TRANSCRIPT FOR EPISODE 96

Fred: Sometimes it's a temptation to reduce politics simply to ideology. There are these certain abstract principles you want to absolutely realize… I think real life is a lot messier than that. And I think if we think about how we maintain the liberties that many of us, including myself, cherish – like protection from arbitrary imprisonment or your protections, freedom of speech or that sort of thing... I think we think about the sources more broadly, it can help us be more nimble and more resourceful in thinking about how we can maintain those underlying principles for our society.

Weston: Hi y'all. I'm Weston Sim, sitting in for Ryan McDermott.

It's my pleasure to be running a new feature of the Genealogies of Modernity thread of this podcast. In this episode, we feature an article from the Genealogies of Modernity journal, read aloud by the author, followed by a brief interview. Today I'm delighted to welcome Fred Bauer, reading his article, “The Diverse Roots and Routes of Liberty.”

Fred is a writer from New England whose work has appeared in publications such as National Review, The Atlantic, City Journal, and UnHerd. Welcome to the Beatrice Institute podcast, Fred.

Fred: Thanks for having me.

Weston: Now I'm going to turn it over to Fred to read his article, “The Diverse Roots and Routes of Liberty.”

Fred: “The Diverse Roots and Routes of Liberty,” written and read by Fred Bauer. The off-liberal complicates a narrative of “liberalism” as some teleological process of radical autonomy. The off-liberal instead notes a variety of sources for the institutions, practices, and ideas associated with the “liberal” order. It also reveals the ways that various elements of the “liberal” tradition can themselves undercut a teleology of autonomy. In developing some of the alternative pathways of the off-liberal, I would like to highlight three of its modes: noting certain practical sources (outside ideological liberalism) for elements of the “liberal” order, exploring intellectual accounts of modern liberties that do not rely on some claim to radical autonomy, and highlighting the way that figures in the “liberal” tradition can challenge the project of atomistic autonomy.

Limits on centralized power and protections for personal rights are often taken to be hallmarks of the “liberal” order, but their origins cannot be traced to liberal theory. Consider for instance the practice of mixed government. While the dispersal of power is often taken to be essential for a “liberal” state, the mixed regime itself goes back thousands of years. Aristotle discussed it in The Politics, and the historian Polybius spoke favorably of such a regime in his analysis of ancient Rome. As Jacob Levy has explored in Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom, the heterogeneous web of institutions that constitutes civil society (another central “liberal” concept) and checks centralized power can be traced at least to the Middle Ages. The legacy of these medieval institutions was central to the work of many thinkers in the “liberal” tradition (such as Montesquieu). While various liberals might have offered a justification for the mixed regime or checks and balances, the precept of limiting unitary power long predates their theorizing.

More broadly, other principles often grouped in the “liberal” tradition can find justifications quite different from radical autonomy. In his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, Leo XIII defended protections for private property (another tenet long associated with liberalism) not with a reference to John Locke or Adam Smith but Thomas Aquinas. By embedding the person in a wider set of human relations, Leo recast these protections in terms of social obligation: “Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings, whether they be external and material, or gifts of the mind, has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and, at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God’s providence, for the benefit of others.” This enterprise of ownership as stewardship for the greater good offers one view of how protections for private property could be justified not as part of some relentless quest for radical autonomy but instead as involving a personal duty to serve a broader common good.

This attention to the common good also led Leo XIII to emphasize the importance of government regulation—of working conditions, for instance—and cooperative bargaining units to help protect the working class and the virtue of society as a whole. Leo argued that the socialists of his time called for policies that threatened both the worker (by lessening the rewards of work) and the family (by setting up an invasive state that would “destroy the structure of the home”). Leo’s attention to the common good, then, offered a justification for a kind of regulated market economy.

That sense of liberty-via-obligation can be found in other sources, too, and can help to globalize an account of liberty’s resources. The ancient Confucian thinker Mengzi stressed the importance of the rulers serving the people and implied that a ruler who violated the principles of benevolence could be justly overthrown. While this is far from an endorsement of democracy, it does cut against certain doctrines of absolutism. A king’s power depends upon his serving a deeper purpose and ruling his people well. Moreover, the importance of human flourishing and embedded connections for Mengzi and other Confucian thinkers is also compatible with some contemporary accounts of “liberalism” that premise a liberal political order on the idea of a commitment to human dignity. Martha Nussbaum, for instance, has appealed to the importance of concrete human commitments in order to show the importance of Rabindranath Tagore’s work for liberal life.

All of this suggests numerous practical sources for some of the institutions of modern liberty as well as intellectual justifications for them. Moreover, even figures who are sometimes taken as leading “liberal” thinkers might challenge the conventional narrative of liberalism as autonomy. With his opposition to cruelty, Michel de Montaigne plays a key role in Judith Shklar’s “liberalism of fear.” Yet Montaigne’s model of the self is in tension with the conventions of liberalism as autonomy. If “liberty” is fundamentally about the rule of the autonomous will, Montaigne’s account of the person as thoroughly opaque troubles that project of autonomy.

In his apology for Raymond Sebond, Montaigne stressed “the confusion that our judgment gives to our own selves, and the uncertainty that each man feels within himself, that it has a very insecure seat.” For Montaigne, it’s not merely that our opinions are inconstant—the operations of our selves remain cloaked in mystery. His essay “How the Soul Discharges its Passions on False Objects When the True Are Wanting” finds that we will divert our energies to some available object in the effort to fulfill some deeper need. Montaigne referenced Plutarch’s claim that people whose “loving part” lacks “a legitimate object” will instead lavish affection on pets: “the soul in its passions will sooner deceive itself by setting up a false and fantastical object, even contrary to its own belief, than not act against something.” That passionate display of affection for a pet, Montaigne claimed, is a refracted desire for a deeper kind of love; we do not always see clearly what we ourselves really desire.

Montaigne declared at the outset of his essays, “I am myself the matter of my book,” but the project of his essays as a whole is premised on the notion that it takes great imaginative trial and experimentation to explore this self. This “self” is not transparent to some absolute will. Looking inward, a person cannot immediately diagnose what she really wants and set her will to realizing this end. Habit, circumstance, and impulse shape that self and its responses. For this model of personhood, the ideal of some self-authorizing autonomous will might seem fraught to the point of incomprehensibility.

Montaigne’s point about the messiness of the inner person might be revealing for another aspect of the off-liberal, too. The off-liberal scavenges for eclectic insights, pursuing oblique paths in the hopes of getting a better view of the whole. Rather than imposing some reductive (and illusory) comprehensiveness or dissipating itself in endless fragmentation, the off-liberal mounts a continued dialogue between part and whole. Many modern (though not only modern) accounts of the person have emphasized the idea of inner uncharted depths. Those depths give a person substance and the possibility of internal surprise; they simultaneously frustrate and incentivize the project of introspection. The off-liberal takes a similar approach to political ideas and structures. By resisting reductive narratives and hunting through disparate sources, it can reveal the many textures of freedom.

This brief survey of some of the off-liberal’s alternative paths indicates how an emphasis on care, duty, and solidarity—and not mere isolated autonomy—can find virtue in the practices of modern liberty. The various networks that constitute civil society (and prove so essential in restraining centralized state power) are in part forged through human commitments. Leo XIII saw in a regulated market economy the opportunity to defend the formation of families and advance the cause of personal dignity through stewardship. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville based the exercise of American democracy not on the search for radical autonomy but instead on the organic commitments of community. Resisting individualisme and encouraging participation in cooperative social endeavors were essential for checking the rise of a velvet-gloved autocracy.

There are many roads to modern liberty, but some of those routes focus not on the triumphant will but instead on the richness of the person and our commitments to one another.

 This was “The Diverse Roots and Routes of Liberty,” written and read by Fred Bauer.

Weston: At the beginning, I wanted to ask what exactly do you mean by off-liberal? Just so that everybody listening has a sense of what that term means.

Fred: Yeah, thanks. That's a good question. I borrowed the idea of the “off” from the comparative literature scholar, Svetlana Boym, her idea of the off-modern. Boym argued that the off-modern explores alternative routes to modernity. It's this idea of “offness,” doing things aslant, doing things askew.

That's probably what I'm trying to do with the idea of the off-liberal, to look at the things that we think of as liberal from different angles and to try to find heterogeneity. It's not necessarily strictly quote “liberal” or necessarily “anti-liberal,” but more of finding alternative ways of thinking about it.

So that's what I'm trying to aim at with the idea of the quote off-liberal.

Weston: Fred, reading this article, I was reminded of Wittgenstein's concept of family resemblances, wherein categories aren't defined so much by fixed essences, but by sets of similarities. Why should we consider liberalism as not having an essence or a telos? What are the practical stakes of this idea?

Fred: It's funny, Weston, that you should mention Wittgenstein, because I've recently been thinking a lot about a relative contemporary of Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, in his essay, “A Plea for Excuses,” from 1956.   and in that, Austin's also addressing a similar issue, I think, where he discusses what he calls trailing clouds of etymology – which is the way that words retain the resonances of past uses – and he applies that to various intellectual models beyond liberalism… but I think a point that he raises here is actually really instructive for liberalism. Because he says “it must be remembered, that there is no necessity whatsoever that the various models used in creating our vocabulary, primitive or recent, should all fit together neatly as parts into one single total model or scheme. It is possible, and indeed highly likely, that our assortment of models will include some, or many,   that are overlapping, conflicting, or more generally simply disparate.”

I think that's exactly what, in some ways, I was trying to get at in this idea of the off-liberal, to look at the disparate sources of liberty, that we can't simply view our contemporary liberties or even “liberalism,” as we understand it, simply as the unfolding of a single ideology or ideological imperative. Because I think, as I argue in the article, if you look back on past the development of these things, you'll see that there's not just a single ideology or single invisible hand of a dogma motivating it. It instead comes from a variety of sources, and I think that's useful.

I'm not inherently opposed to someone coming up with their own, as it were, boutique version of what liberalism is, with a certain telos. You think of, say, Judith Sklar's liberalism of fear, in which the idea of liberalism is to reduce suffering and pain, especially the cruelty that's inflicted by the powerful upon the weak. If you want to come up with this boutique brand for what liberalism is, that's okay, I guess, but recognize that that is just one brand of politics out there, that it's not the only kind that's out there, and if we think of the practical consequences, I think that's kind of useful for us.

If we think of day-to-day politics and thinking how we can manage it…because I think sometimes maybe I'm showing my cards a little bit too much here… I think sometimes it's a temptation to reduce politics simply to ideology. There are certain abstract principles you want to absolutely realize. I think real life is a lot messier than that. I think if we think about how we maintain the liberties that many of us, including myself cherish – like protection from arbitrary imprisonment, or your protections: freedom of speech or that thing – I think if we think about the sources more broadly, it can help us be more nimble and more resourceful in thinking about how we can maintain those underlying, principles for our society.

Weston: Yeah. Speaking of boutique liberalisms and alternative sources for it… So a few years ago, as a divinity student, I took a course titled “The Crisis of Liberalism.” And one of our professors – we had three professors teaching it together – one of the professors argued that a lost thread of liberalism that we should reclaim is a liberalism based on the value of creativity rather than individual autonomy. So this is a liberalism that traces back more to John Milton than Jeremy Bentham.

Both thinkers we'd call liberal, maybe using this Wittgensteinian idea of family resemblances, but both having very different points of emphasis in their thought. I'm curious, your article talks a lot about off-liberalism generally, are there any particular so called off-liberalisms that you would find compelling?

Fred: Yeah, that sounds like it would have been a great course! I think your professor hits upon a point that I think is useful for what I'm thinking about in some ways with off-liberalism. Thinking about liberalism as creativity, and one thing I'd like to search for that. Not to sound too much like T.S. Eliot…

Weston: Not a bad thing!

Fred: Yeah, I know! Exactly! which I don't think is a bad thing, right? I once,   was in a situation where people were talking about someone's writing and someone said, well, this sounds like reading something by T. S. Eliot. I don't know if I'd want someone to write like this. I don't know. I think that's pretty good. I think if you can get to that, that's a good level. I mean, there are worse things to aim for, right?   

But I think one thing that Eliot really gets is how much creativity, as we understand it, depends upon tradition, depends upon a bigger infrastructure outside the self. And when I think about, quote, “off-liberalism,” that's the thing that I'm interested in, the way that our self-actualization, which I think we moderns think of as very important, depends upon things outside of ourselves. I think we could just think of our own lives. Some of the things that are most important to us are things that are beyond us, right? Whether it's religious faith, Whether it's our connections to our family, those sorts of things, that rely upon our fragility and our recognition of our fragility. So when I think of those sorts of approaches to politics, I think of… I mean, again, I don't want to say reduce off-liberal realism itself to a single ideology…I'd more tend to think of it as “offness.” Looking at different angles of things. I don't think you can emphasize the theme of disparate – reduce it to one thing.

I think certain figures who are interesting are people like Montaigne, the great French essayist, who is again, is often called a liberal. But when you look at Montaigne's model of subjectivity in his great essays, his model, the subject of subjectivity, emphasizes our own internal uncertainty, our own doubts about ourselves, how we're not always fully clear to ourselves. One thing that a contemporary academic philosopher, Charles Larmore, has indicated, is I think some of the risks of modernity just viewing the self purely as this transparent medium, and the goal of politics is the maximization of the satisfaction of that transparent medium… someone like Montaigne viewing the self as uncertain, viewing the self as unclear, really cast doubts in this idea of politics simply about preference maximization because Montaigne's whole point is, what are my preferences? Now I need to spend more time digging into that.

You think older figures, you think people like Montaigne…I think a more contemporary level…I guess in the 20th century, someone like Iris Murdoch I think is very interesting. Who is, again, I think often sometimes put as part of the liberal tradition. But if you look at her essays, collected in Sovereignty of the Good, one of Murdoch's key themes – or key re-imaginings of liberty – is the idea that freedom is not simply just doing what we want. Again, the maximization of our power for the satisfaction of our, our will, but instead freedom is the clarification of vision and can we understand ourselves and the world around us better. I think that's an important thing.

And again, I think more broadly, something I'm interested in is thinking about the way in which it is our connections with other human beings and the kind of vulnerabilities that are entailed in that as an essential part for thinking about freedom and also of course, thinking about human fulfillment in general.

Weston: I love that Murdoch, rendering of freedom. How did you describe it? It was…

Fred: …like the clarification of vision. Yeah. Seeing more clearly, and seeing oneself more clearly and escaping the temptations to narcissism that we have.  This is one of Murdoch's big claims, is that our self-love and selfishness makes us misunderstand ourselves and the world around us, and it actually causes a confusion of our insight into the world. And that we now want to try to transcend that she argues.

Weston: Wow. So, you mentioned diverse sources for liberal institutions such as different medieval institutions and ancient practices. Could you elaborate a little bit on what some of these sources are and how they've influenced our contemporary liberal practices?

Fred: Yeah, sure. I mean, again, as with all genealogies, I'm sure this is always up for disagreement or negotiation, but I could offer some hypotheses. As I suggested in the article, some of the practices that we associate with being liberal predate John Locke by a century or arguably millennia. You think of the… I mean, I think it seems an essential premise for a lot of, quote, “liberal theorizing” about politics is that political power should be divided. So you shouldn't have, as it were, an absolute ruler who can do whatever he or she wants, whenever he or she desires, but simply there are restrictions. So we think of separation of powers in the American context. Well, I mean it's Polybius, the classical writer, thinks about that – goes all the way back to ancient Rome! When you look back, the Framering generation of the American Republic is very much aware of this like classical lineage. So, it's not just “Oh, there was this division of powers in ancient Rome,” and “Oh, coincidentally it happens again in the United States.” But no, they very clearly had this in mind when they were thinking about things.

If you think back to the… this is more of a cultural way of thinking about liberty than say a precise institution…but you think back to the world of ancient Greece, one of the essential elements in Athenian democracy was the idea of what the Athenians called paretia, which is the ability to say all. That part of being a free person, exercising that freedom in Athenian society was at least in certain circumstances the ability to speak freely and openly. Again, this is 400 B. C. This is long before John Locke.

To think of another more concretely political institution, we might think of, say, something like the Magna Carta, which, again, 1215. I think, we're closer to John Locke than John Locke is to it! But when you look at the Magna Carta, what does that do? That lays out limitations on the king's power. It creates some autonomy for the city of London. And so, again, this decentralization of power, which is so often called liberal, but again, this is not…you can't trace this to Bentham or something like that. It explicitly says that to quote “a free man can't be in prison without being subject to a trial to establish certain protections for the person.” Now, obviously, those protections for the person have continually been evolving over time, and obviously the idea of a free man – what that meant in 1215 – was much more limited than it is today. I'm sure it was a much smaller portion of the population. But, nevertheless, some of these institutional things long predate so called liberal theorizing.

I mean, again, not to quote someone else, but you don't necessarily have to be Hegelian to say liberal theorizing is the rationalization of these practices, but nevertheless, you can say that these practices long create liberal theorizing. And I don't think we can simply reduce that theorizing to those practices.

Weston: In addition to practices and institutions from ancient times or medieval times, you talk about how there are thinkers who provide non-conventionally liberal arguments for positions or political commitments that are characteristically liberal. In your article, you use the example of Pope Leo XIII, who argues for a right to private property. He's not using so much the theory of John Locke, as he is talking about the inherent dignity of every human being seen under a Christian frame. And so, I'm curious going from your example of Pope Leo XIII, how do you think off-liberalism relates to theology? Do you think theology can help revitalize liberal political theory?

Fred: Yeah, I think that's a really great question. I'll be forthright here. I am far from Master of Theology. I don't have anywhere near your background, Weston. So I say this all …

Weston: Master of Theology is a high title. I don't know if I,   have earned that!

Fred: Well, at least I'm not even an Initiate to Theology. I'll put it that way, you know but I think, yes, I think theology can in multiple ways be informative.

One is…and I think this is more of a big picture thing… I think ultimately politics has to be conducted with at least some awareness of the most important and pressing kind of big picture questions of our lives. Now again, I don't think necessarily you can go to a political rally and get the meaning of life there. In fact I tend to think if you go to a political rally and it's telling you they have the meaning of life, it's a reason to be very skeptical about it. But, nevertheless, I think there at least needs to be some awareness in the background and the framework of what are some of the most important parts of human flourishing.

I think one of the temptations that certain quote “liberal theorizing” gets into is say, “Oh, we can simply bracket all of those big political questions – simply  put them aside and just focus on questions of civic peace” or something… or how you can have a high level of income because I think when you get down to the nitty-gritty of politics, you always have to keep in mind, ultimately, what does it mean to have a fulfilling life?

Now granted, there are different opinions on what that means, but I think that has to be there in the background. What is one of the things theology is concerned with? By at least a lot of conventional theologies: these are some of the foundational issues for human flourishing, right? Or what? I mean viewing the human being in a much bigger framework, a much more…maybe this is, Wes, you might know better than me if this is controversial to say… but I would say in a much bigger metaphysical framework… I think that's an important thing. I think theology in terms of thinking about what's involved in human flourishing is a valuable thing. I mean, you mentioned Leo XIII. I think if you look at something like the Revised Catechism of the Catholic Church, there are a lot of political points in that, right? Or claims to be brought up about stewardship and responsibility to others, I think clearly has political stakes.

I think facing up to some of those bigger questions is important, for a few reasons. One, because I think it'd be helpful for people who are involved in politics to be aware of some of this stuff. But also for people who maybe are, skeptical or doubtful about what our society is, what's involved in it, who haven't bought into… not to use him as this like figure of derision, I don't mean this way…but we're not to say bought into like John Locke or something like that. Here are other ways of looking at our life.

If the alternative is not, say, Lockean or to escalate even further, like some radically libertarian approach to private property, or Soviet communism. They're actually other ways of trying to strike this balance. I think theology can be a way of illuminating that.

I think especially in a Western context, maybe this is too reductive, but a lot of our understandings of a liberal society and political pluralism can, in part, be traced to some of the divisions and the controversies that arose during the Reformation, which were highly charged theological issues. So, I think looking at some of those theological issues is returning to the sources of some of the Psychology of the way we think about our liberties.

Weston: Yeah. Yeah. Recovering the, the theological origins of modernity and of different practices and ideas of liberalism I think is super helpful theoretically – and theology allows you to do that.

I think also on the practical side of things theology seems, and this is coming from someone who studied theology so maybe I'm a little bit biased, but it seems uniquely illuminating with respect to political theory, in that theology is grounded in practiced religion. Which is constituted by the lived, concrete experience of millions upon millions of flesh and blood human people across space and time who have collectively created these religious traditions.

So, in other words, theology potentially, depending on, I guess, which religion it's sourced from, has accumulated so much broad human experience and it's underlying it in a way that I think other sciences… it's not for them so much, except for maybe for philosophy. Maybe that's a bit exceptional.

Fred: But even in philosophy, it's a little bit different to go along with your point. A lot of philosophy is focused on the level of theory. Whereas, as you emphasize with theology, it's this idea of religious practice and this ritual activity that people go through. As I think you were implying there, you even think about some of the key elements of religious practice, how those have deep political consequences… In at least in many world religions, marriage is an important theological…I don't know... form or something. But obviously marriage is a deeply political institution too. Especially if you look at the ancient world, they viewed very much as a political entity is in part about joining people together, part of perpetuating family lines. Theology is another way of getting at some of those institutional practices.

Weston: How can the off-liberal understanding of liberalism inform contemporary governance and policy making? Are there any practical steps that can be taken to integrate some of these off-liberal values that you mentioned in your article, such as principles of care, duty, and solidarity?

Fred: I think so. Definitely. How that does it is very much up for debate. And I would argue that part of what we're seeing in contemporary American politics, and maybe Western politics more probably, is a debate about exactly what's entailed in that.

But I think it does because I think again, not to be too reductive, but I think sometimes there was a temptation and in past decades to simply think of maintaining freedom is simply maximizing your preference utilization. Viewing also state power as the singular threat to our individual liberty. But I think we've seen in the disruption of recent decades other potential challenges to it, right? The way in, say that social dislocation can lead to people feeling adrift, can lead to a loss of that self-actualization potential that a lot of people view as important. How economic precarity is not just an economic problem, but a cultural problem, a psychological burden upon those who undergo it. Think about what we can…I think what we're seeing a lot of in contemporary American politics is debates about what we can do to try to address those issues, are there certain things we can do to, for instance, strengthen the family?

For instance…not to get into partisan politics…but I think both Republicans and Democrats and contemporary American politics are at least some angles are considering are there certain maybe tax benefits we could have to families or can we increase the child tax credit or something like that? I mean, this is a perennial political question, but also perennial logicstical question, what can we do in an educational system? I think a lot of people are dissatisfied with the idea that education is simply about training you for a job or something, it's in part about this bigger kind of cultural nourishment, which creates a bigger political question. How do we provide the cultural nourishment in a divided society? But that's, that's just another point. I think if you look at, say, something like the opioid epidemic, which really speaks to all these questions about the role of addiction, the role of social alienation, the withering of those ties of human connection that are so important… and obviously it's a big debate about what public policy can do to address these things.

For instance, the Biden administration within the past year or so… some congressional Democrats were proposing this idea of should there be a loneliness czar? Should there be a White House office of someone to manage loneliness policy? And I know there was some debate about whether the White House is the best level to do that. But I think people on both sides of that question realized that loneliness and realized that alienation were in fact, political questions, and political challenges to address.

I think right now we're seeing a lot of debates about how to address those things. I think when you step back and think about the way in which we as human beings are embedded in a bigger network of care and obligation… think of John Donne, the “no man is an island.” Well, that's true. What are the political implications of that? And again, I think in this time we're increasingly realizing that it's not just a choice of absolute atomism or absolute centralized state control, like a Soviet commissar. That we can find these other ways of addressing those questions that simultaneously recognize the need we have for other human beings, but also recognize the potential disagreement and the importance of having some level of independence.

Weston: On the note of contemporary American politics, as we record this, we're in the summer of 2024 and there is a looming U.S. presidential election between Joe Biden and Donald Trump. With so many people dissatisfied with both candidates, do you think off-liberalism can help open up the American political imagination?

Fred: That's a deep question. I don't know if I have an easy answer for that. Ideally yes, although it might do it in ways that we might not necessarily expect.

This is a personal intention of mine, it's more of a hunch than anything, that's well grounded in any scientific research… but I do personally tend to think that both political coalitions, both the Republican and Democratic coalitions, are undergoing some internal disruption and internal rethinking about how to address some of these political questions. Ironically, again, at the time we're recording this in early July of 2024, even though at the time the current seeming nominees, Joe Biden and Donald Trump, seemed to have great personal opposition to themselves… they're actually certain continuities between both of their administrations in terms of looking at industrial policy in terms of federal entitlements, at least in terms of messaging documents.

I think a lot of policy stakeholders are thinking about how we can take political action to strengthen some of these underlying foundations of the social safety net, and also create a sense of national solidarity, which is so attenuated…We're obviously deeply divided, how can we try to address some of those questions?

I think, at least for me, I think a big underlying political question for me is, will both political coalitions be able to come to some consensus, even if there's disagreement in that consensus, but some kind of consensus that addresses some of these issues, or instead, will the body politic continue to dissolve in this escalating internal warfare? I don't know if we have an answer to that in July of 2024. Maybe we'll have an answer sometime in the future, I'm not sure. But that's obviously been a big issue over the past years, the simultaneous escalation of political conflict. But also I think there's increasing awareness that we need to have something to mediate that conflict. So, it may just be a race against the clock to see which imperative will win.

Weston: Yeah, so you just expressed some agnosticism about this, but I'm curious, intuitively, do you feel hopeful about the future of liberalism?

Fred: Do I feel hopeful? Well, I'll put it this way. I think hope is a virtue. I aspire after virtues, so I aspire to be hopeful and I could see ways in which the fundamental underpinnings of the liberal – in this non-ideological sense – I  could see ways in which could be replenished. I could see how it could break, there's an increasing understanding of that role for human recognition… there's the kind of policy revival that…I think again, speaking for purely for myself… I think our country so deeply needs. I think we're stuck with an outdated policy paradigm that is not really meeting the needs of the moment. I could see a pivot to a kind of resilience paradigm could help address some of these things and could help create this underlying foundation that would allow… But again, speaking for myself, I've used a lot of good things of like elections and some level of self-determination and decentralization… I think all those things are good, or at least have been very useful and I can see how they can continue, but it's going to take a lot of reform and a lot of imagination, and I think especially a lot of charity. Especially intellectual charity, to make that happen. I would be hopeful about it, as I said, I will walk in the direction of hope. Hope that there will be truly hope in the NC.

Weston: That's a good answer. Do you think that, or do you see any specific or concrete seeds for that hope? Are there any off-liberal political movements or politicians – maybe they're off-liberal, maybe they're not – who you think might give us a glimpse of what the future of liberalism could look like?

Fred: I don't know. It's hard to say because politicians can always disappoint us. I think that's one of their main jobs is to disappoint us.

Again, based on the perspective of the moment, I think there are elements of both the Republican and Democratic coalitions that could push in this direction. On one hand, we see a reformist, sometimes called populist, but I don't think that's always the best term for it… but it's a reformist element on the right that's looking to push politics more in the direction of what could we do for families. How could we tighten the labor market to improve the outcomes for average workers? A more pro-worker politics. I think you see elements of that in the Democratic coalition, too. You think of people like Ro Khanna, a congressman from California, you think of Chris Murphy, a Democratic Senator from Connecticut. Murphy has written a lot about how we need to address this deterioration of civic bonds.

I think it's on the radar of certain politicians and the other disagreements here on immigration, say someone like Mark Rubio, or Tom Cotton, or J. D. Vance, who's much more on the reformist side of the right, probably differs a lot from Murphy on immigration. But I think on other issues, about worker power – there might be more affinities. So we might be able to see a… I don't want to use the term triangulation… but it's a kind of triangulation – a balancing between sides of both factions who can try to find some commonsense reforms… or maybe not commonsense reforms, but effective reforms.

Because I do think if you look at American politics, the broader sweep of it, major changes that are effective and that are enduring are often bipartisan changes. Whether there's the bipartisan consensus during the cold war. Even if you look at the new deal, a lot of the social security passed on a bipartisan basis. There's overwhelming Republican support for it. So, I do tend to think if you're looking to see the kinds of changes that I think would be useful, they will most likely run through both parties if they're going to happen. If I am hopeful, that's the dynamic I look at.

Weston: Well, Fred, this has been riveting. Thanks for your time in conversation.

Fred: Well, thank you for having me, appreciate it.