Adrian Wooldridge: Can Liberalism Save Itself?

Tammy regularly hauled stuff to her kids at college. That's why she shops at BJ's wholesale club, saving up to 25% off grocery store prices. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods, even they can't screw up. "Have you met my kid?" And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. "They call me the road warrior." This is your home road warrior, mom. Home of the save. Join for just $20 at BJ's.com/maskete and save 10 cents per gallon for six months. Open soon limited time offer new members only. BJ's home of the save. Football is back and prize picks is bringing out their best offer yet. On prize picks, you can make all the picks you want, all in the same app. And now, prize picks is available nationwide. Lock in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on prize picks. What you want? Download the prize picks app today and use code Spotify to get $150 instantly in line-ups. If you win your first $5 line-up, prize picks, run your game. "Most people present in certain states visit prizepicks.com for restrictions and details." When you're building a company, you learn the trust is what closes deals. You may have the best product, but buyers won't sign without proof that your product is secure, especially if it has AI. Vanta gets you compliant fast with SOC2 ISO 27001 and more, and keeps you secure with continuous monitoring. Hyperbound, a YC backed startup used Vanta to unlock the Fortune 100 in under a year. Snowfire got audit ready in a month and closed a multi-million dollar deal. Trust matters. Get started at Vanta.com. Think GLP1s are too expensive. On row, you can access FDA-approved GLP1 weight loss treatment at your lowest possible price if you're covered. Start with rows free insurance checker. Just upload your insurance card to see if you're covered for certain GLP1 shots. Whether you use insurance or pay cash, row helps you find an option that works best for you. Plus, rows membership plans help you save even more. See if you qualify at row.co/health. Our ex-only for side effects of GLP1 medications, including box warning, go to row.co/safetyed. Additional row membership be required. Liberalism. For centuries, liberalism promised to liberate the individual from inherited hierarchies, to restrain the abuse of power and to create a society in which disagreement could flourish without descending into violence. But today, the liberal order is under pressure. From populism, identity politics, economic disruption, and a growing sense that freedom itself has become unmoored from responsibility. So did the creed that helped make the modern west possible ultimately contain the seeds of its own undoing? Adrian Waldridge is a distinguished journalist who spent more than three decades at the economist and now writes for Bloomberg. In his new book, "Centrists of the World Unite," he argues that liberalism's virtues can survive. But only by rediscovering its deeper traditions of individual self-government, moral formation, and elites formed by an ethic of cultural excellence. So can liberalism reform itself? And can it do so without recovering the Christian civilization from which so many of its virtues emerged? I'm Thomas Small. This is my conflicted conversation with Adrian Waldridge. Hello, Adrian. My goodness. What an honor it is to meet you. Thank you so much for coming on conflicted. Your extremely kind. It's great to be here. Adrian, you are a tremendously distinguished journalist. You worked for the economist for 32 years. You wrote its Lexington column on America. It's Shumpeter column on capitalism and its budget column on Britain, which you began just as the Brexit crisis broke out. And Brexit was not something the economist thought much of. So what a time to write that column. You've also published oodles of books on lots and lots of subjects. You're now at Bloomberg. Just a huge career. The idea of a conversation with you is rather daunting. I must admit you're very flattering. Your new book, "Centrists of the World Unite" is a sort of summation, I think, of your whole career and of your life as an intellectual. Its subtitle is "The Lost Genius of Liberalism". Adrian, what is "The Lost Genius of Liberalism"? Liberalism now means to people two sorts of things. To people on the left, liberalism means being kind to people, being generous, being nice. That's left liberalism, being tolerant in all of those things. To people on the right, liberalism means essentially shrinking the state, having a free market, letting business do its own thing. And I think those two definitions of liberalism have become problematic or have become constricting in certain very important ways. And what I'm talking about "The Lost Genius of Liberalism" is to say that we need to go back over the history of liberalism and discover its much richer history than is summarized in those two manifestations of liberalism. Much richer in two ways, firstly because I think the essence of liberalism doesn't lie in either the free market or in infinite tolerance. And secondly, because I think the essence of liberalism or the manifestations of liberalism shift in significant ways that liberalism is a solution to problems, not something that's fixed. And many contemporary people who regard themselves as liberals are forgetting to change what they believe in the light of new problems. Oh, that's very interesting. Now here, uncomflicted, and we've been going for about eight years, I think at times people listening to us, and we focus mainly on geopolitics, on Middle Eastern history, and all of that. But we try, at the moment, especially to document our changing world order. Sometimes it seems like the collapse of our world order, frankly. But people listening to us over those eight years would probably pigeonhole us kind of into the post-liberal space, a kind of sense following Brexit and Trump and all of that, that neo-liberalism or liberalism had failed or wasn't enough. So, you know, that's the furrow that we've been plowing. And so your book was, in many ways, challenging certainly thought-provoking. You write in it that liberalism is first and foremost a response to the transition from a largely static world to a progressively mobile one. And by that largely static world, you mean the pre-modern world. So first, was the world before modernity really static? Or is that actually a liberal or liberalist caricature? Then second, if the world became more mobile in the modern era, and I think that's undoubtedly so, what caused that if not liberalism itself? Because often the genealogy of liberalism stretches back to Renaissance humanism, as far back as that, so that modernity itself is seen as liberal, but of course that can't be true as you make clear in the book. So what is modernity as a concept? And how does it differ from liberalism as a concept since you say liberalism is a response to modernity? Well, let me start off by saying what I think is the essence of liberalism. The essence of liberalism in my mind is not knightness being nice to everybody. It's the left liberals would say. It's not free markets and allowing free markets to do their own thing as conservatives or right wing liberals would say. The essence of liberalism lies in three things. One of those is a belief in individualism. That is a belief that we should start with the individual and work upwards and outwards from the individual, not starting with the tradition, not starting with the collective, but starting with the individual. Secondly, liberalism insists on a notion of tolerance. The belief that because we cannot know ultimate truths for certainty, we should be allowed to discuss a debate to differ about certain theological matters. These shouldn't be imposed by the state or any collective power above us. And thirdly, liberalism starts with skepticism about power. The belief that power is such a dangerous thing, a poison or drug that it needs to be constrained in certain ways through constitutions and builds of rights and things like that. Those are the three essential things, which I think define liberalism. And these things were all of them created in reaction against the traditional world, the pre-modern world. The pre-modern world has two fundamental assumptions. One is that basically society is static. That you inherit your position as a matter of birth. That economic change will be relatively slow. You would get about 10% growth per century up until the mid-19th century, rather than 10% growth a year or every couple of years or things like that. So it's very, very slow change. But also a fundamental assumption of the pre-modern world is that you're born into your beliefs. That the sort of beliefs you have are determined by where you're born. That you will have an official church, an official religion, or a collective tribal religion, which you will not really be able to question without being thrown out of that that society and liberalism comes along. when two things happen. First of all, when growth begins to speed up, so the economy begins to grow faster, and also people begin to get more control over their lives, more control over where they end up in their lives, that the individual can shift from being, you know, a plowman or whatever, and rise upwards. And that becomes a sort of central factor of life rather than something that's very peculiar. But secondly, it comes from a world which becomes increasingly pluralistic, that's instead of the state, a religious group being able to impose their orthodoxy on all the members, people begin to question those faiths and begin to say, "I want to be different." And again, that happens, well, you know, the more rapid growth begins to happen with the industrial revolution. The disagreement about faith, you know, begins really in Europe to happen with the reformation and things that happen after that, and you begin to get slowly the notion that's the individual conscience that determines your faith rather than just inheritance or what you're born into. And of course, that speeds up a lot in the 19th century when church and state begin to separate. In a reading your book, I began to think that in a way liberalism and liberals may have agreed with those, you know, with the ancient Greek philosopher Thelys, who said that water is the primary principle in the universe, or indeed with Heraclitus, who said that everything flows. So there is a kind of metaphysic underneath liberalism that takes it for granted that everything is in a process of constant change. There isn't a way, no solid being, it is just all becoming. It flows and flows. And therefore, liberalism is a kind of reaction to that fact. I mean, it's a strange, the genesis of liberalism is hard to pin down because you say, you know, in one way, liberalism is a reaction to the medieval world. It's also a reaction to the early modern reaction to the medieval world, which created absolutist structures and confessional war and kind of a church that had become more ideologically fixated and oppressive, but also liberalism is generating the world of constant change. So is it a response or is it, is it the engine or is it responding to it? You see what I mean? It's slightly hard to pin down. Absolutely. I hate to say both because that sounds that sounds like a get out clause, but of course it is to some extent both. And when liberals are talking about the meaning of liberalism, one of the words that they keep coming back to is the word motion. You're talking about liquidity and water flowing, they in the in the in the late age, in the early 19th century, very often refer to motion. They refer to the world of the locomotive and the locomotive moving along. They refer to machines and machines being being in motion. They refer to the fact that everything is getting faster, everything is speeding up. Some of them also, as you say, do refer to liquid modernity and the liquidity of things, but it's this notion that permanence has gone and that we have to come to terms with the world that is in motion. And that creates a great deal of angst in the sense that if things are constantly changing, you're in a perpetual state of confusion or doubt about what's true and what's false and what's real and what's permanent. But it also leads, you know, to a great deal of creativity in the sense that people who have been condemned throughout their life to repeat certain mantras that they didn't really believe will then fashion their own beliefs, people who be condemned to be plowman to use that phrase can fashion their own lives. So it's a world of uncertainty and angst and it's a world also of expanded possibilities. And the two things reinforce each other. I mean, change reinforces, liberalism reinforces change and change reinforces liberalism. But I wanted to focus a bit, you know, talk about your own position as a post-liberal. And I think a lot of post-liberalism has come into being because liberalism is perceived to have failed in various ways. And what I try and do in this book is not to say post-liberals are idiots and it's all nonsense and they're just talking through their hats, but to say actually this angst about certain things that the liberal world has created is quite reasonable and quite true. And the question is, do we need to become post-liberals in order to deal with it or can we deal with it within the framework of liberalism? So a world that is constantly in motion, a world in which everything is thrown open to doubt, a world in which there are no higher values or certain is. Is an unsustainable world? Absolutely, I think that's right. It's an amazing thing, you know, your book, which is, you know, dear listeners, it's encyclopedic in its scope. It really walks you through the whole history and all of the different permutations of liberalism. It reveals that liberalism, you know, though Adrian, you sort of say, ideally it's in the center. And we'll talk about what that means. It's also clearly very much a broad church. There are so many different varieties of it, but it also engages with questions that have been animating Western civilization from the beginning. You suddenly realize that their, you know, Plato in his conflict with the sophists, you know, there's a sort of sense of the same argument being had as liberals are being confronted by conservatives and reactionaries and vice versa. Now, you do say, you've just said, and it's right, that liberalism properly so-called rises in the 18th century and the early 19th century, but you start your book in the early modern period or late medieval period with sort of three proto-liberals. And I'd like to talk about them a bit because they can help us establish some of the themes you trace. The first is Erasmus. He's something like a patron saint of your book. It seems to me. Yes. And you use him, I think, to exemplify the epistemic modesty, as you put it, the antipathy to ideological certainty that animates liberalism at its best, you say. So in a way, the chief virtue of being in the center is that you are not certain and you know that people will disagree and you therefore build and support institutions that manage disagreement. Is that a very important pillar of liberalism? That's an absolutely perfect summary of what I think is a pillar of liberalism and also what my argument is. Erasmus is a fascinating figure, but he's also an extremely attractive figure. And what I try and argue in my book is that liberalism is a temperament before it is a theory or an ideology. And Erasmus is an exemplar of a certain temperament. And that temperament is scholarly, civilized, modest and tolerant. And he lives a certain life. And what you're getting a world when Erasmus comes along, which is suddenly divided between two certainties, two certain orthodoxies. One of those certainties is Protestantism. And the other one is Roman Catholicism in its counter-reformation form. And these are people who, because they're so inflamed with certainty, go along to do all sorts of atrocious things to burn people, to burn books, to do terrible tortures, to impose their religious beliefs on people. And Erasmus looked to a different world, what he calls the Via Media. He said, well, we shouldn't destroy Catholic civilization, but we should reform it. We shouldn't burn everything down in order to create truth, but we should recognize that there are institutional corruptions within Catholicism. We should try and get closer to the spirit of the Bible, but also the spirit of Christianity. And that way forward, which he points to, and embodies in the sort of life that he leads, is foreshortened by the reformation and by the counter-reformation. And I think one reason why I found this very attractive is partly because of the temperamental side, because I think political theorists are too obsessed by theory and not don't pay enough attention to modes of life, to sensibilities, to styles of life. But also because I think we're going through a very similar period now. We are seeing these tensions or divisions between the militant left and the militant right, militant secularist, militant religious people and things like that. And it's the via-media negotiated through compromise, which is the way forward for civilization. Well, I completely agree with you that Erasmus is a very attractive character. I've always been attracted to him. He is, in my view, something like the finest flower of medieval Christendom. He kind of is what that civilizational arc produced Erasmus, a wonderful character, and liberal in temperament. And I'm also glad that you bring that up, because I often say that I am a liberal, but not a liberalist. Temperamentally, I am liberal. I wish people to live as they want. And in my mind, that liberality is grounded in a kind of Christian humanism, frankly, liberalism, I feel, sometimes, at least, falls foul of that epistemic modesty criterion and becomes a form of ideological certainty. And it reduces everything to certain terms, some of which can be contradictory and cause some of the destabilization. So how do we distinguish between liberality, which is much older than liberalism and liberalism, which seems to me sometimes to be a kind of totalizing ideology? A totalizing ideology is a very good phrase, and I think it's difficult. And I think the answer to your dilemma lies in the issue of a temperament, of a way of approaching things. I don't think as a liberal myself, I could say that I'm infinitely tolerant of everything. Car poppers, paradox of tolerance, that if you tolerate the intolerant, the intolerant will ultimately destroy liberalism. There's some truth in that. There are certain fixed things about liberalism, which means that you won't tolerate the breach of those things. I say the division of skepticism about power. As a liberal, you can't say, well, I welcome totalitarianism or strong man rule, or things like that. As a liberal, you have to say that you would not tolerate the prescription of certain religious beliefs via a militant church, or things like that. You have to have institutionalized tolerance. And individualism ultimately is a non-negotiable thing. So there is a paradox here that what you're doing as a liberalist is asserting a totalizing ideology, but you must assert it in a way that A is a rasmian in the sense that you're willing to listen to debate about it. But secondly, in a way that leads you to be willing to take into account criticisms of your ideas. And I would say that individualism is quite an interesting example of that, because although I say that liberalism starts with the individual and works upwards, it starts with the rights of the individual in regards to those things as absolutely fundamental, nevertheless, within the liberal tradition, there are very profound criticisms of a society that is over individualistic and that just dissolves into warring and competing egos. So we have to be as liberals willing to interrogate our assumptions whilst also ultimately saying, this is what I stand for. I stand for these three things, or however many, many there are of those things. As you read the book, you realize that liberalism under your pen becomes something almost like a philosophical way of life. And perhaps we'll gesture towards that at the end of this conversation. But that it is difficult, yes, is true. The way you describe it, you know, it's not just in the center, ideally, but it's a center that is also a tightrope. You're always-- - I love that phrase. - Absolutely, yes. - Having to stay in balance between these extremes. And maybe liberalism is fragile by its very nature, but possibly that is what it's all about. Now, the next early modern figure that you talk about in the book is Thomas Hobbs. And you do see him as a proto-liberal, even though I would say he's most famous for his defense of absolutism. So what role did Hobbs play in the creation of liberalism? - Well, Hobbs is a proto-liberal because he thinks that society consists of individuals pursuing their proper ends and the best way that individuals can secure self-preservation, I suppose, as the ultimate thing in Hobbs. And the only way that they can do those things is by joining together as individuals to create a state that dominates them. So again, a paradox that this extreme individualism leads to the creation of an artificial man, a Leviathan, who rules over them, and he rules over them to prevent them from killing each other, ultimately, which they will do if they're left to their own devices. And why this is liberal is essentially because in traditional medieval philosophy, the social hierarchies justified in accordance to inheritance, prescription, notions of organic unity, notions of the family, natural heads, or notions of divine intention. And Hobbs says, no, all of these things are nonsense. We must justify the social order on the basis of individuals pursuing their ends, their individual ends, and you know, the great frontispiece of Hobbs is the sovereign, composed of lots and lots of individuals. So he is a liberal in the sense of being an individualist, and the great thinker and philosopher in some ways post-liberal John Gray says that not only was Hobbs the first liberal thinker, but he's the only one worth bothering about, which is a very typical John Gray sort of thing. The other thing I think that Hobbs does, as well as saying that society starts with the individual and works upwards, is to anticipate the great criticisms of liberalism. That's a loss of the best critics of liberalism, including Topville, including many of the post-liberals, say that the problem with liberalism is because it's so excessively individualistic, it leads ultimately to totalitarianism. - Well, Hobbs himself is an example of that because his state is the Leviathan. - It is, exactly, so although I would question, I mean, I think he's not a totalitarian in the sense he wants to mold everybody's thoughts in the way that the Soviet Union did, 'cause he says that people should be allowed to pursue their own ends, if their lives run their businesses without the state micromanaging it, what he says they can't operate in the public sphere, according to their own lights, that's the sovereign, that's the Leviathan must do, rather a Chinese view of the social order actually. - Slightly Islamic view, as well, as it happened. - Interestingly enough, I don't know enough about that, but Hobbs, I'd say, is a proto-liberal in the sense that he dissolves society into its component elements, individuals, and says that the social order is anchored in its ability to satisfy the needs of those individuals. There's lots of ways in which the Hobbesian vision is a very cold and dangerous one. - Well, let's talk about individualism then a bit, because I would have thought, maybe I'm playing the devil's advocate, I'm the post-liberal in the conversation, so I would have thought the fact that maybe the first philosophical individualist in the modern period ended up with a very absolutist and authoritarian political vision might give a liberal some pause, because what if we are not individuals? But what if we are, in, let's say, a more sort of classical Christian formulation, persons, and therefore inherently relational, right? Meaning that to be who we are, each of us, we literally have to sacrifice ourselves, sacrifice our egos, sacrifice our personal ambitions and so on. So what if individualism falsifies human nature and results in people not being themselves? In the name of saying we must support every individual to be himself, by then imposing individualism, the idea that what you are is essentially an atom, a disconnected unit of humanity. You might just be falsifying the very humanity that you're seeking to protect, does that make sense? Yes, I mean, what I would say is this notion of individualism is a safeguard against collectivism in various ways, against the idea that what ultimately matters is the collective rather than the individual. The collective might be in the conservative vision of these things, tradition, in the left wing or Marxist or pseudomaxist vision of these things, might be a future in which humanity as a species being flourishes to his highest level. And we need to safeguard against that because I think thereby leads a road towards totalitarianism, a different road to totalitarianism from Hobbes' but a road whereby we are shaped according to the wills of the powerful or governments and things like that. But I would say if you mean by individualism, the freedom to do our own thing, to satisfy our lusts and desires indiscriminately, either as consumers or as social atoms looking for self-satisfaction in the left liberal view, I think that that is a very degraded view of individualism. Amen. That what we mean by individualism is allowing individuals to achieve their higher selves, to achieve fulfillment, according to their own lights and starting off as individuals, and they achieve their fulfillment, how, by being responsible members of their families, certainly, but also by distinguishing between a good desire and a bad desire, by absorbing the great intellectual traditions, if you look at something like John Stuart Mill, who's regarded as an archetypical sort of liberal, and who is regarded by many modern liberals, as somebody who basically said, "Do your own thing." So dear listeners, John Stuart Mill, this is a 19th century thinker, we've skipped ahead a few centuries, yeah. Yeah, so I don't think that that's the true description of John Stuart Mill. I don't think John Stuart Mill is saying, "Do your own thing." He starts off as a sort of utilitarian benthamite, but he rapidly re-thinks his position. He has a kind of breakdown, doesn't he? He does, in his early 20s, he has a mental. John Stuart Mill is brought up by his father, James Mill, as the sort of perfect utilitarian. The utilitarians believe that the meaning of life is the greatest happiness of the greatest number, the greatest amounts of pleasure, happiness is pleasure, and it's the greatest number of individuals maximized. A sort of modern epicurianism in a way, absolutely. And John Stuart Mill is brought up to believe this, and he goes through this extraordinary education he's learning Greek at the edge of three, then he's. doing Latin at the age of four, and he writes quite a good history of India at the age of eight and things like that. He's sort of force-fed by his father, and as a result of this upbringing, he has a sort of mental breakdown. And the result of that mental breakdown is that he has a richer form of liberalism. And part of the richness of that is he moves away from the idea that individuals are just pleasure maximizing machines, or happiness maximizing machines, and says that individuals are part of society, they're enmeshed in cultural traditions, that there are higher pleasures and lower pleasures, or satisfaction is not pleasures. And that he begins to say, well, talked about the importance of a cultural tradition, and people distinguishing between high pleasures, low pleasures. And this leads to his embrace of this sort of notion, which is a notion of callery, actually, of something called the clarity. And the clarity is a group of people who are endowed by the state and colleges vision to preserve high culture and to preach high culture. So central to this liberal vision of society, being a society of individuals, is also the idea that you need to have a countervailing force to extreme individualism, to say that there are higher pleasures, there are lower pleasures, there is a cultural tradition that needs to be preserved and preached, that teaches people what to like, and what not to like, what to value, and not to value, how to live their lives. Sounds Adrian like John Stuart Mill was the first post-liberal. Well, he had his breakdown, and he emerged, and when you describe it that way, human beings, what, they're not individual pleasure seekers, they're free rational spirits with moral responsibility and conscience and intellect, with the responsibility to improve themselves. And they exist in a nested web of relationships, and there should be a clarity that governs the whole by preserving tradition. You begin to wonder, isn't this just the Middle Ages? Isn't this just the Church? Well, get back to the end. So let me just say, and another figure in this tradition, who's extraordinary interesting, is Matthew Arnold, who writes this great book called Culture and Anarchy, which he says exactly the same thing. He says, "I am a liberal, but I am a chastised liberal, and my chastisement is to believe in the importance of culture, of tradition." Again, what you're saying is that in order for individuals to be individuals, they need to be educated. In order for them to be educated, they need to be immersed in a cultural tradition. Now, I would say that this is liberalism grappling with its own possible contradictions and doing so in a way that preserves individualism by seeing that individualism needs to be perfected by self-improvement. And I would say that that's not post-liberalism, because post-liberalism involves too much going back to a world in which the collective is the starting point. Well, dear listeners, don't be a post-liberal, be a chastened liberal, because the right word. You also see how, Adrian, how your liberalism is a kind of philosophical way of life. It's more than just an ideological program for the political economy. The third pre-modern thinker I'd like us to talk about a little bit is Montesquieu. He is famous for basically arguing, and you gestured to this before, that power is dangerous, no matter who governs, therefore government is best when there is a separation of powers. Let's say that's kind of summarized him thus. Now, on the show before I've asked other people, so I'll ask you, there is Lord Acton's famous saying power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. In a way, this becomes a kind of liberalist creed, like this is just taken for granted an axiomatic statement now the United States of America in its post-war liberal heyday gave birth to spider-man, our great philosopher, and he said with great power comes great responsibility. So there are sort of two different versions of power there. Does power corrupt as liberalists tend to say or does power a noble, can power actually a noble, make a man wiser and more responsible when he has to exercise it? And so is there a blind spot in liberalism? They just assume that this thing they call power is corrupting. I think that's a fascinating question. I would say that just as the argument for tolerance is an argument from skepticism, the argument about power, the liberal argument from power is an argument from sort of fear or caution, that the danger is that people will get too much power and use it for terrible ends. They must have lots and lots of checks and balances as a safety key or safety valve against things that might go very wrong in the world. And there was a very interesting, I think quite profound in many ways, liberal thinker to Harvard University called Julius Schlar who wrote about the liberalism of fear. And she says that liberalism should start with worry, with fear about people abusing each other. And it should be rooted in that. You're saying that, well, power can be noble, it certainly does no great virtue in being utterly powerless and unable to improve the world and that being in a position to improve the world is a wonderful thing. And certain people who feel and exercise power are enabled by this, I think, Teddy Roosevelt was someone who was enabled by this Charles de Gaulle, Churchill in some ways, they all did great things, and they did great things because they were powerful people. But I do think we have to have what is now called guardrails to prevent things from going wrong. And I would obviously point to what's happening in America and Trump for things that are going wrong. So there's a sort of caution, a cautionary principle there. But I don't think I think you're right to say that we shouldn't just glory in powerlessness. Yeah, I mean, I've wondered really ever since the rise of Trump, I have wondered if and I inherited this too as a liberal American, you know, that this essential skepticism about power, the sense, not just skepticism, but the sense that power is somehow inherently bad corrupting. It may, if it's wrong, it may tend towards that thing that happened to late liberal society where everyone who has power is held in suspicion, everyone who has power is mocked or not respected. You know, that weird world that we began to live in around the turn of the century, when our leaders are figures of fun, our leaders are essentially untrustworthy, they're all going to lie to you. You know, I wonder if that exercised a corrosive effect on the body politic. Hank joined BJ's wholesale club the day he became a father of 30. I coach football. Now coach Hank saves up to 25% off gross restore prices, 30 pounds of pasta, three cases of protein bars, 75 sports drinks, and that's just pregame. He knows teamwork, and BJ's knows savings. This is your home coach, home of the save, joined for just $20 at BJ's.com/maskete and saved 10 cents per gallon for six months, open soon, limited time offer new members only. I sometimes, in the more unfortunate phases of my life, I'm listening to the news on Radio 4 at six o'clock, and then it gets to 6.30 and then they have a comedy half hour, which is distinguished day by the fact that it's not a dull funny, and be by the fact if you mention any politician, you just, you know, you see, and such a door, yeah, you boo and you laugh and you mock that person. I know, it's, I think it's deeply, it's a deeply corrosive, deeply corrosive. You had a situation, I think, in the 1950's, where the BBC actually had rules whereby you weren't allowed to mock politicians, you know, Harold McMillan could not be mocked, and then you had the satire boom, you had people like Peter Cook and Dudley Moore coming along with Alan Bennett, Alan Bennett, all those people who have played the vicar and mixed fun of a certain minute, totally transformed English society. Absolutely, and so, but now we have the opposite orthodox, that you're not allowed in many ways to mention a politician without saying that they're corrupt, evil, and figures of fun. And the result of that actually is a peculiar democracy of disdain, and it's one of the things that empowers people like forage and people like Trump, is if you assume that all politicians are corrupt, and ridiculous, and self-seeking, then it doesn't matter whether they steal a billion pounds, or six pence. I think it doesn't just empower the obvious, you know, quote unquote, bad guys like forage and Trump. I think it also empowers that sort of, I don't know, PPE, Oxford, class of rather narcissistic empty shirts that tend to, to govern us, you know, if you're not, if you're not going to get any respect, then only someone who doesn't need respect will want to pursue the job. And another thing I think is that sometimes when we say, well, we don't like strong religion, or we don't like strong nationalism, and we mock those things. We create a sort of asymmetry whereby you can't have strong religion, you can't have strong nationalism, but you can have strong doubt or strong hostility to religion or strong hostility to nationalism. That's very interesting. So you have a sort of unfair playing field in the world as a result of that. As I say, but you know, I use Matthew Arnold's phrase about chastened, not chastised chastened, and I wrote this book about liberalism because I did feel in many ways chastened because the two sorts of liberalism, both of which I'd agreed with and argued for, which were dominant from 1980 to 2000, which were on the one hand free market liberalism, let the market decide, let business decide, and the other hand social liberalism let people do their own thing because we have no right to tell them what to do if they're seeking self-fulfillment or pleasure. Both those forms of liberalism became increasingly over time counterproductive, increasingly in themselves counterproductive and also counterproductive when they merged with each other, when they interacted with each other because they both depended on a notion of the unrestrained and irresponsible individual seeking satisfaction in different sorts of ways. This is causing more and more trouble. It's causing more trouble than it's worth. How can we save liberalism from itself? And what I wanted, as I say, talking about the clarity, talking about self-improvement, talking about all sorts of things. UICs are on the post-liberal side of this, but what we share is a belief that the particular synthesis that was created from the 1980s onwards is in its current form unsustainable. I think so. And a lot of us who did fall on the post-liberal side following Brexit and Trump and trying to make sense of what was going on, we often thought that the liberal establishment, as it was understood, didn't subject itself to any sort of conscientious scrutiny. It was like they were learning nothing. So dear listeners, this book by Adrian Wildridge is not that. You really are taking seriously the failures of a certain generational liberalist project. You really are staring it square in the face and trying to work it out. One more thing about Montesquieu and the idea of divided government or separation of powers. So I think today we find our late liberal institutions often frustrating. There are so many checks and balances, so many independent courts, so much federalism, so many procedural rules that make sure that no one power center can have any kind of overweening executive power. That basically the state can no longer get anything done. And there's an irony there, if liberalism is a response to the flow of modernity and it's ever changing, ever progressive development, if it should have at least now eventually resulted in that kind of scleroticism where change can't happen because liberalist institutions and procedures are always just stopping everything. There's a sort of irony there, isn't there? It's a sort of, not only is it a sort of, I mean, it's a veto crusade, so essentially you multiply the number of veto points to such a point that you can't actually do anything at all. So if we want to build a railroad, or not build a railroad, it's up to York or whatever. Takes years and years and years of planning position, and that's one of the reasons why people turn towards authoritarian governments, because authoritarian governments can get things done. China can build railroads when we can't build railroads because it's not democratic, because it doesn't have all this, this obsession with division of powers. And sometimes when you have divisions of powers, you can frustrate the will of the majority in ways that are counterproductive. I would say that what we've been doing with refugees clearly is something that's the legal process supports, that lawyers support, but it's getting to the point whereby it's frustrating the will of the majority to such an extent that we are risking undermining democratic legitimacy. So again, I agree with you. I would, again, I would err on the side of caution. I would err on the side of the division of powers, particularly because of the problem of Trump, who shows the dangers of strong man rule and where the strong man rule leads you to make very, very bad decisions, as we've seen in Iran, because you don't have countervailing voices. But yes, this sclerotic government is again one of the paradoxes of, you might call it late liberalism, liberalism of assault. I should add one more thing about Montesquieu. Hobbes is a brilliant writer, Erasmus is a brilliant writer. Montesquieu is very weird writer. It's very difficult to read. This is rambling sort of nonsense in lots of ways, the spirit of the laws. So it's difficult to read, but he's saying some very, very important things, not just about the division of powers, but he talks about the spirit of the laws. And he says it's not just a matter of a formal division of powers. It's a matter of the spirit with which you approach these things. So he says that in Britain, you don't have as you do in the United States, a formal division of powers within the House of Commons, but nevertheless, in real terms, you do. You know, you have checks and balances and things like that, which didn't negotiate it informally. And which work precisely because they're informal, you have to have a sort of culture. He says that political institutions are rooted in traditions, are rooted in culture, are rooted as it were in the soil of life. And I think that was one of the things when I'm thinking about the Iraq war, for example, that the Americans thought they could invade Iraq and impose, you know, Madisonian democracy, which ultimately comes from Montesquieu, into that soil. And it turned out that you couldn't. You had to have the spirit there. You had to have the culture there. So you have to have a pre-existing predisposition towards tolerance, discussion, democracy, open debate. So I think it's a great pity that the conservatives who planned that particular war, people like Bill Crystaloude, studied under Harvey Mansfield, that Harvard hadn't read their Montesquieu a bit more thoroughly. Well, I think so. I mean, if, as he said, the spirit of law must proceed the form of the law, he thought you couldn't just carbon copy one, politics, constitution, and sort of paste it onto another's. Exactly. But beyond just the Iraq war, which is a particularly egregious example of that error, we can see how that clashes, I would say, with the entire Washington consensus and that project of neoliberal globalization. I mean, absolutely. In fact, in the old days, you know, reading a magazine like the economist, you might think that it took for granted the the universality of liberal institutions and homoeconomicus that we are all just individuals seeking to make money, frankly. No, no. I mean, I think that the blindness to cultural traditions, to the different spirits of different institutions. And of course, we had this famous debate in the in the mid 1990s between, as it were, Francis Fukuyama, who talks about the end of history and the universalization of liberal principles on the one hand. And Samuel Huntington, you know, the clash of civilizations, you said that you have different different spirits, different civilizations in different areas of the world, and that they would ultimately clash and I don't go all the way with Huntington, but I certainly think that he won that argument against Fukuyama and that we have to be, you know, I'm in favor of advancing liberal principles, but you have to go with the grain of different cultures and the different cultures can operate in quite strikingly different ways. You have spent a lot of your career thinking about and writing about meritocracy. So Adrian, yes. What has meritocracy got to do with liberalism? I can see liberalism as equally exemplified in a kind of piratical, the wildest character wins, not the the best or the most, you know, one who merits it, you know, this sort of, and also isn't China meritocratic, wasn't Mandarin China meritocratic, isn't the CCP today in China meritocratic. So what is the connection between meritocracy and liberalism in your view? Look at the history of these things, that liberalism is a revolt and the critique of feudal society and feudal society is a society which ascribes people's position by their birth, by their inheritance, by their social status, and liberalism comes along and says, no, we must judge individuals as individuals rather than as being the son of so-and-so or the daughter of so-and-so rather than as having a certain social class. And we must allocate positions on the basis of open competition in which the best man or the best woman wins. So central to the advance of liberalism is the advance of examination open competition system which says that, you know, you won't give this place an Oxford to somebody because their father went there or because they're the Earl of Sandwich or something like that, because they're the best person. And the way that you assess their best person is to get them as individuals to sit these tests and to be judged on the basis of their intellectual abilities. Now the first time that system was put into place actually on a massive scale was China and it still flourishes in China as a system so it doesn't necessarily make for a liberal society. so you can have a society that's based on examinations, and open competition, and all of those things, which is fundamentally liberal as a generist. But I don't think you can have a liberal society which doesn't make use of these things in order to allocate positions and opportunities. Now, there is a very good host-liberal critique of meritocracy, which says that meritocracy reproduces the ills of aristocratic society by basically creating a new aristocracy and aristocracy of exam winners. I think Michael Young, when he wrote the rise of the meritocracy, actually used the word satirically to forecast precisely that, that a new, and he thought, I think, arguably, cruel or elite based on IQ and effort was going to take over. And, you know, maybe that has happened. Well, the extraordinary thing about Michael Young's book, I'm which was published, I think, in 1957. '58, actually. '58, yeah. It's the first use of the term meritocracy, and it uses pejorative. Many people who read the book didn't think it was a pejorative. Tony Blair, who later claimed to be a great meritocrat, talked about the book and didn't realize it was supposed to be a satire in a pejorative book. But I would say that, and yes, I think we do have an examination class which has come to power, particularly in the, you know, from the 1980s onwards at the heart of Western liberalism, which is characterized by thinking of itself as being very clever and also making incredibly fundamental mistakes in policy terms, particularly about, you know, about human nature, I think, be very naive about human nature. So again, I don't think you can have a liberal society without open competition, meritocracy, of various sorts. There's no other principle that you can use to allocate positions, but you have to be careful about these people becoming new aristocrats. And one of the ways I think you have to guard against that is I keep putting these emphasis on the clarity, but the clarity, the absolutely people should be taught to value, there should be taught the best that mankind has ever thought or believed or hoped for. That should be a central part of their curriculum. I also think we need to have various systems of community building. What we tend to do is segregate people on the basis of educational outcomes. I'm in favor, pardon, because of what Russia's doing. I'm in favor of having, you know, conscription and things like that and people going into the arm is they do in Sweden now. So there is things that need to be done to stop educational segregation. Muscular, chasing, liberalism, dear listeners, that's what we need. Now let's talk about tolerance for a second. So liberalism as an ideology has included both the idea that the truth is knowable, that human reason can know it, and that error should be tolerated so that by debating it, reason can uncover the truth. And the idea that truth is unknowable because it is relative. And so all ideas should be tolerated in a large marketplace of ideas. Isn't this incoherent? Which of those two forms of liberalism do you think we need? Well, I think that liberalism as a doctrine and as a practice has been under attack very substantially from the populist right. But it's also been under attack from the populist left. The populist left sort of descends in many ways from the poststructuralists, from the '68 sort of mob in France. And one of the things that they say is everything is about perspective. Everything is about identity. There is no such thing as truth. There is no such thing as absolute values that it's all a matter of the interplay of power, all a matter of the subjective judgment. And I think that that is corrosive of any serious society. You don't think you can have any serious society, liberal or not. But it's certainly very corrosive liberalism. So I think there's a great distinction between saying that we can't know ultimate theological things with such firmness that we should have an official church which imposes a way of life on people, liberals reject that. There's a difference between doing that and saying that we can't know certain things. There's no such things as facts. There's no such things as good ways of living or bad ways of living. There's no such thing as truth ultimately. I think there is such a thing as truth. There is such a thing as virtue and goodness and all of those sorts of things. And again, it's a matter of how you believe them and how you approach them. We must believe them with tolerance and we must approach them by open debate. But that doesn't mean that everything is relative and all the rest of that. That is identitarian leftism. That's not liberalism, in my view. It's very, very corrosive, very, very corrosive of any civilized society. You've just set me up because I wanted to talk about identitarianism next. Does identitarianism betray liberalism or is it yet another manifestation of a problem with liberalism? So I ask because if we are not individuals, really, but persons and therefore naturally have a group identity in addition to, but alongside our individual identity, for liberals, this means that majorities are dangerous because an individual member of a majority group will use the majority to crush the liberties of individuals of minority groups. Facing this problem, liberals have increasingly thought that minority group identities need to be strengthened to defend the individuals within those minority groups against members of the majority group. So you understand what I'm saying. There's a dynamic there that I think the liberals caused. I disagree, I think there. I think that there are certain liberals who are worried about majorities bullying minorities. And I think that they can be worried for liberal reasons. But I think that what is fundamentally challenging liberalism at the moment is the identitarian left and the identitarian left is not characterized primarily by its worry about majorities bullying minorities. It's characterized by its belief that our essence as individuals is determined not by ourselves as individuals, but by our membership of groups. It's our membership of groups. It's the primary thing about us, whether we're Muslims or whether we're black or whether we're women or non-binary or whatever the rest of it is. And that is something which is so important to our identities, so central to our identities that we can never get beyond it. So the first question to ask about somebody whose black is how does their experience of blackness limit them and depress them or define them? Or define them and I think that that's not true. I think that individuals are more than the group that they belong to. They are also constituted by the group that they belong to, not necessarily by skin color, by more profound things. And that's actually a total made up category. It seems to me totally. But you are in prisons in this left wing, woke, whatever you want to call it, idea. They're obsessed by groups. And what they are doing is reversing the liberal revolution. The liberal revolution says we judge people as individuals. The liberal revolution says that we allocate positions in society or educational opportunities on the basis of individual merit. And they say no, we are defined by our group identity and we have to make sure that the institutions of society reflect the group composition of society. So we override individual merit and we say there must be so many black people, so many women, so many of this, that and the other in various positions in society. And that is being written into the law of supposedly liberal societies in all sorts of very, very profound and fundamental ways people like Theresa May who probably would regard themselves as liberal have fallen for ideas about disparate impact and things like that that says that you take the differences in composition of groups as pre-may-facier evidence of discrimination. And if you're doing that, you're doing that on the basis of the idea that groups override individuals, that collective attributes override individual attributes. And I think that's become interwoven with this very corrupt version of establishment, liberalism that we have at the moment. I definitely can see how a radical turn happened in which liberalism was, you know, was betrayed, if you like, by identitarianism. But I still think that that turn would not have been able to happen unless a logic within liberalism that distrusted majorities hadn't laid some foundations for that turn. And, you know, I think it also essentially came out of the United States, the civil rights movement, the United States had a totally different history. And obviously it saw quite concretely that the majority white population had been absolutely oppressive to a minority black population that had been held in slavery, which offends every liberal sensibility. You know, so I'm not actually saying that this is, you know, bad or immoral. I can see why all of these things happened. But I do think that there's something in liberalism and it's distrust of majorities that paved the way. And I don't know. Can we afford to distrust majorities to that degree? It's almost like our conversation about power. Can we afford to distrust power to such a degree that we ridicule our leaders and only get contemptible leaders? Can we afford to distrust majorities to the degree that we don't allow popular expression? I'm myself. an anti-majoritarian that I'm very worried about numerical majorities as being the the the the Summon Bonham that I think there are certain ways in which numerical majorities have to be frustrated by individual rights which prevent majorities from declaring that I should be hung or whatever. Me too. All by various constitutional mechanisms which which which restrain power, but you can't go too far with these things and I think one of the things that's happening at the moment within the liberal world is because liberals elite liberals are seeing certain things that they hold to be extremely important being threatened by majorities. They're increasingly retreating into institutions, the United Nations, the law courts, the international law courts, the NGOs, or just the C-sweets of big corporations. C-sweets or big corporations or indeed universities and trying to rule in an undemocratic way. And although I think that democracy needs to be restrained, there's a difference between democracy and liberal democracy. I think liberalism, managerial liberalism, if it overreaches, can be a very dangerous thing and can lead to explosions. One of the things that I want to emphasize is that I've argued in this book that liberalism is defined by these three things, skepticism about power, belief intolerance, and individualism. But these things are combined in different ways in different eras and liberalism has always had to reinvent itself to deal with the problems of the day. So in the mid-19th century, liberalism is, you know, to a significant extent about small government individual rights, certainly very hostile to big government action. And that creates a sort of sustainable set of beliefs for a while. But by the end of the 19th century, when you have the rise of big companies, the rise of big cities, big problems with pollution and things like that, liberalism reconfigures itself to become more tolerant of state action, says that there's more to liberalism than just saying no to state intervention. The only way that you can really preserve the liberal principle is to encourage people to be educated or provide free educational, provide welfare things and that. So a difference from positive to negative liberty and things like that from negative to positive liberty. In America, this became the progressivist or the progressive movement. Exactly so. So liberalism, while still being a philosophy based fundamentally on individualism, provides a new answer to the question of how do individuals become their best selves? Not just by saying no to the expansion of the state, but by saying yes to certain forms of state intervention. Again, in the 1930s, liberalism is collapsing as a philosophy. There are very many, very serious people like Walter Lippmann, one of the great liberals of that area, who thinks that liberalism is dead. It's finished. And again, after the Second World War, liberalism revitalizes itself through the welfare state, through social democracy and through creating international institutions to regulate the workings of the global economy. By the late 1970s, this social democracy looks as though it's running out of steam, becoming sclerotic, unaffordable, unaffordable, and so you get the rise of neoliberalism, which adjusts liberalism again. And I think in the 1980s and 1990s, we got a sort of liberal synthesis, as I said, pro-business, pro-market, but also pro-left progressive agenda on sexuality and all of those sort of things. Liberalism is adjusted itself, and that was a fault. I think that particular synthesis of liberalism is now, in the same state, the Victorianism was in the early 20th century. It is dying. It's not a sustainable synthesis. And my solution to that problem is for liberalism to reinvent itself yet again. I suspect that yours is to say post-liberalism. No, no, not at all. I was only playing devil's advocate by being the post-liberal. I have a lot of sympathy for what you argue in the end. Before we get to the end, though, I mean, you just mentioned that period in the 1930s when liberalism seemed on its deathbed. Yes. And in the book, you tell that story, and I think very convincingly, you, to some extent, explain the problem as the world lost a liberal hegemon. Yes. When the British Empire, during the course of the First World War, basically, weakened itself and could no longer provide the function of a liberal hegemon. And yet America, following the First World War, decided not to be that thing, a liberal hegemon. And what I liked about that is because you're honest. You say up front, a liberal international order needs a hegemon. Yes. And one thing, I think, in our late liberal age that I think liberals have been very slow to admit is that fact. They seem to think, it seems to me, that the international institutions that developed in the postwar period, and which they put a lot of stock by, they can exist fully independently of the United States military and a US national political economy that supports that military. I mean, I, and I'm not saying necessarily that I support that system. I'm just being honest. That's the system. And it requires a liberal internationalist hegemon. Correct. And we're losing that. And it's correct. Look, there's lots of instability in the world. Look, the only thing worse than a world with a liberal internationalist hegemon is a world without one. And quite strangely, a lot of the people who denounced America and denounced America as a piece of power, as soon as America begins to say, okay, we're not playing that role anymore. We're going to put America first. We're not going to do all of these things. Suddenly start screaming, come back. We want you back. We want you to do all of these things. Because there's no point in having a United Nations or having a World Bank or an IMF, unless you have an enforcement mechanism for all of those things. And the only enforcement mechanism we have today is the United States. It's the only country with the military power to operate on a global scale. So the EU can say as much as it wants. The United Nations can say as much as it wants. It doesn't mean anything. It's hot air unless there's some enforcement mechanism. And again, this is a Hobbesian case, actually, that you need to have some sort of leviathan to impose order. And that the only thing worse than the leviathan and the order it imposes is having no order. It's the war of all against all. Absolutely. And in which life does become, as Hobbes says, solitary sport. And the British played the role of the global hegemon. I think it played it extremely well in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But the British economy just was not strong enough for them to continue to do that. It wasn't a big enough platform to do it. Britain exhausted itself in the process of trying to impose these rules. In the 20s and 30s, America begins to step in in a rather clumsy and over-idealistic way with Woodrow Wilson and the United Nations and things like that. And then it retreats back to itself. And the result of that retreat is an unbalanced global economy. And the collapse of order, particularly in Europe, the rise of Hitler, the rise of Stalin, the rise of all of those sorts of things. Then what happens after the Second World War is that America re-engages with the world both as an economic backstop and as a provider of military hardware and the rest of it. And that lasts for a very long time. They play their cards, not as well as the British, my opinion, but they play it pretty well. They play it pretty well. I agree. I actually think that America's liberal republicanism makes it singularly less capable to perform those imperial functions than the British. I think that's probably true, actually, because you have to be, well, you know, Graham Green gets it, I think, in some ways. You have to sort of, you have to be a bit more idealistic than the world properly needs. But what you get now with Trump, to some extent before Trump, but certainly with Trump, is America deliberately throwing away that international order, drawing away from preserving that international order, Britain retired from the job, ceased to conduct the orchestra, as I think Cain's put says, because it didn't have the economic mites. The extraordinary thing about America is it does have the economic mites to do it. America, during the height of the unipolar moment in the 1990s, was 25% of global GDP. America now, under Trump, when he says we just can't afford to do these things, is 25% of global GDP. The American alliance is much, much bigger and much more powerful than the Chinese alliance. America could continue to pursue this role. It is chosen not to. It is chosen not to. Essentially, because domestic politics is dysfunctional. I think that's partly true. I think there's a lot of cogency to the argument from within the Trump administration by some of its voices that globalization actually sawed off the branch that the global list project was standing on by offshoring so much American industry to China and other places in the world. Yes, on paper in GDP terms, America remains very strong in real industrial terms, which are the terms that matter if the whole order is based on a military. It was becoming incredibly weak relative to its rivals. I think that carries a lot of weight with me. I also think we can see the Trump administration in a cac-handed and irrational and terrible way. Don't get me wrong. Trying to show sure up that world order, but it may not be able to, it may be too little too late, it may not be getting enough support from its allies because of Trump's personality and his, you know, I don't know. Well, definitely looks something goes wrong in 2000, not just the invasion of Iraq, but something goes wrong in 2000 in the sense that the China shock is very big, much bigger than we expected it to be, that we get a massive erosion of a lot of manufacturing industry, but we also, we also thought globalisation meant that you'd get, China would become more liberal, more democratic, become one of us. That's the liberalist, that's that totalising idea already again. That clearly, clearly didn't happen. And so I think we have to recalibrate globalisation when you have a major player in the global system, not playing by liberal rules, but playing by mechanist rules. And we do need to have an arsenal of democracy in the sense that we need to manufacture more at home because you can't have a functioning military without a significant manufacturing sector. And we also need to be more cautious of the Chinese intentions because they're not going to be liberal, they're not going to be democratic and they've made that perfectly clear. One of the interesting things that's going on at the moment is that the shock that we had to the United States after 2001 and China's admission to the WTO, we're now seeing that replicated in Europe. Europe basically continued, the EU is the last great neoliberal project and it's the last great un-reconstructive sort of set of believers in globalisation and they continued to believe in in globalisation in its pure form. And I think they continued to believe essentially that trade would produce liberal culture, eventually that Putin would eventually fall in line in the rest of it. Now that has been completely shattered, what you're getting is the EU's biggest industries, the car industry at the beginning of being crushed. Machine tools in Germany, Germany's now importing more machine tools than it's exporting. Incredible. The Germany's situation is incredible. And the result of that is the sort of trumpification of German politics, that the social basis of the free trading global world, which is a successful, middle-stand, middle-class, is being destroyed and you're getting the radicalisation of German politics. So we're going to see what we saw in America now in Europe and Europe because it's not just a sclerotic bureaucracy, but it's a bureaucracy which is based on a series of assumptions about free trade and not subsidising things and being against protections. It's going to have to think on its feet in ways that is never done before. And the question is, does it have the capacity to do those things? Adrian, you've given me a lot of your time. So just one more question and I'll make sure it's a doozy. First of all, to just summarise your solution to this problem as you've hinted at it during this conversation. On the one hand, you want a pivot back to what you call the radical centre. This would be economically to the left of neoliberalism because it would regulate the harmful effects of corporate capitalism more culturally to the right of progressive liberalism because it would protect some of those more collective inherited institutions and identities that possibly radical progressivism has undermined. You also believe that none of this is possible without a return to a sense of freedom rooted really in I think Renaissance humanism of Erasmus. The freedom to not be subject to forces outside yourself that limit you as a person, that degrade you, that dehumanise you. So to be strong enough to exercise self-government enough to resist temptations to pure pleasure seeking, temptations to pure egotism. So a more moral picture of freedom. So that's your image. I find it very attractive. I agree with all of it. But this is what I don't understand. Given everything that you argue in the book, everything we've discussed, and ultimately we agree on so much, why are liberals today still so opposed to the small-sea Catholic Christian tradition? When it seems obvious to me that that liberal European temperament that you admire, that I admire, and which the Churchman Erasmus exemplifies, is clearly the result of Christian belief, ethics, and worship. And I'm not saying that everyone should become Christian at all, although maybe they should. I don't know. What I mean is I find it increasingly amazing, as I read essays, books, about the problems facing the West, that so often the singularly, historically amazing fact is overlooked, that we are the first civilization in human history that really doesn't worship, that doesn't engage in that dimension of life. And it doesn't come up. It's like there's a hole at the center of arguments about this problem we're facing. And it seems to me to be that small-sea Catholic tradition, that traditional Christian, you know, educated, philosophical, enlightened. Why is there still such a resistance to considering, or reconsidering, liberal biases against it, as if Christianity had nothing to do with the social and cultural ground on which liberalism flourished? I think there's a sense in which we're sort of, if you go back to the late 19th century, in the late 19th century, there was anybody who was a liberal, said that state intervention was a terrible thing, and that the essence of liberalism was laissez-faire, which meant an extreme form of individualism. Then suddenly, five, ten years later, it had all changed. And everybody accepted that there was a different and richer, in my view, conception of what individualism meant. And the people who stuck to the ideas of, let's say, Herbert Spencer, were regarded as fossils. And I would like to say that that's going to happen to this instinctive reaction against what you're calling a sort of Christian Catholic sort of tradition. That we still have a liberal establishment that bulks at the notion of any form of judgmentalism, except its own judgmentalism, but that's a different body. I wish it bothered judgmentalism. It's own judgments, woke or whatever. But anything that looks as though it's an elite telling the masses what to do, anything that looks as though it's rooted in a Christian conservative tradition is immediately denounced. And so you have this sort of non-judgmental sort of elite that allows that things drug-taking in the street is probably all right, that we should be legalising drug-taking, that you should never pronounce at all on issues of sexual morality and things like that, that you should never look as though you're a better person telling other people what to do with their lives. And I think it's not just the Christianity or small sea Catholicism is disliked. Anything that looks like an assertion of ancient truths is disliked by this sort of this neoliberal, left-liberal synthesis that I'm talking about. But then I would also say that there are ways in which this is changing. One is that on the European continent, politics, particularly in Germany, is dominated by a sort of parties that do have quite deep roots in Christian traditions, the CDU and the rest of them. And also there's a very widespread worry, I think, amongst ordinary regular people, that the internet culture that we've created is degrading us. It's degrading us because of the sort of stuff that's produced on a mass level. This pumped out all the time that we see, pornography and the rest of it, all of that sort of stuff that's being produced. It's also degrading us because all of these images, these flashing images, everything, reduce our attention span, reduce our ability to concentrate and things like that. Your roads are a basic civility, for instance. And civility, that is all disappearing. So I think there is the basis for rise in civilized judgmentalism. And I know that the woke people are skulls that they're willing to make judgments of all sorts, but there's never a judgment that says, this is a set of civilized values, this is a set of ways in which you can fulfill yourself as an individual and it implies a set of moral choices between higher and lower. It's a kind of inversion of moral probity, frankly. It's a strange phenomenon. It is a very strange phenomenon. It's, as I say, it's non-judgmental judgmentalism, as it's peculiar, or judgmental non-judgmentalism, I should say, that's the better way of putting it. But I do think that in five years, 10 years time, I think that your world may well be coming back. think that the instinctive denigration of the wisdom of faith traditions will not be an instant way of winning applause. Well, I think maybe muscular, chastened liberalism in conversation with questioning post-liberalism, maybe the way forward. And if it's going to succeed, then that melancholy long withdrawing roar of faith of Matthew Arnold in the late 19th century is going to have to sort of rush right back in. Yes. Because I feel that as long as we continue in this derasinated post-Christian reality, we're going to get nowhere. But that's my view. Thank you very much. Adrian Waldridge, what a tremendous honor. What a wonderful conversation. Thank you so much. I very much enjoyed it. Thank you. That was Adrian Waldridge. His new book, "Centrists of the World Unite, the Lost Genius of Liberalism," is available from all good booksellers. Remember, for deeper dives into the ideas we explore on this show, including world-class Q&A's with my co-host, Amen Dean, check the show notes for details on how to join the conflicted community. I'm Thomas Small. Conflicted is a message herd production. Our executive producers are Jake Warren and Max Warren. This episode was produced and edited by Thomas Small. Beef jerky, microwave meals, laundry pods even they can't screw up. Have you met my kid? And with BJ's gas, she gets there for less. They call me the road warrior. This is your home road warrior mom, home of the save. Join for just $20 at bj's.com/maskeet and save 10 cents per gallon for six months, open soon limited time offer new members only. BJ's, home of the save. And now, prize picks is available nation-wide, lock-in for kickoff because everyone and everything is on prize picks. What you want? If you win your first $5 line-up, prize picks run your game. When you spend enough time around great companies, you notice that the best ones treat trust as a growth strategy, not a box to check. Vanta helps companies build and prove trust from day one. It's a gentick trust platform connects compliance, risk, and trust at enterprise scale. Vanta delivers a 526% return on investment over three years and pays for itself in just three months. Learn why over 16,000 of the fastest growing companies use Vanta at Vanta.com. Kick off the fall season with Decovis. Our quality western boots are hand-crafted with 200 meticulous steps for broken and comfort right out of the box. And each pair is built for all fall's festive moments, from game day to tailgating to outdoor festivals and long weekends. Find your perfect pair and customize them with complimentary boot stamps and branding. Add a Decovis store near you or shop with us anytime at Decovis.com.