Chris Beem talks with political theorist Alexandre Lefebvre about why liberalism is more than just a political ideas and procedures, and how abiding by liberal principles can enhance your life far beyond politics.
Chris Beem talks with political theorist Alexandre Lefebvre about why liberalism is more than just a political ideas and procedures, and how abiding by liberal principles can enhance your life far beyond politics.
In his book Liberalism as a Way of Life, Lefebvre argues that liberalism isn’t just a set of neutral procedures; it’s a comprehensive way of life that shapes the way we live and think and work and love in innumerable ways. He also argues that it’s a way of life worth robustly defending, drawing on examples from pop culture and recent history.
Lefebeve is a professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney. He teaches and researches political theory, the history of political thought, modern and contemporary French philosophy, and human rights.
Jenna Spinelle
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. Welcome to Democracy Works. I'm Jenna Spinelle. This week, my colleague and co host Chris beam is joined by Alex Lefebvre, a professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney to discuss his book, liberalism as a way of life. Chris and Alex are both political theorists by training, but I promise you that this conversation does not get too too deep into the political theory weeds. I think you'll find throughout the conversation and in Alex's book, if you read it, that he's very easy to understand and the book is very readable. There's an old saying that when you do these kinds of interviews, you should explain something like you're talking to a friend in a bar. Alex is maybe the first person in all the years of doing this show that I've heard actually do that or come the closest to doing it. So it's a fantastic conversation, and Alex's book looks at liberalism, not just as a governing philosophy or sort of political ideas like individual rights and civil liberties and those kinds of things, but rather as how we live our lives with one another and how liberalism undergirds a lot of the social connections that we have, and thus why it's something that's worth defending despite attacks from a variety of illiberal forces, as we've discussed many times on this show. So I hope you enjoy this conversation with Chris beam and Alex LeFevre. Let's get to it.
Chris Beem
When one sees a book by an accomplished political theorist, and the publisher is Princeton University Press, it's, you know, it's reasonable to come at that book with certain expectations and and this book is very different from that, right? There's a there's a really interesting historical account of swear words, and there's lots of Count accounts from stand up comics and TV shows. But that's really kind of your point, isn't it? That that liberalism is it's not correct to understand it as merely, or even primarily, a political theory right which most people, who you know, if they've taken any political theory class, they kind of have a general notion that this is about limiting that liberalism means liberal limited government and equality, civil rights. But your argument is that it's filtered down into the most ordinary and kind of almost invisible dimensions of our social lives. Is that right?
Alex Lefebvre
That's exactly right. And thanks for having me on the podcast, Chris. It's great to be here, but yeah, that's my big pitch. So typically, we tend to think when we when we say the word liberalism, the things that come to mind are immediately like political kind of stuff, constitutions, laws, rights, policies, and none of that's wrong, and I definitely don't want to throw that out, but what I try to contribute in the book is an awareness of how much liberalism and liberal values and habits and sensibilities have just kind of permeated the culture that you and I and people living in western democratic countries navigate on a 24/7 basis. So I live in Australia, you live in the United States. I'm Canadian. So we're all going to have our own unique textures, but I think the same matrix of values is going to be quarterbacking most, if not all, of popular culture today,
Chris Beem
But we don't, we don't really know that, right? We don't understand that. That's the case, right?
Alex Lefebvre
That's right. So what I'm trying to do, it's as if, it's as if we this is, this is the pitch at its most extreme, is if we took a time machine back to the 19th century, and everyone had forgotten the word Christianity, but they were still living the way they do, Christian, with Christian values and habits and mores. And someone were to finish furnish that word like your value system is Christian, and they'd be like, Oh, so that's the pitch of my book, and it's kind of most extreme. It's that we have this way in which we navigate the world in which we understand ourselves and others, and it's most of the time, it's just pre conscious, pre reflexive. It's just, it's our vibe, it's how we are in the world. But we don't have the right we don't nominate the right label for it, and the label that I think is most appropriate to kind of designate who we are nowadays is the word liberalism and the package of values that it nominates just so we're not in the dark here, and we'll get into this much more what I mean by kind of liberal values, and you have a great deal to say about this, so we can bounce this back and forth, but the main three I nominate are things like, If you value personal freedom, fairness and reciprocity, then that, for me is a liberal package. Huge. And my hunch is that that for you is not for you the general listener is that that is probably not merely or only confined to your political opinions or to your behavior as a citizen, but it sort of travels deep down in your bones as to who you are and the kind of entertainments you watch, the way you are, in romance, in friendship, the way you parent, etc, etc. That's the claim of the book, that this thing, that liberalism is truly, indeed hegemonic, and that to understand our culture and ourselves, we need to see that
Chris Beem
And ubiquitous, right? It's everywhere and, and you have this really lovely quote from Wittgenstein that I hadn't, I was not familiar with but you know, he says light when we first begin to believe light dawns gradually over the whole and that's kind of your argument. It's like there isn't any place that hasn't been, in some sense, lit up by liberalism, right?
Alex Lefebvre
That's exactly right. No one's picked out that Wittgenstein quote before, so I'm delighted you noticed it, but that's it, right? Like realization doesn't happen one bit at a time. You see a kind of horizon that illuminates all, and that's what I think liberalism is doing nowadays. And we just need to kind of, or we don't have. It's not a normative point at this point. It's a descriptive point that to understand ourselves and our culture, we should orient ourselves to how liberalism has become this vast cultural, moral, esthetic kind of thing, as well as a political and social and economic doctrine.
Chris Beem
So the US Surgeon General has actually come out and said that loneliness is a serious health problem, and said that loneliness is the equivalent of smoking two packs of cigarettes a day. I think that's what it is anyway. I mean, there. I mean, I think the Patrick deneens of the world and others might say, see, we told you. And I'm wondering, if you how you would respond to that.
Alex Lefebvre
I think that, okay, it's a great question. I think that that when I read what let's take Deneen, because we're talking about him, what I read what Deneen says about liberalism, I can't help but thinking that his book show, his famous book, was called Why liberalism failed, and it just got huge traction in 2018 Obama retweeted it, and it just took on a life of its own, with a lot of a lot of critics, but especially a lot of fans um, celebrating what he said. So the book is titled, Why liberalism failed. I think the book would be more aptly called Why neoliberalism failed, because I think that the attitudes that he's talking about particularly it's aggressive individualism, the idea that that, in his mind, liberalism is corrosive of our relationships and of our thick attachments, and that it gets everyone to start kind of calculating on a minute by minute basis as to, like, what's in it for me, or how do I build my personal brand, or my my own Alex Lefebvre portfolio? Like, that's the mindset. I think that that's a neoliberal sensibility and attitude, and in that sense, I think that might well lead to the kind of pathologies and psychosocial health risks that you mentioned in loneliness. But I think that if you look at history, if you look at so we can talk more about the history. Liberalism was born in the 19th century, and it was a doctrine that was as much ethical as it was political, and it was really against selfishness. It was trying to get people to learn to be in the world in a generous, fulsome, giving kind of manner. And while liberalism hasn't, of course, lived up to that in so many respects, that notion that that community and fairness are at the heart of the doctrine, along with individualism and autonomy, is something I think can't be ignored. So I think it's just a straw man ish version. It's interesting. It's either a straw man ish version of liberalism that's being attacked, and that's not doesn't honor the richness of its moral and political thinkers. When it's called individualistic or leads to loneliness or else, it's kind of an apt criticism of what liberalism, or a liberal democratic world has become today, such that enemy and those sorts of terrible conditions, especially in old age become pervasive. So I don't at all mean to celebrate liberalism and say that we live in the best of all possible worlds, or that it is guarantees community, but I do think it has the resources internal to itself to motivate a criticism of our liberal world, but in in and through liberal principles, unlike Dean who wants to fly to some other set of principles to replace them. I think liberalism has the tools within itself to reproach the world that has become today and its loneliness and its atomism and all that stuff.
Chris Beem
Well and and it's neoliberalism, right? I mean, I think that is, I mean, I find that argument, your argument, very persuasive, at least the second one, because I think there are many people, and I'm trying to recall the name, but it's not really all that germane just to say that there are people who would make the same claim of ubiquity about neoliberalism, especially in you know, and. American culture and, and how, you know, we are all brands that are, you know, that have to market ourselves and, and you know that is, you know, a slice of the liberal tradition. But the but the notion is that it's it has overwhelmed the bounds of the marketplace to turn everything into a market.
Alex Lefebvre
That's right, yeah, no, I think that that's very accurate. So I had, I don't know why some conversations in life just stick out with you. So I had lunch one day with Michael Frieden, who is an Oxford political historian. He wrote the Oxford little handbook on liberalism. And he just kind of, we're talking liberals. And he just kind of put down his fork at one point, and he only said, Alex, this is how I think of liberalism. And he says, I think about it as modular furniture. I went, huh? And he said, Yeah, liberalism is like, modular furniture. So there's like, all of these different kind of major strands of liberalism, and think of them as, like, different kinds of furnishings of a home. Like you have a couch, you have an armchair, you have a chest of drawers, whatever. And at different points of the liberal tradition, one of those moves into the center of the room and kind of takes up the center of gravity. It becomes kind of the Sun around which the orbit of the other furniture pieces. My metaphors are getting confused, but go with me circles. So sometimes you have the idea of limited state power at the center. So that would be sort of kind of Cold War liberalism. Sometimes you would have social democratic the couch of fairness and of redistributive justice at the center. But we have, for a long time, I think, lived in, in a living room where the neoliberal core of kind of liberal liberal, the centrality of liberalism being market, open markets, and certain individual freedoms necessary for that as economic agents, where that has sucked up a lot of the attention, both of policy and politics, and we live in that shadow for a long, long time. So I think the critics are right to indict that. I just don't think that that exhausts, as we were saying what liberalism means as a whole, and I think that that that tradition has terrific resources to give not only a more nuanced and more balanced idea of what it might be, but a pretty firm criticism of that strand.
Chris Beem
And fair to say, I think that your your effort here is to, you know, kind of recapture some of these and and defend them, right? I mean, I'm sure you heard the the notion that the old wag that a liberal is somebody who won't take their own side in an argument, and you're perfectly happy to take my own side into this argument.
Alex Lefebvre
Yeah, that's definitely true, yeah. And, I mean, it's listen. The book starts off, and I don't want to go deep into this, but the book is centered around the great American philosopher, moral, political philosopher the 20th century, John Rawls. And it's interesting here to bring him in, because he gives a glimpse into the kind of method that I'm using, that he used to ground his whole work. And Rawls is like this most complicated political theorist of all. He has a he has a concept for everything. It's this whole crazy architecture, and he can take decades to read his work and still not fully grasp how it all clicks together. Fine. That's really hard. But on the other hand, Rawls moral philosophy is animated by a really, really simple moral intuition, and his big claim that grounds the whole project, whether early in his career or late, is that society should be seen and run as a fair system of cooperation from one generation to the next. It's that idea that our society should be fair. In Australia, we have this wonderful locution for it that political parties use on both sides of the spectrum, and it's saying that everyone in this country should have a quote, unquote, fair go. Now, if I could nominate two words for what should encapsulate the liberal spirit, I'll take my adoptive Australian home, and the fair go is perfect. Now, what's so interesting though about Rawls is that he doesn't say, like, I John Rawls, mighty moral philosopher, think that liberalism should be this. What Rawls does is he looks around his world and he just kind of like does, like a bit of like a bit of, like anthropology, or, like a bit of, kind of armchair survey. And he's like, all right, all right. I look at all the major political institutions in our world, things like the Constitution, political speeches, Supreme Court decisions, etc, etc. And once we kind of get all that stuff and collect it, and we sift it, and we try to find its bedrock moral idea, what do we find? And he says, it's that idea of fairness. And his point is, is that everyone who has grown up in this society will sort of have imbibed this idea of fairness by virtue of being surrounded by these institutions that, at least publicly profess this ideal. So here's the point when Rawls and me say that liberalism is x and is grounded in fairness, we're not trying to legislate that as an idea. We're trying to appeal to the sensibility of our readers to say, hey, maybe you already think this, and maybe that ideal already has hooks in your heart, and we can build off of that. So rather than the neoliberal ideal that everyone that man is a wolf to man, and we're all hustling and we're all portfolio building, maybe the other moral ideal. So it may seem more aspirational, more idealistic, in some way, but maybe it has actually more bite on us, because maybe we believe it more deep down, because we've been raised in a culture that professes it 24/7,
Chris Beem
That's great because that because the next thing I wanted to ask you about is the the the fact that we don't really live in a liberal society. We live in liberaldom. That's right and right, and that's your word and and can you just define what that means?
Alex Lefebvre
Sure. So yeah. So the the innovation, of course, is that when I say these, liberalism is based on fairness, and then the obvious reproach to me, or to anyone who ever says that, is, Alex, look out your window. Does this look like a fair world? And the obvious answer is like, manifestly, no, no, it doesn't. So what I have to come up with is, what needs to be come to up with, more generally, is this notion is a concept to designate what our world is if it's not living up to liberal principles. And I coined a word that is liberal, dumb, D, not D, U, M, B at the end, D, O, M, and I'm riffing off the great Danish theologian of the 19th century, Soren Kierkegaard. And just bear with me for a minute, and it'll become relevant. But Kierkegaard wasn't just a great theologian. He was, he was kind of a magnificent social critic. And Kierkegaard walked around his native Copenhagen in the mid 19th century, and he looked around and everyone was basically on the same page. Everyone was professing the good life of Christ. There was a Lutheran church on every corner. People were trying to, trying to follow consciously an example. Everyone went to church. So it looks like a it looks like a totally Christian world. But then Kierkegaard kind of took a beat and he looked again at these same people, and he's like, You guys aren't Christian at all. Like, if I really look at how you live, what you really are is kind of bourgeois. You're like, respectable Philistines who want, above all social respectability, a roast on Saturday, maybe a mistress on Sunday, like you want, like the quiet pleasures of life that won't shake too many boats or rattle too many whatevers. And you go to church and you profess the good life, and that's just two hours a week man. And then the other part of the week, you're delivering some other kind of values. And he came up with this devastating word to name that world. And he called that world not a Christian world, but Christendom, and the word in Danish, literally means Christian ish, Christian Ness, it's the world that results from play acting at Christianity. And here's the crucial thing, Kierkegaard never wrote trying to convince the Muslim or the Jew or the atheist to try to be Christian. He was writing and preaching and talking for Christians to become Christian. He wanted to convince people who already, at least notionally or publicly profess these values to double down on them and live up to them. And he did so, partly for reasons of piety, but also partly because he thought that a life based on those values was intrinsically good and rewarding. Now, of course, I don't think we live in Liberal actually, I don't think we live in Christendom anymore. I think Christian morality has passed as kind of the official public morality of most Western liberal democracies. But I do think we live in the analogous form that I coined liberal dome, namely, a society that talks the talk, but that doesn't walk the walk. And so my pitch in the book is twofold. One, I think, of course, our governments need to live up to their liberal commitments much more robustly, and that's important. And there's all kinds of reforms, political, market, legal, that those governments should pursue. Now, in the book, I don't talk so much about those. If I can recommend a book that I think does a great job at it, it's just not my project. But based on the same kind of Rawlsian ideas as me, is Daniel Chandler wrote a book last year called free and equal, and there he really goes at the idea of how to reform our policies, our schooling, our unions, a whole bunch of stuff along the lines of liberal ideals. And it's very wonky, like it gets into the weeds of what we should do. That's great my book, on the other hand, so I think that's terrific. We should support that. I just make a different contribution to which is to suggest how we as liberal individuals might honor our liberal commitments more in our own day to day lives. And that's what I'm trying to make, the case, trying to make the Micro Case rather than the Micro Case. Though, of course, both have to go together as to why you and I, who profess these pretty liberal sentiments, should actually take them seriously, even if they cost us at one level, because the commitments worth it.
Chris Beem
Well, you do have, I don't know if it's a theory of change, but you do have a prescription, and the prescription is to have John Ross serve as your spiritual director, and and, and, which actually I think is I really like that. I mean, I never met him, but I heard him talk two or three times, and he just comes up. He came across as an incredibly, deliberately kind human being. And. And, and, I mean very, you know, no, no screwing around with the with the intellectual stuff, the academic stuff, but just generous to that was part of his like, it was a study generousness, right? It was like, This is how I should act, and I'm going to model what it is that I'm that I'm calling for. And so I don't think it's crazy, but it is. It is interesting to me that you that you're talking about the parts of roles that, you know, I mean the original position and the reflective equilibrium, which are really not complicated, but they take a long time to explain, because Rawls was not a really good writer, but, but it does, it does seem to me like what you're saying is that if we think about this and and and strive to understand what they mean and to live up to them that we can become better liberals and better people. Is that a fair summary?
Alex Lefebvre
Yeah, that's absolutely right. I mean, I think that. I mean they say, never meet your heroes. And I think that's true 99% of time. But I wish I had met my new hero, which is John Rawls. Every single account of him emphasizes his decency, his grace is especially his modesty. He was like low key kind all the time. And I So Rawls biography is interesting. So he was, he wanted to be a minister up until he was about 20, and then he was in the Second World War in the Pacific Theater, and learned, yeah, and then learned of the Holocaust, and he lost his faith, but I don't think he ever lost his. I don't think he ever lost his. I don't know how to put this. His spiritual sensibility is the bland word, but what he thought life could give us, in some his sense of what to use Charles Taylor's Word, His sense of fullness, of what it means to be a present, generous giving and also happy human being in the world. And what I think he tried to do is essentially generate a political philosophy that could lead in that direction. He secularized Christianity in all kinds of ways. And so people in this book often say that liberalism has religious origins, as if that's a criticism of liberalism. I don't think it is. I mean, obviously liberalism didn't just come out of thin air One fine day, and it has a whole set of antecedents, I think, in Christianity, but in particular in reform Christianity. And I think now, though, that it's able, I know, with 200 years of kind of working itself out, I think liberalism is able to stand on its own two feet. And I think that that's what Rawls tried to do, establish what a liberal worldview might mean, and especially politically, but also morally elaborated, a whole moral psychology as to what it might claim to us. So what I try to do, sorry, I'm wandering a little bit here, but what I'm trying to do in the book is take some of his most important, his greatest hits, as it were, like if you had a Rawls, like the Eagles, Greatest Hits, the Rawls Greatest Hits, and you put it on an album, and number one track would be the original position is the concept that anyone who's ever looked at Rawls knows something about, and then other other bangers, as it were, the reflective equilibrium public reason. And I kind of go through the list of what they would be, and I try to suggest that they're not just kind of political ideas, but in some important and deep way. And I think untapped way, there are spiritual ideas, and I call them spiritual practices, or spiritual exercises, that people can take on to themselves to become a different kind of person. So the original position, I won't get into the details, but the original position, the whole idea there, is to try to imagine us as a bit more impartial. We try to think of like what we would want of our societies if we didn't know our place in it. So if I didn't know that, I was take to take me a white, heterosexual, middle class kind of guy, and I were to design my society like, what kind of principles would I nominate if I didn't know who I was and Rose's point is, we all basically want to think that way. Right? None of us would accept that creating principles of justice in our image of our position is fair or right or good or anything like if I were to designate rules for whites or rules for kind of middle class heterosexual guys, that's obviously not okay, not just to the broader society, but to my own moral conscience, I would be repelled by that. And Rawls is trying to get us, in a sense, to get some distance from who we are and our own kind of the luck or unluckiness of our positionality, and try to think of how we would want our society to look like, but also how our own lives to look like. And so what I try to do in the book is try to suggest how that idea of an original position can be used as, I don't know, a meditative exercise, something that we can just kind of call up whenever we like, and to just get our heads in order and yet, maybe at a limit, our lives in order and live a certain kind of way. And last thing I'll say about this, but we can go there, if you like. The claim that I think Rawls makes is that we should do that, not just because it's like the right thing to do, or that it will help vulnerable people, though it does do that. His claim is that if you live a life according to liberal ideals, it is intrinsic. Rewarding on its own terms. Like, there's a lot of good stuff that comes out of that. And I call them, I'm being a bit cheeky here, but I call them the existential perks of liberalism. And like you, you have your seven, your seven virtues of liberalism. I have my seven day don't mean to Trump you. It's not a competitive exercise. But I have my 17 reasons to be liberal, and all of them are kind of qualities of character, things like, some of them are high end, like impartiality and autonomy, like very liberal sounding things. But other than it's like, you get to be more chill in the world, you get to be more thankful. You get to be kind of funny, like, there's certain qualities of character that spring from our liberalism. And that's what I think Rawls was on about, reasons as to why we ought to be liberal. It's the oldest problem of political philosophy. When you think about it, Plato, at the very beginning of the tradition in the Republic, asked the big question that would never not occupy us, which is, why be just? And he had to reply to these badass critics, Thrasymachus, Callicles, you name them, who are like, I want to be a tyrant. Being a tyrant is awesome. Look at all you get to do. And Socrates had to come up with reasons as to why, not just that tyranny is bad, but that tyranny is bad for you, and that living according to these other values is not just good for society, but is good for you. And that's what I'm trying to do in the book. Suggests that living up to these liberal values is good, I think, at a macro level, for society, sure, but that it has its own rewards and benefits that are not to be underestimated.
Chris Beem
This is the human condition we're talking about, right? There are always going to be problems that are going to be left unsolved, and, and, and it's just a matter of, you know, well, a you know, your argument would be that there's not a lot of choice, right in terms of where we are right now, liberalism is the water we swim in, you know, in your metaphor, literally and also that there are, we are, we are unwilling to speak to the, you know, genuine and important advantages that come from this culture could come from this, you know, sunlight spreading everywhere.
Alex Lefebvre
Yeah, that is, there's so much in that set of remarks you just made. And I'll start. I love that you cited the Berlin I love that quote, and it's important to me. So the idea there so raw CITES, I say Berlin one of the great Cold War liberals. And Berlin's putting forward the idea that value systems, great values, great religions, great civilizations, great moral systems are not altogether commensurable that you can't just, like, take the best bits of Christianity, the best bits of Islam, the best bits of liberalism, and like, go away on a picnic together and feast on that these value systems crowd each other out in really important ways, and you, if you hold to them robustly, you can't hold to others robustly. So what I want to do in my next book, I'm starting this. I don't know how I'm going to do it exactly, but my next book is going to be called, we'll talk in 10 years time, Chris and we can we can talk then. But the idea is, is the title would be something like, what do they want? And I want to work with insiders from non liberal regimes and illiberal regimes to ask them what their conception of the good life is, why they think it satisfies real human desires and longing, and how their state aggressively and actively promotes it. So I want to work with people who believe in the CCP in China, people who believe in the Modi government in India, people who believe in the more aggressive right wing strands of the United States. And I want to take them at face value. I want to say that this isn't just about kind of like power or something like that, that there are robust value systems. They're just not liberal, and they're going to elevate different human satisfactions and different human desires to their core, kind of like the module of furniture I was talking about earlier, and that it's good to see what options of spirituality, let's say, are on the table today, as promoted by the most powerful institutions on Earth. And I want to get a snapshot. It's not going to be a critical book, but I want to see Isaiah Berlin's point. I want to see what are the great goods and how they crowd each other out. Now, coming to liberalism, you point out something very two things. One is that the idea that we're sunk until so many of us are sunk into liberalism, and that we don't just haven't, like, look, if I could, I don't know what this even means, if I could just hop to Christianity and be a Christian believer, maybe I would. I don't know, but that's not a live spiritual option for me. I can't just flick on a switch and believe in the divinity of Christ and believe in the other worldliness of his values and all that stuff like they're they're noble human values. They're just not live for me and don't rip me. And so what the book is trying to say is that, look, this is the hand we have been dealt, fellow liberals, particularly. So I feel like I'm the elder of this I'm born in 1979 I feel I'm the elder of this crowd. But people who were raised to me, right? But generally, but the idea of people who have been really raised in a kind of, like a full blown secular kind of culture, where that permeates the airwaves, etc, etc. And I'm saying that, look, it might be nice to be something else, but you're not. And so why don't you take that thing that you have seriously? And this brings me to the last point, which you raised, which is the darkest night stuff. And I think that liberalism can be faulted on this. I think that when the chips are down on the incredible moments of devastation of life, losing a child, your own mortality, liberalism. May not be equipped to handle that, but it is equipped to handle 98% of your life. And so then it becomes, I don't know this sounds like I'm being a rational choice theorist in a weird way, but like, Do you want a morality that prepares you for the 2% of your life, or do you want a morality that is fully adequate for the 98% and if we have our wobbles and our terrors at the 2% and we have to clutch at straws for some other value system that isn't our own, just to kind of make sense of these, these, these human these deep human losses, then so be it. I'll take that loss. But if it's like carrying, I think the alternative is to say I'm always going to carry around a snowsuit because it's going to Blizzard one day. And I don't know, I get, I get the impulse, I just don't know how practical, but that is right, right, desirable.
Chris Beem
It's that's really, it's really interesting. And, and we could continue this part for a long time, but, but I want to bring this in for a landing and, and this is the question I want to ask you about, and it's completely different. But this podcast is called democracy works, and you know the McCourtney Institute for Democracy, right? So, so I want to ask you about the relationship that you see between liberalism and democracy. And here's what here, let me just set it up this way. I have argued more, you know, successfully, sometimes not successfully, others, that democracy doesn't make theoretical sense without liberalism, which is to say, without equal rights. There is no legitimate theoretical or moral reason to affirm political equality right. So you know the old saw about, you know, democracy is two wolves and a pig deciding what's for dinner. That's not democracy. Because all those you know, every person, every every part of that conversation, every part of that vote, has status and has rights. And if they don't have that, then, then democracy is just, you know, power, right? You're named the majority, and I'm wondering whether or not you agree with what you think about that, and how you understand the relationship, but you lead these two really big and important terms.
Alex Lefebvre
You say you're gonna land the plane here. I feel like I'm just about to pull into Chicago, where you are, and now you're asking me to go to Orlando. I'm down with it. So let's see. I'll try to keep it to a to a minimum here. So I think that we I think that interestingly, we superficially disagree and we deeply agree. So I'll run it up this way, so that if you look at the history of liberalism, so we live today in a liberal democratic world, and we think that that those two things just work together. It's like peaches and cream. It's like that little hyphen between those two words just makes it appear like a coherent package. And that may be true today, but the fact is, is that historically, that took a lot of work and negotiation to achieve. So liberalism was an 18th and, excuse me, a 19th century doctrine born in rebellion against Napoleon and especially in reaction to the French Revolution and to its perceived populism. And for the first kind of, like, 40 years of liberal developments, in here, we have really great thinkers. I'm talking banjot Alexis de tuckville. Mill is a kind of tricky case, but all of these people were liberals, but they were terrified of democracy. And some of the more kind of reactionary ones, the kind of aristocratic liberals, just tried to close the door on democracy. Others were a bit more kind of like, not just open minded, but realists, like tuck bill, he's like, we got a deal. And so they tried to forge a compromise. But the the harmony between liberalism and democracy is a hard one achievement where, especially liberalism was created to be a kind of prophylactic or a protection against certain populist urges. So if you go through your head and just list all the major liberal institutions, individual rights, division of powers, judicial review, all that stuff. All those are expressly counter majoritarian institutions. They're all designed to, like, pump the brakes in some important ways, about about potential excesses of democracy. So that reconciliation took a long, long time what I see in the world today. And so I'm going to bounce the question actually, back to back to you, what I see in the world today, when I look around at all the kind of challengers and critics of liberal democracy, is that I don't see them as undemocratic. I see them as illiberal. And in particular, what I see them doing is putting a crowbar or rising apart democracy on the one hand and then liberalism on the other hand. And for me, that makes a lot of I'm not saying that's normatively good, but I think that that's descriptively kind of accurate, that I don't think it's if you see democracy in narrow terms, like sovereignty of the people and majority decision, then the wolves pig example, is democratic, right? It is a domination of a minority by majority, but by. Majority rule. And that might be what's going on in many parts of the world today, that majorities are happy to assert themselves without too many scruples over minorities. And it can still be democratic in the sense of popular sovereignty, and kind of numerically majority will the majority, but it's not liberal democratic. So I would be, I think it's, I think it's analytically important to call a country like right now, like Hungary or India or turkey or Russia, I think that it's important to call those democracies, but I think it's very important to call them illiberal democracies. And so it's that prizing apart that I think is very important. What do you think about
Chris Beem
No, I mean, you know that's illiberal democracy is straight out of orban's mouth in Hungary and and I do think you're right that the the the way that democracy goes south is when it becomes, you know, populism and and becomes reactive. And, you know, moves so, moves quickly, right? Without, thinking, or without any kind of sense of of, you know, ethics or, let alone long term planning, right and, and I do think you're right that, that you know just about every you know extent version of liberal democracy has those breaks in place. But, you know, in US context, and really just about every other democracy that's been founded since then, there are, there, you know, part of that founding is some, some some listing of rights and and those are not merely structural or procedural. They're moral right that that has part of us moving in this. In order to make a more perfect union, we have to agree to these things, and these things are grounded in the idea that we are all free and equal, and you know, and you know, and that's where we have to start. And if we don't start there, democracy is nothing more than cannot be anything more than tyranny of majority, no matter what structures we have.
Alex Lefebvre
I agree with that. Yeah. So this is where I feel that we had superficial disagreement, but deep, deep agreement. Well, all right.
Chris Beem
Well, then maybe that's maybe that's the place to end. I could continue this a long time. I just think, honestly, it is a rare experience in our in our business, to read a book that is actually readable. So congratulations. I really enjoyed it. And and, and I, you know, I recommend it for everyone who's just kind of trying to get a sense of where we are today, and and and, and how to think about our culture and and, and what we what we need to do, and, and I hope that your book is part of this kind of renaissance of of reflecting on Rawls now that we have some distance from him. So anyway. Alex LeFevre, thank you so much for your time. Really, really enjoyed talking to you.
Alex Lefebvre
It's been a pleasure. Thank you.