The Daily Signal - The Daily Signal Presents “The “Signal Sitdown - Woke Is Liberalism All Grown Up | Dr. Patrick Deneen

Episode Date: September 6, 2025

Notre Dame Professor Patrick Deneen’s book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” was not a project undertaken to explain the Trump phenomenon after President Donald Trump’s surprise victory in the 2016 election. Nevertheless, it quickly entered the panoply of books, with Vice President JD Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” among them, that provided insight into a new era of not only American but Western politics. The book’s success, even featured on former President Barack Obama’s list of recommended books, ⁠catapulted Deneen⁠ to one of the most prominent academic figures in the West and his ideas to the forefront of America’s most contentious political debates. Much has happened in the years since “Why Liberalism Failed” was published. Liberalism managed to claw back power, first through undermining Trump’s agenda at almost every turn from within, and then through the empty vessel of former President Joe Biden. Yet, Trump was able to mount a surprising return in 2024 with a new resolve to dismantle the forces of liberalism concentrated in Washington, D.C. Deneen joined ⁠“The Signal Sitdown”⁠ this week to discuss what future lies beyond liberalism. Keep Up With The Daily Signal   Sign up for our email newsletters:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.dailysignal.com/email⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠     Subscribe to our other shows:    The Tony Kinnett Cast: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2284199939⁠ The Signal Sitdown: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL2026390376⁠   Problematic Women:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL7765680741⁠   Victor Davis Hanson: ⁠https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9809784327⁠     Follow The Daily Signal:    X:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠https://x.com/intent/user?screen_name=DailySignal⁠ Instagram:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/thedailysignal/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Facebook:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.facebook.com/TheDailySignalNews/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  Truth Social:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://truthsocial.com/@DailySignal⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠  YouTube:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠    Subscribe on your favorite podcast platform and never miss an episode. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, Bradley Devlin here, politics editor of The Daily Signal, and I'm excited to share this episode of my show with The Daily Signal with you. The Signal Sitdown is one of the Daily Signal's other podcasts, and each show I bring you inside the biggest battles in Washington, D.C., with some of the biggest names in politics. So if you like what you hear today, make sure you subscribe to the Signal Sitdown for weekly episodes.

We'll see you there. As long as liberalism co-existed with sort of non-liberal institutions and practices and religion and family life and culture, liberalism was not fully itself. And that way, I think when people are sort of nostalgic for the good old days of liberalism, they're thinking of a kind of mixed, a certain kind of mixed regime in a way, liberalism that was not itself thoroughly liberal. But as the kind of ideological commitments and logic of liberalism unfolded and certainly accelerated in the last 30, 40, 50 years, I think we see the kind of catastrophe that it leaves in its wake. Thank you so much for tuning into The Signal Sitdown. But before we get to the interview, we'd love it if you'd hit that like and subscribe button on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you may be joining us. And please remember to give us a five-star review because we love your feedback. Remember, it's your government, and together we'll expose how it really works and how to affect real change.

Without further ado, here's the interview. Patrick Deneen, welcome to The Signal Sit Down. Thanks. Thanks for having me. So, this might sound like an old question for you. Why did liberalism fail? It is an old question, but it's never easy to answer because we're talking about, obviously, a very big topic. But I guess to give something of the usual answer, and we can go from there. Liberalism failed not because it failed to live up to itself, but it failed because it succeeded.

In other words, the kind of ideological underpinnings of liberalism, which advances the idea of human life lived in accordance with the sovereign, the choices of the sovereign will must be thoroughly liberated, must be liberated from all bonds, arbitrary limitations, limitations of other human beings, limitations of nature, limitations of inheritance. And so as long as liberalism coexisted with sort of non-liberal institutions and practices and religion and family life and culture, liberalism was not fully itself. And that way, I think when people are sort of nostalgic for the good old days of liberalism, they're thinking of a kind of mixed, a certain kind of mixed regime in a way,

liberalism that was not itself thoroughly liberal. But as the kind of ideological commitments and logic of liberalism unfolded and certainly accelerated in the last 30, 40, 50 years, I think we see the kind of catastrophe that it leaves in its wake. And not to take any credit for these observations, this has really just worked over Alexis de Tocqueville and what Tocqueville in many ways feared from what he called democracy, but was liberal democracy.

It's our own internal tendencies working themselves out over time. So I think it's really just re-articulating some very, very old anticipations that have figures like Tokeville recognized as a real danger. And of course, my first question in reference to your book that is what some eight years ago published, why liberalism failed, made quite a splash. People weren't thinking in terms of liberalism, the post-liberalism. It was always liberalism versus conservatism or whatever other right-wingism you want to

put in conservatism's place. You mentioned, though, that liberalism failed because it succeeded. So there's an important distinction to make. Liberalism fails because objectively it's bad for the human person. That's the failure. But it succeeds. And there's a saying now that's hot on the right with kind of the more online right, the tech right, the youth right, which is, you know, a system's purpose is what it does.

and that's kind of what you seemed to lay out vis-a-vis liberalism, not only in your answer, but in the more thorough work in your book that preceded regime change was it actually succeeds. The system is doing what it's supposed to do. The system that you could describe us living in right now, even with the Trump administration in place, What are the characteristics of this successful liberal system? What type of dangers does it pose to everyday Americans? Well, I think, you know, conservatives who have been talking for many, many years about aspects of, you could say, the conservative way of life collapsing, almost maybe not even in spite of the fact

we've had conservative electoral victories or electoral victories by political figures that self-described as conservative. You know, everything from Reagan 1, Reagan 2, George H.W. Bush, George W. Bush, Trump one, and now Trump 2, there's been this kind of sense of even when one wins, one's still losing. That the things, the aspects, the ways of life that one might describe as kind of traditionalist, conservative, the way of life that, you know, that J.D. Vance described in his book, Hillbilly Elegy. represented a kind of news to the world, news to the coasts, that life was catastrophic in the kind of heartland, that the kind of traditional ways of life were being eviscerated by a whole series of phenomena. Economic globalization, the kind of raising of the manufacturing sector, the outsourcing of labor, the weakening of religious and communal ties, the devastation of family life, the lack of marriage,

the lack of children, a kind of generational inherited condition of just the inability to become an adult in many ways. And this was news to a lot of people on the coasts who weren't necessarily paying attention. They would fly over, fly over country and not stop in between unless they had to layover in Chicago. ago. So even as you had these supposed political victories, we saw a kind of hollowing out of the culture, we saw a kind of coarsening of the culture, you know, popular culture becoming increasingly pornographic. You know, we would not permit our children to watch the Disney Channel growing up because we just immediately noticed it was just ripe with sarcasm and sort of mockery of the adults in the room.

So this kind of smart alec ethos became predominant. And so in that sense, the system, what's the phrase? The system? The purpose of a system is what it does. Is what it does. And the purpose of the system of liberalism is to do what it did, which was to free us, which was to liberate us from these limiting conditions. And it turns out that this does not comport.

with human flourishing. And in this book, regime change, part of what I talk about is how this sort of devastation of these traditional forms of association, institutions, practices, actually benefited a class in our society. It wasn't all bad, in a sense, if you want to put it in sort of raw, objective terms of power and wealth. It actually benefited the people who, you know,

who kind of enjoyed life going through the modern university system. elites like us, you know, who negotiated that system well, who benefit from the kinds of work that, you know, we're doing, the kind of mental work, the work of the mind, the work of what Robert Reich once called symbolic analysts, sort of moving symbols and figures around on paper or in media. But what it didn't do is serve people well who were, again, in the heartland, who tended to do well moving around physical things. Right. The trades and so forth.

So what we really did was to create the system created a bifurcated system or the system that did what it did was really beneficial to a class in our society. You know, the elites, what we describe as the elites now, who increasingly adopted a strategy of claiming to be the strongest defenders of egalitarianism, even as they built out the system in which you had radical and growing radical inequality, not just monetary. In many ways, the monetary side of it's maybe not the most important side of it. It was the cultural side of it, which it turns out you could replace those forms of kind of cultural norms and cultural practices. you could replace that by essentially making it into a luxury good.

And, you know, people who get to hang out in the D.C. suburbs know this well, right? I mean, our kids grew up in northern Virginia doing travel soccer and taking part in all kinds of, you know, activities that we were very fortunate. I was a Georgetown professor at the time, and, you know, we could get them into those kinds of activities. But these are the kinds of activities that increasingly became out of reach of our less fortunate fellow citizens who were not, you know, did not benefit from these advantages. All the while, the people who were occupying these elite positions became the most strenuous ardent defenders of a certain kind of egalitarianism that served as something of a shroud to their

own advantages, a kind of shroud masking their own advantages, even even to themselves. And so, you know, Of course, we've gone through this period of woke and identity of politics, and there are lots of explanations for it. But one of the simplest explanations is this was a way for elites to avoid having to talk about class. Because the political left was once defined and defined itself as the political movement that sought to redress the differences and the distance between the classes. And what you'll notice in the last decade, 15 years, is the left almost completely abandoned that in the name of defending the equality through identity politics. And so it kind of became a form of sort of, you say, self-serving class, a kind of self-defense mechanism. And interestingly enough, I mean, we've had many people talk about the case-shaped recovery since the 2008 Great Recession, where the elites end up OK, ask. that owning people end up okay.

People talk about an asset bubble right now. And of course, the middle class family, the working class family, did not see their wealth, their livelihoods, their standard of living, recover or improve after the Great Recession in 2008. And it's interesting that over the last decade, decade and a half where you said they focused on more immutable characteristics like race or gender. to cement some kind of divide in American society and to obscure the elite versus common man, the elite versus populist division. The common man now became one of the redouts of privilege.

Right. Right. Right. And you have that shift even when inequality in this country is continuing to, increase to levels that the American experiment has not dealt with before. Do you think if this level of inequality continues at pace, there will be a reversion back on the left to matters of economic class? Or do you think that they are so entrenched in the divisions based on gender, race, sexuality that they can't move back to a kind of working class? You know, we talk a lot

about working class conservatism. And until further notice, right, until I see a democratic politician with the charisma and ability to talk to working class Americans, I'm not super concerned about the working class leaving the right and going to the left. I'm worried about the working class not turning out during a midterm or not turning out when President Trump's on the ballot, but I'm not worried about them running to an AOC candidacy in 2008. Does that make sense?

It absolutely makes sense. And I grew up in New England, an Irish Catholic, and it was, you know, you were Irish, you were Catholic, and you were a Democrat. And not even necessarily in that order. Pretty close to that order, though. And so for me, it's been really quite a kind of very personal for me to see the Democratic, the old Democratic Party abandon its kind of working class roots, which, you know, took decades to kind of accomplish.

And there's, of course, really interesting story there that has a lot to do with the civil rights movement, the way in which the Democratic Party saw, especially the working class becoming resistant to certain aspects. Bussing was a big part of that, the kind of social engineering side to this. So there was a long, decades-long transformation that took place. Right. And it's interesting that the civil rights movement is situated in that period of time when economic mobility was really high. Yeah. Because it's difficult to divide a population. on the basis of economic class when you have high levels of economic mobility.

Yeah. It just is. Yeah. At the same time, of course, you had, you still had very traditional way of life amid that kind of opportunity. So the New England that I grew up in was still a very traditional society. It was transforming. It was changing.

And I would say like the sort of Catholic ghetto. ethos was quickly evaporating as the opportunities to leave behind, you know, the limitations of what it once was to be an Irish Catholic in which that became possible. But all that said is, it's striking to me now that one is far more likely to encounter discussions of class and class inequality and class injustice on the political right now than on the political left. That that conversation is almost entirely shifted from the not notional left to the notional right. And it makes me really kind of wonder in some ways, what are these, what does this left, right divide even mean now? Because I'm not the first person to notice that in many respects,

what we now think of as the, you know, the conservative Republican Party has embraced a lot of the core commitments of what used to be the old Democratic Party, you know, working class commitments, protecting manufacturing, you know, defense of certain kinds of traditional values, which was not left coded. Back when I was growing up, it was still, you know, fairly, it was possible to be a pro-life Democrat, to be a traditional religious Democrat in ways. So we've seen a real transformation in the last several decades, in which in particular the those who were once the defenders of the ordinary citizen have to switch places. And the institutions that once saw themselves as in some ways where the elites saw a kind of responsibility of a kind of old-fashioned

nobles oblige have now become the strongest accusers and even kind of dismissive toward ordinary citizens as as people who are the, you know, in many ways, well, you know, the deplorables, the people who are irredeemably backwards and need to be, you know, put into re-education camps. Right. By the suggestion of one former presidential candidate. So, so, yeah, we've seen a real transformation and we're left now with a real question of, you know, is the, is this realignment, is this realignment kind of going to become a fundamental

fact of American politics going forward. Your question is, can I imagine a world in which the left attempts to reclaim that ground? And I would say if they had any good sense, they would attempt to. But I don't know whether, you know, having now been educated in these institutions and shaped by these deep pervasive assumptions of what it is to be an enlightened, woke person, whether that's going to be a possibility for the, you know, for the future candidates in the Democrats. Party. Right. And a perfect example of this is what's happening in New York City right now, where during that primary debate, you know, it was Eric Adams and Cuomo arguing about who had been to Israel more and who is more sympathetic to the Jewish community in Israel and in New York City. Of course,

New York City, large Jewish population has a lot of ties back in Israel. But Zaron Mamdami, you know, to our shock said, you know, I'm more interested in what's happening in New York City. I'm more interested about the crime problem. I'm more interested in the affordability problem. Every single question that he's asked, he pivots back to the affordability problem, which is a class problem at the end of the day. But at the same time, you see from his social media presence now and previously, and his public stances on policing, his public stances on, foreign affairs to the extent that he, you know, he's very anti-Israel, of course, that's not a very large surprise.

Kind of this, the hot thing on university campuses right now is on Mamdami. Yeah, sure. And so you can see this tension where he's trying to talk about working class issues, but he's unable to fully go in because the coalition, the fragile coalition that is the Democratic Party starts to crack up if you actually go all in on these working class issues. Yeah. Of course, I mean, you know, maybe the most telling point is that if you look at the income distribution of the primaries, the people in the who would be the more working class. At Desjardin, we speak business. We speak startup funding and comprehensive game plans.

We've mastered made-to-measure growth and expansion advice, and we can talk your ear. off about transferring your business when the time comes. Because at Desjardin business, we speak the same language you do, business. So join the more than 400,000 Canadian entrepreneurs who already count on us and contact Desjardin today. We'd love to talk, business. Part of the electorate, the Democratic Party electorate in the New York primary, they voted for Cuomo. You know, Staten Island voted overwhelmingly for Cuomo. So oddly enough, socialism, which was supposed to be the, you know, the economic way to redress the class issues, has become an upper class, again, a kind of interesting luxury good, the upper class. That's certain percentile voted for Cuomo, but then slightly

below that. I mean, I don't, like you call it the working poor, right? They were leaning towards momdami. And then also you had Uber elites on the Upper West side or whatever leaning towards I mean, that is kind of the Democratic Party. That is the Democratic Party. And if you start, and Emily Zhizinski pointed this out to me when we were talking about Mamdani on the show is that as soon as you start to pivot away from the virtue signaling, the cultural messaging that the Uber elite donor class batch of voters in New York City want you to be talking about and focus on those issues, you lose funding, you lose that voter base.

But if you go too deep in on what. socialites want you to say at these fundraising events in the Upper West Side, Upper East Side, then you lose that working poor vote. And it's a multiracial working poor vote. We've seen this with the Trump phenomenon as well. They're whites. They're Puerto Ricans. They're Jewish. They're all sorts of all sorts of different races and ethnicities. And that's, that's, I think, a problem that they won't easily escape. But previously you mentioned And Hillbilly Elogy, J.D. Vance, your book, Why Liberalism Fails, comes out. That's not a memoir, of course. It's more of a product of political theory of drawing on to Tokeville and all those other insights about liberalism and democracy, particularly in the American system and in Europe. That's a work of the academy. And then, of course, J.D. Vance's book, a memoir. And it's interesting to see. that book come out around the same time, both of your books trying to, well, were credited

with explaining the Trump phenomenon in some capacity. And the critiques of your book and also J.D.'s memoir are similar in another way as well, where the two critiques of J.D.'s of J.D.'s book were by some, this is too libertarian. You're saying that they have to have personal responsibility and pull themselves up by their bootstraps, even when you lay out in your memoir all these various political realities or policy decisions from Washington, D.C., that hollowed out the heartland, right? There has to be a political solution. And then the other critique was that, you know, J.D. Vance is calling for state intervention. into everything to solve the problems of the American heartland, right?

Both of those things cannot be true at once and as is often the case with very complex political problems, the answer is in the middle. There are certain elements of society in America's heartland that needs to be reinvigorated and to retake responsibility, take up the mantle of their own lives and their own decision-making, and also So there needs to be policies that need to be adjusted, change, rectified for them to have a chance at success in the long term. Similarly, similarly with your book, you were accused of wanting the state to do everything and that in your solutions chapter towards the end of the book, you're caught in this normative trap of liberalism. That you're still fairly open to freedom of speech, freedom of religion, you know, these types of freedoms, freedoms. that we would call liberal, but at the same time, you're saying these look differently

in a properly ordered and more traditional society. So I'm sure there's a question that follows this question. Yeah. Can I actually just, I actually want to address, I think an interesting, I hadn't thought of juxtaposing the response to these two books before, but there's another element that strikes me, which is that both of the books, obviously probably very different audiences, J.D's book sold a huge number. But they were not, neither book was coded conservative out of the, you know, out of the gate.

They had a readership. Both books had readerships that span the left, right divide and which people said they really appreciated. Just learning from those two respective books, aspects of American political life, American cultural life, that they just simply have. hadn't thought of before that they hadn't really reflected on before. You know, it's been often mentioned that the Weiler-Bosom-Failed book was read and recommended by Barack Obama in the summer after it came out, which was a surprise to me that it made his recommended summer reading list. But it didn't surprise me because out of the gate, the book, like J.D.'s book, appealed across the political spectrum because people, I think at that moment in 2016, there was a kind of of openness to saying, well, what's happening? How do we understand this? And it wasn't all

being framed or understood in starkly partisan terms. And so even the way that you asked this question and how people responded to it, there's a way in which that response changed. And even people's memory of their responses changed several years afterwards. Once J.D. becomes a senator, runs for Senate in Ohio. Once, frankly, J.D. picks up my book, and then I become, you know, increasingly associated with J.D. and other Trump-Trump-related political figures and become more vocally supportive of this populist uprising against the sort of the liberal elites. The retrospective recollection of how people are.

responded to those books, I think, changed. But that's a reflection in many ways of a kind of, you know, you could say this is a new closing of the American mind, which is that it's very difficult now for people to think about these ideas, qua ideas that aren't automatically, you know, just coded according to where, you know, where we are vis-a-vis Trump or where we are vis-a-vis the current Republican and Democratic Party, which I think is, you know, there was a sort of promising moment there where it seemed like there was the possibility. of a mutually respectful exploration of what how has our country reached this this kind of plight that we're in right now and that evaporated fairly quickly under the kind of you know

the right basically the reaction of of our political social order to to donald trump no and it's and it's a very interesting point that you bring up because for the critiques on either side of jd eb's book and either either side of your book they were made by both liberals yes and conservative. That's right. Right. So some liberals were saying you're trusting too much that these people will pick themselves up by their bootstraps. This is this is a libertarian book, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And some conservatives as well were saying your wish casting that these people will take responsibility and pick themselves up by their bootstraps. In the case of my, that's more JD's. In the case of my book, it was more, I was a kind of, my book that while liberalism failed was more

kind of pox on both your houses argument that both the left and the right were essentially liberal. And the operative side of liberalism that always won on the left was the sort of sexual liberation. And the operative side of the right that always won was the libertarian economic side. So each of the political parties had a non-liberal or a less liberal dimension. In the case of the Democratic Party, it's kind of what it once was its working class interest in economic justice and fairness. And on the right, it's concerned with family values and the kind of cultivation of communal norms and so forth. But that side almost never won. In fact, that side consistently lost, in part, and the argument of the book, was because of the other side, the liberal side that was winning, was actually undermining the kind of, you know, so in the case of Republicans, the free market,

ethos, I recognize I'm here in the Heritage Foundation building. But the free market ethos was at least insignificant part, one of the factors that undermined the kind of communal life that J.D. was describing the effects of in Ohio. So the left and the right loved half of the book, and they hated half of the book. It was just a different half. They loved and hated. Right. Well, and the question that I was getting to is, you know, we see this on display a lot in political conversations now. There's not only clashes of ideas, but clashes of style. If you run into someone who's much more politically theory-oriented versus someone who's much more news or cultural-oriented, those people, if they're put into debate, are not only going to clash over different ideas, but they're going

to clash over styles. And I don't think it's a mistake that these books have similarly juxtapose critiques. One comes from personal experience, memoir, J.D. Vance, when he was writing this book, had graduated from law school and was working in the tech industry. And you, a work of political theory in the academy. I don't think it's a mistake. The connection between, I guess, technology and the academy in, you know, two different connections. in the coal mine that invite a whole bunch of conversation and or criticism for pointing this out. I mean, I mean, it makes sense to me in a pre-rational way that the academy and tech would be, you know, two people from those worlds would be pushing this conversation into the political mainstream when

it wasn't there previously. Well, you know, I first met J.D. before he, before he held political office. This was around that time when he's working. I don't know if he was still in the tech world at that point, but he was considering entering the Catholic Church, and he'd read my book, and he was very interested in the argument of the book and the way that it, the points of contact between arguments of the book and Catholic social teaching. And that's what he wanted to sit down and talk with me about.

So we first really got to know each other talking about the sort of high-level philosophical and even theological aspects of the book. But I think we also found that we had, if not really similar biographies, I wouldn't compare my own upbringing, which was very different, very stable family, very kind of idyllic New England town. But the sense of loss that we both feel,

I certainly feel when I go back to my hometown, just to see the kind of the way of life has been eviscerated by, you know, big box stores. the devastation of the insurance industry in Hartford, Connecticut, and just the sense of how, you know, powers far outside of where we grew up ended up really destroying the places where we grew up. And so I think there's a point of contact between the high theory and the sort of the load of the ground experience, biographical experience, that in this case brought those two books and then those two authors together in conversation.

And that's a conversation that J.D. and I had for a number of years as he then became senator and then now as vice president. Now tell us about that initial conversation and those touch points that he was interested in that you point to with while liberalism failed in Catholic social teaching. What are the relationship between those two things? I would be lying if I said I can remember every specific of our first several conversations. This was quite a few years ago. He didn't have a beard. He had very baby face. I look back in those pictures we took together. He was a pretty well-known author at that point,

so I was plattered that he wanted to speak with me. But as I, as I recall those conversations, he was just very interested in the way in which the broadly critique of liberalism on both the left and the right drew on this. this longer tradition of Catholic social teaching that teaches us, I mean, going all the way back to Aristotle, teaches us that we're social and political animals and that we are, we understand ourselves not fundamentally as creatures described in, you know, Hobbs or Locke as creatures in the state of nature, that in our natural condition, if we could imagine ourselves in a natural condition, it would be these radically individualated autonomous selves, these sovereign choosing individuals, but rather when we think of ourselves, we rightly think of ourselves as part of a fabric

of human beings, beginning, of course, most obviously with the family, but emanating outwards to all of the, not only the people in our communities, in our churches, and our synagogues, and our wider communities, our universities, our schools, but also as parts of long inheritance. is the Burkean, right, the social contract that includes the dead, the living, and the not yet born. And that to think of our lives as anything but a kind of a thread in a very large, much larger fabric is to misconceive of who we are. And I think that just recognize the way that the kind of contemporary formation of the left and the right both were based on a flawed understanding of human nature as the human being ideally is right.

radically individualed self. Either on the left as this sovereign chooser of our identities, you know, ultimately like with trans being maybe the furthest most example of that, and our sexual identities requiring the maximal individual freedom possible. And of course, the right imagining us as these sovereign economic actors that ideally operate in this frictionless marketplace that heritage. This used to be Heritage's view, that a frictionless marketplace in which any choice we made was unobstructed by any other sort of influence, governmental and otherwise.

Those conversations were at the heart of what J.D. wanted to talk about. And I think it helps us to understand why he maybe more than any other figure has, I think, articulated how the new right understands public policy, the way in which our economic thinking and our social thinking draw on that deeper tradition of thinking of ourselves of ourselves as enmeshed in you know kind of duties and responsibilities that extend outside of ourselves and so the common good becomes you know the the way in which we evaluate these kinds of decisions not as aggregates of individual choices but how our choices themselves right are are both contributing to and drawing from a well that's that's larger than ourselves you mentioned

You mentioned the Birkian quote. I think as someone who's spent most of his career working with and operating with paleo-cons. I mean, my favorite encapsulation is a Chesterton quote, which is tradition is the democracy of the dead. Democracy of the dead. I love that line. It's such a great line. And it brings tradition into something that is not separate from politics. I think too often we, you know, culture is downstream for politics or however, you know, people are quick.

to liken culture to politics, but they are quick to think of tradition as something farther away, both temporally and spiritually from politics itself. And that really brings it back into the conversation in a powerful way. The subtitle of this book that's sitting here in front of us, regime change is towards a post-liberal future. We've been dancing around the topic as we talk about liberalism, but I'll give you the opportunity to define post-liberalism. What is it?

Because this is funny, I was talking to my wife yesterday about this. My former student. Yes, your former student, how I know you. Whose name is prominently at the beginning of this book, who assisted me in the completion of the book. Yes, and we were talking about this yesterday, and it was actually a point that Robert Reich, when you mentioned earlier when I was a student of his at UC Berkeley, brought up to me. I didn't know this. Yes. Not a close pupil, but I took his class and got to know him a little

bit. Frankly, you know, he, I think he has some ludicrous takes, but I will never forget when he would send me emails when members of the Berkeley College Republicans or members of conservative groups on campus would be assaulted or attacked or have their speech suppressed. You'd always send me an email kindly saying that he sympathizes, empathizes, and is supporting of me. So he brought up to me, you know, he had this class on globalization. He's just, it's hard to have even a conversation about global globalization now because it was a term that meant so much so early on and then was so overused that it doesn't mean anything anymore. And you can say that same thing about neoconservatism. Right. And about post-liberalism.

Yeah. Because everybody has a take sure on post-liberalism. Little did, little did I know or anticipate now. this term is everywhere. It's become one of the touch points of either what it is we fear or what it is we want, but it is become very much part of the political parlance of our day. I guess I would just say to begin by saying that it's sort of if if my thesis is correct that liberalism has failed, we are already in a post liberal future. I mean, and I think that's a matter of fact throughout I think it is political theory. I think that's true. I think we are in a post liberal future. In the sense that certainly, if we look at the Republican Party, and again, Heritage being a good case and point, we are no longer in a world of the neoliberal belief that the free market will solve all problems.

And that the aim and ambition of all of our politics is simply to eliminate government and to free us into this libertarian paradise. The Democratic Party is still struggling with its own libertarian, its orthodoxies. but, you know, as we've already noted, there is this sort of socialist wing of the Democratic Party that's gaining steam and gaining strength. It's also the case that I think even in the last few years, the woke experience with wokeness has shown us that even so-called liberals are no longer liberal. That's the sort of the orthodoxies of liberalism were things such as free speech and free expression and freedom of religion and those basic, you know, John Stuart Mill's harm principle and allow people to hold views and articulate claims, regardless of what they might be, so long as no one was harmed in the conversation. And the left, the progressive left, has ceased, as many have noted,

has become an illiberal liberalism or an illiberal left. So factually, we're post-liberal. We've passed, you know, if 1989 was the high water mark, or 2001 was the high water mark, whatever, whenever you think the end of history ended, we are past that now. And I think we're past that. I can't make predictions necessarily about the future. It's really hard to predict the future. But I think we're past the high watermark of liberal ideology and practice. So this is an interesting distinction that you're making, where you're making a distinction between post-liberalism.

Yes. As in post-liberalism versus a post-liberal era or time period, much like modernity versus modernism. Yeah. So I think in one sense, you could say we are in a post-liberal era simply because the high-water mark of liberalism has been passed. And now... Now, in that reflecting earlier, and I'm sorry to interrupt you again,

but reflecting earlier on that conversation, that high watermark of liberalism being liberal impulses controlled or channeled or mediated by traditional institutions that actually made the system work, where it was a more successful version of it. I would say that what we're past is once all of those pre-liberal inheritances had been purified, the system does. A.K. Destroyed. Yes. Then the clear sort of inhumanity of living in that condition. And the sort of unbearableness of that for especially our ordinary common man who simply was not thriving under conditions of globalization and borderlessness and sexual anarchy and communal devastation and family breakdown, that, politically that meant it was over.

Okay, so a post-liberal era in terms of liberalism has won. It won and it lost, right? Because, you know, I think 2016, of course, was the critical year because Donald Trump ran against left liberalism. Sorry, he ran against right liberalism first, you know, defeating Jeb Bush and the old Marco Rubio and basically the whole gang that thought it was going to sort of run the show forever on the Republican side. And then he defeated left liberalism in the form of Hillary Clinton and then later on with Kamala. So that, so post-liberalism then is what does, what do we do now that we are living in the wreckage of the kind of the high water mark of liberalism? And I would say that there are now contending post-liberalisms. Which is why I brought up the globalism point because there's so many different strains of globalism.

And so there's a lot of different strains of post-liberalism. So I would put three on the table. There's the one that I just mentioned. It's the attempt to reconstitute wokeness as the kind of currency of the left's form of post-liberalism to say that we, you know, there are, we no longer need to hold to the old, the old commitments and orthodoxies of the liberal tradition. because the purpose of our vision of what the ideal human life is, is one in which any obstacle to self-making has been overcome. And therefore, there are lots of things you're not permitted to say. There are lots of things you're not permitted to believe.

This is the kind of censorship regime, the cancellation regime, all of the things that we've seen in the last number of years. And if we look, you know, for example, just what this morning or two days ago or yesterday, you know, England is arresting people for making unacceptable jokes. And so post-liberalism in that sense, in the sort of leftist progressive sense, is alive and well in parts of the world. And I think Europe is going to have to go through this post-liberal moment in lots of ways. Then there's a post-liberalism of the kind of alt-right, which is, you know, a kind of, you know, the manosphere, that's the tech bro. It's the, it's the libertarian post-liberalism side,

which it's, you know, maybe the best instantiation or version of a way to summarize that would be someone like Curtis Yarvin who sees the need, basically, we need to eliminate democracy, we need to have a kind of a CEO to run America, essentially a kind of of we will gain liberty through tyranny or through a kind of despotism, that a good despot will give us thoroughgoing liberty. So it's an odd thing to say we need authoritarianism to ensure liberty because ordinary people don't want to be free. So two very different, complete rejections of a mixed regime. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And then I would say the alternative that I would propose would be a very distinct form of post-liberalism, which would be to

reject the libertarianism of the left and the libertarianism of the right. And so I really think that the coming years are going to be a contestation of these three kinds of post-liberalisms. And stay tuned. I want to ask you something about the post-liberalism of the left. one thing that you pointed out to me in a conversation we had earlier was the origins of critical theory critical theory obviously playing a big role not only in your local school but also in animating or providing the philosophical foundation for the politics of woke that we see played out every day in the Democratic Party It wasn't

Super fringe left-wing scholars That the creators of critical theory were citing It was classical liberals So Obviously critical theory has been along for decades And now has finally taken The helm of the Democratic Party But at what point, because they're drawing

on this classical inheritance, which I want you to speak to, at what point does that become post-liberal? Isn't wokeism just a continuation of liberalism succeeding? Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, so it's, yeah, these are maybe a little bit semantic, but you could say that liberalism built into liberalism is its own sort of its own post-liberal sort of outcome. And that's particularly visible on the left today, the progressive left today. So what you're referring to is the critical theorist whom a lot of conservatives have been turning to as the, in order to understand the origins of wokeness and identity of politics, is Herbert Marcuse.

He was sort of the air of a certain German tradition, Marxist tradition, in particular the Frankfurt School. Mark Levine calls the Franklin School. The Franklin School, that's right. Now, the Frankfurt School was an effort to revise Marxism, which they recognized just orthodox, particularly orthodox economic Marxism, wasn't working out. The revolution wasn't working out. You know, Soviet Union was not the vision of some sort of earthly utopia. And in fact, the working classes weren't all that revolutionary.

You know, the case in point being the New York primary that we just talked about that, the sort of, you know, the proletariat were not necessarily the most revolutionary element of the society. Right. Andrew Cuomo killed your grandmother, but you still for him in the prime. Amazing. So this was an effort to revise Marxist thought that began to jettison a lot of the economic presuppositions of Marxism and kept what we now describe or what many on the right describe as cultural Marxism. So how does one ensure a kind of revolutionary society if it's not going to be affected through this kind of bottom-up revolutionary overturning of the economic order and the bringing in of a kind of communist paradise. And Marcuz is the kind of the figure that

really devises what he understands to be. The revolutionary aspect of society will be largely driven by elites. It will be driven by university faculty and elites in cultural institutions. and it will be particularly directed against the conservative impulses of ordinary people. Marcusa concludes that the ordinary people, far from being revolutionary, actually are quite conservative. They kind of want to live these orderly traditional ways of life. And they resist the revolutionary impulse. And so the revolution will have to come from above. It will take place in the universities.

and what's needed to affect that revolution is to silence conservative voices, is to be aggressively, aggressively seeking to disallow conservatives from having any kind of influence in the political order. This is all written in an essay, a very famous essay that Marcuse wrote called Repressive Tolerance, that tolerance could be extended only and not beyond the point in which unacceptable opinions, in this case, conservative opinions. Right, no tolerance for intolerance. That's right.

Now, the figure that Marcusa cites 13 times in his essay is not Karl Marx, and it's not any figures in the Frankfurt School. It's John Stuart Mill. So built within the classical liberal tradition itself and, and, Mill is really the key figure here, is the idea that liberalism can in a sense only succeed once it has effectively eliminated any obstacle to liberalism to the true liberation of human beings from any longer exercising any kind of rule or authority. I mean, Mill's quite clear that in his essay on liberty, that the aim of liberty is not

simply liberty for liberty's sake. of liberty is to ensure progress and progress is affected by overcoming and overturning tradition. So it was an anti-traditional project from the outset. And if tradition continues as an obstacle, then toleration cannot be extended to those backward people. And so liberty is not, in Mill's mind, a disposition to will the good, right? No, a more substantial Catholic. like Christian version of vision of freedom. Sure. Yeah. No, in Mills, I guess I suppose in his defense at some level, he believed, I mean, he had a kind of, I would say a kind of evolutionary view of the good, which is that only through a kind of progress of overcoming tradition would the kind of the truest

and the best form of humanity come forth. And of course, what's quite interesting, again, most classical liberals didn't like or ignore this side of Mill. But he thought the outcome of our would be that we were communistic creatures, right? That we would no longer be self-interested and we would not be inclined to be capitalistic. So Mill's classical liberalism has always been embraced very partially by erstwhile conservatives. In fact, in many ways, there's a much closer alignment between what we today call cultural Marxism and classical liberalism, which has tended to be ignored by the contemporary right. Going to the other form of what might be called dangerous post-liberalism,

this transhumanist right, the threats there. I think everyone feels the threat to human dignity, whether that's through AI or whether that's through chips in your brain or however they want to cook this thing up. Talk about the threats and how the threats to human dignity might actually materialize. I don't think we've ever been faced with the possibility that maybe the thing that makes us most human is are, you know, what the Greeks called logos, are the aspect of humanity in which we think and really. and deliberate and reflect, philosophize, write literature and poetry. So the story of technology for much of human history has been in many ways to make up for

at some points to replace what we might regard as the less, maybe not that which does not define us as human beings, which is our physicality, the animal form of us, right? We used to have to use, like, one of our technologies was to figure out how to domesticate and then use animals to make up for the lack of muscle power of human beings. So oxen plowing fields and then, you know, using the internal combustion engine. And in many ways, you know, that if you think back to arguments and justifications for these developments of technology, this would liberate us to do the more human thing that constitutes It's what we are as human beings.

It would free us, you know, if you think of Joseph Piper's great essay, leisure the basis of culture. It would allow us leisure that thereby we could create culture, that essential human phenomenon. Right. It's why the city is the fundamental unit of politics for Aristotle. It's not just about surviving. It's about the fullness of human capacity.

And we should also remember that this is the reason that Aristotle justifies, actually goes so forth, to justify the existence of slavery. So slavery exists because we would have no leisure otherwise. Some human beings have to essentially labor, do the work of the beasts, so that other human beings can have the ability to have leisure and to think and to philosophize. And in Aristotle's favor, he says, well, were it possible for us like Hephaestus to fashion tripods that could walk and bring light to wherever you needed it in a room, then we wouldn't, you know, we wouldn't need to have this kind of human labor. So he does, you know, he does, you know,

he's carving out all sorts of avenues all the time. Absolutely. The abolition of slavery. Yeah, that's that that's right. So he, he understands that maybe we would technologically be able to sort of, you know, substitute for these forms of, you know, what are, what are degrading forms of human labor. And frankly, it's not only slaves, he says, farmers, you know, are basically essentially a form of degraded human existence because most of their lives are lived in a kind of drudgery, which at that, certainly at that time was certainly true. So all of these forms of technological development have been, you could say, in one way or another, oriented us to, with the aim of making us more human if we define humanity as that which is especially related to that

to that quality of thinking, of intelligence, of logos. Now, I personally and many conservatives over the years have been critical of this undertaking as already undermining or dismissing an aspect of our humanity that is actually central to who we are. It's a Gnostic dream to say that we're just minds and not bodies. That's actually the literal definition of what Gnosticism is. And so I've always been very fond of

and commended the work of Wendell Berry, the work of, well, Matthew Crawford has written on this eloquently in his book, Shop Class of Soulcraft. There's a long tradition in the conservative, I think, panoply of people who were concerned and critical of this Gnostic form of thinking. But nevertheless, a recognition that technology was the human condition. I mean, we are the homotechne, maybe more than homo sapient. We're the creature that can only exist because of our ability to shape, use, and deploy technology. Otherwise, we would have been wiped out.

But for the first time now, we're faced with the real prospect that possibly that distinctive aspect of our humanity, which is thinking or logos, may be replaceable. We may have a technology that can more or less do a lot of what we used to have to do ourselves. I mean, we've already been living that experiment for some years. I mean, this is going to shock you to learn that, like, I used to have to go to a library and look up books and, oh, man, the micro-feesh, that was a nightmare. So that was technology. But the technology is up to this point has not replaced the curious impulse, the questioning impulse, the inquiry. It's replaced the manual labor needed to get to the answer. We've made it easier for us to get to the

And at the moment, you know, I use GROC as a kind of search engine. It's pretty good, you know, if I need to know, you know, a certain answer to this or that question. So it's just an intensification of what we've already had. But AI, the promise of AI is to do our thinking for us, is that we won't have to think anymore. And we will now have leisure not to think. So what is leisure for, right? What will it be for? What will our leisure be for?

And less AI pornography and... Well, I think that's that certainly seems to be one of the proposed compensations for essentially displacing, replacing a lot of humanity from the kinds of work that we've had to do. Right. Is that... And government subsidized, OZemPEC and... Yeah. Now, I think there's one of the things that strikes me as quite interesting. is that we may, as a result of this, if this happens, and a lot of the kind of intellectual work

that was once needed by, you know, doctors and professors and stockbrokers and so forth, lawyers, we may see a really interesting return to the work of hands and bodies. I wouldn't be surprised if as more and more of our sort of the landscape of what it is human beings do, that a lot of the activity that we once had to do as a matter of simply work to go to the office and do these kinds of jobs, well, there will be a lot of people who occupy themselves with AI pornography. But I think there will be a growing movement of people who occupy themselves with kind of learning or relearning ancient crafts. you know, kind of being able to cultivate now, not as a matter of survival, but as a matter of just interest.

Like if I wasn't a professor full time, I would really like to learn carpentry. Right. Woodworking was the one thing that came to learn. I would really love to learn to be, you know, a craft, not just like what I do now, which is like, screwed together two pieces of wood and hope they, but to be a craftsman to be able to do that. And I wonder whether, you know, one of the, one of the ironies of what we're likely to see transpire is that we'll be increasing increasingly sort of the creatures that work with our hands as the demands in our minds decreases.

And you view that as just a natural desire for humanity to find dignity in its own work. Yeah. I don't think... It's going to be, regardless of how bad the tech situation is, you're going to do get a certain segment of the population going in that direction, finding figuring out woodworking because they need that in their life. But I do think this is going to become, you know, it's going to become the, whatever it is we do as human beings after AI, if AI ends up taking over a lot of the kind of intellective

work that we've had to do as a species, it will become a sort of minority luxury good. And that should be concerning to us as human beings. And again, I think it is another way in which the class divide will manifest itself. And the great fear is, I mean, it seems to me there's two simultaneous fears. One is one is which that we learn very quickly how to pacify a large percentage of the population through distraction, which maybe we're already being well prepared for that through life on the screen. But there's also the real possibility that pacification is not going to be complete, and that way it may give rise to a new kind of uprising from the bottom.

I don't know if that's in that kind of a new form of anti-Luddite, you know, animus against the AI overlords and destroying data centers and so forth. But I think, you know, there's lots of reasons for concern. Yeah, don't worry. We'll stop you before you go full Ted Kizins. That's right. I'm not saying me personally, but I'm fortunately old enough that I won't have to see any of this come to fruition, although it's apparently coming quite fast.

But I don't, it's not so much fear that all human dignity will be eliminated. I think what's more likely is a kind of an ever worsening form of a kind of class divide in which the level of satisfaction. Your own dignity almost looks as a luxury. Yeah, yeah, in which the level of satisfaction will be immense if you're kind of on the minority winning side in this transformation. And the level of a kind of maybe unconscious degradation will be simply incomprehensible for those who are, you know,

receiving their universal basic income and in a kind of constant state of, you know, meta glasses distraction. If someone's watching this and they're of the libertarian persuasion and they haven't already had an aneurysm, I probably want to ask a question on their behalf. And in our conversations about liberalism and post-liberaliberalism, oftentimes what we substitute what in yesteryear, we would have said freedom, right? Right. We substitute freedom with choice.

Choice maximization rather than freedom maxing. That is intentional. And that's because the post-liberal right or people of a, you don't even need to be persuaded by post-liberalism generally. But I think more of the right is latching on to an older definition of freedom that I don't think. think all these, whether it's the post-liberal strains, the nationalist strains, no one's really coalesced around this older definition of freedom yet. And so as one of my final questions to you, I want to ask you, what is your definition of freedom? What is freedom properly understood? Because I think this is the biggest question plaguing the right, right. Right. Yeah. So, well,

we actually really didn't get around to talking about my own understanding of post-liberalien, But I think this is where it fits. Yeah, this is where it comes in. So in the first instance, I would say that the definition of freedom at core is the freedom to be to choose the good. The freedom. So it is a freedom of choice. It involves choice. And it is to choose that which leads both individually to flourishing, the flourishing of a human being, which would be a kind of the

the capacity of human beings to fully develop these faculties of mind and body to the greatest extent possible in the context in which those gifts can be developed and then contributed to the betterment of those with whom we live. This is, again, the classic idea of what a calling is, that we are, God in his infinite wisdom and madness created us so that we all have these different gifts and that none of us is self-sufficient, that we are. We need others around us to make up for our own deficiencies. This is how Plato's Republic begins, which is the question. Would the best political order be one in which everyone does every job possible and therefore

can be self-sufficient or is the best political social order one in which each person focuses on one job, their work, and does so in the context in which others are doing their job? and the answer to the question and the root of what Plato describes as the nature of justice is each person doing their own work with an awareness that other people doing their work contributes to the common good. That it's not simply the Adam Smith definition of doing what you do simply out of self-interest, but the division of labor is the source of solidarity, not division. So that understanding of freedom as the development of our capacity, and then understanding how those capacities and abilities contribute to the good of the whole

means that freedom is not simply doing whatever it is we want. It is being a part of a social and political order in which we are contributors, hopefully, and in which we are self-governing, self-governing individually and self-governing politically as a political order. This means that to learn this form of freedom isn't, it's not a default mode. It's not like just take humans and default them to the state of nature. It's a learned condition. And of course, this is the classical understanding and why you have to have an education in the liberal arts. The liberal arts is the learning of what it is to be free.

You're not automatically free. You're not born free. You have to learn how to be free. It's a kind of form of discipline. You literally, when you study when you go to college, you learn disciplines. Right. That's the word. The African priest says, the discipline to will the good.

Yes, the discipline to will the good. Good priest. But it turns out that this discipline is not easy. And it needs a lot of sort of institutional forms and practices or to use the Aristotelian or to a mystic term. It needs habituation. It's not something that you're just going to get willy-nilly by luck or even by self-will.

Yeah, and this is why I struggle, like, I don't object to the definition of freedom that you've laid out, but as a matter of fact, I think I agree with it. The problem that I have with, oh, what is freedom? And then the first sentence is, the freedom is the freedom to choose the good. Well, we've just used the word freedom in the definition of freedom. And so then, okay, as you further explain and flesh out what freedom is, it starts to look synonymous, not even synonymous, more than that, it seems as if freedom and virtue are the same thing, that there is no clear distinction. Because for virtue has to be habituated, freedom has to be

habituated, freedom chosen. Here I want to be clear. Because I think there was a particularly pernicious understanding of the relationship of freedom and virtue that was advanced by Frank Meyer, the architect of fusionism. And his argument was that you can only be genuinely virtuous if you actually freely choose it. If you as an individual have freely chosen that virtue. Can I just pinch one thing right here? Yeah. Our last episode was with Dan Flynn, who just wrote a full biography of it. And I asked this question to him, this, of what Bozell says in National Review about no-fault divorce. in America versus punishment and penalties for divorce in Spain. So is the American man better for

staying with his wife and resenting her or the Spanish man who is under penalty of law if he left his wife, right? Aren't those two people both choosing the good thing by staying with their spouses? I'm not going to necessarily answer that specific question, but to come back to Meyer, the argument is that you can only be in a sense genuinely a virtue if that virtue is chosen and in the conditions that are akin to the state of nature, right, in which we have achieved gender. So you need a thoroughly liberal society where we began of complete freedom, freedom of complete choice,

and then the individuals who choose virtue have done so legitimately. And everyone else is too bad for you. Now, if you raised your children on this view, you would be an absolutely, you know, abominable parent. And if you formed a society on this space, you would have an absolutely abominable society because what you would be saying is that we are essentially those individuals who through

some kind of unique capacity are able to choose virtue in conditions of complete total libertarian freedom and everyone else who for whatever reason can't achieve the conditions of virtue. That's just character flaw. That's a horrible way to think about how we organize a human society. Rather to appeal back to the classical understanding, one seeks to form, shape, through law, through culture, through social forms, to, in a sense, put a thumb on the scale for virtue, to as you would do with your children. My wife would always say, you know, don't, don't, don't tell our son what to do, but make sure they are making the right choice.

orient them toward the right choice. So this is a kind of paternalism, of course. That's the libertarian critique of forms of virtue ethics and so forth. But every human being, in some ways, is going to be shaped and formed by their political order, inescapably. And so ought we not have a political order that seeks to shape and form people toward the good. And this is where I would say is the distinctive aspect of the post-liberalism that I would advance is how does one strengthen the kinds of institutions and the kinds of practices that are necessary to this orientation toward virtue and toward the good in a post-liberal age in which those have been significantly weak and if not destroyed. So this is, it's really, I think it's post-liberal in the sense of saying

liberalism has done its work. Post-liberalism can't simply make the old argument that if we liberate people from the state or from political authority, all good things will arise. Families will flourish and communities will flourish and civil society will flourish. This was kind of the argument of the right

for many, many years. I think it's the time, you know, if we look at the clock and see what time it is, these institutions are going to need the help of the political order. They're going to need the assistance of law. They're going to need the assistance of policy. I know Heritage, I heard Kevin Roberts at the NatCon opening plenary session in which Heritage Foundation is going to be orienting a lot of its efforts towards strengthening the American family. I think this is absolutely in line with what I would describe as a post-liberal

understanding. We are not indifferent and the law is not indifferent to the question of whether or not You marry and you have children and you stay married. And here, Bazel was right. It can't be indifferent to that question. It has to, in some ways, say there's a better and a worse. And we're going to instantiate this in law. We're going to instantiate this in what's praised and what's not praised. And this is a post-liberal order is one in which we understand that liberalism has done this work of destruction

that can only be corrected in and through, among other things, the political order itself, strengthening the institutions of civil society, even the institutions that we think of as private, such as the family. Reflecting on your vision of post-liberalism, I remember the book launch for this book in Washington, D.C. where I attended it, and it was you and then-Senator, J.D. Vance, and Kevin Roberts was there. And I believe Sorab was there. No, no, no, he had someone. You had someone from the New York. It was Christine Emba.

Christine Emba, yes. A whole bunch of who's who was there celebrating the book. We had a good time for sure. But one of the things that has stuck with me is an exchange that you had with Dr. Roberts, where Dr. Roberts said that he wanted to waterboard the administrative state. And you kind of were taking it back. And he said, I don't know if I'm comfortable with waterboarding anything. But I think what Kevin was.

was driving at then, and the question for you now is, you are... I dare say I think that Kevin Roberts has come around more to my position than I have come around to his position. Well, we're going to have to bring you both in it. That would be great. Yeah. But I think what Kevin is driving at and what you and post-liberals like you and cut from the same cloth are accused of is wanting the nanny state, you know, the paternalism that

you mentioned in your last response. the ideal size of the state in a correctly oriented post-liberal future, is it bigger or smaller than the state now? I think this is, I mean, I just don't think this is the right question. The right question is, is the particular level of government doing that which is appropriate to that level of government? And then does it have the resources and the personnel and the kind of ability to perform that? So again, this is classic Catholic social teaching, but this is Catholic social teaching beautifully conforms and I think can be articulated through the federal system

of the United States, which is that ideally, issues, problems, challenges that we face as human beings should be dealt with at the most vocal level possible. It's the level where we have the most familiarity. It's the level where we're most likely to be committed. This is kind of the Ordo Amorous debate that we went through recently with Vice President Vance, was well-schooled in this, that we are more likely to care and care deeply about the things

that are closest to us. And when we care about them, we're likely to act on behalf of them, not just to sort of wait for somebody else to do it. But local levels can't deal with every problem that they're faced with. And so then you move up to the next level, which in our case would be maybe the region or the state and then where the state can't deal with certain issues, it would move up to the next level. I agree completely with what Kevin Roberts said in his opening speech at NatCon, which is that when it comes to things like improving, hopefully, the state of the American family, we do have

50 states. And the states can and ought to be places where lots of different policies can be attempted. Let's see what works. Maybe different things will work in different states that have different cultures and different traditions, different, you know, maybe the makeup, the religious or the the basic makeup of the state might be somewhat different that might lead to different outcomes. But at the same time, I think we have to recognize that there are lots of areas in terms of strengthening family life where we're going to need the help and assistance of the federal

government. And I think in this case, the question isn't how big the government is, is it doing that job and is it doing it well? And if we need more people to hire to do that, then great. And if we need fewer people to do it, then great. But it's less a question of, is it too big, then is it doing the right things at the level and at the kind of, you know, at the level of comprehensiveness of what it should be doing? I guess that leads me into my final question for you, which is Trump's back in office.

There's a lot of conversations about executive power, a lot of conversations about separation of powers. Of course, his fight with the judiciary, his fight with certain members of the legislative branch right now when we're talking about, whether it's the Epstein files, or whether it's his use of the Alien Enemies Act when we're talking about his battle with the courts. And Russ Vote, you mentioned NatCon, that's why you're in town. This morning, Russ Vote, I think, laid out a very sound case and a sound history of the evolution or the creation of the administrative state. how Congress has ceded a lot of its legislative authority to the administrative state. And in return, how Congress has held on to its power by increasing its power over the purse strings, by asserting more of its power where this is where we get into recisions and impoundment,

et cetera, where in the past, for 200 years from George Washington and Richard Nixon, the spending levels set by the government in appropriations was essentially. ceiling. You can spend up to this much on insert program here. You can spend up to this much on purchasing new B-2 bombers. Well, after the impoundment control act, that became a floor. So in the past, the president could decide to not spend certain funds and return that to spending down the debt or return that public fist back to the public. Now we're in all sorts of interesting territory with respect to executive power. In a post-liberal future, is this power returned to Congress? It's the legislative branch in line with the kind of populist resurgence

retake its responsibilities and engage them, or is it something that is going to have to be left to the executive in a lot of ways? As in the American regime, the only officer of the federal government elected by the entire people. Yes, through the electoral college, but still, the, you know, a more Jacksonian view of the executive, a more energetic executive, as Hamilton might say. Right. Yeah, it's funny how the American executive really resembles increasingly of the kind of king position that Alexander Hamilton himself argued during the Constitution Convention. And only a few years ago, Alexander Hamilton was the hero of the left. So the ironies are thick and deep. Well, in the first instance, one of the reasons I say that Kevin Roberts

has come around more to my side of things is that I don't think he really wants to waterboard the administrative state anymore. I mean, he said so much in his speech laying out heritage's commitment to assisting, seeking out policy, exploring ways that every level of the public order, the governmental order might be able to support formation and sustenance. of family life. That without strengthening a family in this nation, this nation will literally cease to exist, but effectively cease to exist as a working political order. Without strong families, no amount of money that we spend on the defense budget is going to matter at the end of the day. So in order to do that, in order to affect that policy, you're going to need elements of the administrative state to affect that policy.

Now, it would be great also to have Congress voting on pieces of legislation. But the reality is that in the 21st century, as we move forward in this century, America is a very different country than it was in the 1780s or in the 1880s. It is a more of a national entity than it was in those days. Our economy is national, even global, are an awful lot of the issues and challenges we face, require going up to that highest level of the nation to begin to attempt to resolve those. I'm not saying far be it for me to say that every aspect can only be dealt with in the federal level. But I think for too long, conservative simply thought if we can get rid of the

administrative state, all will be well. And I think the real change that's happened in the last several years, and Donald Trump really deserves a lot of credit for this, is the, is the to abandon this shibboleth of thinking that all would be well if we get rid of government and really asking the question, how do we deploy the obvious need and resources of the federal government to do well the things it needs to do? Not simply to eliminate it. Eliminate it where you need to, but to orient it to doing well the things that it can do well, particularly toward conservative ends. So I think we've had, you know, whatever, 50, 60, 70 years, of conservative think tanks, thinking of policy for what we do to get rid of government or to

cut taxes or what you will, when what we have needed for at least that many years is thinking about what kinds of policies would strengthen the weakening of civil society, what kinds of roles can be played at the level of the federal government, state government, local government, to strengthen civil society, to strengthen the family, to strengthen those vital elements of our society, through which the formation of human beings to choose the good is most likely to occur. And I think that's the sort of post-liberal future that I hope to see, not the other versions that I mentioned. And from what I've seen thus far at this meeting of NatCon here in D.C., it seems to me that there is a coalescent, agreement that that's what's needed in the conservative movement today.

Well, we will be keeping an eye on post-liberalism in all of its forms here on this show, as we should. Professor Patrick Danone, thank you for coming on the Signal Sitdown. Thanks, Brad. That was awesome. Okay. Thank you so much for tuning into the Signal Sitdown. Before you go, be sure to hit like and subscribe on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you may be

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