making that allows Anglicanism

00:09:44.700 to be so shy about itself

00:09:45.960 and allows you to project onto it, onto all these other faiths,

00:09:50.080 the idea that they can all exist under the umbrella of pluralist liberalism.

00:09:52.960 And I'm sorry, that's just deluded and it's going to destroy your society,

00:09:57.080 but because they have no other anthropology in mind, they can't course correct.

00:10:03.200 So two points here.

00:10:05.160 One point that I fully agree with is that for liberalism to function,

00:10:10.460 it must attack people's core identities and try to weaken those identities because those

00:10:17.580 identities when actually adhered to do imply vast differences between different cultures and

00:10:25.580 therefore an inability for these cultures to get along which is something that the Ottomans kind 1.00

00:10:31.760 of figured out which is why every Middle Eastern city has a Muslim neighborhood a Jewish neighborhood 0.94

00:10:37.720 and a Christian neighborhood and they do not really meet that much. They might interact in

00:10:43.440 the market but they live separately, they marry separately, they have different inheritance laws

00:10:49.540 and the Ottomans were wise enough to allow each of these religious groups to apply its own personal

00:10:56.720 law which is something weirdly that the Israelis have inherited but that's a different conversation

00:11:00.560 but they understood that these are different communities and they were governing

00:11:04.760 all of them nodding to their differences, but subject to one rule. And that was really the

00:11:12.680 only way for this to work. And now in Britain, you do have a de facto millet system where the

00:11:19.180 Muslims apply their own sharia courts, where the Jewish community has its own ambulance service,

00:11:26.000 health care service, pension, sorry, elderly care rather than pension, education system, etc.

00:11:36.020 And you see this natural tendency to self-segregate. And it bothers the liberals to the extent that

00:11:42.720 somebody like Jenrick will go and make a video saying, well, you know, there is clearly no

00:11:47.460 integration here. Not that anything should be done about it, but the reality is recognized.

00:11:53.580 so that's one side of it and this attack is on on identity is necessary and it works most

00:12:00.680 effectively against the native community against christians but the other side of it is that

00:12:06.440 in a real sense the assumptions underlying liberalism come from universal monotheism

00:12:16.840 as practiced by Islam and Christianity, rather than particular monotheism as practiced by

00:12:24.500 Judaism. And with Islam, this will never work by definition because it is a religion of government

00:12:34.040 and conflict and power, whereas with Christianity, given that it's been hollowed out of Christian 0.53

00:12:42.460 virtues and christian order it can work a lot more effectively i mean it won't work with islam 1.00

00:12:49.520 as well because um alfred guillem is quite good on this and he was an arabist so you know he was

00:12:55.180 he was quite a flatterer um islam just mapped onto the seventh century tribe system that existed in 1.00

00:13:01.400 the in the arabian region um as governed by you know where you have to gather around water sources

00:13:07.860 and um it's not just that muhammad you know when he was it when he it was when he conquered kaibar

00:13:15.200 and he took his own cousin as a as a wife that's being used as the justification um for cousin

00:13:20.720 marriage but it's also just that cousin marriages have been so common throughout all of human

00:13:24.160 history in most societies and if it's encouraged by your culture by your your uh biradiri clan 0.99

00:13:30.340 structure by the the concept of asabaya so in group loyalty but also by your scripture

00:13:34.900 then thinking groupishly is just the way that you do things and so even if islam because that's the 0.55

00:13:41.260 default setting of almost everyone exactly and so even if islam preaches the the the the identity 0.99

00:13:48.620 is dissolved in the umma um gwelaim recognized like there's between an arab no one no authority 0.60

00:13:54.960 can get behind between him and his blood kin there there is still there is a there is a verse

00:13:58.920 the quran i forget the exact citation but it is um the the the the recognition of the suit of the

00:14:05.320 authority of allah does not dissolve the the importance of blood between the brotherhood

00:14:10.160 of believers whereas um a covenant in the christian understanding is that we treat one another as if

00:14:16.920 we were brothers there is a there is a compact between us of moral consideration it's not it's

00:14:20.940 not saying that you know we're going to rebuild a tower of babel we're going to deny ethnic 1.00

00:14:24.380 differences this is why the end of the gospel of matthew is go forth and minister to all nations

00:14:28.780 not you know deny natural differences this is why at pentecost holy spirit descends speaks in

00:14:33.360 different languages doesn't speak to one people in all the same all the same way so in islam even 0.98

00:14:39.700 if you try and uh use it as a binding agent to overcome those ethnic differences those ethnic

00:14:46.340 differences will be entrenched by the tribal customs of its adherents and so you'll get like

00:14:50.480 a de facto caste system where the emiratis think the pakistanis are disgusting and so they'll just 0.98

00:14:54.400 give them guest worker visas on the other side of that you've got um the tribalism of

00:15:01.680 jewish faith which is best embodied in israel and it has become the sort of centerpiece of

00:15:09.720 contemporary politics um both because of october the 7th and because since the second world war

00:15:15.620 there has been a large presence of jews in politics agitating for the security of their

00:15:21.200 own state using the specter of the holocaust as the region it's not like it hasn't been a 0.99

00:15:26.600 powerful story that is engendered sympathy but the problem that they have is in a universalistic

00:15:33.300 liberal or a christian system which has been used to direct sympathy towards that state

00:15:40.280 you've got the double standard where this nation can have unalloyed national tribalism on ethnic

00:15:46.820 lines because Ben-Gurion founded it as a secular state not as a religious state but you have to

00:15:51.220 be liberal diverse and tolerant and you also have to accommodate everyone into your tribe as part

00:15:55.660 of your identity and there is no punishment for the people that actually betray the values that

00:16:00.160 we have redefined your identity to be um and so you you monotheism falls apart with that ethnic

00:16:08.480 tribalism that's practiced elsewhere because of cousin marriage but then this universal liberal

00:16:14.280 identity falls apart because of this double standard of tribalism that is championed in

00:16:19.360 one nation that has that has taken up so much of the energy in our politics that our loyalty is

00:16:25.180 commanded for while we are denied that same effective standard of what yak would call it

00:16:31.500 national solidarity um in in the fashion of a cross uh nations are that the fate of nations

00:16:38.200 is secured by the lineal bonds of ancestry that then engenders the horizontal cultural

00:16:43.760 and religious bonds of solidarity as if you break the chain of ancestry and the recognition that

00:16:48.540 ancestry is important then you break the chains of of cultural solidarity as well um and so i do i

00:16:53.900 do think christianity has cracked the code uh in that regard but as you said all the christian

00:16:57.280 institutions including unfortunately at least some level the catholic church have been hollowed out

00:17:02.700 by this and so um i do think christianity is instrumental to revive to help our societies

00:17:10.600 But I don't think, this might be blasphemous, I don't think Christianity alone can rescue our societies from the brink. It does require a hint of tribalism about ourselves and our own culture in order to have something with you. 0.85

00:17:30.040 I fully agree with that.

00:17:31.220 And I think it's sort of a recognition of natural law and natural philosophy in that

00:17:35.960 at the end of the day, as you said, the miracle of Pentecost was kind of an inversion of the

00:17:43.180 Tower of Babel, but it still respected each nation enough to speak to it in its own tongue.

00:17:50.040 And everybody heard the speech of the apostles in their own language, accepting that in Christ

00:17:57.360 there is neither Greek nor Jew, but that doesn't abolish the existence of a Greek nation or indeed

00:18:06.660 any other nation. So it's fundamentally what I would describe as having happened, and I would

00:18:15.380 love your thoughts on this, is everybody's animated by Christian sentiments, whether they realize it

00:18:21.600 or not, but they aren't actually animated by Christian thought, because Christian thought

00:18:27.660 would recognize vices and virtues correctly, would avoid the deadly sins, would encourage

00:18:35.500 the Christian virtues, and that would be the correct platform from which you then launch

00:18:43.000 yourself into politics, because essentially politics is a theological debate. All political

00:18:49.660 differences are in a very real sense theological differences and what you're dealing with here is

00:18:55.460 not um in the church of england christianity what you're dealing with here is sentimentalism

00:19:01.680 in a christian rapper christian sentiment in a christian rapper without christian thought

00:19:08.800 underpinning it what my my experience in politics might provide some anecdotes for this so um i

00:19:15.420 remember natcon conference in 2023 in london and jacob reese mog was on stage talking about the

00:19:22.380 the need for brexit to get control on migration how ironic um and some crazy old boomer bum rushed 0.95

00:19:29.980 the stage to complain about the inhumanity of the rwanda plan the boondoggle that was on ongoing at

00:19:34.460 the time tim stanley followed him tim stanley being a a catholic um but i mean former trotskyist

00:19:41.740 now just as far as i can see tory boy liberal and he stood on stage and he said you know as a

00:19:47.880 catholic i must say i find the the conservative government my own party's approach towards

00:19:52.840 refugees unbelievably cruel we have an obligation to welcome in the stranger we must we must we 1.00

00:19:58.080 must not reject these people completely inconsiderate cultural concerns completely

00:20:01.580 inconsiderate by the way of the fact in the catechism it says you know nations are biblical

00:20:05.600 entities um nations may well have obligations to help the needy but also those claiming to be

00:20:11.240 needy have obligations to respect the cultural heritage and the economic prosperity of the

00:20:17.360 nations not to exploit the goodwill of the natives um and also of course when you're when you're in

00:20:22.760 that land you abide by the law insofar as the law respects the gospel and also the other one there

00:20:28.700 was a there was a there was a dinner late last year and there was a vicar there um fine giles

00:20:37.920 Fraser he's he's a sort of uh very liberal leaning Anglican vicar he sort of goes to unheard

00:20:42.720 events and things like that and we were having a bit of a debate around the table and Ann Coulter

00:20:46.840 was there so you can kind of imagine her losing her mind at this and the debate was what is the

00:20:52.020 greater threat facing Britain is it immigration and cultural replacement or is it secularism

00:20:57.020 and he was arguing that it's secularism because at least Muslim migrants believe in God and the

00:21:01.660 book and I pressed him and I said which God and which book and he just sort of started and went

00:21:05.320 hand waved it away as you're saying it's all about sentiment it's not about content and the

00:21:11.040 moment you try to examine their their prize the moment you try to make it particular the um the

00:21:16.940 the default liberalism the the blank slate anthropology sort of kicks in and then you get

00:21:22.240 the kind of the temperament the recoiling from conflict the sort of uh the the looking down

00:21:27.480 their nose ickiness that is endemic to to westminster circles kicking in and the conversation

00:21:31.860 just goes nowhere yeah i i think fundamentally the the assumption is that islam shares the same

00:21:40.380 sentiments as christianity but that fails to address a fundamental difference between the two

00:21:46.200 which is that in large part religion is an answer to the question of what do you do with suffering

00:21:54.460 if you enjoyed this piece of premium content from the lotus eaters

00:21:58.140 head to our website where you can find more

00:22:00.700 Thank you.

The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - April 06, 2026

PREVIEW： Realpolitik #41 ｜ Liberalism： How We Got Here with Connor Tomlinson

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