Liberals, particularly classical liberals and libertarians, have too narrow a view of power. They focus on government force, or the threat of government force, and ignore all the other ways power is exercised in society. And the way classical liberals and libertarians imagine the fully autonomous self is at odds with our deep cultural embeddedness and the social construction of our identities, our ways of seeing, and the concepts through which we come to understand ourselves and the world. That'...
Jun 30, 2025•52 min
What's happened to Twitter, or now X, is the clearest example of why it's actually not great that so much of our digital communication is controlled by just a few firms and, through them, the whims of guys like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. These single points of control not only mean a product we love today can be unlovable, or just gone, tomorrow, but also give more dangerous actors, like governments, avenues to use that centralization against us. The alternative is to revive what the internet...
Jun 19, 2025•51 min•Ep. 86
The government's power to see is its power to oppress. The more the state knows about us, the more levers it has to control us. Understanding that connection, its history and its application, is critical if we are to secure our liberties in the face of authoritarian threats, such as the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the federal government in Los Angeles. I'd scheduled this episode—with returning guest Patrick Eddington about his new book The Triumph of Fear: Domestic Surveillance and P...
Jun 12, 2025•35 min
Equality is central to the liberal project. Thomas Jefferson failed, dramatically and unforgivably, to live up to this ideal, but he stated in correctly when, in a letter, he wrote that "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately." Liberalism views us as equals, and demands the law treat us as such. The illiberal project, then, is the denial of this equality. And the failure to notice inequalities, or t...
Jun 03, 2025•46 min
The Trumpist right has a very clear picture of what they imagine masculinity to be, and are quite upset that it's not a picture all men find all that appealing. It's one of violence, belligerence, and professions of heavy labor. Anything else, including the whole of the knowledge economy that has made the developed world rich, is inauthentically masculine, the result of corrupting feminization. As someone who earns his living communicating ideas, and is pretty happy doing so, I find their argume...
May 27, 2025•56 min
The authoritarian right loves to talk about how they're upholding democracy. Trump didn't lose the 2020 election, because if he had, democracy would've been against him. So instead it was stolen from him, his loss a subversion of the democratic process. Now, as a deeply unpopular second-term president, he and his loyalists pretend they are executing the will of the people, instead of horrifying most Americans while circumventing the people's elected legislature. My guest today has written a terr...
May 15, 2025•54 min
The first few months of the Trump administration have proven not just how willing much of America was to embrace and celebrate fascism, but how crucial careful, clear-eye, and thoughtful reporting and analysis are to building and sustaining a resistance movement. Few publications have been as essential in this moment as Liberal Currents , which has consistently brought deep understanding, a sense of urgency, and a commitment to the necessary practical steps of defending liberal institutions and ...
May 06, 2025•53 min
As we've talked about a fair amount on the show, gender is at the center of the ideological clashes defining our political moment. Trumpism is, at its heart, a misogynistic movement, and the fractious coalition of philosophies within the Trumpist tent all agree that increased freedom and opportunities for women have been very upsetting for right-wing men. My guest today brings gender into dialogue with the structure of the economy has it has manifested in the developed world. And, in doing so, s...
Apr 29, 2025•44 min
Many very rich men who support Trump fancy themselves heroes from the novels of Ayn Rand. I've never done an episode of this show on Rand's ideas, because I'm not a Randian, and don't think about political questions through anything like an Objectivist perspective. But the fact that so many men breaking the country believe they are Randian archetypes makes her ideas now, I think, worth talking about. Particularly because, as my guest argues, Rand would hate these guys. Paul Crider is an associat...
Apr 15, 2025•55 min
I wanted to try to do a hopeful episode. The world look pretty grim right now, and many of us feel discouraged. The unlawful and authoritarian actions of the Trump administration keep coming at a relentless pace, and it can be difficult to see any reasons for optimism. It can also be lonely. Someone mentioned to me recently that, in times as dark as these, we need friends, but we also need comrades. We need people who share a common purpose in defending liberalism and who are working, alongside ...
Apr 07, 2025•43 min
The right-wing ideologies we see most active in the world right now aren't intellectual by any stretch of the imagination. But there is a rich tradition of conservative political and social philosophy and, as liberals, it's important to understand what its objections to liberalism look like. ReImagining Liberty stalwart Matthew McManus, a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan, wrote an article for Liberal Currents not too long ago about the philosopher Roger Scruton's criti...
Mar 26, 2025•47 min
How we navigate the new political environment the voters thrust upon on, and the new regime that seeks to tear up the very foundations of our liberal society, is a matter of ethics. And ethics is bigger than just political questions. It's about how you live, what you aspire to, and what makes for an admirable life, both inside and outside of politics. My guest today has written an important book about just that. Seth Zuihō Segall is a clinical psychologist who served for nearly three decades as ...
Mar 18, 2025•44 min
We talk a lot on this show about the benefits of free and open markets and, given the growing hostility to economic freedom, not just from the Trump administration, but from populist governments around the world, we'll continue to do so. Today I wanted to approach that conversation a little differently from usual though. Most of the time, when people say markets are good, what they mean is that markets make us richer, driven innovation, and so on. But markets do more than that. They make us bett...
Mar 01, 2025•52 min
The information environment in which Americans form and discuss their political views has gotten weird. Walter Cronkite is gone. The editorial pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal have lost influence to podcasters, social media influencers, and internet conspiracy theorists. Trump's rise, and return to power, was in large part fueled by figures on the far-right who knew how to take advantage of this changed environment in a way liberals haven't yet figured out. T...
Feb 23, 2025•47 min
Last fall, I had the extraordinary opportunity to travel to Delhi, India, to give a talk to young Indian liberals. The topic was the connection between Buddhist philosophy and liberalism. If you’re a regular reader of my work, or listen to my podcast, you’ll know this connection has been central to my work for some time. I believe that Buddhist ideas give us important tools for understanding not just why we ought to be liberals, but why liberalism is the best political system for make the world ...
Feb 14, 2025•52 min
The rise of Trump is, in many ways, a story about status. Plenty of Americans feel like their relative status has fallen in recent decades, and they believe Trump, both as an embodiment of their identity and values and as a wielder of vast power, can give them that status back. That's the argument my guest made in a recent essay at the Bulwark called "Trump’s Secret Weapon Has Always Been Status Anxiety." Alan Elrod is President & CEO of the Pulaski Institution and columnist at Arc Digital. ...
Feb 07, 2025•47 min
In this conversation, Aaron Ross Powell and Anthony L. Fisher (Senior Editor at MSNBC Daily) discuss the political landscape following Trump's second inauguration, focusing on the rapid changes in governance, the Democratic response, and the fractured media environment. They explore the implications of these dynamics on public opinion and the importance of engaging in new media spaces, particularly podcasts, to effectively communicate liberal values and counteract authoritarian tendencies. If yo...
Jan 31, 2025•52 min
We've talked a lot about gender on this show, in the context of transgender rights, the way declining relative status drives men to the political right, and the broader role gender plays in the political environment. The results of the presidential election in November proved just how central gender is to story of rising illiberalism, with men shifting right while women shifted left. To discuss how we should read this shift, and dig into what's causing it, I've brought back Samantha Hancox-Li , ...
Jan 02, 2025•48 min
For this first episode to be recorded after the results of the presidential election, I've brought on my friend and former colleague Walter Olson . Walter is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, a staunch defender of democracy and liberal institutions, and an expert in the processes and law of American elections.We talk about why the election went the way it went, avenues for electoral reform, and what lessons liberals should take from the results, given that we now need to commit ourselves...
Nov 27, 2024•49 min
Today's episode was recorded a few weeks before the results of the November presidential election, and before an unrelated change I've made to this podcast. So before we jump into my conversation with Matthew McManus, I wanted to take a moment to give some context and talk about ReImagining Liberty going forward. First, for all of its life, ReImagining Liberty has been a listener supported show, and the way listeners supported it was to become paying members and get early access to new episodes....
Nov 11, 2024•1 hr
Unless you're an early access supporter of the show, this is the last episode you'll hear before the presidential election, which will profoundly shape the state, or looming absence, of American democracy. The critical importance of the choice between Harris and Trump has much of the country thinking about getting more people involved in politics—and the question of political participation, and particularly how much of it is reasonable, is what my guest spends a great deal of his time thinking a...
Oct 28, 2024•1 hr 6 min
An important theme of this show is the role of rhetoric in politics. It's not just the arguments we make that matter, but when we choose to make them, and how we talk about political issues. And we can learn a lot about the people who disagree with us not just by parsing their arguments, but by paying attention to when and how they make them. This is critically important in a political environment as charged, fraught, and arguably on-the-brink as ours in the days before a presidential election. ...
Oct 14, 2024•59 min
We're staring down the barrel of a presidential election, one that highlights deep questions about democracy and political participation. If our goal is radically more freedom, how should we think about democracy's place in achieving that, given that the popular will often isn't for more freedom. And if the system, as it exists, is rather far from fully just, how should we approach participating in it? These are questions libertarians, and others, raise frequently, and they're worth taking more ...
Sep 30, 2024•44 min
When Biden dropped out of the presidential race and Harris took over, we witnessed not just a change in candidate, but a change in rhetoric. Harris's campaign began talking in the language of "freedom" and "liberty." Harris's running mate, Tim Walz, contrasted himself with the meddlesome social conservatism of JD Vance by saying he was for "minding your own business." For those of us who have long championed a politics of radical liberty, this was met by both enthusiasm and suspicion. Enthusiasm...
Sep 16, 2024•58 min
This, as it says on the tin, is a show about liberalism. But teasing out what that term means can be challenging. Not just because it's philosophically complex, but because common usage of terms doesn't always conform to rigorous conceptual categories, and even when it does, language evolves. That's the jumping off point for today's conversation. My guest is Samantha Hancox-Li and she's a writer , game designer, and associate editor at Liberal Currents . We discuss what it means to be liberal, a...
Sep 04, 2024•46 min
A liberal society is necessarily an open and diverse one. When people are free to move and free to choose, a country's population and culture will reflect all those differences in tastes, preferences, and ways of living. And that's part of what makes liberalism so great. But a pluralistic society can be bothersome for those who'd prefer everyone be just like them. And if those sorts get uncomfortable enough with cultural diversity and dynamism, they can turn against liberalism itself. To help th...
Aug 19, 2024•45 min
I'm joined today by Janet Bufton , Program Coordinator & Co-Founder at the Institute for Liberal Studies. I'm a little embarassed it's taken me this long to get her on the show, because she's one of the most thoughtful advocates out there of the kind of genuine and broad liberalism--and liberal values--that are at the heart of ReImagining Liberty. We discuss the link between liberalism and liberation, the intellectual history that's led many self-described liberals and libertarians to be ske...
Aug 05, 2024•49 min
On June 7th, David Boaz died. He was the Executive Vice President of the Cato Institute, author of *The Libertarian Mind*, and the most important figure in the libertarian movement in the last half century. He was also my mentor, my close friend, and, for twelve years, my boss. I had the privilege of holding, for the first two of those years, what is among the most exclusive, challenging, and rewarding jobs in Washington: Staff Writer at the Cato Institute, a role that primarily meant being Davi...
Jul 22, 2024•53 min
Politics gets pretty emotional, and we typically view that as bad. The political scene would be better, we suppose, if more people could set aside their emotions and rationally engage with the hard questions. My guest today isn't so sure. Jason Canon is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge in political science, and while he doesn't reject reason, he argues that emotion plays, and ought to play, a much larger role in how we think about and approach politics than it typically gets. Reaso...
Jul 05, 2024•47 min
Among the various ideologies opposing liberalism that have seen new or renewed prominence in the last decade is Christian nationalism. It motivates quite a lot of the far right in the culture war, played a role in the attempted overthrow of American democracy on January 6th, and seems to be everywhere on social media. But what is it? Where did it come from? And how can liberalism respond? My guest today is my good friend Paul Matzko . He's an historian and author of The Radio Right: How a Band o...
Jun 08, 2024•57 min
