The Pete Quiñones Show - Reading Paul Gottfried's 'Liberalism vs Democracy' w/ C.Jay Engel

Episode Date: March 11, 2026

108 MinutesPG-13C.Jay Engel is a writer and the host of the Contra Mundum Podcast. C.Jay joined Pete to read and comment on the "Liberalism vs. Democracy" chapter from Paul Gottfried's book, "After Liberalism."Contra MundumC.Jay's SubstackC.Jay's TwitterPete and Thomas777 'At the Movies'Support Pete on His WebsitePete's PatreonPete's Substack Pete's SubscribestarPete's GUMROADPete's VenmoPete's Buy Me a CoffeePete on FacebookPete on Twitter

I want to welcome everyone back to the Pekino show. Return into the show. See, Jangle. How are you doing, CJ? Doing good. Thanks, Pete. Thank you for coming and agreeing to do a reading with me. Now, this is a longer chapter.

I don't know that we're going to get through the whole chapter, but I think this is a really important chapter in Paul Gottfried's book after liberalism. So we were just before we started recording, talking about Paul Godfrey. You actually just finished doing a live stream with him. Talk a little bit about this book and why you were eager to read from it. Well, anything Paul's written, I take very seriously. Paul's a very academic writer.

You know, like a lot of his commentary and stuff, it's very, you know, popular. But he's a very dense academic writer. And the thing about Paul is he has a very wide grasp on all the various contributions. and he has the ability to kind of sift through all the commentary over the centuries and recognize which sources have been the most transformative. You know, which ones you have to talk about. You can't talk about liberalism in the 20th century without talking about, you know, John Dewey or John Gray or people like that.

So a lot of these more academic aspect of things, he captures very well. Even like a lot of us on the dissident, right, you know, we'll read people, but we don't actually, he's he's much more involved in the the um the trajectory of the academy you know over the over the years over the century so i think paul is really good um if you need to get a sense of where um the like the the the basics of officialdom came from so in terms of this book after liberalism you know he he actually discusses this in chapter one it's impossible to define we don't know what liberalism is it's it's been used in so many different contexts and so many different frameworks that it's hard really to pin it down and you can't pin it down. You have to define it every time you're going to address it.

That's important to remember and keep in mind when talking about people like James Lindsay, you know, other pro-classical liberals out there. We need to keep in mind that liberalism is incredibly difficult to define because of its historical path. But it's also sort of one of those hegemonic phrases that you just assume that you know because it's just part of our political discourse. But he points out that it's a lot more difficult than that. So we'll probably get into some specifics related to that. But go ahead. That's my take on the overall.

Cool. All right. Well, let me share the screen up here. And yeah, there we go. Very cool. All right. So we're hopping over chapter one to chapter two, which is liberalism versus democracy. And I think this is really where you start getting into the meat of it.

And he also does a really good job of hitting some history here. So, um, If you've heard me do readings before, stop me at any time to comment on anything, even if it's mid-sentence. I think the only person who's ever done that to me is AA, but I don't mind it at all. Yeah, okay. I'll see what I can do. Liberalism versus democracy, liberal and democratic mentalities. A process that drew attention at the turn of the century and even earlier was the movement from a bourgeois liberal into a mass democratic society.

Not all of those who observed this process made the same judgments about it. Some, including the European socialists and the founding generation of American social planners, welcome democratization. Others, such as Max Weber, sorry, considered it to be an inevitable outcome of capitalism, technology, and the spread of the electoral franchise. Still others, typified by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, 1892 to 1894, prominent 1829 to 1894, pardon me, prominent jurist and a decidedly anti-egalitarian liberal protested that unseemingly haste, protested the unseemingly haste with which John Stuart Mill and his friends greeted the

new Democratic age, quoting, the waters are out and no human force can turn them back. But I do not see why as we go with the stream, we need saying hallelujah to the river God. Yeah, let's pause right there. I mean, I think the idea, for a lot of people, it probably not new to your audience, but the idea that there is this difference between democracy and liberalism, I think is new to a lot of people. I mean, the phrase itself, liberal democracy or democratic liberalism, the two go hand in hand to so many people. But like look at people like Victor or Bonn and how serious he is about the democratic interests of his own people require him to be illiberal. So these two don't go hand in hand. And we'll get, I think, a little bit more into the

differences between liberalism. But I think that right there is really important. A lot of the, a lot of the original, like, classical liberals in England were very anti-democratic. They didn't trust the spirit of the masses and especially the ability of the new elite, the merchant class, the capitalists, to basically, you know, use democracy as a weapon for their own pursuit of, you know, material interests. Yeah. It was obvious to them where a lot of people, are just waking up to the fact that it can be used as a weapon, where back then many had already seen it. Yeah.

Or foresaw it. The tension between liberalism and its successor ideology and between the social classes embodying those ideas provides a recurrent theme in 19th century political debate. Francois Gizot 1787 and 1774, the Huguenot Prime Minister under France's liberal July monarchy and a distinguished historian of England considered democracy to be as much of a curse as monarchical absolutism. As French prime minister in the 1840s, Giseau fought doggedly against the extension of the limited franchise, the sins, from property taxpayers to other French citizens. Yeah, I mean, that right there is important too. Like when we think of democracy, and I know it's

kind of an overrated point. A lot of people make fun of, you know, people distinguishing in America, government between like Republican and and democracy and stuff. And sometimes that that is overstated. But there is a truth to the fact that mass democracy in the 20th century, sort of the American 20th century model is not the original Republican instinct. In fact, you know, the original Republican quote unquote democratic instinct was very much anti mass democracy. They did not trust the extension of the, what he means by the franchise is the ability for everybody to vote, regardless of their class, regardless of their property status, their race, their sex, et cetera. So the original, you know, trailblazers of liberalism were definitely not

pro-mass democracy. He distinguished sharply in his speeches and political tracks between those civil rights suitable for all citizens, such as freedom of worship and the vote, by means of the second, Gizzo maintained the lower class could destabilize society, radically redistributing redistributing property and bringing resourceful demagogues to power. He believed the bourgeoisie formed a class capacity those who would be guided by reason

and their stake in society in directing the actions of government. Indeed, yeah, that's guided by reason because I've studied a, you know, when you study objectivism at all, right, right, whenever you see that, like, those three words together, you immediately think, uh, you're, it jumps to one thing. Right. It's also, I mean, this is, this is sort of like, um, it is a contribution of like

enlightenment thinking, um, and it affects objectivism, obviously, but it also permeates into libertarianism, even certain trends of like Marxism. and certain aspects of socialism, just the idea that we can use reason, utilize it and guide society by our own expertise is definitely an enlightenment holdover. Yes. Indeed, Guzot recommended the idea of creating a state through representation which would fully reflect the values of bourgeois electoral law,

aristocracy. Although in 1831 he fought to give representation to government functionaries and other professionals who paid lower taxes than required for franchise eligibility, he nonetheless argued for the special suitability of the upper middle class for political participation. Only that class combined wealth with four with, only that class combined wealth with formed intelligence. In other words, the original liberalism was not at all interested in, you know, handing a power over to every, you know, ghetto pop culture, you know, subsumed consumer, right? That was never the goal of liberalism, much to probably the frustration of people like James Lindsay who think in these absolutist individualist terms, you know, these original liberals, they never would have been interested in, you know, sharing political power with the proletariat

or, you know, the culturally deranged. Yeah, they certainly wouldn't be championing the Civil Rights Act. I mean, if you're confused about your own gender and you want to start chopping yourself to bits, maybe you shouldn't have the vote. The English jurist William Leakey, who admired Gizzo, devoted his long polemical work, Democracy and Liberty, 1896, to the polarity between liberal order and democratic equality. surveying England's parliamentary history in the second half of the 19th century, Leakey worried that a universal franchise was irreversibly changing both English society and the English state. Not surprisingly, his book appeared at a time when English socialism was becoming a political power, and Leakey devotes more than 140 pages to analyzing the new radicalism.

In 1893, the Independent Labor Party officially came into existence in the Yorkshire town of Bradford. Since the elections of 1874, however, a vowed socialist had sat in the British Parliament and socialist labor unions had been around since the 1850s. To the consternation of German liberals, German socialists, meeting in the Saxon town of Gotha, had drafted a program in 1876 calling for public ownership of the means of production. The Gotha Socialists also demanded an entire battery of social programs to be introduced by a properly democratized German state. In France, the revolutionary socialist, this, all right, here goes one, Jules D'Ezzde, sat at the, sat in the chamber of deputies from 1893 on, and as lucky reminded us, this day in the catechism socialist presents the family.

as an odious form of property, one destined to give away to a multiplicity of sexual relations for men and women alike. Yeah, I think one of the points here is something that we all recognize now. At the origin of these liberal or democratic movements, you know, there was a difference between them. They didn't stem from the same impulse, I guess is what I want to say here. You know, they came. America was sort of the first to unite these. concepts and its own, you know, for his own purposes. But I think Paul's point here is throughout the Western European world, Germany, France, England, et cetera, these were very different instincts. Yeah. All right. One way to look at such social quarrels is to observe how dated they are.

These battles were supposedly waged between reactionary and democratic liberals. Those liberals who were just in humanitarian, it has been argued, went with changing times, while others who were not, such as the Franco, Italian economist and socialist, Delvedo, Pareto, fell into bad company and even sometimes into fascism. Implicit in such a view is the distinction that more and more modern liberals have drawn throughout the 20th century between themselves and those they have replaced. It is a purely strategic stance that minimizes the reality of past conflicts, like the mainstream New Deal liberal historiography in post-war America,

the liberal historical view stresses the natural progression of things by which the new liberals took over from the old. Yeah, this is important because a lot of people who have this, I mean, this is classic like James Lindsay type stuff. Like everything is kind of reaching its own conclusion. It's been onto trajectory for hundreds of years. In fact, this was actually a sort of mentality that Murray Rothbard had early on, not later Murray Rothbard, who recognized the function of the power elite. But early Murray Rothbard, he saw, like, if you read his essay, you know, left right and the prospects of liberty.

It's all this, yeah. Yeah, it's all this like this single meta-narrative. It's all like coming into fruition. Everything's improving over time. He definitely drops that at the end of his life. When he talks about, there's an essay on, you know, Mises's role or whatever. you know, within Austrian economics, but he definitely drops this. But the point is that a lot of people in the 20th century America do have this mentality

where, you know, some people took the wrong path, but this has been, the liberal projects have been slowly improving, you know, over time. And Gottfried's saying that actually, and this is one thing that Gottfried is really, I wouldn't say it's unique to him, but it's something that he really is unique in terms of like overall traditional conservatives, like, who have this medicine. a narrative story of things. He does emphasize discontinuity. Paul Gauphrean always recognizes that the New Deal replaced something before it.

And the post-1960s left replaced the New Deal left. And like there's all these discontinuities. He doesn't see things in terms of this overall continuity. That's something that Paul always emphasizes is that every historical epoch is unique to itself. Yeah. You just did an episode on, the same thing, epochs, how things change, how, but it seems like it goes in cycles.

Yeah, but the current 20th century, like people who see America is sort of like the fruition of all the best aspects of Western history and it's all culminated into America, they need the overall narrative thing because every age has to be like an improvement. It has to be this organic process. And America is sort of at the top, like post-war America is like the ultimate end of history. It's the end of man. It's the best and most complete political system in terms of justice and wealth and inequality and all these things. Whereas Gottfried says, no, he denies the continuity there.

He says what we see in a liberal democracy in our age is basically a repudiation of, you know, historical epochs. Yeah. Anyone who looks at what the United States has become and says, oh, this is, this is the zenith. you're insane. You're insane. Yeah. I mean, it's just, it's brainwashing. All right.

Let's move on. It is possible to perceive continuity in the movement from a bourgeois liberal society into a more democratic one. But that continuity is not the same as direct continuation, as was noted by Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and other early 20th century social commentators. Rather, we are dealing here with a series of points. points leading from a bourgeois into a post-bougeois age that is with a process of displacement that went on for several generations. Thus, Weber focused on rationalization in analyzing the movement from a bourgeois capitalist towards a bureaucratized socialist society. A liberal bourgeois world created the secularist foundations and economic organization necessary for

socialist rule. Another pessimistic social commentator with liberal leading's Joseph Schumpeter believed that the middle class concept of freedom encouraged the expression of critical opposition. This tolerance undermined the belief system of an older liberal society and prepared the way for social democracy. Yeah, so I think this is important because here we see, and Goffrey's going to get into this more, I think, and I think he also does later in the book, but we always have to keep in mind there's a big difference between what you might call historicist liberalism and universalist liberalism. Historicist liberalism was the instinct that labeled itself liberalism, but within the context of a certain political paradigm. And so the English liberals, you know, saw themselves

basically as pursuing new avenues of freedom within the context of their own history, within the context of their own political, you know, horizons. Whereas, and that's not the mentality that a lot of like objectivists, I'm, you know, Iranians, but also like some libertarians and James Lindsay and other advocates of what they call classical liberalism, they have a more universalist liberalism where the ethnicity, the cultural context doesn't really matter. Every individual has these, you know, universal human rights. And it doesn't really matter what the context, the political context is.

things are eternal and they're sort of transcended over all things. That's universalist liberalism. So what Gauphre is trying to say here is that, you know, the original liberalism, what's much more rooted within particular societies. That's why German liberalism was different than English, which was different than French, and so on. Yeah. But neither of those attempts by old-style European liberals to find links between two distinctive social and political formations denies the differences between them. Both Weber and Schumpeter were looking. at the conditions in which social changes took place, and they note the overlaps as well as

distinctions between the epochsum question. Panjatus, Condolus, I think that's correct. That's as correct as I'm going to get it there. Yeah, good enough. Yeah. A Germanophone Greek scholar whose work is not yet widely known breaks new ground in this respect. Condolus examines the distinctions between liberal bourgeois and mass democratic societies by looking at their literary and cultural artifacts. Modern democracies differ from pre-modern ones, according to Condolus, in that they disassociate citizenship from cultural and ethnic identities and in the way in which mass production affects society.

Yeah, this is something I'm personally interested in. And I think a lot of younger people might emphasize this even more than Paul does. But we have to pay attention to how cultures, like the market, you know, the so-called free market, the capitalist space, the production of consumer goods. They don't just respond to consumer interests. They often direct them. They often change the culture itself. And they're often placed into culture with the objective of transforming them. And so the emphasis on what has mass production done to society, I think is something that right-wingers need to continue to emphasize, you know, much more than liberals.

You kind of see as this neutral space, wherever the free market is, there's like just, you know, cultural neutrality there. But I think that Condalus is this entirely correct that the entire, you know, cultural landscape can change just by the introduction of mass production. it also seems like a lot of the economics that you see pushed from like libertarians is doesn't really take into account what we've seen as far as globalism as far as to advances in technology itself also social engineering things like that exactly it just it exists in a vacuum you can make it work in a vacuum, but when you have to introduce it to, I mean, can you imagine like all of a sudden the United States just dropped all its regulations on trade and manufacturing and just went,

okay, go. Yep. I mean, that's something that Mises would have, Mises would have been okay with. Rothbard probably would have wanted the state, Rothbard would have wanted the state out of the way. But, you know, it's still, you look at that in your life. like, okay, I understand why you want to do this because you see what government and what, what quote unquote cronyism that word that they love so much does, yet you're not taking into account what Condolez is talking about here, talking about disassociating citizenship from

cultural and ethnic identities. Right. What that does to what that does when you have, because if you have a free market, you also have no borders because you're going to have free trade. Yeah, it also universalizes and it makes uniform world culture. I mean, the more you extend,

I mean, this is actually, this is controversial, but this is actually a point that Lenin makes. As you extend the capitalist order, you're going to do away with old cultures. It's inevitable that everything is going to become homogeneous culturally when you do. do this. Yep. If I can cite him. Perfectly. I mean, I read through all of State and Revolution

on this show. So, yeah, Lenin is not a, he's not a friend of the show. He's definitely been a big part of the show. Well, he's got insights that are worth learning from, you know, I'm not going to be autistic about it. Well, and sometimes if you even read Rothbard, it almost seems like the dialect, like his dialectical style is Lenin's. Yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. Like he stole, like he read Lenin and he decided to use that dialectical style, which I don't think is a bad thing because I think Lenin was definitely the most intelligent

of all of them. Right. And what, by the way, what Lenin is critiquing is not some Messisian paradise, but he's critiquing basically the managerial capitalism. Right. Yeah. All right. The modern as opposed to pre-modern,

the modern as opposed to pre-modern and Democrat is not continually situated and has a fluid cultural identity being shaped by a consumer economy. That's a sentence. That's a sentence right there, man. It is, yeah. The consumer economy shapes man.

Man doesn't shape the consumer economy. It's important. Yeah. As I said, social engineering, it just doesn't. You're not taking that into account when you're talking about this free, quote, free market. Yep. He also inhabits a culture that remains hostile to the older liberal universe.

Postmodernism in literature and literature, and literary criticism, Condolus argues, is the latest in a series of cultural strategies aimed at subverting the 19th century liberal order. The refusal to recognize a fixed or authoritative meaning for inherited texts, which is characteristic of postmodernism, represents an assault upon liberal education. Contrary to the world of moral and semantic order presided over by an ethical deity, which bourgeois liberals preached, the postmodernist exasks, indeterminacy. They decry the acceptance of tradition in discourse as well as in political matters

as a fascist act of domination or as the inadmissible allowance of the past to intrude upon the present. And I would say even the future. The future, I agree. The other thing I want to say too, and this is kind of in passing, but the idea of describing the older, this is what he's describing it, the older liberal order as fascistic is something. that when Godfrey wrote, when did you write this? What was this 1990s, right? Is it 98, 99? Yeah, 99.

So, yeah, so the idea that this would be determined fascist was probably seen by its readers as, like, dramatic. But look at everything that's called fascist. Everything that your grandma held just instinctually is now fascist. I mean, Gottfried was on the cutting edge of recognizing where all this was going. Yeah, that's why when people, that's why I tell people when they're like gushing over James Lindsay, I'm like, Paul Gottfried gave this to you 25 years ago. Yeah.

Exactly. Exactly. Nowhere does Condolus call for the eradication of postmodernism or make the facile assumption that by opposing it, the present generation can resurrect the bourgeois world. He contends that liberal and mass democratic societies are not only distinct but mutually antagonistic and that antagonism has expressed itself culturally as well as socioeconomically. Yeah, this is where this is where just the neoconservatives and I say that in a time when everybody hates the neoconservatives

but I really just mean 20th century American ideal Americanist ideology they really people need to recognize and we need to push this even harder that that mass democracy democracy the extended vote

and all the people that are pro civil rights regime, all this stuff, these are the mechanisms by which the old liberalism are being destroyed. So a lot of people try to balance, like mainstream people, they try to balance democracy and liberalism as like these unified, you know, paths forward or whatever, but they are not. You know, one is eating the other. The old American bourgeois liberal order that existed in the 19th century is being eaten alive by mass democracy.

For over 100 years, bourgeois liberalism has been under attack from authors and artists presenting views about human nature and the nature of existence antithetical to bourgeois convictions. Materialism, atheism, and pluralism have been three such worldviews, which the bourgeoisie long viewed with justifiable suspicion. Deconstructionism is a more recent form of cultural criticism aimed at inherited assumptions about meaning. by now Condalus maintains the old liberals have been reduced to a rearguard struggle while watching, I'm not going to pronounce the German word, while watching their opponents take over culture and education. But the reason for this reduced liberal presence, Condolus explains, is not an insidious contamination by a cultural industry separated from the rest of society. cultural radicals have done well in mass democracies because they continue to target the liberal order that the Democrats deposed. The cultural opposition continues to mobilize even after the political war has ended.

Right. This is also an insight of people like Gramsci, right? Like he recognizes that they can capture power, but the cultural revolution, it has to continue going. the moment it stops it falls apart like people think oh the you know the trans stuff is like ridiculous and silly and goofy it's actually not you you have to come up with something you have to continue to advance it in some direction otherwise it stops and and you can't have a revolution that stops if you have a revolution that stops you could you know that's that's when you get the the momentum that goes to reactionaries you know the second they stop creating new things to terrorize us with culturally that's when we'll gain a footing so you know a lot of people

people think, oh, when is this going to stop? Why didn't it stop with the gays? Why is it going to trade? Why is it going to pedophiles now? It's because there has to be a new thing. The cultural revolution has to continue mobilizing even after the political war has ended. If you're going to have progressism, there has to be constant progress. That's why people concentrating too hard on the transgender thing and just concentrating

on that, they don't understand that what's, you really should be looking at what comes next. And I think that by reading what we've already read before, we can see that Paul, that's the genius of Paul is he's like, he's not stuck where he is. He's looking 20 years, 25 years down the road. And he's like, okay, where are we going to be? Right, right. Victorian rigidity, social status, and elitist attitudes about education have all remained the butts of academic and literary criticism. And the opposition points back to the conditions of strife in which mass democracy arose. This cultural insurgency, Condolus observes, draws strength from a subversive source that once served liberalism in its war against the past. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. See, liberalism was something that came about on the scene of world history because it was attacking something that came before. You know, the political interests at the time of the rise of liberalism needed to confront it, you know, subversively, basically. it needed to them and we're talking back we're talking back at like um you know oliver cromwell and

stuff and so when the birth of some of these you know tendencies uh could be found so today liberalism has basically uh you know come into the establishment it is the establishment view of things so but but now it's being opposed by something that also has to be culturally subversive yeah here we start getting into rufflin feathers the enlightenment tradition of critical rationalism was crucial for the war of ideas waged by the bourgeoisie and its defenders against the remnants of an older world. Despite the attempt to integrate this outlook into a bourgeois vision of life, Enlightenment rationalism has played a new destructive role as the instrument of a war against a bourgeoisie on behalf of openness, skepticism, and material equality.

Yeah, I mean, this is, you know, not to oversight, you know, Edmund Burke, I mean, but this is, this is exactly what he said. You know, the moment you start playing with society like this, it has to continue forever. You know, so enlightenment, rationalism is going to come up with this new, you know, like this new, you know, series of reasons why, you know, like homosexuality is, is reactionary, right? It's always going to come with something crazier. And it's going to be justified with, you know, quote unquote reason. Yeah.

And this is the reason why maybe you can look to Lindsay for certain. someone like James Lindsay for certain things, but you can't look to him for answers because his answer is the Enlightenment. His answer is continual change. He just sees his change, the change that he desired has taken a detour. Exactly. He wants to go on the,

you know, he sees the trans stuff and all, you know, the wokeness. He sees that as the enemy of progress. Whereas there's a certain, group that sees that as the progress. He's just, they're on, they're on the same road.

They're just, they're on, they've just, it's a fork in the road, but both of those roads leads to destruction. Exactly. Yeah. All right. These pointed observations about the culture of mass democracy do not deny the fact that cultural differences exist among Democrats. Deconstructionists and liberal democratic absolutists still fight over the values to be taught in

history and literature courses. And I don't even know if they do that anymore. That might be one that's, I mean, do they? Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, who knows? And some advocates, what? Yeah, go ahead. And some advocates of post-World War II abstract expressionism, such as Hilton

Kramer, have now come to oppose latter schools of art as relative cultural traditionalists. Yeah, exactly. Like, yeah, this is why like, like, JFK and stuff is now like a, a, right-wing traditionalist, you know. Nonetheless, radically anti-Busoie movements have remained powerful in our cultures as mass democracy continues to struggle against the remains of an older heritage. In the United States, traditional liberal and agrarian democratic forces, state forces stayed alive into the 20th century and resisted the inroads of the Democratic

administrative state. I wonder, I wonder how if you go to that nonetheless, sentence there. I wonder if he would update this to I wonder how much of a struggle there actually is between the older heritage and the mass democracy.

I can't, it's hard to find an institution that's fighting for something older. Right. You know, I think it's like mass democracy versus the new left, basically now. Yeah, I mean, it's like who's struggling? Chronicles.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, there's no one fighting for the older heritage. Nobody. Mass democracy needed a cultural as well as political strategy to triumph. And the values and concepts juggled by our literary and now media elites are keys to the emergence of a post-liberal society and politics. Condolus also makes clear that mass democracy could not have developed without the demographic and economic revolutions that transformed Western Europe in the 18th and

19th centuries. Industrialization, agricultural modernization, and urban working class, the disappearance of a family-based craft economy, and the operation of assembly line production were the factors, Condolus observes, contributing to mass democracy. Yeah. I mean, mass democracy could not have happened if it wasn't for the industrial revolution, basically, is what he's saying here. Right. And this one part here, the discipline. appearance of the family-based craft economy. I didn't, it wasn't until I read Werner-Sanbart that I, that, it blew my mind. It was like, yeah, that's when once you, you can see how Walmart exists.

Once you see that how the family-based craft economy, the, the, the tailor, the, the specialty shop, how that just is moved out. and now you get cheap, cheap crap from pretty much anywhere. Right. Exactly. It's funny. I know everyone talks about her. Everything's made in China, but my, so my family, my wife's family is German. Her mom basically came from Germany in the 90s when she got married because my father-in-law was stationed over there.

So she goes back to her village where they, you know, they've been making crafts for, you know, hundreds, maybe thousands of years, you know, the same village, the same rural village. And she was just absolutely dismayed to go back to the same village. And you see all the products that they've been selling for a long time are basically imitations of the older products. And they all have stamps made in China. And I know everyone recognizes and talks about it. But it's just it permeates every aspect of the old European world.

And people pretend like consumerist capitalism is culturally neutral. It's a complete lie. The entire rural village has been transformed just by the mass production of these goods. Yeah. Well, I mean, hey, as long as it's cheaper, that's all that matters, right? It's true. As long as the line is going up, everything's fun. Yes, exactly.

Exactly. Although Imperial Rome experienced the concentration of uprooted proletari in its swelling, strife-ridden cities, it could not have produced a modern political movement because it lacked both mass production and mass consumption. Earlier societies had to deal with perpetual scarcity and with the need to share limited resources in a communal setting. The modern West, by contrast, provides more and more material gratification

to socially isolated individuals. Just the way libertarians want it. Yeah. I mean, just as long as I have Instacart and, you know, porn on demand. Yeah, we're good to go. I'm happy. It's politics are therefore predicated on hedonism and individual self-actualization values

that give an ethical dimension to a consumer economy. Yeah, the ethics, the ethics sort of justifies what's happening economically. Yes. As Democratic politics also advocates material equality as opposed to the exclusively formal or legal equality preached by 19th century liberals. It's actually, sorry, keep interrupting, but it's, it's funny. Like, there's one of the essays by Mises, and I have these examples in my head, because you and I both came from that world, but I have this story of Mises.

I think, I'm trying to remember what book it's in. It might be in his interventionist book, but he basically says that, you know, we capitalists don't disagree with the interventionists in terms of our shared desire for a material equality. It's just that we have different paths to get there. So he says, you know, his view, the liberal view is that by the capitalist free market economy, we can provide the same type of material equality that the interventionists are also trying to do by their own means. But, you know, now becoming a right-winger, I actually don't care all that much for a material equality at all. It doesn't phase me.

It doesn't enter into my, you know, priority scale. By stressing the ties between modern democracy and material pleasure, Condolus also explains why modern democracy cannot appeal effectively in the long run to an ethic of austerity. At the end of the 18th century, both American and French revolutionaries invoked classical ideals of Republican simplicity, a practice found preeminently in the political writings of Rousseau. self-indulgence and luxury were viewed as aristocratic flaws and among 19th century French Republicans as upper middle class vices. Democratic and later socialist revolutionaries even tried to exemplify the moral conduct which they hoped to enforce in a society of equals. The Jacobin socialist Louis August Blanke lived and dressed like a priest and the self-procrant

proclaimed Republican Senegal in Gustav Flaubert's novel, Les Education sentimentale, is made to appear eccentric in his extreme pursuit of virtue. Seneca is shown embracing dietary and sexual restraints and scorning sumptuous living. In a similar vein, Black Marxist president of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, has denounced the homosexuals in his homeland. Mugabe is outraged that sodomists and sexual perils, perverts continue to be found there and scoffs at the idea of rights for those given to bestiality. Yeah, this is so funny to me because, I mean, I think what Paul Gottfried's trying

to communicate here is a lot of these very anti-liberal people are actually more like just instinctually culturally conservative than today's left and today's quote unquote right. You know, all the people that are, you know, seeking freedom and liberty against, you know, the democratic totalitarianism or whatever, they don't realize that they're all. using the same far-left phraseology that were opposed by all these anti-liberals. It's fascinating to me. I mean, I think it's hilarious when these like Marxist revolutionaries in the third world are against like sodomy.

That's just hilarious. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, and an American, American quote unquote socialist, they don't get it. And they have to make excuses for it. And what do they do? They make cultural excuses. Oh, thank you very much.

Yeah. It's like it's like the Republicans, like when they point out that like, you know, Stalin was anti-LGB and you're like, oh, so Stalin was kind of based. It's interesting. It's like, there's something I agree with them on. All of these revolutionary democratic or socialist appeals to public virtue hark back to Republican models that Congolus views as incompatible with mass democracy. What distinguishes the latter from the former in his opinion is the prevalence of hedonism associated with mass production and mass consumption. This ethos express itself, expresses itself as a ceaseless desire for consumption combined with resentment against those who have more access to pleasure. Yeah. See, this is like, this is how I would, right here, this is how I would describe the uniqueness of the American situation.

You know, people always want to say that we're becoming, this is, this is a classic James Lindsay, right? We're becoming like communist Russia or whatever. We're coming like communist China. Actually, those communist experiments were very much focused on austerity. They were very much focused on denying material gratification and denying pleasures to the point where you basically had a miserable life. We're on the opposite end of the scale. The entire point of the American regime is to make us just absolutely sick and disgusted with titillation, with pleasure. Like we're living on Pinocchio's pleasure island and sort of like mandated prosperity. All right. It was the failure of liberalers excuse me, it was the failure of liberalism from the standpoint of mass democracy to move decisively

enough toward material equality and individual self-expressiveness that led to its undoing. The defenders of bourgeois liberalism temporized when faced by the sociological evidence of inequality in their own society. They claim to be more interested in freedom than in the further pursuit of equality, but were more were also more committed to family cohesion and gender distinctions than to individual freedom. The reason for this is clear, according to Condolus, bourgeois liberals were both economic innovators and perpetrators of an urban civilization going back to the Middle Ages.

In their heyday, they spoke about sweeping change, but they were never as dedicated to the social and cultural implications of a consumer economy as were those who replaced them. Yeah, that's so, you know, that's so fascinating to me. Just drawing this distinction between old school liberalism and how much it would be opposed to James Lindsay's consumer-based liberalism. You know, this sort of like modern democratic 20th century American liberalism has almost nothing in common with the old liberalism. And that's, I think, what Coffrey's trying to communicate here is we live in a world that's post-industrial revolution. the entire economic world order has changed, and therefore the type of liberalism that you're going to see is going to change with it.

Basic to the thesis is the recognition that liberalism is a bourgeois ideology, a set of ideas and principles indissolubly tied to the Western middle class. This does not mean that liberal principles are reducible to material interest, nor that they should be dismissed as a pretext for economic exploitation. In the early 1950s, John Plaminetz tried to separate ideology from the pejorative associations many Marxists had loaded onto that term. According to Plaminat's, the word ideology is not used to refer only to explicit beliefs and theories. Those who speak of bourgeois ideology often mean by its beliefs and attitudes implicit in the bourgeois way of speaking and behaving, and sometimes they speak of bourgeois, theories and doctrines as if they did little more than explicit these beliefs and attitudes.

Understood in the cultural sense and not simply as a theoretical instrument of self-justification, liberalism exemplifies bourgeois ideology. It designates not just liberal ideas, but also their social setting, that is, the context without which liberalism becomes merely disembodied concepts or slogans. Yeah, this is what I was talking about before. You know, original bourgeois liberalism came from like what he just said there, like a social setting. It came from a certain context. But when you just, when you try to rip those principles out of their context and apply them to the world today as this universalist and transcendent political principle, you transform the function of liberalism from a, you know, a culturally contextual

function into basically a world revolutionary project. When Benjamin Constant and Francois Guizu argued for a political just melu in the 1820s in the form of constitutional monarchy, they were not simply advocating moderation or an Aristotelian golden mean. They were looking at the educated hot bourgeoisie as a natural leadership class that could maneuver between the equally disastrous shoals of absolute monarchy and democracy. Gizot identified that class with the modern nation state. He believed that this political order and the bourgeois and the bourgeoisie would benefit from

their historically necessary association. This cultural context does not mean that the French doctriners, as the constitutional liberals in post-Napolianic France called themselves, had nothing to teach of our own generation. It is rather to insist on the need to avoid tendacious parallels, which arrange past figures and past movements in accordance with current appetites for a usable past. Yeah, this is, I mean, yeah, we have to avoid it, but if there's anything that describes the modern age, it's exactly this. They're arranging all these, you know, they're lining up past figures that they consider

good and past figures that they consider bad and basically like this is this is what the whole thing about like everybody is you know Hitler or whatever that's exactly what's going on here they're arranging them in accordance with current appetites you know so that's yeah that's exactly what he people Paul will say that we need to avoid this but this actually deeply characterized characterizes our ideological formulation today what I am emphasizing here is the need for sexualization, the avoidance of which typifies contemporary zealotry. Appeals to human rights as historically unbounded absolutes now resound in political debates in which opposing sides accuse each other of relativizing values. Wards and social policies are justified by invoking

self-evident truths, even though what is true in these truths may be different now from what seemed self-evident about them 200 years ago. Pointing this out is not the same as relativizing all truth. It is only to question the opportunistic and decontextualized use to which the past has been bent. He's basically critiquing. Yeah, he's critiquing historicism. Or he's critiquing universalism from a historicist mentality. You have to look at things in their original context.

English liberalism is not the same as American liberalism. and to treat them as the same is basically to engage in propaganda. The decontactualization of liberalism can happen in two ways. Either when we place liberalism into an eternal present going back and forth in time or else when we make it real history into a stepping stone to the present. A particularly striking case of this comes up in F.G. Bratton's The Legacy of the Liberal Spirit in 1943, a once widely esteemed defense of the liberal her. heritage. In his preface, Bratton explains that liberalism is not to be viewed as a 19th century

phenomena ending with the Second World War. As an attitude toward life, it has a history of 2,500 years. It goes back to the age of reason and the reformation and to earlier distant attempts to establish intellectual freedom and the life of reasons. In the journey that follows from Plato through Jesus to John Dewe, Bratton celebrates thinkers who he believes have pointed in his own direction. Thus, he favorably contrasts one North African Christian Platonist origin with another, Augustine, presenting the first as a proto-liberal and the second as an obscurantist. Yeah, basically, Paul's saying that it's cheating to say that like all the good things throughout

history were liberal and anticipated our age, right, and all the bad things were forks in the road that people went in the wrong direction. It's basically part of creating an ideological hegemony in our time. Yeah, and you see this. This is not only with liberals, classical. Everyone does this. Right. Everyone knows this.

In liberalism, John Gray also assigns liberal ratings to thinkers who lived long before the liberal era. Gray praises Pericles, funeral oration, or its reconstruction by the historian, Thucydides for a statement of a liberal egalitarian and individualist principles. This is basically what the neoconservatives do. Like if you read Leo Strauss, Paul is really critical of Leo Strauss precisely here, where he basically says that you can find aspects of American liberal democracy in the Greeks, and then he goes to the Romans, and you can just go throughout history and find all the good ones

and say this, you know, America perfected all of these tendencies. You know, it's cheating. Yeah. He thereby ignores the pervasive stress in that speech on living for the public good, which was paradigmatic for ancient Greek democracy. Yeah. Modern liberal individualism existed only insipiently, if at all, in Greek antiquity, a point documented in works by N.D. Fustold de Colanges,

Fustel de Colourne. I'm trying to remember how to pronounce that. I think it's DeCoulanger. De Colange. Yeah. Fustle de Calange, the ancient city to Paul Ra's Republican, Republic's ancient and modern. Among the readings of liberalism, which try to shove its past into a triumphalist present are the academic apologetics discussed in the first chapter.

In all fairness, it should be said that even probing critics of contemporary liberalism ascribe it to an excessively long genealogy. Christopher Lash, John P. Diggins, and the ethical philosopher Alistair McIntyre have all written critically on the liberal heritage, which they believe has descended more or less intact from earlier centuries. Yeah, I think one of the things that Paul would say here is it's what you can't do in history is reach back into specific contexts and take a phrase. I'm someone who spent a lot of time in Christian circles.

Protestant Christians do this all the time. They'll reach back in history and take a phrase. Catholics do it too. But they'll take a phrase and they'll basically just apply current meanings to it in order to justify their association with that past figure. That's what he's describing here. You can't say because Greeks use democracy and we use democracy, were basically like, you know, the Greeks who are on our side and we can cite someone from history.

That's ridiculous. Yeah. Faith and material progress as a means of solving moral problems, a buoyant skepticism about religious questions, and especially in Diggins' analysis, individual autonomy at the end of social policy are all, in their opinion, permanent aspects of the liberal worldview. So, yeah, people who want to hold on to liberalism and, um, and are Christians, Catholics, I mean, inherent in it, especially since the Enlightenment has been a buoyant skepticism about religious questions. I mean, that anyone could deny that, dismiss it, or try and poo-poo it away is insane to me.

It's just what it is. Yep. This worldview is thought to define liberalism, which it preached, whether or, it preaches a free market economy or the need for social democracy. Diggins and other perceptive commentators contend that people would not go on for generations speaking about a liberal heritage unless one truly existed. Those who admire John Dewey and John Rawls could, for the same reason, find something in Adam Smith and John Locke to admire.

Otherwise, they would not fix the same label upon all of those. Me ter and I'll say it. I don't know what that means. I didn't look it up. The view of a liberal heritage is furthermore, based on a reliable axiom and historical research that a long-term and widely held belief in the persistence and integrity

of a movement cannot be entirely illusory. Note that while classical liberal John Gray sees his own liberal ism transformed by modern social Democrats, he nonetheless searches for shared ground between himself and them.

But this approach raises its own methodological difficulties. It overlooks several generations of agitated debates between liberals and Democrats. These debates include Gizot's warnings about the sovereignty of numbers and Stevens' assaults on John Stuart Mill's faith that all people should live in a society as equals. Indeed, much of the political debate in Western Europe from the same. second half of the 19th century into the early decades of the 20th testifies to the deep divisions between old-fashioned liberals and democratic reformers. Yeah. I mean, liberal democracy as this natural, historically prevalent uniting force is what Paul's

deconstructing here. Yeah. The French anthropologist Louis Dumont in Homo Achilles treats as the unifying theme of the modern of the modern West the rise of individualism within the world. Would you argue that? Yeah. No, I think, are you asking if I think, you think he's right there?

Oh, no. No, I don't think, I don't think, I don't think that's the unifying thing with the modern West. I think, I think that's an aspect of certain tendencies within the modern West. I think, I think it's a weapon. I think it's, I think it's, well, I think what it does. is, is it's something, it's part of the American, you know, the American ideology's version of things, I would say. Okay.

Sounds good. Unlike the ascetic ideals of medieval Christianity and Eastern contemplative religions, Western modernity has been characterized by the belief that individual fulfillment should take place within society. This individual consciousness, Dumont explains, does not require that people withdraw from hierarchical world based on status relations. To the contrary, it has encouraged an individual seeking success and self-expression to find it in a changing and increasingly atomized society.

Yeah, I really do think, though, that, you know, the idea of modernity being defined in this way, I think this is actually the unique expression of the American version of the modern age. I don't think you can see a lot of this. I mean, because, like, you would have to consider a lot of the reactionary. movements in France and Germany and England. Anyone from like, um, anyone from like Mosley to Miscellini, anyone like that, you know, all these people were basically modernists and none of them had an individualist view of the world. Right. Okay. Yeah. I'm talking about America. Okay.

Dumont's analysis treats the intellectual history of the Western world as a steady movement towards expressive individualism from the Protestant Reformation to the rise of a contractual view of civil society in John Locke and in other early liberal theorists. I do agree with that. I do agree that there was a major strain of this individualism, you know, perhaps working itself out for sure. Implicit in this interpretive perspective is distressed by the German sociologist Fernando Tonis on the movement from traditional communities to functionally oriented and highly

mobile societies. Dumas focuses on the cultural and cultural. and intellectual basis underlying Tony's transition from Geismundshaft to Geiselchoft, and he places that transition into a continuum of thought going back to the early modern period. Dumont's thematic stress on individualism within the world underscores a problem found in explorations appealing to root causes. They account for both too much and too little. By citing a single force that is made to account for modern culture, Dumont ignores the distinctiveness that marks specific phases of Western history from the Reformation onward.

Yeah, that's what I was saying. Because I was saying it accounts for too much. So I agree here. I agree with Paul. Though clearly he knows that the Protestant idea of the individual experience of divine grace has little to do with contemporary views of individual self-gratification, Dumas' interest in cultural continuity leads him to play down such a difference. His study of individuality in the West causes him to overlook short-term cultural changes,

even those with powerful cumulative effects. To the extent that our own study deals with two successive epochs, which Dumas disregards is, for us, significant. Moreover, liberal democracy has accelerated some aspects of that long-range process outlined by Dumont while making others less important. Material redistribution as a means of individual fulfillment has become basic to our own liberal democratic age, while the cohesion of the nuclear family has grown weaker as liberalism has lost out to liberal democracy.

Differences and values can be perceived in short-term political transformations, even if the general trend of modernity is what Dumont describes. critics of the old bourgeois liberalism are finally too hasty and linking liberal concern about the social question to economic interests. As Gertrude Himmelfarb has demonstrated with regards to Victorian attitudes about work and philanthropy, questions of character formation and family responsibility were tied together in the Victorian middle class mind. Himmelfarb argues that such an association was not a threadbare defense of low factory wages

or of the lack of public works programs. Did you know Helmelfarb was Bill Crystal's mom? What? Yeah, I think it's Bill Crystal's mom. Oh, my good. Yeah, she married Irving Crystal. Okay. I'm going to look that up after this.

I hope I'm right. I'm pretty sure I'm right. Rather, it came from widely shared assumptions about the social good. The broad middle class extending from bankers and miller owners to shopkeepers and church canons rejected a welfare state conception of government because of what they assume were it were its socially destructive effects. It's interesting here that the old liberals he's describing as being opposed to welfare and all that.

Like if you asked a current day liberal, like someone from the Libertarian Party or like James Lindsay or something, you know, why we should be opposed to welfare. Well, first of all, James Lindsay wouldn't be that opposed to welfare. But generally it would say because it, you know, treads on individual rights in their freedom and all this. But, you know, these within the social context, the socially situated situation where old liberalism found itself, they were mostly concerned to about the socially destructive effects. You know, the effects on their ability as a family to function cohesively and continuously throughout the generations. I mean, this is very much, the old liberalism was very much historicist instead of the universalist. It's interesting to me.

Yeah. Where did I? Okay. Even if modern liberals disagree with these judgments, their disagreement does not justify substituting their own adaptation for the liberal tradition. Whether welfare state Democrats and public administrators have refined or degraded the original article is beside the point. What they have done is changed that article in ways that would make it unrecognizable to

earlier generations. Nor will it do to speak. of the failure of earlier liberals to see the world like modern liberals. If they had seen the world differently, they would not have been liberals, but social democratic advocates of public administration. American historian John Kloppenberg accounts for Weber's liberal skepticism about such concepts as the will of the people by pointing to the longer context of German history. Weber, as interpreted by Kloppenberg, could not

imagine the meaningful practice of egalitarian politics because, quote, Germany had no tradition of popular sovereignty and liberals repeatedly put their faith in elites rather than democracies to accomplish their goals. True 19th century German bourgeois thought did not produce as much radical ferment as its English and French counterparts. But Weber's liberal doubts about the people's capacity to rule were not restricted at the turn of the century to Germanophone observers. Kloppenberg, as a social democrat who thinks of himself as liberal, looks for larger context, i.e. the particular, the particularities of German history for his own ideological use to detach the liberal tradition from traditional liberal views that he finds distasteful. Yeah, that's that that's just a common, it's a common trick.

Right. Yeah. It's just a dismissal of, it's a dismissal of the opinion. or belief of somebody because of a social opinion or because they come from a different culture, they have a different cultural background, simple stuff like that. Yes. Yeah. Unlike today's liberals, traditional, well, and when you look at, it's also wrong. I mean, Prussia had a welfare state.

Yeah. So it's, but and it seems to operate very well. Why? because it was homogenous society. Yeah, they thought of themselves as part of a greater community rather than a bunch of individuals from all over the world. Exactly. I'm talking about that,

I've been reading from Imperium Yaqui, and he talks about that. He talks about how as soon as you have two cultures clash, within one land, you're going to even by trying to repair that rift, it actually makes it worse. Right. Yeah. Yeah.

It can't be done. Yeah. Which is like this is why things are so bad now, not only because we have the, all these, you know, cultures coming into one place to try to, but we also have like hysterical experts who think that they can, they are the ones by doing more. They have more tools at their disposal. They're the ones that can finally. unite all these cultures. And that's why it's especially bad here.

Unlike today's liberals, traditional ones entertain deep reservations about popular rule. A belief that democracy leads inevitably to socialism was common to French liberals of the 1830s and 1840s, and it is equally apparent to Lakey, Pareto, Weber, and other liberal observers at the end of the century. Paredo and Lakey feared that democracy would bring forth a trade union approach to economic policy. Unless put under some kind of control, democratically elected trade unionists would add to unemployment by driving up wages, which would then harm the most expendable workers. Democratic spokesmen would also agitate to impose tariffs on foreign goods,

and this would hurt domestic consumers while unleashing reprisals from those countries whose goods were being excluded. Does that all sound familiar to you? Yeah. The effects from such economic measures would then be blamed on the owners and captains of industry and social democratic governments would cite this accusation to justify their confiscation of the means of production. The Fendisiakal prediction about trade union democracy revealed the persistent liberal fear about a seizure of property that would take place at the urging of socialists. Despite the French Revolution of 1848 in which bourgeois and social democrats went from being allies to violent enemies, a liberal view did persist that democratized governments would become radical ones. Socialism or rampant social order would accompany the advent of a universal

franchise. Thus, Fitzjames Stephen declared with finality in 1874, quoting, the substance of what I have to say to the disadvantage of the theory and practice of universal suffrage is that it tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men ought to rule those who are foolish and bad. To say that the sole function of the wise and good is to preach to their neighbors and that everyone indiscriminately should be left to do what he likes should be provided with a rate of share of the sovereign power in the shape of the vote, and that the results of this will be the direction of power by wisdom seems to me the wildest romance that ever got possession of any

considerable number of minds." Yeah, this is a critique of the entire 20th century American spirit. I mean, the idea that we're going to disseminate political power to every single, I mean, look at the people. Like, you want to give every person the vote. Look at the people that you're giving the power to. And then the idea that this is going to result in a wiser governmental direction is absolutely insane. He calls it a wild romance.

And I think that's kind of understating it. But this is basically the mentality that captures the Republican Party, the Democratic Party and all major voices and advocates within that entire regime ideological sphere. This is the Americanist impulse in the world is to share political power with every person. This is why the civil rights regime is so crucial to the way the American power sees the world. But it has been proven so fundamentally wrong. I can't think of anything more disastrous than handing out the ability to vote to all of these groups that have been very easy to radicalize. I mean, Paul, even Paul Gottfried, who's writing this, he talks about the fact that he would have opposed the central mandate, the national mandate, that that all blacks have the vote because he recognized that these people would, could very easily

be radicalized and they could be fueled in order to pursue, you know, various, you know, far left objectives. And so this is exactly what's happened. We've lost wisdom in at the same time as we've gained the right to vote for more and more people. Yeah. These 10 lines on paper just perfectly describe the, the religion of civic nationalism in America. Yeah, exactly. And this, and this is, this is a, Not only is this against like, you know, the Democratic Party, but this is specifically against the impulses of the neoconservatives, the conservative incorporated, not just neoconservists, but conservative, establishment, conservative, you know, political commentators. This is against them specifically. They're the ones that are pushing for the Martin Luther King view of the world. Yeah, yeah, Martin Luther King.

Yeah. And Abraham Lincoln. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, Abraham Lincoln wouldn't have been, you know, this bad. Yeah, yeah. He understood the differences. Yeah, he wouldn't have given them the right to vote for sure. Well, I guess the mythological Lincoln that we hear about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure. Like Stephen, Lakey feared that democracy by overwhelming and sweeping away any national leadership would leave to capricious and unstable government. He predicted almost 20 years before it happened that the House of Lords would be disempowered. And in the 1890s, he also warned that, quote, the disassociation of the upper classes from public duty is likely to prove a danger to the community. Yeah. What is it said?

Nobles obligé? That goes right out the window. Mm-hmm. And it's what kept society going for centuries for millennia, for millennia. Right. Liberal critics of mass democracy offered differing, but equally grim predictions about the disposition of power in a democratic age. In the 1870s, Stephen could find no cohesive group of political leaders that might create stable rule in the world as imagined by John Stuart Mill.

His opponents were mere dreamers who, like the radicals, the term by which he designated Mill in his circle, look forward to an age in which an all-embracing love of humanity will regenerate the human race. It's not only is it, you get this. kind of egalitarian language, but you also get a theological language thrown in there as well. Of course. Though the radicals complain of the petty social arrangements in Victorian England, they lack the hardness of mind, Stephen observes, to change things for the better. In time, they would be swept aside by better organized fanatics.

Another liberal critique of democracy, widespread among the doctrinares of the 1820s, was its primitive character, which made it unsuited for the 19th century. Charles Remusat and Guizot both stressed the idea that Democratic republics were a product of classical antiquity. Given their need for cultural homogeneity, severe public morals, and highly restricted citizenship, popular polities did not seem destined to flourish in the 19th century. we didn't read that again given their need for cultural homogeneity

severe public morals and highly restricted citizenship popular polities did not seem destined to flourish in the 19th century why would they flourish now right exactly yeah unlike gizzo's democratic unlike gizzo's democratic critic and traveler of the new world Alexis de Tocqueville, the doctrinares did not believe that the European future belonged to democracy. They viewed the American experience as suigenerese. According to Gizot, Americans had established popular sovereignty because they had been

able to build a regime without an inherited class system. Tocqueville's depiction of localism as the essence of American democracy seemed to confirm Gizot's judgment. It offered a political picture that Gizot and other doctrinares thought had no bearing for France or for Europe in general. A Europe of highly centralized nation states required a stable social pillar drawn from the educated bourgeoisie in order to maintain political stability. Democratic primitivism, as revealed in the chaos of the French Revolution, was the political alternative, Giseau complained, into which his democratic critics would plunge France and the rest of Europe. So I don't know if people caught this or read this out of it, but, you know,

getting to know Gautfried over the years, the way I read this is it's basically that it's insane for America to export its own model, which by the way is a complete aberration from its original model, but it's insane for America to export its own model back to Europe. These things don't work. I think localism in America has a history. has an organic history that is just completely non-transferable to the old world. You can't transport it. That's why nationalism in the old world in Western Europe makes much more sense than

localism does in terms of dealing with the political emergency. Whereas nationalism in America, you know, for whatever political advantages we can gain from it right now, it's over the course of the last 200 years, it's tended to be more progressive than anything. but you can't, but you can't export the original Tocqueville's model of local democracy back to Europe, it doesn't work like that.

And the attempt to do so is basically led in all of the radicals and it's led in all the far left movements and allowed them to capture power. Yeah. The doctrinares pointed portentously to the Joccoven rule in 1793 as a precedent for democratizing experiments.

As Gizzo explained in the essay de la democracy that done society modern air democracy is a cry democracy is a cry of war it is a flag of the party of numbers placed below raised against those above

a flag sometimes raised in the name of the rights of men but sometimes in the name of crude passions sometimes raised against the most iniquitous usurpions but also sometimes against legitimate superiority yeah

Yeah. Democracy knows no higher principle, basically. While Tocqueville and Gizzo underlined the link between American democracy and America's decentralized republic, a new and fateful view of the American regime surfaced in the theorizing of George Bancroft, 1800s, 1891. Jacksonian Democrat career diplomat and author of the 10-volume history of the United States, Bankroft admired German idealist philosophy, which he popularized in the United States. As a young man, he had studied in Gottengen, Berlin, and Heidelberg, and while in Germany, he had become intimately familiar with the historical speculation of Hegel. His own work incorporated several unmistakable Hegelian themes, that history showed the progressive unfolding of the divine personality, that this process was reflected in the advance of human liberty,

and that liberty had developed most fully in the Protestant Germanic world. For Bancroft, unlike Hegel, however, this progress toward liberty reached its culmination on American soil. Bankroft presents the American people as the ultimate bearers of divine, divinely ordered liberty, and makes this point explicit at the end of his history of the formation of the Constitution of the United States 1882. Quote, a new people has arisen without kings or kings. or princes or nobles. They were more sincerely religious, better educated, and of nobler minds and of purer morals than the men of any former republic.

By calm meditation and friendly councils, they had prepared a constitution which, in the Union of Freedom with Strength and Order, excelled everyone known before, unquote. It's interesting. It's a fantasy. That's a fantasy. But, you know, it's funny to be it's funny. me that people can take the American situation in the 19th century, 18th century, or the 18th century, or even earlier, and in disregard the ethnic and cultural roots of that society

and basically universalize it, bringing tons of people and expect it to remain the same. So the idea that you can take this, you know, fantastical situation and just universalize it has been the foundation for all sorts of, you know, egalitarian terror in the Western world. A discussion I've been having privately with a friend of mine recently is whether the United States as a colony could even transport the culture, the high culture of the home country to the colony. Right.

It proved, it proved, you proved that you couldn't do that. Yeah. It couldn't outlast the first generation that had absorbed it firsthand. You know, the longer those things are separated and the more, you know, foreign elements you interject into something, you can't keep that up. Well, you also have to take into consideration that while this new colony is growing, it's the enlightenment injected into it. You're getting all of these ideas injected into it, which are going to clash with its original

high culture. Yeah. So I don't know. The conversation goes on. All right. The spirit of the people thus described was held to be democratic and Bancroft described to Americans a collective wisdom which found expression in their political architecture. The American federal union, as he saw it, was no mere convenient state, but the only hope

for renovating the life of the civilized world. The political institutions fashioned and inspirited by America's Democratic people assumed in Bankroft's writing a mystical quality and his insistence that the voice of the people is the voice of God led Tokoville to remark that pantheism is the religion most characteristic of democracies. Yeah. The American capacity for self-government that Bankroff exalted, was not in the end the American propensity for local self-rule.

Bancroft glorified a national democratic will, and his history of the United States ends appropriately with the topic consolidating the union. According to Bancroft, an American people and an American national government were both incoately present even before the colonies formed a nation state. Quote, For all the one of government, their solemn pledge to one another and mutual citizenship and perpetual union made them one people. And that people was superior to its institutions,

possessing the vital form which goes before organization and gives its strength. Yeah, this is sort of the foundation of like propositional nationhood, right? Like it's these things, we're formed independent of our own past. You know, and anyone can, anyone can jump in and be part of it. Be part of the people. Yeah. All right, I'm going on. Because he starts talking about, okay.

One does not have the strain to find here a Jacobin imagination hidden behind Hegelian language. A consolidated American national government, a powerful executive representing the popular will, and a global civilizing mission are the visionary exceptions that one can read into Bankroft's patriotic scholarship. Although his history of the United States

deals predominantly with the colonial period, it points more toward the American future than back to the 18th century. Bankroft is celebrating the progress of the democratic spirit as embodied in the American nation. In the process, he replaces an older American liberal constitutional identity with one that Gizot and Tocqueville might have associated with their own 18th century French revolution. Yeah. The original vision of the American situation was basically replaced by neo-Jackabinism, for sure. Yeah. While Bankroft celebrated the triumphant course of democracy in America, others, among them European liberals, grew increasingly agitated about the inevitability of popular rule.

This thing, actually, we're starting a new, and we only have a few pages left, so we're just going to, you don't mind going to the end. I'm good. I'm good. Okay. All right, this new section is entitled Liberal Pessimists. While Bankroft celebrated the triumphant course of democracy in America, others among them European liberals, grew increasingly agitated about the inevitability of popular rule. This anxiety in some cases became more pronounced as the 20th century began to unfold than social problems in Europe appeared to be worsening. The most detailed critical treatment of democratic rule produced by European liberal

was transformation of the democracy by the, I'm just translating that from the, by the sociologist, economist Pareto. Paredo's example, as John Gray remarks, makes dramatically clear how the pre-1914 liberal mind was placed irreversibly at a crossroads. In the face of a Democratic franchise, riotous trade union strikes and the intrusive presence of public administration, some liberals embraced authoritarian solutions. Of those, Paredo was perhaps the best known and the most deliberate, as can be judged from his social rights. It's funny. It's funny that today's liberals, you know, you self-describe liberals, they'll never talk about that. The importance of an authoritarian solution in the midst of a crisis or emergency. You know, it's really interesting how they never bring that up. In transformation, he outlines the characteristics of the democratic epoch and its relationship to the period that had preceded it. In the 19th century, a parliamentary regime had come to Italy as a result of a faithful. alliance between a demagogic plutocracy and the popular classes. Both had opposed to rule of landed

wealth and the ecclesiastical establishment, but drew apart after a liberal, constitutional, and unified Italy had come into existence. Thereafter, the laboring class had worked to seize the wealth of the liberal middle class, and by the 20th century hit it also turned against the parliamentary institutions on which the plutocracy had built its political legitimacy. In the aftermath of the First World War from which Italy had emerged on the side of the victors but financially crushed, unions took over the railroads, ironworks, and factories in Milan and throughout the industrialized north. Red Guard units were formed to police the worker-occupied areas, and though these units carried out the summary executions of the

enemies of the working class, the national government then under revolving premierships avoided military force. There was political calculation behind this hesitancy. The largest block in the post-war Italian parliament was a socialist, who in 1919 had voted to nationalize key industries. They and the Catholic Social Democrat Popolari held enough votes to bring down any government, and both were afraid of estranging their constituents by releasing armed forces against the syndicalasti, syndicalists. Meanwhile, land peasants, landless peasants, do you know what that word means? Bracianti? Yeah, I think it's just the landless, the peasants.

Like, okay. We're grabbing land from large estates as a paralyzed national government conferred on these expropriations ex post facto approval. Perredo vented particular contempt on Giovanni Gioliti, the, and aged prime minister who formed his fifth and most disastrous government amid these trials. Paredo mocked Giolyti's cowardice when he responded to Red Guard violence with the statement that intervention would be tantamount to capital punishment, which would be inappropriate at the present time. Paredo contested Gialiti to those fascist squadrons who in the fall of 1919 moved against the Red Baranies in Bologna and Po Valley. For Paredo, the plutocracy had become

timorous and moronic. And the only groups which now seemed capable of exercising power were nationalists and union leaders. Quote, among the property class, the sentiments of self-defense and property are largely spent and have begun to transform themselves into a nebulous, uncertain social responsibility, which others call social duty, used interchangeably with work now defined as a right. in some parts of Italy, workers invade the land and perform useless tasks thereafter claiming the right to receive wages, which the owner has a duty to pay them. I guess that's the labor theory of value, huh? Right.

The response of many bourgeois is approval. Elsewhere, Pareto notes that the hatred and combativeness manifested by the unionist towards the property class no longer elicited resistance. quote, on one side of the class divide, one sounds the trumpet and moves on to the assault. On the other one, on the other, one bows one's head, capitulates, or better yet, joins the enemy and sells one property for 30 pieces of silver. In two political commentaries published in 1923 following the fascist advent to power in October 1922, Paredo expressed the hope that Mussolini's regime would restore economic and political order. In January 1923, he perceived as the major difference between past and present governments

that one ignored economic issues, paying attention to demagogic sentiments, and particular interests, while the new government is seeking to reestablish an equilibrium between social forces. At the same time, Paredo warned against the danger of taxing heavily those who were salaried or small landowners, and he recommended that moderate unionists be consulted in setting economic policy. In September 1923, he also suggested how the fascist regime might best reform the structure of government. Paredo urged Mussolini to maintain a free press.

Let the crow's caw, but be indefatigable in repressing rebellious deeds. Experience demonstrates that leaders who embark upon this path of censorship find headaches rather than benefits. It may help to imitate ancient Rome, not occupy oneself with theology, but attend only to actions. Predo also advocated the putting into place of a new parliament, which would express popular sentiments

without crippling the executive. Though he readily admitted the failure of Italy's earlier parliamentary experience, he nonetheless thought that the new regime should not operate without elected institutions. He believes such institutions necessary to stabilize and legitimate the fascist order. So, Paul here's going on a long-winded example of, you know, the tendencies of the democratic tendencies of, you know, the fascist experiment.

Basically, I think he's trying to demonstrate that democracy and liberalism are not always mutual, like, they're not always like, you can have aspects of liberalism and democracy within non-liberal democratic political orders. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm reading here. In assessing these comments written shortly before Pareto's death, that is important to keep in mind two critical factors. First, there was no reason for Pareto and others to believe in 1922 that the Italian fascist regime

would later go berserk and ally itself ideologically and politically with Nazi Germany. In the early 20s, the Italian fascist expressed neither racist nor anti-Semitic ideas, and they were willing to offer leadership in a country that had broken down economically and was on the verge of political collapse. I actually personally disagree with this part.

I think that Italian fascists, I think like so many regular Europeans over a thousand years, had racial prejudices. Yeah. Well, you know, and when you... I mean, maybe they didn't consider it as like official part of like,

you know, a political agenda or anything. but like they were aware within their own context of you know the dangers of multiculturalism multiracialism and also you know the Jewish threat you know to say that the Jewish threat is a post 1930s or 1940s European phenomenon I think is overstating it yeah to say that Italians were not aware of the of the Jewish question right exactly it is yeah second Peretto saw his own class to bourgeoisie as spent and demoralized. And though he hoped to preserve some of its creations, particularly a free market, a free press, and religious liberty, he did not believe that his own social class would be able to do so. He therefore thought it was necessary

to turn to what he, like Machiavelli, designated as the Lions, bold warrior forces, to save what had been devised by those who had become foxes, parliamentary schemers, and finessing plutocrats. What Pareto saw happening in Italy seem to belong to a broader civilizational context. Throughout his writing, he used the concept of uniformities, which he applied to both economic and social affairs and which he claimed to have derived from an experimental research method. The long-term invariability of the income curve and the equivalent advantages to producers of a perfectly organized monopoly and of an unimpended free, an unimpeded, an unimpeded,

impeded free market are two such laws that are worked out in Pareto's major economic works. In Trasado de Societogia General, he developed a theory of psychological predispositions to explain social behavior. In this analysis, we find six such predispositions, which Pareto called residues and associated with changing movements and ideologies, also known as derivations. The six residues underlying group behavior are the instinct for combination, the persistence of aggregates, the desire to manifest one's beliefs, sociality, and the integrity of the individual, the integrity of the individual, and the sexual drive. It is the instinct for combination and related residues three and four that actuate groups on

the rise, while the persistence of aggregates and the concern about individual interests are most characteristic of established elites. Preda discussed those residues operating within Italian society in the context of his social observations. He believed that the waning of liberalism, conspicuous in his own country, was taking place throughout the industrialized West. The liberal bourgeoisie had lost its assertiveness in the face of its insurgent working class and of other democratic forces expressing instincts for combination and group solidarity.

In the First World War, according to Pareto, the parliamentary plutocrats had triumphed over the German military aristocracy, but had succumbed to the democratic classes without which they could not have hoped to win the war. The only force now able to resist a revolutionary socialist, Prado maintained, were the nationalists who drew upon the same residues prevalent among the socialists. Socialism and nationalism seemed to be related derivations, both resulting from residues leading to collective action. Among his last published remarks

were those on Italian constitutional reform addressed to the new fascist government on September 25th, 1923. Under a democratic ideology runs the current of fascism which overflows at the surface, but beneath that runs a countercurrent. Beware

less that countercurrent overflow. Beware lest you bestow upon it power to power by trying to close it off completely. fredo believed that the fascists and their socialist enemies were harnessing the same democratic enthusiasm that a now declining liberal society had given up trying to oppose. He felt that the fascists would have to coexist with social democracy, but hoped they would do so on their own terms. Paredo's appeal to some aspects of liberal heritage occurred in the face of what he took to be an irrevericable political change.

The march towards democracy would continue no matter what, and the decadence of the Roman plutocracy was only a portent of the destiny towering above our own plutocrats. An activist and redistributionist democratic government was about to arrive, and unlike Likki a generation earlier, Paredo had no doubt that a corresponding elite was arising to take charge of modern democracy. Political upheavals did not transpire randomly, but were the work of purposeful elites. who took advantage of their consequences. For us? Yeah, elite. I mean, it's just classic elite theory. Yeah.

Faced by the Italian nationalists and the precept of the social proletariat, Pareto opted for what he considered to be the more moderate democratic leadership. In fact, he chose what turned out to be less far-sighted of the two aspiring democratic elites. In the 20th century, it was the exponents of working-class democracy, not of democratic nationalism,

who made the more compelling claim to represent liberal democracy. Significantly, social democratic planners took over a form of discourse more closely akin to Pareto's than to that of Italian fascism. Fascists. In Scandinavia, England, and the United States, they appeared to experimental, scientific methods in education and public policy, and they presented their takeover of civil society as an act of liberating individuals and upholding their rights. But they also appealed effectively for several generations to democratic legitimacy, unlike the Italian fascists who were forced to manufacture popular endorsements for their plans. It is not surprising that by the end of the century, social democratic planning had given rise to what Charles Krauthammer calls reactionary liberalism, holding fast to the structures and constituencies of the welfare state come what may. more interesting is the fact that this liberal democracy held up for more than half a century in the most prosperous and literate areas of the world with popular approval.

This result indicates that some European liberals read the political future with clearer eyes than others. Despite his demonstrated polemical skills, Fitzjames Steven underestimated J.S. Mills' capacity to plan a popular regime. Mill did not intend to leave the uninstructed masses to do it as they please. Maurice Cowling notes that Mill staked his democratic hope on a religion of humanity, quote, a better religion than any of those which are ordinarily called by that title, unquote, and on a new cleracy, which would work to instill a universal faith in rationality. unlike the Anglican clergy and most of the English professoriate, Mills' cleracy would propagate scientific method and political sociology seen as the true science of society.

This elite would arise in response to social need and to the spread of secular rationalism. It would train citizens to emulate its own rationality and bring them into fellowship with the advocates of social progress everywhere. Yeah, like he's describing the rise of like the managerial state, you know, the ability for the reasoned experts using rationality and their own training to basically create something ongoing and something that was more stable. Caling further argues that Mill's devotion to intellectual freedom was conditioned by his concern about great minds being crushed by mediocrity. Mill was less of a libertarian than someone looking out for the highest nature's noblest minds and the advancement of scientific truth. Note that Mill favored extensive state intervention in the economy and the ongoing redistribution of incomes. He also hoped that his own elite would take charge of the general culture. It would thereby become possible to teach and apply his own utilitarian ethic, which Mill assumed would bring forth a new social morality.

All enlightened citizens would eventually accept the utilitarian notion that the good is that which maximizes general happiness. But as Kowling perceives, the highest end that men here were imagined to pursue in quest of pleasure was whatever Mill and his confrers desired for themselves. They never doubted that their own social preferences would come to prevail in a democratic age. clearly Fis-James Stephen and his younger brother Leslie Stephen though both

sagacious critics of Mill did not see fully his authoritarian side. They did not grasp the inquisitorial

certainty which Cowling exposes at the core of his method of inquiry. Nor did they appreciate the dogmatic way

in which Mill generalized about subjects he never studied. Mill knew little in detail about the history of British society and the 250 years before he was born. His denigration of its polity and religion was based neither on close observation nor on exact

historical knowledge. Boy, if that doesn't describe the current liberal spirit, like they just, they have no bearing in history. They have no idea what happened. They just have the solutions, which of course include much worse solutions than Mill ever put forth. Well, and to know what happened, they'd have to understand. understand why.

Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And that's one question no one wants to ask anymore. It's like, oh, this happened. Well, why did it happen? Well, because people are mean. Yeah, exactly. You can't look at specific political dynamics.

You just have to rely on generalities like that. Yeah. Finally, Mill's liberal critics underestimated the power of his vision of a new clarity, crafting and directing in democratic order. However weak may have been his grasp of the past, Mill evoked a society, of democratic planners, which would arise after his death. His twisting of historical data and fudging of laws of human progress were of less significance than Mills' ability to foresee mass democracy at work.

No other mid-19th century figure, including Tocqueville, exhibited such understanding of the dawning democratic age, even if that understanding, in Mills' case, was ideologically colored. And only one European liberal, Max Weber, revealed comparatively, insight in plotting the likely course of modern democracy. Unlike those liberals who trembled over the fate of property and parliamentary civility, Weber associated democratic life with the iron cage of bureaucracy. Like Pareto, he was willing to entrust democratic government to plebiscatory leaders, not because of the fear of anarchy, but because of his dread of

bureaucratic despotism. Interesting. Yeah. Very. In an off-quoted letter from Weber to the sociologist of elites, Robert Michelle's, at the end of the First World War, Weber questions the intelligence or honesty of those who exalt the will of the people. He goes on to admit that genuine wills of the people have ceased to exist for me. They are fictitious. All ideas aiming and abolishing the dominance of man over.

man are utopian. In 1918, Weber observed even more incisively, in large states everywhere, modern democracy is becoming a bureaucratized democracy, and it must be so, for it is replacing the aristocratic or other titular officials by a paid civil service. It is the same everywhere. It is the same within parties too. It is inevitable, despite the attempt by Weber's critics to attribute such remarks to the anemia of German liberalism, what they indicate is Weber's deep perception of a secular trend, the intertwining of mass democracy and public administration as the shape of things to come. Yeah, this is such a powerful narrative. I mean, the entire ethos of conservative incorporated and the liberal establishment is that America

represents the triumph of individual freedom. And I think Weber is much more perceptive to the fact that actually what it represents is the triumph of the managerial state, the triumph of the administration, the triumph of bureaucratized or whatever, you know, bureaucrats basically just running people's life and trying to arrange the world in the way that they see fit. And that's exactly this spawn, this administrative state that Weber had his sights on, We basically spawn the multiculturalism in which we exist. We don't exist in a world of increased individual freedom.

We exist in the world of mandated cultural degradation. That's what we existed. And it's handed down. It's politically derived. I mean, I think the people that say, like Aaron McIntyre and others who say that culture is downstream from politics, recognize the fact that the administrative state,

the thing that Max Weber warned about, is characteristic of the American function in world affairs. You know, everything, our culture, everything is handed down from politics. Everything is handed down from above. And it comes from not individual freedom, but from bureaucracy. Yeah. And in order, it has to be that way. If you understand that the managerial state, it's one purpose is to perpetuate itself.

It has to control everything. It has to control the culture. It has to guide everything. Yeah. And that's why the, you know, was Jonathan Bowden famously saying the, only way you change this is to clear it all out. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I think, I think the overall lesson here for Paul is that liberalism and democracy are not the same, but their unity is the particular characteristic of American totalitarianism. The attempt at unifying these two themes has created

an ideological hegemony that people don't know how to oppose, that the dissident right is only now figuring out how to oppose. But this is one of the sacred cows of the American ideology is the union of democracy and liberalism. And the real genius of it is the fact that you have this left-right paradigm, this Democrat-Republican paradigm, let's call it, where they do not realize that they're both operating within the same system and that all conservatives are working to do is to conserve this system. Exactly.

If they're working to to keep any of it, they're perpetuating the system. So there's a certain genius to its design in that you have, if you only have two factions that are allowed to genuinely fight within it,

they're both working to, they're both working to keep the system going. Yeah, this is why like people, I mean, people, as they're becoming more radicalized on the right, you know, they're recognizing that something more substantial needs to be done, but I've never found the solution really in Republican politics,

you know, Republican Party politics. I mean, sometimes it's fun, but really that's not where change has to happen because both of these parties are reinforcement mechanisms for this regime. And it have to be. It's built into the cake like that. You have to clear it out. Yep. So. All right, man. Promote whatever you want. Thank you. Well, first of all, thank you for this. Yeah. And I didn't know it was going to go this long, but thank you for. Yeah, Paul, Paul is such a dense, a dense writer. So it's really hard to get through sometimes. But at Contra Mordor is my Twitter.

And then my name, C.J. Engel. substack, you can find me there. And that's basically, I also do the Chronicles magazine, which is small now. And we're making some changes for next year. So that'll be fun. We always have- Chronicles Magazine podcast, right? Yeah, Chronicles Magazine podcast.

And so we're doing some more stuff next year for that. But in anticipation of that, you can always check it out on YouTube, et cetera. All right. I'll link to it. Thanks a lot, TJ. Yeah, thank you.