Has Freedom Failed Us? A Debate
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This is honestly, if there's a headline that we could give to the past decade, I think it's this: Liberal democracy is under threat across the West and beyond, and populist movements are on the march. Overseas, Brexit is now a done deal. After nearly a half century of membership, Britain has withdrawn from the European Union. Whether you're looking at Brexit in the UK... Listen, this is England there. We got our country back. ...Victor Orban in Hungary...

Bolsonaro in Brazil and in the U.S., of course. Fellow Americans and people of the world, thank you. Donald Trump.

Big business, elite media, and major donors are lining up behind the campaign of my opponent because they know she will keep our rigged system in place. They have total control over every single thing she does. She is their puppet, and they pull the strings. ♪♪

And many people, especially many people in the mainstream press, say that the election of Donald Trump is proof that our country and our values, the very foundations upon which America was built, are slipping away. Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans represent an extremism that threatens the very foundations of our republic. I want to be very clear, very clear up front. And so today we're here to debate, first off,

Is that actually true? And second, should we be fighting to preserve this system in the first place? Or is the system itself the problem? It's not exactly a low stakes debate, the future of America and liberal democracy. And we couldn't have two better people to have this conversation with than Brett Stevens and Patrick Dineen. So thank you both so much for being here. Thank you for having me. Good to see you both.

Patrick, you're a political science professor at the University of Notre Dame. Your 2018 book, which is called Why Liberalism Failed, grabbed the attention of people across the political spectrum, including Barack Obama, who included it on his books I'm reading list.

Brett, you are a Pulitzer Prize-winning opinion columnist for The New York Times and previously of The Wall Street Journal. Your specialty, I think it's fair to say, is foreign policy. And your book, which foresaw a lot of what we're currently living through now, is called America in Retreat. Now, both of you are what people would call conservatives, right?

But I think the really interesting thing about our current political moment is that there's likely to be more disagreement between the two of you than probably between the average Democrat or the average Republican. So let's get into it. First thing, I want to set the table by having you each diagnose the state of our union. What do you see when you look out at America these days? And Patrick, let's start with you.

I suppose we all are in the midst of a bit of nostalgia for an America that's been lost. Many people, interestingly, on both the left and the right, look back to the 1950s with a certain degree of nostalgia. The left looks back to a time when labor unions were strong, when employment entailed also a host of benefits, good health care, retirement benefits that weren't, you know, sort of subject to the vicissitudes of the market.

the winning of five-day work week and 40-hour work week.

But it was also a time of sort of, you know, social conservatism was the norm. The expectation that you would marry at a fairly young age and have children and, you know, the ideal of the family life of attending church, of a strong sense of community was also a part of that time. I think when I look at America today, what I see is massive losses on both fronts. And both of these are the consequence of what I would describe as the sort of

the triumph of liberalism, the triumph of an ideology that has really sown a kind of instability in all aspects of life, economic as well as social. And what we have is our two political parties that have been divided between which of these two dislocations is worse, the economic or the social, when in fact –

both have in some sense has been advancing this liberal project from, you know, burning the candle at both ends. So I see an America that is in many ways suffering from the triumph of an ideology, but not yet capable of in some ways digging itself out of that. Brett Trump in his first inaugural address famously described a scene of American carnage. Back then it was sort of

everyone I know rolled their eyes at it. It was like, what are you talking about? Five years later, I think there's maybe more people than not that see at least a little bit what he was describing or maybe trying to describe. Polarization, deaths of despair, economic inequality, the center not holding, lack of trust. Now, you might see him as a catalyst for some of those things, but do you agree that there's more brokenness than wholeness right now in America? Well, it's hard to measure, but I would say that

If I were asked to offer a three-word diagnosis for what ails the United States, I would say it's the triumph of illiberalism, quite the opposite of what Patrick just described. Now, that's not to say that liberalism doesn't have costs. Every system has costs. Authoritarianism, communitarianism go down the list. But liberalism as a whole, that is to say...

a system of institutions, habits, beliefs, and laws that put the individual, his rights and his dignity or her dignity at the center of the political project.

is the best thing mankind has ever known. And let's look again at what's happening in the United States and what ails us. It's a triumph of illiberalism on the left, which subscribes to a culture of censoriousness,

and kind of an aggressive and destructive moralism. We see that on the right with a contempt for the rule of law, contempt for institutions like elections, for example. We see this in both parties with the diminishing belief that the United States is best served when more countries around the world

follow our values and subscribe to this ideal of government for the sake of the people. That is what is falling away, that is what has been falling away I think for the past many decades. And again, I don't want to diminish the fact that liberalism has costs. It has costs because it is a system that asks the individual to make choices and many of those choices are bad ones.

But perhaps somewhat more of those choices are good ones. And that's why liberalism, in the end, is the only system that I can imagine any of us in this debate, I would wager, including Patrick, would want to live in.

So Patrick, as you said before, you believe the source of our problems at the root is liberalism. By that, you don't mean anything in particular about the Democratic Party or Rachel Maddow or like any of the things that most people associate with that word. You mean liberalism as Brett was just defining it in the deepest sense of that word. Like the ideas...

upon which the current American political system is built, ideas of individual autonomy, personal freedom, really this 500-year-old political philosophy that human beings are rights-bearing individuals. And you're saying it doesn't work. Why? What do you mean when you say, as the title of your book has it, that liberalism has failed?

Right. So, what we're calling liberalism as an "ism" is different from what we might want to say and the way in which we might want to speak about liberty. The word liberty and the concept of liberty is very old. It's an ancient concept. You can translate it into various words or from various words. In Greek, obviously, Latin, the word is libertas. It comes from a very old idea of what it is to be a free human being.

And in that older tradition, this classical and Christian and biblical conception of liberty, liberty is the condition of being a self-governing human being, by which is meant development of certain kinds of virtues, of character, and also self-governing in the political sense that we learn together in various ways to govern ourselves and put ourselves under law. So this concept has an idea of rule of law. It has a concept of making good choices.

But it also understands that in order to be free, we actually have to be shaped and formed quite considerably by a whole variety of institutions that include, of course, law. Law is one of the foundations of what constitutes this classical ideal liberty, but also the formation in the family, the formation in community, formation in churches or religious traditions and communities alike.

It requires a kind of thick set of institutions and a deep, pervasive set of norms that do exactly what Brett was just suggesting. Help us make the right choices. In other words, we're not just thrown into a state of nature and said, here, everyone, just make the right choices. You actually need a kind of formation to help you make the right choices. And any parent knows this, that you just don't want to throw your kids out into the world and say, okay, whatever.

Figure it out yourselves. You want to help them by making them into a kind of free person that's not just indifferent to the consequences of their choices but begins by making hopefully right choices and not beginning by making the worst choices. Now, here's the problem is that liberalism as an ism, beginning with philosophers in the social contract tradition, we could point to John Locke, his predecessor, the non-liberal Thomas Hobbes.

These thinkers introduce a different concept of liberty, and liberty is understood as the absence of constraint or the absence of obstacles. It's the condition of complete free choosing. You mentioned language of autonomy, the freedom of the individual. And in order to achieve this kind of liberty, liberalism as an ism ends up dismantling the

either through kind of soft insidious forms or the outright use of power, political power, it begins dismantling those institutions, the very institutions that in that older tradition were seen as essential. And so you end up with a polity and a social order in which those sort of non- and pre-liberal institutions exist.

end up being dismantled by sort of the logic of liberalism. And here's, I think here's the real rub, and this is where Brett and I might agree about certain things, but disagree how we interpret them. Liberalism worked in America because it was never fully liberal.

It was never fully defined by this modern definition of freedom. So we had a society that was thick with family life and community life and church life and a sense of what the nation was and the sacrifices that all of these things entailed and the duties. So we're not just rights-bearing creatures. We're also duty-bearing creatures to all of these institutions. But here's the problem is that

When liberalism becomes an ism, when the logic of this idea of freedom as the absence of obstacles takes its full course, it ends up dismantling those very structures that make a kind of responsible freedom possible. And so I think what we're seeing today is the kind of logical outcome, not of liberalism's failure in a sense, but of the very success of the project. And that's the paradox we're living through.

So you're saying we have all of the freedom and none of the virtue in a way we've been like liberated from the fundamental things that are required to actually have in your what your definition is of true liberty, like family and religion and so on.

Well, yeah, in the process of liberating ourselves from all of those things. And in many cases, it's not by force of government. It's not by diktat of law. It's by the internalization of what it is to be free. And so young people today, in order to stay free, don't form families, don't have children.

don't take on the obligations of bringing up the next generation, live lives of basically perpetual adolescence, and they fail to learn in many ways what it is to make the kinds of choices that you have to learn if you're going to be a parent and you're going to be a responsible member of a community. So I think the paradox is how do you shore up those institutions or even recreate them

in light of a world in which we've adopted a definition of liberty that runs against the strengthening and reforming of those institutions. Brett, what do you think? Do we have too much freedom? Well, again, I prefer too much than too little. So let's start with that. What Patrick said was quite rich, and I just want to address some of the points that he raised. I think he and I agree that

that a well-constituted society is a balancing act between liberalism in a maximalist sense that ultimately it is the individual who will make choices for himself and not

the community, the mother, father, society at large. It's the individual who has to prevail. But within that, there's always been a belief in the classic structures of liberalism that you need those countervailing institutions, the family, the church, the school, the military. They're the civic associations that Tocqueville talked about in Democracy in America. They're the little platoons that Edmund Burke

described, that was always a part of the basic idea of liberalism. And the way I describe myself as a conservative is that my conservatism is an effort to preserve a concept of liberty that respects the institutions that both Patrick and I agree are hugely important. Now, here's where I think Patrick's diagnosis falls a little short in my views.

First of all, it wasn't liberalism that destroyed the institutions that are important for the formation of character and for self-governing individuals in the Roman sense of the term.

It was often the very institutions themselves that had been entrusted with this task. I mean, just look at, forgive me for saying this, but look at the Roman Catholic Church, which has, for the last 25 years, been dealing with the wreckage of one sexual abuse case after another. It's a heck of a thing to indict liberalism for the failures of, say, the morality or moral failures in society when an institution that was primarily entrusted with the task

fell so very short of it. A second point that I think bears mentioning is that liberalism itself, in the purest sense, tends to engender

virtues which strengthen character, which make good people, which make responsible citizens. Final point I want to make, just briefly, Patrick mentioned the absence of limits, the absence of obstacles. And of course, we all agree that in their total absence,

things would probably be worse. Well, first of all, they're not absent. Not even today are they absent. Behavior is regulated in so many different ways. I think you and I, Barry, would agree that certainly in schools and in corporate life, it's probably over-regulated. But the deeper question, I think the deeper flaw in Patrick's argument is, well, who ultimately sets the limits of

that are supposed to make good people, who regulates the regulators, so to speak. And, you know, ideally they should be self-regulating. Ideally they should function on their own. But when they come into conflict, my argument is that liberalism, by essentially saying that the default in our society is that the individual

gets to choose for himself or herself, not the other people, is a preferable system, a better system, a more moral system, a more character-building system than any alternatives that I know of. Patrick, do you want to respond? Yeah. So I guess maybe just to the last question, which is who sets the limits or how are those limits understood?

And here's where I would say that this is one of the areas where you see the sort of self-undermining nature of liberalism as an ism, which is precisely the long tradition of liberal arts education, which was the effort, I think, the long-studied, deeply learned effort.

effort to understand what those limits are, where they can be found, how we are to recognize them and respect them, aware that there's no perfect delineation of what they are because what it is to be human is, of course, a complex undertaking. It's much more difficult than math. As Einstein said, politics is more difficult than physics.

But here's where the wisdom of a long tradition from which we can learn and was established as the liberal arts. And think about what that very description means. It's the education in the art of being free, that to become free requires a kind of being steeped in and learning deeply from a long tradition that has preceded us.

But this, of course, is a tradition that comes to be regarded and suspected as overbearing, as a limitation on my genuine freedom. Among the architects of the liberal tradition, there's a constant argument for the need to overturn and overthrow a kind of traditional classical education.

And to embrace rather an education that focuses upon what we now know as a sort of STEM discipline, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and economistic disciplines. And so what we learn in some ways from our education is how to push back.

The barriers and limits, especially of nature, of the natural world, and of our own nature, and of human nature, which put constraints upon us. And so rather than confronting that challenge of what it is to be human and what are the limits of being a human and what are the virtues required to live in a world of limits –

We replace that education with one that seeks to free us from limits. And we probably all agree that what takes place, what transpires today, especially in the humanities and the social sciences on college campuses, is probably worrisome to most of us, if not deeply abhorrent.

The kind of progressive inculcation of radical ideologies, radical liberationist ideologies that seek to overturn all the past, the Western tradition, any inheritance, any – literally this kind of iconoclastic destroying of the statues. But that's precisely the logic of where this liberationist project goes. So where –

Brett would seek to say that this sort of moralistic, progressivist, ideological leftism is a departure from liberalism. It's an illiberal liberalism. What I really want to stress and underline is that it's actually a logical outgrowth of the Barry Project idea.

That in some ways you at least are partially endorsing, which is to suggest that we human beings ultimately have to be left free of these kind of traditions of – that would teach us limits and virtues in order to be able to make our own free choices sort of in a kind of an independent way.

soup of our own making. And here's, I think, the logical outcome of that is now the ideologies that are no longer limited to the campuses but have now become, you know, a kind of travail in everyday life. Yeah, you're not going to get an argument from me about the illiberalism, what I'd call the illiberalism of college campuses, nor Brett. I mean, I think that's certainly an issue where we could agree that

But I guess I want to take up the way that you just described the ideology that's prevalent on American campuses. I think you called it liberationist. But the idea that, you know, we should overthrow the past and that the right solution is a kind of radicalism rather than reform. I think one of the reasons, Patrick, that your ideas in your book is so exciting, especially to a lot of young people I know, is because it kind of does that.

What you're saying ultimately is that the very system that was set up by the founders who, especially conservatives, so venerate inevitably resulted in the kind of brokenness that we're seeing now.

In other words, the idea that we're entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What is that if not liberalism? Like what is the American cultural inheritance if not this thing that you are criticizing? So I wonder, I mean, obviously I know you're a patriot. I know you love this country. I find it hard to kind of square your big ideas, your desire in a way to...

go to the root. And if you want to really go to the root, it goes well beyond what we're seeing on American college campuses or on the political left. It might even go to the very founding ideals of the country itself. Yeah. So maybe among conservatives, the most controversial arguments in my books have consistently been the indictment I make against

the philosophy articulated by some of the founding fathers, which runs counter, of course, to a longstanding conservative article of faith that if we could only go back to the philosophy of the founding, all would be well. And really, I need to perhaps make a clarification about the nature of the argument I was making, which is that

The philosophy articulated by a number of our founding fathers, and you could mention the phrase life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. You could pick some of the arguments in the federalist papers or look at various articulations at the time of the founding. You find in a number of those instances fairly pure statements and articulations of liberal philosophy. And someone like Thomas Jefferson, as he's writing the Declaration of Independence, is more or less just cribbing –

John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. I mean, he finds in that text the precise justification of why America is going to revolt against Great Britain and uses those arguments to justify the rebellion and therefore articulates what many see as the founding and fundamental philosophy of the American tradition. And you call me a patriot, and I am a patriot because I think America has always been more than these fairly...

limited, let's say, limited and constrained articulations of liberalism. In other words, going back to what I've just said earlier, America was always a kind of mixed nation. It had these liberal declarations and it had these liberal statements, but it also had a thick set of pre-liberal inheritances. And Brett mentioned Alexis de Tocqueville. When Tocqueville comes to America, what really impresses him is

...is how many of those inheritances from a kind of pre-modern tradition have been maintained and sustained within a new free country. And Tocqueville argues that if America wants to remain a democracy, it has to fight against its temptation to move in a liberal direction. It has to fight against the temptation of dismantling all those institutions that shore up and maintain democracy...

Among others he points to is the practice of politics, the practice of democratic politics that Tocqueville himself suggests and argues are informed by that classical definition of liberty. The practice and the discipline of learning self-government, which he said is what he saw when he visited the townships of New England, when he visited those towns and those debates, those political debates, those public debates in which he said citizens would come together –

They would come into politics in order to advance their own idea of what they wanted to see as an outcome. But in the course of their debate and their discussion –

They would actually learn the limits of their own arguments. They would learn the need to compromise. He said that their hearts would become enlarged, and he called these institutions the primary schools of American democracy. This was where a kind of liberty of self-governance was learned and the exercise and muscles of self-government and civic responsibility were learned.

So Tocqueville insists and maintains that as long as Americans can sort of maintain these kind of classical understandings and practices that develop the virtues, democracy in America would be admirable.

But he goes on, especially in volume two of Democracy in America, to suggest that the tendency of America will be to want to pursue individualism, to pursue their own ends, to pursue their own vision, individual vision of the good at the expense of the shared public and civic life of the country. To the point at which they would actually lose their liberty and they would in some ways agree to submit themselves to a new kind of despotism, what he calls a democratic despotism.

a despotism of kind of radically individuated selves who have nothing in common other than a kind of common dependence upon a central government.

So I think Tocqueville is really a helpful resource in helping us to see that it's precisely those sort of pre-modern inheritances that it's constrained that philosophic strand in the American tradition. But when that strand was in some ways released from those constraints, it took on a logic that has really, I think, led us to the point where we're at today. Yeah.

So I think Patrick and I don't disagree entirely. I mean, again, my definition of being a conservative is I want those countervailing institutions to leaven. You know, what Tocqueville talked about is pure democracy or I guess unfettered liberalism would be another word for it.

But the problem with what Patrick is saying, as I hear you in this conversation, is it's a little bit at variance with your argument. It's one thing to want a set of healthy institutions that inculcate moral behavior within a broadly liberal context, within a context that respects equality.

that ideal of the pursuit of happiness, that wonderful phrase which is both universal and also utterly individualistic and subjective. And once you make the argument, well the problem here isn't that liberalism has gone too far or that the institutions that are supposed to soften its edges are failing and say, well the problem is actually liberalism itself.

That's a very different argument, it seems to me, and a very problematic argument. And it's also one that doesn't really diagnose our problems today. Right now, the problem of the United States is not really the tyranny of the majority. It's the tyrannies of the minorities. You can look at that in all kinds of data in which a majority of people are afraid to speak their minds.

Why? Because they're afraid of what a small and voluble minority might say about them. There are lots of Republicans who live in fear of Donald Trump, but they keep their mouth shut about January 6th, about his other lawless or reckless behavior, because they're afraid of the minority within their own party that will shut them down. There are lots of liberals, conservatives,

in the contemporary sense, who again are terrified of speaking their minds because there are little red guards in publishing houses and at media outlets and other institutions that will call them names. So we don't have a problem of excessive democracy at the moment. What we have is a problem of radicalized angry minorities, which have, I don't mean racial minorities, I mean just popular minorities,

that have way too much power and way too much sway in our cultural sphere, including on college campuses where lots of professors live in fear of opening their mouths for what two or three students in their rooms, in their classrooms,

might say about them. You know, the other problem, I think, with this argument that you're describing or making, Patrick, is that in the absence of liberalism, politics inevitably becomes a zero-sum contest for power. You know, right now, Barry wants to go her way. Patrick wants to go his way. I want to go my way. We can all do that merrily and not feel like one person's views detracts from another person's rights.

But without that, when you are going to prescribe that this set of people get to set the rules for everyone else, then inevitably you're going to want to be in that set of people. You're going to want to be in the clique or the group that makes the rules for other people.

This is extremely, extremely worrisome. Right now, most conservatives I know are chafing under what they feel is the rule of a highly progressive clique that dictates how we speak, how we think, what we write, what we can publish, and so on. And the

illiberal or the anti-liberal prescription on the right is to say isn't to say well There's something wrong with those guys because they're not respecting the rights of everyone It's to say we want to be those guys right we want we want to imitate the illiberalism of The left and create an illiberalism of the right and then we want to seize power Then you're essentially you're off to the races as a society. We talk about all the things that ail America and

But again, ill America compared to whom or compared to what? Adam Smith said there's a lot of ruin in a nation. There's certainly a lot of ruin in our nation. Spend a little time in China. Spend a little time in Russia. Spend some time in the developing world. And our problems will seem relatively benign by comparison. Patrick, one of the things you write

in your book is you say that what we think of as liberty in our contemporary age is actually just, and here I'm quoting, "...the illusion of autonomy in the form of consumerist and sexual license."

In other words, we think we're free, but actually we're slaves. So what does real liberty look like to you in practice? Not in the abstract, but in practice. What does it look like if what we're now is essentially unwitting slaves? By real liberty, going back to what I was speaking of earlier, it is that learned...

discipline of self-governance and self-limitation that, in a sense, responsible adults have to learn. And so what would responsible liberty look like? It would, well, we could name a couple of things. We could begin to talk about the economic sphere,

and a nation that now, we can start to compare what better places there are to live, but I'll complain about our country and say it could be better. We could say, okay, everything's fine because we're not China, we're not Russia, and I'm just not content to say, okay, we're not China and we're not Russia. Can't we be a better version of ourself? I see a people who are absolutely buried in debt, who have not learned or have been encouraged

to live well beyond their means, consumer debt in particular. And while we can praise Barry for her ability to create this media empire that she has, and congratulations about that, I think it's especially, we see especially among those who are less well-equipped to navigate

the rather winner-take-all economic landscape that we live in. And so those who are on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale are doing comparatively a lot worse when it comes to things like managing their finances and attempting to live lives

that at least seem to be without limitation by the assumption of great levels of debt that's encouraged and indeed you could say cheer-led and positively enjoined

by a massive apparatus of advertising, of encouragement to consume, of keeping up with the Joneses. And it would seem to me that a society that would teach a kind of genuine liberty would be one in which the encouragement would be to be responsible, not to take on debt and leave debt to your children, but to leave an inheritance to your children.

to give them something, to give something to the next generation rather than just to give them debt. And I say this especially seeing the terrible way that many of our young people are starting their lives with unconscionable

levels of debt in order to attend these institutions, including the one that I teach at. And it should be just an object of deep and profound shame that we allow this to take place. But we could also talk about this in the social realm. Again, the assumption of those responsibilities of being a parent, of being

of being responsible for the next generation. And the complete, you know, almost collapse of family formation, again, we can look at this in socioeconomic terms, the lower you are on the socioeconomic scale, the worse you're doing in the realm of sort of social relationships, forming families, having children within married families. So we now have, in a way, what we might call virtue is now increasingly a kind of luxury item. It's something that's enjoyed by those of us who are in the elite, whether we're on the left or the right.

but it's not something that is widespread. And this is a kind of...

You could say this is the way in which liberalism creates a kind of zero-sum game because it generates the division between the classes that is the source of the politics that Brett is criticizing, right? This class divide that creates a deeply resentful lower and working class that resents an elite that seem to be enjoying all the benefits of our socioeconomic system while they are laboring under, in many cases, you could say self-reliance.

inflicted wounds, but self-inflicted wounds in a landscape that is now bereft of the institutions that once were responsible with the shaping and forming of a kind of responsible moral character. So I actually see what we're describing as precisely the consequence of liberalism. And you lament it as the departure from liberalism. I see it as the kind of absolutely predictable outcome, the logical outcome of

of a society that benefits those who are most able to function in a world without those guardrails and creates a class of people who will benefit at the expense of those who can't. And I think, you know, having a kind of virtue-forming institutions as a kind of public utility is a far better way to organize a political and social order rather than having it as a kind of private gated good. America was founded on debt. Thank God for Alexander Hamilton.

I grew up in Mexico, and when I grew up in Mexico, debt was very hard to obtain. You couldn't get a mortgage, for example. You couldn't take out business loans unless you had very high levels of capital. You know what the result of that was? Poverty.

So you can make the argument that right now we have maybe too much of a good thing, but debt, if it allows you to borrow to buy a car you need for your job or to create offices, that's the source of American prosperity. And each of us would be living in a poverty that you can scarcely imagine if debt weren't at the heart of the American liberal project. So I think it's very important. I mean, I don't wanna diminish

The problems the problems are real every system is going to come with problems You can make the argument that the United States through Fannie Mae and you know recklessly encouraged taking on way too much debt when it came to housing crisis

We have been encouraging student debt and we've been encouraging universities to jack up their prices through misbegotten student loan programs. These are all failures of policy or mistakes of policy that can be tweaked and shaped

in better ways, but how that's a critique of liberalism itself, I really don't understand. You know, we can have arguments about policies within the broad liberal order, but I think that the suggestion that, for instance, somehow taking out debt is a sign of moral weakness is, sorry to say this, ludicrous. I mean, there are millions of people who are listening in, maybe you, Patrick, who have a mortgage, right? That's all debt.

And so long as you're encouraged to be responsible in the use of debt— I think that's exactly what I was saying. Encouraged to be responsible, right? Right. And that's—so—

That phrase, encouraged to be responsible, you just suggested that somebody has to be doing the encouraging. Mine wasn't a broadside against debt as a whole. It was the assumption of irresponsible levels of debt that's especially crushing to those who are least capable of taking it on and are not benefiting from the formation of those institutions that I have been arguing are unprofitable.

undermined and disassembled by this liberal idea of freedom. A hundred percent. Don't mischaracterize my argument then in your response. Fair enough. A hundred percent. We should be encouraging people, especially people at lower levels of education, at the lower levels of the socioeconomic ladder, to think very carefully about some of their personal choices. And it's a failure of modern liberalism to

I would argue that we have failed to do that. But it's not a failure of liberalism itself.

And in fact, a truly liberal society would be a great teacher about the dangers of excessive debt because it would have tougher bankruptcy laws, for example, or it would not be as free with kind of a concept of second chances as we are today. Capitalism is a great teacher because it teaches you sort of the realities of life and the dangers of excess. But that's, again, we're talking about

problems with policy, problems with institutions, but these are problems that we have looked at before and we've overcome before. You can go back 40 years and find Americans anxious about too much debt. You can go back much further than that and feel these same arguments, and yet the Republican jurors

What came to mind as I was listening to Patrick talk was the motto that I'm sure still exists at the WSJ editorial page, which was free people, free markets. The whole idea, the big, big prevailing idea there was the idea that free market capitalism was absolutely the best system for lifting people out of poverty and creating unbelievable wealth.

for nations. And yeah, there were downsides to it, but ultimately that was very much the sort of consensus view. That was kind of the Reagan view. That was the view of the conservative movement until incredibly recently. Patrick, what I hear you articulating is the kind of emergent alternative view, which is free markets, maybe not so good. Free people, and by which they meant a sort of liberal immigration policy and also liberalism more broadly, are

Maybe not so good.

that's what I think is the deeper thing at stake here, not debt or not debt. Right. Yeah, no, I mean, that was an example, and it's an example I would stay by, which is, this is just one example, one area. I was just picking an example from economic life where sort of unfettered freedom and the vision of unfettered freedom, it proves to be deeply problematic. And I especially wanted to underscore, it's especially problematic for those who are the least well-equipped

to sort of bear that burden. And we have created a society, a kind of flattened society, in which our freedom is won at the cost of disassembling of those limiting institutions. Brett criticized such things as the churches, but churches, religious institutions, these have been among the great teachers of how it is one learns a kind of self-control.

and a kind of self-mastery. And what social science shows us over and over again is that over the last 50 years, and probably around the time when the Wall Street Journal puts up that phrase as its motto, but also the left is putting up the phrase, you know, "free love" and so forth, that both the left and the right are pushing a vision and proposing a vision of a kind of radical freedom of individual self-making selves

And at that very time or over the course of that time, all of those sort of institutions that Brett himself would praise begin to go into decline. They're not going into decline because they're being oppressed. It's not like life under communism or fascism where they're being sort of destroyed by the government. But they're being destroyed by an ideology. And the ideology is the ideology of the liberated self-making human being.

And so when Brett laments the decline of the kind of human beings that seem to be able to shore up their lives with these institutions, it's not because of some infection from the left, an illiberal infection that came from the left. It's born from the very heart of the philosophy that's advanced, among other things, on the pages of the Wall Street Journal of the idea of the unfettered economic actor who

who is sort of freed of a kind of moral environment and limiting space in which an economic life has to take place for it to be a kind of enterprise in which a good, virtuous, moral people can emerge and can exercise forms of self-limitation.

So I think the disagreement isn't that the landscape is problematic and that we have, I think we actually agree on many of those, what we would see as those problematic elements. The deepest disagreement arises on its sources. Its sources, whether it's in some ways from within the liberal order itself or it somehow comes from some source outside of it. And I guess I'd like to hear more about what was the source of the contagion that undermined an otherwise...

seemingly perfect regime that by, you know, if we're to go with the telling that Barry was suggesting, was at the nation's founding and was continuous until about, what, 1968 or 1972? I guess I'd just like to hear a little bit more about what went wrong. Well, there was no seemingly perfect regime ever.

The 1950s were the era of Jim Crow. I mean, you go back one generation after another and you find mutatis mutandis, as they say in Latin, necessary things being changed. Huge problems in liberal society, huge inequities, injustices,

deeply problematic aspects of both the regime and as well as the social, moral, and institutional order. But the complaint here, I think, ultimately isn't against liberalism as a system. The complaint is one really about human nature and

and the fact that utopia means no place. And we are never going to have a system in which you don't see, go back to that wonderful Smithian phrase, a great deal of ruin in the nation. We have a great deal today. We had a great deal in the past. My argument simply is that given the available alternatives that mankind has experimented with over the generations, I can't think of one that has produced

More libertas, as Patrick put it, more genuine liberty or ancient liberty, more prosperity, more good for more people than liberalism. And what threatens it today are strains of illiberalism, which have infected various streams of political thinking. The strain that infects it now in academia is a kind of left illiberalism or even totalitarianism.

That's frightening and there is a kind of blood-and-soil nationalism on the right that frightens me as well So, you know, we have lots of problems. We always have had lots of problems Typically speaking my argument is that more liberty is a better cure than the than the available Alternatives within bounds obviously this is not this is not a precise science but my question for you Patrick again is is

If this system is failed, right, or is failing,

What alternatives do you propose? What models are out there that have been shown to work at any point in history that produce outcomes that are better than the ones that we have achieved in this society? And I mean that also from a moral perspective. You know, you said earlier in one of your comments, you said that virtue has now become kind of a luxury for the elite. That is to say, virtue is a luxury for people who have satisfied their material wants.

Well, here and in other countries in the advanced world, we have done more to satisfy our material wants than in less fortunate, less successful societies.

Again, I can attest to this because my home country Mexico is a country that is overrun run by narco traffickers corrupt politicians a lot of grief a lot of unhappiness and a lot of bad dealing on account of Material want so so I'd like to know what what other society there is and it can't be a society with you know Five million people or some tiny little country but a large society on our scale that can produce a better outcome and

That may be one of our deep challenges, is it may be hard to run a society like ours and over a long time produce the kinds of citizens that...

that a republic needs, that a republic requires. And here, you know, our founding fathers and Tocqueville and others would be the first to point out that a republic needs certain kinds of virtuous citizens. But a society that is large, in which the mode of being is a kind of exit, as opposed to a kind of developing one's character in a tradition, it is a kind of anti-traditional society.

This is going to be a society in which having those kinds of citizens over a long period of time is going to be difficult. So you asked me what's the alternative, but I can't pick something like Switzerland, I guess, which is interesting. That was the model that was pointed to by the critics of the Constitution, the so-called anti-federalists who wanted us to be more of a –

a much more decentralized, more localist, state-centered nation in which states would have a lot more sovereignty than they've ended up having under our constitutional order.

So you asked me about then what would I suggest as an alternative. And here I would say the following. We're having this conversation. Barry asked us to be here because of a sense that I think she has and many have that something has gone deeply wrong with the nation. And the sense too, or at least the fear, that the current crisis we're undergoing is one that resembles or at least could be a harbinger

of the form of political division that has marked the beginning of the end of many political orders, whether it's in the form of a kind of civil war, whether it's in the form of an outright tyranny by one class or the other. And you mentioned, you know, the sort of the potential for tyranny on the right, the potential for tyranny on the left.

Here, as a political theorist, my job is to sort of think, well, what is the alternative? And I guess I would suggest that one of the things that we have to face the possibility in the history of what we know of nations is when the kinds of formative institutions that shape politics,

a citizenry for virtue, when they have fallen into disrepair, there are not a lot of happy stories of reversal. In other words, there's a lot of nations we can look to as having undergone decline when that happens. We could look at Rome, we could look at Greece, we could look at British Empire, we could look at a lot of nations that have undergone a kind of political catastrophe in

that leave those countries intact, but we no longer look to them as kind of models or exemplars of political excellence. And so I think right now we have to face the possibility that we are in the midst of one of these crises, and the answer isn't to just keep doing what we've been doing and to double down on what we've been doing. Here is where it seems to be this is the crux of the argument, which is do we seek to restore

the very set of conditions that in my view have led us to this point and that if we don't arrest this trajectory, we are going to end up either in civil war or some form of tyranny. Or do we, in whatever way possible, move toward a different understanding of what it is to be free, what it is to be a free human being, and take the existing institutions that we have

but in some ways repopulate them with a very different idea of what it is that we're trying to do as a shared political community. And I don't know the answer whether that's possible at this point. We may be past a tipping point.

You know, I grew up in a household where my father was attracted to titles that suggested that the end was nigh. So James Burnham, Suicide of the West, 1968. Christopher Lash's Culture of Narcissism, 1979. Jean-Francois Ravel's How Democracies Perish, 1968.

1984, Alan Bloom's Closing the American Mind. 1987, Robert Bork slouching towards Gomorrah a few years after that. This is a habit in American history to say essentially what Patrick has just said, that we are at a tipping point. In fact, it goes all the way back to Mercy Otis Warren, who in 1788 wrote a book about how the United States Constitution was

was imminently to lead to a completely catastrophic outcome for the new United States. I mean, that was the view of the anti-federalists as well. So the story of people forecasting imminent decline is not a new one in American history. And it is absolutely true that we have gone through hills, peaks, and valleys in our history, and I would argue that we're currently in something of a trove, of a valley.

But typically speaking, we have saved ourselves and we have discovered sources of regeneration and renewal by our fidelity to the most liberal phrase ever written and the one which, in my view, forever earns Thomas Jefferson his spot in the pantheon of American heroes, which is that phrase, the pursuit of happiness. It is the most beautiful phrase ever expressed in any language, the pursuit of

of happiness, that idea that each of us is endowed separately, individually, and universally with

with a right to pursue happiness as we ourselves, we personally see it. And it is because of that and because of what John Stuart Mill called the experiments in living that we've been able to create so many possibilities for happiness, also for strife, also for regret, also for mistakes,

But for happiness, for hundreds of millions of people, it's why we have been able to succeed on such a large scale, whereas people like Rousseau and others thought that the only happy republics could be very small republics like Corsica, in which everything was very, very tightly regulated. So liberalism itself, for all of its warts and all of its defects and all of its compromises with human nature,

has been the principle of regeneration. And I'll just finish with one thought. Barry's hometown is Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh 50 years ago was a dump. Right?

Right. I mean, the ability of that city. Oh, it's true. I mean, its river was practically on fire. The ability of that city to renew itself, the ability of places like Texas and Austin and Atlanta and Charleston, South Carolina, Nashville, Tennessee, to rise from real or metaphorical ashes is

is a striking testament to the fact that we are not like other nations where once decline sets in, it's permanent.

It's just not been our national experience. We had the 1970s that were awful. We had the 1930s that were awful. The 1890s were awful. We rose above these challenges. And I think we are going to do so again if we maintain the old-time religion in the United States. And that old-time religion is called liberalism as expressed in the Declaration of Independence. I mean, Patrick could easily come back to that and say, yes, but for every Pittsburgh, there's also hollowed out

across the industrial Midwest that are basically, you know, dens of meth use right now and all of their jobs have been shipped over to China. Yeah, 100%. And have you ever visited when you were a kid a ghost town somewhere out in Arizona or Colorado? There are ghost towns littered all across America for many reasons. That has been a part of the American story from time immemorial. By the way, opioid or meth,

opiate epidemics also a part of the American story since at least the end of the Civil War. None of this is particularly new. We are not entering a new epoch, and we don't need to try to reinvent the formula that has served us so well for so many generations. We'll be right back. ♪

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

I feel like for some people listening to this, you're like probably thinking, I haven't heard of some of these book titles. These guys have a lot of different ideas of what libertas and liberty and these Latin phrases mean.

But this is a little abstract, so I want to try and make it more real and touch grass a little bit here. You know, Brett just mentioned the phrase, the pursuit of happiness. And one thing that has allowed me personally to fulfill that phrase has been women's liberation, which is considered, I think, by many to be a key achievement of liberalism.

Patrick, you write this in your book about the liberation of women. You basically argue that freeing women has actually enslaved all of us.

Here's what you write.

And here's the key phrase, but it effectively puts women and men alike into a far more encompassing bondage. You could imagine those lines in a way being written by a Marxist, which I know you're not, but explain that to me. Explain to me how women's liberation has effectively put women and men alike into a far more encompassing bondage.

So the thoughts underlying those passages are actually the name Christopher Lash was just mentioned. And one of Lash's books, which was written before The Culture of Narcissism, is a book titled Haven in a Heartless World. And that book tracks the kind of change of attitude and view about the relative place of home and of work over the course of American history.

Where, in a way, the place of a kind of genuine freedom, oddly enough, was seen as the home. Now, it was the home that was also a working home, typically farm, typically some kind of local business that was owned or run by relatively either family or a set of families. But that having to go and then in the 19th century having to go and especially to work for a factory.

To work for a boss, to work for an industrial magnate or a tycoon was seen as an act of profound kind of sacrifice for the man at that time, the man leaving the house, leaving the place of relative freedom where you could set your own hours and work as the work demanded but also as the rhythm of the home demanded.

And the woman typically who would stay home was seen as enjoying the freedom that the man was giving up by going to work outside of the home. Now, if we fast forward about 100 years or 60 or 80 years, we find a different set of arguments articulated by Betty Friedan in particular who argued that it was life in the home, especially the suburban home.

That was a life of bondage, the life of just complete brain deadening, you know, sort of working with the, you know, the newfangled instruments of suburban life, vacuum cleaners and dishwashers and so forth. And that this was a brain deadening life and that real liberation could be found outside of the home working now in the way that the man was working. Those comments were really meant in that passage in the book was really meant to sort of highlight that

What we see as the greatest accomplishment of the women's liberation movement is a kind of reversal of what had been the understanding in the previous century, that going to work for a boss and for a corporation, no longer in some ways being able to enjoy if that's conceivable. But Patrick, leave Lash behind for a second. Why do women today have it worse than before? Well, I...

I guess I would say that women, I think, in a way that I think probably men don't have to face, women are faced with the profoundly difficult situation in which they are typically expected or at least desire to

To be both very successful, especially if you were in the upper classes, be successful professionally, and be probably the main person raising the family in the home. This is something that many of my students, the young women, especially after they graduate, will talk with me about and express great interest.

pain about the kinds of choices that they find themselves having to make and not knowing how to find that balance. But do you think that that choice causes more anguish than it's worth? Like,

I relate to that anxiety and that feeling of, did I make the right choice? And am I balancing my life in the right way? Every single woman I know that has career ambitions and also family desires feels exactly that same way. But isn't having that choice better than having no choice at all? My grandmother looks at my life and she's like, this would have been impossible for me.

You know, my producer is pumping right now, like as she's in this conversation. Yeah, well, this is where I wonder if we're forcing on not just women, but men and women, a false choice.

Why is it that you have to choose one or the other or be anguished over this choice? Can't we have a civilization in which we can have work and we can raise families and we can do so in a way which is not demanding a kind of existential crisis on the part of certainly women, but I think also men, right?

And that would mean putting in its proper place what the boundaries of work are, making it possible through government assistance, through government policy, through public policy, making it possible for people to have a genuine choice and not to have to choose necessarily between having children and going to work. And so I think this is one area where a kind of thinking beyond the liberal paradigm of saying you'll have to do this on your own. You'll have to fly solo.

and rather saying that there's a place for public policy, for government support, to support family formation. And if people, men, women, both, want to stay home and raise their families, it will be possible to do this. Brett, do you think that the liberal order is hostile to the family in the way that Patrick is suggesting? No. Or to women? I can't think of any order that is more conducive to women's happiness than the liberal order.

There certainly hasn't been one that I can think of. And look, you know, choices are difficult, right? I mean, women's lib combined with technology-saving devices, combined with birth control and other technologies, created a world of choices that simply did not exist for the vast majority of women today.

a hundred years ago, right? And those choices can be agonizing and difficult, and they're better than not having the choice. I mean, the real choice is, well, you could come up in a society where you don't even have to think about it, right? Whether to have a career, whether to not have children, whether to not pursue a kind of a traditional life. And that, I guess, it's a kind of liberation that you're bereft of the choice.

But I suspect that certainly for my daughters, I'm glad we live in an order that provides women that choice. And I think we're a much richer, and I don't just mean materially richer, I think we're a much morally richer society in that women are now able to do things that were certainly next to unimaginable.

even around the time that I was born in the early 1970s, we were just beginning to be imagined then. I would add that that also goes for the other great liberation of our time, which is the liberation in terms of gay people. I mean, we forget that up until 50 years ago, actually up until when I was a kid, two, three, 4% of my cohort lived in fear

of revealing their most basic preferences in life. And that was an unmitigated horror, which liberalism, by virtue of this principle, the pursuit of happiness, was able to relieve in a way that few other societies have. So again, all of these things have costs and human nature and life itself is never easy. And it would be nice to say, well, could we have a society which is pro-family and yet lets

everyone work exactly the way they want to work to the right degree while not ignoring children, while not ignoring this and that responsibility. Of course, that would be lovely. And we're finding our way towards a somewhat better society. But, you know, the anti-liberal argument that's being made is it would be better if we'd never had to have this choice to begin with. First of all, it's a kind of a foolish argument because the horse is left behind.

horses left the barn. But I don't think it's a particularly moral argument because depriving half of humanity of meaningful choices doesn't seem to me to maximize virtue or happiness.

If I could, I just want to say that what I emphasized at the end of my comments is that it's precisely to be able to give people the kind of choice in which they are – in some ways I think the choice that many people face today, men and women alike, is whether I'm going to have a family or whether I'm going to have some kind of work. And that to me is – that's not a genuine choice that fulfills our nature. And this is where I think thinking beyond the liberal paradigm where you just have to do it yourself –

and support for a society in which the formation of families is going to be a priority of our public order is actually a departure from the liberal ethos that I think otherwise leaves us with a situation in which theoretically we have a choice but in which what we're seeing is the absolute collapse of the formation of families in the next generation. Forgive me, but I think that's really an evasion of your argument. Yeah.

Look, there are plenty of liberal societies, France, for example, Denmark, where I was just the other day, that provide all kinds of subventions for pro-family policies or...

pro-natal policies, you know, one way or another of supporting families. They tend to have disappointing results, but liberal societies are perfectly capable of doing just what you described, Patrick, even if we don't do enough of it here in the United States. But the really strong argument, the argument that's more consistent with your broader point is that women should not have ever been asked to make these choices. The 1960s was a giant...

universal mistake. Everything about it was wrong. The pill was wrong. Control over your reproductive choices was wrong because it deprived us of this kind of leave it to beaver style family that was a kind of a perfect American ideal. And I mean, it's a kind of a moot court argument because we're not going back to that world, but that's the strong anti-liberal argument. Was that world really better? Was it really better than what we have now?

And I think if you kind of look at it through rose-tinted glasses, it might seem to have had advantages. It might seem to have been more placid, more peaceful, more morally healthy, provided you weren't a woman or black or in some category that was being mistreated. But if you really think of it, I don't think that's right. You know, our former colleague, George Maloan, a name that Barry remembers from the Wall Street Journal days, he was...

When we were at the Wall Street Journal, he was the longest serving employee from Indiana farming family. It started at the Journal in the 1950s. And I always thought of him as just kind of the the most conservative person there. And I remember having a conversation with him once. And he said, and this was a quote, he said, you know, the 1950s were unbearable.

unbearable in terms of the strictures, the conformism, the sense that everyone had to march in a similar direction. The 1960s happened for a reason. That reaction happened for a reason, and we shouldn't close our eyes to that fact. There were plenty of excesses in the 1960s. There are plenty of excesses today, and we should correct for those excesses. But let's not forget that eras in which a kind of

a certain kind of illiberalism prevailed in many structures of life was not a happy period. In the book, Patrick, you allude to the problem of liberalism's permissiveness around sexual behavior. And I wonder where you draw the line. You know, do you think it would be better if gay marriage had not become legalized? Is this a place where nostalgia for the 50s is warranted in your view?

Well, I should point out that when I began speaking about nostalgia for the 60s, I was asked for where we might find our discontents in America today. And what I was really wanting to underscore was that on the left, our discontents are especially about the economic inequality and the loss of a sense that we have some kind of solidarity when it comes to economic causes and our economic lives.

And on the right, the discontent comes from the breakdown of what Brett himself described as the little platoons and civil society that shores up and makes good and responsible liberty possible. So I'm not suggesting we should go back to the 50s. In fact, I don't think you go back to anything. I think you can only go forward. And when we go forward, I think what we have to go forward to is a world in which, yeah, the genie is out of the bottle.

We do have various forms of sexual liberation through both feminism, through gay rights, now through transgenderism. You're asking me where to draw the line. And I guess the line would be, for me, what are the social forms today? What are the public policies today? What are the ways in which our leadership class, the elite class who shapes and forms opinion, can encourage young people

to consider forming marriages, having children, raising children, staying together, being together when their children have children, creating a sense of multi-generational obligation and duty to each other, which I fear a society that's not forming families isn't just not reproducing for the future, not recreating itself or creating a new generation.

But it's not encountering, I think, that most vital human experience of coming to know firsthand the sacrifices that your parents made for you when they had you. This, for me, was the overwhelming experience when we had our children. Yeah.

Which was until we had our own children, I didn't realize what my parents had done. I didn't realize the depth of the sacrifice they had undertaken in raising us. I think that in a way I don't think you become fully an adult until you experience that. And I'm not saying that people who don't have children can't be adults. I just think that there's a way in which if a civilization...

doesn't promote parenthood, not just to repopulate their nations and the next generation, but as a kind of deeply, you know, kind of the development of our human telos, of our human end. I think that we accelerate a kind of civilizational suicide at a whole bunch of different levels. So given where we are today, how do we begin to do that? And so I mentioned earlier, and I didn't hear Brett necessarily disagreeing with me,

Active promotion through public policy, through using our tax code, through using direct payments, encouraging the formation of families. But more than that, and maybe this is where France and Germany and other countries fail, making parenthood something that's honored, something that's more than just a choice that's random. Choose this, choose that. But something that's actually – we recommend this. This is something that you should do.

This is something that we encourage. This is probably not liberal. It's not sufficiently liberal perhaps for Brett, but I think it is. Why is it not liberal to venerate parents? Because at least what I've heard Brett saying is that nobody should tell anyone what they should choose. No one should recommend what the preferences should be. Whose job is it to tell us what human virtue is? But I think this is one area where

A positive encouragement and a kind of national civilizational honoring of a certain way of life would be a place to start. And I think we could begin to populate that out into a whole range of other areas of life if we began to count them up and tally them up. But I –

This is not – so I just don't want to leave the false impression that I'm saying, yes, we just need to go back to the 50s. I think we need to take where we are now and this doesn't dishonor gay people. It doesn't dishonor people who choose not to have children. But it is a way of saying this is what we as a civilization value and treasure and honor.

I just want to make sure I'm understanding. So let's imagine an American president in 2024 that takes up this vision. And in order to venerate a particular kind of family and to elevate it as a moral example, maybe there would be some kind of child income tax credit for traditional families. Is that along the lines of what you're describing? Yeah.

I think more than that. Democrats want to basically say we'll give you a credit, a tax credit for child care so that you can work outside of the home. And I think if Republicans or conservatives – I don't know if Republicans are conservative. I don't think Brett's really conservative. You think Brett's just a lib? He's just a lib. But at any rate –

Truer words were never spoken. Tell my readers. But if we are serious, if conservatives are serious about the central role that's played by these formative institutions, then the public order, including the government, has a role to play in shoring them up and in providing the kinds of resources that make it possible for people to choose what

If they want to choose to be in the home, they can choose to be in the home and it can be the mother, it can be the father, it can be both of them. But not to force upon parents the choice that they must either work outside the home and if they're going to have children, put them into child care or not have children.

Well, so when we see, you know, candidate for Arizona Senate, Blake Masters, talking about in ads how families should be able to survive on a single income, is that the kind of thing you're talking about? Yeah, and I think this is where if, you know, if a single income isn't making, isn't possible to make it here, you could have the public purse make up the difference. But I completely agree. I think a kind of single family income is the basis of strong family lives. Right.

I think that's economically infeasible and would yield pretty weak results. Again, throughout Europe, you've had efforts in France and other countries to shore up the family by encouraging

creches in France that start nearly from the cradle and long parental leaves and other efforts at providing financial funding for families. And the decline in Western families is happening for reasons which transcend

policy measures like that. By the way, it's also happening in cultures. It's happening most markedly in non-Western cultures. Go to South Korea, go to Japan, for example, or Taiwan, or even China, where childbearing is just plummeting.

Part of it is that we've populated the planet pretty darn well in the last hundred-odd years. We're about to hit the $8 billion mark. It was $6 billion at the turn of this century. And people are finding a new balance in terms of just how much parenting should be a part of their lives. But if you really are concerned about parenting,

Bringing up people in the United States, bringing in more demographically, bringing in more people and restoring American traditional American values or traditional or the kind of traditional values that I suspect we all subscribe to.

The best kind of policies you could have would be a very liberal immigration policy because immigrants provide people, they have babies, they provide energy, imagination, and enterprise. We could once again restore the concept of meritocracy to the center of American life and reject the kind of

illiberal objections to meritocracy. We could renew our faith in the liberal idea of free speech and the importance of gadflies and intellectual dissent

and going your own way in American society. All of these are sort of quintessentially liberal concepts that I think do a lot to cure what ails contemporary American life. And again, Patrick and I agree on a lot of, I think we see the symptoms in the same way. The difference is that I think he's looking at a skin condition and says it's melanoma, and I'm thinking it's psoriasis. And you can cure it through less radical interventions than the one that Patrick prescribes.

Well, Brett, you just offered a vision that's kind of the opposite to Viktor Orban, a name that I'm shocked has not come up yet in this conversation, Viktor Orban, the head of Hungary. You know, he's embraced restrictive immigration policies, not allowing Syrian refugees in the country in 2015, sort of infamously or prophetically, depending on your view. He's used government subsidies, exactly as Patrick was saying, to promote marriage and childbirth, which have been a huge success.

He's tackled some of the ideology that we've mentioned in this conversation in universities like defunding gender studies program. So Victor Orban...

elected democratically, beloved by Hungarians, but is an open advocate, calls himself, you know, and a liberal Democrat. He believes that Hungary is in a liberal democracy. And I guess my question is, Patrick, is that the model when you're thinking, you know, when Brett sort of asked you before what the model would be and you didn't mention a country, I wonder if Hungary is exactly the model that you're thinking of when you're thinking of the direction we could go.

Well, I mean – yeah, I think Hungary is a place that can be instructive to us but of course within limits. I think Brett limited me to five million. So I guess if that's the case, then – All right, 10 million. Yeah, so if it's 10 million, then Hungary wouldn't be a model. And I think seriously it can't be an exact model obviously because it is a small country, relatively more homogenous. It's got a very distinct language that's impossible to learn.

And its geographic location makes it very distinct being kind of at the intersection of the east and the south and the west. But I do think Viktor Orban as a political leader can be instructive to the political right. And actually I wrote about this. I co-authored a piece on our substack called Post-Liberal Order after a visit in Budapest where we met with a number of international scholars and

met with Viktor Orban for about two hours. It was called Dispatch from Budapest. It actually addressed the controversy over the speech that he gave where it was translated as opposition to mixed race. So if you're interested in our thoughts there, feel free to check that out. But I think where Orban is instructive is a willingness to use political power to

his office to advance causes that I think for a liberal age, doubtless someone like Brett would be extremely uncomfortable with, to advance causes both in the economic realm as well as in the social realm. So it was mentioned family policy and that's – I think his policies are ones that I would put forefront as examples, which I

They're successful. It's still a country that's not exceeding the replacement rate, but it's moved closer. It's one of the few countries in the world that's moved closer to the replacement rate. He's used political power to constrain some of the campus ideology, and that's regarded as –

interference in free speech but these are taxpayer funded institutions as are most institutions in the United States even private institutions receive considerable amount of taxpayer money the left is more than willing to use its political power to influence

both at the primary, secondary, and university level. And the right is always in a way fighting with one hand behind its back saying we should just be laissez-faire about this. I think if we're concerned with the education of the next generation, we should be deeply concerned about the ideology, the homogenous ideological takeover of these institutions. And I would support that.

a conservative political leader using political power to exert some influence on the shape of these institutions. To have a kind of opposition running the education of the next generation seems to me to be deeply problematic.

And I think also – I mean I don't disagree with the need always to be thinking about immigration. But one of the things that Orban actually talked about in our meeting with him was the need to think about the ways that immigrants – immigrants, new immigrants are going to fit into the sort of cultural fabric of the society. And this is really what he was speaking about in that controversial speech.

Where he talked about the problem of mixed races? Yeah. And that translation apparently is obviously contested. But if you read the context, it's clear he means a kind of cultural tradition and not a kind of ethnicity issue.

What I think in the United States, we're going to have a different condition and a situation to think about this. But to think about immigrants – new immigrants in ways that I think was acceptable and indeed was expected in an earlier generation, which is how will these new set of immigrants be absorbed into this country? How will they be sort of socialized into America? So not sort of leaving it to just – again, this –

...pel-mel market of cultural mishmash. But to recognize that cultures are different... ...and cultural assumptions are different. And what's happened in, you know, in the... ...let's say the liberal societies of Europe in particular... ...is, you know, a form of immigration... ...that's creating deep, profound divisions in those societies... ...precisely because the cultural traditions are so different... ...with the very real prospect...

of a completely different cultural tradition becoming dominant within the next 50 years. Now, that might be fine in the liberal view of immigration, but oddly enough, those won't be liberal countries anymore. Those won't be European or Christian countries anymore.

They're going to be something very different. So it seems to me just to say, yes, let's just open our borders, open borders, open people, open markets. This is problematic. So I think Orban and Hungary can be instructive once we translate some of those ideas into a somewhat obviously different American context. So if Hungary is the model that Patrick has in mind for a non-liberal state –

I kind of rest my case. I didn't say, no, I didn't say it was a model. I said it could be instructive to us. In fact, I said it wasn't a model because we're a very different country. Okay, but if you think that Hungary is, and I'm leaving aside whether it's a model for us, but if you think it's a model of, Hungary under Orban is a model of a good and virtuous country, I have to tell you that terrifies me.

We could not be having this conversation, Patrick, with Barry, and she could not have her media platform in Hungary under Hungary's media laws. You could not have your academic job in Hungary, and you could not be a free-thinking academic because the Central European University had to flee Budapest, was evicted from Budapest and had to go to Vienna,

because of the level of restriction and harassment by the Orban government. Now, the Orban government happens to have goals which you are in some sympathy with, but if it happened to be a left-wing government as opposed to a right-wing government, you would rightly recognize it

as a kind of Castroite or maybe not quite Castroite, but a nasty left-wing dictatorship. The only thing that's different, it seems to be, is that some of his social views are in sympathy with your own. I would also hasten to add, you know, I once looked at this. Hungary in its modern history has produced 10 Nobel Prize winners, half of them Jewish. With one qualified exception, every single one of those people left Hungary.

The United States, which has won more Nobel Prizes than any other country in the world, one-third of American Nobel Prize winners were born in another country. That is to say, one-third of our Nobelists are immigrants. The cultural mishmash that you talked about is precisely the kind of conversation that we are having.

having right now between... Between an Irish Catholic, two Jews sitting in a Protestant country. I mean... And now I look at the ingenuity and labor and enterprise that Hispanic Americans are bringing in or Asian Americans are

are bringing Nigerian Americans and so on. And I think what is the secret sauce to the United States, which distinguishes itself from countries like Hungary that tried to be one ethnic unit? And I think, thank goodness we are so polyglot.

Thank goodness we are so multi-ethnic. Thank goodness this mishmash can exist in a liberal order that's so endlessly fruitful and productive. That is the American system. That is why my mother came here as a displaced person, stateless person at the age of...

age of 10 with $7 and no PhD to her name. So this view of this kind of idealization of the society that

speaks one language, observes the same customs, places an emphasis on certain national or traditional beliefs, and is led by a quasi-authoritary leader who brooks very little dissent. That's a recipe for failure. Hungary is a failing state, not a successful one.

Patrick, is Orban's model instructive because he uses the state to promote a more explicitly Christian society? Or is it the fact that he's willing, unlike in your view, many conservatives or Republicans in this country to use the levers of state power in the way the left so clearly is? No, it's absolutely the latter. As I said, and I think

Brett unfairly characterized my view, I don't see Hungary as a model for the United States. It's simply a different country. It's a very different situation. What I did say is that I actually think that Orban provides some lessons, especially for conservatives, for conservative political figures in the United States.

And those lessons are precisely what Barry just said, which is the willingness to use state power. And in this case, not just states, but federal power to advance a vision of society that in many cases we might agree upon. So if we see this collapsing, the downturn of the kinds of civic life, those small communities

the little platoons that once served as the seedbeds of a kind of civic education and a democratic and republican form of virtue.

Then it seems to me that we should look to examples of political leaders and where they're available, rethink them, remodel them, reimagine them for a different context, for the American context. What that's going to look like in the American context is very different. But all this depends, Patrick, on your guys gaining the commanding heights of political power.

The moment the other guy gains the commanding heights of political power, you're going to be very unhappy. Well, we're already unhappy. The other guys are already doing this. So basically this is an argument that you don't want a level playing field. You just want to turn the tables on the other guys.

No, it's not that I want to turn the tables. I actually think that we are seeing, as I began by saying, we're seeing the logical outcome of a political order in which the principles that you've been advancing and the beliefs that you've been advancing have given birth in a sense. They are the womb, if you will, from which the progressive left was born.

So it's not that it was some kind of invasion that came from abroad. It was born right here, and it was born out of basic principles and beliefs of classical liberalism. I mean you mentioned and praised John Stuart Mill and the idea of experiments and living. Well, if you read those passages of On Liberty, the entire argument is against traditional and customary life.

His argument in On Liberty isn't just about government oppressing people's speech. It's primarily about just everyday ordinary people creating a world that you described about the 1950s, for example, a world in which there are certain norms and ways of life that people are expected to live and which suppress or effectively suppress not by outright oppression but just simply kind of a conformity to a way of life.

Now, you could say, okay, that's terrible, but you could then say that what John Stuart Mill wants us to do is to flip the preference, to flip the default to one in which we're going to undo all of those norms and all of those customs. We're going to become a society that's iconoclastic, that's going to destroy the testimonies, the kind of remembrance of the past. That's going to be the society that tears down statues, that this society is going to be one that's liberative.

The contemporary left, the campus left that I think both of you would otherwise decry are the direct descendants of this argument. They are the direct descendants of the Millian argument. They are precisely the iconoclasts that Mill seeks to place as the default against a more traditional customary society.

So in fundamental respects, what's needed is a kind of reassertion through – among other things, through political power, pushing back against this logical outcome of the liberalism that you think we just need to go back to but which in fact has given rise to the current situation. Your intellectual lineage I think is mistaken. Right.

I'm actually pretty confident about this. Modern critical race theory is a kind of a bastard child of Marxism. Marxism does not come to us as a reaction really from critical liberalism. It comes, it's born in the revolutions of 1848 against reactionary autocratic regimes that sprang up post-1815 in that period of time. And the hard left,

that came to us from Russia, from Germany. Again, that was not a reaction to the United States. It's one of the reasons why radical politics never really took root in the United States. And I think Thorsten Veblen writes about this sometime, about 100 or so

years ago why socialism was never particularly well entrenched here in the United States. By the way, why antisemitism never found much of a solid footing here in the US because we had this liberal system in which people, I mean to use the cliche, kind of agreed to disagree and were able to live and let live, another cliche. My argument must really be falling apart this late in the game that I'm resorting to one cliche after another.

But the real terror is when you have a system in which one group or another thinks that it has a right to use state power to impose a certain vision of the good life. And liberalism, as traditionally conceived, has been an intellectual and moral bulwark against that.

And that bulwark is what needs, I think it's the most important task of our time is to shore up that bulwark because the alternative is that when your guy isn't in power, you are going to sieve and plot. And when you're in power, you're going to try to impose and oppress. And this is a kind of system that's really unsustainable. If you want to talk about the decline and fall of empires, they happen when one side thinks the possession of political power is a life and death struggle for them. And

Until recently, the United States was able to avoid that kind of binary manichean opposition. We'll be right back.

Let's go a little deeper into American politics for a second. Patrick, what I hear you basically arguing is that we have one unit party and what we think of as Republicans and Democrats in the main, let's leave the Blake Masters and the J.D. Vance's to the side, are actually both liberals. It's why you think Brett, who identifies as a conservative, is just a lib. And that is what's holding us back.

Is that fair enough? Well, in a sense, it's not holding us back. It's what's led us to our current predicament. Fair enough. And Brett, what you have written in so many columns is that the problem and the reason we've gotten here is that the center isn't holding. That the problem is not that these parties are the same, but that the parties are only increasingly representing the fringes. I would love for you to make that case to us. Well...

Typically in American history, the fringes of politics try to bend towards the center in order to gain a certain respectability and appeal. And what we've seen in the last 15 or 20 years is that now that tendency has been reversed. It's the center that bends toward the fringe. It's Kevin McCarthy prostrating himself before Donald Trump.

And it's the Democratic Party prostrating itself before the hard left. So in a sense, Patrick is right. The Democrats and Republicans increasingly resemble one another. They resemble one another in the fact that both of them are increasingly illiberal. Both of them are increasingly censorious. Both of them are increasingly willing to use state power to impose a certain kind of moral, political, and social vision.

And I think that that's not where the American people and American traditions have been for most of the republic's history. So I don't want to say the center in the sense of like, you know, moderate. Right. Right. But the the vital liberal center that Arthur Schlesinger Jr. talked about back in the 1940s when he felt that the United States was besieged.

besieged by a hard left and a hard right in his time, and on through a broad American tradition. That has been the vital center that has been the healthy place of American politics.

So I don't think we get very far by trying to dignify the anti-liberal politics of the left and the right. They will bring us to grief. It's only a kind of broad liberalism best enunciated in the Declaration of Independence that can solve the problems that we have today and that we can foresee in the future.

Well, it's just striking now to hear Brett praise how wonderful things were back in the 1950s after he told us. I did?

Well, you were talking about the vital center of— No, no, I didn't praise—sorry, now you're mischaracterizing my argument. Okay, well, it seemed like you were praising when there was a vital center. No, I was praising a historian who started Americans for Democratic Action to try to vivify the vital center against what he saw as the illiberal tendencies of his day, which resembles in some ways our own. Okay, well, but that there was at least some point in American history where there was a vital center. Right.

So I'm just struck by, you know, we're hearing a certain amount of nostalgia. I guess what strikes me is that the center, such as it was, was central because it was a far less liberal society. It was a society, as was described, which, you know, it seems to me that Brett can play both sides of this, but that it was a society that both had higher degrees of sort of social solidarity of the little platoons, right?

But when necessary, it was also the most regressive, oppressive society imaginable. I think that you can – in some ways, you can only have a vital center as a political possibility where there is a kind of – let's say a social order that is far less liberal than the official philosophy would suggest.

It is much more populated by those thicker set of norms that John Stuart Mill wanted to disassemble, by those thicker set of institutions that might otherwise limit our individual choices that are not necessarily chosen, that are inherited.

That are with the expectation that we live lives deeply embedded with expectations of being parts of institutions ranging from family to church to community to nation. All of those institutions that develop civic practices. Now, one can describe that as a liberal political order. But it is not a liberal society in the sense that I think –

… is being described at various points in this conversation. It's actually a society that's deeply and profoundly kind of traditional. The question is, is once those institutions have been disassembled, as I began by saying, and disassembled by the logic of a kind of ideology, an ideological form of liberalism…

How does one begin to in some way, shape or form to reassemble them? And I just don't see any answer outside of the use of political power now to constrain the worst pathologies of an advanced form of liberalism. So it is a kind of melanoma. It is a cancer that's eating at the heart of the republic. And the cure is in some ways is not being something that we're not.

But it is increasingly to use political – the willingness to use political power now against a hyper-liberal and intensely liberal liberationist ideology that looks like it's illiberal because it is going to force its ideology upon you. It will force you to use pronouns. It will force doctors to perform mutilations on children in the name of individual liberty, in the name of the true identity that I am.

This is not a departure from liberalism. It's its end station. So the solution, in my view, is going to come from basically – this is shameless flattery, but it's true. 10,000 Barry Weisses said – no, I mean this. Basically, going their own way –

and creating a new set of institutions that gain broad public appeal, not through state coercion, but because they are appealing and attractive to large audiences. And we know from a variety of surveys that there's a huge hunger

for precisely this kind of thinking. It's why you call your platform common sense, right? And that's how it's going to happen. It's going to be driven by forces from below that are going to be seeking, they're going to be creating experiments at liberty and seeking means and venues that ultimately evolve into institutions and norm-making institutions that preserve

vital liberal principles and a liberal sensibility, the habits of a free mind. I appreciate the flattery. What's interesting is that the end of Patrick's book basically makes that argument. He talks about the need for people to voluntarily come together and build local distinctive cultures and resist, this is Patrick's language, the abstraction and depersonalization of liberalism.

So I guess maybe in a way there's some agreement there, although I think the disagreement would come from the fact that, Brett, the very sort of going your own way groundswell that you're describing is...

You might also describe as populism and see that as a liberal. Does that make sense? In other words, you're saying that the change needs to come from people, the change needs to come from local cultures and community. That is happening. And yet many people at the venerated newspaper where you work and where I once worked would look at those local experiments and say, that's illiberal, that's populism. So how...

How do you make the distinction? Well, as they say in Israel, as they say in Israel, it's depend, right? I mean, look, Donald Trump represented in some ways a healthy impulse in terms of his aggressive anti-establishmentarian posture. You know, I said he was a he was a proudly raised middle finger at a failing and self-satisfied elite. Problem is, basically,

The guy was an ignorant jerk, right? So a lot of these experiments are going to happen and they're going to happen in a kind of endless variety. And some of them I'm going to like and some of them I'm going to dislike. And that's just kind of the way it's going to work because I don't know what the ideal outcome ought to be. But what I do know is that all of these things should have a quality of a groundswell, be bottom-up outcomes.

efforts and be small scale efforts, right? So that the best and most successful formulas will be able to find their way to the top. That's been the American way. By the way, you know, this is a bit of a departure, but if you look at the great American corporations of today,

One of the things that's really fascinating is how young they are. Go to France and the big corporations are like Total and other companies that have been around for 100 or so years. The United States, the great corporations, Microsoft, Oracle, Apple,

I think the Home Depot all started in the 1970s and 1980s. More recently, obviously, Facebook and Google. They were young. They were experimental. And some of them rose up and transformed, usually for the better, not always, the way we lead our lives. That has been the way in which America has been able to renew itself economically. And I think it's also been the way we've been able to renew ourselves economically.

culturally, thank God for the great Catholic migrations of the 1840s and 1850s, which disrupted the staid and religiously fairly uniform Protestant society that we had until then. The Irish massively enriched us, and then the Jews massively enriched us, and succeeding generations of other

ethnic and racial and cultural traditions. So that has been the American formula of success. And many of our failures stem from our refusal to recognize that we are already in possession of the secret sauce. We already know how to use, to make the Big Mac. We just have to return to the, to the better, the tried and true formula. Boy, I'm really, I'm really collapsing. You're good, tried and true. Last two short questions.

I think the thing that I really agree with Patrick on is that liberalism, or let's just say freedom, unmoored from any sort of grounding in what he's calling virtue or many people might just call religion or civic organization or sense of belonging to something bigger than yourself, it's not good.

It's just leading to very bad outcomes all over the place. I guess the place where I depart from it is I don't really see how you can force virtue on people. Well, I guess...

I'm not sure I'm going to answer your point. Meaning, like, we can't convince people to believe in God, you know, in 2022. If they don't, they don't. You know, the best thing you can do is make that the kind of life that maybe we'd call it a virtuous life so attractive that people want to join it. Right. But I think in this sense, and since people like Mill and Tocqueville have been invoked, I'll invoke Aristotle. Yeah.

Aristotle describes the development of virtue as a kind of form that's not dissimilar from how we think about a gardener raising plants. I've got great tomatoes growing in my backyard right now. And a good gardener, of course, understands that we have a certain nature as human beings. But in order for the best aspect of our nature to emerge –

You create the conditions. You create the kind of culture, whether it's culture in the biological gardening sense or in the human sense. You create the kind of culture in which those virtues are most likely to emerge. And that is a – it is a mysterious combination of

Which, of course, as we've been speaking about, vitally depends upon a kind of bottom-up efforts. The creation in innumerable communities of the kinds of ways of life that people have developed in this country and all over the world of how you bring up the next generation, how you inculcate certain kinds of virtues.

But it has always also depended on the tutelage of law and the use of law. And let's not forget that in this tradition that we're describing as liberal, there were a lot of ways that the law was used to encourage and cultivate virtue up until very recent times. I mean I think in one of your emails to me, you asked about blue laws and whether that's something we should reconsider. And I think, yes, we should reconsider it.

Because it's precisely a kind of – it's an instantiation of a value of society that says there are – there's a day of the week where we are not going to be commercial people. We're going to constrain the market for one day and we're going to highlight something else, whether it's the worship of God or the time with our family and not just be consumers seven days, 24 hours a week.

in those seven days a week, 24 hours a day. So I think what we really need to be thinking about is if we are in agreement that this culture, which can produce good human plants, good human beings, has seen a considerable deterioration, what does the gardener need to do? What do we need to do to revivify the soil? And I agree completely with Brett and with you, Barry, that this needs vitally a bottom-up

A very important one, and I write about this in my book and it's been something I've been writing about for a long time. But I think conservatives in particular, because of this American – relatively recent American sort of deep mistrust of the state and government –

have been neglectful of the role that law plays and the instructive role that law plays in this. And as a Catholic, since again, you know, mentioning the benefits of Catholicism in America, as a Catholic, I think we need to think about this in terms of subsidiarity, which does give a preference for the local and the ways that local communities can form these kinds of cultures. But it also needs to be able to look at

to those institutions, those places, whether it's at the level of states or at the level of the federal government, that can also help to revivify those cultures through various uses of the law toward that end. And I do think there's a change that's occurring within the conservative movement and in the Republican Party that's moving away from its relatively more recent historical aversion to thinking about the role of the state in this.

I just would not want to hand the state a knife that would be wielded against me in my own views. And I think that's where Patrick and I fundamentally disagree, which is that the use of state power to advance ends to which he is sympathetic will ultimately, ultimately, almost inevitably entail the use of state power to advance ends that he abhors. And so better not to give that state, give the state that power at all.

Brett Stevens, Patrick Dineen, I'm incredibly grateful for your time and for this really illuminating conversation. Thank you so much. Thanks a lot. I learned a lot. Patrick, nice to meet you. Thanks very much, Barry. Nice to meet you too. Thanks for listening. We'll see you again soon.