The Munk Debates Podcast - Munk Dialogue with Munk Dialogue with George Will, Ash Sarkar, Jacob Rees Mogg, and Sohrab Ahmari

Episode Date: October 30, 2023

On November 3rd four debaters will take to the stage at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall to debate the crisis of liberalism. The motion is Be it Resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right.  On this Munk Dialogue, we are speaking with each of the debaters who are taking part in this important and timely debate, to get a sense of their arguments and what we can expect from them on stage at Toronto’s Roy Thomson Hall on November 3rd. Arguing for the motion is the controversial British M.P. and former cabinet minister, Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg. He will be joined by the American writer and columnist who has shaped a generation’s thinking on the important issues of our time: George F. Will. Opposing the motion is U.K. journalist, self-avowed communist and popular leftist thinker, Ash Sarkar. Her debating partner is the disruptive and thought-provoking American social conservative, Sohrab Ahmari, author of the bestseller Tyranny Inc.: How Private Power Crushed American Liberty. The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events.This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/ Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Kieran Lynch  Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

When you're a journalist and people don't trust you, it's always your fault. These people need to be represented. They are Canadian. They deserve to have a voice and a seat at the table. It is time to go back to the office, and the time is now. Russia had reasons to be concerned. They had reasons to be fearful. We're at an absolute turning point in reproduction. This is the problem with realism. They just treat all countries the same. They don't distinguish between dictatorships and democracies. Hello, monk listeners. Roger Griffiths here. and moderator, welcome to this,

our continuing conversations called The Monk Dialogues. These are in-depth questions and answers with some of the world's leading minds and brightest thinkers. We go deep into the big issues and ideas that are transforming our world and shaping the public conversation. They have a limited stake where the rights of the individual come first, and that has led to the globe's most successful economy

in all recorded history. I would then question some of the spending priorities of liberal and so-called democratic states in the West, where they've presided over an extraordinary impoverishment of their domestic populations, but always have money for wars. The primary thing that classical liberalism does, it keeps the peace.

We have a situation in which working class life expectancy is on the decline compared to anywhere else in the world that is a little bit less liberal. November 3rd in downtown Toronto, four debaters will take stage, Roy Thompson Hall to debate the crisis of liberalism. The motion before the House, if it resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right. Today we have a special monk dialogue. In fact, it's four monk dialogues, all in one. Each of the participants in this debate are going

to be represented in this program. They're going to give you a sense of their key arguments and ideas. Arguing for the motion, be it resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right. is the controversial British MP and former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg. He'll be joined by the legendary American conservative commentator and pundit who shaped a generation's thinking on issues such as liberalism, freedom, free markets, capitalism, you name it. His name is George F. Will. One great team of debaters deserves another, and here our monk debate on liberalism will not disappoint opposing the motion as UK-Germist. capitalist, self-avowed libertarian, communist, and popular leftist thinker, Ash Sarkar from the United Kingdom. Her debating partner is the thought-provoking American social conservative, Solab Amari, author of the recent bestseller, Tyranny Inc.

How Private Power Crushed American Liberty. On this podcast, we're speaking to each debater. Again, you'll get their key arguments, their key ideas ahead of our debate on November 3rd. Up first is Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, recently knighted by King Charles III. Let's hear what he's got to say in favor of liberalism, getting the big questions right. Sir Rees-Mogg, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Well, thank you very much. I'm very grateful to be invited. We're looking forward to hosting you in Toronto on November 3rd,

and let's, for the benefit of our listening audience, just get your off-the-top definition of liberalism. This is a concept that many people will read into their own kind of thoughts, projections, maybe prejudices. How do you define liberalism? The starting point is that liberalism is the belief that power comes from the individual and goes upwards rather than coming from the state and going downwards. And so if you believe in liberalism, you believe in freedom of the individual, you believe in freedom of association and freedom of speech and indeed free economies, whereas if you're an anti-liberal, you believe that the state comes first and the interests of the state are more important than those of the individual. You're in favor of the collective rather than the

individual. When you think of liberalism and its evolution, how would you define yourself in either temporally in the context of thinking of how liberalism has changed, over time and or in the context of how people define a liberal today? Well, it's a very interesting question because a liberal in America is very different from a liberal in a British context. And a liberal, as I understand it, in American English, is somebody of the hard left, whereas a liberal in the English context is more of a classical liberal, who is somebody who believes in freedom of the individual and would argue that the British indeed the American constitutions and Canadian constitutions have all built up from this understanding

of the individual being preeminent. So there's been a divergence in terminology. If you look at the 19th century, liberalism went very strongly with laissez-faire economics, which you would nowadays consider to be a right-wing, rather than a left-wing economic philosophy. And Jacob, when you think of the great accomplishments of liberalism, what would you number these as? What particularly comes to mind to you as the kind of the legacy, the heritage, the gift of liberalism to modern society? Well, it depends how far back in history you want me to go, because I think you start with the Anglo-Saxons and you start with William the Conqueror confirming the rights that were enjoyed in the reign of Edward the Confessor when he is crowned

King in 1066. And that is then reconfirmed by Magna Carta in 1215. And this is really important. The rights of Magna Carta are the rights of the individual against the state. No free man may be taken or dispossessed of his goods without the judgment of a court by his peers that the church will be free. These are central liberties of conscience, liberties of the individual limiting of the power of the state are what liberalism grows out from and have created the constitutional structures that we enjoy. And why is this so important? Well, there's a wonderful 15th century political writer called John Fortescue. And he explains why your economic prosperity depends on your constitutional settlement.

Because if the individual is free and the individual keeps the profit of his labor, then he invests in his land, he does better, he tries to make his agriculture as efficient as possible. If you can just be pinched by the king, then he gives up. And this was Fortague's explanation of why the UK, why the English economy at that point was doing better than the French economy because the English king was under the law and the French king was the law. And you see this so strongly in what the authors of the American Constitution are trying to say, they have a limited state where the rights of the individual come first,

and that has led to the globe's most successful economy in all recorded history. Let's talk about some of the criticisms of liberalism. First, I mean, what do you think of them? What do you think about this moment that we're in right now, Jacob, where it seems there are portions, especially younger people, who have turned against liberalism, who see it as a failed ideology. They, in fact, would argue that it's a source of oppression, not of liberation and freedom and opportunity and choice. Well, I think they're using Humpty Dumpty language because the whole basis behind the woke movement is to control what people say and what they think. You're free to say and think whatever you say as long as you agree with me. Well, that's not liberty of any kind. And constraining what people say in case they offend is the antithesis of liberalism, but it also creates a very stultified society. It ultimately creates a totalitarian society, which won't be prosperous or free. And when you think of, let's say, the economic criticism of liberalism, that as you've pointed out and it's accurate, you know, the handmaiden of often individual freedom is perceived of historically as economic freedom. There's now a critique out there that that laissez-faire approach to the economy, deregulation, all the things that allow for the free enterprise and the exchange of goods.

and services. This, in fact, for liberalism's critics, is just a pantomime, a show that, in fact, covers up, obscures, you know, divisions of class, divisions, as you say, increasingly of race and identity that are being played out in the marketplace. And this is the kind of poison fruit of liberalism that contaminates everything else. Well, I think you just need to look at the evidence that If you go back to 1990, over half the world's population was living in poverty, the under a dollar day in those times income. And now that's down below 10% of the population. You've had, with a growing global population, a decline in the absolute number of people living in absolute poverty. And what does that coincide with?

It coincides with the greatest explosion of global trade that the world has ever seen. And the biggest declines in poverty have, of course, been in China and India, and those have happened because of trade and because of free markets. So it's all very well to have what you might call luxury opinions. The opinions of the rich and already successful to say that free trade is not fair and it's not very nice and so on and so forth. But if you're living on under a dollar a day, your best chance of getting out of absolute poverty is the ability to trade, for your nation to trade, and for wealth to be generated.

So I think these really are the high end of luxury opinions. It's why so many remarkably well-to-do people end up having essentially socialist views. They can afford to. We refer to them as limousine liberals here in North America. That's a very good time. I like that. I don't know if that's a turn of phrase in the UK, but we use that here. It soon will be. Now you've given it to me. I can see myself. Let's just talk about one other critique of liberalism that is current right now. And as you mentioned, one of the core beliefs in liberalism is self, is the representation of the individual through legislative, deliberative bodies. You're a member of the House of Commons.

You know what this is all about. There's a criticism now that these bodies no longer function. They are paralyzed. They are unable to make decisions that the common good, the common wheel demands. And this is a sign of some kind of institutional collapse at the core of liberalism. Its representative function has failed. Well, you see, I disagree with that. I think the problem actually hasn't been liberalism and democracy. It's been phony internationalism.

It's been efforts to limit domestic liberalism by saying that there is a superior law which countries must follow and have no democratic say over. So I think it's been a strangling of democracy through international bodies, which I'm opposed to. I think the nation state is the natural body of sovereignty, of the demos for the democracy, and that actually the basic principle, the Westphalian principle, if you like, is one where the individual sovereign state is free to get on with its own business, its legislature is free to make all the laws that are necessary for that state subject only to its own constitution, which of course from the UK's point of view is a constitution of parliamentary sovereignty.

And it's been internationalism that has undermined that, but internationalism is actually an offshoot of socialism. It's not an offshoot of liberalism. Final question, and I know you'll have strong views on this, but a critique, again, adopted increasingly on college campuses and elsewhere, at least here in North America, is that liberalism's fixation on the individual ignores the extent to which issues of race, gender, and identity of the individual are not recognized. They're not. not expressed, either in the institutions, the laws, the socioeconomic ordering of things by liberalism. And we need a new approach, new ways that acknowledge power relations,

power, disequilibrium between groups based on race, sexual preference, gender identity, and such. And liberalism is just not constructed to move humanity forward. along these lines. Well, it's a jolly good thing it's not, and you wouldn't want it to be, because I think constructing society on those lines is fundamentally wrong. You see, I believe, and speaking as a Catholic rather than as a politician, in the fundamental worth of every soul in front of God, and that God doesn't look at that soul and say, well, it's of this race or of this sexual orientation, it is a soul valued by God of equal worth

absolutely regardless. And it is for that soul to make its way in this world and the next. And it's not for society to say that because of things that happened potentially hundreds of years ago, we should favour one group over another. It's up to us as individuals to make our own way. I think it's desperately condescending to people to say, oh, you won't be able to succeed because. I think that's a damning thing to say to people. You want to say to everybody, our society is set up, which is true in the UK, true in Canada, true in the United States, our society is set up so that you have an even chance of success depending on your own merits, your own willpower, your own drive, and that that's nothing to do with what happened

in the 18th century or in the 8th century or 5,000 years BC. Jacob Reismog, thank you so much for a sense of taste, a delicious presentation here of ideas and thoughts that we're going to unpack in detail come your appearance on the monk debate stage on November 3rd at Roy Thompson Hall. I really appreciate your time today. Well, that was Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, who will be defending liberalism at our debate on November 3rd at Roy Thompson Hall. Again, you can grab tickets. There's a few left right now. at triple-W monk debates.com. That's MUNK Debates with an S.com. Up next, we have British journalist and left-wing activist, self-described libertarian communist. Let's figure out what that means. Ash Sarkar,

Ash, welcome to the monk dialogues. Thanks so much for having me. Well, we are looking forward to hosting you in Toronto on November 3rd for our monk debate on the crisis of liberalism. And let's start there. I'm sure you're familiar with this argument, this line of reasoning, what crisis? Why liberalism? Many people, especially here in North America, would see liberalism and liberal values as being cornerstones of our society today. Give us a sense of why you feel there is a crisis underway, why you think liberalism is in a moment of stress. Well, I think the first thing to lay out is that liberal,

Liberalism is such a massive political tradition, and I get the feeling that all of the debate participants are going to have their very own gloss on what it means to them. For some people, they're going to be talking about the liberalism of the 18th century, which really was about this aspirational rising merchant class overturning the kind of feudal stranglehold on property in the political system that had existed for centuries. Other people will be talking about liberalism to mean neoliberalism, the kind of laissez-faire free market capitalism, pioneered by Milton Friedman and Hayek, implemented by everyone from Margaret Thatcher to Augusto Pinnichet. And in a North American context, liberalism just sort of means anything left

of centre. So if you like things like gay marriage and some kind of welfare provision, you're a liberal. So it's very difficult to go, well, why is liberalism in crisis when it could refer to any one of these three things. The reason why I think liberalism is in crisis, despite it referring to this huge political tradition, is that when you look at the very big questions facing us, not just in the global north, but as a species, climate change, inequality, foreign policy, I think that liberalism has not only failed to produce any compelling answers, I think it's presided over some of the catastrophes. I mean, we've known about man-made climate change since the presidency of Jimmy Carter.

We've had an awful lot of liberal governments from, you know, Europe, America, Canada. And what we've seen is the bedding in of a particular kind of complacency. So there can be lip service paid to action on climate change. But when it comes to the state being able to really rev itself up, get stuff done to decarbonize, there is a total failure to grapple with the scale of the crisis. You've had some decarbonization of domestic energy grids, but that means absolutely nothing when all of us are importing cheap goods from China, which is the sort of, you know, the biggest global contributor to carbon on the planet. When it comes to foreign policy, I mean, my politicisation came in the early 2000s as a lot of,

a kid during the war on terror. My very first protest was 11 years old against the war in Iraq. And there was a liberal consensus that the war on terror was not only a good and a moral thing to do. It was something that could work and that led governments like Tony Blair's administration in the UK to some very illiberal means, extraordinary rendition, torture, to say less of what ended up happening in Afghanistan in Iraq. I don't think. we ended up with stronger liberal democracies in either one of those countries. And then you've got to look at inequality. This is the cause which I would say is closest to my heart.

Of course, liberalism has been the engine behind some forms of social equality or moves towards social equality, which I totally embrace. When it comes to economic equality, the workers' share of wealth has been in decline in the country of my home, the UK, since the 1970s. We had peak equality in 1971. And what we were promised with rising inequality is that it would raise standards of living for all. There would be innovation. There would be trickle down of wealth. We've seen neither of those things. I mean, right now, my home country has just scrapped a tiny portion of high-speed rail. I mean, really, like the geographic distance it covers, you guys in Canada would laugh. You would consider that a distance. You would

drive to get a burrito. We couldn't even get that done despite having about two decades in which to achieve it. Whereas when you compare that to the thousands and thousands of kilometres of high speed rail in China, it's embarrassing. So inequality didn't deliver better standards of living. And it certainly hasn't delivered innovation either. So that for me is why I consider liberalism a failure. Whatever way you want to look at it, whether you look at the liberalism of the 18th century or you look at the liberalism of, you know, Rawlsian social democracy, I think it has failed on almost every measure that means something. Excellent.

Your opponents most likely will say that the failures of liberalism are just simply failures of expression and intent, not of results. And I think both would probably eschew more to a classical liberal view that if only we unleash the market more, if only if we promoted individual freedoms and choices over, you know, group action or group rights, the promise of liberalism would be revealed. And as you say, society would see these benefits, which have been kind of clouded by the economic climate and social record of the last few decades. Oh, I don't want to give away the good stuff before the debate. Oh, so I've got the risk of, do I sound really stupid now, but hold my fire?

It's up to you, you know. little hint. Will Jacob Rees-Mogg be listening to this podcast on the way over to Canada to debate you? You'll have to... I would hope that he is too busy with the business of Parliament to do that. But just in case, I'm not going to give away the entire dairy, but I'll give a hint as to what I'm going to get into.

I think some of these rights that liberals talk about, they don't look at the way in which they conflict with one another. And I think that when it comes down to it, the one right for liberals which is inalienable is property rights, particularly the tradition that Jacob Rees-Mogg is coming from, he would say that property rights are the right which undergird every other right that exists. And I think that it is precisely this right, the inalienable right to property, which I would say isn't the right to possessions, which we all have, but the right to accumulate, the right to hoard, the right to take more than your fair share, I think that that ends up crushing every other right that we have

underneath the heel of its boot. And I'm going to talk about the ways in which that happens at the debate. Excellent, excellent. I look forward to that. Another aspect of the liberal argument, the liberal camp, is, but I'm sure you'll challenge this, is a notion that liberalism gets the important answers right because it's inherently neutral,

that it doesn't have a theory of the case. It isn't asserting a concept of the good, and it's that very neutrality that makes it fairer than other systems, that makes it acceptable to people as a way of social organization, economic organization. What's your take on that? Am I allowed to swear?

Go right ahead. Okay, well, that's bollocks, isn't it? Because nothing that is concerned with power can be neutral. Power is always operating in its own interests. Power is never neutral about its own interests. So I think that we can really think that this concept of neutrality is for the birds. The idea that liberalism has never concerned itself with the concept of the good, I think that that is not the tradition of liberalism that came from 18th century

Enlightenment thinkers the notion of the good features really prominently in the works of Hume, of Bentham, Locke. These are really important notions for them. They're trying to think about what leads to human flourishing. There's a reason why the word happiness features so prominently in the early works of the American Revolution. It means something to them. And I think that this myth of neutrality, it comes from a particular kind of liberalism that we've seen in the latter portion of the 20th century, beginning of the 21st century, which is liberal technocracy. So it's basically, if you bring in this professional managerial class from McKinsey, Deloitte, KPMG, and you get them to run the state, they're going to apply these principles, which are always correct, which always results. in maximum efficiency, and it's neither good nor bad, nor pursuing an ideological aim, it's just going to get you the best result.

One, I don't think that has resulted in delivering when it comes to the public good. In the UK, we really have outsourced an awful lot of our state functions to these massive consultancy companies, and we've seen a decline in the quality of those public goods. And then the second thing is that that is its own kind of bias to think that if you went to Oxford and you did politics, philosophy, and economics, and then you went off to the city and you worked for McKinsey for a bit, that you are the perfect kind of person to run a state and govern a democracy, that is intensely ideological. So I have absolutely no truck with this concept of neutrality. I don't think any of us are neutral. I don't claim to be neutral. And I laugh in the face of those

do. Yeah. Let me pick up one of your earlier answers about, you know, the climate crisis and liberalism's possible role in in the creation of that crisis and seemingly now its inability to address it. What's going on there, Ash? Is it that liberalism and its focus on the individual just lacks a lexicon, a vocabulary to talk about collective rights, the rights of nature, the rights of nature, the rights, rights of non-human things to exist? Is there some kind of epistemic crisis that liberalism confronts when it faces the climate crisis? I think that the reason why liberalism has not been able to get a grip on the climate crisis, is not because of the paucity of its ideas, it's a problem of material conditions.

I believe that the politics that we end up with in any given society is a reflection of class forces. And when those class forces are stacked so in favour of the ownership class, an ownership class which has been defined for the past 150-odd years by its relationship to fossil fuels, you've ended up with widespread corporate capture of the systems of government. So you've had an extraordinary reluctance to force big energy producers to move quickly. You have seen an extraordinary reluctance to roll out the technologies that would break the stranglehold of fossil fuel companies on our energy grids, despite these forms of energy production being better for us in terms of the planet, being less vulnerable to external shocks, like we saw with the war in Ukraine

driving up the cost of natural gas and of oil, and also being something which is closer to us. These are solar panels on our homes. These are air source heat pumps in our homes. It's better insulation for our homes. I think that we've seen, you know, if the system of government is meant to be, you know, a concrete mixer, we've seen the likes of Shell, BP, ExxonMobil, really, you know, just stick a crowbar in there to stop it from functioning, to implement these policies which benefit everybody. So it's less to do with the language of collective rights.

And I think more about what at best is a kind of. naivety, that there's any bargaining to be done with these people? Final question. You know, in some ways, the endurance of liberalism, and it's kind of implied in our debate motion that be it resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right, is that other systems historically, you could say, have been less successful at getting the big questions right. The ideological manifestations of competing.

leading ideologies in totalitarian systems in the 20th century seem to, at least for a while now, have discredited some of the traditional intellectual and ideological opponents of liberalism. How do you respond to that maybe just subtle or not so subtle skepticism that potentially audience members that this debate will have, that there is even an ability to contemplate another system, another way, a different ideology than liberalism itself? So I think the first thing, which is thinking about where the Cold War ended up resolving itself, I think that that shows to me that some of those liberal rights, what we consider liberal rights, freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, political freedoms, you can't just throw them away

and end up with a healthy society. That's why I belong to a tradition that calls itself libertarian Marxism. It takes some of those freedoms of the individual very, very seriously indeed. The second thing is that I think it's proof that any society which prioritises nukes over bread is not going to end up with peace, land and justice for all. And so I would then question some of the spending priorities of liberal and so-called democratic states in the West, where they've presided over an extraordinary impoverishment of their domestic populations, but always have money for wars. I would say that where we've ended up now, the reason why it still seems like the best option

there is is because we don't entertain the alternatives, despite the fact that we've got these interlocking crises, a crisis of inequality, a crisis of climate. We've got an oncoming train called artificial intelligence. which is going to radically disrupt the labour market, we think that the system that we have is going to be able to cope with all those things. I'm not advocating a return to the past. I'm saying that we have to look with clear eyes

at the conditions of the present and the near future and ask ourselves, can liberalism cope with it? Because it's not coping right now. And I think that it's up to the other side of the debate to explain why suddenly the great liberal democracies of the West are going to get off their eyes. and do something about it when they haven't for decades.

Great answer. Well, we really look forward to hosting you in Toronto on November 3rd for a terrific debate on the crisis of liberalism and learning more about your thoughts and ideas and views on this important topic. So, Ash, thank you so much for coming on the program today. Thanks for having me. I'll try not to swear quite as much for the actual debate. Oh, a little swearing is just fine.

It's not a PG audience. We're ready for it. Bring it on. All right. You don't know what you've just asked for there. We'll see. That was Ash Sarkar, who will be squaring off against Jacob Reesmog on November 3rd. Again, a reminder, grab your tickets now before they're gone. Triple WMunk Debates.com, November 3rd, downtown Toronto. Roy Thompson Hall.

Again, go to our website, monkdebates.com to get your tickets now. Up next is one of America's most widely read and respected political columnist. He's been a big voice for conservative thinking, but ideas on property capitalism. Classical liberalism for a generation or more. His name is George F. Will. And he's arguing in favor of the motion for our debate, be it resolved. Liberalism gets the big questions right. George, welcome to the mug dialogues. Glad to be with you. very much looking forward to seeing you in Toronto on November 3rd for this debate on liberalism. Let's maybe back the card up, so to speak, to help our listeners understand how you define liberalism yourself. Let's forget for a moment how the rest of us might think about liberalism. How does George F. Will think about liberalism in 2023? I think of liberalism not as the term is used in the United States today, that is, as a shorthand for progressivism with all its leveling impulses and energetic state. Rather, my liberalism comes with an adjective, classical liberalism, by which I mean, in the shortest or shorthand, the philosophy of the American founders.

There's a lot of terminological confusion in the United States about this, because American conservatives are classical liberals. That is, what we want to conserve is the American founding. And the American founders, Madison, Jefferson, Hamilton, all of them, although they had their ferocious differences with one another, were nevertheless united as the legatees of Montescue and before him John Locke and before him Hobbs and all the rest. So my understanding of liberalism is, A, a belief in natural rights. That is rights that have been proven by history to be essential to the flourishing of people with our natures,

which means, therefore, we believe not only in natural rights, but in a fixed human nature, that we are not just creatures that take on the impress of whatever culture we happen to find ourselves in. That in very short compass is my understanding of natural rights. it necessarily entails limited government, a government of enumerated powers, delegated powers that can be taken back from the government. In the language of the American Declaration of Independence, governments are instituted to secure our rights. That's the most neglected word in the declaration. First come rights, then comes government to secure those rights, which means that rights are not as progress. would tell us little spaces of autonomy granted by the grace of government, but they in fact precede

government and disciplined government. Let's talk about some of the longstanding and perceived benefits of classical liberalism. First and foremost is a sense on the part of many people that part of classical liberalism's genius is that it does not have a defined prescribed definition of a good or virtuous life. It has assumptions, it has first principles, but it doesn't ask individuals a priori to conform to a certain way of living and being. Can you unpack that for us a bit? Because I think it's important for us to understand. You're exactly right. Classical liberals believe that human beings are, A, opinionated and be egotistical.

That is, they tend to rather like their own opinions. And the problem of politics anywhere, any time, is to get people of this nature to live with reasonable congeniality with one another. So the first thing, the primary thing that classical liberalism does, it keeps the peace by saying we're going to carve out this vast sphere of individual autonomy where people can go their own way and can associate with like-minded people, understanding that they live in a common polity and have to have a certain minimal level of cooperativesness and congeniality. I think the world is really divided, and certainly in the last two blood-soaked centuries, it has been divided.

Between those, on the one hand, who say, let's envision the very best possible society and try and get there. And on the other hand, are the more prudent people, prudence being the great virtue of classical liberalism. The prudent classical liberalism says, no, let's not do that, because that way you get the pursuit of utopia and all the coercions. necessary to get there. Instead of identifying the most noble end and pursuing it with a ruthlessness commensurate with its nobility, let's instead identify the worst and let's avoid it. That's the essential prudence of liberalism is let's not use politics to find the meaning of life or the noble way of living, let's rather carve out a large protected sphere of autonomy

whereby people work this out on their own, rather than giving government with its monopoly on violence and its tendency to coerce, a license to violently coerce in the pursuit of beautiful, shimmering things. well put um one of the core beliefs of uh classical liberal thinkers is the extent to which the market and the free exchange of good and services acts as a kind of handmaiden to this underlying concept of liberty and how liberty should again not be prescribed and constrained it

should happen through the spontaneous and voluntary interactions of individuals. How important do you see that connection between generally freer and more open, capitalistic, market-based economies and the principles of liberalism? I think the one entails the other, the one dictates the other. That is, it seems to me, classical liberals are capitalists. And they're capitalists prudentially and aspirationally, prudentially in the sense that by dispersing power and leaving a great deal to the spontaneous,

I love your use of Hayek's word there, the spontaneous order of a collaborative market society, they disperse power and that's, that conduces to safety. But beyond that, a capitalist society does not only make us better off, which it manifestsly does, it also makes us better. That is, it teaches us cooperation, it teaches us politeness. Go into any store in Canada or the United States. First words you hear are, how may I help you?

Well, that may be a perfunctory trope of people trying to sell you shoes or butter or something. still it matters that that's part of the background music of life in a market society. And I think it's kind of nice. You will know these criticisms, but people will argue, as I'm sure, will be made. A case will be made at the debate that liberalism and many of the classical attributes that you would associate with it are simply not delivering. The institutions of liberalism, our parliaments, our congresses are dysfunctional. In our economies, we are seeing growing economic inequality and the perceived injustices that flow from that. So there would be a case made at this debate that the gap that has opened up between liberalism's aspirations, its beliefs, and the reality.

of the world as we see it and receive it today is so big that one has to call the entire ideology into question. Well, first, I would say that material equality is not a liberal aspiration. A liberal aspiration is meritocratic. Now, the meritocratic aspect of life has indeed widened inequalities as we become more cognitively stratified as a society. More and more rewards go into those who have mastered the information nature of our modern society. I, however, find vast disparities of wealth not morally very interesting,

as long as people, everyone has enough. I do not know how to get upset about the fact that Jeff Bezos has approximately 100, $83 billion more than I've got. Good for him. I don't see the moral problem here. If that translated on his part into vast inequality of political power, then there'd be another problem, but I don't see it, frankly.

Jeff Bezos and Amazon are being chased hither and yon by the government right now over various, in my judgment, and imagined antitrust violations. But whether you agree with that or not, the fact is the government is hardly Amazon's handmaiden at the moment. Well, put, you know, here in Canada, even, we've gone so far as to limit, you know, political donations to a few thousand dollars per individual.

We've outlawed donations from corporations, unions, obviously a different situation in the United States, but it's an interesting point to make that inequality matters most. in terms of our political participation and our ability to be kind of sovereign citizens in a democracy. George, let's end just by some thoughts on where you think liberalism could or should be renewing itself. Where does it need new kind of vitality, thinking, energy, drive? how do we rediscover, maybe you don't believe we need to rediscover it,

but how do we kind of rekindle the dynamism of classical liberal ideologies and thinking from the 19th and 18th centuries, which were so important to the massive advancement of Western society and Western culture, immense sense of confidence that imbued our civilization at that time in many ways seems missing today.

I think what we classic liberals ought to do is we had to brag a little more about our distinguished pedigree. Our pedigree was honed really in the 18th century when classic liberals became the driving force against inherited hierarchies, hierarchies of wealth, hierarchies of birth, hierarchies of ecclesiastical, support whatever. Classic liberals, they get out of the way. We want churning. You know, someone has said that the Bible reduced to one sentence.

The story of the Bible is God created man and women and promptly lost control of events. We classed great, we don't want events controlled. We want spontaneous churning of society that will produce unpredictable outcomes like smartphones and great literature and all kinds of things that no one planned, no government planned. This emerged from the fecundity of freedom. A woman, this is messy, and anti-liberals don't like messiness. They want everything tidy and planned and organized from above. I would only say to them that a woman making her maiden speech in the House of Commons

in Westminster a few years ago, said, democracy is like sex. If it's not messy, you're not doing it, right? And that's classical liberalism in a nutshell. We don't mind messing this. That is a pull quote we're going to use. I hope you use at the debate, George. Thank you so much for giving the audience of the monk community here

a taste for what should be as fantastic. conversation on just a vitally important theme, the fate, the future of liberalism, classical. In particular, we're going to get all into it November 3rd with George F. Will Roy Thompson Hall. Please join us. I enjoyed it. That was political calmness, George F. Will, giving us a preview of his key arguments for the Monk debate on the crisis of liberalism November 3 in Toronto. Our last guest today is the thought-provoking American social conservatives, So Rab Amari. It will be partnered with Ash Sarkar, both arguing against the motion, be it resolved.

Liberalism gets the big questions right. So Rab, welcome to the Monk Dialogues. Thank you for having me. With all these pre-conversations that we're having with the debaters, I want to kind of just start with some first principles because often the challenge of the debate like this is definitions. What is liberalism? How do you think of this term?

What liberalism of the various varieties will you be debating on Roy Thompson Hall's stage come November 3rd? So one of the challenges of challenging liberalism is that liberals, supporters of especially classical liberalism, can be quite slippery. Whenever you want to try to pin them down to what liberalism is, they'll say, well, that's not liberalism as I understand it. that you, X, Y, Z objection you might have to liberalism is only to one variety of liberalism. Actual liberalism has never been tried. Here's what it would look like and so on. I think I would like to put forward a premise for liberalism and then how that premise works out in both liberal theory and practice.

The premise of liberalism is that human beings are fundamentally alone in the world, that we are thrown into this world that is often illegible, that is brutal and so on. And therefore, we are not as classical, as a classical and Christian tradition, the tradition represented by the likes of Aristotle, St. Thomas, Aquinas, various classical philosophers. And then even, you know, more modern critics of liberalism in their own ways, like Karl Marx from the left, They all insist that human beings are social and political animals and that we are not little atoms just seeking to self-maximise. Whereas liberalism begins with the premise that we are thrown into this world and that we are, the best we can hope for is just not to murder each other. and that kind of low expectation of not murdering each other, which is otherwise what's bound to happen

or not to repress each other, should determine everything else about our politics and that the best we can expect out of our common life together is to avoid various forms of repression and, more importantly, to maximize individual liberty. And the fact that we're thrown into the world together also means that we are, that we are, that we are incapable of recognizing what's good for human beings as such for a political community, that it's always up to the individual to define what the good is. And we just couldn't possibly agree about fundamentals, about what the good life is. So again, the best we can do is set up a system in which each person can pursue his or her own account of what the good is.

and to maximize their autonomy and to not be coerced. That's, I think, a fair definition. I'm sure that in the actual debate, our interlocutors will disagree with that or will take objection to that. But I think that's a fair framing, even if it's a polemical framing, I think it's a fair one. Well put, and absolutely it is a fair one. So let's go drill a little bit deeper on this. you've alluded to it already.

One of the supposed great benefits of liberalism, it's kind of almost assumed in our resolution, be it resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right, is that liberalism is neutral, that it doesn't impart a set of overarching values or, as you contextualized it, a kind of philosophy of, of the good life, a platonic ideal of how human beings could or should be.

And that is part of its enduring strength. That's why it has existed in one shape or form or another now for almost a quarter of a millennium and why it will continue to be the kind of dominant human ideology for the foreseeable future. Yeah, the framing of the question that is up for the rest. I should say the resolution that's up for debate is very interesting because it says be it resolved, liberalism gets the big questions right. I'm slightly paraphrasing, but I think that's right. And if I were my debaters on the other side, if I were one of my interlocutors, I would actually

disagree with the resolution and say, no, look, liberalism doesn't claim to get the big questions right. It leaves it up to the individual to decide what their own answer to the big questions are. All it does is provide a framework by which we can reasonably disagree without, you know, murdering or suppressing each other. Unfortunately, that is not how the resolution is framed. Of course, I will use that to my advantage. If it were merely, you know, look, liberalism is a set of procedures developed over time for people with fundamentally competing worldviews to be able to live alongside each other.

You know, one can sign up to that kind of minimal liberalism, but that's not what the premise of the question is. And I think the reason why that's not the framing of the question or the resolution for the evening is precisely because liberalism is not satisfied with liberals, I should say, are not satisfied with that narrow definition. Why? Because, well, for one thing, a lot of the procedures that people cherish about liberalism as a set of practices, right? The fact that liberalism is associated with impartial administration, freedom of speech within limits and in certain contexts, and so on, or due process, any of these, a lot of these things predate ideological liberalism, right? It's not like liberals invented impartial administration. You know, the Roman, Chinese, Persian empires developed a lot of that millennia earlier before there was such a thing as liberalism.

It's not like liberalism invented due process. The idea of what a fair trial is and what's not a fair trial is there in the story of the execution of Socrates. People can recognize that that may not be a fair trial or of Jesus of Nazareth. So the notion that there should be due process. that there should be evidence brought against someone accused that people should be allowed

to discuss things before power makes a certain kind of decision and so on is much older than that. And if we want to preserve those things, we can do that without, and here's my argument, without signing up for full-on liberal ideology, which posits human beings,

again, as fundamentally alone in the world and totally autonomous without this kind of other aspirations besides liberty, like we have other aspirations like equality, we want meaning, et cetera, et cetera, that liberalism simply doesn't service. And often in practice, liberalism has been quite coercive. Economic liberalism, which is capitalism, is not like this organic thing that just came about through human nature. It was coercively imposed. Markets were inventions of human beings and they displaced older. older, more solidaristic forms of life. So that's what I would argue is that there's a reason the

debate is framed the way it is. If it were just the minimal liberalism, then it wouldn't answer the big questions. But insofar as it answers the big questions, I would argue the answers are wrong ones or incorrect ones. One of the questions that liberals think that they do have the right answer for, which is the economic organization of society around capitalist principles, and that this is more than simply, you know this well, this is simply more than optimizing the use of capital, social, or otherwise, it is actually, for classical liberals, at least, an expression of human freedom, that it is imbuted with an argument about values. And again, it kind of goes back, to this idea, and it'll be part of the debate that we'll unpack, that all of this is neutral,

that all these choices that are manifest and add up through the actions of solitary individuals create this entire edifice of society, of culture, of our way of life. And I think for many people, it's hard to think beyond that. because this is not the reality that we've lived in, certainly for the last century or so. For about 200 years, I would say. And look, I would say that specifically, what is the promise of liberalism in our economic lives? The promise of liberalism as its economic liberals. And here, there's a danger in terminology. Again, liberalism is one of those loaded terms, but in the United States and to some extent in Canada as well, but not in Europe, to be an economic liberal is actually to be a kind of

what in North America we call a conservative. That is that you want to maximize individual liberty and to let the market have its way because the liberals, again, keep in mind it's not, we're not talking about progressives here, But liberals say that the market under all other things being equal, the market is the best way for human beings to coordinate their economic activities without coercion, right? Because in any given market, there are a multitude of sellers and buyers. And the price point is this impartial thing that no one market actor can control. it means that I can always find a better deal elsewhere. If I'm a worker who doesn't like his or her job,

I can move to another employer. If I'm a consumer who doesn't like what a one seller is selling me, I can find a better price or a better deal elsewhere and so on. So this is the premise of economic liberalism. And the problem with it is that this has not been the case. The economy has never really looked like that. The closest we got was maybe a brief period in the late. 18th century, the period defined by so-called masterless men, yeoman farmers, mechanics,

artisans, and so on, who freely traded, and there really was the market looked like the way that you hear in kind of classically liberal econ 101 accounts. But ever since the industrial revolution, most markets are characterized by a relatively few or even just one seller with lots and lots of buyers on the other side, or in the case of labor markets, sellers of labor power, workers, many of them going up against a relatively few employers. And when you have that kind of concentration of power, it means that the price point is not this emancipatory signal and promise that just lets people always find a better deal elsewhere. The price is what the seller says or what the buyer insists depending on what kind of market you're

talking about. And that means that you can coerce as much as you want. And we've, you know, ever since, especially since the, the middle 20th century in response to the crises of kind of classically liberal models, we've built economies that try to use state power to mitigate some of that, to restrain market tyrannies, whether that's through labor unions, collective action and so on and so forth, welfare and etc. But it's very important to say that, and I think someone like George Will or Jacob Rees-Mogg would agree that those are all violations of pure liberal principle. If you went by pure liberal principle, we'd get the economy of the 19th century and the early parts of the 20th century, which was really, really brutal for

working in lower middle class people. And thank God that we've moved beyond that, thanks to labor movement, thanks to, you know, kind of social and Christian Democrats and so on. But we have to be honest here. So the gist of the argument, though, is just that coercion is actually all over market economies. Market economies are suffused with coercion. It's just that we're used, we're conditioned by people like Jacob Rees-Mogg and George Will to think of coercion as only what government does to us, rather than what our employer can do, rather than what Uber can do to us, rather than what health insurers can do and so on. Final question.

And you can choose to answer this or not because it's some ways a little bit outside the parameters of debate. But again, I think it's somehow embedded in the resolution, this idea that if liberalism doesn't have the right answers or the best answers to the big questions, then is there something else that does?

In other words, if you really wanted to crush your opponent, at this debate, could you not only problematize or delegitimize liberalism, as they will assert it, could you also put forward an alternative? Well, I mean, the resolution doesn't call for that. So if I'm on the stage, I may not go there unless you force me, Rudyard. But that's not because I'm afraid. It's just that, as you know, there's this old rule in whether it's debate or writing articles that if you can charge someone with manslaughter, and get a conviction, don't go for murder one.

I'm happy with the lower. I ask this question, though, because I think that part of the primacy of liberalism in many people's minds is that it's not displaceable, that it's kind of that old quip about, you know, democracy that, you know, it's the least, the least worst thing when everything else doesn't work, it functions. So there might be a portion of the audience of this debate who's not, you know, classical liberals, but would say, okay, maybe I'm not, maybe it doesn't have all the answers, but the answers it has are better than the ones that anyone else is offering. Well, I think that's a fair point. And I sometimes take that position myself. that's a kind of minimal account of liberalism as a set of institutions, like I said,

which is that it doesn't have answers, but it just lets us get along with each other. The first thing I would say in response to that temptation, which is not one that I, like I said, I personally share it sometimes, is to recognize that liberal principles have gotten us to a very, very broken place. And that we, here's what I mean by that is we have. We have a situation, especially in the United States, which I think is the most liberal society in the classical sense that there ever existed. And as a kind of classical liberal ideal has become more entrenched, as we've gotten rid of

the few social democratic elements, non-liberal elements that were introduced to our economy in the middle of the 20th century, we have a situation in which working class life expectancy is on the decline compared to anywhere else in the world that is a little bit less liberal. right? We have a huge fentanyl crisis in the United States, an opioid crisis. And if you put a map, the map of the fentanyl and opioid crisis and the map of counties in America that were in the United States, I try to be Canadian conscious here in the United States that were most exposed to liberalized free trade regimes, those maps uncannily overlap. In other words, free trade, the perennial fetish of every liberal since the 18th century correlates with the destruction of working class life.

We have unbelievably un-eye-watering inequalities in the United States, and they're also growing in Europe and other parts of the developed world as well. And I think we have just a profound crisis of meaning that plays out in all sorts of different ways. And so, you know, the first thing I would say is that another world is possible, and that the task of the citizen is to be alert to people who would sell terrible conditions to you and say, this is the best you can expect. I think that's a betrayal of the human spirit. And to say that unless it's this Pramese system, then you are going to be, you know, it's going to be either

medieval theocracy or communist totalitarianism and so on and so forth. That's something that we should overcome. So I think what is the alternative? For me, I don't want to replace entire institutions and societies. You know, I'm an immigrant to the West. That means I love certain things about the West and I want to preserve, actually want to preserve the best that is in the West. And so what that means is is ameliorating at least some elements of liberal ideology. Right. So in the economic sphere, especially trying to strive for a greater measure of redistribution. And it's not even redistribution, a measure of recognizing that workers do a lot to produce social value and they shouldn't be barely being able to scrape by on minimum wages,

that we should take care of the elderly, that we should take care of the vulnerable, that human beings aren't all like striving entrepreneurs. A lot of times they just want stability. And so I just want to ameliorate and reform. And we can't do that, though, if we adhere. to hardcore classical liberal ideology. We can reform things if we're, in my case, a kind of a Catholic Social Democrat or in case of my partner in the trenches, Ash Sarkar, who is more of a leftist. We can meet eye to eye and try to horse trade around reforms and say, but we have to admit

that there's something wrong and we can do better. And the aspiration to do better need and mean, as classical liberals typically argue, medieval theocracy or stod. colonism or something like that. We actually tried certain things in the middle 20th century to ameliorate liberalism's crises, and we did pretty well. Inequality was narrowed to a measure. Income redistribution happened. Working class mass prosperity came by. This is true of Canada's crew of the United States, and it's true of Europe. So to try to at least ameliorate liberalism is okay. It's been done, and our grandfathers and great-grandfathers did that. that and that's okay. And it doesn't mean, you know, inaugurating tyranny as liberals would believe,

would have you believe. So, Rob, fascinating points. So looking forward to getting you out there on the stage at Roy Thompson Hall for this much anticipated debate on the crisis of liberalism. That's how we're positioning it. And I think it is a crisis. Many people evidencing skepticism, fatigue, exhaustion with big elements of the liberal project, you're going to be. bring that message to Toronto on November 3rd. We thank you for your time, your attention, and look forward to seeing you soon. I really enjoyed that already. I can't wait for the big debate. Well, that wraps up today's special Monk Dialogue. I want to thank all of our guests for their time and attentions for Jacob Rees-Mogg, Ash Sarkar, Georgia, F. Will, Solrab Ahmari. They've certainly

given us a lot to think about. Please send us your comments and reflections to podcast at monkdebates.com. to hear from these different debaters that sparked your interest that got you thinking about liberalism. We'd love to know. And also a reminder that there are just a few tickets left for the November 3rd Monk debate on the crisis of liberalism at Roy Thompson Hall in downtown Toronto. You can hear all of these guests live on stage in person. Wow. Imagine that. Do it right now by going to triple W monkdebates.com.

We also have a special promotion on for young people age 24 and younger. You can grab a ticket 50% off. Simply enter the promo code MD that is Monk Debates, MD 50, to access your discount youth ticket to the Monk debate on liberalism. We'd love to see you there. It's your future that these debaters, in a small part, will be engaging with on the Roy Thompson Hall stage. Let me wrap up by just thanking all of you for spending some time with us today and lending your thoughts and attentions to our mission and mandate to bring back the art of public

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