ReImagining Liberty

I've got a special bonus episode for you today. In August, I attended the second annual Liberalism for the 21st Century conference in DC, organized by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. That's the group that runs The UnPopulist, a publication I occasionally guest host for on their Zooming In podcast. I led a special live recording of that show at the conference, a conversation with journalist (and ReImagining Liberty guest) Radley Balko and commentator Charlie Sykes. I framed the conversation around the second Trump administration as vigorous effort to roll back the Civil Rights Movement, legally, institutionally, and culturally. This led to a deep and spirited discussion. I hope you enjoy this very ReImagining Liberty adjacent discussion.

Cathy Reisenwitz's "Sex and the State" is one of the handful of newsletters I consider indispensable. She writes, from what I'd label a radical liberal perspective, about culture and gender in ways I consistently find illuminating. And she was my guest on episode 50 of this show, on misogyny and the political divide, which remains one of my favorites. So when she and I were recently chatting about the future of the liberty movement, and what's needed in our authoritarian moment, I wanted to get her back on.We discuss her early days in the liberty movement, why she left, what's brought her back, and what she learned in the intervening years. Then we discuss making the case for liberty, and why the right's focus on cultural issues has given it a leg up in persuading many Americans to its side. A strong case for liberty demands taking social issues seriously, and interrogating social patterns and their origins.Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

The political right, including more right-wing sorts of self-identified libertarians, are rather down on feminism. For those right-wingers, their hostility is understandable, because feminist insights challenge truths the right imagines to be natural and immutable, about equality, and gender, and hierarchy. But for radical liberals, feminist theory offers powerful tools for understanding and critiquing power and its use by the state.Today I have on my friend Kelly Vee for a discussion of these ideas and their place within a radical liberal framework. Kelly is an individualist anarchist-feminist and a graduate of Tulane University with degrees in accounting and finance, which she puts to good use when she’s not writing about mental health, feminism, and the State.

An introduction to the people and ideas most central to the ideologies of Trumpism and post-liberalism.The last episode of this show was about what ReImagining Liberty is. With frequent guest Cory Massimino, I talked about the values and perspective behind ReImagining Liberty's approach to liberalism, and how it's distinct from right-libertarianism. Today's episode is a nice companion to that. Not just because it also features a frequent guest, this time my friend Matt McManus, but because it runs further with the theme of distinctions. Namely, in this case, the ideas of the anti-liberalism of the far right. Our topic is the contemporary right-wing canon, the thinkers whose ideologies have come to dominate, and whose writings are giving form to the authoritarian fascism challenging liberal values and virtues.Matt McManus is an Assistant Professor at Spelman College and the author of The Rise of Postmodern Conservatism and The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, among many other books.Here's Matt's essay on "The Modern Far Right Canon" that was the spark for today's conversation.

A conversation about the the values underlying radical liberalism, and what distinguishes it from more right-wing forms of libertarianism.You can think of this episode as kind of a soft reboot of ReImagining Liberty. Or a back-to-basics. This is a show about politics, but it's a politics grounded in a particular set of values and a particular perspective, and with the political and policy specifics downstream of those. Ever since the election, I've spent a lot of time on those specifics, as well as on the policy details of what the forces of illiberalism are up to. And that's important. But I want to bring the show back, at least a bit more, to those values and that perspective. What is it about the kind of radical liberalism motivating this show that sets it apart? What are those values? What is that perspective?So today's episode is the start a series of conversations on just that. And it's framed around change. I've brought back my very first guest, and my dear friend, Cory Massimino. He has been, it is fair to say, one of the biggest influences the evolution of my intellectual and moral approach to politics over the last ten years. We talk about how our views have shifted, what it means to be a radical liberal, and what sets the kind of radical liberalism at the heart of ReImagining Liberty apart from the right-leaning libertarianism many are familiar with.Cory is an independent scholar and a Fellow at the Center for a Stateless Society, where he hosts the podcasts Mutual Exchange Radio and The Long Library.

Landry Ayres, a passionate Creative Director at the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism and producer for various podcasts, discusses the intricate role of podcasting in shaping political landscapes. He reveals how podcasts bypass traditional media, allowing for more diverse political discourse. Ayres examines the unique audience dynamics and authenticity sought by listeners. The conversation also touches on the evolution of the medium, balancing commercialization with its grassroots origins, and the importance of building community through shared ideals.

We sometimes talk about technology on ReImagining Liberty, in the context of how it interacts with a liberal society, or how technology can help us defend and advance liberal. The big technology everyone's talking about right now is, of course, artificial intelligence. It's a topic I've written about, but not one I'd yet done an episode about specifically regarding what it means for liberalism.Then I read an essay by Ted Underwood, a professor in the School of Information Sciences, and in the English Department, at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. It's titled "A more interesting upside of AI" and you can find a link to it in the show notes. He argues that the framing of AI technology as aiming at "super-intelligence" is misguided, both undesirable and misunderstanding important aspects of society and culture. Instead, he's an advocate of viewing AI as a cultural technology. What grabbed my attention was his further claim that, as a cultural technology, it can help us map and appreciate cultural differences, and cultural similarities, in ways that line up with, and support, liberal principles like pluralism, tolerance, and understanding.It's a big claim, and a fascinating one, and it lead to really fun and illuminating discussion.Join the ReImagining Liberty Patreon to get episodes a week early, listen ad-free, and become part of the Discord community. Learn more here: https://www.patreon.com/AaronRossPowellProduced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

It's difficult to be optimistic about liberalism's future. Certainly in the short to medium term. We're in an acute period of democratic bacIt's difficult to be optimistic about liberalism's future. Certainly in the short to medium term. We're in an acute period of democratic backsliding and authoritarian ascendency. The opposition party, or at least its leadership, has been largely supine in response. A backlash is rising, but it's an open question whether it'll be enough, and soon enough, to make a difference.But it's also not a time to give up all hope. There is a backlash. The current regime is deeply unpopular. And a ton of Americans—and people around the world watching what's happening to America—are rediscovering the value of liberal principles and values.My returning guest today is Andy Craig, a Fellow in Liberalism at the Institute for Humane Studies. We discuss the blitzkrieg of lawlessness in the first six months of this new Trump administration and why so many Democratic lawmakers have failed to respond to it with seriousness and urgency. But we also talk about the way forward, and how liberalism—true and radical liberalism—can chart that course.

Note: There were some issues with my guest's audio that make a few of his answers difficult to hear. So he kindly wrote out his answers and sent them to me. Those appear below in the show notes. Liberals, particularly classical liberals and libertarians, have too narrow a view of power. They focus on government force, or the threat of government force, and ignore all the other ways power is exercised in society. And the way classical liberals and libertarians imagine the fully autonomous self is at odds with our deep cultural embeddedness and the social construction of our identities, our ways of seeing, and the concepts through which we come to understand ourselves and the world.That's the argument my guest sets out in his new book, which asks classical liberals and libertarians to take seriously the analysis of power, knowledge, and identify set out by the French theorist Michel Foucault. And, as Mark Pennington further argues in Foucault and Liberal Political Economy: Power, Knowledge, and Freedom, taking Foucault seriously strengthens the foundations of liberalism and makes it better able to respond to illiberal critiques.Pennington is Professor of Political Economy and Public Policy in the Department of Political Economy, King's College, University of London, and is Director of the Centre for the Study of Governance and Society.We discuss Foucault's ideas, and introduce them for listeners who know nothing about his theories. And we show how they can point to liberal conclusions, including individual rights and a free market economy. Mark's book is the book I've been wanting someone to write a long time, and it not only doesn't disappoint but is, I think, one of the most import books in the liberal tradition in decades.Produced by Landry Ayres. Podcast art by Sergio R. M. Duarte. Music by Kevin MacLeod.Written Answers21:59If we have seen that ideas of scientific truth have changed across different periods that might make us think twice today about thinking that we have got something like access to a scientific truth.25:00Traditions are often historically contingent – but that doesn’t mean they aren’t valuable. It doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t be sceptical about radical ideas about how they might be reformed.26:24Philosophers use the term ‘immanent criticism’27:00It isn’t really a properly conservative approach to say that there are pure ‘natural’ types – that is much closer to what I would call a scientific naturalism which isn’t compatible with ‘true’ conservatism let alone with the sort of liberalism I would like to advocate.32:00Human beings are not like atoms that can be tested in a laboratory. That doesn’t mean we can’t say anything useful about human beings and their relationships, but we have got to have this scepticism about, for example, claims made about human nature – these have often been wrong and that this scepticism is especially important in contexts where those claiming scientific expertise use this to claim to exercise political authority over others. So, a big concern in Foucault is about the alignment between claims to scientific expertise and state power. This is what Foucault was concerned about - as are many Foucauldians. It is not saying you should ignore science but that you should be wary of monopoly claims to that expertise arising. If we look through the history of science and the number of ideas that have been subject to radical change then it should give us reason to be sceptical of anyone who claims today to have discovered some notion of absolute scientific truth.34:35One way to think about social justice might be to focus on the distribution of income and wealth; and another aspect of social justice might be to focus on the identity aspects of it such as issues of cultural status across different groups.  What I think is common across these two discussions is the belief that – or at least this is what I think is the dominant narrative on social justice in today’s world is the belief that society can be manipulated or managed to produce desired outcomes.36:38The first would be a kind of scepticism of the assumption underlying these dominant views that societies are legible or manageable objects in this way.40:12This is all about, in various organisational settings, people being told that they must meet certain targets or goals about the people that they work with or the various practices around speech they should be using – this sort of thing.41:11And in many ways can reproduce some of the categories that people in the gay liberation movement for example and some racial justice movements wanted to challenge. 41:42Some discussions around DEI reinforce certain stereotypes about gay people and other historically disadvantaged groups that reproduce various stereotypes.

What's happened to Twitter, or now X, is the clearest example of why it's actually not great that so much of our digital communication is controlled by just a few firms and, through them, the whims of guys like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. These single points of control not only mean a product we love today can be unlovable, or just gone, tomorrow, but also give more dangerous actors, like governments, avenues to use that centralization against us.The alternative is to revive what the internet once was: a decentralized and much more open place. I think this is really important, not just because it makes our digital communication less subject to arbitrary will, but also because it enables us to carve out communities for ourselves.My guest today wrote what is probably the most important essay about this need for decentralization, called "Protocols, Not Platforms," which inspired some of the most exciting current developments, including Bluesky. Mike Masnick is an expert in technology and technology policy and the editor of the indispensable blog, Techdirt. He's also on the board of directors of Bluesky.