Transcript 0:01 When we say that we agree with everybody about something, it can be easy to forget that we disagree with everybody about something, right? I don't completely agree with almost anyone. 0:09 I don't completely agree with my husband. That's why we have a lot of our most interesting conversations. 0:13 I think we do really want generally to get along with people, and we generally don't want to have disagreements, especially with people that we're working with. 0:21 But I think that there's nothing wrong with disagreement either. Welcome to the liberalism.org show. 0:28 I'm Aaron Ross Powell, senior director of liberal projects at the Institute for Humane Studies, and I'm joined today by Janet Bufton, a fellow at liberalism.org and co-founder of the Institute for Liberal Studies. 0:41 Much of what we talk about on this show is the content of liberalism, its principles, its ideas, its arguments. But anyone who's actually done politics knows you can't get much done alone. 0:53 And Janet's recent liberalism.org essay, Tribes, Coalitions, Parties, got me thinking about how much the people we work alongside end up shaping what we believe. 1:04 Janet and I discuss what Ronald Coase's theory of the firm can teach us about political alliances, why the civil rights movement held together and then came apart, and how liberals can keep arguing with the allies they need. 1:22 Liberalism.org is largely about ideas, or that's the kind of stuff that we talk about and publish and that liberals talk about is the ideas of liberalism, the, the ideologies, the principles, the perspectives, the policies, and so on. 1:38 Call it the content of liberalism, which made your latest piece for liberalism.org 1:46 particularly interesting because it's less about the content and more about the form, I suppose, of politics, how we do politics in the world, the, the coalitions, the movements, and then the effect that that form has 2:03 on the content of our politics. So can we start there? How does-- I, I'll ask a very big question to kick us off. 2:14 How does the form of our political engagement influence the kind of politics that we engage in? Yeah. 2:25 Uh, so my first three essays have been kind of about this bridging of the ideas with more the prac-- I guess what you said, the more practical forms that politics take. 2:36 And this most recent one is about, um, coalitions in particular is the word that I used. But basically what I mean by that is, uh, so you and I call ourselves liberals. 2:47 Um, we have friends who call themselves conservatives. We have friends who call themselves socialists. Uh, we can work with some of these people, um, in politics, right? 2:56 We share goals, and we can work together towards those goals. Um, and we can work with them in different ways, right? 3:02 We can join an issue campaign, or we can join a broader sustained movement, uh, towards, you know, either broadly shared goals or a specific, um, policy goal. 3:15 The example I use in the essay is the civil rights movement in the United States. You think that the way that we do these things has a big effect on us because it affects who we're around. 3:25 And, uh, Matt Zwolinski's, I think it'll still be his latest, uh, when this comes out, he also talks about, um, the way that our groups, the groups of people we're around affect the ideas in those groups. 3:40 And so if we're allied with a liberal socialist, for instance, uh, you and I, uh, both know Matt McManus and his work, we're gonna be incentivized not to talk as much about our disagreements with liberal socialism. Uh, 3:56 if we're work-- especially if the people on the other side from us are specifically not in that camp, right? 4:02 Uh, it makes more sense to focus on what we're working on together and not to get into big public fights with the people that we're, that we're working with. 4:10 I think over time, that's just naturally going to affect the way that we think about the ideas that we're fighting for, and that's the reason that I wanted to write the essay because 4:20 to, to me, when I look at politics and the way that people are struggling in the current realignment to kind of make heads or tails of people say, like, "Left and right don't mean anything anymore," or, "I never thought I would be aligned with so and so on this," when we're, when we're trying to figure all that out and why it feels so discordant, I think thinking about the way that our previous coalitions affect the way that we think about the world generally is really helpful. 4:48 So is this then just the claim that, you know, we can operate at the level of politics as simply ideas and philosophy and thinking through what's right and good and pure and true and so on. 5:03 Um, and that's important, and both you and I do that quite a lot. But ultimately, when it comes down to it, politics is about affecting change in the world. 5:13 We, we think the world would be more just, better, more thriving, et cetera, if it looked like this instead of that. And so we want to then do whatever it takes 5:26 to get it to this instead of that, and that means working together. And so is this, 5:35 is this just like in politics, you have shared goals, and you find the people who have close enough shared goals and ally with them to advance those goals and leave the rest of it, all of that, like, good and pure and true thinking behind? 5:52 But it sounds like what you're saying is that, 5:55 and maybe you can unpack this a bit, that the-- that act of kind of allying in order to accomplish things in the world can then have a downstream effect on the other kind of thinking, on the good and pure and true 6:09 Version of politics, at least our perception of it. Yeah. Um, so I'm, I guess I'm making the claim that it, it literally does. Like, that is something that happens to us. 6:21 Um, and kind of, uh, below the surface of my piece is an argument that it doesn't have to necessarily be that way. 6:28 Um, so you and I, like if, in the hypothetical I was using, if you and I are working with a liberal socialist, and, uh, the goal we're working towards is something like, uh, criminal justice reform. 6:41 Out- on the outside, we can talk about being allied against people who want more, uh, leeway for police or who want stricter sentencing or are in favor of capital punishment. 6:53 But I don't think that precludes us when we're working together from talking and disagreeing with each other. Um, the thing that I want to bring forward, and the, the, the thinker I use to do this is Ronald Coase. 7:06 Uh, and Coase's theory of the firm, it kind of says, like, the really short version is markets are, if markets are so great, why are there firms, is the, the, the quip that people use. 7:16 And the idea is if market competition and all of these people working on their own, uh, coordinated by prices, uh, profit to loss, 7:25 is so great, why does anybody ever come together and organize in a top-down or a at least much more di- uh, consciously directed way? And Coase basically says sometimes the benefits outweigh the costs. 7:38 Uh, it's more complicated than that, but that's the gist of it. And I think that's also why we work together. Um, and it's really easy to think, especially when we've been working with someone for a long time, 7:50 we work together because we basically agree. Um, and I don't think that's actually true. Like, [chuckles] I, I don't completely agree with almost anyone. I don't completely agree with my husband. 8:00 That's why we have a lot of our most interesting conversations, right? And so we can have those agre- disagreements, and they can be normal. Um, but they can also start getting treated like they're not normal. 8:12 Uh, and that can be for a bunch of reasons that I talk about in the essay. But yeah, my, my claim is basically that we do do this. We can look around and see the effects of this having happened, but we don't have to. 8:22 If we think about our political coalitions, our political partnerships, the way that we engage in politics as something that has a benefit when we get together sometimes, but there are also costs, which are that we're working with people we, who we still have fundamental disagreements, um, that, that can really help us, first of all, not change our idea of what's good and true, right? 8:46 Um, if you keep arguing when you go out for drinks after a day of campaigning, um, and keep remembering that you really disagree on other stuff, I think that can act kind of as a, 9:02 a disincentive to do that smoothing over of differences. Uh, that would be really healthy. 9:10 Um, this is definitely an ideal, um, because I think we do really want generally to get along with people, and we generally don't want to have disagreements, especially with people that we're working with. 9:22 Um, but I think that there's nothing wrong with disagreement either. Yeah, I mean, as you were saying that, what I was thinking is, sure, yes, a firm is a 9:35 tool we can use for coordinating resource allocation, creating these efficiencies, overcoming these challenges that would exist if everything was just independent actors. But a firm is also a culture. 9:48 And you can feel this, like you're in one job and there's, people behave in a certain way and have a certain culture and kind of share beliefs and norms, and then you switch to a different organization, a different employer, and it feels very, very different, even if they're like nominally in the same space kind of working towards the same sorts of things or building the same products or whatever it is. 10:07 Uh, and, 10:09 and so the same would apply to a political movement, a coalition, an, an activist cell, whatever it happens to be, that there's a culture, and that culture affects us because also you recognize, like you go to the new employer, your own behaviors and beliefs and perspectives start to shift. 10:27 You pick up the lingo. You kind of just fit in with the, the social scene within there. So what you're describing sounds challenging. 10:37 It sounds challenging to be in a group of, with people who you share some common goals, yes, but you also have fundamental differences. 10:46 But you're, especially if this turns into a movement or it's a political party or something that's denser than just we kind of all yell at the same people on social media together, uh, 10:58 it, it can be awfully hard to not have that impact your worldview and behaviors and perspectives, even in ways that you just, you don't recognize it happening. 11:11 And, and then, sorry, uh, just the other kind of issue I see is if you're in that, you're in the thick of like this movement, this coalition, 11:24 if you're the guy who's like, "I actually disagree with basically everything all of you believe except for this one thing," you're probably not gonna last in the coalition. 11:33 They're gonna get, they're gonna get sick of you. You're gonna get sick of them. So this, we're just, like it, it feels like there's a lot of kind of social pressures to 11:43 do the perspective morphing that you're saying we don't actually need to do. Ooh. So like, let's think about the way that you just said that. 12:00 Do we actually need to... I think that it will naturally happen, and it's good to guard against it. Um, I don't know if I think we need to do it. I wouldn't say it quite that way. 12:10 Um- I'd, like, I would like for us not to need to do it, right? There are a lot of things about the world that I would like to be different. Um, if we think about it as 12:20 having downsides, um, I think we react to the fact that it, of it happening differently. Um, and, and I think that's good. Uh, you said some stuff about, about culture that I, I wanna talk about. I don't talk 12:33 that much about this in the, in the essay, uh, explicitly, but I do think this is an important thing, and this is something that anybody who has been politically active, whether that's on a, like, explicit campaign or in the ideas movement, has been in spaces where there is a definite culture, and you notice it most if you don't only spend time in your own space. 12:57 Uh, right? Uh, so when you go from, uh, a, as, as I have, a, a, a more conservative space to a more left-wing space or a more libertarian space, you notice the things... 13:14 Actually, I'm gonna add a step, and then you go back. [laughs] Uh, you start to notice things that you didn't necessarily notice before. Oh, everybody uses these words to mean this thing. That becomes a shorthand. 13:25 It's like jargon, right? But it's not only jargon. It's also, um, what kind of things you make excuses for and what sort of ideas are almost taboo. 13:38 Um, and I don't wanna say that like it's a bad thing, actually. It certainly can be, right? It can be, it can be oppressive. 13:46 You can have such a narrow number of acceptable things that it becomes li- it will probably undermine your movement unless it's very, very ingrained already. 13:58 Um, because if you kind of say nobody's allowed at this table that I'm trying to get people to come to, uh, you're gonna be sitting by yourself. [laughs] Um, 14:08 but also I would say the people who are coming to the table should do more to notice that, and that's not directly about what we think is good and true and w- the world that we imagine, uh, that could be better. 14:21 But I think it is important because the culture of our partnerships and our coalitions and our movement tells us something about the values of the people who are in it beyond the specific goal that we're working towards. 14:37 Um, and so [laughs] I guess I'm adding another thing that you don't necessarily want to just become complacent about. 14:45 Um, but like I said, I, I do think this is an ideal because the, the normal thing is going, for most people anyways, uh, is going to be to want to be f- friendly and not argue every single time you sit down, right? 14:59 It's one thing to, to go out with friends and, and have a friendly argument. It's another thing that every time you sit down with someone, you have to, like, relitigate something that you've talked about a million times. 15:08 Um, at some point you become unpleasant [laughs] to be around, right? And so this is something that we have to balance, and it's... I don't wanna make it sound like it's, it's simple. Um, but I do want to 15:22 not let us forget, um, specifically as liberals, uh, and we can talk about why if you want. But not let us forget that there are costs to the way that we're doing things, and the fact that 15:33 what we're doing is worth bearing those costs doesn't make them go away. I wanna get to those costs and the, like, the lessons for liberalism as a political project. But, but before we do, 15:47 one of the aspects of your essay that was really, I found fruitful, um, clarifying, was the way you discuss essentially there's a spectrum of these kind of political organizations we can engage in, from 16:02 coalitions, parties. I don't know that this, this is not a linear spectrum. But you talk about there's coalitions, there's political parties, there's political movements. Um, there's lots of things in between. 16:16 Can you just set out, like, what are those, and what are the differences between each of those in terms of maybe what they're trying to accomplish, what they're good at, and what they're bad at or where they can go wrong? 16:29 Yeah. Um, I actually do kind of set it up as a spectrum, but the real-life examples I-- are harder to place on that spectrum. 16:35 And the, the spectrum I set up, I actually use, um, a skit from Monty Python's Life of Brian, uh, which is the, the skit about the People's Front of Judea. 16:44 Um, and for those who haven't seen the, the skit or the Life of Brian, which I would recommend, it's pretty fun. Um, but Brian, uh, is very thinly veiled. [laughs] Uh, he's supposed to be Jesus, but his name is Brian. 17:00 Um, and he is a Jew in Rome, and he is selling, um... I think he's at, like, they're at, like, the ga- the gladiator, gladiators are fighting. They're in the stands, and he's selling, um, terrible-sounding snacks. 17:13 And he comes across a bunch, a group of people, and they say, "Oh, why can't you sell real food, not that Roman food?" And he says, "Oh, do you not like the Romans?" And they say, "Of course we don't like the Romans." 17:23 And he says, "Are you the peop- are you the People's Front of Judea?" And they say, "Of course we're not. We would never associate with them. We're the Judean People's Front." And they get into this 17:34 argument about who is the worst group of people who want to expel the Romans from Judea. There's also the Popular Front. They're like, "Whatever happened to that guy? He's over there." It's, it's a, it's a thing. 17:46 They're making fun of this idea of being so obsessed with purity that you can't work together. 17:55 Uh, the o- they say, "The only people we hate more than the Romans are these other guys who are also trying to do the same thing as us, but they're doing it wrong." 18:02 Um, and so that's, like, the, the one side of the spectrum. I don't th- that doesn't exist in an appreciable way, right? We've all met the kind of person who can't work with anybody. 18:12 Um, but on the other end of the spectrum is 18:16 This, there's another scene where Brian is up in the window and everybody wants to know what he wants them to do, and he's yelling out the window and he says, trying to say like, "Go off and do your own thing." 18:28 And they say, "Tell us what to do." And he's like, "You don't have to listen to me." And they're like, "Just tell us." And he says, "You're all individuals." And they say, "Yes, we are all individuals." 18:36 And so, like, it's just, again, it's this idea of being so committed to a single way of working together that you can't even differentiate yourself from each other. And so those are the two ends of the spectrum. 18:49 Neither of those really exist, right? 18:52 Um, but within those, uh, you've got people who are so committed to a pure idea that they can't work together, and on the other hand, you've got people who are so committed to a movement that they lose their pure ideas. 19:03 In the real world, we're kind of in the middle of that, right? And, uh, I kind of use, to, to use the three that you talked about, um, I think that, at least I think this is the way that you talked about them. 19:13 One is kind of just a loose coalition and, um, one way we might think about that is criminal justice reform, uh, in the US in the tw-2010s, I think is when this was doing quite well. 19:25 Um, a lot of groups were working on this, but they weren't necessarily working together, right? And so you had people who were just kind of campaigning, um, maybe locally, and they might have been very progressive. 19:37 Uh, and especially if they were in an inner city, they could talk about things like social justice and racial justice, uh, and trying to fix, uh, some of the problems of overpolicing in racialized neighborhoods. 19:49 But if you were doing criminal justice reform in a, like a very red state or a rural area, you would not use that message, right? 19:56 And it's, in that case, it's not even a disagreement between them, it's the context, right? Which is another thing that can make it impossible to work together. But they're working in the same direction. 20:07 They're working on the same things. Um, because they're not working together though, that compromise that you and I were talking about earlier is just much less strongly felt. Like you, you don't feel 20:22 the need to reconcile your beliefs as a red state criminal justice reformer with a progressive, uh, person in a northern city 20:31 because even though you're working towards the same goal, you don't have to do it together every day. Um, you don't n- you're not called upon to make their arguments. 20:40 Uh, you, it's just not as, it's not as much of a thing. And so there are a couple of benefits to that, I think. 20:46 One is what I just said, um, especially if you're someone who has an idea of the world that you think is worth working towards. You don't have to compromise it, right? 20:55 You can just work towards the thing with the people who you agree with the most strongly. You can work towards something that you really, really believe in, and there's, that feels really good. Um, but it also... 21:10 Yeah, I, I guess that, that's what I wanted to say about that. And another example is, um, parties. Uh, political parties are a bit different, right? Because they don't come together over an issue. 21:23 They are trying to find issues to bring people to their cause, uh, issues that they can pick up. 21:30 One way they can do that is actually walk, watching that looser political, uh, organization that's happening without the compromises, right? 21:38 They can look at what's getting people excited, and they can pick that up and adopt it. Um, I don't want that to mean that politicians and political parties can't lead. I think that sometimes 21:49 politicians latch onto an idea and they find that it has the salience, right? They're not finding it from someone else. They do something, and it gets uptake, and so they, they embrace it, right? 22:02 Uh, so parties are working together, but they have much more disciplined messaging, right? They're going to have comms people. Uh, sometimes, uh, these days, I would say too many. 22:11 You've got a lot of politicians who won't say anything at all, lest it upset some, uh, perceived group that they wanna go after. Um, 22:20 I think there's a cost to that though, which is that you lose that inspiring salience, um, that you can find from watching this more dispersed political action. 22:29 Uh, you also mentioned a movement, and like I said, the example I use in the essay is the civil rights movement. Um, in that case, there was like a very clear goal. Um, and a lot of people came together. 22:43 The, the big groups, uh, that are usually mentioned is the SCLC, the Southern Christian Leadership Conven- Convention, I think. Uh, the students for, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and the NAACP. 22:55 Um, and so these are three groups that had like, you can sort of put them on a spectrum too if you wanna do spectrums. 23:02 Uh, the NAACP was like, "We should be doing this in the courts," and SNCC was like non-violent direct action, which is not pacifist, right? It's, it's challenging people to get a response. 23:13 Um, and then, of course, Martin Luther King Jr. is, we now think of him as the, the leader of this movement, and he's kind of in the middle, and he's navigating the demands of the different parts of his movement. 23:24 But they were really working together in a disciplined way. They talked about how they were going to respond. It wasn't a bunch of people kind of doing their own thing in the same direction. 23:35 They would talk about where they were going, who the people there were. They would talk about the tactics they would use that would get the response that they wanted. 23:45 And after an action, they would get together and they would talk about what they'd learned and what they wanted to do different next time. 23:52 And while they were pursuing that goal, that was enough to hold them together despite real disagreements about the end goal, about the tactics, about where and where to go and what to do next. Um, but they didn't have 24:07 the, the institutional formation that a political party does. A political party has mechanisms for keeping its messaging on track, for keeping its candidates. Uh, I guess this is different in different countries. 24:20 I'm in Canada. Um, in Canada, if you really go off message, the party leader can just say you're not in the party anymore. 24:28 Um, I realize this is different in the United States and it's- Different in many countries, but there, there are usually mechanisms to try and get a certain amount of unity [chuckles] in a political party. 24:39 And in both the case of the party and the movement, that gives them the power to form a narrative, um, and direct the political action that they're going towards much more than that loose action is able to do. 24:54 And so those are the, the, the benefits I'm talking about of, of working together more closely are things like being able to shape the narrative more directly, um, but also coming together and having a united front, um, especially when you are going up against somebody else who has done the same thing. 25:10 Uh, the, the cost, though, is that you do lose... If you're somebody who believes something very strongly about the way the world should be, you lose that 25:20 feeling that you're working towards something that you always believe in. 25:23 Um, and you do have that temptation that we talked about earlier to abandon those disagreements and not think about it, and I think that is much more likely in a party, um, than it was in the civil rights movement, uh, which is one of the reasons that the civil rights movement, um, dissolved, um, once, once the Voting Rights Act passed in the United States. 25:42 Not all at once, a little bit at a time. 25:45 Um, but it, it kind of, it, it got the Civil Rights Act passed, um, which ended, uh, formal segregation and, and eventually, like, much more of the segregation in the United States, and it got the Voting Rights Act, which, uh, substantially increased the number of people who were able to register to vote and participate in the political process. 26:04 Those were its big goals. Uh, and after that, the, King wanted to do, like, the Poor People's Campaign. Other people wanted to go after, like, Black power. 26:13 Um, and the, uh, others probably wanted to go after more marginal, uh, court victories. None of those things got people as excited. Um, and so without that driving force of a shared goal, it kind of came apart. Um, 26:29 yeah, I'll stop there un- 'cause I've talked for a long time. 26:32 As you're describing this, it sounds like there's, there's a lot of debates right now, um, as, especially as primaries been happening and we head into November elections, about the Democratic Party and the coalitions around it. 26:49 And, and I think everything you just described is kind of, like, clarifying lens on that, or I can see echoes of that in these same debates. 26:57 And so we have, for example, concern that the establishment Democratic Party, expressed concern by people within the Democratic coalition, has kind of just turned into this, like, loose coalition of 27:12 party leaderships that aren't really committed to anything. 27:15 People are, like, mad right now, want something to be done, want someone to stand up, and are angry that they perceive kind of the core Democratic leadership as not doing that, as just doing the, like, "We're just gonna kind of hold the coalition together, keep our heads down," and so on, and there isn't a sense of, like, purpose is what people are seeing. 27:36 Versus we've seen these DSA candidates winning, and it, there's, one explanation is maybe the people like socialism. But the, another explanation that I think is more plausible in the moment is 27:51 the DSA seems to, their candidates seem to be, well, they're younger, they seem more driven, and it seems like more of a movement. 27:57 Like, we're part of this movement against the bad things that are happening right now, and we're energized in that movement, and we're vocal in the direction we're taking and what we're trying to achieve, and so on. 28:08 And that feels more like something voters want right now versus the loose coalition. Um, but, and this gets to, like, the trade-offs, there's also, like, the, the DSA is rife with infighting 28:26 in a way that I, I saw someone joking that, so that as these DSA candidates have been winning, um, Republicans have been paying, like, groups to dig up dirt, opposition research, fairly standard stuff. 28:40 And someone joked, like, "You don't need to pay anyone. You just ask, like, a different DSA cell for all the dirt, and they'll give it to you," you know? 28:47 Um, versus there's a little bit less of that in kind of just, like, the blander Democratic leader. Is that-- 28:55 Am I accurately describing that, or is that, like, an accurate way of kind of applying this lens that you've given us 29:01 to, like, a live political issue that all of us are watching play out in the news and on the ground right now? Yeah. Um, I mean, I think American politics are weird. 29:13 [laughs] And so, uh, I would actually, like, say that this is happening in both, both American parties, right? You also ta- hear people talking about the, uh, the, the MAGA coalition coming apart, um, which 29:27 I, I don't, I don't know that I'm convinced either that the DSA is, is taking over the Democratic Party or that the MAGA coalition is coming apart, um, because it's just such a mess, right? 29:38 Like, there isn't uni-- There isn't the kind of unity that is normally associated with a party, right? 29:42 If, if American politics were in Canada, you guys would have, like, a bunch of new parties by now, uh, especially if you were in Alberta. 29:49 Alberta, like, changes governments by forming a new party and tossing out the old guys, right? And so, like, it's not surprising to me when you've got... It's almost too much of what I, what I mentioned. 30:02 The institution can't evolve to match the politics, right? And, um, I, I guess I don't talk about this in the essay, but, like, the, the, the inability of the American system to accommodate 30:17 movements that differ from the institutional tools that it has available is making things kind of a mess. 30:24 And I'm not, I, I'm, I won't try to predict, um, which way it would go if it w- I, I think it would probably be more, more like other countries, um, where it's, it's harder for- 30:35 I mean, it would, it just, it is much harder to get complete control as a, like, small group that's able to get people excited just because you wanna do something if you don't have a winner-take-all system, right? 30:46 Um, in, in countries where there's proportional representation, we see that the, like, 20 to 30% of the vote that extremist parties can get, um, it doesn't get you a coalition. 30:58 Um, there are downsides to having to have a, like, uh, a red line that the other parties line up against, uh, a far, a far right or a far left party and say, "We're not gonna form a coalition with you." 31:11 Um, and it's that it dissolves the differences that otherwise make people feel represented by those parties. Um, 31:17 but in Canada anyways, if you get, like, 30-something percent of the vote, depending on the riding, you can win, and we have a first past the post sy- system, right? 31:25 So we don't have these more extreme parties at this point. Um, and we also... But we ha- we do have more parties, so we also don't have this, like, infighting within a specific party. 31:39 Um, as to the, the, the DSA, I mean, it's such a, it's such a mess to understand what's going on, right? Because I think y- you, you kind of said, "Oh, well, one explanation is people like socialism." 31:51 And I don't think that's mostly it, but I think to, to the extent it i- even to the extent it is, I should say, what they mean by socialism is not, um, is not what you or I would necessarily say socialism is. 32:04 Matt Zlinsky's piece at liberalism.org on this is good, uh, Is It Really Socialism? It's, it, it's so many things, right? Some people just like them because what's most important to them is fighting back. 32:15 And as you said, the... 32:19 I don't know if, I don't know if it's actually right to call it the establishment of the Democratic Party, but certainly the, the pa- the people who are in Congress, who are in leadership roles, want to do things much more gradually. 32:31 Um, they're a bit like the NAACP in the civil rights movement, but without... They're do- they don't really have to negotiate in the same ways because they control the institutional machinery. Um, and so it's a big mess. 32:43 Um, and it's, it's kind of a fight for the, the, the machinery itself. Um, I, I don't think we actually know what the coalition... 32:54 I, I still don't think we know what the coalitions are gonna look like, um, because I don't, I don't know that 33:01 in the United States, and I'm gonna say that this is true in Canada, we don't know where everybody is gonna end up yet, um, because we haven't really put the lines in the sand on enough issues. 33:13 Um, and so, so I can imagine, uh, I... Let's just imagine what I would like. 33:18 Um, I can imagine that, uh, the, the Democratic Party, um, in the United States and, uh, the Liberal Party or whoever in Canada, I don't care who, um, but the Liberal Party's in power, so that's who I'm using, um, 33:34 just say we are gonna be committed to protecting democracy. There are DSA people who don't like that, right? 33:41 Um, they, they think that that is, that's gonna be a problem because they want specific things accomplished, and they don't care if it's unpopular. 33:49 If that becomes a dividing line that puts people on one side of the spectrum or the other, we could see some people moving from, like, the, the left to the, to the right that haven't done so yet. 34:00 We could also see people moving from the right to the left, right? Like, the, the only things we kind of have right now are, um, like I would say immigration is one around the world. 34:12 Uh, in the United States, there's a tolerance for corruption, [chuckles] uh, it seems, right? The... 34:19 I, I have another piece with liberalism.org where I talk about principles, um, and how they work to help us coordinate, uh, and navigate politics. And I talk about, um, a tolerance for cruelty, which I don't... 34:32 I think we should have a very low tolerance for cruelty. We should want to avoid it. 34:35 Um, I also suggest corruption, um, and op- uh, uh, opposition to corruption and commitment to openness as things that we could, we could want, um, to, to put our foot down about. 34:49 But until we do that, um, we don't really know where everybody's gonna end up. And so we actually still don't know, right, what, what the movements look like. 34:58 I feel like there was, uh, there was a m- a moment, uh, like a long moment, but there were the No KINGS protests, um, as an outside observer of the United States. This was something that was really motivating people. 35:08 And then it seems like they watered down their message or tried to, like, add more stuff to it, and people are just, it's not as salient, right? And so they might have just shot themselves in the foot. I don't know. 35:19 Um, but I do think people still want to... In the United States, I think people want to fight against the sorts of incursions of the government into their lives that they're seeing, um, right now by this administration. 35:36 And I think that around the world, you see people pushing back against the same kind of politics. Uh, the, the big good news story this year is in Hungary, right? 35:46 The, uh, the opposition, um, taking power back from Viktor Orbán, and that was on an anti-corruption, uh, message. So, like, I do think that that's a good potential one. 35:55 Um, I think that commitment to democracy is going to be, um, relevant, but I don't know if it's going to be the, one of the lines in the sand that anyone draws. 36:06 So then let's close out with the question of what this means for liberals and for liberalism, and, and using liberal in, uh, the rather specific sense of 36:21 pretty strong commitments to a set of principles about openness and dignity and autonomy and freedom i- not just in politics, but in economics and the social sphere and so on. 36:34 It's a, it's a robust doctrine, and it's one that is historically and currently still pretty radical in terms of what it demands of The world and its governing institutions. 36:49 And that commitment to those principles, they're not just principles of like, we think these policies are better, but we think these are grounded in like moral truths about the human condition. 36:58 And that matters to us as, as liberals. And yet we have to form in coalitions. We have to be part of movements if we want to see the world become more liberal. 37:14 And that means people who disagree with us on-- even if there are people who can reasonably justifiably claim to be liberals as well, just different sorts or with different emphasis, 37:30 but people who disagree with us on some of that or would shave off some of those hard edges of our principles. What does this analysis mean 37:43 for liberalism as a movement and not just a set of principles as, you know, as we as liberals enter into the world to engage in politics with others? Yeah, that's, that's really good. 37:58 Um, I think about a, uh, it's a book chapter, um, by our mutual friend and a liberalism.org contributor, uh, Jacob Levy. 38:06 And he talks about differentiating, um, liberalism as a framework for disagreement or a liberal constitutional order from a liberal, liberalism as a party idea. So a contested idea within that framework. 38:19 Um, and you kind of said, you talked about like people who are liberal in, in some ways and not necessarily in others. Um, I think there are a lot of people who have 38:28 party idea commitments, um, that are different, but, sorry, that are different from liberals, but their commitment to the cons- liberal constitutional order, a system in which we have di- peaceful disagreements and peaceful transfers of power and, uh, broad tolerance, um, and respect for rights and due process and things like that, that allow us to have these disagreements. 38:50 Um, that, that, that's relevant. Like the, that, that difference is relevant. Um, and I think we should be thinking about it when we, when we go into things because the-- 39:02 it's hard to navigate right now, um, which is why I have the, the essay about principles because you're, we need to figure out who we stand with on the issues where liberalism is most threatened. Um, and doing that 39:21 puts-- if we find those people, that puts the pressure that I was talking about earlier on us, right? And there are examples of this, um, and I mention them in the essay. I, I, uh, call back to a, 39:32 um, rather old at this point book review by Michael Ignatieff, um, where he talks about, um, he uses the third way in the UK and the fact that Tony Blair said, you know, there, there aren't really any substantial disagreements between social democrats and, and liberalism, and so we're just gonna do the things that we all agree on anyways. 39:52 Um, on the other hand, uh, Ignatieff talks about, um, a conservative who is using a very specific, uh, definition of liberalism, probably very constrained to that constitutional, um, 40:06 well, although I'm about to disagree with that, but from their perspective, probably very constrained, uh, to that constitutional idea and saying liberalism is the only ideology that has ever really taken hold in the United States. 40:18 Um, in both those cases, uh, that was not true. Um, there are substantial disagreements between liberals and social democrats. Uh, social democrats are much more 40:30 willing to use state power without worrying as much about the danger that it poses. Um, and that conservative who was writing that was writing that before the end of Jim Crow. 40:41 Um, and so to say that there was a robust liberalism in the way that you just meant it would, would have been wrong, right? That a, a robust liberalism will not tolerate 40:52 institutionalizing different, different levels of citizenship inequalities under the law. Um, and so 41:00 I think first of all, we need to be very clear about those disagreements and about the level at which we can find agreements and where those are. 41:08 Um, and the reason that I think we need to do that is because rather different things follow based on the premises with which you go into something, right? Um, and so if you go into 41:22 a, uh, a policy change, and I think that the n- the reason for the policy change is to make people freer and to en- enable them to do the things they want to do with their lives, to go and live all of the ways that people find the good life. 41:38 And somebody else goes into that thinking that the policy change is going to favor their specific group. And then what happens is I'm-- I guess I'm picturing a deregulation of some sort. 41:51 If what happens after de- the deregulation isn't what they imagined would happen, then our substantial agreement in going into that policy change starts to break apart. And so I don't think-- 42:06 I think it has been very easy as liberals to find agreements. Uh, we used to joke that we agree with everybody about something, uh, right? 42:14 Because we would say, "Oh, well, I agree with conservatives about, um, limited government and balanced budgets, but I agree with progressives about things like, uh, dr- drug legalization and, uh, sin taxes or something, or maybe not sin taxes, but, uh, 42:33 consensual crimes," right? Um, when we say that we agree with everybody about something, it can be easy to forget that we disagree with everybody about something, right? 42:44 And so, like, while I did really agree with the conservatives about those things, I also disagreed with them about the things that I agreed with the progressive about. Um, and so I think this 42:55 calls on us not to lose what you mentioned, which is 43:00 our deeply held idea of what would make the world a better place, our vision of the world, uh, the system that we think would make everybody better off, uh, that would make things work best. 43:11 I think it's important for us to 43:14 not only not lose that in ourselves, but I think it would be good for us to cultivate places where we're having those disag- those disagreements among ourselves, like friendly disagreements, uh, to figure out what really matters to us, um, maybe in light of the coalitions that we're in, um, but also the places where we can come together and affirm those values. 43:32 Uh, and so I don't exactly know what that looks like, um, but going through the process of thinking through how coalitions shape ideas, uh, did make me think it's something that we should be thinking harder about. 44:02 [outro music]
