Across the developed world, political parties of the center-left and center-right are losing ground to populist parties from the extremes of the ideological spectrum. In the intellectual sphere, the liberalism that historically has undergirded those parties is also losing ground to greater enthusiasm and energy around postliberal ideas, including National Conservatism and Integralism on the right as well as socialism and dogmatic identity politics on the left.
Adrian Wooldridge’s important new book, The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism is a concise history of the emergence of key liberal ideas — upholding the freedom and dignity of the individual against the claims of groups and the state, insisting upon tolerance in the realm of ideas, and setting laws and limits upon power — in the wake of the European wars of religion and the contributions of thinkers like Edmund Burke and John Stuart Mill during the 18th and 19th centuries.
Wooldridge is a British journalist who was the Economist magazine’s Washington bureau chief and is now the global business columnist for Bloomberg. Liberalism, in his view, is above all “a repository of political sense and practical problem-solving. More than any other political philosophy, liberalism created the modern world.” But he argues that contemporary liberalism has lost touch with its radical spirit by veering too closely toward technocracy, market fundamentalism, and identitarianism, while liberal leaders have become a complacent and out-of-touch establishment.
In this podcast discussion, Wooldridge recounts the history of liberalism and the difficulties it has encountered in addressing contemporary problems. He maintains that he is an optimist about liberalism’s prospects, because at various points in its history — particularly in the late 19th century and in the years following World War II — liberalism has successfully been re-envisioned and reanimated. He is confident that a new liberal blueprint can be devised, and he offers some suggestions for policies by which liberalism can address the discontents that drive populism including declining social mobility, government underperformance, and social anomie and isolation.
Transcript
Adrian Wooldridge: Now you have a system in the United States where you have two gangs of people: I mean the woke left and the Trumpian right. Their hatred of each other matters more to them than anything else. And that’s a very, very dangerous position for the world’s leading hegemonic power to have.
Geoff Kabaservice: Hello! I’m Geoff Kabaservice from the Niskanen Center. Welcome to The Vital Center Podcast, where we try to sort through the problems of the muddled, moderate majority of Americans, drawing upon history, biography, and current events. And I’m honored and delighted to be joined today by Adrian Wooldridge. He is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and he was for many years a writer at The Economist as well as the magazine’s Washington bureau chief. And he is the author of numerous books including The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World; Capitalism in America: An Economic History of the United States, co-written with former Federal Reserve chair Alan Greenspan; and most recently, The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism, published on April 7th by Pegasus Books. Welcome, Adrian!
Adrian Wooldridge: Thank you very much for having me. It’s a great honor.
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m afraid that I damned you with a bit of faint praise in that introduction, to be honest, because you were not only a writer at The Economist for three decades, you at various times authored all of its major columns under the time-honored pseudonyms of Lexington, Schumpeter, and Bagehot. And while it is technically true to say that you have written numerous books, this seriously understates the matter. I have at home a stack of at least a dozen books you have written or co-written, and I’ve been a fan of your work since The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, which you co-authored with John Micklethwait more than twenty years ago. In fact, that book really was a touchstone for me as I was writing about the Republican Party.
But I especially want to congratulate you on The Revolutionary Center, which I think is my favorite of your books yet. It really is magnificent. It honestly has been ages since I’ve enjoyed a nonfiction work of history, politics, and economics as much as this one. I think it helps that I share between 95 and 98% of your outlook, but I think that even people who disagree with you significantly more than I do would still appreciate your gift for concise but beautiful writing, the epic span and scope of the argument you’re making in this book, the thoughtful way in which you approach the subject, and just the manifold ways in which you can sum up large and often quite complicated ideas while still holding the reader’s interest. So congratulations again.
Adrian Wooldridge: You are being extremely kind. I must correct you on one point. I did author all of those columns at various points — I didn’t author them all at the same time. I mean, I think to write four or five columns a week would have been rather too much, but I did write them successfully. Indeed, I’m delighted to be on this podcast partly because of the Niskanen Center, but partly because I’m very happy to be sharing the conversation with you because I’ve read your books in the past and we both share an interest in what might be called the intellectual aristocracy and its virtues and indeed its vices.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yeah, that’s quite right, very much so. So this book is actually, even as we are speaking, published in Britain but not yet in the United States. But in Britain, it actually has… well, a different cover, but it also has a different title: Centrists of the World Unite! Why these different titles for the different audiences?
Adrian Wooldridge:
Well, you’d have to ask the publishers to some extent. It is slightly awkward to have different titles for different audiences, but the feeling was, I think in the United States, that the words “centrist” or “liberal” are potentially quite toxic in the United States. There might be a neuralgic reaction to the word “centrist.” And I have found when I’ve tweeted the book in its English title, there’s a certain constituency in the United States that is very angry at the term “centrist.” Well, you have an angry public at the moment.
We decided that, well, Americans like revolutions, and so if we qualified the word “center” with the word “revolutionary,” then it might not put people off. And secondly, you do have, for example, The Vital Center by Schlesinger. Books that use the term “center,” modified in various ways, do have a long tradition in the United States. So we wanted to tap into that tradition.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think it was George Bernard Shaw who made the witticism about Americans and the Brits being two peoples divided by a common language, and there are a lot of problems with titles making the transition from one side of the ocean to the other. One thinks of the play which was called The Madness of George III on the stage. But when it came time to be made into a movie, Hollywood thought, “Well, that sounds like a monster movie. And since the American public won’t have seen the films Mad George I or Mad George II, we’re going to have to call it The Madness of King George.” There are various misunderstandings, as you say, between us. But both titles of your book and indeed the name of this podcast point toward what I think is our shared belief that centrism can and should be vital and even revolutionary in its defense of liberalism properly understood.
Adrian Wooldridge: Absolutely. There is an assumption that the center is flaccid or floppy or incapable of taking tough decisions — that it’s a mush, as you were saying in your introduction. And one of the central claims in this book is that that really isn’t so, that this has been the most powerful, revolutionary and coherently thought-out philosophy that has been developed in history. It’s the one philosophy that really deals with the problems and opportunities of modernity in a coherent way, and we should be embracing it and proud of it.
As you say, there are two different titles for the book, but they both share the same subtitle, and the subtitle is much more what the book is really about. The subtitle is The Lost Promise of Liberalism. So in Britain, Centrists of the World Unite! In America, The Revolutionary Center. What is the revolutionary center? What are centrists uniting behind? And what I think they should unite behind is the genius of liberalism. And that genius, unfortunately, has been a bit lost at the moment, but throughout history it has always managed to reassert itself.
Geoff Kabaservice: Since we’re talking about the lost promise or genius of liberalism, can you give me a very bare-bones definition of what you understand liberalism to be? “Mere liberalism,” perhaps, to borrow a phrase from C. S. Lewis.
Adrian Wooldridge: “Mere liberalism” is a very good phrase. Let me start off by clearing up a misunderstanding. A lot of people on the neoliberal left would say that the essence of liberalism is about the size of the state or the relative role of the state compared with the role of the market. A lot of people on the left-liberal side of things, would say liberalism is in essence about being generous to people; it’s about being nice, it’s a nice philosophy. And I think both of those things are sort of secondary characteristics.
Yes, I quite like the idea of having more market and less state. And yes, I think being nice to people is generally good. But being nice to people is not a governing philosophy, and the size and scope of the state is not absolutely central. Hayek was a liberal and he believed in the market and in a smaller state, but Keynes was undoubtedly a liberal and he believed in a bigger, more active state. So that’s secondary, it’s not a primary thing.
I think the primary thing that really defines liberalism is three things: one, individualism; second, tolerance; and three, a skepticism and worry about power. By individualism, I mean that the world starts with the individual and works upwards to the collective — the opposite of high Tory views and the opposite of socialist views. And by “the individual,” I don’t mean the notion of just allowing people the freedom to go shopping and to choose whatever they want in a free market. I think liberal individualism is a much richer and more profound philosophy than that. It’s about being our best selves. It’s about self-improvement, self-control, self-development. The essence of liberalism was to do with self-help, self-improvement, self-education. It’s a very questing, striving sort of notion of individualism.
Secondly, tolerance, that you must be tolerant of other people’s opinions. And the reason for that… It might sound like a nice thing to be, but the reason for that is a philosophy of knowledge: that we don’t know what is true, and we definitely don’t have the right to impose our theological views on other people. So the right thing to do is to be tolerant, is to be skeptical, is to be pluralistic about different knowledge claims.
And thirdly, and in some ways most importantly, is worry about power. If you’re a liberal, you’re saying that power is in itself a dangerous thing. It needs to be constrained, it needs to be disciplined, it needs to be governed by rules.
And so I think those are the three things. So you can have big state government; you can have a big-state liberalism, small-state liberalism. You can have nice liberalism, you can have tough liberalism. But you can’t have a liberalism that believes in strongmen, that believes in imposing religious beliefs on other people, and that believes that collectives matter more than individual self-development.
Geoff Kabaservice: I quite liked your comparison of liberalism to a set of motifs in Wagner’s Ring Cycle. In other words, there are many variations that could be had on what a liberal society is. It could be libertarian, as you say, it could be social democratic. But it cannot discriminate on the basis of religion, for example. There are certain limits to it.
Adrian Wooldridge: Or race, in my opinion. And the way that these various component elements are mixed together over the years changes. So liberalism has a certain fixity; it has the motifs, the Wagnerian motifs that have to be adhered to and have to be repeated. But it is also — I think this is vital — it is a set of changing solutions to changing problems. The problems change and so the ways that you combine together the various elements also change.
There has been an enormous industry, for example, in the United States about defining what liberalism is, say in the liberalism of John Rawls. John Rawls was a great man, a great thinker, but obsessively talked about. And I resisted just listing a series of great questions and great answers delivered by abstract philosophers like Rawls. I try to focus much more on the precise solutions that are being delivered to problems that people are confronting — so not an ivory-tower approach.
I talk a great deal about John Stuart Mill, but I try and talk about John Stuart Mill in terms of the problems that he is confronting within Victorian England and how he’s trying to solve those problems. So it’s not an ivory-tower book, although the ivory tower makes an appeal, but it’s a problem of how we solve our collective problems within a liberal framework. And the reason that I do that is partly that this isn’t a work of political theory, but partly because I think the problems that we confront are massive at the moment, and liberalism as it’s currently constituted, as it is mixed together, is not solving those problems.
Geoff Kabaservice: I agree with you very much that liberalism has those three central concerns, which are a flywheel, I suppose, into which different gears could be plugged depending on whether one has a preference for a more left or right, conservative or progressive kind of society. But this does to some extent beg the question, then; Why did you address your book toward the center, toward moderates? What is the special calling of moderates or the center toward liberal democracy?
Adrian Wooldridge: The main reason is that at the moment the center is demoralized and it’s intellectually a bit vacant. All of the energy in politics is on the extremes: it’s on the woke left and it’s on the Trumpian or the populist right. So we’ve got these two forms of populism coming together, and liberals, partly because they’ve been in power for so long and partly because they are not adjusting their philosophy to new problems, are feeling rather lackluster. And what I say at the moment is you shouldn’t be feeling lackluster. You should be reviving your beliefs, you should be fighting back. And this is the way to do it, by looking back at the liberal tradition.
Because what’s happened to the liberal groupings at the moment is they are the establishment. Davos is a bunch of centrists gathering together, trying to order the world and not doing it particularly well. We had in this country two weeks ago a by-election in the outskirts of Manchester in which the Labour Party, which just won a huge, massive election victory a year or so ago, came third — a very poor third — having won that constituency solidly since 1931. The Green Party, which is a very odd party in this country, came first by a long way, and the Reform Party, which is a Trumpian-style party, came second. And the Tory Party lost its deposit entirely. It got 700 votes.
So what you have is the parties that traditionally have been part of the center lack any vitality, and the parties on the extreme right or the extreme left have all the momentum. I think it’s obviously the case that they have emotional momentum, but I think they have quite a lot of intellectual momentum as well, certainly in the United States. I mean, there’s quite a significant number of quite interesting thinkers on the Trumpian right. They are reformulating a lot of arguments. They’re challenging people in some quite significant and interesting ways. It’s not just an emotional spasm, it’s an intellectual spasm (as it were) as well.
And so what I’m trying to say is that we liberals (or we centrists) need to recover our mojo — “Big Mo,” as George H. W. Bush would have called it. But in order to do that, we have to start thinking a bit more about what it is we believe, and we have to be willing to sacrifice some of our assumptions from the last few years, and we have to be a bit less establishment-minded, a bit less close-minded, and a bit more radical — which is why “The Revolutionary Center” is what we have called it in the United States.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes, the Gorton and Denton by-election received considerable attention outside of what you would think would be its merits precisely because it does suggest a future in which the established parties — and really the center-right and the center-left — are ground to dust between the nether and upper mills of left- and right-wing populism. Of course, there could be particular factors which aren’t quite that going on there too. For example, the Labor Party kept one of its prominent politicians, a former mayor of Manchester, from running in that election for fear that he would then challenge the current prime minister, Keir Starmer.
But nonetheless there does seem to be a widespread dissatisfaction with the center, with the people leading it, with what had hitherto been the successful ideologies of the twentieth century since the World War II era. And you and I both were politically sentient during the 1990s, when it seemed after the fall of the Soviet Union that liberalism had driven all of its illiberal antagonists from the field. So in very broad strokes, what went wrong to bring us to today when we have this embattled liberalism you’re writing about?
Adrian Wooldridge: Two things went wrong. One was that the liberals became the establishment and they began to have all of the congenital failures of an establishment, which is that they became self-serving, self-indulgent, nepotistic, and cut off from the average person. And I think a classic example, a perfect example of that is what happens at Davos. There’s a group of people who run the world who are pretty much centrists — most of them, not all; the Chinese turn up. But in general, they’re centrists. And they’re insulated in ways that they don’t quite understand, and they’re also stuck in time in ways that they don’t quite understand.
I started the book with a reference to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, which is a difficult but wonderful novel which is set in Davos — just above Davos in a sanatorium. And it’s full of people who are basically suffering from TB but also pandered to by their doctors, so they’re lying around all day in this state of ennui. And I rather think that that’s the global liberal establishment: they’ve been on top for so long in such a cosseted world that they’ve forgotten what’s going on in the valley below.
Geoff Kabaservice: You call Magic Mountain “the greatest modern novel about decadence.”
Adrian Wooldridge: I think it is.
Geoff Kabaservice: And decadence does seem like an appropriate label to apply to those liberal leaders.
Adrian Wooldridge: This is a decadent class and it’s a decadent group of people. They’re people who are very strange in the sense that… We have a whole set of problems that are quite obvious to everybody. You have the problems of drug addiction and just appalling degradation on the streets of San Francisco. We have the problems of immigration and assimilation of ethnic minorities in many towns in Britain. And a significant number of these people say that the ways to deal with these problems, which everybody can see are not working — we’ve had the gang grooming problems, you’ve had the obvious appalling nature of San Francisco streets — they just want more of the same. And that seems to be an ideological cocoon, which is quite bizarre, quite odd to say that. So there’s cocooning.
The second set of things that happened is overreach in the sense that these were people who became too cocky, and they overreached in certain important ways. One was the financial crisis, obviously. The deregulation of finance went to such a point, and the Ponzi scheme in the financial sector went to such a point, that it came crashing down. This was a sector which basically was making enormous amount of money, which was looking after itself, and then it all came crashing down, and these people were all bailed out by the state because there was too much systemic risk. And that created for the economy a big drag that lasted for a long period of time, but it really, really shattered people’s faith in the system. People who believed in markets until markets turned against them, people who played with other people’s money until it was set on fire — that really shattered people’s faith. And I think that was a long-term thing. For example, in this country, we had the Labour Party being seized by Jeremy Corbyn, the far left. Then we had the Tory Party going through this long cycle of prime ministers. There was a collective nervous breakdown.
And then of course there was the question of the Iraq war. Many people might find it strange to think of George W. Bush as a liberal, but he was — not just in his rhetoric but I think in his actual belief that we were going to spread democracy to the Middle East: Democracy was a good thing, the reason why the Middle East was such a mess was that you had all these frustrated people being sat upon by these kleptocratic dictators, and all you needed was democracy, and that would sort out those problems. And to get democracy, all he needed to do was to blast these people out of existence. And that is a series of assumptions, both about what democracy is — because it was basically one-man/one-vote rather than any notion of elaborate liberal constitutional constraints — and also of the sort of soil that you need for democracy to flourish. So I think it was a liberal overreach. It was an assumption that the world just consists of liberals wanting to be free. I think that was naive.
So cocooning plus overreach was how things went very wrong. It may be fatuous or unnecessary to underline how wrong things have gone. You’re now in the second term of Trump, who is a very unusual president in terms of how he sees constraints on his power and how he seems to act. He’s an illiberal president — one of the most illiberal presidents America has ever had.
We have here in this country the Labour Party going the way of the Conservative Party, which is collapsing in terms of its support, and a potential for a Reform victory or a Green victory, which would be massively destabilizing to the country — particularly a Green victory, because their view of financial government is extraordinary.
But you also have the AfD in Germany — a country which had built this cordon sanitaire around the far right — and that’s now on about 22% of the votes and growing. And you have the extraordinary phenomenon of the National Rally, the National Front, whatever you want to call it — in France, which is not only poised to win in 2027 but already runs big chunks of the country; it’s an incredibly powerful, deeply rooted party. And if the National Front takes over the national government in France, it’s very hard to see how the European Union, as it has been designed, continues. Things are moving in what I would regard as the wrong direction — really quite relentlessly, quite fast.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think this is why I raised the 1990s, because it felt to me then that history was moving in the right direction. It certainly does not feel that way now. I suppose I should add that when we use the term “decadence,” we’re not necessarily referring to moral depravity — although of course the revelations of Jeffrey Epstein’s emails have shown that there was in fact quite a bit of that in the Davoisie. But really what we’re thinking about here is decadence in the sense of a historical forgetting and a going through the motions — and forgetting particularly that the achievements of liberalism were gained only through lakes of blood.
Adrian Wooldridge: Absolutely. One of the assumptions that certain liberals make — and I think to some extent Francis Fukuyama, who I admire enormously, to some extent he makes this assumption — is that liberalism is somehow natural. Fukuyama, in The End of History, is almost saying that we will reach the end of history and the end of history will be a bit boring, but that’s where we’re going. And I think it’s not boring — for many reasons, but one of the reasons it’s not boring is that all of these liberal virtues are very hard to create.
People with power like to hoard it; dividing power and making sure it’s transmitted is very difficult. People with opinions like to impose them on others, so encouraging a regime of tolerance is quite difficult. And the same with individualism. Societies become like group entities, and encouraging people to be individualistic, to be different, to challenge conventional opinion, to live in a different way — all of these things are quite hard. So a liberal society involves pushing against certain of our more general instincts.
But I wanted to come back on the decadence issue because I think that… I don’t want to disassociate myself from a pejorative use of the term “decadence.” Because I think one of the things that happened in the 1990s was that you had this alliance of bourgeois bohemians: the “Bobo” alliance. And basically the argument was, “Let’s have free markets and permissive morality, and that’s great. That’s wonderful, and that is what a mature society ought to have.” And so there was a denigration of regulations and constraints on the way that the market would operate. There was also a denigration of Victorian values and all of those terrible things. They said, “Let’s all be individuals, we’re all mature, it’s only sex,” et cetera, et cetera. And what you have in Epstein Island is — I don’t want to say the logical conclusion of this, but it’s one possible conclusion of this. And it shows what happens when people are just looking after their own egos, when they’re just making as much money as they can and having as many girlfriends as they can. That can lead to a very, very dark place, I think.
So the desire to throw off constraints that regulators had imposed after the Second World War on the way that markets worked, and the desire to throw off regulations the Victorians had imposed during the 1960s — there is a commonality there. And it’s a naive belief that if people are left to their own devices, it’s going to work out well. I think that led to an enormous exploitation of women in general — obviously in the Epstein case — but it also led to some very bad conduct by the CEO class, which ultimately led to a crisis of confidence in that class.
Geoff Kabaservice: I think one of the reasons why this book is particularly appealing to people in the political center is that you are capable (indeed eager) to say that there are problems on both sides. Now, of course, in the States, it has become a pejorative to say that you’re “both-sidesing.” In some sense that means perhaps that you’re excusing Donald Trump’s authoritarianism by pointing to excesses of woke-ism or whatever you want to call it in liberal-dominated institutions like the universities, the media, foundations, and so forth.
But in fact I think it is developments on both the left and the right which have brought us to our present place. And I think there’s also an element here that to be a moderate is to understand that every human has some conservative and progressive impulses, and that they need to be balanced if the whole operation is going to run smoothly. And what you’re talking about in the case of Epstein is a liberalism that overthrew the moral restraints of Victorianism (or whatever you’d like to call it), and that is playing out in ways that we’re seeing now are devastating for liberal societies. And therefore there needs to be some conservative restraint on the liberal impulse, even as there needs to be a stimulus to progress for conservatives.
Adrian Wooldridge: Absolutely. One of the chapters of this book which I like most myself is a chapter which I call “The John Stuart Mill Solution.” And it basically says… John Stuart Mill had a very peculiar upbringing. He was learning ancient Greek at the age of three and Latin at the age of four, and he wrote his first history of the British Empire and India at the age of eight. He was force-fed in the most extraordinary way, and by the time he was twenty he had a sort of mental and nervous breakdown as a result of this force-feeding. And his father, who put him through this education, was a utilitarian — a very, very firm utilitarian, a disciple of Jeremy Bentham, who was also Mill’s godfather. And he taught him that all you need to do is maximize happiness, that it didn’t matter what pleasure you’re pursuing because all pleasures are equal, and that’s all there is to morality.
Mill had this mental breakdown, and as he recovered from it, he moved simultaneously to the right and to the left. He started reading poetry. He started reading people like Coleridge, who was a Tory thinker as well as a poet. And he started thinking about the importance of beauty as opposed to just general utility-maximizing stimuli. And he started thinking about the importance of cultural traditions, high culture. At the same time, he starts thinking more about groups who are not represented very well in the philosophical calculus of Bentham. He falls in love with a woman, and he starts thinking about the problems of feminism. He starts thinking about trade unionists, who are constrained in their economic actions in ways that he hadn’t seen before.
He moves both to the right and the left. And through that, he really deepens and makes the liberalism that he continues to adhere to a much richer thing. It can take into account issues of cultural tradition, it can take into account hierarchies of value, but it can also take into account constraints on opportunity.
I think we need to do exactly that. We have a Benthamite era very much dominated by a neoliberal calculation., dominated by these awful economists all saying, “Let’s maximize utility, let’s maximize happiness. Those are the only things that matter and everything else is just waffle.” I think we need to start moving a little bit to the left and little bit to the right. We need to appreciate much more the importance of cultural tradition. We need to value much more things like art, beauty, culture, ballet, all the rest of it. But we also need to start taking left-wing arguments seriously as well, particularly about constraints on opportunity or about exploitation and things like that.
And I’m particularly keen in this book… The liberal consensus from the 1980s on was very pro-business, and it would make any possible excuse for the business world. You have Robert Bork saying mergers are fine, it doesn’t matter how big companies are as long as there’s some sort of consumer benefit. And I think we liberal centrists need to be much harder on business in two senses. One is about concentration. We need to revive the Brandeis tradition rather than the Bork tradition in terms of worrying about concentrations of ownership.
But secondly, in terms of what the tech companies are doing to our powers of concentration, to our powers of thinking, to our news sense, things like that. There are these companies which are pursuing profit through information manipulation, which entails a great many worrying things. The sacred center of the liberal world is the individual. It’s the individual as a rational, considerate being capable of thinking ahead, capable of focus, capable of self-reflection. And all of those things are being eroded by these tech companies at an incredible rate. We see IQ going down, we see reading abilities going down, we see concentration rates going down. The very essence of liberal capitalist society — the responsible individual — is being undermined. And I think that’s not a small criticism of what’s going on. That’s quite a big criticism. It’s a way in which we have to reconfigure what we consider to be liberal in quite a big way, not forgiving business everything.
Geoff Kabaservice: This isn’t a digression, but I was taught that Matthew Arnold was an arch-reactionary in terms of prescribing a rigid canon of the works of dead white men that consisted of “the best of what has been thought and said.” But there’s a distinction — you come back to it at many points in your book — in terms of Arnold’s distinction between “our raw selves” and “our best selves.” Can you explain more about that?
Adrian Wooldridge: Who taught you these terrible things? Was this at Yale?
Geoff Kabaservice: I’m afraid so.
Adrian Wooldridge: The things that happened to English literature and the humanities is something I’d like to talk about. But I think Arnold is a really, really interesting thinker. And he is interesting in the sense that he says that human beings come into the world as a mass of wailing appetites, and they’re only civilized through education. And the essence of that education must be the ability to see what he would call the good, the true, and the beautiful; to see fine things that are really of enduring value.
So education is not just a utilitarian thing, teaching us how to use tools or something like that. It’s an education of our preferences, of our moral selves and of our aesthetic selves. And he makes this distinction, as you say, between our raw selves and our better selves. But that’s also a distinction that John Stuart Mill makes; it’s very, very important in John Stuart Mill. And the Victorians believed that individualism was about self-improvement. It wasn’t just about asserting your rights — “I want this, I want that, I want to buy this thing” — it was about being a moral but also an aesthetically civilized person.
And how do you have these values, these better selves created? Arnold says — and this is where individualism links in a very interesting way to cultural conservatism — he says you must have a class of people whose job it is to preserve and to teach high culture. And Coleridge talks about a “clerisy,” people who are educated at Oxford and Cambridge and at the English public schools. They’re not a class because they come from all sections of society, but it’s a group of people who are united by their commitment to high culture.
And I think it was a tragedy in our university systems that you had a bunch of — I would like to say “leather-jacketed idiots” or whatever they were — who started trying to denigrate that tradition, because they denigrated it for a minor reason and didn’t see the major thing that was going on. They said, “Well, these are all dead white males. They belonged to a certain culture, and that culture is losing ground in a multicultural society,” and things like that. That’s a secondary issue. The primary issue is that these were people who preserved high culture. And because this was England, or this was a certain section of America, the people who did this were of a certain race and a certain style of life.
But any culture has these representatives of high culture. We can choose Ibn Khaldun or somebody like that from Islamic culture. There are all sorts of people from different cultures that we can choose that represent high culture. The important thing is that we should educate taste, and you educate taste partly by focusing people’s minds on the great texts — because they are great texts — but also through the process of studying them. The important thing is not whether it’s Virgil or The Arabian Nights that you are studying. The important thing is that you are spending a long time taking a particular text really seriously and reading it over many years.
So when I was talking about moving to the right and moving to the left, I think it’s vital that we should be much more critical than we have been of the tech companies, the hyper-capitalists and the rest of it. But just as importantly, something has happened to our universities. And that something is that we have taken liberal culture, liberal education — which is a great ideal — and trashed it. We’ve trashed it in the name of research for the sake of research, of dissidence for the sake of dissidence, of tearing things down for the sake of tearing things down. But we need these values more than ever. So, yes, I want to clean out Silicon Valley, but I also want to clean out the Yale faculty. Because what they’ve undone — in this naive frenzy that started in the 1960s with deconstruction and the rest — was educating the individual to use their freedom to make choices that are considered and responsible and rational and enrich their lives. And this more important than ever.
I’ve just been reading Jim Hankins’ new book — have you seen this? — called The Golden Thread. It’s a wonderful book. I’m reading it every night, and I’m really enjoying it. So there is a strong pushback, a sense that we must rediscover “the great tradition” which Matthew Arnold talks about, but I think it’s more important than ever in the age of AI slop and the rest.
Geoff Kabaservice: And also important in the sense that education, at places like Yale and Harvard as well as Oxford and Cambridge, is supposed to be education for leadership, and the liberal curriculum essentially was thought to be the basis of having civilized leaders. Perhaps that’s also something that has been lost sight of.
Adrian Wooldridge: Well, it has been lost sight of. And I think that the notion of civilized leaders… In a democratic society, there’s a great resistance to the idea of a class of people who consider themselves to be better than other people, and there’s a great resistance to the idea of leadership. But at the same time, the same democratic society complains that we get terrible politicians: They’re no good, we’re not creating a pipeline of civically responsible people.
So democracies are very ambivalent about these things. But I do think that one of the things that these institutions were doing… The left-wing worry is that what they were doing was creating a privileged elite and piling more privilege on those people — and I know you’ve written extensively about this. But one of the things that they were actually trying to do was to take a self-indulgent elite and teach them to be community-minded, teach them that public service was part of their job. The English public schools in the early nineteenth century, they spent their time fox hunting, roasting each other in front of fires, and getting drunk. And what they said is, “No, you’re a ruling class, so you have to be responsible.”
And what we’ve tended to do more recently, because of the Bobo synthesis, is to let the ruling class off some of its responsibilities. So people make lots of money, they do very well in private life, and they haven’t done what the elite did before — that is to go into public service — as much as they used to. Or if they go into public service nowadays, it’s almost like a wrestling match rather than a notion of doing good for the community.
Geoff Kabaservice: This conversation is making me intensely curious about your own education and whether you may yourself have been some kind of Millian prodigy.
Adrian Wooldridge: I went to my local grammar school. I was brought up in a place called Ludlow, which is in Shropshire, which was A. E. Housman land; A. E. Housman loved Ludlow and was buried in the local church. I went to my local grammar school, I didn’t go to a public school — by which in Britain we mean a private school. I focused on history and Latin and English literature and that sort of thing. Then I went to Balliol College, Oxford, which features quite a lot in my book because Balliol was a college that from the mid-nineteenth century onwards was very much focused on creating a guardian class, a Platonic elite. The great master of the college was a man called Benjamin Jowett, and he believed in the combination of open competition and civilized education. So you recruit from this wider range of backgrounds, looking for talent rather than just birth. But when you’ve got these people, you teach them to do public service.
There was one academic in the late nineteenth century — I can’t remember his name — who, when one of his pupils said to him that he had decided that he wanted to stay at Oxford and be a tutor, he was absolutely furious: “What do you mean you want to be a tutor? Why waste your life in academia? Go out and work for the public, for the public good.” So you were trying to create a public service class, which in those days was because of the empire — was particularly focused on the Indian empire. But the idea was that you were a Platonic guardian. You lived a fairly austere life; you had cold showers, just as they do in The Republic. You had a collective life almost, just as they did in The Republic. But you went out and tried to be a moral ruling class.
And that had some very, very interesting consequences. On the one hand, it produced a lot of stiff-necked Imperial civil servants, many of whom were probably terrible bores and had terrible racist attitudes. But it also produced a class of people who said, “Look, there’s a large working class in this country that is being given a raw deal.” So in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, a remarkable number of people — particularly from Balliol, but from Oxford University and to a lesser extent Cambridge as well — began to go into public service, constructing a welfare state. They went and lived amongst the poor in the East End of London, they went to teach, they ran things like the Workers’ Education Associations. And they had a great sense of their moral obligations to people who were less fortunate than them.
This is one of the stories in my book. Up until about 1900, liberalism was very much the philosophy of laissez-faire. It was a philosophy that “The market always works best, and any interference with the market has all sorts of perverse consequences which we must avoid. And if you’re kind to people who are poor, you’ll end up harming them much more.” And then these new liberals come along and they say, “Actually, this is based on too cynical a view of the state and it’s based on too optimistic view of individual opportunities. What we must do is construct a welfare state, and particularly an educational system that means that people can learn to read and write. In order for people to be free and to make sensible choices, they need to have input from education, and they need to have healthcare,” and all of those sorts of things.
So you begin to move from a world in which liberalism means doing nothing except letting the market work, to a world in which liberalism means being much more active: the state taking a more active role in education, in welfare, in providing a safety net. And these people who go through this revolution in liberalism, moving from one sort of liberalism to another, have a very longstanding impact on society. One of them is William Beveridge, who was at Balliol, and he eventually designs the welfare state in Britain. The Beveridge Report comes out in 1942 and lays the foundations for the welfare state. Another is John Maynard Keynes in King’s College, Cambridge. He again goes through the same transformation from pure laissez-faire liberal to somebody who believes in the more active role of the state; obviously, he creates the Keynesian revolution.
What I’m saying in a long-winded way is partly that this creation of a new ruling class might seem: “Well, it’s a bunch of privileged people holding onto their power and looking after their interests.” No, these people go in and actually change the nature of the state because they begin to have a more benevolent notion of what freedom means and how you attain a free society.
So this is how liberalism, confronted with its own obsolescence — and it began to look as though was dying in 1900 because the world of the nineteenth century individual, the capitalist individual was dying — and then it resuscitated itself. I think in some ways we’re in the same moment now.
Geoff Kabaservice: Yes. Benjamin Jowett and Balliol College are important to this story because liberalism successfully reinvented itself at the turn of the twentieth century, as you say, with the disciples of Jowett taking a leading role in Britain, and then again after World War II with the Vital Center that I’m talking about. I hesitate to single out any one of your Bloomberg columns, lest I seem to cast aspersions on others, but I particularly like the column you wrote about Benjamin Jowett. At the time there was a demonstration on at Oxford saying, “Rhodes must fall.” A statue of Cecil Rhodes stood atop the gateway of, I think, Oriel College, and people wanted to have it brought down because Rhodes is associated with colonialism and racism. And you said actually it would be a great idea to have a prominent statue of Benjamin Jowett up somewhere. Because he was responsible, as you say, for this rebirth of liberalism around the turn of the twentieth century. He might even have been a pioneer as a trans person; certainly there is some speculation as to why his engagement with Florence Nightingale was broken off.
And I also was quite taken with the doggerel that Balliol students composed about their master: “Here come I, my name is Jowett/ All there is to know, I know it/ I am the master of this college/ What I don’t know isn’t knowledge.”
Adrian Wooldridge: Yes, absolutely right. Now, the speculation about whether he was trans… I think there was quite a lot of evidence that he had, let’s say, not a weird sexuality but that he was somebody who had a genetic difference. There’s a biography of him by Geoffrey Faber, who keeps hinting at this point, and that he did have a clinch with Florence Nightingale which resulted in general confusion and then their marriage being called off. He had very high-pitched voice. He may have been mixed-gender, as it were, not out of choice but out of genetics. When I wrote that column, Balliol College very pointedly did not get back to me to say either that they were building a statue or that this was a true representation.
But I think that Jowett was a very great man, and he was a great man in the sense that he understood that all societies need to have an elite, and that what matters is not whether you have or don’t have an elite — what matters is the quality of that elite. And you have to take certain people who have talent and direct them in the right direction — that’s to the public good — and also form their minds in ways that mean that they’re educated but also publicly minded.
And I think that it was very much the case that the United States had exactly such a class — I know you’ve written extensively about this — after the Second World War. These were people pretty much in the Anglo-Saxon educational and Protestant tradition who believed in public service, who believed in elites, and who believed that the best of us must construct a liberal order both at home and abroad. And you had this extraordinary action after the Second World War… After the First World War, America sort of retreats back into itself. It doesn’t want to deal with this messy Europe. After the Second World War came this extraordinary realization that America is now top dog, and in order to be top dog, you don’t just eat what you want but you have to act in a benevolent way for the rest of the world. You have to try and run the world.
And something happened to that elite, to that process of creating an elite. The Vietnam War divided that class into very antagonistic factions. They hated each other, they disagreed — George W. Bush disagreed with Bill Clinton, there was a lot of fighting — but it survived. It survived, but more and more fissiparous and more and more bad-tempered. Now it’s gone. Now you have a system really in the United States where you have two gangs of people: I mean the woke left and the Trumpian right. Whatever their social class backgrounds, whatever their monetary position, their hatred of each other matters more to them than anything else. And that’s a very, very dangerous position for the world’s leading hegemonic power to have.
Geoff Kabaservice: It is indeed. If I could return briefly to your story, you moved from Balliol to All Souls College at Oxford, and then presumably to The Economist magazine and the United States. Can you tell me something about that?
Adrian Wooldridge: Sure. I did history at Balliol, which is a very well-trodden path, a very enjoyable and very sensibly constructed undergraduate course. And then I went to All Souls, which is a very odd college because it doesn’t have any undergraduates; there are only fellows of the college. And in order to get in, you have to do an exam, which I think was six papers; I can’t remember. You have to do a lot of papers. And one of these papers, which was by far the most enjoyable, was a one-word essay: you have one word and you have to write for three hours about this word. If you’ve had the sort of background that I’ve had and you’ve gone through it, you’re absolutely sick of writing essays on “What was the origin of the Reformation?” or whatever. But one word… The word we had was “extravagance.” And thinking and writing about extravagance for three hours was very enjoyable.
Anyway, I managed to get through that examination. Famously, in All Souls you also have to have dinner with all the fellows, which can be quite a testing process because not all of the fellows are necessarily as normal as you might hope; some of them are quite eccentric. And the great story that was told was that you always had to eat cherry pie, because the great test was what you did with the stones. And everybody said to me, “Oh, it’s all apocryphal, the cherry pie story.” But when we had our dinner, it was cherry pie and we had to deal with the stones.
Geoff Kabaservice: So presumably it was bad form to swallow the cherry pits out of embarrassment…
Adrian Wooldridge: I think some people did.
Geoff Kabaservice: But spitting them at the master might show a bit of panache.
Adrian Wooldridge: So I was there in All Souls for about seven years — writing about the history of intelligence testing, actually, which was strange, because it was regarded at Oxford as an almost crazy thing to write about. It was a very obscure subject to write about. Ever since then, the interest in this thing has got bigger and bigger and bigger. It’s the essence of meritocracy. We’ve had lots of very good work done on it since. But I think when I wrote about it then it was regarded as odd.
I finished my Ph.D. at a time when the academic world was going through a massive contraction and the government had cut back on funding. I was looking around, I was teaching, I was doing this, I was doing that. And I was thinking, “God, where can I get a job?” And then somebody from The Economist phoned me up and said, “Look, we need somebody to fill in for our person who was covering the National Health Service.” It was a review of the National Health Service and regarded then as a big thing, although it wasn’t really. “And could you write about it?” I said yes, okay.
So I went to The Economist, never having wanted to be a journalist and not knowing really what journalism was. And I started writing about it. I said to one of the more senior people who’d been at The Economist for a while, “I’m supposed to write about the Health Service. I don’t know anything about it. How do I write about it?” He said, “My only advice to you is you’ve got to read The Irish Times. All the other newspapers are full of lies, they’re nonsense. Read The Irish Times.” So I started reading The Irish Times. The Irish Times, not surprisingly, wasn’t covering these reforms of the British Health Service, so I gave up on that. And then I asked somebody else, “What would you advise me to do?” And he said, “Oh, he told you that? He’s an idiot, that dude. The only thing you need to read is Gibbon.” So I thought, “Okay, this Gibbon is not quite doing it.” So finally I did find one person who said, “Just phone up the Secretary of State for Health,” who was a man called Kenneth Clark, “and then say you are from The Economist and go around and see him.” So having never done journalism before, I did this. I was very frightened. And he said, “Oh, yeah, come over.”
That’s how I learned journalism. So then, having seen Ken Clark and quite enjoyed that, I stayed around for a few years. I went into writing about the welfare state in Britain, British politics… I got to writing about management and business, business management, which struck me as quite interesting. And then I went to the United States, and then I got stuck in the United States.
I first went to Los Angeles — I was in Los Angeles for three years, from 1997 to 2000 before I went to Washington D.C. And what I found quite extraordinarily in Los Angeles is I don’t think there was anybody from Time or Newsweek there. The Economist had a person there, but Time and Newsweek didn’t. There weren’t that many people from the East Coast actually, partly because the LA. Times was a massive newspaper and had that beat. I began to realize that it was a different media world on the East Coast. Anyway, Los Angeles, which I loved… It’s like paradise for an English person, Los Angeles. Then I went to Washington, D.C. for ten years, which were ten very, very wonderful years but a lot of work because we had the George W. Bush/Gore election, then we had September the 11th, and then we had Iraq and Afghanistan and everything. So it was relentless. I suppose it is a relentless place, Washington.
Geoff Kabaservice: I would imagine that your time in Los Angeles would have given you early exposure to globalization, which is much more advanced there than in Washington, DC, and also a sense of the tech world and perhaps also multiculturalism as a fact and perhaps as an ethos.
Adrian Wooldridge: Absolutely. I was lucky enough to get to know a person called Joel Kotkin, who writes a lot for the Manhattan Institute. He taught me all about the ethnic minorities of Los Angeles. We used to go around Chinatown, and every single ethnic group we went and looked at. Because most British people, insofar as there were any in Los Angeles, they were just interested in celebrity world, so they spent a lot of time writing about that. And Joel said, “That’s not LA, that’s nonsense. Who cares about them? Let’s go and look at Little Vietnam or Little China,” the Azerbaijanis and all of that. So I got a really wonderful education in that.
Then there was the question of immigration, of course. There was the beginning of the backlash against immigration, and also just the sheer numbers of immigrants. I was very interested in that. And the tech world… Tech journalism wasn’t like a massive industry yet. Tech was taking off, but I remember that I went a lot to San Francisco and to Silicon Valley, and this was a world which didn’t yet have this huge spotlight on it — it was beginning to happen, but not yet happening — and secondly there was a real feeling in that world that they were inventing a new form of capitalism. It was entrepreneurial. If you got up in the morning and you decided you didn’t like your boss, you’d just drive into a different driveway and you’d have a new boss. It was a very informal, flexible, networked world. And the world that you now have of massive companies, which basically dominate everything and are only interested in startups to the extent that they can buy them and fold them into their operations… It was a completely different ethos. It was the ethos of freewheeling, Tom Peters-style “Be your own boss” capitalism. A huge change that was.
The other thing about that world was the cultural problems of assimilation, of crime… The grubbier side of LA I found absolutely fascinating. I remember I spent quite a lot of time in South Central LA, going around with the police and looking at that side of Los Angeles. And Washington is different. Washington is a black town plus a white town, whereas LA is massively, massively ethnically diverse.
Geoff Kabaservice: Washington, D.C. is no English person’s idea of paradise, or just about anyone else’s really. But you were there at an interesting moment when you were writing The Right Nation, because in hindsight that was more or less the midpoint between Ronald Reagan’s conservatism and Donald Trump. I suppose the question to ask the author of that work (or the co-author) is: Did the conservatism of Ronald Reagan lead inexorably to Trumpian populism, or did a lot of things have to happen along the way for that to take place?
Adrian Wooldridge: I’m going to answer that question in a very roundabout way. It’s a very, very interesting question. I think that when I arrived in Washington, D.C., I was predisposed to be sympathetic to Reaganite Republicanism, because I thought Thatcher had been a positive for Britain and that the world that Thatcher inherited and changed was going nowhere very quickly. This corporatist, mushy world was leading to stagflation, and she shook that up and improved things. So I was predisposed to be in favor of Reaganite conservatism, which to some extent George Bush’s conservatism was modeled on.
I was also predisposed to it in a second way, in that I wasn’t part of the gangs that you have in Washington D.C. I came there and I was a British conservative, and I suddenly discovered that there were two groups of people in America: there were Republicans and there were Democrats, and they didn’t deal with each other. And if you were a journalist, you were supposed to be a Democrat. I found it very, very strange that all these people I was getting to know from the New York Times and other papers, they don’t really bother very much with these Republicans. They don’t write very much about the Republicans. They might write about the presidency and the run for the presidency, but there’s a whole culture of conservatism that they’re not interested in, and there’s an intellectual culture of conservatism that they’re not interested in.
So I started saying, “Well, wait a minute. George Bush has won the election. The Republicans have taken the House. They’ve taken the Congress,” I think — I can’t remember the exact details. “They’re the ascendant faction on the Supreme Court. And yet all these journalists are spending all their time looking at the Democrats or just pouring scorn on the Republicans.” I thought, “This is insane.”
I would go along to meetings of CPAC, let’s say, and I’d be about the only journalist there apart from National Review people, who were part of the movement. And I would say, “This is very odd.” Here was a massive story that was handed to me on a plate. I remember that when The Right Nation came out, the then-editor of the New York Times called in some people saying, “Why have we got some Brit writing this book on The Right Nation? Why aren’t we covering this conservative movement? They’re in charge of the country. What’s going on?” And I think that was just purely myopia, or the visceral distaste of Republicans — the movement Republicans rather than just the people in the political world. So it was a free story.
Now, I was one of the people then who tended to see Republicanism as being essentially a free-market philosophy and a tax-cutting philosophy, which had got a weird religious thing added to it. I tried to take religion seriously, but I was thinking, “Basically this is good for the economy,” because it was all about cutting taxes and deregulation. And I was a big supporter of a laissez-faire approach to immigration at the time. So it was basically laissez-faire plus some religious people. That’s what I think most of us thought was Republicanism. I was thinking of people I would know, like David Frum. I think that that was their basic position: “We tolerate the religious side, but it’s all about basically a muscular, democracy-promoting foreign policy.” And that’s Bush, that’s Reagan.
We missed another side of what Reaganism was about. There were lots of Trumpian elements that were actually there — not even beneath the surface, that were really quite consciously there — that we weren’t really paying enough attention to. Well, I did talk a bit about them in The Right Nation, but I probably gave short shift to the anti-immigration people. I think they were much more dominant and much more angry than I talked about. George Bush was pro-immigration in Texas; a few Texas elite Republicans were. But Trump doesn’t come out of nowhere. And once you have the disaster of the Iraq war, then that low-tax, deregulation Republicanism is rapidly taken over by these other currents which are patriotic but also a bit xenophobic, which are much more willing to see the state take a much more active role in industrial policy and things like that.
Geoff Kabaservice: I have a few other big questions to ask as we near the end of our conversation. I remember several months ago listening to an old Intelligence Squared debate that you had on the subject of meritocracy with Michael Sandel, the Harvard professor who’s a very prominent critic of it. I thought you mopped the floor with him, to use an Americanism. But in your book on liberalism, you have if anything doubled down and said that meritocracy is an integral part of liberalism. What is that argument?
Adrian Wooldridge: The argument is that what we have to do as reformist liberals, as the radical or the revolutionary center, is to offer solutions to real problems. And I say the reason that this book is not a disquisition on John Rawls is that it’s an attempt to take really pressing problems and suggest solutions to them. And I think one of America’s most pressing problems is its low level of social mobility. Elite educational institutions have become finishing schools for an upper class, and they’re slightly perverse finishing schools because they teach large numbers of people in the upper class that they’re not really in the upper class — which is a weird illusion — through this woke agenda.
But the levels of social mobility have come down. And in order to save liberalism, we need to make the best possible use of the nation’s talents — partly just through recruiting people, partly I think to create this new Jowett style elite, but also to stop people from going off in the wrong direction. University institutions need to make more attempts to recruit people from a wide range of social backgrounds.
What woke is (or what certain elements of woke are) is not stupid. They’re saying there is a problem in social mobility, and mobility particularly from certain ethnic groups, but they’re giving the wrong answer to that question. You don’t do it through a process of just hitting the right numbers, having different cutoff points for different groups. And you don’t do it just by creating scholarships for people who aren’t as well-educated as others and just leaving them to the sink and swim within highly competitive backgrounds.
You need to start with the supply side, with the supply chain, with the pipeline of people. And in order to get the pipeline better, you need to have, I think, selective schools, exam schools. You need to select people early — let’s say ten or eleven or thirteen — select them early for intensive elite education. And in order to do that, you need to do it through certain SATs or objective tests, IQ tests, which had been used in university entrance earlier on. So what I’m trying to say is you need to look for a talent elite much more vigorously than you have in the past. And I’d go all the way down to gifted school programs.
This may sound like craziness… So you have a woke solution or a left-wing solution to the problem of lowest social mobility, which is to have certain reserved spaces, particularly for certain ethnic groups, and put them into universities. That’s too little, too late, and quite often very destructive. So I would say, yes, there is a problem. Trump is wrong to say, “Just allow the market to work, allow the system to work.” You need to have positive attempts to find people, not through artificial means but by trying to look for and cultivate talent all the way down to grade-school levels.
You might say this is a pie-in-the-sky theory, but this is exactly what America did in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. It’s a tried-and-true method of what you do when you have high levels of immigration, a breakdown of certain mobility structures. So you reach down to schools. You had it in San Francisco, you had it obviously in New York, you had it in Boston, with Boston Latin, the rest of it. You had schools that were designed to find talent, particularly in immigrant populations, and send it to Yale, send it to Harvard.
And you do two things: You increase your overall supply of talent and you stop talented people from being frustrated and quite often going out in the wrong direction and becoming angry people. You had that in the early twentieth century. You also had it in the 1950s with Sputnik. Again, there was this great fuss about “We need talent!” Now we need it again. We need it because we’ve got low social mobility and we need it because we have a growing talent competition, a military competition with China.
Now, in Britain we’ve had a series of schools which have done exactly this in the East End of London, in various poor areas. They’re academic schools which are selective in the sixth form, which put enormous emphasis on traditional learning, on academic success. And they have been as successful at getting ethnic minority students into Oxford and Cambridge as Eton has been, but they haven’t done it by Oxford and Cambridge lowering their standards. They’ve done it because they’ve said, “What we have to do is find talent and encourage it.”
Geoff Kabaservice: Absolutely. You actually did a review (writing as Schumpeter) about a decade ago of a book by David Turner called The Old Boys, which is about the private schools of Britain. And you found them to be mostly successes because they were able to innovate within their traditionalism. They were able to bring the discipline of meritocracy and the market to elevate their academic offerings. You had an insight that “insiders can make the best revolutionaries.” Let me just ask you to project that on a broader stage. As we look at liberalism having failed (or seeming to fail), being challenged by the postliberal right as well as an emerging postliberal left, as it seems that people have lost faith in any of the liberal leaders of countries including Britain and the United States, what might revolutionary-minded insiders who prize the liberal heritage do at this present moment to bring us a better future?
Adrian Wooldridge:
My optimism comes from the fact that every time liberalism has looked as if it is dying, it has revived itself. So on the grounds that history repeats itself, I’m an optimist. I also think that there’s a lot of intellectual energy now flowing to the center, and there’s a lot of willingness to admit that we’ve made mistakes in the past. So the Labour Party in Britain, which is very heavily dependent on immigrant and minority votes, is nevertheless saying it’s going to put a lot of emphasis on assimilation and a lot of emphasis on moving towards the Danish model of making sure that people either assimilate or face the consequences of not assimilating, not allowing parallel societies to develop.
So there are a lot of people who are liberals who are willing to question shibboleths, slaughter sacred cows. And the same thing is beginning to happen in the tech world: We’re beginning to ban smartphones. We’re beginning to recognize that this deluge of pornography that’s coming from these sites is problematic and needs to be dealt with.
So there’s a healing process that is happening. What most worries me is that there is an elite that’s there that’s hard to budge. That it’s been there for a long time. It’s very powerful. In some ways it’s richer than it ever has been, and it’s more capable of insulating itself from the consequences of its bad decisions than it ever has been before. It’s an enormously powerful group of people. One would have thought Davos might have imploded, but it goes on and on and on, preaching an incredible lot of clichéd nonsense to the world.
So it is a very embedded group of people. And I think if you look at the last election in the United States, the presidential election in the United States, you wouldn’t have believed that it was going to happen until it did happen, that you would have someone who was clearly cognitively not able to run for the job. You would have somebody who was his deputy, his vice president, who clearly should not have been playing in national politics. It is a very, very decadent elite. So what we need to have is insiders fixing it: a revolution from below, people younger than myself coming up who imbibe this liberal idea and conduct a revolution from the center.
What I’ve tried to do in my book is to focus not on the ground game or on particular rules for how to play the game of politics, but to try and provide an intellectual blueprint. And what happened in Britain in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is that the Liberal Party was visibly dying. It was just old. And then a bunch of intellectuals came along and presented a blueprint, and it was that blueprint that ignited a political revival.
So I think you have to get the ideas there, and then the politicians, I hope, will come along. Remember, we were very despairing about the state of the Democratic Party, and then Bill Clinton came along. America is a big country. People come from all over the place. But the salvation is not going to come from the established center, it’s going to come from a revolution within the center.
Geoff Kabaservice: May it be so. Adrian Wooldridge, thank you so much for joining me today. This conversation was a privilege in the best sense. And congratulations again on the publication of your marvelous new book, The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism.
Adrian Wooldridge: Thank you, that’s very kind of you.
Geoff Kabaservice: And thank you all for listening to The Vital Center Podcast. Please subscribe and rate us on your preferred podcasting platform. And if you have any questions, comments, or other responses, please include them along with your rating or send us an email at contact@niskanencenter.org. Thanks as always to our technical director, Kristie Eshelman, our sound engineer, Ray Ingegneri, and the Niskanen Center in Washington, D.C.
