Jonathan Rauch Explains How Liberalism Became Humanity's Greatest Social Technology and Its Battle Against Modern Threats

[00:00] My name is Jonathan Rauch. I'm a senior fellow  at the Brookings Institution and I've spent my  

[00:06] career trying to understand liberal values  and institutions and how to improve them.  

[00:12] Today on Big Think, I'm going to talk about the  most revolutionary and important technology in  

[00:18] human history, which is liberalism, the modern  threats to liberalism, and then the surprising  

[00:24] discovery of how our liberal democracy relies on  Christianity. Thank you for watching Big Think.  

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[00:52] now back to the interview. Chapter 1, Liberalism,  humanity's greatest technology. One of the biggest  

[01:02] and deepest questions in political theory is is  what is liberalism because it's the core concept  

[01:11] of today's political institutions and there are a  few different cuts at that. One is philosophical.  

[01:18] This goes back to philosophers like Hobbes but  especially John Lockach 17th century philosopher  

[01:26] considered the founder of liberalism and then  people like Emanuel Kant the founding fathers.  

[01:32] James Madison was one of the great liberal  thinkers and their core idea was that the  

[01:39] traditional way of organizing human societies was  flawed. And that's from the top down. You know,  

[01:45] when you've got a group of more than about 150  or 200, there's no way they can all know each  

[01:49] other and have trusting relationships. So, you're  going to have large numbers of people to organize.  

[01:54] And a lot of them are going to be strangers. And  the traditional way of doing that is you'll have  

[01:58] a chief or a boss or a dictator and you'll have  a hierarchy and you'll have orders issued from  

[02:05] the top down. Monarchy, priesthoods. That's the  way it was done until these guys came along and  

[02:12] said let's try organizing society in a radically  different way where instead of having rulers you  

[02:19] have rules and instead of having coercion you try  to foster cooperation and where instead of having  

[02:26] hierarchies you have equality. So in principle  everyone's interchangeable. Well, that leads  

[02:32] to anyone can vote, anyone can buy at the same  price, and anyone can perform an experiment and  

[02:38] be able to see the same thing. Once you do that,  you got liberal social systems. And that's what's  

[02:45] so transformative. In the United States, for  my lifetime, liberalism meant a doctrine on the  

[02:55] political left. it it lights government programs  for example and it was opposed to conservatism.  

[03:03] Well, that's a very different meaning from  the meaning that's now coming back and it's  

[03:07] the meaning that I use today whenever I talk  about it. You could think of it maybe as small  

[03:12] ill liberalism and and that's not about left or  right. There's leftleaning versions of liberalism  

[03:20] and there are also right-leaning versions. But  that's what often been called sometimes classical  

[03:26] liberalism, traditional liberalism. In Europe,  it's just called liberalism. But it's what our  

[03:32] founding fathers in the United States meant by  liberalism, which is the doctrine that all men  

[03:39] are created equal and endowed with inalienable  rights. So that's what I'm talking about today.  

[03:45] and all of the many things that spin off of that.  I have a slightly unusual take on on liberalism  

[03:53] because most people who talk and think about  it are political theorists who will tell you  

[03:58] it's a political theory and it is. Liberalism  is the idea stated best in the Declaration of  

[04:05] Independence that all men are created equal and  endowed with inalienable rights. But liberalism  

[04:12] is also a way to structure societies. It's a  social technology. It's a way to answer maybe  

[04:20] the most difficult question humans have which is  how do you organize cooperation of large numbers  

[04:27] of people most of whom will be strangers to each  other. And liberalism gives a unique answer to  

[04:34] that and a uniquely effective answer to that.  so effective that as a social technology as a  

[04:40] way to organize our groups it is literally species  transforming the social technology the core idea  

[04:48] is you operate societies according to rules not  rulers you use cooperation not coercion and you  

[04:57] assume equality and the people are interchangeable  instead of hierarchy in which some people are by  

[05:04] virtue of their birth or their wealth or whatever  in charge. So, how do you instantiate that? What  

[05:10] does that actually mean when the rubber hits the  road? Well, it turns out that there are three  

[05:14] great liberal social systems and in some realms  they're distinct, but they have the same core  

[05:20] idea and they're interacting all the time and  we all depend on them every day for everything  

[05:26] we hold dear. Peace, prosperity, freedom, and  truth. So, the first of those is liberal markets,  

[05:34] often called capitalism. That's the idea that  you have a big marketplace and people negotiate  

[05:39] through mechanisms like prices and we trace  that back in its theoretical form to Adam Smith.  

[05:46] The second big liberal system is liberal  democracy. And this in the United States  

[05:52] we trace to our founding fathers, the greatest  avatars of this idea who built the constitution  

[05:56] around it. And that's the idea of consent of  the governed through their expression as voters,  

[06:05] multiple branches of government, each with its  own power centers so that they're competing and  

[06:10] compromising multiple levels of government.  and above all equality before the law. The  

[06:16] core concept of a liberal democracy. You don't  get special treatment depending on who you are.  

[06:22] And then there's a third system. This is the one  that often gets left out, but it's just as liberal  

[06:28] and just as important as the other two. I call  it liberal science. And that's our system for  

[06:33] finding truth and settling disagreements in a way  that both keeps the peace and keeps us in touch  

[06:40] with reality. And that's the system that says,  so how do we settle conflicts over what's true  

[06:45] and what's false? People often disagree on that  and you can't run a society if you can't come  

[06:51] to some kind of consensus about truth that's in  touch with reality. Traditional way of doing that,  

[06:58] you'd have a priest or a pilot bureau. You'd  use an oracle. You'd lean on tradition or a  

[07:04] text like a Bible. That's how you'd settle things.  Doesn't work very well. Liberal science says, "No,  

[07:11] we're going to do something different.  We're going to require people to be in  

[07:15] a constant exchange of criticism according  to rules." Like, if there's an experiment,  

[07:21] everyone needs to be able to do it. And like no  one can shut down the conversation using force.  

[07:26] And through that process, we're going to establish  what looks today like science and journalism and  

[07:31] law. And that's an open-ended rules-based truth  seeeking system. That's liberal science. I think  

[07:37] it's the most important and successful of the  three because that's given us the technological  

[07:42] advances and the advances in knowledge. It  is literally true that any given morning,  

[07:48] our global world of science produces more new  knowledge than humanity did in its first 200,000  

[07:56] years. But those three are all working on the same  principles, which is they're relying on rules and  

[08:02] they're depersonalized and people are equal within  those systems. A big misconception about liberal  

[08:08] markets confuses it with libertarianism. And  and libertarians are a branch of liberalism,  

[08:15] but they're a branch that's really fundamentally  they maximize what what they consider freedom,  

[08:21] individual autonomy. They want to minimize  government at every turn. And their idea of  

[08:28] liberal capitalism is a specific type that's it's  very lazy. They want absolutely minimal government  

[08:35] intervention. They put a strong emphasis on  property rights as inherent rights. Many of  

[08:41] them will say government doesn't even have the  right to tax or to regulate property beyond very  

[08:46] narrow limits. Well, that is one tributary of  the liberal tradition, but it's only that. The  

[08:54] core of liberalism is much broader and it leaves  a lot of room to define different types of rules  

[09:00] for capitalism. The founder, the great theorist,  original theorist of liberal economics, liberal  

[09:07] markets, Adam Smith was not a small government  libertarian. He believed that government should  

[09:13] provide important basic public services. He  believed that it should provide education. Uh,  

[09:20] a lot of the great liberal thinkers have always  thought that. And there's room in liberalism,  

[09:25] this is why it sometimes can be confusing to lots  of people, including me. There's tons of room  

[09:31] within this tradition to debate what the specific  rule should be. Like, you know, what do you do  

[09:36] about zoning laws? Should you have anti- monopoly  laws? What are the boundaries of property rights?  

[09:42] All of these things. And these are hard and  contested questions and they're super important.  

[09:48] But it's equally important to realize that they're  all coloring within the same lines and that those  

[09:53] lines are the idea that we are looking for rules  that maximize our peace and our prosperity and  

[09:59] freedom and knowledge within that larger context  of liberalism. Liberalism of all three types,  

[10:07] liberal markets, liberal democracy, liberal  science, they're all big broad fields and they all  

[10:13] have constant debates within themselves over what  the specific rule should be. So liberal democracy,  

[10:21] how much direct democracy do you want? Do  you want to do it like the founders did it,  

[10:25] which is you only have elections every few years  and the rest is done by representatives? Do you  

[10:30] want to do it with direct referenda and initiative  like some of the states do? What do you guarantee  

[10:36] in the constitution? What are the limits of  executive authority? On and on and on. This is  

[10:41] what liberals do for a living. And to the extent  that people joke about it, they say, you know,  

[10:46] a liberal is someone who can't even agree with  herself. And the same is true in liberal science.  

[10:51] One of its great strengths is that the boundaries  of liberal science, I include in that journalism  

[10:57] and all the fields that try to seek objective  truth by doing replicable reporting and  

[11:02] experiments. They are constantly arguing with each  other about what the right methodologies are. Is  

[11:08] it real science? Is this some other process  better than others? What are the boundaries  

[11:12] of journalism? And and that's a feature, not a  bug, because none of the authoritarian systems  

[11:18] can do that. None of them can be in a constant  conversation about what the rules and guidelines  

[11:24] should be and about how to readjust those rules  when we're at a moment of crisis as I think a  

[11:30] lot of people would agree liberalism is today.  I mentioned that liberalism is a unique social  

[11:37] technology. There's nothing else like it and  it's revolutionary compared to everything that  

[11:41] came before and everything else that's available  as alternatives today. you know, authoritarianism,  

[11:48] um, populism, theocracy, you name it. What's  different about it? It has some super important  

[11:56] traits that have all kinds of implications. Okay,  what are those? First, it's decentralized. You can  

[12:03] go and look for the president of liberal world.  You won't find anyone. There's no president of  

[12:09] science. There's no president of the market.  There is a president of the United States, but  

[12:13] it's a individual with specific powers. There's  no president of the whole constitution. There's  

[12:18] no president of all the states and all the judges  and all the branches of government. And that's on  

[12:24] purpose. Liberalism says, look, human beings can't  be trusted with huge amounts of power with one  

[12:31] person in charge. Partly because that person's  likely to be corrupted and self-interested, but  

[12:36] partly because even if that's person's a platonic  style philosopher, guardian who's perfectly wise,  

[12:42] they're not going to have anything like enough  information, the world is so vast and one person  

[12:49] can't know more than the tiniest fraction of that.  So instead, you have a decentralized system where  

[12:55] information is always flowing through from all  kinds of quarters. And that of course is the  

[13:00] genius as FA Hayek the great economist pointed out  of a liberal market. It's a gigantic information  

[13:07] processing machine and those information  are all represented in the price. The same  

[13:12] is true of science. The same is true of liberal  democracy where you've got all of those levels  

[13:16] of government and branches of government and  agencies and politicians and committees pulling  

[13:21] in information and looking to cycle those through  negotiations. And of course the same is true of  

[13:26] liberal science. very decentralized researchers,  labs, institutions, universities all over the  

[13:33] world doing different things yet coordinating.  Second key characteristics, depersonalized.  

[13:39] In an ideal liberal system, of course, the world  isn't perfect. We have some distance to go, but in  

[13:44] an ideal liberal system, it shouldn't matter who  you are. If I do an experiment today in downtown  

[13:52] Washington DC where I'm sitting, someone else who  repeats that information in Bengal should get the  

[14:01] same result. It shouldn't matter who we are. Same  with prices, rules and markets, liberal democracy,  

[14:07] we all get one vote. The idea here is if you  take personal standpoint and privilege out of it  

[14:12] so that we become interchangeable that allows us  to coordinate among not just a handful of people  

[14:18] who happen to agree on things or be in the same  tribe or be in the same physical place. We can  

[14:23] now coordinate millions, hundreds of millions,  billions of human beings who follow those rules.  

[14:31] And that's the greatness of science. It's one  gigantic global enterprise in which someone in  

[14:36] one country can identify the corona virus  over a weekend and two weeks later someone  

[14:41] in a different country many countries in fact can  design a vaccine for it. All collaborating through  

[14:47] these institutions by the way that also helps  with freedom because it means you can't be an  

[14:52] authoritarian and command other people which leads  to the third. It's consensual. It's non-coercive.  

[14:58] Liberalism is always looking for alternatives  to coercion and force. Now, sometimes you need  

[15:03] coercion and force. People break the law. You've  got to raise taxes. But they're looking for ways  

[15:08] to minimize this and instead give people  incentives to cooperate. And of course,  

[15:13] that's the magic of Adam Smith's Invisible Hand.  But that's also the magic of science. You inspire  

[15:18] people to do experiments and persuade each other  to to create knowledge. No one's in a position  

[15:24] to say, "I'm going to throw you in jail if you're  wrong, or I'm going to have all your books burned  

[15:29] by authority of the state." That non-coercion  not only protects freedom, but it also gives  

[15:36] you better results because it's giving people  positive incentives to incentives to cooperate  

[15:42] on a gigantic scale. The fourth of these of these  revolutionary changes is self-correcting. Now,  

[15:51] someone's going to say, "Look at all the things  that went wrong and didn't get corrected at all  

[15:56] or maybe didn't get corrected for 200 years."  and they're going to point to slavery. And  

[16:00] unquestionably in science, you get bad theories  that survive for a long time. In politics, you get  

[16:06] bad situations like Jim Crow that last a very long  time. And yet, liberalism is unique as a system  

[16:14] because all other systems for organizing society,  you can run the tape either forward or backward,  

[16:20] and you won't see a direction of progress. You  won't see progress specifically toward equality  

[16:25] or greater human rights. You won't see progress  toward greater knowledge or freedom. You won't see  

[16:32] economic progress. For most of human history,  basically the economic growth curve was flat.  

[16:37] Nothing happened. Liberalism is different. It has  a direction which is it self-corrects over time.  

[16:45] All of these systems about looking for and finding  each other's mistakes and errors. And that means  

[16:50] the liberal tape, you can always tell it's running  in a direction. If you're seeing the production of  

[16:56] more knowledge, if you're seeing more and more  people being drawn into the circle of human  

[17:00] rights and equality, if you're seeing government  that is more rules-based according to rule of  

[17:07] law and less authoritarian, and if you're seeing  markets that are producing growth and expanding,  

[17:12] you always know which way the tape is running. And  that is unique to liberalism. One mistake that I  

[17:18] think a lot of people make about liberalism, Markx  made this mistake. It's often full of conflicts  

[17:24] and contradictions and it'll be getting stuff  wrong and it'll have people arguing about things  

[17:28] and Markx thought that this was a fatal flaw of  capitalism. It had internal contradictions and in  

[17:35] the working out of those contradictions it would  blow itself up or fall apart and communism would  

[17:41] then supersede it. And what all these people  don't understand is that those contradictions,  

[17:47] those conflicts, those those constant challenges  within the system are a feature, not a bug.  

[17:55] Because working through those is what allows us to  bring in the new ideas, the new the new systems,  

[18:05] uh the new laws, the compromises, all the things  that allow for both dynamism and change. on the  

[18:12] one hand and yet an overarching stability on the  other. And so yeah, liberalism can get stuck for  

[18:18] a while and kind of a side Eddie. Bad things can  go on for a long time. I know that story. I am a  

[18:25] homosexual American. I'm a gay man born in America  in 1960. In every single state in the union,  

[18:31] it was illegal to be gay. We were actually  menaced with prison in the world I grew up  

[18:36] in. The idea that that today I would be married  to a man, happily married, unbelievable. And yet  

[18:45] it was within that system that the contradictions,  the obvious contradictions between the aspirations  

[18:50] of society, how it's supposed to treat people and  the reality of society, how it was treating gay  

[18:57] people. That became something that led to FOMO.  It led to protest. It led to litigation. And it  

[19:04] sparked people's consciences. and and here I am  happily married now for over 10 years. And so I  

[19:13] just encourage people who say, "Yeah, liberalism  isn't perfect. It gets stuck." I say, "Yeah,  

[19:20] but no one has a better idea." And and actually  no one has an idea that's that's nearly as good.  

[19:27] Liberalism is very challenging. It requires people  to follow all kinds of rules. It requires them  

[19:34] to try to blind themselves to the identity of  the people they're dealing with. It asks them  

[19:38] to try to put aside their tribal affiliations,  cooperate with total strangers across the world  

[19:45] on on all kinds of projects. It protects minority  rights, something that majorities never like to  

[19:51] do. It's deeply counterintuitive liberalism. asks  a whole lot of people way more than tribalism or  

[19:59] monarchy which are our our hardwired systems of  of governance. And so that means that every day  

[20:09] we who are liberal have to get up every morning  for the rest of our lives and reexlain this system  

[20:16] from scratch. And our kids will have to do it and  their kids and and so will their kids. And one way  

[20:22] we do that is the way I've been doing it, which is  by saying this is the system that uh that protects  

[20:28] our rights. But the most important way to do it  for a lot of people is to look at the products of  

[20:33] liberalism to say what is this actually done for  us? And the answer here is very evident on on at  

[20:40] least four different fronts. So no particular  order. Freedom liberal comes from the root of  

[20:49] free. The idea of free and equal individuals is  hardwired. That's not true of every system. But  

[20:57] that means that there are certain builtin guard  rails against authoritarian individuals and tribes  

[21:06] and movement to try to take over the system  and marginalize or force out other people. No  

[21:12] other system has provides that degree of freedom.  Second, prosperity. None of the other systems that  

[21:19] have been tried and there have been many and they  include in the modern world communism and they  

[21:23] include in the previous world feudalism. None has  produced consistent economic growth and prosperity  

[21:29] which we now take for granted. We assume it's  a you know mediocre year if GDP growth rises  

[21:35] by I don't know 2% a year not realizing that  under previous regimes 2% a century would be  

[21:43] pretty good. So we get this tremendous prosperity  that we see around us. Of course, we get problems  

[21:48] that go with that and that's part of the constant  re-evaluation and adjustment that we talked about,  

[21:54] but that's essential. Third, we get knowledge.  Possibly the greatest aspect of the system is  

[22:00] that humanity now produces literally more new  knowledge in any given morning than it did in  

[22:06] our first 200,000 years as a species. And and the  rate at which we're producing knowledge is only  

[22:12] accelerating. By all the measures of science that  we have, the faster we learn, the more we learn.  

[22:19] And now AI is coming to that mix. So who knows? No  other system produces knowledge at that rate. And  

[22:28] no other system is able to bring us into agreement  about who's right, force us into constructive  

[22:35] dialogue, persuade each other through experiment  and rational argumentation. And that leads to what  

[22:40] may in fact be the ultimate liberal product and  that's peace. A crucial element of liberalism,  

[22:48] another defining element is it tries to settle  disputes in non-coercive cooperative ways. It  

[22:57] looks for peaceful ways to resolve things. It  says, "Look, I'm going to follow some rules and  

[23:03] you're going to follow the same rules. We're going  to agree to some of those rules. We may disagree  

[23:07] about principles and have to re renegotiate.  But if we live in a society where we can follow  

[23:13] those rules, we don't have to go to war with  each other and settle things through violence,  

[23:20] through bloodshed. We can find alternative ways  to um to end our disputes. And ultimately, that's  

[23:28] what all of these systems do. Liberal markets  allocate scarce resources without forcing people  

[23:33] into violent conflicts. Liberal democracy forces  people to compromise and negotiate with each other  

[23:40] all across multiple levels of government without  violence. And liberal science settles disputes  

[23:48] about the nature of reality which historically  have caused massive wars, wars of religion.  

[23:54] It's thought today, you know, a third of the  population of today's Germany was killed in  

[23:58] those wars. You've never seen science wars where  scientists, you know, get their bows and arrows  

[24:04] or their flamethrowers or whatever and get in  tanks and start wiping each other out. They  

[24:08] have to persuade. And peace, I think, is is the  ultimate product of liberalism. And maybe if you  

[24:14] had to pin me down on on the one of the four  that's most precious, it might be that one.  

[24:20] If people take away one thing about liberalism,  it's that we too often think of it abstractly,  

[24:29] you know, as a grand statement or as a political  theory. But it is also a social technology.  

[24:37] And it's the most important human social  technology and the best social technology  

[24:41] ever invented because it allows us to coordinate  human affairs on a scale in the billions on a  

[24:47] planetary scale as well as a national scale. And  it allows unprecedented peace, freedom, knowledge,  

[24:53] and prosperity. And all of those things are true.  And the most overlooked part of this is what I  

[24:59] call the constitution of knowledge, which is the  part that that I think I've given the most thought  

[25:04] to and have spilled the most ink on. and in some  ways is is the part that may be under the most  

[25:11] strain right now. One of the hardest problems that  any human society faces at any scale, whether it's  

[25:19] a small tribe or a large nation is figuring out  who's right and who's wrong about what's actually  

[25:28] true in the outside world. Now, that's not  necessarily hard. And if you're in a small group  

[25:36] of humans and you have a question like, "Is that  a tiger in the bush or just a breeze?" or "Where  

[25:44] can I find water?" or "Where is the neighboring  tribe camped?" It's not too hard to stay in touch  

[25:49] with reality. But as soon as you get to anything  much more abstract than that, like why is it not  

[25:54] raining? What god should I pray to to make it  rain? You get contention. And a lot depends on  

[26:00] those disputes. Those contentions often lead to  conflict and war or to avoid them you wind up with  

[26:06] authoritarian solutions like priests and oracles  which have no contact with reality at all. So you  

[26:14] get societies that are oppressive and ignorant  and that's the way we ran human affairs for  

[26:18] the first 200 300,000 years. It didn't work out  super well from the point of view of knowledge.  

[26:26] So, liberalism comes along and it looks at  this spotty record and then it looks at the  

[26:32] wars of religion in the 1500s and 1600s. People  in Europe went to war, Catholic versus Protestant,  

[26:42] Protestant versus Protestant, and huge huge  numbers of deaths over a long period of time.  

[26:47] And they said, "How can we stop that?" And they  said, "Well, let's switch to a different way of  

[26:52] deciding what's true and what's false." Let's say  we're going to have a set of rules and we're going  

[26:57] to have to persuade each other using evidence and  reason argument that anyone can see. It shouldn't  

[27:03] matter who you are. So, we're going to have a  couple rules. One is no final say. You don't  

[27:09] have a prince or a priest who's in a position  to shut down the debate. You can always ask the  

[27:13] next question. And the other is no purely personal  authority. I don't get special say because of my  

[27:22] color or because who I was what tribe I was born  into or anything else. If I say I can see it, you  

[27:29] have to be able to see it. If it seems rational to  me, it has to seem rational to you. That gives us  

[27:35] the foundation for a system in which people can  start correcting each other and looking for each  

[27:40] other's mistakes. In a system like that, we figure  out a way to cope with the fundamental problem  

[27:48] of reality, which is that we are all inherently  biased. There are dozens and dozens of documented  

[27:54] human cognitive biases, but we cannot see our own  biases. They prevent us from grasping reality,  

[28:01] but we cannot see our own biases. However, you can  see some of mine, and I can see some of yours. And  

[28:08] if we're put into an environment where we have  rules and institutions that force us to agree,  

[28:13] that force us to persuade each other and criticize  each other, we put those biases, we harness them,  

[28:19] we pit them against each other. And the product  of that is truth. I talk about this thing called  

[28:26] the constitution of knowledge. Why do I say that?  It's because the principle that I just outlined  

[28:33] is almost identical in structure to the principle  of the US Constitution, which says you're going to  

[28:42] have a lot of different factions in societies,  people from different regions, people with  

[28:46] different interests, people with different  ideologies. What do you do about that? Well,  

[28:52] Madison says famously in the Federalists,  "How do you solve the problem of ambition?  

[28:58] You can't contain ambition. There's only one  thing that works. You pit ambition against  

[29:04] ambition. I think the single greatest idea in the  whole of political theory. You harness ambition  

[29:12] by forcing people through the constitution to  compromise. That's why the president can veto  

[29:18] what congress does, but congress can override  the veto. But the courts can override congress,  

[29:22] but the others can change the constitution. All  of that is forcing people to have an ongoing  

[29:28] negotiation and compromise. And what comes out the  other end is something like a consensus. It turns  

[29:34] out the institutions and norms and rules that we  use to structure the search for knowledge are very  

[29:42] similar in structure to the ones that we use to  structure our constitutional form of government.  

[29:48] That's the constitution of knowledge. It's the  institutions and the rules and the norms that  

[29:52] structure our collective search for knowledge.  It is not a metaphor. It's not a simile or figure  

[30:00] of speech. There actually is a constitution of  knowledge. It's not written down in one place,  

[30:04] but it's written down in lots of places. These  are the rules that the American Association of  

[30:09] University professors first wrote down in the  early part of the 20th century. They're the rules  

[30:14] the American Society of Newspaper editors wrote  down around the same period about the right way  

[30:19] to go about reporting. They're all the rules  for citations and how labs operate ethically.  

[30:24] They're the rules in law about how lawyers present  evidence and stick to truth and can be penalized  

[30:29] if they don't. On and on and on. Those are the  rules and structures which guide us in our search  

[30:34] for knowledge. And that's what makes science and  intellectual progress possible. The constitution  

[30:39] of knowledge. It's a very robust system because  for reasons that we've already discussed,  

[30:46] it's decentralized. It's open-ended. It's it's  non-coercive. It's self- adjusting over time.  

[30:52] And all those things make it very enduring. Like  if you want to end the process of global science,  

[30:57] where would you go to do that? You can do that  in a country for a while like the Soviet Union,  

[31:01] but then it's going to collapse because you're  collide with reality. So in the sense that there's  

[31:06] no other system that works for creating knowledge  on a global scale in a way that's peaceful and  

[31:11] productive and realistic, it's very robust. On  the other hand, it's also fragile because there  

[31:19] are all of these rules and settings that you  have to get right. A lot of people think, well,  

[31:23] free speech is enough. You have a marketplace of  ideas and you have a lot of free speech and out  

[31:27] of that the best ideas will float to the top.  If you ask most American undergraduates where  

[31:32] knowledge comes from, you know, a lot of them will  say the marketplace of ideas as if it's automatic.  

[31:38] The problem is it's not automatic. Free speech  isn't enough. You need all of these rules and  

[31:42] guidelines. And in the sciences, it takes decades  to come through an educational and training  

[31:48] process to learn those rules and those disciplines  and become expert in how they work. And those are  

[31:54] fragile because there's a lot that can go wrong.  And they're also fragile more fundamentally  

[32:00] Because for a lot of people the constitution of  knowledge is hostile to what they want to believe.  

[32:05] For example, the constitution of knowledge through  the what I call the reality based community that's  

[32:13] science, journalism, law and government, all  reality based have refuted the idea that the  

[32:22] earth is about 5,600 years old. It it just  doesn't wash. People no longer in those fields  

[32:28] contest that. They no longer explore it. There  are a lot of people who believe that the earth  

[32:33] is about 5,600 years old and they believe that  that's very important and they're very unhappy.  

[32:39] People are taught otherwise. There are a lot of  people who are unhappy that for example biology  

[32:44] insists on evolution. There are a lot of people  who are unhappy right now that we have a lot of  

[32:51] science about vaccination that they disagree with  uh and that they don't like. One of those happens  

[32:56] to be the sitting secretary of health and human  services. So, anybody with a particular belief  

[33:02] that they're defending that goes against say a  scientific consensus is not going to like this  

[33:07] system. or anyone who believes that we live  in a universe where miracles or magic occur  

[33:16] on an everyday basis, they're not going to  like this system because you're not allowed  

[33:21] to have miracles and magic in science because  you can only have things that other people can  

[33:26] reproduce. And by definition, miracles aren't  reproducible. So, they're going to be unhappy  

[33:33] with it. authoritarians are going to be super  unhappy with it because there's nothing more anti-  

[33:39] athoritarian than reality. All those things that  tell dictators, you know, invading that country or  

[33:47] uh taking undertaking huge amounts of  debt or throwing your opponents in jail,  

[33:52] it's not going to work. They don't want to hear  that. They want to do what they want to do and  

[33:55] they're not going to let science, liberal science  and the constitution of knowledge get in the way.  

[34:01] So the first thing authoritarians do when they  can is shut down the constitution of knowledge  

[34:06] because they believe it's a power that they  cannot control. And they're right about that.  

[34:11] All of that means that there always has been and  that there always will be a large and varied and  

[34:16] determined constellation of people who don't  like the constitution of knowledge. They either  

[34:21] don't like part of it or they don't like all of  it. And that's the challenge that we're always  

[34:25] facing. And that brings us to the present.  That brings us to the challenges right now.

[34:34] Chapter two, the global backlash to liberalism.  Since the day it was originated back in the  

[34:42] 16th and 17th centuries, liberalism has been  controversial from the very beginning. It has had  

[34:51] powerful and dedicated opposition. You can look at  the church which put Galileo under arrest. You can  

[34:59] look at Marxism and communism. You could look at  theocracies places like Iran today. You can look  

[35:07] at fascism. One after another, large numbers of  human beings have said for one reason or another,  

[35:14] liberalism is wrong. It upsets the natural  order of things. It offends God. It allows  

[35:19] dangerous alternative lifestyles. It's unfair.  on and on and on and today is no exception  

[35:27] to that. There's a headline today. We see it  everywhere. We see tons of books being written,  

[35:33] many of them being written by our most  prominent liberal thinkers. You know,  

[35:36] people are great thinkers, people like James Davis  and Hunter and and Francis Fukuyama and Brink  

[35:42] Lindseay and others who were saying liberalism  is in crisis right now. It's not the first time  

[35:46] people have said this. Liberalism was in crisis  when Karl Marx came along. Markx was no dummy.  

[35:53] Markx was seeing turbulent change in society  that looked at the time as if capitalism was  

[35:59] on track to dismantle itself because the working  conditions in the factories of the 1840s and 1850s  

[36:06] as documented by people like Charles Dickens were  were so deplorable. Looked like capitalism was  

[36:11] making people worse off not better off and making  society more stratified not less stratified and so  

[36:16] forth. And that led to a crisis which of course  led to communism. Communism turned out to be the  

[36:22] most bloodthirsty ideology in in human history.  We've had recurrent crises and they tend to have  

[36:28] in common periods of rapid social change. When  you've got liberal institutions that have been  

[36:33] set up and they're kind of ticking along and they  seem to be running okay. So, you know, in the  

[36:37] 1970s and 80s and 90s, we thought we had a pretty  good congressional system and the economy seemed  

[36:42] to be firing on most cylinders and the budget was  balanced and so forth. And then we get shocks and  

[36:49] those shocks cause disruptions. And because of  the decentralized nature of these liberal systems  

[36:54] and because they're rules based, they can't turn  on a dime. They evolve over time. They tend to  

[37:01] be bottom up. And so they go through these periods  when society is demanding more from them than they  

[37:06] can deliver. Now all the other systems would be  worse because they're so corrupt and authoritarian  

[37:14] and they don't have good inputs. But in these  moments, the challenge for liberalism is to adapt,  

[37:20] to change, to meet new needs, to find new ways of  doing things, new structures, new products, new  

[37:25] ideas at a fast enough clip to adapt. And a lot of  people think, and I think they're quite probably  

[37:32] right, that we're in one of those moments right  now. So, we've had a series of shocks. We had 911,  

[37:39] the financial meltdown of 2008, 2009. Every so  often markets fall apart. We've known that about  

[37:48] them since Adam Smith's time. And that caused  a crisis which has caused a a a big reduction  

[37:55] in confidence in liberalism. You had COVID which  a lot of people think the system didn't handle  

[38:04] very well. We can argue about that, but that put a  lot of strain on the system. You had the eruption  

[38:09] of social media and the decline of the traditional  reality gatekeepers in places like journalism, you  

[38:15] know, conventional mainstream media. You had the  rise of algorithms which are disruptive. You know,  

[38:21] as the saying goes, enragement is engagement.  And you've had a decline for other reasons in  

[38:27] traditional organized religion which left a lot  of people looking for meaning in life. And you  

[38:31] get all those things and they're kind of coming  along at once, right? That's a lot to deal with.  

[38:36] It doesn't matter if you're liberal or illiberal.  That is a lot to deal with. And that's what we're  

[38:40] adjusting to right now. And it's I I won't I  won't kid anyone. It's it's a major challenge.  

[38:46] So liberalism is a recent invention. Like it's  really dates back to 350 years ago. That's the  

[38:53] blink of an eye in human evolution. Illiberalism  is everything else and it's a lot older.  

[39:01] It's all of the many many theories and systems of  running a government, an economy, a truth seeeking  

[39:09] process which is based on coercion for example, on  hierarchy, on tribe, on fundamental distinctions  

[39:18] between different types of humans. So if you're  saying that a person from Africa is inferior  

[39:22] and can only be a slave, that is illiberalism. If  you're saying that freedom is a dangerous concept,  

[39:29] that's an idea that goes back to Plato, which  is long before modern liberalism. He believed  

[39:34] that democracy, that freedom would would lead to  decadence. He wanted to have a North Korean style  

[39:39] dictatorship led by someone like himself.  Illiberalism goes back much longer than  

[39:46] liberalism, and it takes many, many forms. It's  really it's a catch-all term for really almost  

[39:51] anything that disputes the core idea that all  humans are born free and equal. And that comes  

[39:56] in in so many different flavors. So today we've  got a group um that go loosely under what's called  

[40:05] post-liberalism. And those are groups of people.  They're they exist in one form on the right and  

[40:11] another form on the left. But they basically say  liberalism is out of date. It's no longer serving  

[40:16] our needs as a country or as a community or as  basic humans. It comes in all kinds of flavors.  

[40:23] People of a theological bent who say liberalism is  hostile to God, to faith, to communities of faith,  

[40:30] and that's unmuring us from our basic values.  You have nationalist post-liberals who say  

[40:35] liberalism dissolves national boundaries and  it dissolves ethnic ties and other social ties  

[40:41] that hold countries together. So it's dissolving  us in this big multinational global meaningless  

[40:46] mindless soup. Vice President of the United States  seems to believe something like that. You've got  

[40:53] opponents of capitalism on the right. Um you've  got all kinds of people who think that science  

[40:59] is threatening antia. There's there's all kinds  of things over there. And then on the left you  

[41:04] have people who are identified with post-modern  forms of illiberalism. And these people who say  

[41:09] there's no such thing as objective reality. It's  really all just about discourse and it's about who  

[41:15] controls the discourse and those who control  the discourse control reality. So they say  

[41:21] science is just a game that's being played for  the benefit of privileged white males. They've  

[41:26] talked in the past about, you know, they've had  afroentric science. Um they question the very  

[41:32] idea that truth should even matter. They think  it's politics all the way down. And that's had  

[41:38] a deep foothold actually in the academic left. And  all of those things are circulating out there. Um,  

[41:44] none of them is entirely new. And the challenge  today, as always, is is to defend from those  

[41:51] ideas, to make our case against them. You know,  they're not they're not weak and stupid ideas.  

[41:55] They're wrong ideas, but they're not weak and  stupid. The two biggest challenges I point to  

[42:00] in my book on the constitution of knowledge,  one is coming predominantly from the left and  

[42:05] it's called cancel culture and another is coming  predominantly from the right and that's a campaign  

[42:15] of anti-liberal propaganda and they're quite  different but they have a common goal which is  

[42:24] to undermine Americans or potentially the world's  collective sense of reality and undermine the  

[42:31] institutions that we rely on to keep us connected  to reality. So start with the one on the left,  

[42:38] not the liberal left. These are not, you know,  center-left people. These are more the far left.  

[42:43] These are the postmodernists. These are the people  who believe objective truth is itself a lie. These  

[42:47] are the people who believe that science is a  colonialist and oppressive institution that  

[42:52] we need to be freed from. These are the people  who'd like uh to have a hierarchy in which certain  

[42:59] groups would be privileged over other groups. They  figured out that even though they're a minority in  

[43:08] cultural institutions like universities, that  if they organized and functioned in ways that  

[43:17] could basically punish disscent that they could  create a false consensus where it kind of appears  

[43:24] that everyone on campus is on the left and that  challenging these propositions they uphold about  

[43:28] race, class, gender, whatever it happens to be, is  certainly dangerous and probably wrong. And this  

[43:35] is a very sophisticated propaganda technique. It's  called consensus spoofing. And it's based on the  

[43:40] psychological principle. It's been demonstrated  in countless experiments. That if I'm sitting  

[43:45] in a room with seven other people who all say  something that doesn't seem to me to be true, but  

[43:51] they're all insisting that it's true, I'm going  to be influenced by that. Either to stay quiet,  

[43:55] but more often to even doubt what my own eyes  tell me. So if you can manipulate the apparent  

[44:01] consensus, you can make people doubt their beliefs  at at sometimes at a maximum. You can make people  

[44:07] change their beliefs. At a minimum, you can make  people shut up. And that's what cancelling did.  

[44:12] This said, we're going to use all kinds of social  mechanisms. We won't be governmental necessarily,  

[44:17] but we're going to investigate you. We're going  to hammer you, uh, brigade you on social media.  

[44:24] We're going to threaten your job. We're going to  threaten your reputation. We're going to call you  

[44:32] things like racist or homophobe or transphobe.  We have a dozen different ways to make your life  

[44:39] miserable if you speak out in dissent from what we  think correct the correct viewpoint is. As people  

[44:48] are, I'm sure thinking right now, there is nothing  new about this. This goes back to the beginning  

[44:54] of time. But these techniques were effectively  harnessed in environments like many universities  

[45:02] and they had new tools like social media. It  used to be it was difficult and timeconuming  

[45:08] to try to round up you know a petition against  someone to condemn them. With social media it  

[45:13] was instantaneous. You could get on Facebook, you  could get on what was then Twitter and organize a  

[45:18] campaign against someone and overnight they would  have to apologize or be vilified. and sometimes  

[45:24] they apologized and were vilified anyway. So  that's cancel culture. It was a real thing.  

[45:30] It's a documented thing. It's not the same as  reason criticism which is allowed under science  

[45:35] under under the constitution of knowledge. It's  quite different. That however probably peaked a  

[45:41] few years ago. It's still out there. It's still  a problem and we still need to fight it and be  

[45:46] aware of it. But a lot more people now are aware  of it. especially on campus, they've become more  

[45:52] aware that they've been manipulated by these kinds  of tactics, that small numbers of activists have  

[45:57] managed to shut down debate and disscent. That  there's not enough viewpoint diversity on campus,  

[46:02] that students and faculty need to feel more free  to have robust conversations. I wouldn't say we've  

[46:08] turned a corner there, but I'd say we're headed  in the right general direction. Okay. What's the  

[46:14] other big problem today? The other big threat it  used to be if you wanted to manipulate reality,  

[46:23] one way to do that was censorship because we had  a lot of gatekeepers. So if you were government,  

[46:27] for example, you could out and out shut down um  or prosecute an outlet that you disagree with.  

[46:34] But then along comes social media and related  technologies and they say actually wait a minute,  

[46:42] you can do the opposite of censorship. You can  drown people out. You can make it very difficult  

[46:48] or impossible for people telling the truth  to get attention by doing what Steve Bannon  

[46:54] called flooding the zone with [ __ ] Now, this  is something he actually said and it's a a very  

[47:00] good summary of a propaganda technique that was  originally pioneered by the Russians. They're  

[47:07] still the best practitioners. And it's called fire  hose of falsehood disinformation campaigns. And  

[47:14] that's where the goal is not to put out a single  false narrative and persuade people. It's to put  

[47:19] out such a deluge of false narratives of lies,  halftruths, exaggeration and conspiracy theories  

[47:26] that people can't tell what's up anymore. They  can't tell what's true, what's false. They become  

[47:30] cynical f of fatalistic. And when they're cynical  and fatalistic, they become passive and they stay  

[47:36] home. That's how Putin has manipulated the Russian  population. Along comes a guy in America who  

[47:44] understands this. His name is Donald J. Trump.  He is, in my opinion, the most sophisticated  

[47:50] propaganda operative since certain people in the  1930s who I won't name. He is brilliant at this  

[47:58] stuff. He knows he's good at it because he's  talked about it over the course of his career.  

[48:04] He understands that if you say something false  often enough, it will sink in. And in fact,  

[48:09] just making people refute it will make it sink in  even more. He understands that if you say enough  

[48:15] self-contradictory things at a fast enough  clip, people will lose their orientation to  

[48:22] reality altogether. So you don't want to have a  consistent story and stick with it. You want to  

[48:27] say all kinds of different things at a different  rate. He understands another propaganda tactic.  

[48:32] It's called reversal. That's because he'd rather  have a puppet as president of the United States.  

[48:37] And it's pretty clear. It's pretty clear you  won't admit that the Russians have engaged.  

[48:43] I'm not the puppet. You're the puppet. Whatever  you say about me, I turn around and say to you  

[48:48] another tactic of mass confusion. He then both  as a candidate and then as a president harnesses  

[48:55] every avenue to this end. He uses the government  and the White House to propagate election lies.  

[49:02] He and his supporters used the court. They  were going to court as a fire hose of falsehood  

[49:07] propaganda channel to just populate the world with  these false narratives. They have their own media  

[49:14] channels. They have social media. They have um uh  the repetitors in the Republican party. These are  

[49:22] very sophisticated cognitive manipulation tactics.  They're not something that we're accustomed to  

[49:28] dealing with in an American context. Eastern  Europeans and places in the Baltics know all  

[49:34] about them, but we're not used to them here. And  they caught us off guard. And we in the reality  

[49:40] based community are still racing and struggling  to catch up and to reestablish orientation to  

[49:47] reality. And it's I got to say um it's touch and  go. It's really tough. the attacks that I worry  

[49:54] about at the moment, the attack from President  Trump and the MAGA movement and the elements  

[50:03] of of non realitybased conservative media uh and  social media worry me much more. The challenges to  

[50:12] basic reality now control crucial branches of the  federal government. So you have people in places  

[50:19] like the Justice Department waging prosecutions of  the president's political antagonists and enemies  

[50:26] and just people he has grudges against based on  what lawyers in the administration know are not  

[50:33] true narratives or not violation of law. But when  those people object and say you can't do that,  

[50:41] they get fired or sidelined. You have agencies of  government u like for example the department of  

[50:49] homeland security promoting narratives that  are just plain false like that the election  

[50:55] was stolen. When you have the government driving  false propaganda narratives in the United States  

[51:02] you're in a different world. American government  like like all liberal governments but maybe more  

[51:08] than most. American government is just structured,  shot through with institutions designed to keep it  

[51:16] mored from reality for the simple reason that  if the government isn't mored to reality, it's  

[51:21] totalitarian. It can propound its own alternative  version of reality and it can use that to arrest  

[51:28] you, to throw you in jail or kill you. And  that's what historically they've done. So you've  

[51:33] got everything from the congressional budget  office and intelligence community and places  

[51:38] like the justice all through the government, the  national oceanic and aeronautics administration,  

[51:44] the weather bureau, the department of labor  statistics, they're all in the business of  

[51:48] forcing government to stay real. When you subvert  those government mechanisms and you use them to  

[51:56] substitute alternative reality or as Kellyanne  Conway famously put it, alternative facts right  

[52:04] there, you are flirting with a totalitarian style  of government because that's what totalitarian  

[52:10] governments try to do. Hijack and control truth  itself. I'm not saying we're all the way there,  

[52:17] but I'm saying we need to be really careful  because there are people trying to do that to us  

[52:22] right now. These are both worldwide phenomenon,  but cancel culture phenomena turns out to be  

[52:29] mostly an anglosphere phenomenon. We've seen  it most in the United States and Canada, UK,  

[52:37] Australia, New Zealand, and even there it seems  to be on the Wayne because, you know, it's it's  

[52:42] pretty hard to use tactics of intimidation to  shut people up for a very long time because after  

[52:49] a while they feel, you know, this doesn't make  sense. I don't want to do this anymore. And that  

[52:53] seems to be happening. What about the campaigns  of disinformation, the fire hose of falsehood,  

[53:00] uh the other very sophisticated cognitive warfare  techniques? Those are global. Those originate at  

[53:07] the time of the Zars and Lenin in Russia. Russia  is still the world's best practitioner of these  

[53:12] tactics, but they're being imitated across the  globe. So, you know, you see them in places like  

[53:17] Hungary where the government that was recently  defeated was trying to propagate narratives that  

[53:24] were false about the war in Ukraine, saying,  you know, it was instigated by Ukraine and  

[53:28] Ukraine is is is our enemy. You see people using  these tactics in places like Poland. Of course,  

[53:35] you see them in the United States right now. So,  we see these right-wing authoritarian and populist  

[53:41] parties all over the all over the world harnessing  social media and other tactics. You saw some of  

[53:47] this in the Brexit campaign in 2016 where we can  have an argument about whether Brexit was a good  

[53:54] idea or a bad idea. But the main argument that the  Brexit side used, which was that it would allow  

[54:00] huge amounts of money to be to be captured and  diverted into the British National Health Service.  

[54:07] That was just false and that was known to be  false. But that proved to be a powerful narrative  

[54:12] online which they were able to propagate.  Arguably that caused Brexit to go through.  

[54:17] All of these techniques that we're talking  about, it's very important to understand we  

[54:22] are all vulnerable to them. Being smart does not  help. In fact, there's evidence that smart people  

[54:29] are more vulnerable to cognitive manipulation  because we're better at rationalizing whatever  

[54:35] it is that we hear that we want to believe. Being  smart does not protect you. These are fundamental  

[54:42] cognitive flaws in our brains and how we perceive  the world. And mobilizing them and exploiting them  

[54:50] is a fine art. How do you resist them? That's why  you need a constitution of knowledge. Ultimately,  

[54:58] what the constitution of knowledge is doing is  protecting us from our own cognitive flaws by  

[55:03] forcing us to subject our own beliefs and  perceptions to the beliefs and perceptions  

[55:09] of others to compare them and say, "Okay, who's  right and who's wrong in this situation? What's  

[55:14] true and what's not?" And to do this on rigorous  principles of evidence and reason. That's the only  

[55:20] protection. And that's why these forces around the  globe are trying to dismantle the constitution of  

[55:25] knowledge so that they can substitute their own  version of reality or even worse total chaos and  

[55:30] no reality at all. One of the most confusing  debates at the moment is what to say about the  

[55:38] MAGA movement in the United States and its foreign  equivalents. They're all different in different  

[55:44] countries. things like the Peace Party, PIS Party  in Poland and AFD in Germany, which tend to be on  

[55:52] the far right and tend to be illiberal. One of the  things that this is leading to is an understanding  

[56:01] that right now in real time in the United States  during the second Trump administration and through  

[56:07] the MAGA movement and its tactics, we're seeing  something that's starting to emerge as a kind of  

[56:15] updated 21st century version of American fascism.  At least to me at least. I'm someone who who  

[56:22] really avoided characterizing the MAGO movement  as fascist because a lot of things just didn't  

[56:27] fit certainly not in the first term. Like they  didn't seem interested in conquering or coercing  

[56:33] territory from other countries and they didn't  seem interested in standing up domestic military  

[56:41] uh parapolicing units. They didn't seem that  interested in street violence. So there's a lot  

[56:46] of elements of fascism that we didn't see that.  Unfortunately, we're starting to see them now in  

[56:51] the second term. There's not one clearly defined  thing called fascism. There never has been. Not  

[56:56] even fascists have agreed on what fascism is. So,  my approach is a diagnostic list of 18 things that  

[57:02] are all characteristic of iterations of fascism  that we've seen and all of which are appearing in  

[57:08] the Trump administration. If it w was one or two  or even five or six, okay, you know, maybe there's  

[57:13] some bad stuff going on. But when you see 18 of  these things, and I could have extended the list,  

[57:17] you got real trouble on your hands. So what kinds  of things are we talking about? We're talking  

[57:21] about the valorization of violence, like when you  glory in violence, when you're putting out memes,  

[57:27] celebrating killing of boat survivors by people  in helicopters with machine guns. Another is that  

[57:36] fascists hate rational deliberation. They think it  slows them down. and they celebrate the triumph of  

[57:42] the will, which is rapid, firm decision-making by  the leader, no questions asked. And we're seeing  

[57:48] that again and again in this administration. The  use of paramilitary police forces that are told  

[57:57] that they are not accountable to the rule of law,  that are told that they can do anything they want  

[58:02] and touch anyone they want, committing acts of  violence against citizens. That's not a hallmark  

[58:08] of liberal democracy, but that is something  that you would not be at all surprised to see  

[58:13] in a fascist country. To me, one of the biggest  is more philosophical than that. The preeminent  

[58:21] philosopher of fascism in the early part of the  20th century is a German named Carl Schmidt.  

[58:28] Schmidt promulgated the theory that what politics  is about is not as in liberalism figuring out ways  

[58:37] to get along with each other in a pluralistic  world where we disagree. It's the opposite of  

[58:41] that. It's about identifying our enemies and  crushing them. He said politics is inherently  

[58:51] about winning and crushing your enemies. Now,  we heard a member of this administration say  

[58:59] publicly, "You can talk all you want about  international nicities and everything else,  

[59:04] but we live in a world in the real world, Jake,  that is governed by strength, that is governed  

[59:12] by force, that is governed by power." that  substitution of domination and strength for  

[59:21] rule of law and morality. The idea that the  rule of law and of moral principles are for  

[59:26] wimps and sissies and losers. That's core to the  self-conceptualization of fascism. And the idea  

[59:33] also stated by an administration official that  the other side is wicked and we're coming to get  

[59:41] you. Your time is over. These things and other  and others like them are all deeply alien to the  

[59:50] tradition of James Madison and our founders,  the liberal tradition and they are all common  

[59:56] to versions of authoritarianism and fascism. I  am not saying America is a fascist country. Our  

[00:02] courts remain independent. Our Congress remains  partly independent. Our state governments remain  

[00:08] independent and our people remain independent  and our media remain independent. There is no  

[00:13] way that Trump or MAGA or anyone else can do in  the United States, I believe, what Hitler did  

[00:18] in Germany or what Mussolini did in Italy. But  what they can do is eat away at the foundations  

[00:24] of the system and acculturate a whole bunch of  people in our major one of our major political  

[00:30] parties to a fascist way of thinking about our  country. And that by itself is pretty dangerous.

[00:38] Chapter 3, the surprising link between liberalism  and Christianity. There is a standard criticism  

[00:46] of liberalism and it's that liberalism does not  provide people with a larger sense of meaning in  

[00:55] life. There's a a weaker version of the critique  that liberalism doesn't provide meaning in life,  

[01:03] purpose in life. And then there's a stronger  version of it. And I think the weaker one is  

[01:08] true. And the stronger one is not true. And the  weaker one just says liberalism is necessary, but  

[01:15] it's not sufficient. It doesn't give you a sense  of transcendence or a place in your world. And  

[01:20] that's on purpose. That's a feature, not a bug, of  liberalism. It's deliberately thin. something the  

[01:25] founders stressed, liberalism is going to create  the space for people to invent themselves and  

[01:32] invent their communities and their societies.  It's going to get out of the way of religion.  

[01:36] It's going to get out of the way of invention.  It's going to get out of the way of truth and  

[01:40] allow people to unfold that for themselves. But  what it doesn't do, what it doesn't try to do,  

[01:45] and what it cannot do is answer ultimate questions  like the difference between good and evil, like  

[01:51] why am I here on this planet? like what should I  dedicate life to doing? And the founders told us  

[01:58] liberal theorists going back to lock arguably the  father of it all have said look you're going to  

[02:05] have to look to other sources for that and that  will always be a problem for liberalism because  

[02:11] to a lot of people it's not enough and it's not  supposed to be enough but that means we have this  

[02:18] challenge of meaning where people keep saying  to us liberals so what is it all for? what's  

[02:23] the meaning and we say I don't know you tell  me so that criticism is true but it's a feature  

[02:32] not a bug then there's a stronger criticism and  this dates back to the 19th century at least to  

[02:38] Marx especially to Nietz and now it's major strand  of what's called post-liberalism mostly from the  

[02:46] illiberal or uh liberal right often the uh the  theocrats as some have called And the strong  

[02:54] version of this critique says liberalism is by its  very nature destructive of core values like faith,  

[03:05] family and community and nation. They say these  things cannot coexist because liberalism puts  

[03:14] individual autonomy and freedom before all other  values. It says do whatever you want. It doesn't  

[03:21] matter. you're not accountable to God, you're not  accountable to family and so forth. That what a  

[03:27] liberal society is going to do is undermine  the values that it depends on and ultimately  

[03:32] self-destruct. And therefore, we need to move away  from liberalism and toward a society founded on  

[03:38] religious principles. That means to one school  Catholic principles, to others it means forms of  

[03:44] Christian nationalism, the seven mountains mandate  they call it. uh lots of different things that  

[03:50] they want to substitute for liberalism, but that  have in common a kind of authoritarian view of  

[03:56] where values come from from God, the Bible, what  have you. Now, that strong version is just wrong.  

[04:02] We know from 350 years that's that religion, faith  institutions are stronger in societies that allow  

[04:11] people to choose their own faith and their own  religion. The reason the founders put in the  

[04:15] first amendment forbidding government to have a  state religion is that they understood that the  

[04:20] state is a danger to religion. And it's also the  only way you can honestly come to God because if  

[04:26] someone is forcing you to do that by government  fiat, that's not real witness whether you're a  

[04:30] Christian or anyone else. What is kind of true  here and the part of this critique that folks  

[04:36] like me are taking seriously is it's challenging  to be a person of faith in a secular liberal world  

[04:45] that's where a lot of people are consumeristic  where you've got a lot of materialism where  

[04:50] you've got a lot of secularism and I think it  is true that we secular liberals lost track of  

[04:58] the importance of our faith institutions and our  faith faith tradition, specifically Christianity,  

[05:03] because that's America's founding faith  tradition. We lost touch with how important  

[05:09] that is as an undergurting of our democracy. And  we haven't been as welcoming as we should be,  

[05:16] as inclusive as we should be, as curious as we  should be about the Christians and other people of  

[05:23] faith in our in our midst. Liberal democracy does  not supply all of its own values. It relies on  

[05:31] outside sources to provide a lot of those values,  to teach them, to promulgate them, to give a sense  

[05:38] of transcendence. And when you look at safeguards  against authoritarian challenges like for example  

[05:50] fascism or for that matter like communism,  something I think that the founders understood  

[05:57] and that Lincoln understood is that the principles  of Christianity are in their own way bull works of  

[06:05] liberalism. Let me try to explain what I mean by  that. And what I don't mean is that Christianity  

[06:12] as practiced all of the time is liberal. God knows  I'm a I mean I am a gay American and the number  

[06:21] one force that made life miserable and painful  and often suicidal for gay Americans was misguided  

[06:29] religious teachings. So I'm not white whitewashing  any of that. I also need to say another thing I'm  

[06:34] not saying which is America is a Christian country  and the Constitution is a Christian document. The  

[06:42] founders specifically rejected references to Jesus  and Christianity in the founding documents. They  

[06:48] were prevailed upon to do that and they refused.  And I'm not saying that you have to be a Christian  

[06:54] to be a good American citizen. Far from it. I am  not a Christian. I'm an atheistic Jew. Okay. So  

[06:59] what am I saying? The core principles of Jesus  Christ map awfully well onto the core principles  

[07:08] of James Madison. And that's something that I  did not appreciate enough until recently. Jesus

[07:17] promulgates three core revolutionary values that  are orthogonal to everything that went before.  

[07:24] I mean, they have roots in Judaism, of course,  but but they're different from everything that  

[07:28] went before. Number one, don't be afraid. That's  people say the most frequently repeated injunction  

[07:34] in the Bible. What he means by that is look beyond  this world to the next world. And if you're living  

[07:41] your life hunker down in fear, being paranoid,  you're forgetting that God has a plan for you and  

[07:47] that the calm that Jesus demonstrates in his own  life. The faith in God's plan will help you make  

[07:54] better choices in life and help you be a better  person. Two, imitate Jesus. Jesus is a radical  

[08:01] egalitarian. This is new in history up in that  point. Jesus's people are the poor and the weak,  

[08:07] the prostitutes, the lame, the sick, um the  outcast. Jesus's message is that all humans  

[08:15] have an innate equality and dignity. And of  course, that's a new idea. And that this is  

[08:21] inherent. You never use people as a means to an  end. Every individual is an end unto themselves.  

[08:29] And the third principle of Jesus's Christianity is  forgive each other. We may be angry. We may have  

[08:39] outrages and sins committed against us, but it is  God's place, not our place, to judge. And we must  

[08:46] forgive. And that's the hardest commandment of  all. But this leads to doctrines like mercy and  

[08:52] grace, which are courted Christianity. researching  my book, I'm an outsider to Christianity,  

[08:56] but I interviewed theologians and pastors and no  one disputed that those are three core doctrines  

[09:01] of Christianity. I mean, some people wanted to add  some other things like repentance. But everyone  

[09:07] agrees that's at the heart of the teaching.  Okay, let's take those three things and let's  

[09:12] translate them over to James Madison and the  core some of the core virtues of liberalism.  

[09:19] the things that our founding fathers said that  citizens need to show, need to demonstrate in  

[09:26] order to keep our system running. One of them  is sometimes you're going to lose an election.  

[09:32] It's not the end of the world. Don't go through  life being afraid that if the other side wins,  

[09:38] it's the end of life as you know it and thus you  have to steal the election or deny the election  

[09:42] or end democracy. In fact, it's a good thing that  sometimes you lose. Approach that in a spirit of  

[09:49] adventure and not fear. You're going to learn  from it. They're going to learn from it. Share  

[09:54] the country. That maps very well onto don't  be afraid. Don't be crouched down. Number two,  

[10:02] imitate Jesus, fundamental equality and dignity of  human individual. Well, that one's pretty obvious  

[10:08] because it's right there in the Declaration of  Independence and it's right out of those doctrines  

[10:13] of Christianity. All men are created equal and  endowed by their creator with certain unalienable  

[10:19] rights. What they meant by that is that inherent  equality and dignity of every person. And that of  

[10:26] course is the core doctrine of liberalism itself.  A very direct connection. And the third thing,  

[10:33] the hard one, forgive each other. That doesn't  translate directly, but it does translate  

[10:40] indirectly into the principle of forbearance,  which is sometimes in a liberal democracy, you're  

[10:46] going to win an election, but the goal of winning  in politics is not to obliterate the other side.  

[10:53] We talked a minute ago about authoritarianism and  fascism, and that according to Carl Schmidt and  

[10:58] other fascists, your goal is to obliterate the  other side. If necessary, you even murder the  

[11:06] other side. Liberalism says, "No, you're going to  show forbearance. You're going to treat them when  

[11:12] they're out of power, the way you'll want to be  treated someday if you're out of power. And that's  

[11:17] going to build reciposity and trust that makes  this system possible. And more than that, it's  

[11:23] going to save your soul. Because if you go through  life trying to destroy and dominate people who  

[11:29] disagree with you, who are not like you, your own  integrity and your own goodness will be demolished  

[11:36] along with that. So there you have three core  Christian values. You have three core liberal  

[11:42] values and they support each other. I say they're  like two planks which don't stand all that well  

[11:48] individually, but if you lean them against each  other, they're mutually reinforcing. And that's  

[11:53] one of the reasons why the founders expected  America in their day to turn to Christianity as  

[12:00] not the necessary part of government, but as part  of the substrate of the broader civil society,  

[12:08] which they hoped would help support democracy by  being Christian. What happens when Christianity  

[12:15] moves away from those core values? In the white  evangelical church in America, we've seen what  

[12:20] amounts to something very close to a fusion with  the Republican party. We've seen politicization.  

[12:27] We've seen the elevation. Um the strongest  supporters in the country of the least Christlike  

[12:33] figure possibly to emerge in modern times are  white evangelical Christians. And pastors who  

[12:40] do not like this report what I call the church  of fear. what one of them I talked to calls the  

[12:46] battlefield mindset, which is we're not going  to church with our eyes on the next world. We're  

[12:53] going to church with our eyes on mobilizing the  word of Christ to win in this world, to win the  

[12:58] culture wars, to own the libs. That's had a couple  effects. One is it's causing the rapid shrinkage  

[13:06] of white evangelical churches. Fewer than half  of Americans are now affiliated with a church.  

[13:12] It was 70% 70% through the whole 20th century. And  that's making it hard for democracy because now  

[13:18] people are looking to partisan politics for their  transcendent meaning in life. And that's not what  

[13:24] politics does. Politics is about negotiation,  not ultimate meaning. And then you have the  

[13:29] other problem that when people get caught up in  these narratives, these apocalyptic narratives of  

[13:34] if we lose the next election, our way of life is  endangered and our very position are being able  

[13:40] to have Christmas in society is endangered.  Then every election becomes apocalyptic and  

[13:45] that's that's toxic to a liberal democracy. So as  white Protestantism, white evangelicalism pulls  

[13:52] away from those values of liberal democracy, as  they become less mutually supportive and more  

[13:58] mutually antagonistic, everything gets harder.  And that I think is part of the crisis driving  

[14:04] liberal democracy. And so where I come out all  this is I think America needs more Christianity  

[14:10] if it's going to be more successfully democratic  and more successfully Christian. But the kind of  

[14:16] Christianity I meant is the kind of Christianity  that Jesus preached. For me, understanding the  

[14:24] importance of healthy Christianity to healthy  American democracy has has just been a journey.  

[14:30] It's not at all where I started. In fact, in  2003 for The Atlantic, I wrote what I think is  

[14:37] the dumbest thing I've ever written. And believe  me, that's that's an honor honorary designation  

[14:42] because there's some other real contenders for  that spot. But I wrote in praise of what I called  

[14:47] apaththeism. And by that I meant secularization,  which is I was looking at the numbers showing that  

[14:53] Americans were becoming less religious. And I  said, "Isn't that great?" Because religion is  

[14:59] um divisive in human history and we'll all get  along better if we have less of it. Well, we've  

[15:04] been running that experiment now for for 22 years.  We've seen a retreat from religion like nothing in  

[15:10] American history. There's no parallel for the rate  of deurching that we've seen the rapid the the  

[15:17] um stratospheric rise of what are called the  nuns n these are people who have no religious  

[15:25] affiliation. And we've seen that the result of  that include more loneliness, more isolation,  

[15:31] more sense of enemy, nihilism, anger, and toxic  partisanship. People replacing transcendent  

[15:38] value of um of religious life with a kind of  deified religion. Wokeness seems to be a version  

[15:47] of this. Certain forms of environmentalists,  environmentalism seem to partake of this. And just  

[15:52] rank partisanship where the meaning of my life  is defeating the other side. in in politics. So,  

[15:57] we've run the experiment and I was wrong. I  was just flat wrong. And I think a lot of other  

[16:02] people have reached the same conclusion. And  that's partly driving the contemporary liberal  

[16:08] rediscovery of the importance of of faith as  properly understood a bull work of our democracy.  

[16:18] I only wish that I had not had to learn the hard  way or that we had not had to learn the hard way.  

[16:23] The way I think about it is kind of three  varieties of Christianity, each with its own  

[16:29] social implications. And the first of those  is what happened to the mainline churches in  

[16:36] the second half of the 20th century. These are  your mainline Lutheran and Episcopalians and  

[16:43] Methodists and uh to some extent though maybe a  lesser extent Catholics. We're talking here about  

[16:49] the white churches predominantly. The black church  is is a in a different space. They got culturally  

[16:56] thin. And what's meant by that is the Christianity  is a countercultural doctrine. Jesus's teaching is  

[17:03] at odds with the Judaism of his time. It's even  more at odds with the Roman virtues of his time.  

[17:10] And it asked people to be different from the  surrounding society by focusing, for example,  

[17:15] on the next world, by being radically forgiving.  And that's been Christianity's historic strength,  

[17:23] its differentness. It does best historically when  it presents an example of a countercultural way of  

[17:28] living. And a lot of the mainstream churches lost  that and they began blending into the background.  

[17:34] They became just another consumer choice. I had  mainline pastor, one retired pastor told me that  

[17:40] in his denomination, it became common for there  be a whole whole church gatherings in which the  

[17:46] word God was never mentioned. They got absorbed in  a social gospel kind of teaching which was not so  

[17:52] much about the scripture. It was about what are we  doing in our daily lives to advance justice. Now  

[17:57] that's a good thing but it's not as strong if it's  divorced from the specific teachings of Jesus and  

[18:04] the Bible. And they just kind of they just kind of  blended into the surrounding left-leaning society.  

[18:09] Well, if you want to be a leftleaning social  activist, you don't need to give up your Sunday.  

[18:14] And those churches kind of drifted away and lost  a lot of their rais on detra and they know it  

[18:20] and now they're working hard to try to fix that.  Then comes what happens to the evangelical church,  

[18:26] the white evangelical church in this  century predominantly and that's what  

[18:29] I call the sharp church. This is a different form  of secularization. And it's not the thinning out  

[18:37] of the church where you lose the boundaries  of church and the broader culture. Instead,  

[18:42] it's where you narrow down the church and you  begin to say, "In order to be a Christian,  

[18:48] you need to have a certain view of politics. You  need to have a specific view of homosexuality and  

[18:55] abortion and even national defense." And then it  becomes you need to support a specific political  

[19:03] party and that party is Republican. that begins in  the 1980s with Reverend Jerry Fwell and Reverend  

[19:09] Pat Robertson and Reverend LS Sheldon, but it  really turbocharges in the last 10 years where you  

[19:16] see a what amounts to, as Ryan Burge, our leading  religious demographer, has said, a functional  

[19:22] merger of the Republican party and white  evangelicalism. And that sharpens the part the  

[19:29] um Christianity that wing in a couple ways. One,  it sharpens the message. It makes it partisan.  

[19:35] It makes it divisive, says you can't be here if  you're not with us on these political issues,  

[19:40] very contrary to the universalistic message of  Jesus. But it also literally sharpens the church  

[19:46] in the sense it makes the church smaller because a  lot of people don't want to be there for that. So  

[19:52] you see the same kind of collapse in numbers of  white evangelical organized churches that you'd  

[19:59] previously seen in the mainline churches. They  have the same collapse and that leads to this  

[20:04] rise of the nuns, the nes who are unchurched  and they're looking to partisan politics for  

[20:10] their values. So you neither it turns out the thin  church nor the sharp church is really doing the  

[20:17] job that the founders hoped Christianity could  do and that's the job of what I call the thick  

[20:22] church. That's a form of Christianity which is  thick in the sense of creating strong bonds of  

[20:29] community, asking people of their followers,  not just being a consumer choice, doing more  

[20:36] than that, creating that community, that sense  of transcendence, of group worship, of of meaning  

[20:41] in life, of scriptural teachings that have actual  commandments, and also thick in the sense of being  

[20:50] in harmony to a large extent with our liberal  democracy of saying we are going to be a distinct  

[20:58] cultural entity but we're going to understand  that our country is stronger when the values of  

[21:06] Jesus and the values of Madison are in alignment  and you can do both of these things that's what  

[21:12] I mean by a thick church both countercultural and  functional and supportive of a pluralistic society  

[21:20] with people who are different from itself So,  how do you do those two things? Like they sound  

[21:25] maybe contradictory. How do you be a culturally  distinctive thick Christianity that's not like the  

[21:32] rest of the culture in the country and yet also  supportive of democracy in which people are going  

[21:38] to be different from you. A lot of people will be  atheists or non-Christian or whatever and they'll  

[21:42] have very different views. How do you do both of  those things? It turns out there's a good answer  

[21:48] to that and that answer is captured in a two-word  phrase I didn't know before I started doing this  

[21:53] work. It's called civic theology. Let me just say  what what that is and why I think it's such an  

[22:01] important connecting bond between Christian world  and liberal world. The church has been pretty good  

[22:08] um to this day at doing what it calls discipling  people in their personal lives. Discipling people,  

[22:18] also known as spiritual formation means helping  people to become more Christlike in their lives,  

[22:28] forming them in the image of Christ. And it is  still true, wonderfully true, that when the city  

[22:36] of Asheville is underwater from a flood, the  churches are the first on the scene with aid  

[22:42] and comfort. And it is still true that a lot of  churches are doing great work in their communities  

[22:48] and for the hungry and serving food every  Thursday and taking in the needy. And in their  

[22:54] own immediate worlds, members of churches are  often very Christlike to each other. Not always.  

[23:00] you see some horrible behavior. But then there's  this other question, and this is where American  

[23:07] Christianity, especially white evangelicalism, has  really fallen down on that job. How would Christ  

[23:15] want Christians to behave in politics and on  social media? there in the the famous words of the  

[23:26] Christian writer David French. I'm going to use a  bit of language here, but he puts it awfully well.  

[23:32] If you're saying, "I may be a bit of an [ __ ] on  social media, but you should see me in the soup  

[23:37] kitchen." That's not being Christlike. You can't  make a division between being Christian in your  

[23:45] immediate personal life and then going on social  media and ripping people's guts out, calling them  

[23:51] names, or behaving in ways that are going to tear  apart our country. Thinking the worst of others,  

[24:00] being unforgiving. Viewing politics as a forum for  domination. viewing your own church as a vehicle  

[24:08] for moving forward toward a culture war politics  in which one side has to dominate the other. So  

[24:16] there's been this artificial barrier between  personal civic uh spiritual formation and civic  

[24:24] spiritual formation. And a lot of Christians now  have realized that something's gone very wrong  

[24:29] here. The church has failed in its mission  of having a civic theology that answers this  

[24:35] question for Christians. How can we be Christlike  on social media? That doesn't mean you give up  

[24:41] your positions on whatever the social issue is.  Abortion, homosexuality, poverty programs, war. It  

[24:48] doesn't mean that you change your outlook in what  you believe, but it may mean you change your view  

[24:55] of how you behave in the civic realm. Can you be  kinder and more forgiving of others? Can you work  

[25:03] to listen more to their point of view? Can you  take a Madisonian spirit of negotiation rather  

[25:11] than a fascistic spirit of domination? There are  major elements of Christianity that are working on  

[25:21] doing that. There are places like the center for  Christianity and public life that are now working  

[25:27] on these questions of merging the doctrines of  Christian Christianity with civic life. The most  

[25:33] interesting of all of these I think is what's  happening right now in the church of Jesus Christ  

[25:37] of Latter-day Saints. Now, there's a whole side  debate evangelicals may want to have about whether  

[25:42] they're Christian or not, but they worship Jesus  Christ. They accept the Bible and they advance  

[25:49] those three doctrines that we've been talking  about. But they have actually built a full-fledged  

[25:54] civic theology which says that what Christ wants  followers of Jesus to witness to in public life is  

[26:05] a spirit of what they call patience, negotiation,  and mutual accommodation. Doesn't mean you give  

[26:11] up your basic view, but patience, negotiation,  and mutual accommodation. They call this their  

[26:18] peacemaking initiative and by that they mean civic  peace and they think this is part of their mission  

[26:23] as Christians to try to tamp down the issues  in public policy where that's possible and  

[26:28] create more room to live together. And they've not  only talk the talk, they've walked the walk. They  

[26:34] actually supported a piece of landmark compromise  legislation in 2022 which federally recognized my  

[26:42] same-sex marriage which is against their church  doctrine while also enshrining in the very same  

[26:47] law protections for their church to not have to  recognize that marriage. And that's exactly what  

[26:53] the founders wanted. That's a thick church.  You have a strong church within its borders,  

[27:01] what it believes, yet it's also willing to come  to terms with and support a stronger civil society  

[27:07] outside the church. That's a thick church. I  can't really think of anything more important  

[27:13] than rebooting and strengthening an alliance  between Christianity and secular democracy.  

[27:22] everything else will be so much easier if these  things are supportive of each other than if  

[27:28] they're pulling in opposite directions. And my  plea to Christians, you know, I say this all the  

[27:34] time. I'm an outsider and I'm not telling anyone  who doesn't want to be a Christian or doesn't  

[27:39] believe in Christianity to become one for the good  of the country. Far from it. You know, I'm I'm not  

[27:44] a Christian. I'm not going to become one. But the  message to Christians is that the elements that  

[27:53] our country needs to be a stronger democracy and  frankly a more civil society are right there in  

[28:01] the gospels. If Christianity were to elevate those  core principles of Jesus that I've spoken of,  

[28:12] don't be afraid, imitate Jesus, and forgive  each other. and make a point of engaging with  

[28:20] the rest of the country and especially with the  Christian world of promulgating a civic theology  

[28:27] that emphasizes those elements brought over into  our public sphere. It's going to be good for  

[28:33] democracy and just as important maybe it's going  to be good for Christianity. When Christianity  

[28:39] becomes politicized and sharp and harsh and  partisan and when it looks like everything else  

[28:44] going on in social media, no wonder that's  not something people are interested in. So  

[28:50] what I'm my message to Christians is there's a  powerful convergence of needs here and that what  

[28:56] our country needs is right there in the book.  And then the complimentary message to that is  

[29:01] um you know it comes from my own journey as a  secular liberal as a non-believer as an atheist  

[29:08] as a gay person who had very bitter experiences  of Christianity growing up when I saw it at its  

[29:14] worst. I think too many of us threw out the baby  with the bathwater. I think we forgot that we need  

[29:21] sources outside our framing documents that uphold  these these core virtues um that the founders  

[29:30] called republican virtues and that we have a stake  in healthy Christianity. Christianity turns out  

[29:37] to be a loadbearing wall in our democracy and  we need it to be stronger as much as they do.

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