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The Radical Liberal Response | Andy Craig
159 Plays2 months ago
In this episode of the Project Liberal podcast, hosts Max Marty and Tyler Harris engage in an illuminating conversation with Andy Craig, Fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies. Following his recent piece in The Unpopulist, Andy makes a compelling case for a more strident, unapologetic liberalism in response to America's current illiberal trajectory. The discussion explores how liberalism has historically been a radical force for change—from early democracy movements to civil rights—and how it must reclaim this bold reformist tradition to counter rising authoritarianism.
Topics Discussed:
- Why liberalism needs to move beyond a stale defense of the status quo and reclaim its radical reformist tradition
- How both centrist establishment Democrats and the progressive left wing have failed to offer compelling liberal alternatives
- The housing crisis and immigration reform as potential rallying points for a revitalized liberalism
- The breakdown of democratic norms and the normalization of political violence in American politics
- The importance of reclaiming free speech as a core liberal value Electoral reform and the case for proportional representation to improve American democracy
- The strategic necessity of thinking long-term about liberal institutional reforms
The conversation delves into how liberalism finds itself in an oppositional space against an increasingly illiberal administration, and why Democrats need to emphasize the constitutional crisis at hand rather than engaging in politics as usual. Andy argues that a radical liberal alternative—distinct from both centrism and democratic socialism—offers the most viable path forward for those committed to defending constitutional democracy and individual liberty.
- A Liberalism Without Fear or Apology: https://www.theunpopulist.net/p/a-liberalism-without-apology-or-fear
- Follow Andy Craig: https://theunpopulist.net/author/andy-craig
- Learn more about the Institute for Humane Studies: https://theihs.org/
- Project Liberal: https://projectliberal.org/
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Transcript
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:01
Speaker
All right, everyone, welcome to another episode of the Project Liberal podcast. I am your recurring host, Max Marty, today joined by Tyler Harris.
00:00:13
Speaker
Hey, Max, it's great to be here. Thank you very much. And I'm very excited because we have a conversation today with Andy Craig. Andy Craig is a a thinker and writer of much renown in our space and is currently with IHS, which is the Institute for Humane Studies at George Mason.
00:00:32
Speaker
ah Andy, I will seem like an amateur. what is your What is your full title over there and what did I miss in the intro? Plain and simple, I'm just a fellow at the Institute for Humane Studies.
00:00:43
Speaker
Ah, a a fellow and a good fellow at that. um and Thank you, Andy, for being here. i look forward to chatting with you. Thanks. Looking forward to it. Glad to be here.
Advocacy for Radical Liberal Reforms
00:00:53
Speaker
And so the I'm sure we can have as freewheeling a conversation as we like, but the impetus for asking you on is that you had a ah piece recently that you, I believe, had published in The Unpopulist. It may have gone around to other places, but calling specifically for a much more strident, much more unapologetic liberalism in the face of America's current illiberal administration.
00:01:20
Speaker
ah Perhaps for our listeners, you could explore that thesis a little bit. Sure. No, ah this is something that I think has been bubbling up for a long time, particularly in the in the aftermath of the 2024 election.
00:01:35
Speaker
um The perception that that liberalism in the broad sense, not just what we would call classical, but essentially in in that vein, um has fallen into a kind of stale defense of status quo institutions um and has lacked the kind of radical reformist tradition that liberalism is has historically embodied and that is uninspiring to people and I think that's part of what we saw with the kind of mainstream Democrats going down in flames last November
00:02:13
Speaker
And so i think it's important to acknowledge that people do have a lot of complaints that aren't baseless about the ah kind of pre-Trump status quo ante of our our institutions and our policy failures, and that there are a lot of important...
00:02:29
Speaker
fundamentally liberal answers to those problems that have been neglected. um So on on things ranging from from housing to rent seeking ah to to all all sorts of policy questions, the kind of disgruntlement with the bureaucratic state, there are good important answers, immigration, that we need to be out there pushing. And that's the only way to give some people something to rally around.
00:02:55
Speaker
um You know, you had a ah situation where Trump ah was able to run as kind of the radical change candidate, and that gave people something that ah was missing from the other side of the aisle.
00:03:09
Speaker
How long do you think that's been the case, that that's been missing? Because I was just, when you were saying change, I was remembering that, of course, Obama's campaign slogan was hope and change, as I recall.
00:03:20
Speaker
um So do you think that was just um a slogan but had nothing to do with reality? There was no real change and very little hope under the Obama administration? Or how would you, or... or yeah Well, it was successful as a rhetorical posture. People were obviously very mad at at the last years of the Bush administration. There was a strong backlash. I mean, to a degree, each new president is somewhat elected as a backlash against their predecessor. Yeah.
00:03:48
Speaker
But there's certainly the case that there was not, as it turned out, a whole lot of radical change. I mean, they did. I think Obamacare is the most is the thing most people would name. And that was substantial, whatever we think of its merits. It was it was it was something.
00:04:03
Speaker
But beyond that, you know, there was a lot of a lot of the backlash had been over foreign policy. And there was not nearly as much actual change as as people wanted on that out of the Obama years.
00:04:15
Speaker
um But I think this goes back longer. um to To what Hayek wrote about, kind of complaining about, that in in America, liberalism was such a broad, shared thing for so long, particularly in the in the post-war era and then especially kind of the post-civil rights era, um where our all our politics took place in kind of a right-liberal versus left-liberal framework.
00:04:40
Speaker
um But the the fundamentals of constitutional rule of law, that we have an electoral democracy, that we have checks and balances, all those things weren't really up for grabs. And so, you know, there was less impetus.
00:04:54
Speaker
impetus to focus on those kind of core first principles, liberalism. um And there was, you know, in part due to the dysfunction of Congress ah to address real major policy problems, the concentration of power in the presidency.
00:05:11
Speaker
um There was a long time where things kind of built up. ah where there weren't necessary keeping up with the times and addressing people's complaints about it. And so that that goes back to decades, at least. And now, all of a sudden, we're in a position where actual illiberal authoritarianism is really on the table.
Liberalism's Identity within the Democratic Party
00:05:35
Speaker
And so in order to counter that, I think we do have to get back to stressing a message about those broadly shared principles of the American tradition. Is that, I wonder, you know, you mentioned liberalism in its historical context, and it just has me thinking back about these moments where liberalism has been this strident force for change and reform, going back to the early democracy movements of the, you know in Europe in the 1840s, through the abolition movement as a radical, liberal, change-oriented movement, through a Ph.D.: Human rights in the context of ah you know anti colonialism in the late 19 early 20th centuries into the civil rights movement of the 1960s these big liberal cause celebrate's do we.
00:06:26
Speaker
Is liberalism lacking that now? Is there one on the horizon? what what is the sort of unifying cause for a strident liberalism to say, this is this is a fundamental this is a problem that's a fundamental affront to human dignity, and we need to come together to change it?
00:06:44
Speaker
Well, I name a ah few particular ones that I think are are big ones. One of them is the the housing crisis in the United States. I mean, that's one of the big entrenched policy failures that kind of built up over time and now has real consequences for people. I mean, there's a lot of, ah you know, the fact that a lot of people kind of in my position can look at their grandparents without college degrees, working class people had what would today be million dollar houses.
00:07:11
Speaker
um and so And it's also a particularly acute problem in blue states and cities. um and I mean, that's one of the big things Democrats, even while they're out of power at the federal level, could and should be doing.
00:07:25
Speaker
And we've seen some positive movement. I mean, we've seen organizations, we've seen energy bubbling up with the EMBs. um And so that's one case. I think the other is immigration. um We have seen the total collapse of making an affirmatively pro-immigration argument, ah where the Democratic message has been, you know, actually we'll be more effective managers of keeping the border closed and not having too much immigration.
00:07:51
Speaker
um when you know I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean you have to go as full radical as kind of my ideal, just throw it open, open borders stance, but I do think you have to to make the case that this is the American tradition. This goes back to you know what Thomas Paine called being an asylum for mankind. like That's core to American national identity.
00:08:14
Speaker
And by surrendering that ground of not only should we not make the immigration system more restrictive, that we need to liberalize it, that we need to open it up more, that we need to make it um more under the rule of law, so there is the orderly process of it Because people do, ah you know, the current system has produced chaos in a lot of ways, and that's what fuels some of the backlash against it. But you have to have a liberal answer to how we solve that, and it is having ah orderly
00:08:47
Speaker
ah open, you know, fairly generous immigration policy. um So those are some things. And and i I do think on the global kind of foreign policy level, um you know, rallying against the kind of resurgent global authoritarian alliance led by figures like Putin ah with the war in Ukraine and all that. I mean, there's nuance to...
00:09:10
Speaker
um how interventionist a foreign policy you want to have and like we don't want to swing back to kind of Bush era hawkishness and and adventurism. um But it is something that I think rightly kind of ah excites and agitates the passions when We see something as as blatantly evil going on as as the war in Ukraine.
00:09:33
Speaker
so So those are some examples, I think. um But more broadly, I think there has to be a recognition that our political economy has been in real deep ways corrupted by rent-seeking and by the...
00:09:52
Speaker
You know, I mean, not to sound too lefty about it, because there's market-based answers to this, but there are artificial concentrations of wealth that have been produced by these policies in ways that we are seeing come to to kind of ah really unfortunate fruition in things like ah like, you know, what's going on with Musk and all that.
00:10:12
Speaker
I think most people, when they can so when they think about ah ah radical liberalism, maybe not those of us on this call, but most people would say what they'll think about is ah radical progressivism in the Democratic Party.
00:10:29
Speaker
And so they think, okay, the Democrats need to do something big and exciting to get people energized again for for the Democratic Party. So the Bernie wing is going to be ascendant and it's going to bring us the socialism that, you know, everybody deeply desires, but but isn't getting.
00:10:43
Speaker
um So I feel like liberalism yeah is is doing the liberal as the liberal wing within the Democratic Party is doing everything it can to kind of keep ah it's it's it's running as hard as it can to sort of stay in place by keeping the Democratic Party from going in such a progressive direction that it might want to go, especially right now, while it feels so unmoored ah in these times.
00:11:05
Speaker
So do you think that there's a chance or do you do you see do you worry about that same risk that the the the lesson that the Democrats might take from from hearing that they need to become more kind of radical is not the one that we all hope they would take?
00:11:19
Speaker
No, definitely. That's something I talk about in the piece. that They kind of, on the one hand, you have the um moderate centrist establishment center-left Democrats that, the you know, are kind of that stale defense of the status quo thing.
00:11:33
Speaker
And on the other hand of it, you have what is kind of stale and out of date in its own way, the usual progressive leaning into democratic socialist kind of, um ah you know, we just need bigger government for everything kind of progressivism, the Bernie Sanders wing.
00:11:49
Speaker
And I don't think either of those really works. um I mean, the the kind of hard left stuff doesn't sell. It's unpopular. it doesn't It doesn't work with the voters. Such candidates, when they get nominated, run behind...
00:12:02
Speaker
um the more moderate Democrats, and and particularly in key races. um And on the other hand, it's it's we've seen a development that I think is very positive, and this is part of what I've been leaning into, is what Project Liberal is obviously doing, too, of reclaiming the word liberal. And there's been an opportunity there because it has become a term of disparagement on the left in a way that it didn't you know used to be so much. And so we are to some degree...
00:12:31
Speaker
correcting um another thing Hayek bemoaned about the terminology here is how liberal in an American context came to being progressive or leftist and that kind of thing.
00:12:43
Speaker
um And that's not, I mean, I think the the language beyond just our circles, just kind of general usage is shifting in a way that people are starting to get more that when you say liberal, ah you don't mean Bernie Sanders.
00:12:56
Speaker
um and And in the current crisis, um it's it's largely been orthogonal to those that split. I mean, there have been people in both wings of the Democratic Party who have been ah very bad about kind of, you know, we've got to roll over and accommodate Trump and we have to move in that direction.
00:13:16
Speaker
i mean, Bernie Sanders himself was out there talking about how tariffs are good, which is a longstanding kind of labor position on the on the left.
Reclaiming Free Speech and Liberal Values
00:13:24
Speaker
But then... um You know, then you look at at like Ocasio-Cortez, she's been out there giving people a a more hardline anti-Trump message that's not really about necessarily that kind of leftist policy.
00:13:39
Speaker
And on the flip side, on the moderate wing, um Jamie Raskin is somebody I would point to who's also ah really able to lean into articulating the kind of constitutional values at stake and who understands those issues. Whereas...
00:13:54
Speaker
Somebody like Jared Golden, a a moderate Democrat out of Maine from a purple district, has also been doing the, you know, oh, Trump's got some good points and we have to move. You know, I mean, you saw the votes for the the the Lake and Riley Act, all the Democrats who voted for that.
00:14:09
Speaker
um So, I mean, I think it's important to, like, stress that that neither of these wings has it right on what a more kind of radical liberalism in the 21st century message would be.
00:14:24
Speaker
You know, i it's interesting that we talk about these wings of the Democratic Party, and you mentioned that both of them have had this sort of, have had individual actors who have...
00:14:35
Speaker
placated Trump and not been particularly great on on messaging just getting from a tactical perspective since we're in this moment where liberalism finds itself in an oppositional space right we have this increasingly illiberal administration and liberalism is going to take on the role of an opposition movement and opposition philosophy ah Is it incumbent on liberals in in any way to sort of ah give credit where it's due as it is to an administration that that might occasionally, you know, be a broken clock that's that's right twice a day? yeah
00:15:13
Speaker
Should we say, you know what, it is a bad idea to have the penny around or I'm glad to have plastic straws back or like do we have to give props to this – to this administration that's moving the country in a very liberal direction or tactically as part of strident's digging our heels in saying if 99 things are bad and one thing is good, I don't need to go out of my way to talk about the one thing.
00:15:38
Speaker
Let's talk about the 99 things and let's message on that strongly. you know well It is a careful needle to thread because I do think there are, I mean, I'm with you on abolishing the penny and I think paper straws are bad and um to some degree the broader message of kind of dissatisfaction with sclerotic government bureaucracy and that kind of thing. I think it's important to immediately pivot to the way they're doing it is not...
00:16:03
Speaker
is not ideal that like you know we're not we're not going to just completely junk the constitution and give absolute power to elon musk to go run around ripping wires out of the government wherever he wants um and that's not the way to to address these sorts of things um ah but i mean yeah i think the the biggest thing that you've seen Some movement on in ways that is justified, ah but you have to be careful about it, is some of the backlash against, ah you know, i mean, i woke is kind of a a a problematic term in a lot of ways, but like the over-the-top stuff that was going on there in terms of DEI, and
00:16:47
Speaker
it's not nearly as much as they make it out to be. They overstate it. they Then they swing way too far in the opposite direction and in some ways that are just overtly racist and bigoted.
00:17:00
Speaker
um But, I mean, I think you've seen... ah pet Pete Buttigieg was having an interview with David Axelrod where he talked about this, where they looked at the DNC meeting they had where they were electing their their chair and other officers.
00:17:12
Speaker
And they had all this stuff, you
Internal Democratic Challenges and Opposition Strategies
00:17:14
Speaker
know, we need... ah This seat is reserved for a left-handed Polynesian and like we have to check all those kinds of boxes. and like People are sick of that. um and and i don't and it's And it's in its own way can be a liberal.
00:17:28
Speaker
um that it you know it It cuts against the kind of individualistic quality of the liberal tradition and is is not the is not the way to go. So... Um, I think that's probably the biggest thing where you can, you, you know, again, you have it's not in exactly giving credit to them, um, to a degree kind of the backlash, like affirms the, uh, basis of all this stuff that there actually is still a lot of, a lot of bigotry, uh, that goes in authoritarian directions. Um, um,
00:18:01
Speaker
But you have to develop a more classically liberal approach to what policy should be and ah ditch some of the the weird off-putting language police stuff where you come up with these new terms that everybody hates and and and that kind of thing. So, I mean, that's not entirely baseless.
00:18:24
Speaker
I think what what I was seeing ah years ago, some some years back when I was living in Silicon Valley, was exactly that a lot of people just felt really upset about all the woke stuff. And and I saw it at you know private events and things where people would talk more candidly and they would all be...
00:18:44
Speaker
fuming about this stuff internally. And I think a lot of what has resulted is that sort of is the backlash, the reaction to that. Though I fear that now we're going to have a reaction to the reactions. And so as you're saying, Trump has gone so far in the other direction that we're going to see this kind of seesaw effect where those kinds of sort of woke identity politics things yeah know go from one extreme to the other extreme to one extreme to the other extreme and administration after administration rather than just landing on some a reasonable comfortable middle ground of how we treat these things.
00:19:22
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that's that leans into um the failures of our electoral system that we really have to grapple with, the the way it fuels polarization and the failures of the...
00:19:34
Speaker
really unique on a global level, the the strictness of our two-party only system, ah where where you do get that kind of seesaw and back and forth and it's hard to come to stable solutions in the middle and that that fuels a lot of regime uncertainty. I mean, it has economic consequences when you have that kind of, ah you know, ping-ponging back and forth on things.
00:19:58
Speaker
But it also makes it hard to for us to find kind of just a sense of stability and normalcy that like our entire society and everything about it is not up for grabs every four years.
00:20:08
Speaker
um So that is, I mean, that is a real danger that like they will, there will be a negative polarization that pushes them even further in a worse direction on that stuff.
00:20:20
Speaker
And I think it's still the case, though, that if that's what they do, it's not going to sell. Like, they're not going to win elections on it. um I mean, I think even when, you know, we talk a lot about, I mean, it's true that there's a lot of outright bigotry in Trumpism's base and message, but it's also true that they gained with minority voters. And that was part of what fueled Trump's victory among Latinos and even some gains among among black voters, among Asian voters. Yeah.
00:20:49
Speaker
and And that's because they have their, i mean, like, a lot of them aren't, you know, it's off-putting when you when you do have these kind of in-the-bubble coastal elites, some kid fresh out of Columbia or Stanford or something who wants to tell people, I'm representing you with, you know, making people use Latinx and stuff like that.
00:21:11
Speaker
um and And so, you know, the yeah, there is ah there is a real danger to that. And I think that's part of what, you know, part of the case here. is that why Democrats need to move in a radical liberal direction, which is something different from both centrism and the the hard left.
00:21:28
Speaker
you know We sort of talked around it a little bit these the for the past few minutes, but I want to kind of approach it head on maybe. Is this conversation about where liberalism needs to go and where liberalism needs to be a conversation that resides more or less exclusively within the Democratic Party right now? Or is there a broader basis on which we ah can conceive of and talk about liberalism?
00:21:53
Speaker
I think in concrete political terms, I mean, it largely is just because there's so little opportunity for um center-right liberalism, you know, what might call liberal conservatism, all these terms that Europeans are more familiar with because ah they have a multi-party system, and and and so it's a little bit more obscure to people.
00:22:13
Speaker
But, I mean, you know, I was at the the principal's first conference, the the Never Trumper event, where the Proud Boys called in a bomb threat. um But, ah like, though though they they get it, and they are an important part of the coalition.
00:22:28
Speaker
um And they should be, and, like, you know, I'm not a necessary kind of partisan political pundit. I mean, I'm not a Democrat. I'm registered independent.
00:22:39
Speaker
um I don't particularly want to be a Democrat. Like, I still have all my center-right libertarian background complaints with them. um But we are in a moment where there's a need for a a grand coalition, um and that's going to have to stretch from the center-right out to to people on the the further left like AOC.
00:23:01
Speaker
um You know, the fact that Bill Kristol and AOC are more or less de facto in the same political camp and party these days is is the reality. Yeah. you know as we look out further to, ah ah God willing, a post-Trump GOP at some point, one way or another, if nothing else, he's not immortal.
00:23:20
Speaker
um You know, that's that's going to be a ah a big part of that conversation. and and But it's really hard to project this far out how much viability it will have.
Trump's Influence and Liberal Response
00:23:30
Speaker
Like, are we going to have um a more, you know, traditional, principled, conservative, less populous candidate in the primaries at some point who's viable?
00:23:41
Speaker
you know, four or eight years down the line. i hope so. But for now, for this immediate moment, um the opposition to illiberal populist authoritarianism by necessity within the confines of our two-party system is going to be a ah conversation largely about Democrats and what kind of message and direction they need to move in.
00:24:05
Speaker
I mean, you were you said you were at that principal's first conference. um I saw ah a yeah recording of I think it was Chris Christie who had spoken there at that at that event.
00:24:17
Speaker
And um he was one of the ones, of course, who for a long time was a big backer of Trump and then you know famously turned that around. um So you've been saying we've been saying that most of the opposition going to be coming from within the Democratic Party.
00:24:34
Speaker
Do you feel like there's still a lot of Republicans in Congress or or Republicans in the in in the party in other ways that are secretly waiting for the moment when they could, yeah ah you know, put their hand up and say, no, no, no, I'm out of this. I'm i'm i'm not really one of them.
00:24:50
Speaker
Or do you think now with the purges and and and how long it's been, they're almost all true believers? I think there are still a lot of them. It's a lot less than it used to be.
00:25:01
Speaker
I mean, you know, we certainly saw more Republican pushback and less lockstep in the first term and and ultimately leading up to January 6th and the aftermath of that.
00:25:12
Speaker
And now it's a lot grimmer. I mean, the fact that all these crazy... nominees came down who would have been dead on arrival before and they couldn't find four republicans in the senate to vote at the same time against any one of them to kill them um is is a pretty grim sign um but it's absolutely the case that you know like if you talk to members of congress in private a lot of them still hate them a lot of them will be will be like that um i mean the the unfortunate reality is a lot of them have a real fear for their physical safety um, that they, they fear the, the kind of incitement of, they get an angry Trump tweet and, you know, God, who knows some crazy person could show up at their kid's school or something.
00:25:53
Speaker
Um, and that has moved votes on some things. Um, You know, I think there's potential there. We could get to enough of a backlash collapse thing where Trump's ability to police and purge the party and demand absolute loyalty ah breaks down a little bit. And and we see ah that happening. But I i don't think.
00:26:14
Speaker
I mean, it's kind of, it goes handin hand in hand. For that to happen, there has to be some degree of collapse in Trump's popularity, and that requires good effective messaging from the Democrats in order to chip away and lower his approval ratings and all that kind of thing. And then that gives some some some of the better Republicans more room to play with and in terms of coming out against him on on at least some things.
00:26:40
Speaker
You know, it strikes me that ah for the second time now, we've sort of casually touched on political violence as a feature of the current landscape. um You know, what you just mentioned with members of Congress and earlier with the bomb threats called in at the principal's first convention.
00:26:59
Speaker
ah it it seems to me that for at least for most of modern politics,
00:27:07
Speaker
Democrats and Republicans alike have sort of all been playing this this political ortho game, right? there's ah An ortho game is ah a competitive exercise with two or more players that where everyone agrees on the rule set and there's some sort of ranking at the end to determine who's won, right? And so we we play politics as an ortho game in this country and in most civilized countries. That's what democracy is. It's the gamification of conflict, right?
00:27:33
Speaker
And ah there's this sense now that you no longer have an agreed upon set of rules being followed, whether that's the erosion of institutional guardrails, the implementation or threat of implementation of political violence that would ordinarily be way outside the bounds of of what would be considered political decency.
00:27:54
Speaker
how How does that breakdown of the rules? If you agree with me that it's occurring at all, I suppose that's where the question begins. But then if if we do agree that that's a fundamental transformation of the ability to play this political game that we've all of our lives been comfortable playing, how does that change how liberalism has to act as an oppositional force when the other side is not playing by the same set of rules?
00:28:19
Speaker
No, that's a huge problem. I mean, one of the famous quips and in political science and theory is democracy is a system where parties lose elections. um and the You know, the the kind of implication of that is that accept it. accepted um But we're in a position now where one of the parties does not accept that they can legitimately lose elections and is willing to use violence to that end. I mean...
00:28:43
Speaker
You know, for God's sake, he sicked a lynch mob and and they sacked Congress. And now he's back in power and pardoned all those people who are now out running around threatening people. um That's a real problem. I think one of the implications it has for for liberalism is, i mean, one, we do need to lean into calling out and opposing the the normalization of political violence in the way that Trump and his movement, um yeah I mean, it's it's literal terrorism.
00:29:11
Speaker
um And that's that's a grim situation to be in. And it's a it is a radical thing to say that the President of the United States is a terrorist. um But he is. and And that's what's going on. But the other aspect of it is, and I wrote a piece about this at MSNBC, um liberals really need to reclaim and fight on the ground of free speech.
00:29:32
Speaker
Because that's ultimately what this is. I mean, it's it's an attack on free speech. It's an attack on people's ability to peacefully advocate and operate within a ah democratic system. And, ah you know, we're seeing not just the violence, but it's related to the all the the frivolous lawsuits to punish people for speech they don't like, and now the threat of state retaliation against speech that they don't like. And so, you know, I think it's important...
00:30:00
Speaker
um One of the really unfortunate things that's happened and that too many have gone along with is that kind of the Musk camp and the broader MAGA movement, they claimed the mantle of free speech, were being censored and whatnot. And a lot of that was bogus. Some of it had some kernels of truth to it, but most of it was bogus.
00:30:21
Speaker
um But I think it's important. I mean, you want to talk about kind of the radicalism of the liberal tradition. Free speech has always been at the forefront of that. I mean, you you can go back to lots of cases, but like the free speech movement at Berkeley wasn't, you know, in the grand scheme of things all that long ago. It's within living memory.
00:30:37
Speaker
um You know, or the ACLU defending the right of the Nazis to march at Skokie and that kind of thing. um And when we see now the threats to roll back cases like New York Times versus Sullivan and the legal protections and the exceptional in a good way ah free speech ah tradition of American jurisprudence, which is is really a big outlier in the world in ah and a good positive way. We have by far, at least on paper, the strongest free speech protections in the world, and that's worth a lot.
00:31:07
Speaker
um But we're seeing that undermined, and the the use and normalization of threats and violence is part of it. um The use of state retaliation is part of it, and the use of these um they're called slap suits, uh, uh, and the, and the need to have better laws against that kind of thing. I mean, we're in ah We're in a situation now where a lot of mainstream publications are reticent because effectively, if you criticize somebody who's rich enough to burn the money on lawyers, like rich people can hand out seven figure fines. Even if you ultimately lose the case, even they ultimately lose the case, which they would in most instances, um, the, the litigation, the process is punishment.
00:31:50
Speaker
Um, And the the leveraging of the risk aversion for a chilling effect, particularly on institutions, um it can be a little bit hard to explain to people because it feels like, and it's true, you can still go on Twitter or Blue Sky or whatever and tweet how much you hate Trump and all that, and the Gestapo isn't showing up to haul you off for it.
00:32:09
Speaker
um But it's it's it's a lot of the model of what we've seen in places like Hungary, the kind of illiberal democracy where you have the incumbent party that disrupts and suppresses opposition it just enough that they're not electorally viable, but doesn't go to the kind of full-scale, Stalinist repression of... of of people. And so it can give that illusion of normalcy. It can feel like we still have free speech and free civil society and know, well, and the the the liberals lost the election. So, um but I think,
00:32:45
Speaker
It's a difficult thing to kind of wrap our head around. ah But I think that's got to be part of the case. i mean, we're talking about issues that a radical liberalism needs to put front and center. The fact that these these people are waging a censorship campaign, and that's what it is, ah needs to be a big part of the message.
00:33:06
Speaker
i hope I hope that that happens, Andy. though i For many years, as you know, the left was um ah was was quite far from from what you're describing. of eight They were were... Hate speech laws and things like that. Yeah, yeah. So I hope they discover what you're describing.
00:33:27
Speaker
um What do you think... Trump would would have to do. So so a little bit ago you you mentioned that there would need to be some kind of rallying cry, some kind of shelling point that would allow people from ah the Democratic Party, the the the liberals within ah the conservative movement, et cetera, to sort of get together and say, here is something we can finally, where Trump is going to ah torpedo his approval ratings and we can finally say, okay, now we're going to stand up and do something about this.
00:33:58
Speaker
um It seems to me that even if one of these January 6th rioters were to ah murder a member of Congress or or one of their children or something, that probably wouldn't be enough because Trump would easily be able to say, I didn't say it wasn't me. You know, I didn't do it.
00:34:16
Speaker
um And ah on foreign policy, um you know, he could be he could be caught, you know, going to McDonald's and having a wonderful ah meal with with the Kims or or with Putin or whoever. And that that seems like it won't.
00:34:31
Speaker
um So it seems like maybe there's only ah ah the only two things I can think of would be a lot of inflation very quickly, maybe not hyperinflation, but numbers probably worse than we saw even with Biden um would have to surface.
00:34:47
Speaker
and And maybe because Americans really seem to dislike inflation, maybe that would be enough. um And the other thing is perhaps clear signs that he's losing it, just like just like Biden, um in a very public, very obvious, very ah ah forward-facing way. you know he has ah he has ah He has a stroke you know while he's standing on a stage somewhere. Maybe that would be enough um to suggest that he's not fit for the job but Can you think of anything else that could possibly rally people?
00:35:20
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, it's ah that's a tough question. I mean, we've seen how persistent his kind of the floor of his base of support is, as, you know, even even when the worst, it's it's in the low 40s, you know, um and and um right now it's higher than that.
00:35:38
Speaker
um I think those are... in the right direction for how things could go to the point where there's a a kind of breaking point. um I think the increasingly overt lawlessness and authoritarianism, like I think the chaos too of the Doge stuff, you know, i mean, you know on this call, I think we would all generally agree that like we want free markets and smaller government and that kind of thing, but that doesn't mean you go randomly fire a bunch of national park rangers.
00:36:07
Speaker
um And that kind of thing that's going on is going to cause direct impacts in people's lives. But certainly, i mean, the big thing would be some kind of economic crash or, you know, a big recession um and inflation and and things and that thing could absolutely fuel more of a backlash.
00:36:27
Speaker
um But one of my big complaints about the Democrats is that they have not been acting like and they have not been sending the message that we are in a real constitutional crisis.
00:36:39
Speaker
And a lot of that goes to how they're not really making a big dramatic fight on the floors of Congress like they should. And so I don't necessarily know if that's enough to to do it, but um I think it's one of the things where we would see at least some more movement in that direction. I mean, they're already talking about opening sham criminal investigations into Democratic members of Congress. So like if they they haul Chuck Schumer off to Gitmo or something, I don't know, maybe maybe that's the kind of thing. i do think we're going to see on the immigration stuff, there will be backlash, particularly as really awful stories come out. um
00:37:16
Speaker
maybe maybe Maybe, again, that's not enough, ah but i may it could be that kind of it's the cumulative thing where all of these things chip away at it to a ah to a degree, and then eventually it adds up to some kind of breaking point.
00:37:31
Speaker
um But it it is really essential that we... emphasize that this is not just um bad policy coming down the pike, that this is not just, you know, oh we disagree with cutting that agency or or that's going to be a you know ah bad bad policy move.
00:37:51
Speaker
um This is the destruction of our constitutional republic. um... and we need to really lean into that i mean he is trying to be a dictator uh... and there are are and that still has power in the american imagination uh... that's our worst enemies that's the antithesis of our national identity and And Democrats did a little bit of that. ah in you know They moved in that direction in talking about it in the campaign.
00:38:20
Speaker
um But it it comes across as weird and hollow when you say that while also otherwise doing normal politics and normal policy issues. Like, if that's really the case and you really mean it, then nothing else matters.
00:38:34
Speaker
um And they're not giving that impression. you know Democrats in Congress haven't done anything that would look out of place if we were in the second month of a Mitt Romney administration.
00:38:45
Speaker
um And so when you have that and then you try to come out and say, you know, this is a ah ah real authoritarian crisis and they're destroying democracy and the rule of law and all that, um it doesn't it doesn't hit in the way that it needs to.
00:39:00
Speaker
um And there are some outliers in that. and I'll i give a shout think J.B. Pritzker is an example of somebody who's correctly talking about this in a way that um is good. you know, like I mentioned, Raskin, I think AOC. There's a few out there that that do get it a bit better, but it's certainly not the leadership. It's certainly not Jeffries and Schumer. who are frankly just complete clowns.
00:39:23
Speaker
I mean, you talk about kind of the need for a Democratic Party. Part of it is they need a real urgent leadership turnover. um We are not going to see anything like what we need being led by the current leadership in Congress.
00:39:39
Speaker
Well, let me let me make a very quick and this is out out of character for me because I'm also not the Democrat. I've never considered myself in any way associated with them. But ah to defend their position for a moment, maybe their view is if we keep saying that.
00:39:57
Speaker
um, Trump is a, this is a constitutional crisis. This is ah a tyrant, a dictator. You know, we're all, we're all in peril, et cetera. The, the, this experiment of, of the United States could come apart.
00:40:09
Speaker
Maybe they, they worry that they're going to be the boy who cried wolf. And then finally, um, uh, people just won't, won't take them seriously. They're saying the same message over and over. um ah they're going to so i mean there were I remember there were stories about how they would used to say during the Bush years, oh, Bush is a terrible dictator and ah and whatever and a tyrant. and you know ok So when you say it so often, it starts to lose its impact.
00:40:32
Speaker
So maybe they're very strategically waiting for the moment in which Trump, for example, defies a court order or something like that, and brazenly just tries to do something that actually could... So they're they're hoping to time their their attack more strategically than just kind of continuously putting it out into the void and eventually getting drowned out.
00:40:55
Speaker
do you Do you think that's possible? and No, that's a fair point. And I do think some of them are probably thinking along those lines. um ah You know, what I would say to that is that what's been going on particularly with with musk i mean that goes to the core structure of government he holds no office he was not appointed to anything um and yet he's been essentially you know put in charge of the entire government and is running around doing a lot of radical things in the uh... you serving the power of the first from congress the the ability to control spending and impoundment so i i think i'm not sure that we like
00:41:33
Speaker
we're necessarily going to have a big dramatic moment where it becomes bigger than what it already is. um Like, I don't know, you know, maybe, i mean, I think it's going to get worse in a lot of ways.
00:41:45
Speaker
um But I think there has been ah real lost opportunity to emphasize that, like, this is starting from, this started from day one.
00:41:56
Speaker
um like these things and has been steamrolling very fast in very huge dramatic ways um and so there's kind of the opposite risk of you know oh why are you saying oh this is this now crosses the line why weren't you saying it before with all that other stuff like that that is its own risk that it can come across as insincere political rhetoric um when when all these other things are going on and now you know Now there's this other one thing that's worse, and you all of a sudden switch into that message.
00:42:29
Speaker
um But it it's it is a difficult thing, and you know I'm not a i'm i'm not a campaign strategist pollster, and I get that they're getting all this feedback saying, you know no, we have to talk about egg prices, and we have to talk about ah you know more material, bread-and-butter, kitchen table kind of issues. and And in a lot of ways at times that would be a correct instinct. I think where it's going wrong is that Democrats have been taking this kind of poll-tested, focus-grouped message as if public opinion is this extrinsic fact they can't influence.
00:43:08
Speaker
um And you don't see that from Trump. I mean, you know, he doesn't he doesn't hold back from saying something because somebody gave him a poll saying it's unpopular. He goes out and says it. And it becomes the position of his party and of half the voters who then rally around it.
00:43:22
Speaker
And so um you you this you know this goes to the kind of the radical boldness message that like if you want to actually move public opinion, you have to be out there saying it.
00:43:33
Speaker
um And you have to but you you can't you can't have this purely passive. mean, that's what comes across as so cynical and fake. And people do recognize that when it's obvious they're just repeating some talking point that they got from a ah pollster or something.
00:43:48
Speaker
um You need the sincerity. You need the authenticity. And I think that is there. I mean, most of them are do have, you talk to them in private, like they have the sincere authenticity of they're panicked about how bad this is and what it means.
Electoral Dynamics and Democratic Strategy
00:44:06
Speaker
um But if you're if you're so timid that, you know, oh, that that that might not poll well or look, his approval ratings are still whatever. You're never going to move the Overton window on where public opinion is.
00:44:19
Speaker
um So i think I think that's kind of the counterpoint to, um well, we need to keep our powder dry, which is like James Carville has been out there advocating that. He just had a New York Times op-ed where he literally said, you know, roll over and wait for a better time to do opposition.
00:44:35
Speaker
And that's just not how being an effective opposition party works. Yeah, and I think you you hit on something really, really critical, which is that strident opens up the opportunity to actually move public opinion instead of chasing it to try to triangulate over this sort of fixed concept of where the electorate is. And I think that's where a lot of the consultants and pollsters, ah Max, that you were at least hypothetically talking about come from is a world of like, let's snapshot where the American people are
00:45:08
Speaker
and let me then advise you on how to carve out a 51% slice of them. Trump had the last eight years to move the electorate, to change the electorate radically...
00:45:20
Speaker
and has committed to doing that. And I think that's not unique to Trumpism. That's not unique to the sort of brand of populist nationalism.
00:45:31
Speaker
It is indicative of being willing to speak unpopular things. And I think that's a tremendously important thing to highlight. um That can certainly work for liberalism. It can work for other philosophies.
00:45:44
Speaker
You know, it's it's it's not philosophically unique. um But it strikes me that the Democratic Party has sort of been unwilling to pick up the baton. And I wonder how much of that you think is to connect it back to something you were talking about earlier, this sort of weddedness to demographics, this sort of the Democratic Party looking at itself and saying, you know,
00:46:10
Speaker
the one The one group of voters that ah actually broke more for Kamala Harris in 2024 than for Joe Biden in 2020 is college-educated white voters.
00:46:23
Speaker
And women in particular, but a Democratic Party looking at itself saying, are we willing to become more white, more educated, less working class, less blue collar, you know, less, ah less monopolistic in our, ah you know, support amongst minority groups?
00:46:44
Speaker
I see a lot of i mean, is that what's holding the Democratic Party back from just committing full in to just let's let's be unabashed, unapologetic, adopt some of these principles and so and let the portions of the electorate that are coming to us come to us ah so that we can, you know, so that we can win.
00:47:02
Speaker
yeah No, they I mean, that is certainly part of it that you have. It doesn't help that you have a bunch of, you know, octogenarians leading the party um who have this this history of, you know, I've got the classic a Democratic coalition, which is like working class union voters plus minorities.
00:47:20
Speaker
um And that's not what the realignment's happening. I mean, that's decades out of date on just the reality of it. um And so, I mean, it doesn't, you know, It doesn't mean that like they should, like, throw those those constituencies under the bus or anything.
00:47:35
Speaker
um But it does mean that you have to accept that, like... you know if you look at European multi-party systems which in some ways kind of make more legible the factions here um the center right to center left socially liberal pro-business parties are invariably they're the upper middle class professionals ah they're they're you know what an American context would be kind of like the suburbs um and we see that on the maps I mean like the blue shifting suburbs has been a big thing
00:48:06
Speaker
um And so and at the same time, like the the idea that you're going to have a ah a union centric labor base when like that's 10 percent of workers or something like that these days, I think is is misguided. Biden was really into that. Like, I'm going to be a classic pro union labor guy. um And, you know, we show it didn't work. I mean,
00:48:27
Speaker
that Part of that is the is the educational divide, which is becoming more and more salient. um And it's a kind of unfortunate thing. If you're the party of college graduates, like that's still the smaller chunk of the electorate. It's about one in three American adults have a college degree.
00:48:44
Speaker
And so that is not itself a winning coalition, but, ah you know, you it's it's a game of inches. ah you take your You take your advances where you can among all the various groups.
00:48:57
Speaker
um And that's an essential an essential part of how you do build a winning coalition is you have to adapt to the reality that ah the traditional, the sixth party system, as we call it in kind of the the typology of American history, has been coming to an end.
00:49:15
Speaker
And like what comes after it is going to have very different dividing lines in terms of who's in which party's coalition. It seems another characteristic of sort of the end of that sixth party system and the beginnings of a shaping of a seventh party system.
00:49:37
Speaker
is this inversion of what has traditionally been the case, you know, and when I came, when I started in politics 20 years ago and in campaign politics, it was ah as as solid a law as any law of human behavior could be in sociology or in political science that low turnout elections favored conservative candidates, favored Republican candidates, that high turnout elections favored left-wing candidates, favored Democratic candidates,
00:50:04
Speaker
widely attributed to the fact that lower information voters would break for the Democratic Party and would break left. ah You had a generation of Republicans committed to trying to restrict access to the ballot box to prevent high turnout, a generation of Democrats trying to cast open as wide as possible, as easy as possible, a a system of voting so that as many people would vote as possible because that would benefit them.
00:50:29
Speaker
ah And for the first time, or maybe the first time clearly, if not the first time literally, i think this last election saw that invert. And you had a very high turnout election ah where where the turnout ah very much seemed to benefit Trump ah to the detriment of Kamala Harris. you You feel like maybe if, you know, if 20 million fewer people had voted, Kamala Harris is probably president right now.
00:50:56
Speaker
yeah and And it's such a wild inversion of what we've known our entire lives. It seems to me that both parties are lagging behind the implications of that.
00:51:09
Speaker
ah How do you see that shaping, you know, as as you kind of open the door to us moving out of the six-party system and into the seventh, how do you see that transforming what that system looks like? No, it's absolutely the case that parties ah have been slow to catch up on that reality. I mean, I saw it in races in going back to at least 2020, and you probably saw it in 2016, too.
00:51:31
Speaker
And it was particularly when Trump was on the ballot himself, personally. um You didn't see it nearly so much still in the midterms. You didn't see it in in kind of special elections so much.
00:51:43
Speaker
um But he does have an ability to turn out ah low propensity voters, people who don't usually religiously show up at the polls to vote every election. um And that cut to his advantage. I mean, one of the, that and the related point that Trump won the popular vote this time, um could I think maybe have a slightly salutary effect on the kind of anti-democratic stuff coming out of the GOP at the election denialism and the, you know like you touched on the kind of ah trying to crack down on, you know, you can call it voter suppression or, or, you know, having, having, making it harder to vote at least.
00:52:26
Speaker
um And I think, you know, maybe we'll see that tempered a little bit more. Um, But, it I mean, it is it is hard for Democrats to accept that lesson, too. And I think maybe 24 was dramatic enough, a demonstration it'll get through. and And, you know, of course, that doesn't mean, like, Democrats should suddenly be the party of making it harder to vote um or that they should embrace any of that that kind of stuff. I mean, there's still the principle of the matter. Yeah.
00:52:53
Speaker
But, you know, in terms when you're looking at political strategy, it's certainly the case that simply assuming high turnout benefits Republicans or benefits Democrats has been reversed now.
00:53:06
Speaker
and there And it goes to that educational divide, too. um You know, I mean, when you have college voters who are a higher propensity to to vote and are breaking Democratic and all that kind of thing, that's that's part of why that's going.
Exploring Electoral Reform
00:53:20
Speaker
Something I want to get your reaction to, Andy, which is um ah earlier you were talking about how in multi-party systems we see the coalition, the group of people, the the that the people who we meet but we might want to call classical liberals or or liberals in the way that we like to use the term.
00:53:40
Speaker
um have a very direct voice in those in in those sorts of political systems. so um We're speaking not too long after the Germans had their election, and i was looking through those results.
00:53:55
Speaker
And i I'm not too familiar with all the parties in Germany. I mean, obviously, we we're becoming more familiar with the far-right parties there. But... I learned a little bit about ah their party structure. And I guess the closest one that I could find to what we might call a classical liberal party is I think it's the FDL or something like that. FTP. FTP. That's what it is.
00:54:15
Speaker
um and And and they receive something like five percent of the vote. Yeah. ah they They fell under the threshold so they didn't get any seats, which is yeah that's the rule there is you have to get at least 5%. And they they fell. Four point something, right?
00:54:32
Speaker
Yeah. um and And when I see those kinds of results, I end up thinking, um Maybe, ah maybe, maybe everything that we're trying to do is just in our own way, sort of counter democratic, maybe people, they really just want, you know, people have just become more populist, um ah less liberal.
00:54:56
Speaker
And, and And that is why we're not seeing as much of a pushback from the Democratic Party. That is why we have seen the rise of Trump and other populists. That is why we're seeing this kind of um ah illiberalism taking hold around the world.
00:55:12
Speaker
And we are we are are dinosaurs that are are pushing against that tide, um but it is ah potentially ultimately ah a losing battle. And we have to figure out other ways, maybe perhaps outside of politics, to try and make the world a more liberal ah place.
00:55:28
Speaker
So would you just say, you know, maybe ah maybe all these... um think tanks, ah you know, on in the Beltway should just just sort of retool and think about how do we you know impact culture or how do we um impact the movements of technology or something, because directly trying to have an impact on on politics is ah kind of a losing game.
00:55:50
Speaker
No, I mean, it's it's certainly the case that like there's no getting around and finding a shortcut around like public opinion and winning the persuasion game. um I mean, the the history of the FDP in Germany is interesting because that's, for the long time, they were almost always in government because they had that 10% slice that made them essential for a majority. And like the the miracle of Germany's post-war economy, like was largely driven by that. But like even even when the center right or the center left was in power, they were always there with an essential say, kind of nudging things in a more
00:56:25
Speaker
market-friendly direction, and now we've seen that kind of collapse, and they're they're out and and gone altogether from their parliament. um I think it's it is the case that there is a ah i mean there is a broader space outside of electoral politics. Like, electoral politics is a downstream of culture, and that's true.
00:56:47
Speaker
um That, like, if you're going, you have to um get out there and kind of push the ball forward in like just these these moral values.
00:56:58
Speaker
um And that can be a hard, complicated long haul. And it always has been. I don't think it's futile. Um, I don't think, uh, you know, part of it is there will be, and I think we've already seen some signs of it, but there will be ah backlash against, against this. I mean, that's, a you know, it, it, it, you can cynically say it's kind of just a thermostatic politics. The pendulum always swings back and forth, but there is opportunity in that and to shape what it looks like when the pendulum swings back the other way.
00:57:28
Speaker
um But, you know, I mean, I've written a lot, and we kind of all come from ah of libertarian-ish background, um about the both the positive and the negative legacies of that and the ways it's it's split off in various directions.
00:57:43
Speaker
And one of the more negative ways is this explicitly anti-democratic tendency that, like, The only way we're ever going to get free markets and smaller government is if we abolish democracy, ah basically, and have ah you know an enlightened despot who's going to... No small part of what we're seeing here, as I know you're familiar with. Maybe not the enlightened part. but Right, right.
00:58:06
Speaker
you know The anti-enlightenment part, right. um But when we see the opposite... the the opposite The flip side of that, what I think kind of our more positive legacy strain of libert the libertarian school of thought ah is the is the radicalism, is the the big, bold message of, you know, like, we agree with you the status quo is not good and needs to be upset in big ways.
00:58:37
Speaker
um It's just, you know, you have to you have to have a better alternative on the merits as opposed to a worse alternative on the merits, which is what we're getting. um so So I don't think, you know, I'm not giving up on like winning elections matters. I mean, Trump won by, you know, was less than a point or two points or whatever it was.
00:58:58
Speaker
He didn't even crack 50% of the vote. Like we're, you know... There is a danger of overstating the idea that this thing has some massive popular mandate. I mean, his approval ratings are almost always underwater.
00:59:11
Speaker
ah Like, Musk is even less popular. um And so and so i do I do think there's still the opportunity there and that... um i you know I would definitely resist the idea that like we can go in an anti-democratic direction and thereby get liberal outcomes. I don't think that's the case, and I think there's a long record of history that shows that doesn't work.
00:59:36
Speaker
You know, it the... interesting sort of like convoluted ah process of the german elections is fascinating to me and i'm glad you brought them up max because ah you know we we've talked about the values of proportional representation before and andy i know you uh are a fan of uh you know proportional representation in multi-member districts and ways of improving american democracy i a lot of considerations hit this German election.
01:00:08
Speaker
In a lot of ways it was, you know, AFD, Alternative for Deutschland, the far-right extremist party, um the, uh, I suppose it courts some controversy, but not particularly much controversy to refer to them as a neo-Nazi party, which they, for all intents and purposes, are.
01:00:26
Speaker
i They're an incredibly ah strong polling going into Election Day and strong performance on Election Day. They got about 20% of the vote. ah I know was a big, big hallmark on this election. The other big hallmark of this German election was the failure of the current government. The whole reason an election was being called early in the first place is the sort of stoplight coalition, as they call it, fall falling apart.
01:00:52
Speaker
um ah The three-party coalition that was in government, including the FDP in that coalition, ah falling apart. And I know a lot of Germans, front of their mind, had done the strategic voting math.
01:01:06
Speaker
and knew that a center-right, center-left coalition government would only be possible if FTP was not in parliament. anything And so that there was this this this this white knuckle, like if we need to continue to shut out the extreme far right and build this coalition, it's like heavy strategic voting impulse. And so like to be Churchillian, if we accept that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others,
01:01:34
Speaker
My question for you, Andy, that I've taken long the long route to get to, I suppose, is ah is ah multi-member system of proportional representation sort of the worst form of democracy except for all the others?
01:01:48
Speaker
ah I think that's very much ah the case. I mean, you know, it's not it's not a silver bullet. Like, no electoral system is going to get you around the fact that ah like voters are are moving in an ugly direction, and that's what they want, that's how they vote. That's what they're going to get.
01:02:06
Speaker
um But I do think it's important to understand kind of the long-term ecosystem and incentives of the party system that different kinds of electoral systems give you. um You know, even for all their, like...
01:02:19
Speaker
In the American system, and this is basically what we've seen, that 20% of the vote that AFD got would have been enough to sweep the Republican primaries, and then that gets you a coin toss chance of being in power um without any coalition or anything like that.
01:02:35
Speaker
ah Whereas we've seen the the kind of firewall um refusal of the other parties to work with them and that kind of thing in Germany and... and ah coalition governments, I think, have an important role and they fuel a dynamic of of non-domination norms, like the understanding that, okay, even if you're the party that that plays first, that doesn't mean you have absolute unchecked power um and you still have to have the give and take and the compromise of a healthy democratic system. And those are things we miss in the United States.
01:03:06
Speaker
um And so, you know, electoral reform is an important part of the kind of the long-term, medium-term picture of how we reach a new constitutional settlement once we get through the other side of of the current crisis, which is, know, one way or another that will be happening.
01:03:25
Speaker
Like we are going to reach some kind of new constitutional settlement that's going to be different in important ways from the old order that's been destroyed. um And so I do think, you know, strategically, like that's going to involve a lot of things like ballot initiatives at the state level.
01:03:42
Speaker
That's going to involve legislative work. um But the timeline on which that kind of thing can happen and then the positive benefits of it can play out is something measured in decades.
01:03:55
Speaker
um And so, you know, that's not... that's not going to be an immediate, you know, what do we do in the next six months to to stop our looming dictatorship from getting entrenched and all the rest of it.
Promoting Liberalism: Long-term Strategies
01:04:07
Speaker
Um, but you know, the comparative politics, I mean, the, the, The United, of the core ah kind of stable, long-established liberal democracies, you know, us and our our peers in Western Europe and and Canada and places like that, um the only place where the far-right populist actually came to power ah has been here. And I think that goes to I mean, you know, in 2016, he didn't even win a majority of the vote, so there was this kind of minority aspect of it. But even if you look at
01:04:40
Speaker
At 24, I mean, a lot of it goes to our, it's not just the general election that we don't have PR, it's also the the terrible consequences of our primary system, where we have this entrenched quasi-governmental institution that runs the two-party ballot labels, that like it's, in a sense, they're not even real political parties.
01:05:00
Speaker
um And that has a ah perverse effect of really supercharging the kind of ah farthest, most polarized, most extreme chunk of the electorate that's enough to turn out in the primaries and win the primaries, and then you get your your coin toss chance in the general.
01:05:17
Speaker
um So, I mean, those are all important things to grapple with when we kind of think of the the what's what's the future of um American liberal democracy look like and what do we want the future of our Constitution to look like.
01:05:30
Speaker
But on a more media level, we just have to like be defending the fundamentals that like the president can't defy court orders and Congress controls the budget and things like that, um which are not necessarily so so kind of tied to to electoral. ahead.
01:05:46
Speaker
You said something that that I thought was was incredibly important, which is that you said that a lot of the positive reforms could take decades for us to sort of see the the benefits of them.
01:05:58
Speaker
And I think one of the things that one of the reasons that we're in this state that we're in now is because a lot of, ah you know, I'm thinking back to the Silicon Valley types, they were talking about the the long term, they were talking about the long game.
01:06:11
Speaker
decades ago. I mean, I remember being in in in things like in like 2010 and before that and and and hearing this kind of talk about how like, how are we setting things up now to change the outcomes more than a decade away.
01:06:24
Speaker
And I think it's that kind of thinking that is incredibly powerful, right? When we stop trying to just look at how are we going to impact, you know, the the next election cycle or whatever, but how are you setting things up so that we're not so that we're in a much better place ah years from now. And so many so few people tend to think in those terms that it means that you're kind of playing in a different sandbox.
01:06:47
Speaker
You're not having to compete with everybody that's just thinking about um you know that the next blurb on TV or the next election cycle or or even the next five years. So i think I think it behooves us all who who care about a more liberal world a freer world, a world with more free speech, a world with more civility, to be thinking about how can we set up, ah set things up politically? How can we set, how can we put cultural ah gears in motion to change things in the long term? And that might be, that might be the most powerful thing and and the most impactful thing we can be doing today.
01:07:23
Speaker
Absolutely. and i And I think it kind of feeds back into the way in which a bold radicalism is the more effective short-term option too. Like when you're talking about that, it can be, then you're getting to the big picture things that can be inspiring and the real long-term goals and the ways in which, you know, you people care about like, you know, what the world's going to be like in 20 years or 40 years or, you know, down the line for their children and things like that.
01:07:53
Speaker
um And so you can have, when you have an excessively myopic short-term focus, which I think is kind of one of the things about the the stagnation of liberalism I wanted to push back on, um you you get kind of the best of both worlds. Like you get the big long-term wins ultimately out of that, and you put yourself on that trajectory by having a more effective way to get the short-term wins.
01:08:21
Speaker
right, Andy, well, i thank you so much for coming on and making the time to talk to us. This has been a fascinating conversation. it has
Conclusion and Further Resources
01:08:29
Speaker
been intellectual. It has been insightful. Those are my favorite kinds.
01:08:33
Speaker
ah And I'm sure it has left everybody listening wanting more. ah Where can listeners find more Andy Craig? Well, I am a regular columnist at The Unpopulist.
01:08:49
Speaker
um I write it at a few other pay places. um You can follow ah at the Institute for Humane Studies. all my All my stuff gets shared there on the blog. And if you're the kind of person who likes this sort of thing, you can also find me on Blue Sky these days, and I share everything I've got there.
01:09:07
Speaker
Perfect. Thank you, Andy. Thank you, Tyler. Thank you.