Ep. 374: Discussing Liberalism (Lincoln, et al) with Walter Sterling (Part Two)

0:12 Dylan: You're listening to the Partially Examined Life. This is part two of our discussion on liberal democracy and the crisis of liberal democracy with Walter sterling, president of St. John's College. We just left off formulating some of the criticisms that Patrick Deneen has in his why Liberalism Failed book. And we were focusing on the particular criticisms of the thinness of the virtues of a liberal democracy. And Walter, you had commented that the retelling of the story and the criticism of liberal democracy that he formulates is pretty familiar in terms of where it goes in that story.

And then, Wes, you were also reminding us that it's also worth noting the context that the founding and the response of even Machiavelli and Hobbes and Locke are in, in terms of proposing a new form of government that ultimately is found in ethos and founding thinking that goes towards the American republic.

1:21 Wes: Yeah, there's a historical context, and it includes religious war and the need for religious toleration. And this, you know, it kind of gets left out sometimes with this kind of great books reading where it's. It's as if everything is just a dialogue between these thinkers. But just, you know, if we want to get out these three points that he's trying to make. The first one is that the idea is that the politics will be based not on the expectation of virtuousness of citizens. Which is interesting in light of what we read from Lincoln where he seems to suggest that it does require a certain kind of virtue that is inculcated in people, a respect for the law, respect for liberalism itself.

But in any case, his claim is that Machiavelli proposed grounding the political on the assumption of human beings vices, right. Their pride, their selfishness, their greed. And then you set up institutions so that there's sort of an invisible hand type emergent. He doesn't put it this way, this way I'm putting it aggregate effectiveness. Right. If you set up institutions correctly, you can channel the human vices into something that overall is the best society that we can expect under the circumstances.

2:37 Dylan: Yeah. So the second one is reinforcing of norms and social structure through political and religious and family life is going to be the way in which we cultivate those virtues is going to be sort of thrown overboard and get replaced by rationalism, an individualistic rationality that is cultivating our individual activities rather than cultivating them through religious social structures.

3:11 Wes: So tradition becomes less of a guide, custom becomes less of a guide, and it's more about reflection and individual rationality, as he says, more individual rationality that could replace long standing social norms and customs as guides for action.

3:28 Seth: He even makes the point even more strongly. He sort of categorizes those types of things as subcategories of relationships in general. Basically he seems to intimate, if he doesn't say explicitly, that the Enlightenment movement towards individual rationality and self reliance on that rationality essentially teaches us that we don't need relationships to form our character, to form our moral stance or what have you. And so essentially they become less important and we become turned inwards on ourselves.

4:07 Dylan: The third one is basically the development of natural science. And the development of natural science as a war against nature and the cultivation of human capacity, limitless human capacity to control nature.

4:26 Wes: So instead of living naturally, right. Nature as a guide to action, we overpower nature, we master nature.

4:35 Dylan: To me, in that criticism, there's sort of a not so subtle claim of kind of impious hubris on the part of natural science in this respect.

4:47 Wes: So to sum it up, a succession of. This is on page 27, a succession of thinkers in subsequent decades and centuries where to build upon these three basic revolutions of thought. Redefining liberty as the liberation of humans from established authority. 1. Emancipation from arbitrary Culture and tradition. It's the second one. And the expansion of human power and dominion over nature through advancing scientific discovery and economic prosperity. Liberalism's ascendant triumph required sustained efforts to undermine the classical and Christian understanding of liberty.

The disassembling of widespread norms, traditions and practices. And this is one of these parts where I have two problems with this sort of narrative. The first is the idea that pluralism is necessarily a disassembling. Right. That the structure of the state, if it doesn't reflect the structure of the community, is somehow necessarily antithetical and hostile to the community. That's the first problem. But the second is just all of these very, very generic claims about what liberalism is doing. It's a. Yeah, it's doing this. Liberalism is like this character in this book and there's not a lot of detail.

I want to say, well, where's the. Where's the quotation or where's the historical reference? But it's just liberalism is doing this, liberalism is doing that.

6:09 Seth: Yeah, there's another wonderful sleight of hand there. There's the. The use of the term pre liberal, which is new to me, but the pre liberal classical and Christian tradition. Because of course, the classical and Christian tradition are essentially interchangeable. You can just substitute Christian values and the Christian worldview with that of ancient Greece. That it's this implication that there's some kind of A, there's some kind of an agreement there, but B, that those two traditions stand in opposition to these things. That he disagrees about liberalism and it's not clear. He doesn't take the time at least to explicitly distinguish how that isn't the case.

6:53 Walter: One way I experienced this is by taking the story back to Machiavelli, et cetera, these stages we went through. I mean, it seems in a way that he's saying liberalism is coextensive with modernity or the modern project. And that's a total way of understanding the human being that's completely antithetical to certain pre modern views that are themselves total ways. And that we're in this crisis of the late decline and collapse of this one way that because it cut us off from all of these other more vital ways of experiencing things. But it seems to me you can disentangle these things.

It seems to me Deneen is saying something like, you can't be a liberal democratic Catholic Christian or a liberal democratic Aristotelian, or, you know, in terms of your understanding of virtue, or that there's a totality that is mutually exclusive and in a way, I'm more sympathetic to that maybe with some of these founding modern philosophers. I don't think it. I don't think it's ultimately true there either, that it's all or nothing. But there are ways in which they're clearly challenging philosophic views, natural theories, that they are revolutionary thinkers.

But I see the liberal democratic project as related in its genealogy and so on, not unrelated to the threads he's weaving it in with, but also different. I mean, in some ways, these religious wars were themselves an early modern phenomenon that prompted a new way of thinking about politics that, I mean, again, I guess I'll just say the. So there are things I'm quite sympathetic to in Deneen's book in the sense that I do think, as you say, there are other critics of individualism, et cetera, et cetera, that argue we as human beings have deeper longings, other sources of meaning, other aspirations that are not well captured by what we've defined as the fabric of our political engagement.

And I'm sympathetic to that, but I don't see an adequate argument, and I don't myself. I'm not persuaded by it. If the argument's there that liberal democracy as such is committed to this absolute and total view of human nature and the way that he presents it, I do think it's meant to preserve pluralism, where we can have commitments that differ about ultimate things and live in a peaceful coexistence. That. That's the project.

9:32 Seth: Yeah. A quick comment. I think he needs that totalizing notion that you're talking about, that it's all or nothing and all in. Because one of his other claims is that liberalism has succeeded, that this is the inevitable and logical consequence of playing this thing out all the way. And so if you're going to make an argument that something has this internal or logical structure, that it eats itself or collapses in on itself, then it has to be responsible. You can't say, well, liberalism might have worked if we had a different economic system. Or liberalism might have worked if the geography of Europe was somehow different. Right. Or liberalism might have worked if some accident of history had fallen the other way, what have you. He's got to basically have it be completely responsible.

10:25 Dylan: Well, he has to basically say, deny the claim that liberalism is about a balancing of diversity and a governing structure, governing ethos, let's put it that way, for a pluralistic society. He has to say that, well, actually, liberalism is just another form of totalization. It's another form of. I'm going a little bit far here. But it's just another form of tyranny. And it's a form of tyranny that is not as good as this other form of tyranny. And so it's basically denying the premise at all of their being of liberal democracy, which is one of, besides cultivating human dignity and human flourishing on an individual basis, is one of doing so in a pluralistic environment, not with the conceit of interfering in as minimal a way as possible, I would say, with the individual's cultivation of their own flourishing.

And I think that he's just denying that as a possible read on what the goods of a human soul are, and that you can have a government that does that. I think, Seth, you're noting that he's going to have to make that totalizing accusation against liberal democracy is right, because he views the whole argument for government as being a totalizing one.

11:55 Wes: Just in that vein, right on page 30, he'll say the loosening. This is a very representative sentence. Loosening of social bonds in nearly every aspect of life, familial, neighborly, communal, religious, even national, reflects the advancing logic of liberalism. All right, so he could have said it was caused by liberalism, but that would have sounded stupid. So in order to avoid saying something stupid, you put in this vague reflects the advancing logic of liberalism. Did liberalism cause it or not? I don't think the ideology of liberalism causes these things.

The liberalizing influences are historical. They happened before it's formulated by thinkers. Coming into contact with other societies destabilizes, for instance, your religious belief. It's already there in ancient Greek society. It's already part of what motivates what's going on in Plato. So immigrants coming into a society, the forces of pluralism have these effects. Communities become less unified, less univocal in a way, and yet that's unsatisfying. And the same thing with the advance of technology. It's not like the technology is some arm of liberal ideology.

And if only we could, you know, understand that we're not atomized, rational individuals, we could do something about that. Technology is its own force, and it's going to do what it does in China just as much as it does it in the United States. So I just think this is part of my problem with this. These very, very grand claims about what liberalism has done to social bonds. I think they're much larger and more complicated and varied forces that cause the loosening of these social bonds. And then, you know, as. As reflected by him going and hanging out with Orban, I just, I think the ulterior motive here is quite clear and it's a nostalgia for this type of strongman.

Right. Who's going to say no? Immigrants? And we're going to undermine the independence of the institution of various institutions like the courts and the civil service. So now we can get things done. And now society can be more Catholic, for instance. It can be Western and Christian and this and that. And it sounds like a very partisan thing to say, but again, I have to say it because I think that is often the ulterior motive of this type of critique.

14:10 Dylan: Well, in fact, it recognizes the power of the institutions with respect to upholding the national religion. If we articulate the national religion as something like the cultivation of the institutions associated with the Declaration of Independence, then you're going to end up with lots of messiness, but you're going to end up with a dedication to those processes themselves that are not aimed at cultivating necessarily the partisan vision of the rule. Right. You're going to have the notion of. You're going to have rules for a newspaper that have to do with journalistic integrity that go beyond what the needs of the newspaper are, and you're going to have a notion of public service for your bureaucracy.

You're going to have an oath that you take as a soldier or a public servant that goes towards those founding national religion. Right. That's what effectively you're taking your oath to as a public servant. You're taking oath to that, not to the role of your own power or the own particular instantiation of it.

15:28 Wes: Yeah. So I mean, ultimately it's about nationalism and nation, a devotion to a certain conception of nation as a. In a thick sense and maybe even an ethnic sense. Right. And that. It just. You can't have that. That's just what I want to say to these people. You can't have it. It's gone. It's not. You can try if you want. And then there's going to be a lot of violence, but you can't have it.

15:49 Dylan: Yeah, but say it.

15:51 Walter: There is a nation that's predicated on a certain worldview inconsistent with the pluralistic conditions and so on. I'm just pressing a little bit because.

16:02 Wes: Yeah, but also unit uniformity. Right. A certain. Right. So blood and soil nationalism for. And, you know, early late 19th century, early 20th century Germany. It was about. It was about race, but it was about culture. It was about connection to the soil. These other people aren't real. Even if they've been here for a generation or two, they're not connected in the way that I am. Why can't Germany be Germany and be for Germany and have a German character as opposed to having all these other facets. Right. I think that's what this is about.

16:33 Walter: Yeah, yeah, I understand where you're coming from. I guess where. Where I want to put a wedge in there is. I mean, I could pick any community, but somehow, like, I'm think the Amish community. And I think if you look at, say, an Amish community in the United States, say, okay, one way to preserve their way of life is to say, we're going to have an Amish nation state and we need to conquer everything to the borders and defend it, and then we'll be safe. Or they could say, I want to support a liberal democratic order where I'm going to be a religious minority whose rights are protected and respected such that I can live my Amish way of life.

And I feel like the wager of liberal democracy is to say, you've got a choice. You can either have this kind of war of all against all of our ultimate worldviews and see who wins. And maybe if you win, you think that's what you want, but you might not win, or you might win it first, you're going to lose later, and you're probably not going to get what you want anyway. Or you can join this social contract, this different kind of ideal of how political community is going to operate, but within that. I mean, this would be my claim that folks don't have to give up their thick culture, their thick religion.

They have to give up some version of it. If you say that the only way you can have it is to have homogeneity across, you know, to the borders, et cetera, et cetera, you know, some kind of religious nationalism. But I guess I'm also prepared to say there is something unstable about this. So, you know, I mean, Dylan, what you were saying, right, you were pushing, and I think Lincoln pushes in this direction, that there's a kind of civil religion that we end up sharing across all our differences that we have to have tremendous respect for. And it cultivates its own kinds of virtues, habits of mind, studies, education, and those are pretty thick requirements, you know, in their own right.

But I think Lincoln's asserting that's in the name of civil and religious liberty, which I do tie to pluralism, which I do tie to having thick attachments that we don't all share, but we create the space for them. And it seems to me Deneen is trying not to allow for that balance that in that world, he thinks there's going to be one religion or another. Either the one you want to have, you're going to be fully committed to. And in a way, it's going to make total requirements or this civil religion, whether you're praising it or blaming it, it's going to be total.

And it's going to set the values and the criteria for your life all the way down. I think Lincoln has a different point of view. I think Fukuyama has a different point of view. And they're trying to have a certain kind of binocular vision on how we're going to think about politics and our ultimate attachments or our thick attachments. But if not paradoxes in there, there's a certain amount of instability in that model and tensions, deep tensions in that model that Deneen's resolving by just taking it all the way. In a certain sense, you might be

19:29 Dylan: resolving those particular tensions. But, you know, I think Wes made the point that at the ignoring of the other tensions that were being resolved, I think that this question of thick versus thin, it is right to diagnose that liberal democracy is cleaving the relationships that we have to our government and to our sort of social structures away from the thick attachments that make us our fully flourishing human beings. And that's true. That's the solution, right, is in order to have pluralism, you need to have that. And Fukuyama would put it as, there's fundamental to this a separation of the public and the private.

And so that national religion goes into the public portion of this. The things that everybody has to assent to to one degree or another in order to be able to be part of this pluralistic society. And, you know, then you have a discussion about what you gain from that, but you also have to have that discussion of what you're not going to get from that. You're not going to get all of the thick things. And so when I, you know, like when I read Sandel, I'm inclined to. Or any of the other communitarians, I'm inclined to agree with the criticism that you don't get that thickness out of it.

But that's not what you need to be getting out of our government. You need to be getting the space for it to happen. And you might have a really live conversation. I think Fukuyama begins to talk about this, especially in his book. But how is it that you're going to continue the growth of those thick interactions that are part of, really the part of the education of your citizenry that maintains your liberal democracy, you need to have autonomous individuals who are cultivating themselves in those connections in a way that maintains them and the society successfully.

21:32 Wes: So I think, yeah, this is part of why I emphasized Lincoln's conclusion concerning an education and a national religion, which again is about instilling a certain kind of virtue. So contra Deneen, you can't abandon some conception of virtue because the institutions are only as good as the individuals who inhabit them. And that national religion does have to take precedence over a religion of nation, let's put it that way. A respect for the rule of law does have to take precedence over your devotion to your religion. If religion means, you know, if some practice requires you to violate the rule of law, it does require.

It does have to take precedence over your interest in a national identity and unity. So that is a real tension. There is something that you have to give up even if it's true. And this is a liberal claim, right, that one can have pluralistic, different communities with thick identities within a pluralistic society. That's what the liberal hopes. It's true. That's what some of these communitarian critics seem to say aren't true. But then when you get to the solution, right, it's always, well, yeah, when I'm not. Yeah, I'm not saying we should do away with democracy.

Let's just join a club, go to church. Well, I don't see how that's different than where we started. And then if you show up on, you know, with Orban, it seems like you want something a little bit more, but yeah, so the nationalist impulse has to be. And the nationalist speaking broadly in the sense of Orwell devotion to any identity, whether it's race. And this goes for left wing identity politics as well, race or nation or something else that is sacrificed to the devotion to the liberal ethos under the rule of law. And this is something. Rorty actually makes this point very well in achieving our country.

Listeners can go back and listen to that episode as well, because we do need a basis for a shared conception of being part of the same country. But a kind of liberal ethos becomes the. Comes the basis for that. It's something we can all share, even if we have different religions and ethnicities and so on. Do we want to move to Fukuyama soon?

23:47 Dylan: Yeah, I think that Fukuyama is probably a little more philosophically articulate about these things that align in the end. I think with Pinker, though, maybe Seth, I guess from the beginning, from your

24:01 Seth: opening, you were Pinker's just one of those scientific types that decides he wants to talk about the sweep of history and culture and philosophy and makes a lot of grand statements that are.

24:14 Wes: Yeah, I agree. I don't see it as very sophisticated, although I did enjoy some of the stuff his science writing. Part of it was about science and I find him very interesting on that.

24:23 Seth: Yeah, I mean, that would be an interesting conversation. How is the theory of entropy somehow the motivating force of most of culture?

24:30 Dylan: I mean, part of the rest of the book is. Well, in fact, at some level he is trying to make the argument, follow up the claims of the Enlightenment and say, well, what happened here are the claims that were made about progress and about rationality and about the use of reason to solve our problems in society. And do we have progress? And do we have. How did that all work? And so that's part of. That's why he has all the graphs. Yeah, right.

24:58 Wes: But I think Fukuyama is very good and I think we did do an episode. It's been so long now, but I'm pretty sure we did is end of History. Right.

25:07 Seth: We did.

25:08 Dylan: Well, we did the identity book. Didn't we have.

25:11 Seth: We did both, I think history too.

25:13 Wes: Didn't we have him on for the identity book?

25:15 Dylan: We had him on. We had him on for his identity book.

25:17 Wes: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I think he's quite good. And you know, if we remember from his identity and his end of history books, he places this emphasis on Thomas, on the concept of spiritedness or pride. Ultimately, I think this becomes. And this is. Fukuyama himself says this. You know, this is closely related to the Hegelian idea of recognition. And it's closely related to what goes on in identity politics, which. Right. I've just identified broadly with. You know, it includes nationalism. So this connects very well to Lincoln's conception of ambition and envy and the problems of ambition and envy.

So in other words, what I want to say is that it's this. Plato recognizes this in the Republic. What we have to figure out is what we do about this spirited side. We can talk about it in terms of ambition. We can talk about it in terms of something that needs to be externalized. Right faced outwards in the case of the Guardians. But we can also talk about it in terms of the problem of identity, the desire to identify with a group and make that identification a point of individual pride and prestige and power. That is a fundamental problem for liberal democracy.

How do you have pluralism and manage that? Because this is what I think in other words, communitarianism can be partly about right. At its best, it's about having a thick identity and having these more grounded social. These thicker social relationships with people, a more genuine community. But the darker side of that is that it's really about identity in the pejorative sense, in the nationalistic sense. Anyway, I thought that connected these two. Fukuyama and Lincoln.

27:06 Dylan: Yeah. And I think the question of identity, in an interesting way, Fukuyama and Deneen are both bringing up identity. And I think that in a way, Deneen is saying liberalism doesn't allow for sufficient identity. And Fukuyama is. So he doesn't have the same. He has a different criticism. I mean, the nationalist criticism he would make of the sort of the conservative critique of liberalism and have some going along with the diagnosis of the lack of thick identity. But the criticism from the left, of the identity politics that comes along from the left is one of liberal democracy and liberalism being the institutional preventer of change that would continue to accommodate the individuals of other identities.

In a way, I found them sort of coalescing as basically both the liberal and the conservative critique of liberal democracy ends up being that you're not doing things my way, you're not cultivating my own way, that I want the world to be enough. You have institutional biases against me. So I have to throw out your institution and your institutional structures because I'm not getting my way.

28:34 Wes: But also, you know, I'm not being reflected in these larger institutions. My identity is not reflected. Fukuyama brings up. Right, yeah. These. The attacks on liberal principles from the left as well. Gender studies, critical race theory. And the idea is that liberal institutions do not honor identity sufficiently, which is to say they don't in this Hegelian recognition dyad, they're not doing their job of being a proper mirror to me as an individual. And this is where I say, yeah, unfortunately, it's not going to do that job unless you get on board with the religion of liberals, the national religion of respect for rule of law.

29:11 Seth: Yeah. The other thing that I mean, Fukuyama has a gift as a writer for clarity and so forth, but he does something that you could see as a direct response to Deneen where he says, you know, that democracy and liberalism, which we could say Deneen conflates in his analysis as part of the totalizing thing that we were talking about earlier. Fukuyama says, you can be liberal and not democratic. You can be democratic and not liberal. So he at least makes that level of a nuanced distinction between the type of. And he also further, I guess you could say he complicates that by talking about the thick relationships versus the thin and so forth.

So the idea is that what liberalism is designed to do, which is encourage and protect diversity can be accomplished through different political and economic systems. And that's okay, right? And that's a nuance that we don't get in Deneen. And so that's, I think, worth pointing out because Fukuyama's response, he wants to point out that it's not just a. And Deneen says this too, right? That there's a progressive attack on liberalism and there's a conservative attack. And Fukuyama points out the same thing, but he more explicitly ties those attacks to the principles of liberalism in protecting diversity themselves.

And he makes a much finer point about how, for example, the progressive quote unquote attack on liberal values, which highlights individual participation in self selected identities, breaks down or can problematize the national relationships or the community relationships or so forth. At least that's interesting and thoughtful and clear and worth exploring in a way that we don't get with the Deneen critique. And of course, we've only read portions of text from these guys.

31:22 Walter: So to be fair, that's the vein in which the more time I spent with this, the more I respected and aligned myself with Fukuyama. And there's a way in which I'm seeing Deneen and Pinker as kind of mirroring each other on the extremes. But I think part of what I see, and maybe variations on what you were saying is that first of all, it seems to me that Fukuyama is saying there is no better alternative than liberal democracy, that you can make a case for that. But in a way, history has made that case. Let's say reasonable people are not going to be willing to wager the benefits of living in this order on what they think is taking away from them and that they're going to fight for.

So there's that he's going to find a way, or he thinks we need to find a way to preserve it. But I feel like he's sympathetic to the way in which it can trigger illiberalism from both sides and from different groups. In other words, I guess I see in Fukuyama Project as saying that the prudent advocate of liberal democracy is going to be the person who's very aware of. Aware of its weaknesses and the ways in which is. I think some. And maybe I'm looking at you a little bit, Wes. I mean, we haven't made this argumentative, but there's some ways of framing the challenges where it just seems like viciousness, ambition, greed, totalitarianism or whatever, the folks who want to overturn it, as though it's just coming from a place of hostility or malice.

Maybe that's not the best way to put it. But what I see in Fukuyama is that he thinks it's going to be quite natural for groups to feel the hostility of or the inadequacy of liberal democracy, and that we need to find ways to try to avoid cornering them, so to speak, to trigger the illiberal reactions. And, you know, a lot of this, it can seem, even in his own account, you know, it can sort of seem, as it often seems to me, that one side or the other is saying something like, well, you know, became illiberal first and started, you know, started cornering me, and now I'm just fighting back.

And I think a lot of left, right, politics, culture wars, politics in this country has that character to it when charged with illiberalism or excess. You know, it's that he hit me first is what's said. And I'm not quite sure how Fukuyama diagnoses that, but it seems to me there's a kind of empathy and sympathy with the ways in which there are temptations towards dissatisfaction. I guess that's just the point that I wanted to make, and I think that's in Lincoln, too, and that it's. That's part of the education. I would view that as part of a liberal education, that you understand the things in human nature that are going to be, you know, tempted, triggered, dissatisfied by this regime.

And then you try to find ways to balance it. I see a lot of that in Tocqueville. I see it in Lincoln. I see it in the Fukuyama. I don't see that way of thinking about a kind of prudent, benevolent management of liberal democracy in light of the complexity of human nature in the Deneen. And I really don't see it in Pinker either, for whom the dissidents seem benighted and pathological. The people don't see and don't get on board. I just don't see the understanding of it in Pinker. So that's my excitement over the Fukuyama. But it's a messiness in Fukuyama too, you know, a complexity in it.

34:47 Seth: So thanks for bringing that up, Walter. You're just. You're reminding me. So it's like, hey, we had three options. Communism, fascism, and liberal democracy, fascism and communism lost. This is what we have. And Pinker's kind of like, I just don't get it. Why is everybody so upset? Like, why don't you see, look, you know, he's got the bill. It's the thing. Every time I see this Bill Gates, you know, one of these guys, it's like, yeah, but think about, you know, how many the life expectancy has increased seven years since the turn of the century. I'm like, fan fucking tastic. Right, but that's like, I'm not saying that's a bad thing, but you're kind of.

35:23 Walter: Walter is right.

35:24 Wes: I am more sympathetic to Pinker on this, but.

35:27 Seth: Yeah, right, but you know, and Fukuyama is the same thing where he's like, okay, guys, we've been through this. This is the only viable option. Yeah, it's not perfect, but we have to work within that paradigm. And there's a sense in which it's like, there hasn't. What if I stood up and I said, you know, there hasn't been a contest? Liberal democracy didn't win. It's temporarily. It won temporarily. It won the battle, it hasn't won the war. These things are not. And again, it's because of this sometimes explicitly stated, sometimes not, notion of progress, the idea that human beings actually learn something from their experiences, which is demonstrably untrue and has been for thousands of years.

And there are many, many. It was so good to read Lincoln, but this makes me want to go back and read some of the other quote unquote, founding Fathers. I mean, I can remember doing a study on the Federalist and the anti Federalist papers. And like, there's interesting tidbits and wisdom in those things that I've just long since forgotten. But the idea that you don't just get freedom and liberty, liberal democracy or liberalism or modern liberalism or modernity, whatever, or Enlightenment liberalism, whatever terminology you want to use, it's not just given to you.

West made this point early on. It's like, it is hard fought and you have to be vigilant. And I think what's happened in the United States at least, is that we've just, we fell into this. It can't happen here. We've just reached some level of perfection that we can't go back on or whatever. And now everybody's waking up to the fact that it's no different here than it has been in any other society where you've started to see this breakdown. And somehow we thought it was. And that's really the premise that I think is missing from the Pinker and from the Fukuyama is it's this incredulousness, like, how could this happen?

It's because it's always happens. It just happens over and over again.

37:32 Wes: Yep, well put. And I am perhaps unfairly, yeah. Less sympathetic than I should be to what's lost with liberalism and these concerns about community and identity. So I realize that it is. It is a pet peeve of mine. And it's come up, you know, many times over the years. And not only that, I mean, I would go even farther, which is to say. So, for instance, I think I have friends who are pretty hardcore socialists who would want to say Trump is a phenomenon of poor material conditions, right? Everything is because of Marx. Everything is a product of material conditions and things are not as good as we say they are, and people are suffering, and that's why authoritarians come into power.

I think it's the opposite. I think there is a natural proclivity for a hatred of the common good and that the better things are, the worse people get. This is kind of an idea based in psychoanalytic theory, specifically someone named Melanie Klein. And it's based on this idea that Lincoln mentioned, which is envy. And envy, broadly speaking, one can envy not just a competitor for what's good, you know, one's sibling, so to speak. One can envy the good itself, which is one can feel bothered by the fact that we have this dependency relation to some external thing that we have to rely on, right.

The nanny state, for instance. And so people want to destroy it. And I see what's going on now not as a product of, you know, I'm very unsympathetic to what's going on now as a product of, say, real suffering or material conditions, I think it's just very destructive. And so the economy, for instance, was doing quite well. And I think the complaints about the economy are really about something else. So when you look at what's going on now in American society and this wholesale attack on our institutions and on the institutions that are meant to take care of people, right, Whether here or abroad, USAID or Medicaid or something like that, it is a contempt for the common good because the common good itself induces this feeling that Lincoln mentioned of envy.

But anyway, again, I realize I'm can be at the extreme on this. That's a fair critique.

39:44 Walter: I was earlier today, if I might just throw this in, I happen to be looking at a quote from US Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts speech he gave. This may just going to read a couple sentences. He says, we are developing a situation where a whole group of young people is growing up having no real sense about how our system of justice works. The idea of an independent judicial entity, a co equal branch of government, was an extraordinary revolution. This is skipping around a little bit. The notion that the rule of law governs is the basic proposition.

And again, certainly as a matter of theory, but also as a matter of practice, we need to stop and reflect every now and then how rare that is, certainly how rare throughout history and rare in the world today. And I mean, whatever one thinks of this or that Supreme Court justice, it seems to me that's a kind of lament that Lincoln would recognize. Again, I think Fukuyama would recognize it. I agree with it, which is to say that it's not intuitive. And you said it very well earlier, Dylan. It's not intuitive why we would care about upholding all of these complex aspects of our system of procedural justice with everything that entails.

And often when it feels like it's contrary to our individual interest or our party or our faction or what have you. And just to keep reinforcing what you're saying, Wes, I do think that what Roberts is saying there, we'd agree with it. It requires a robust civic education to get people to see those principles and what's at stake if you're going to start violating them again. Maybe that won't stop everyone for reasons you're suggesting. People can have overriding motives and agendas that are different than that. But I think most folks couldn't very well construct the argument for why we'd have a system set up the way we do and how the principles are meant to operate and what kinds of problems they were trying to solve and what kinds of problems they don't pretend to solve, and so on.

41:44 Wes: Yeah, well put.

41:45 Dylan: Well, maybe as wrapping up, we can just engage a little bit on. Well, I'm just going to be bold enough to say that it would be wrong to come to this episode thinking, oh, we're going to get sort of unopinionated version of what the crisis of liberal democracy is. I think in the end, we're a bunch of liberal Democrats in this respect. Maybe slightly different perspectives, but Walter did

42:12 Wes: a very good job of keeping us reined in a bit fair and balanced. Honestly though.

42:20 Dylan: Yeah. And this is one of those aspects that for me is. I myself can feel very strident about the notion of defending liberal democracy, which in a certain way is. You might also almost Interpret it as being anti liberal to be so strident in such a thing. But I guess I don't really buy that. And I think this is sort of Lincoln's point is in order for the values of diversity, cultivation of individual flourishing and dignity, cultivation of civic and religious freedom in order for those to flourish, you could criticize it as being thin, but you need to have that thin connection be extraordinarily strong.

And also that strength only comes from the constant recapitulation of it. It comes from the. I'm fine with calling it a national religion. As fundamentally secular as I am, I'm fine with calling it that. Because without it then you do have nothing. I mean, you have to have that. And the thing that I think to me underlies the virtue of liberal democracy is that recapitulation on a regular basis of saying, of being willing to say, well, this is why we're doing this. This is why we have freedom of speech. This is why we have separation of powers.

This is why we have an independent judiciary. And some of the most disheartening aspects of what's going on right now is the unwillingness of the leadership in our biggest institutions to be re articulating and defending their role in that activity. You know, I'm just being straight. In my opinion, the abdication of our legislature in defending their role as legislators. Okay. And I think I liked what you read from John Roberts. I think it's right about the notion of the role of our independent judiciary. But I am straining to see that come to the fore right now.

And even the articulation of our executive is not one of what the proper role of an executive is in terms of being part of the fabric of defending individual dignity and liberty. It has to do with a very anti liberal notion of what executive ought to be. And so we're in this kind of. Yeah. The most disheartening part is just to me, the lack of re articulation that is absolutely necessary. When I think about Lincoln or I think about Martin Luther King or other partisans of our liberal democracy who were trying to change it, they would appeal to our founding national religion.

Right. We could follow up the Lyceum speech with the second Inaugural. Right. And that would be what are we having to defend and rearticulate in that defense.

45:37 Wes: By the way, how great is Lincoln? I was just looking at some of his other speeches as well. Just the level of thoughtfulness and reflection. Political speeches, my God.

45:47 Dylan: And he wrote them himself.

45:49 Wes: Speaking about what we've lost.

45:51 Walter: He's amazing. I think about Six of his speeches can compose a liberal education and a civic education in themselves. And again, I'm hoping we're going to enter an era. I mean, this would be my optimism, and I'll say it the way I carry it, that in a way that I don't think divides along party lines, that in the center mass of the country, there's a felt sense of loss of our shared civic life and education and civic religion, if we want to put it that way. And that folks will understand that it takes some serious moderation of partisan passions and lots of other passions to recover that.

And that in the coming years, we'll need to, if our society is not going to tear itself apart further. And I'd like to believe things like the 250th anniversary of the Declaration will point people back to these documents and these sources that I do think can re educate us into the kind of reflective citizenship and reflective freedom that liberal democracy needs to survive.

47:00 Dylan: Well said.

47:01 Wes: Seth, do you have anything highly pessimistic

47:04 Dylan: for us before we.

47:06 Seth: Oh, I have tons of high pessimism, but it feels totally inappropriate to make that big discussion. I hope Walter's right. I hope you're all right. Look, we all have freedom to see the world in certain ways, but I ironically dictated by the tradition in history. I just am compelled to see things pessimistically. So I hope I'm wrong.

47:33 Dylan: Okay.

47:34 Walter: Whether we're favorites or underdogs, we got to do the same thing, right? That's what I'm always telling folks about preserving liberal education. I'm an admirer of Churchill. Then, you know, you don't always get to be a favorite, but you still gotta fight for what's right. And that's where my optimism comes from.

47:50 Seth: That's called wisdom. Walter. Obviously, something I haven't quite picked up yet.

47:55 Dylan: All right, Walter, thanks so much for joining us, and it's been a real pleasure and great conversation.

48:02 Wes: Yeah, you're great.

48:03 Walter: Well, gentlemen, I think this podcast itself is part of the Seeds of Renewal. You all do something really wonderful, and I'm being sincere, and I consider it

48:12 Dylan: a privilege to be here with you.

48:13 Walter: Great to have this conversation. It'll give me a lot to think about in the days ahead, so thank you.

48:18 Wes: Thank you.

48:19 Dylan: Thank you. Well, that'll be all for tonight, and for our next episode, we're going to be reading Irigaray. For the list of the readings and more details, please see partiallyexaminedlife.com as usual, you can join the conversation by commenting on our blog posts. Or become a supporter@ partialexaminelife.com support. Listen to us on Patreon or Spotify or Apple Podcasts, wherever you get your podcasts. Thank you very much and have a good night.

48:51 Wes: Good night.

48:52 Seth: Good night.