In the heady days after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many imagined that we had arrived at the “end of history” now that liberal democratic capitalism had chased all ideological competitors from the field. Just a few short decades later, things look very different: autocracy is on the march around the world, and liberal democratic institutions and values are under assault in the United States and other advanced democracies.
Adrian Wooldridge, my guest for this episode of the podcast, offers the consolation that we have been here before. In his new book The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism, Wooldridge relates how the centuries-old liberal political tradition has gone through repeated cycles of advance and ascendancy, decline and decadence, and self-criticism followed by renewal. Adrian and I discuss how the basic elements of liberalism — focus on the individual, tolerance of pluralism, and suspicion of power — have persisted through these cycles even as liberalism regularly has reinvented itself to deal with the novel and ever-changing challenges of modernity. We examine how a combination of staleness and overreach has brought on the current crisis of liberalism, and we look ahead to the institutional reforms and cultural shifts that can lead to liberal renewal.
Transcript
Brink Lindsey: Hello everybody, and welcome to the Permanent Problem podcast. I’m very happy to have today as my guest, Adrian Wooldridge, the journalist and author, author of a whole shelf of excellent, thoughtful, sensible, wittily written books on a wide variety of topics. Most recently, The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism. Adrian, welcome to the show.
Adrian Wooldridge: Thank you so much for having me. Delighted to be here.
Lindsey: Yeah. So we saw each other in the flesh in London back in May for the first time in many years, but good to see you virtually today. We met over a quarter of a century ago back in Washington. So you are currently at Bloomberg Opinion, but you were at The Economist for many years. Back then you were with The Economist, you were the Bureau Chief, I believe. And you had just written a book with John Micklethwait, A Future Perfect about globalization. And I was at the Cato Institute. I was the head of their trade policy center. I was myself writing a book about globalization at the time.
So I want to tell you this story about how we first met. I don’t think you actually know this story, but I saw your book came out and I took a look at it and it looked really, really good. And there had been a lot of bad books about globalization. So this was a breath of fresh air. And then I saw that you were in DC and with The Economist and I thought, “Well, that’s a guy I need to meet.” And so I thought, well, the best entree would be to review his book because I like it. That would be a good calling card. So I wrote a review for Reason gagazine and then we got the hard copies of the actual magazine. Back then. I believe we got the hard copies before the online version went on the website. So this was the first time I’d seen it. And I believe all writers have this magical third eye, which opens only when you’re reading something you’ve written in print for the very first time. And when you’re holding it there, the published volume, that eye opens and all of a sudden every typo that had eluded umpteen rounds of editing and proofreading just jumps out like a sore thumb. And so I had the Reason magazine to cover and I was holding it next to your proofs and I saw that I had written your name as Adrian Woolridge, not Wooldridge. So that was deflating. And I thought that ruins the whole entree. The number one rule of book reviews, I don’t care what you say about me, just get my name right. So I had failed that. But I called Reason in a panic and got them to change the online edition. And then I emailed you the online edition and we were off to a fine start.
Wooldridge: But there is some sort of gremlin, isn’t there, in computers? Because I always make sure that I check at least the names of people when I write columns about them. And the number of times that despite checking really carefully, it goes wrong.
Lindsey: Yes.
Wooldridge: It’s quite extraordinary. I don’t know how it is. I mean, it is a gremlin that’s taking out a D or taking out an R or doing something. And the worst thing to do with people is, as you say, to get their name wrong. And it does happen a bizarre number of times, certainly my copy.
Lindsey: So at that time with your book, we were in this end of history, delightful, idyllic phase where we were talking about globalization, which was basically the collapse of the last great challenger to liberalism standing, socialism and state-dominated economic development. It was collapsing and into the vacuum was coming more market oriented forms of policymaking and we called that globalization. And so at that time, it looked like liberalism had chased all its challengers from the field. Things look very different today. Your book is about this, what we could call the 21st century crisis of liberalism. It addresses and responds to that crisis by reminding us what liberalism is all about. It’s not just about the current rather dysfunctional incarnation of it. It has a deeper history and a richer history and a richer body of ideas to pull from than we’re currently pulling from. And so that lost genius of liberalism, you want to surface for us so we can make use of it and get out of our current jam. First, just tell me, there are many different ways to define liberalism. You’ve got your three main themes that appear again and again in the history of liberalism. Why don’t you tell me about those?
Wooldridge: Yeah. Let me talk about the three things that really define the essence of liberalism, because liberalism has many, many incarnations. I think there’s big government liberalism. There is small government liberalism. I think all of these are possible manifestations of liberalism. But the three essential things that you must have to have a liberal regime, are firstly individualism, that you start out with the individual and work upwards and outwards from the individual. Socialism starts with a sort of collectivism, traditional Toryism starts with a notion of collectivism as it were embodied in tradition, but liberalism will start with the individual and that is the fundamental thing that liberals will agree upon. The second thing is tolerance that liberals think, believe that we cannot be certain about a lot of important philosophical propositions, particularly when they’re metaphysical about the meaning of life, that we have to agree to disagree and that must pervade all of our actions. So we must have a belief in pluralism. We must have a belief in open debate. We must have a belief in discussion, all of which emanate from this fundamental skepticism. And thirdly is worry about concentration of power, that all liberals think that too much power in the hands of one person or a few people is in itself a very dangerous thing – even if those people can claim to be enlightened. Because power corrupts, people get old, people become degenerate, people become drunk with power. So liberals are always concerned with sharing power, disciplining power, dividing power, that it’s something that is too dangerous to be in the hands of one person. So those are the three definitional things that I think all regimes must have to be called liberal.
Now for a long time, people have thought that there is this fourth thing, which is the balance between the state and the market. That if you’re a classical liberal, you would believe in the small state, the big market. If you were a sort of 1960s LBJ style liberal, you believe in a compassionate state that embodied certain compassionate values. Now I think that those are secondary things that you can be a small state liberal. You can be a big state liberal. And we shouldn’t be too hung up about the size of the state. That’s a secondary thing. But what you can’t be is a liberal who believes in the established church dictating what everybody believes or a liberal who believes that all power should be in the hands of one party or one person. So a lot of the debates between Milton Friedman, let’s say, and Keynes or between Hayek and Keynes are about secondary things, which is the size and scope of the state. And the reason I think this is so important is because we are now seeing fundamental attacks on these essential liberal principles.
In a sense, we’ve sort of taken them for granted because we’ve all agreed on them. But now there are a whole bunch of people, articulate post-liberal academics and thinkers in the United States, and also of course the axis of autocracy in China and Russia, who were attacking these fundamental principles. So I think we have to go back to the fundamentals and focus a lot more on those than we did in those glorious days of the end of history when we thought we could take them for granted.
Lindsey: So you have a capacious understanding of liberalism, and rather roomier than some actually existing liberals because during those big debates during the 20th century about the size and scope of government, both sides claimed a kind of exclusive ownership of the liberal title. So libertarians like me call ourselves classical liberals and thought that progressive liberals were really just pinkos, sort of semi-socialists who had been infected by illiberal ideas. Whereas progressive liberals thought libertarians, small government liberals like me were reactionaries, just tools of the plutocracy. And we got through that. I think during the ’90s and ’00s and into the ’10s, we had this kind of neoliberal consensus where the center left and center right no longer saw each other as across this ideological chasm. And now that both the center right and the center left are losing ground to social justice radicalism on the left and populism on the right, what remains of the center left and center right are sort of reconnecting and seeing that they have more in common. And certainly their common ground now looks much more salient compared to the differences that separate them from the extremes.
Wooldridge: Absolutely. I gave a talk about my book recently at the American Enterprise Institute. And at the American Enterprise Institute, there were a large number of people who were from Brookings. And the AEI and the Brookings people all basically agreed with me. But then there were also people from Heritage who came in and they strongly disagreed. So the common ground between these two opposed forces of the AEI and Brookings is now big, but there are Heritage people and other radical MAGA Trumpist intellectuals who just fundamentally disagree about liberalism. They’re not liberals, they’re post- liberals and they happen to call themselves post-liberals. So I think a lot of what we were debating in the 1990s and perhaps what Keynes and Hayek were debating to some extent, was about the narcissism of small differences in Freud’s phrase, if you consider it in the long arc of history. Not that these things are unimportant, but that there are certain very, very fundamental things that emanate from the Enlightenment that I think we need to defend collectively and in common before we can get to the wonderful work of resuming our disagreements.
Lindsey: I frequently have these feelings of nostalgia for, wow. Remember back when we used to really get hot and bothered about that?
Wooldridge: Yeah. I know. Oh, absolutely.
Lindsey: So I want to come back and dive into the three elements of liberalism, but first I want to march through the rest of the argument of your book. And so we’ll get to the contemporary crisis of liberalism, but your book argues that we’ve been here before and that is that there have been cycles of liberal ascendancy declining into liberal decadence and then some kind of shock, or some kind of commotion, intellectual upheaval that leads to liberal revitalization and liberal renewal. So why don’t you walk through that history?
Wooldridge: Yeah. As I say, there are these fundamental things like Wagnerian leitmotifs that must always be there, but the way that those things are put together and other things that go along with them change all the time. And so you get different liberal regimes that emerge. Also, I think central to liberalism as well as these three things I talked about is a sort of radicalism, a willingness to test and challenge established orthodoxies, even if the people who are in charge of those established orthodoxies are the liberals themselves.
So the first liberal triumph comes in the middle of the 19th century when the principles of individualism, tolerance, constraints of power are all in place. And they go along with the idea of market dominance, essentially, of a laissez-faire way of organizing things. So liberals say, “Well, the most important thing is to open jobs to competition or open markets to competition.” And that means that all else that’s good flows from that. So you get individualism, you get tolerance, you get a dynamic and growing economy. But then in the late 19th century, a group of people who are called not particularly originally New Liberals come along and say, “It’s not enough just to give people opportunities and stand back. We must ensure that they can exploit those opportunities or take advantage of those opportunities. We must enable them through a certain amount of state action. Let’s say a free education system or a pension system. And it’s not enough that we should just let the market dominate.”
Lindsey: They were saying this against the backdrop of mounting social problems from industrialization.
Wooldridge: Exactly.
Lindsey: The new problem that laissez-faire did not seem responsive to…
Wooldridge: Exactly. So it’s partly that you’re not giving people… If some people are leaving school at the age of 10 and other people are going to top class schools, you don’t really have an equality of opportunity. And if everybody’s building so much that the sewerage system won’t cope with all the refuse that’s created, you’re not really getting the best of a market economy. So they say the state must be more active to give people opportunities. And so you get that New Liberalism, and it’s an assault on the liberal order in the name of the individual. And it’s a a radical rethinking of things. And then that regime, that new regime, which is also designed to absorb some of the social discontent, which you’re saying at the time, works. You also get an active role of the state and say, “We’ve got these massive conglomerates that exercise too much power so we must break them up.” So antitrust becomes, particularly in America, a big part of that. Then that particular manifestation of liberalism begins to run out of steam in the ’90s.
Lindsey: And we’re always in sync in the UK and the United States so…
Wooldridge: Yeah. Very, very much-
Lindsey: … Americans had their analog with our progressives. Yeah.
Wooldridge: So then you get the Great Depression and things begin to fall apart. The global system falls apart because Britain no longer can play the role of the guarantee of global order. And in the 1930s, liberalism is discredited as a creed. Everybody, all serious intellectuals are saying the future lies with collectivism of some sort, with great leaders. Even people like Walter Lippmann, the great liberal writer, is saying, “Well, liberalism is essentially finished.” Mussolini is saying, “Liberalism is finished.” And then again, liberalism re-energizes itself in the 1940s and ’50s, partly through the provision of the welfare state, partly through the provision of Keynesian demand management, but also, and more importantly, I think through after winning the war, setting up a sort of stable.
Lindsey: Yeah. And winning the war had a bit to do with it too, right?
Wooldridge: Absolutely. So liberalism in the 1930s looks dead. It revives itself again. Then in the late 1970s and ’80s, which both you and I lived through, again, that version of Keynesian liberalism begins to decay and die because of overreach, because of government incompetence. A whole series of things. It’s become too flabby in self-indulgence. And you get a bunch of neoliberals, libertarians who come along and say, “Let’s give more role to the market. Less role for the state. The state has become a rent collector.” So you get another surge of liberal inventiveness. The history of liberalism is not just a history of establishing three principles and letting them work as that. It’s a history of creating liberal regimes as solutions to a set of problems. Those problems changing, liberal regimes becoming a bit decadent and then a kick coming from other liberals.
And I think what we are seeing at the moment is precisely that problem again, a decadent elite that’s been in charge for a long time and become self-indulgent. There’s a set of ideas which I regard as a sort of marriage between some elements of neoliberalism and some elements of progressivism, left liberalism, congealing together in a Clintonian governing philosophy, that have failed to answer a set of important problems. So we are prepared at the moment for another phase of liberal radicalism.
Lindsey: So you’ve got two elements to this liberal decline or increasing liberal staleness. First, liberalism just becomes the establishment. And as the problems accumulate, usually the people at the top are least sensitive to them. And so there’s a lot of discontent before it reaches them. And they have their formulas for success. They worked for them in the past. They don’t want to change them, so they’re quite resistant. So you get this entrenched establishment that’s tone-deaf to changing circumstances for the worse.
Wooldridge: I think a very good example of that is what happened in the 1890s. In the 1890s, the liberal elite thinks that they’ve basically solved all the problems of liberalism, that they’ve opened jobs to competition, that they’ve disestablished the church in, well, in Britain, in all but name. They’re sitting there, they’re happy. They feel that they’re successful. The Gladstonian liberals are sitting there. And in America, free market liberals are sitting there. But they’re the establishment and they’re the intellectual establishment as well. But all around them is an accumulation of problems. Sewage, lack of opportunity, industrial discontent, the rise of a system like Germany, which is based on very different principles and much more state activism from the liberal establishment. And what happens is, at least in Britain and the United States, is that you get liberal reformers coming along and saving the system from itself. Teddy Roosevelt in the United States, Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Asquith in Britain. You don’t get that on the continent so much. But the Anglo-Saxon world saves itself because it regenerates liberalism. And I think we’re going through a very, very similar set of circumstances today, even down to the issue of antitrust, I think in some ways.
Lindsey: So you can epitomize our establishment with the folks who congregate at Davos every year.
Wooldridge: Absolutely. It’s a cliche, but it’s a cliche that’s absolutely radically true. And there’s a sort of element about these people that they’ve been successful. They came onto the scene quite often in the ’80s and ’90s. They’ve accumulated enormous wealth. They’ve done incredibly well out of asset inflation. They’re at the top of the tree and they’re quite pleased with themselves.
Lindsey: Yes.
Wooldridge: And what’s so extraordinary is every year we write articles saying, “These are ghastly people. They’re terribly pleased with themselves.” And they still continue to be ghastly people who are pleased with themselves.
Lindsey: 15, 20 years ago, we might talk bad about them, but it will sound like jealousy because we knew they were on top of the world. They were the masters of the universe and they knew it too. Now Davos has this really tired, stale vibe I think to those of us outside. Those inside still seem to feel like it’s same as it ever was. They know something’s gone wrong, but they don’t know any new lines to say about what’s happening. So they just repeat the same old lines.
Wooldridge: It’s quite extraordinary. If you think about when we were talking writing our globalization books in the year 2000, if you look, for example, at McKinsey, you would look at that and say, these are really interesting guys who seem to understand the machinery of capitalism. They’ve got lots of really interesting things to say. So if they produce a new report, you’d look at it and you’d pore over it, and who reads their stuff now?
Lindsey: Right. Right.
Wooldridge: I mean, nobody does. There’s a whole series of exhausted volcanoes out there that used to be regarded as a fount of wisdom and they’re now just nowhere. So you have two things. You have one, an institutional decay. And that institutional decay in terms of the management of Davos is quite extraordinary. But they also have an intellectual decay and the intellectual decay is more important. We had a sort of synthesis in the 1990s, which lasted for a while, which was basically you take certain elements of neoliberalism, which is affection for the market, skepticism about the state, worries about rent seeking in the state sector and things like that. And you take certain things about left liberalism, about people being allowed to choose their personal identities, people being liberated from certain conventional morality. You put those two things together and you produce a new synthesis, which doesn’t give the neoliberals everything they want. It doesn’t give the left progressive everything they want, but it gives them enough to constitute a governing philosophy.
Lindsey: David Brooks, in his wonderful book, Bobos in Paradise, called this the bobo synthesis.
Wooldridge: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Lindsey: Bourgeois Bohemianism, right?
Wooldridge: So you get that. And it is something that is there in Blair. It is there in Clinton. It’s there in most people at the top of most corporations, I’d say. And it could take a Republican form, it could take a Democratic form, but it’s basically a synthesis that survives for a long time. But it’s become a sort of constraint on thinking that there are certain things that people who belong to the synthesis are incapable of recognizing as problems. I would put immigration, the flow of people without proper assimilation, as being a very important part of that. I would put certain externalities from big companies as being part of that. Food companies making us all fat, getting us addicted to things. But more importantly, the digital companies just pumping stuff out without any accountability and any regulation, even dealing with sort of digital addiction that this Bourgeois Bohemian synthesis does not recognize, some of the biggest problems that we now encounter. It has blinders which prevents them from dealing with that. And it doesn’t also address the big issues of the threat from the emerging world. I mean from Russia and from China, the former emerging world..
Lindsey: The emerged world.
Wooldridge: … I should say, in the case of China. And so the great neoliberal thing about China, we’ve got this great civilization emerging, good. Let’s have free trade. Let’s deal with it because it will inevitably be the case that the Chinese, as they become richer and more successful, will also become liberal just like us. So get them into the World Trade Organization and soon there’ll be a liberal democracy. That has not happened. And that same-
Lindsey: Around the same time that led us into Iraq-
Wooldridge: Exactly.
Lindsey: … basically thinking underneath the surface of everyone is a liberal just itching to breathe free.
Wooldridge: Exactly. I mean that’s more than a strategic mistake or a miscalculation. That’s a sort of epistemological mistake, in the sense that it presumes that we’re all liberals under the skin. It doesn’t give enough emphasis, or it doesn’t take enough account of culture, of politics, of all of these big things that neoliberalism didn’t take into account just as left liberalism doesn’t take into account. Let me put it quite simply, our animal nature. So there’s a whole bunch of things. So this bobo synthesis, which is incredibly powerful, continues to dominate a lot of our thinking almost without us knowing it, or the thinking of our ruling class. This has led to big problems, which you didn’t anticipate, but it’s also revealed, because it led to those big problems, to have a certain naivety built into it. And I think the task of liberalism is to grapple not only with the consequences of policy mistakes, but also with the naivety of some of the assumptions that led to it.
Lindsey: For your general approach about what is to be done now, you use the life of John Stuart Mill as a kind of a metaphor for where we are and what we need to be doing. So play that out for us.
Wooldridge: Yeah. Let me talk about that. I mean, John Stuart Mill I think is an exceptionally interesting thinker, partly because he writes so well, as people in the mid 19th century did, is such a vigorous thinker, but also because he’s so different from the sort of notion of Mill that we tend to remember. A lot of people think of him as what Milton Friedman and Hayek probably would’ve called a classical liberal, as somebody who is essentially a utilitarian, essentially believes in small government and essentially believes in government getting out of our way. But in fact, Mill is a much richer thinker than that. Mill went through a certain… Mill was brought up as a utilitarian and brought up as a small government guy. His godfather was Bentham, the founder of utilitarianism. His father, James Mill, forced him to learn Greek at two, Latin at three, write a history of India at eight and all of these sorts of extraordinary things. He was brought up as a sort of prodigy because he was brought up to be the ultimate sort of legislator. Mill Sr. wanted him to be a legislator who had put into practice both philosophically and practically the whole, call it neoliberal, utilitarian program. And at the age of about 20, he goes through a mental breakdown, not surprisingly, given his extraordinary upbringing, in which he begins to think a number of things. He begins to think that actually utilitarianism isn’t enough because there are good preferences and bad preferences, that individualism purely in its atomized form isn’t enough because people are embedded in cultural traditions and all the rest of it. And the ceaseless calculation of interests isn’t enough, because people have things like human affections which isn’t taken account. So in my view, he moves simultaneously to the right and to the left from this utilitarian position. He moves to the right in the sense that he begins to think about cultural traditions, about preferences, high preferences and low preferences, high culture and low culture.
Lindsey: Hierarchies of value.
Wooldridge: Hierarchies of values, all of those sort of things. And he moves also to the left in a sense he begins to realize that different people have different sets of opportunities. Not everybody has the opportunities that he had. And that trade unionism might in fact be a reasonable way in which people who are powerless and don’t have any capital can express their interests. So he moves in these…
Lindsey: And of course, he was quite ahead of his time in holding the rights of women.
Wooldridge: Absolutely. So he begins to think about oppressed minorities and particularly in his case about women because of the woman who becomes his wife, Harriet. In the long run becomes his wife, but becomes his companion.
And I think that what happened in, let’s say 2016 when Britain voted for Brexit and when America voted first for Trump, was a sort of Millian-style breakdown, mental breakdown, as you say, using Keynes’s phrase, a sort of collective nervous breakdown that we go for, particularly in the Anglo-Saxon countries. And I think that the way to deal with that nervous breakdown is to move in a Millian way, partly to the left and partly to the right. I mean to the right in the sense that we need to grapple much more with culture, hierarchies of values, what choices we are making. We can no longer conceive of individualism as being just about the consumer going shopping in a great supermarket. We have to think much more about the nature of the preferences, but also moving to the left in the sense that when we were growing up or when we were around in the 1990s, 2000s, it was all about business as the solution, markets are the solution. Government is bad. We must try and liberate these markets. And now we have to be, I think, a bit more skeptical about markets or a bit more skeptical about certain businesses. And I mean above all the tech businesses because of their size and because of what they’re trying to sell us.
Lindsey: So let me dive now into your three elements of liberalism and pull things out that I think are noteworthy – because I think not all current-day liberals buy your version, but I think they should. So first on liberal individualism, this idea that it’s a rich, striving version of individualism, a questing version of individualism that’s seeking self-improvement, self-betterment, not just upward mobility materially, but intellectually and morally, to self-realization, realizing your potential, not in terms of just having the maximum number of consumer options, but producing the best possible you, which could mean turning away from lower commercialized pleasures in pursuit of higher things. And that is just not the regnant dominant version of individualism we have today. So culturally, the expressive individualism we have today is all about satisfaction of preferences. Don’t look at what the preferences are. Have as many options as you can. The more options you have, the better off you are.
So it’s all this very value-free kind of tallying up of the number of choices you have, regardless of what the quality of those choices is. And so I think there’s the background of this consumerist culture, but then there’s intellectual developments that have played into this. In liberal political philosophy since the 1970s, John Rawls has been just the towering colossus of liberal political philosophy. And he engineered this turn that existed before, but he certainly pushed for a vision of justice that put aside questions of the good life and that privileged right and wrong over good and bad. He had this idea of liberalism as just a pure procedure, that you take these disembodied people with no identities, no pasts, no anything and put them behind the veil of ignorance. And liberalism is what they will choose. It’s just a procedure. So there’s that. And then we think a lot more, especially elites think a lot more, in social science-y terms now than they did 50 or 100 years ago. And economics is the queen of the social sciences. And so the whole economics worldview that welfare is satisfaction of preferences gets a lot of momentum from that worldview. So we have intellectual tendencies adding further momentum to a background culture of expressive individualism and moral relativism. And that all feels like it’s leading to very materially affluent, very spiritually impoverished people in large swaths of society. Of course, we’ve never been materially better off, but you look at a whole lot of indicators for individual wellbeing, chances of getting married, chances of having children, chances of growing up with both your parents, having friends, having a sense that your life is important and has meaning, a lot of these, the arrows are going the wrong way for large populations in the rich capitalist democracies during the 21st century. And yet I’ve found after writing The Permanent Problem – and I’m interested to see what your reaction is — I’vegotten a lot of pushback from saying that actually existing liberal societies of the 21st century are dysfunctional in some fairly profound ways and are in need of some fairly deep cultural renewal.
Wooldridge: Absolutely.
Lindsey: I get pushback that I sound like a post-liberal. I sound like an anti-liberal. So there’s a real sort of defensiveness of actually existing liberals today that doesn’t want to hear that they’ve gotten anything wrong, doesn’t want to hear that we need to do any deep rethink, that the populace just went crazy and the fever will break and we’ll get back to normal somehow or another.
Wooldridge: It’s funny writing this book, I started off thinking in a quite simple way that woke was the problem – because woke is the problem in the sense that it judges people as collectives rather than as individuals. And so I wrote these stirring passages about how evil and appalling Foucault is and French structuralism and the rest of it. And we needed to get beyond this sort of 1960s sort of collectivist ideology and reassert the power of simple liberal individualism. People should be judged meritocratically. They should be judged in terms of their own abilities rather than in terms of these big broad categories. And I talked to a lot of centrist people like myself and we all agreed on that and that was great. And then I began to think, well, what do we mean by individualism? What is individualism? Because it’s the background noise of all our assumptions. And I began to read a lot of these post-liberal thinkers who were saying that liberalism, because it’s pure individualism, just doesn’t work. You go to the streets of San Francisco and see people taking drugs and doing all of that sort of stuff. If that’s what individualism means, or you go to a shopping mall and see people wandering around just buying this and that and the other, the post-liberals say, “If that’s what individualism is, we’ve got to have something better than this.” And I thought these people, what they’re saying is not foolish at all. There is something wrong about this. And there is this sort of…
We were talking earlier about Bourgeois Bohemianism and what these two groups of people who are quite often so different in terms of their vision of society, one being very pro-market, the other being very pro-bigger state, what they actually have in common, and then you discover that what they have in common is a certain non-judgmentalism. There’s expressive individualism on the side of the progressive left and preference maximization on the side of the market rights are both two sides of the same coin. So they agree on this fundamental thing just as they mostly agree on globalization. So these things that hold people who have different notions of tax levels, on a much deeper level, they agree with each other. And I began to think to myself, well, wait a minute, not only do I disagree with them and not only am I tempted and drawn towards quite a lot of this post-liberal stuff, particularly having visited San Francisco not that long ago and seen just what a ghastly mess the whole thing was in the streets. So I then began to read more of these liberals, what were called classical liberals, began to read what the people in the 19th century are saying. And I was thinking, well, classical liberals are people who believe in small governments, preference maximization. So I then begin to read Mill and I begin to read Burckhardt and all of these people with a fresh eye. And I realize that that’s not what they believe at all, that they, classical liberals so-called, are people who are completely absorbed by the problem of individualism, who see a hierarchy of values, who see what is essential to individualism is self-development, self-improvement, self- discovery, not just in a purely sort of, I’m going to improve myself by going to night school in order so that I can get a better job, but I’m going to become a better person.
And the central to real liberalism, classical liberalism, is the notion of a self-improving individual who is striving to live a good life according to various aesthetics and moral tenets. And that in order to do that, I mean, what Mill says that you’ve got to do or what Coleridge is saying through Mill is that you have to have a sort of clerisy in society who sees its job as preserving high civilization. And that having a group of people who are preserving high civilization is just as important as having a civil service that is preserving a good infrastructure or things like that. That if you don’t have a certain commitment on a society level to educating people’s preferences, you are in big trouble. So you say that and people say you’re completely crazy. The Rawlsians don’t like that because they’re all about the veil of ignorance. The economists don’t like it because they’re all about preference maximization. The left-liberals don’t like it because you might be saying that some modes of life are better than other modes of life and all of that is bad.
Lindsey: Right.
Wooldridge: So you suddenly get a whole range of enemies that you didn’t even know you had. But essential to this is, I think, that there is an answer to the problems that the post-liberals are raising that is within the liberal tradition. And I think also that we need really to focus much more on this than we have. We need to be having these arguments. So even if we get a lot of pushback, it’s important to be raising these things because a world of pure expressive individualism plus utility maximization does not cohere. It doesn’t work. And just as in the late 1970s and 1980s, we had to have a whole bunch of arguments about rent-seeking, markets, the dysfunctional nature of big organizations, and the rest of it. And those arguments might have started off as naive, as simple, but they began after a while to get more sophisticated and get more… So we need to start having these arguments about culture, both with a big C and a small c, once again. And a lot of people, the economists, they can’t understand why you’re saying this, but I think it’s essential to keeping society going in the right direction.
Lindsey: I want to move on to your second element of pluralism or skepticism about ultimate truth. But I think it ties in because yes, there is clearly a sense of being open to the other side, willingness to keep the lines of discussion open, a sense that the truth is difficult to get to and we’re not confident that what we’ve got right now is right. That if we keep pushing, we’re going to have a better understanding down the line. So definitely, essential to the liberal sense of pluralism is a sense of fallibility and a kind of skepticism.
But I distinguish between final ultimate truths, truths with a capital T, and liberalism doesn’t want to recognize those, at least not enshrine them in government policy. But then there are sort of foundational truths with a capital T, the axioms that you can’t prove, but they are articles of faith that allow us to move forward and to go into a process of discovery and trial and error. So a belief in the fundamental goodness of human beings, a belief that the natural world is knowable and that using our knowledge of the patterns in nature to improve the material lot of human beings is a good thing to do. You can’t prove these things, but they are the foundational truths of a liberal mentality. And they can get swallowed up as well by skepticism. We have this kind of tolerance of intolerance that we have a skepticism even about the foundational truths of liberalism, so that we allow illiberal populations to come in and set up a law unto themselves and we’re afraid of applying our own laws because we don’t know the difference between right and wrong. So the skepticism that leads to a healthy pluralism can go too far, I think. There are limits to that skepticism. You agree with that?
Wooldridge: Absolutely. If you think, where does liberalism come from? Liberalism comes from two things. One is the world in motion. In traditional societies, basically the assumption is that there’s a limited amount of goods to go around and that you allocate them according to certain source of principles, whatever they are, dynastic power or the will of the king or something like that. And the liberals come along and say, “No, society can grow. We can get wealthier so long as we have open competition and free markets and all of those sorts of things.” So the question at the heart of politics becomes different, not how to justly distribute a fixed supply, but how to live in a world of economic growth. The second question at the heart of liberalism is what do we do about metaphysical issues? In pre-liberal societies everybody said, “Look, there’s truth or falsehood. You have to accept a certain set of truths as a condition of being a member of this society. And if you don’t accept them, you’ll be driven out of society.” And liberals say, “No, we have to agree to disagree, a terrible cliche, but a fundamentally great breakthrough in society that society can’t be based on everybody accepting a certain metaphysical truths, that we have to agree to disagree.” And that leads you to a world of open discussion, relentless discussion as the basis of society. It leads you to a world of pluralism in which people can establish communities on different principles. I think it defines politics down. Politics is no longer a matter of discovering eternal truths and enforcing them through the church or whatever is the dominant religion. It’s a matter of agreeing to disagree. And that is absolutely fundamental, I think. And most of that, we have to accept. And I think where in many ways that the post-liberals have gone wrong is the post-liberals want to go back to this pre-Enlightenment world in which we can have an agreement about ultimate truths. Because I think if you don’t agree about ultimate truths, every other problem follows. If you can’t agree that this particular reading of the Bible is true, then you end up eating dogs or whatever.
And what you are saying is absolutely right. That on the one hand we have to agree to disagree, but on the other hand, we can’t take that in such a countercultural direction that we lose all confidence in any collective values whatsoever, that there are second-order values that we can all agree on. And I’m extremely worried. I mean, the immigration question hangs over a lot of this. Because one place where the Bourgeois Bohemian synthesis breaks down is the Bourgeois Bohemian synthesis says, “Immigration is ipso facto a great thing because it’s good economically. We all get richer. Society expands, the pie expands, but it’s also good culturally because it enriches us. It introduces us to a whole bunch of cultures.” And people who have become, as I’ve become, skeptical about immigration, well, we question the first of those things
because per capita growth, doesn’t this… I mean the increase of the size of the pie in Britain in particular has not led to per capita growth, which is the thing that matters. But also there must be a limit to multiculturalism in the sense there must be a limit to the pluralism that we are willing to tolerate if what we’re tolerating is intolerance.
Lindsey: Yes.
Wooldridge: And we do have communities in Britain that have cousin marriage, that have very few rights for women, that have complete patriarchy deciding on women’s marriages, on how they vote and things, or whether they can vote and things like that. And that is testing liberal societies to the extreme. We have to think that there are certain values that we can agree on as being constitutive of liberalism. Again, individualism, the right to determine certain of your ends in life and toleration that we have to have religious tolerance, tolerance of what faith you have and how you express it as a fundamental component of liberal society. So again, this synthesis, which seemed so powerful, a Bourgeois Bohemian synthesis, which seems so powerful and all encompassing, begins to break down when it deals with the reality of the societies that we’ve created.
Lindsey: Your third element of suspicion of power, I just want to make one note and it’s a note I just want to make as a recovering libertarian, which is my expanding sense of the kinds of power we should worry about. Libertarians famously think the only power you need to worry about is state power, but I’ve come to see that we need to worry about other things as well. And I think right now you’re especially worried about tech giants and the products that they’re addicting us to. So I don’t need to convince you of that. But you and I were both small government free market liberals back in the day.
Wooldridge: Absolutely.
Lindsey: And you’ve wandered a bit as have I over these decades.
Wooldridge: Absolutely. Well, let me talk about the issue of power because as with my two other definitions of liberalism, individualism plus skepticism, a lot of people might say, “Well, that’s all banal. We all accept that. We all agree with that. Who doesn’t believe in limiting power and things like that?” Well, I would say that there are two things that make this notion, this emphasis on power absolutely central to reinvigorated liberalism. One is the rise of strong man rule, that we have strong man rule in a lot of the world. And that is based on the idea that power shouldn’t be limited or in practice shouldn’t be limited that much. And we have a version of that in the United States with Donald Trump, who does not believe in constraints on his own power and is trying to build strong man principles into the American constitution as much as he can get away with. So I think that has gone from being something that we all accepted to something that needs reasserting in a big way.
But the second of those two things is the private economy. And I agree. I think when Lord Acton said “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely,” he was thinking of the public economy. He was thinking of government, but it also applies to the private sector that we do have in two ways. One is that we do have a world in which power is extremely concentrated in a very small number of companies. And that is in itself a worry to me. It’s not a worry to certain traditions of libertarians, Robert Bork and the rest of it. It is a worry to me, partly because I think that those people will use that power in ways that interfere with our lives. If you’ve got a handful of companies running the economy, it’s not just whether they’re providing consumer goods at a good price. It’s in itself corrupting. And it’s in itself corrupting to those people who run those companies. If you look at the people who run companies, the old notion that we had of these tech people being modest sorts of hoodie wearing people, they’re developing into oligarchs, in their lifestyle, in their style of existence and in their relationship with the government. So that is a bad thing in itself.
But also what worries me is what these immensely powerful people are doing with their power, that they are encouraging fragmentation of attention. They’re encouraging addiction to certain products and they’re encouraging a life on the screen, which I think undermines the most precious and important thing about the liberal tradition, which is individualism. You cannot be an individual, an educated, self-developed, self-conscious, morally responsible individual, if you don’t focus on things, if you’re not educated, if you don’t have access to good, solid, tested information and where you’re essentially an addict. And if you look at the history of liberalism, it’s quite interesting the extent to which liberalism as an intellectual tradition or as a political tradition has been exceptionally worried about addiction, that’s addiction to alcohol, addiction to drugs, addiction to stimulation of various sorts, is a worry for liberals. And a lot of people have said, “Well, the prohibition, it’s all because they’re morally uptight, they’re weird.” But I think it’s because they put at the heart of their philosophy the individual as a sort of self-developed, self-actualizing being and that is undermined by addiction in various ways.
Lindsey: So let me move towards the final section of this conversation with some gloomy questions.
Wooldridge: Yes.
Lindsey: Your history of liberalism tells a cyclical story, but we’re not going in circles. We’re going in a spiral. So there is a circular element where there is a cyclical element. So that’s the cyclical history of ascendancy, decadence, renewal. But then there’s linear history that all of this is happening through ever-changing circumstances at the human frontier. We’re exploring social terrain that Homo sapiens has never occupied before. And so we’re making everything up as we go along. And so before that liberal spiral took off, you could see precursors to liberalism, but you didn’t see the real thing. There were certain historic enabling conditions that set the stage and that had to happen. You had the emergence of protoliberal social practices and protoliberal habits of thought. And so that social reality was on the ground first. And then you had intellectuals and intellectual entrepreneurs who wove those realities into a coherent ideal and then applied that ideal as a standard to judge society, and then people started using that ideal as a direction in which to push society.
So the big question is: how much do you worry that the linear element of this spiral that we’re going on may be carrying us into historical circumstances that are no longer congenial to the liberal ideal? And let me lay out three of them. So first we’ve had the decline of organized religion and Christendom, what used to be Christendom at least. And that has gone along with a kind of acidic moral relativism that doesn’t even have a vocabulary of right and wrong. So that’s pretty barren cultural soil in which to plant ideas, this rich idea of agentic, striving, self-improving individualism. So can liberalism survive without some kind of faith? It doesn’t have to be dogmatic, but are we missing some fundamental foundation to a liberal worldview? Secondly, liberalism arose with the age of print. And I think I’ve become more and more convinced by the kind of Marshall McLuhan, … Who’s the guy who wrote Amusing Ourselves to Death? I’m forgetting his name right now.
Wooldridge: Postman. Postman.
Lindsey: That’s right. That the actual medium of communication really does have an effect on the nature of our thought and that print literacy encourages logical thinking, rigor. It’s deliberative. Whereas oral culture is spontaneous, reactive, emotional. And we are moving, hurtling into a kind of post-literate age now as viral videos have taken over the attention spans of more and more of us. Most of us spend the majority of our waking lives staring at screens and most of the people staring at screens are not looking at anything edifying. They’re looking at junk food for the brain and it is creating, forming minds and encouraging habits of mind that just aren’t, again, good soil for the abstractions of things like balance of power and rule of law. These are highfalutin notions that a post-literate reactive public doesn’t seem to put much stock in.
Finally, we’ve seen this in the information age – a new class chasm between the college educated class and everyone else is ultimately at the root of the populist upheaval and a lot of our dysfunctional politics. So we’ve had a whole group of people, they’re materially better and better off, but their place in the world has been marginalized. So the working class during the industrial era, they worked in companies at the frontiers of technological progress. They worked in the automobile and steel industries. Their inputs were absolutely vital to the progress of the overall capitalist system. And that was a very hard bargain that produced a whole lot of instability. The dependence of capitalist progress on brutal physical labor meant a class conflict and meant socialism and meant the Cold War and the possibility of nuclear warfare. There was a lot of instability that came from that dependence of capitalist progress on dirty, dangerous work. But now as capitalist progress weans itself from dependence on dirty, dangerous work, ordinary people’s capacity to contribute to the commonweal in as important in a way is declined. Their status is declined. During the 20th century, we had Diego Rivera murals in public places and we had Aaron Copeland writing Fanfare for the Common Man. And one third of the world lived under regimes that said the working man is the protagonist of world history. And the free world was worried about that. And so they at least wanted to pretend that maybe that’s true too. But the status of the ordinary people is very different now. So I think there has been a real downgrading in the sense of importance of what you’re doing, the sense of the status of what you’re doing and a trend that I think AI could very well extend beyond the working class into the lower and middle ranks of the college educated class. So these…
Wooldridge: Absolutely.
Lindsey: And so liberalism depended upon, of course we’ve got to treat the common man well because we utterly depend on the common man. So the whole 20th century push towards a more egalitarian form of liberalism was pushed because of the obvious need to keep these people from striking. And then also we extended the franchise over time because we needed their bodies to fight our wars for us. And so democracy expanded dramatically in Europe right after World War I because of that connection. But as people become less and less economically valuable and are replaced on the battlefield by drones and robots, what is the leverage that ordinary people have to be counted as equal anymore?
So there’s that. There’s the declining habits of mind in post-literacy. There’s the declining moral universe from secularism. Are we hurtling into post-liberal historical circumstances?
Wooldridge: Well, let me add two other ingredients to your great bowl of pessimism here before trying to say something a bit more optimistic. One is just to continue with your point, a lot of the history of liberalism was in an era of the rise of the middle class or the rise of the working class, a period of rising opportunities for more and more people. And now it seems that politics is being rewired by the decline of the middle class. And a lot of it is about the fact that a group of people who are educated, who have been brought up to think of themselves as in some way the products of opportunity, are seeing declining living standards or declining opportunities in the future. They’ve got massive burdens of debt. They find it hard to see a career ladder. Here the Labour Party in this country used to be said of the Labour Party conferences that they represented – I mean conferences where people gather together every year or so – that they represented the aristocracy of labor. Now they represent the sort of dregs of the middle class, that declining social groups are defining politics more and more, which is very worrying.
Lindsey: Yes.
Wooldridge: If you look at the great revolutions of the rise of Nazism or the Soviet, the Bolshevik Revolution, declining intellectual groups are very, very well represented in that discontent. So liberalism was about the rise of aspirational groups. Now we’re seeing post-liberalism in a sense, the decline of these groups.
The second thing is that we’re seeing across the world the rise of a sort of model of authoritarian modernization.
Lindsey: Yes.
Wooldridge: China being the capital of that whereby you have big states, powerful parties making a deal with the people that they will have all the power and you can do the work. Don’t interfere in politics. We’ll have state run companies, state run activities, state run political systems and those countries have been getting bigger. Singapore started the model, China has continued the model, but you see it’s happening right across the Middle East with these big countries, oil rich countries. Saudi Arabia is a sort of authoritarian monarchy, but right across the place, Rwanda, you have the Singapore model being put there. We’ve always thought that liberal capitalism is the engine of growth, and that now we’re seeing liberal capitalism growing at a pretty slow rate. Our country’s growing. America’s exceptional in growing these past-
Lindsey: That’s right. We’ve slowed down from our 20th century pace, but we’re superstars compared to the rest of…
Wooldridge: Compared to us. We’re not growing at all. Germany’s not growing at all. And so if you’re looking for growth in the world, it’s not in liberal capitalist countries, it’s in autocracies driven by state capitalism more than liberal capitalism. So that’s my second ingredient to a bowl of pessimism.
Against that, I would say two things. One is that I do document in my book that whenever things look particularly dark for liberalism, then liberalism jumps out of its coffin and revives. And however dark things are now, they were worse than the 1930s.
Lindsey: Absolutely.
Wooldridge: But it’s extraordinary if you look at the 1930s, how self-confident people like Mussolini were, that they discovered a new model of how to run the world, how pessimistic liberals were, how the notion of an individualistic civilization was dead. Post-liberals were all over the place in that era. And by 1950, we defeated fascism, we defeated Nazism, and we created a working world order with incredible speed. And secondly, although we don’t have a liberal leader at the moment who we could all say, “This is the guy who’s doing…” There’s no Teddy Roosevelt that we could point to. There’s no Asquith or anybody like that we can point to as creating a new form of liberalism. You do see an enormous amount of popular pressure against the tech giants, against the culture of distraction, defending the culture of the page against the culture of the screen, saying that these things are all bad. So there’s a sort of sense out there in the population at large that this cultural crisis needs to be dealt with by a return to certain basic truths.
Lindsey: Yeah. I agree with that. And so we can wrap up here on a hopeful note that there is recognition that things have gone wrong. There is active debate. There is movement in the right direction, so that’s good. And then at the bottom of it all, we’re liberals and that means we have this fundamental faith in the ordinary individual human being.
Wooldridge: Yes.
Lindsey: And you can’t have that faith unless you somehow or another think that the human species is kind of phototropic, that it leans into the light. When it’s faced between a choice between darkness and the moral abyss and real self-development and real flourishing, that’s what humans really want. So these may be dark times, but there are glimmers out there, pointing us in a more favorable direction. And one of those glimmers is Adrian Wooldridge’s new book, The Revolutionary Center. Thank you so much for coming on.
Wooldridge: Great. Thank you for having me.
