Want to welcome everyone back to the Pekanana Show. Return into the show. See Jangle, How you doing, CJ doing good? Thanks Pete, thank you for coming and agreeing to do a reading with me. Now, this is a longer chapter. I don't know that we're going to get through the whole chapter, but I think this is a really important chapter in Paul Gottfried's book After Liberalism. So we were just before we started recording talking about Paul Godfreed. You
actually just finished doing a live stream with him. Talk a little bit about this book and why you were eager to read from it.
Well, anything Paul's written I take very seriously. Paul's a very academic writer. You know, like a lot of his commentary and stuff. It's very popular, but he's a very dense academic writer. And the thing about Paul is he has a very wide grasp on all the various contributions, and he has the ability to kind of sift through all the commentary over the centuries and recognize which sources have been the most transformative. You know, which ones you
have to talk about. You can't talk about liberalism in the twentieth century without talking about you know, John Dewey or John Gray or people like that. So a lot of these more academic aspect of things he captures very well. Even even like a lot of us on the dissident right, you know, we'll read people, but we don't. Actually he's he's much more involved in the the the trajectory of the academy, you know, over the over the years, over
the centuries. So I think Paul is really good if you need to get a sense of where the like the the the basics of officialdom came from. So in terms of this book, after Liberalism, you know, he actually discusses this in chapter one. It's impossible to define. We don't know what liberalism is. It's it's been used in so many different contexts and so many different frameworks that it's hard really to pin it down. And you can't pin it down. You have to define it every time
you're going to address it. That's important to remember and keep in mind when talking about people like James Lindsay, you know, other pro classical liberals out there. We need to keep in mind that liberalism is incredibly difficult to define because of its historical path. But it's also sort of one of those hegemonic phrases that you just assume that you know because it's just part of our political discourse.
But he points out that it's a lot more difficult than that, so we'll probably get into some specifics related to that, but go ahead. That's my take on the overall cool.
All right, Well let me let me share the screen up here, and yeah, there we go. Very cool. All right, So we're hopping over chapter one to chapter two, which is liberalism versus democracy, and I think this is really where you start getting into the meat of it. And he also does a really good job of hitting some history here. So if you've heard me do readings before, stop me at any time to come in on anything,
even if it's mid sentence. Yep, I think the only person who's there done that to me as AA, but I don't mind it at.
All, So yeah, okay, I'll see what I can do, all right.
Liberalism versus democracy liberal and democratic mentalities a process of your attention at the turn of the century and even earlier, was the movement from a bourgeois liberal into a mass democratic society. Not all of those who observed this process made the same judgments about it. Some, including the European
socialists and the founding generation of American social planners welcomed democratization. Others, such as Max Weber Max Weber sorry, considered it to be an inevitable outcome of capitalism, technology, and the spread
of the electoral franchise. Still others, typified by Sir James Fitzjames Stephen eighteen ninety two to eighteen ninety four, prominent eighteen twenty nine to eighteen ninety four, pardon me, prominent jurist and a decidedly anti egalitarian liberal, protested that unseemingly haste. Protested the un seemingly haste with which John Stuart Mill and his friends greeted the new democratic age, quoting the waters are out and no human force can turn them back.
But I do not see why as we go with the stream, we need saying hallelujah to the river God.
Yeah, let's let's pause right there. I mean, I think the idea I mean, for a lot of people, probably not new to your audience, but the idea that there is this difference between democracy and liberalism, I think is new to a lot of people. I mean, we the phrase itself liberal democracy or democratic liberalism. The two go hand in hand to so many people, but like look at look at people like Victor or Bond, and how serious he is about the democratic interests of his own
people require him to be illiberal. So these two don't go hand in hand. And we'll get I think a little bit more into the differences between liberalism, but I think that right there is really important. A lot of a lot of the original Like classical liberals in England
were very anti democratic. They didn't trust this spirit of the masth and especially the ability of the new elite, the merchant class, the capitalists to basically use democracy as a weapon for their own pursuit of material interests.
It was obvious to them, where a lot of people now are just waking up to the fact that it can be used as a weapon, where back then many had already seen it or foresaw it. The tension between liberalism and a successor ideology in between the social classes embodying those ideas provides a recurrent theme in nineteenth century
political debate. Francois Gusseau seventeen eighty seven eighteen seventy four, the Huguenot Prime minister under Frances Liberal July monarchy, and a distinguished historian of England considered democracy to be as much of a curse as monarchical absolutism. As French Prime minister in the eighteen forties, Guseeau fought doggedly against the extension of the limited franchise, the sins from property tax payers to other French citizens.
Yeah, I mean that, I mean that right there is important too, Like when we think of democracy, and I know it's kind of an overrated point. A lot of people make fun of, you know, people distinguishing in American you know government between like republican and democracy and stuff, and sometimes that that is like overstated, but there is a truth to the fact that mass democracy in the twentieth century sort of the American twentieth century model is
not the original republican instinct. In fact, you know, the original Republican quote unquote democratic instinct was very much anti mass democracy. They did not trust the extension of the the What he means by the franchise is the ability for everybody to vote regardless of their class, regardless of their property status, their race, their sex, et cetera. So the original you know, trailblazers of liberalism were definitely not pro master modocricy.
He distinguished sharply in his speeches and political tracts between those civil rights suitable for all citizens, such as freedom of worship and the vote. By means of the second, Gizo maintained the lower class could destabilize society radically, redistributed, redistributing, redistributing pop property, and bringing resourceful demagogues to power. He believed the bourgeoisie formed a class capasitid those who would be guided by reason and their stake in society in
directing the actions of government. Indeed, yeah, that's guided by reason, because I've studied you know, when you study objectivism at all, whatever you see that like those three words together, you immediately think it jumps to one thing. Right.
It's also I mean, this is this is sort of like it is a contribution of like Enlightenment thinking, and it affects objectivism obviously, but it also permeates into libertarianism, even certain trends of like Marxism and certain certain aspects of socialism. Just the idea that we can use reason, utilize it and guide to society, you know, by our own expertise, is definitely an enlightenment, you know, holdover.
Yes. Indeed, Guseeau recommended the idea of creating a state through representation which would fully reflect the values of bourgeois electoral law aristocracy. Although in eighteen thirty one he fought to give representation to government functionaries and other professionals who paid lower taxes than required for franchise eligibility, he nonetheless argued for the special suitability of the upper middle class
for political participation. Only that class combined wealth with only that class combined wealth with formed intelligence.
In other words, the original liberalism was not at all interested in, you know, handing a power over to every you know, ghetto pop culture, you know, subsumed consumer right. That was never the goal of liberalism. Much too probably the frustration of people like James Lindsay who think in
these absolutist individualist terms. You know, these original liberals they never would have been interested in, you know, sharing political power with the proletariat or the you know, the cultural culturally deranged.
Yeah, they certainly wouldn't be championing the Civil Rights Act.
I mean, if you're if you're confused about your own gender and you want to start chopping yourself to bits, maybe you shouldn't have the vote.
Yeah. The English Juran jurist William Lackey, who admired Gizo, devoted his long polemical work Democracy and Liberty eighteen ninety six to the pop to the polarity between liberal order and democratic equality. Surveying England's parliamentary history in the second half of the nineteenth century, Lecky wrote Lericky worried that a universal franchise was irreversibly changing both English society and
the English state. Not surprisingly, his book appeared at a time when English socialism was becoming a political power, and Leaky devotes more than one hundred and forty pages to analyzing the new radicalism. In eighteen ninety three, the Independent Labor Party officially came into existence in the Yorkshire town
of Bradford. Since the elections of eighteen seventy four, however, avout socialists had sat in the British Parliament and socialist labor unions had been around since the eighteen fifties, to the consternation of German liberals. German socialists meeting in the Saxon town of Gotha, had drafted a program in eighteen seventy six calling for public ownership of the means of production.
The Gotha Socialists also demanded an entire battery of social programs to be introduced by a properly democratized German state. In France, the Revolutionary Socialists, this is all right, here
goes one. Jules Gazzet sat at the sat in the Chamber of Deputies from eighteen ninety three on, and as like he as he reminded us these days in the Catechism, socialist presents the family as an odious form of property, one destined to give way to a multiplicity of sexual relations for men and women alike.
Yeah, I think one of the points here is something that we all recognize now. At the origin of these liberal or democratic movements, you know, there was a difference between them. They didn't stem from the same impulse, I guess is what I want to say here that you know that came America was sort of the first two nite these concepts in its own, you know, for his
own purposes. But I think Paul's point here is throughout the Western European world, Germany, France, England, et cetera, these were very different instincts.
Yeah, all right, One way to look at such social quarrels is to observe how dated they are. These battles were supposedly, supposedly waged between reactionary and democratic liberals. Those liberals who were just in humanitarian, it has been argued, went with changing times, while others who were not, such as DiFranco, Italian economists and socialist Elvedo Pereto, fell into
bad company and even sometimes into fascism. Implicit in such a view is the distinction that more and more modern liberals have drawn throughout the twentieth century between themselves and those they have replaced. It is purely it is a purely strategic stance that minimizes the reality of past conflicts.
Like the mainstream, Like the mainstream new deal liberal his storiography in post war America, the liberal historical view stresses the natural progression of the progression of things by which the new liberals took over from the old.
Yeah, this is this is important because like a lot of people who have this, I mean, this is this is classic like James Lindsay type stuff, Like everything is
kind of reaching it's its own conclusion. It's been on too trajectory for you know, hundreds of years, and in fact, this was actually a sort of mentality that Murray Rothbard had early on and not later Murray Rothbart who recognized the function of the power elite, but earlyer Murray Rothbart he saw, like if you read his essay you know, left right in the Prospects of Liberty, it's all this, yeah, it's all this, like this single merit meta narrative. It's
all like coming into fruition. Everything's improving over time. He definitely drops that at the end of his life when he when he talks about there's an essay on you know, Mesis's role or whatever, you know, within Austrian economics, but he definitely drops this. But the point is that a lot of people in the twentieth century America do have this mentality where, you know, some people took the wrong path, but this has been the liberal projects has been slowly improving,
you know, over time. And Gottfried's saying that that actually, and this is one thing that Gottfried is really I wouldn't say it's unique to him, but it's something that he really is unique in terms of like overall traditionalist conservatives like who have this meta narrative story of things. He does emphasize discontinuity. Paul Goffried always recognizes that the New Deal replaced something before it, and the you know the point the post nineteen sixties left replaced the New
Deal left, and like there's all these discontinuities. He doesn't see things in terms of this overall continuity. That's something that Paul always emphasizes that every historical epoch is unique to itself.
Yeah, you're gonna just did an episode on the same thing. Epochs how things change, how but it seems like it goes in cycles.
Yeah, but the but the current twentieth century, like people who see America as sort of like the fruition of all the best aspects of Western history and it's all culminated into America. They need the overall narrative thing because every age has to be like an improvement and it has to be this organic process, and America is sort of at the top, like the post war America is like the ultimate end of history. It's the end of man.
Is the best and most complete political system in terms of justice and wealth and the equality and all these things. Whereas Gottfried says, you know, no, he denies he denies the continuity there. He says, what we see in liberal democracy in our age is basically a repudiation of you know, historical epochs.
Yeah. Anyone who looks at the what the United States has become and says, oh, this is this is dizen ith. You're you're in sane, You're insane. Yeah, I mean, it's just it's brainwashing. Right, let's move on. It is possible to perceive continuity in the movement from a bourgeois liberal society into a more democratic one, but that continuity is not the same as direct continuation, as was noted by
Max Weber, Joseph Schumpeter, and other early twentieth century social commentators. Rather, we are dealing here with a series of points leading from a from a bourgeois into a post bourgeois bourgeois is bourgeois age, that is, with a process of displacement that went on for several generations. Thus, Weber focused on rational rationalization in analyzing the movement from a bourgeois capitalist
towards a bureaucratized socialist society. A liberal bourgeois world created the secularist foundations and economic organization necessary for socialist rule. Another pessimistic social commentator with liberal leadings. Joseph Schumpeter believed that the middle class concept of readom encouraged the expression of critical opposition. This tolerance undermined the belief system of an older liberal society and prepared the way for social democracy.
Yeah. So I think this is important because here we see and Goffrey is going to get into this more, I think, and I think he also does later in the book. But we always have to keep in mind that there's a big difference between what you might call historicist liberalism and universalist liberalism. Historicist liberalism was the instinct that that labeled itself liberalism, but within the context of
a certain political paradigm. And so the English, the English liberals, you know, saw themselves basically as pursuing new avenues of freedom within the context of their own history, within the context of their own political uh, you know, horizons. Whereas and that's not the mentality that a lot of like objectivists on you know, I Randians, but also like some libertarians and James Lindsay and other advocates of what they call classical liberalism, they have a more universalist liberalism where
the ethnicity, the cultural context doesn't really matter. Every individual has these you know, universal human rights, and it doesn't really matter what the context, the political context is. These things are eternal and they're sort of transcended over all things. That's universalist liberalism. So what Godfrey's trying to say here is that, you know, the original liberalism, what's much more
rooted within particular societies. That's why German liberalism was different than English, which was different than French and so on.
Yeah, but neither are those attempts by old style European liberals to find links between two distinctive social and political formations denies the differences between them. Both Vber and Schumpeter were looking at the conditions in which social changes took place, and they note the overlaps as well as distinctions between the epos and question, hasa panjatas condulus, I think that's correct. It's gonna that's as correct as I'm gonna get it
there good enough? Yeah. A German germanophone Greek scholar whose work is not yet widely known, breaks new ground in this respect. Condolus examines the distinctions between liberal bourgeois and mass democratic societies by looking at their literary and cultural artifacts. Modern democracies differ from pre modern ones, according to Congdolus, in that they disassociate citizenship from cultural and ethnic identities, and in the way in which mass production affects society.
Yeah, this is this is something I'm personally interested in, and I think a lot of younger people might emphasize this even more than Paul does. But we have to pay attention to how cultures like the market, you know, the so called free market, the the the the capitalist space, the the production of consumer goods, they don't they don't just respond to consumer interests, They often direct them. They often change the culture itself, and they're often placed into
culture with the objective of transforming them. And so the emphasis on what has mass production done to society? I think it's something that right wingers need to continue to emphasize, you know, much more than liberals. You kind of see as this neutral space wherever the free market is, it's
there's like just you know, cultural neutrality there. But I think that Condoleus is entirely correct, that that that the entire you know, cultural landscape can change just by the introduction of mass production.
Well, it also seems like a lot of the economics that you see pushed from like libertarians, is doesn't really take into account what we've seen as far as globalism, as far as to advanced in technology itself, also its social engineering, things like that exactly. Just it exists in a vacuum. You can make it work in a vacuum. But what when you have to introduce it to I mean, can you imagine, like all of a sudden, the United States just dropped all its regulations on trade and manufacturing
and just went okay, go yep. I mean that's something that Mesas would have. Mesas would have been okay with Rothbard probably would have wanted the state. Rothbard would have wanted the state out of the way. But you know it's still you look at that and you're like, Okay, I understand why you want to do this because you see what government and what what quote unquote cronyism that that word that they love so much does. Yet you're not taking into account what Condoless is talking about here
talking about disassociating citizenship from cultural and ethnic identities. What that does to what that does when you have because if you have a free market, you also have no borders because you're gonna have free trade.
Yeah. It also it also universalizes and it makes uniform world culture. I mean, the more you extend, I mean this is actually this is controversial, but this is actually a point that Lenin makes. You know, as you extend the capitalist order, you're going to do away with old cultures. It's inevitable that everything is going to become homogeneous culturally when you do this. Yep, if I can cite him.
Perfectly, I mean I read through all of State and Revolution on this show. So yeah, there, Lenin is not a He's not a friend of the show. Definitely, He's definitely been a big part of the show.
Well, he's got insights that are worth learning from. You know, I'm not going to be autistic about it.
Well, some time times, if you even read Rothbart, it almost seems like the dialect like his dialectical style is Lenin's. Yeah, sure, like he stole, like he bred Lenin and he decided to use that dialectical style, which I don't think is a bad thing because I think Lenin was was definitely the most intelligent of all of them.
Right and what and by the way, what Lenin is critiquing is not some Messissian paradise. But he's critiquing basically the managerial capitalism, right, yeah, all right.
The modern as opposed to pre modern, The modern as opposed to pre modern and democrat is not continually situated and has a fluid cultural identity being shaped by a consumer economy. Yep, that's a sentence right there, man, it is.
Yeah, the consumer economy shapes man. Man doesn't shape the consumer economy. It's important.
Yeah, so I said social engineering. It just doesn't. It's you're not taking that into account when you're talking about this free quote unquote free market. Yep. He also inhabits a culture that remains hostile to the older liberal universe. Postmodernism in literature and literary criticism condolist argues, is the latest in a series of cultural strategies aimed at subverting
the nineteenth century liberal order. The refusal to recognize a fixed or authoritative meaning for inherited texts, which is characteristic of postmodernism, represents an assault upon liberal education. Contrary to the world of moral and semantic order presided over by an ethical deity which bourgeois liberals preached, the postmodernists exalt indeterminacy.
They decry the acceptance of tradition and discourse as well as in political matters as a fasci as a fascist act of domination, or as the inadmissible allowance of the past to intrude upon the present. And I would say even the future.
In the future, I agree. The other thing I want to say too, and this is kind of in passing, but the idea of describing the older this is what he's describing it, the older liberal order as fascistic, is something that when Gottfried wrote it, what did he write? This was this nineteen nineties.
Right, is it ninety eight?
Ninety nine, Yeah, ninety nine. So yeah, so the idea that this would be determined fascist was probably seen by its readers as like dramatic. But look at everything that's called fascist. Everything that your grandma held just instinctually is now fascist. I mean, Gotfrid who's on the cutting edge of recognizing where all this was going.
Yeah, that's why when people that's why I tell people when they're like gushing over James lindsay, I'm like, Paul Godfrey gave this to you twenty five years ago.
Yeah, exactly exactly.
Nowhere does Condalis call for the eradication of postmodernism or make the facile assumption that by opposing it, the present generation can resurrect the bourgeoise world. He contends that liberal and mass democratic societies are not only distinct, but mutually antagonistic, and that antagonism has expressed itself culturally as well as socioeconomically.
Yeah, this is where, this is where, this is where just the neo conservatives. And I say that in a time when everybody hates the neo conservatives, but I really just mean twentieth century American ideal, americanist ideology. They they really people need to recognize and we need to push this even harder that the mass democracy, democracy, the you know, the extended vote, and all the people that are pro civil rights regime, all this stuff, these are the mechanisms
by which the old liberalism are being destroyed. So these, like a lot of people try to boot like the mainstream people, they try to balance like democracy and liberalism as like these unified you know, uh, you know, paths forward or whatever, but they are not. You know, one is eating the other. The old American bourgeois liberal order that existed in the nineteenth century is being eaten alive by mass democracy.
For over one hundred years, bourgeois liberalism has been under attack from authors and artists presenting views about human nature and the nature of existence antithetical to bourgeois convictions. Materialism, atheism, and pluralism have been three such worldviews which the bourgeoisie
long viewed with justifiable suspicion. Deconstructionism is a more recent form of cultural criticism aimed at inherited assumptions about meaning by now, Condulus maintains, the old liberals have been reduced to a rearguard struggle while watching I'm not going to pronounce the German word, while watching their opponents take over
culture and education. But the reduced But the reason for this reduced liberal presence, Condolus explains, is not an insidious contamination by a cultural industry separated from the rest of society. Cultural radicals have done well in mass democracies because they continue to target the liberal order that the democrats deposed. The cultural yep, the cultural opposition continues to mobilize even after the political war has ended.
Right this is this is also an insight of people like gramscy right like he recognizes that like they can capture power. But the cultural revolution it has to continue going. The moment it stops, it falls apart. Like people think, oh, the you know, the trance stuff is like ridiculous and silly and goofy, it's actually not. You have to come up with something. You have to continue to advance it in some direction otherwise it stops. And you can't have
a revolution that stops. If you have a revolution that stops, you could you know, that's that's when you get the momentum that goes to reactionaries. You know, the second they stop creating new things to terrorize us with culturally, that's when we'll gain a footing. So you know a lot of people think, oh, when is this going to stop it? You know, why didn't it stop with the gage, Why is it going to trade? Why is it going to pedophiles?
Now?
It's because there has to be a new thing. The cultural revolution has to continue mobilizing even after the political war has ended.
Yeah, if you're going to have progressivism, there has to be constant progress. That's why people concentrating too hard on the transgender thing and just concentrating on that. They don't understand that what you really should be looking at, what comes next. And I think that by reading what we've already read before, we could see that Paul. That's the genius of Paul is he's not stuck where he is. He's looking twenty years, twenty five years down the road
and he's like, Okay, where are we going to be? Right? Right, Victorian rigidity, social status, and elitist attitudes about education have all remained the butts of academic and literary criticism, and the opposition points back to the conditions of strife in which mass democracy arose. This cultural insurgency, Condous observes, draws strength from a subversive source that once served liberalism in its war against the past.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. See, liberalism was something that came about on the scene of world history because it was attacking something that came before. You know, the political interests at the time of the rise of liberalism needed to confront it, you know, subversively. Basically it needed to and we're talking back, we're talking back at like you know, Oliver Cromwell and stuff. And when the birth of some of these tendencies could be found. So today liberalism has
basically you know, come into the establishment. It is the establishment view of things. So, but but now it's being opposed by something that also has to be culturally subversive.
Yeah, okay, here here we start getting into rough one feathers. The Enlightenment tradition of critical rationalism was crucial for the war of ideas waged by the bourgeoisie and its defenders against the remnants of an older world. Despite the attempt to integrate this outlook into a bourgeois vision of life, Enlightenment rationalism has played a new destructive role as the instrument of a war against a bourgeoisie on behalf of openness, skepticism, and material equality.
Yeah, I mean this is uh, you know, not to not to over oversight, you know, Edmund Burke, I mean, but this is this is exactly what he said you in the moment you start playing with society like this,
it has to continue forever, you know. So Enlightenment rationalism is going to come up with this new you know, like this new you know series of reasons why you know, like homosexuality is reactionary, right, It's always going to come with something crazier, and it's going to be justified with you know, quote unquote reason.
Yeah, and this is the reason why maybe you can look to Lindsay for certain someone like James Lindsay for certain things, but you can't look to him for answers because this is his answer is the enlightenment. His answer is continual change. He just sees his change, the change that he desired, has taken a detour.
Mm hmm, exactly what he.
Wants to go on, the you know, he sees the trans stuff and all, you know, the wokeness. He sees that as the enemy of progress, whereas there is a certain group that sees that as the progress. He's just they're on. They're on the same road. They're just they're on. They've just it's a fork in the road. But both of those roads lead to destruction.
Exactly. Yeah, all right.
These pointed observations about the culture of mass democracy do not deny the fact that cultural differences exist among Democrats, deconstructionists, and liberal democratic absolutists still fight over the values to be taught in history and literature courses. And so I don't even know if they do that anymore. That might be one that's uh.
I mean, do they Yeah, I don't, Yeah, who knows.
And some advocates, well, yeah, go ahead, and some advert kits of post World War two abstract expressionism, such as Hilton Kramer, have now come to oppose latter schools of art as relative cultural traditionalists.
Yeah, exactly, like, yeah, this is this is why, like like JFK and stuff is now like a right wing traditionalist.
You know. Nonetheless, radically anti bourgeois movements have remained powerful in our cultures as mass democracy continues to struggle against the remains of an older heritage. In the United States, traditional liberal and agrarian democratic forces state forces stayed alive into the twentieth century and resisted the inroads of the democratic administrative state.
I wonder, I wonder how if you go to the nonetheless sentence there, I wonder if he would if he would update this to I wonder how much of a struggle there actually is between the older heritage and the mass democracy. I can't. It's it's it's hard to find an institution that's fighting for some older right, you know. I think it's like mass democracy versus the new Left basically.
Now, yeah, I mean it's like who's struggling Chronicles.
Is exactly. Yeah, there's no one fighting for the older heritage. Nobody mass democracy needed a cultural as well as political strategy to triumph, and the values and concepts juggled by our literary and now media elites are keys to the emergence of a post liberal society and politics. Condalus also makes clear that mass democracy could not have developed without the demographic and economic revolutions that transformed Western Europe in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Industrialization, agricultural modernization and urban working class. The disappearance of a family based craft economy and the operation of assembly line production, where the factors Condolus observes contributing to mass democracy. Yeah, I mean, master democracy could not have happened if it wasn't for the administration the industrial revolution basically is what he's saying.
Here, right, And this one part here, the disappearance of the family based craft economy, I didn't. It wasn't until I read Rhder Sombart that I that it blew my mind. It was like, yeah, that's when once you you could see how Walmart exists, once you see how the family based craft economy, the tailor, the specialty shop, how that just is moved out and now you get cheap, cheap crap from pretty much anywhere.
Right, exactly, you can. It's it's funny, like, I know, everyone talks about her everything's made in China, but my so, my family, my wife's family's German. Her her mom basically came from from Germany in the nineties when she got married because my father in law was stationed over there.
So she goes back to her village where they, you know, they've been making crafts for you know, hundreds of maybe thousands of years, you know, these the same village, the same rural village, and she was just absolutely dismayed to go back to the same village. And you see, all the products that they've been selling for a long time are basically imitations of the older products, and they all
have stamps made in China. And I know everyone recognizes that, it talks about it, but it's just it permeates every aspect of the old European world. And people pretend like people pretend like consumerist capitalism is culturally neutral. It's a complete lie, Like the entire rural village has been transformed just by the mass production of these goods.
Yeah. Well, I mean, hey, as long as it's cheaper, that's all that matters, right, As long as the line is going up, everything's fine.
Yes, exactly, exactly.
Although Imperial Realm experienced the concentration of uprooted proletai and it's swelling strife ridden cities, it could not have produced a modern political movement because it lacked both mass production and mass consumption. Earlier societies had to deal with perpetual scarcity and with the need to share limited resources in a communal setting. The modern West, by contrast, provides more and more material gratification to socially isolated individuals.
Just the way libertarians want it.
Yeah. I mean, just as long as I have Instacart and you know, porn on demand, Okay, we're good to get happy. Yeah. It's politics are therefore predicated on hedonism and individual self actualization, values that give an ethical dimension to a consumer economy.
Yeah, the ethics. The ethics sort of justifies what's happening economically.
Yes, as democratic politics also advocates material equality, as opposed to the exclusively formal or legal equality preached by nineteenth century liberals. M h.
Actually, sorry keep interrupting, but it's it's it's funny, like there's one of the essays by Mesus and and I have these, you know, examples in my head because you and I both came from that world. But I have this this story of thesis. I think I'm trying to remember what book it's in, and it might be in his interventionist book. But he basically says that, you know, we capitalists don't disagree with the interventionists in terms of our shared desire for a material equality. It's just that
we have different paths to get there. So he says, you know, his view, the liberal view, is that by the capitalist, free market economy, we can provide the same type of material equality that the interventionists are also trying to do by their own memes. But you know, now becoming a right winger, I actually don't care all that much for a material equality at all. It doesn't doesn't phase me, it doesn't enter into my you know, priority scale.
By stressing the ties between modern democras material pleasure, Condalus also explains why modern democracy cannot appeal effectively in the long run to an ethic of austerity. At the end of the eighteenth century, both both American and French revolutionaries invoked classical ideals of republican simplicity, a practice found pre eminently. In the political writings of Rousseau, self indulgence and luxury were viewed as aristocratic flaws, and among nineteenth century French
Republicans as upper middle class vices. Democrat, democratic and later socialist revolutionaries even tried to exemplify the moral conduct which they hoped to enforce in a society of equals. The Jacobin socialist Louis Auguste Blanci lived and dressed like a priest, and the self proclaimed republican Senecal in Gustave Flaubert's novel Le Educashan Sentimentale is made to appeal eccentric in his
extreme pursuit of virtue. Senekal is shown embracing dietary and sexual restraints and scorning sumptuous living in a similar vein. Black Marxist President of Zimbabwe Robert Mugabi has denounced the homosexuals in his homeland. Mugaby is outraged that sodomists and sexual perverts continue to be found there and scoffs at the idea of rights for those given to beast reality.
Yeah, this is so funny to me, because I mean, I think what Paul Godfrey's trying to communicate here is a lot of these very anti liberal people are actually more like just instinctually culturally conservative than today's left and today's quote unquote right. You know, all the people that are you know, seeking freedom and liberty against you know, the democratic lip totalitarianism or whatever. They don't realize that they're all using the same far left phraseology that we're
opposed by, all these antiliberals. It's fascinating to me. I mean, I think it's hilarious when these like Marxist revolutionaries in the Third world are against like sodomy, that's just hilarious.
Yeah. Yeah, Oh and an American American and quote unquote socialists, they don't get it, and they have to make excuses for it. And what do they do They make cultural excuses. Oh, thank you very much.
Yeah. It's like it's like it's like the Republicans like when they when they point out that, like you know, Stalin was anti LGBT, and you're like, oh, so Stalin was kind of based. It's interesting.
Interesting, It's like there's something I agree with them on. All of these revolutionary democratic or socialist appeals to public virtue hark back to Republican models that Condoleus views as incompatible with mass democracy. What distinguishes the latter from the former, in his opinion, is the prevalence of hedonism associated with
mass production and mass consumption. This ethos express itself expresses itself as a ceaseless desire for consumption combined with resentment against those who have more access to pleasure.
Yeah, see, this is like, this is how I would write here, This is how I would describe the uniqueness of the American situation. You know, people always want to say that we're becoming this is this is a classic James lindsay, Right, we're becoming like communist Russia or whatever. We're coming like communist China. Actually, those communist experiments were very much focused on austerity. They were very much focused on denying material gratification, denying pleasures to the point where
you basically had a miserable life. We're on the opposite end of the scale. Like the entire point of the American regime is to make us just absolutely sick and disgusted with a with titillation with pleasure, Like we're living on Pinocchio's pleasure island and sort of like mandated prosperity.
All right, it was the failure of liberals. Excuse me, it was the failure of liberalism from the standpoint of mass democracy to move decisively enough toward material equality and individual self expressive that led to its undoing. The defenders of bourgeois liberalism temporized when faced by the sociological evidence
of inequality in their own society. They claimed to be more interested in freedom than in the further pursuit of equality, but were more were also more committed to family cohesion and gender distinctions than to individual freedom. The reason for this is clear. According to condolists, bourgeois liberals were both economic innovators and perpetuators of an urban civilization going back
to the Middle Ages. In their heyday, they spoke about sweeping change, but they never but they were never as dedicated to the social and cultural implications of a consumer economy as were those who replaced them.
Yeah, that's so you know, that's so fascinating to me, just just drawing this distinction between old school liberalism and how much it would be opposed to James Lindsay's consumer based liberalism. You know, this is sort of like modern democratic. Twentieth century American liberalism has almost nothing in common with the old liberalism. And that's I think what Coffee's trying to communicate here is we live in a world that's
post industrial revolution. The entire economic world order has changed, and therefore the type of liberalism that you're going to see is going to change with it.
Basic to the thesis is the recognition that liberalism is a bourgeois ideology, a set of ideas and principles indissolubly tied to the Western middle class. This does not mean that liberal principles are reducible to material interest, nor that they should be dismissed as a pretext for economic exploitation. In the early nineteen fifties, John Plominets tried to separate ideology from the pejorative association associations many Marxists have loaded
onto that term. According to Plominots, the word ideology is not used to refer only to explicitly and theories. Those who speak of bourgeois ideology often mean by its beliefs and attitudes implicit in the bourgeois way of speaking and behaving, and sometimes they speak of bourgeois theories and doctrines as if they did little more than explicit Then explicit these beliefs and attitudes understood in the cultural sense, and not
simply as a theoretical instrument of self justification. Liberalism exemplifies bourgeois ideology. It designates not just liberal ideas, but also their social setting. That is, the context without which liberalism becomes merely disembodied concepts or slogans.
Yeah, this is what I was talking about before. You know, original bourgeois liberalism came from like what he just said there, like a social setting. It came from a certain context. But when you just when you try to rip those principles out of their context and apply them to the world today as this universalist and transcendent political principle, you transform the function of liberalism from a you know, a culturally contextual function into basically a world revolutionary project.
When Benjamin Constant and Francois Guiso argued for a political just Melu in the eighteen twenties in the form of constitutional monarchy, they were not simply advocating moderation or an Aristotilian Golden mean. They were looking at the educated bourgeoisie as a natural leadership class that could maneuver between the equally disastrous shoals of absolute monarchy and democracy. Guiseau identified
that class with the modern nation state. He believed that this political order and the bourgeois and the and the bourgeoisie would benefit from their historically and this necessary association. This cultural context does not mean that the French doctrinaires, as the constitutional liberals in post Napoleonic France called themselves,
had nothing to teach our own generation. It is rather to insist on the need to avoid tendacious to tendentious parallels, which arrange past figures and past movements and accordance with current appetites for a usable past.
Yeah, this is I mean, yeah, we have to avoid it. But if there's anything that describes the modern age, it's exactly this. They're arranging all these they're you know, they're they're lining up past figures that they consider good and past figures that they consider bad, and basically like this is this is what the whole thing about, Like everybody is, you know, Hitler or whatever. That's exactly what's going on here. They're arranging them in accordance with current appetites, you know.
So that's yeah, that's exactly what he people Paul will say that we need to avoid this, but this actually deeply characterized characterizes our ideological formulation today.
What I am emphasizing here is need for sexualization, the avoidance of which typifies contemporary zealotry. Appeals to human rights as historically unbounded absolutes now resound in political debates in which opposing sides accuse each other of relativizing values. Wards and social policies are justified by invoking self evident truths, even though what is true in these truths in these truths may be different now from what seems self evident
about them two hundred years ago. Pointing this out is not the same as relativizing all truth. It is only to question the opportunistic and decontextualized use to which the past has been has been bent.
He's basically critiquing He's yeah, he's critiquing historicism, or he's sorry, he's critiquing universalism from a historicist mentality. You have to look at things in their original context. English liberalism is not the same as American liberalism, and to treat them as the same as basically doing gauge in propaganda.
YEA.
The decontextualization of liberalism can happen in two ways, either when we place liberalism into an eternal present, going back and forth in time, or else when we make it real history into a stepping stone to the present. A particularly striking case of this comes up in FG. Bratton's The Legacy of the Liberal Spirit nineteen forty three, a
once widely esteemed defense of the liberal heritage. In his preface, Bratton explains that liberalism is not to be viewed as a nineteenth century phenomena ending with the Second World War, as an attitude towards toward life. It has a history of twenty five hundred years. It goes back to the Age of Reason and the Reformation, and to earlier distant attempts to establish intellectual freedom and the life of reasons.
In the journey that follows from Plato through Jesus to John Dewey, Braton celebrates thinkers who he believes have pointed it in his own direction. Thus, he favorably favorably contrasts one North African Christian Platonist origin with another Augustine, presenting the first as a protoliberal and the second as an obscurantist.
Yeah basically Paul saying that it's cheating to say that, like all the good things throughout history were liberal and anticipated our age right, and all the bad things were forks in the road that people went in the wrong direction. It's it's it's basically part of creating an ideological hegemony in our time.
Yeah, and you see this, this is this is not only with liberals, classical everyone knows this, right, everyone does this in liberalism. John Gray also assigns liberal ratings to thinkers who lived long before the liberal era. Grape praises pericles funeral oration or its reconstruction by the historian Thucididies for its statement of a liberal, egalitarian and individualist principles.
This is basically what the neo conservatives do, Like if you read like Leo Strauss. Paul is really critical of Leo Strauss precisely here where he basically says that you can find aspects of American liberal democracy in the Greeks, and then he goes to the Romans, and you can just go throughout history and find all the good ones and say this, you know, America perfected all of these tendencies. You know, it's it's cheating.
Yeah. He thereby ignores the pervasive stress and that speech on living for the public good, which was paradigmatic for ancient Greek democracy. Yeah, modern modern liberal individualism existed only incipiently, if at all, in Greek antiquity, a point documented in works by end Fustal des Colange's fust I'm trying to remember how to pronounce that.
I actually it's de Coulanganga.
Yeah, it was Fustyle de Colange, the Ancient City. To Paul Ros Republican, the Republic's ancient and modern. Among the readings of liberalism which try to shove its past into a triumphalist present are the academic apologist apologetics discussed in the first chapter. In all fairness, it should be said that even probing critics of contemporary liberalism ascribe it to
an exceed excessively long genealogy. Christopher Lash, John P. Diggins, and the ethical philosopher Alistair McIntyre have all written critically on the liberal heritage, which they believe has descended more or less intact from earlier centuries.
Yeah. I think one of the things that Paul would say here is it's what you can't do in history is reach back into specific contexts and take a phrase you know, I'm someone who spend a lot of time in Christian circles. Protestant Christians do this all the time. They'll reach back in history and take a phrase, and Catholics do it too, but like they'll take we'll take a phrase and they'll basically just apply current meanings to it in order to justify their association with that past figure.
That's that's what he's describing here, is you can't say, because Greeks use democracy and we use democracy, were basically like, you know, the Greeks were on our side and we can cite someone from history. That's that's ridiculous.
Yeah, Faith and material progress as a means of solving moral problems, a buoyant skepticism about religious questions, and especially in Diggin's analysis, individual autonomy at the end of social policy are all, in their opinion, permanent aspects of the liberal worldview. So yeah, people who want to hold on to liberalism and and our Christians Catholics, I mean, inherent in it all, especially since the Enlightenment has been a
boyant skepticism about religious questions. I mean that anyone could deny that, dismiss it, or try and pooh pooh it away is insane to me. It's just what it is. Yep. This worldview is thought to define liberalism, which it preached, which whether it preaches a free market economy or the need for social democracy. Diggins and other perceptive commentators contend that people would not go on for generations speaking about
a liberal heritage unless one truly existed. Those who admire John Dewey and John Rawls could for the same reason find something in Adam Smith and John Locke to admire, otherwise they would not fix the same label upon upon all of those, meter and a pen said, I don't know what that means. I didn't look it up. The view of a liberal heritage is furthermore, based on a reliable axiom and historical research that a long term and widely held belief in the persistence and integrity of a
movement cannot be entirely illusory. Note that while classical liberal John Gray sees his own liberalism transformed by modern social democrats, he nonetheless searches for shared ground between himself and them. But this approach raises its own methodological difficulties. It overlooks several generations of agitated debates between liberals and democrats. These debates include Guzeau's warnings about the sovereignty of numbers and Stevens assaults on John Stuart Mill's faith that all people
should live in a society as equals. Indeed, much of the political debate in Western Europe from the second half of the nineteenth century into the early decades of the twentieth testifies to the deep divisions between old fashioned liberals and democratic reformers.
Yeah, I mean liberal democracy as this natural, historically prevalent uniting force is what but Paul's deconstructing here.
Yeah. The French anthropologist Louis demon in Homo Akilus treats as the unifying theme of modern of the modern West, the rise of individualism within the world. Would you argue that, Yeah?
Uh no, I think are you asking if I think, uh.
You think he's right there?
Oh No, No, I don't. I don't think. I don't think that's the unifying theme of the modern West. I think I think that's an aspect of certain tendencies within the modern West.
I think it's a weapon. I think it's I.
Think it's well, I think what it is, it's something. It's part of the American you know, the American ideologies version of things, I would say.
Okay, sounds good. Unlike the ascetic ideals of medieval Christianity and Eastern contemplative religions, Western modernity has been characterized by the belf that individual fulfillment should take place within society. This individual consciousness, Dumont explains, does not require that people withdraw from a hierarchical world based on status relations. To the contrary, it has encouraged individuals seeking success and self
expression to find it in a changing and increasingly atomized society. Yeah.
I really do think though that, you know, the idea of modernity being defined in this way, I think it's I think this is actually the unique expression of the American version of the modern age. I don't think you can see a lot of this. I mean, because, like you would, you would have to consider a lot of the reactionary movements in France and Germany and England, anyone from like anyone from like Mosley to Miscellini, anyone like that.
You know, all these people were basically modernists, and none of them had an individual individualist view of the world.
Right, Okay, Yeah, I'm talking about America. Okay. Months analysis treats the intellectual history of the Western world as a steady movement towards expressive individualism from the Protestant Reformation to the rise of a contractual view of civil society. In John Locke and in other early liberal theorists. I agree.
I do agree with that. I do agree that there was a major strain of this individualism, perhaps working itself out for sure.
Implicit in this interpretive perspective is distressed by the German sociologist Fernandotonis on the movement from traditional communities to functionally oriented and highly mobile societies. Dumal focuses on the cultural and intellectual basis underlying Tony's transition from Geimnschaft to guy Sellschaft, and he places that transition into a continuum of thought
going back to the early modern period. Dumont's thematic stress on individualism within the world underscores a problem found in exportations. Appealing to root causes, they account for both too much and too little. By citing a single force that is made to account for modern culture, duma ignores the distinctiveness that marks specific phases of Western history from the Reformation onward.
Yeah, that's what I was saying it's because I was saying it accounts for too much. So I agree here.
I agree with Paul, though clearly he knows that the Protestant idea of the individual experience of divine grace has little to do with contemporary views of individual self gratification.
Dumal's interest and cultural continuity leads him to play down such a difference. His study of individuality in the West causes him to overlook short term cultural changes, even those with powerful cumulative effects. To the extent that our own study deals with two successive epochs, which Dumal disregards, is for us significant. Moreover, liberal democracy has a accelerated some aspects of that long range process outlined by Dumont, while
making others less important. Material redistribution as a means of individual fulfillment has become basic to our own liberal democratic age, while the cohesion of the nuclear family has grown weaker as liberalism has lust out to liberal democracy. Differences and values can be perceived in short term political transformations, even if the general trend of modernity is what Dumont describes.
Critics of the old bourgeois liberalism are finally too hasty and linking liberal concern about the social question to economic interest. As Gertrude Himmelfarb has demonstrated with regards to Victorian attitudes about work and philanthropy, questions of character formation and family responsibility were tied together in the Victorian middle class mind. Himil Farb argues that such an association was not a threadbare defense of low facts three wages or of the lack of public works programs.
Did you know him? A? Farb was at Bill Crystal's mom. What, Yeah, that's I think it's Bill Crystal's mom. Yeah, she's yeah, she married Irving Crystal.
Okay, I'm I have to look that up after this. I hope I'm right. I'm pretty sure I'm right, Okay. Rather, it came from widely shared assumptions about the social good. The broad middle class, extending from bankers and mill owners to shopkeepers and church canons, rejected a welfare state conception of government because of what they assume were it's socially destructive effects.
It's interesting here that the old liberals he's describing as being opposed to welfare and all that. Like if you asked a current day liberal, like like someone from the Libertarian Party or like James Lindsay or something. You know, why we should be opposed to welfare. Well, first of all, Jim James Lindsay wouldn't be that oupposed to welfare. But generally I would say because it, you know, treads on
individual rights and their freedom and all this. But you know, these these within the social context, the socially situated situation where old liberalism found itself. They were mostly concerned to about the socially destructive effects, you know, the effects on their ability as a family to function cohesively and continuously throughout the generations. I mean, this is very much the old liberalism was very much a historicist instead of a universalist. It's interesting to me.
Yeah, where did I? Where'd I? Okay? Even if modern liberals disagree with these judgments, their disagreement does not justify substituting their own adaptation for the liberal tradition. Whether welfare state democrats and public administrators have refined or degraded the original articles beside the point. What they have done is changed that article in ways that would make it unrecognizable
to earlier generations. Nor will it Due to speak of the failure of earlier liberals to see the world see the world like modern liberals. If they had seen the world differently, they would not have been liberals, but social democratic advocates of public administration. American historian John Kloppenberg accounts for Weber's liberal skepticism about such concepts as the will of the people by pointing to the longer context of
German history. Weber, as interpreted by Kloppenberg, could not imagine the meaningful practice of egalitarian politics because quote, Germany had no tradition of popular sovereignty and liberals repeatedly put their faith in elites rather than democracies to accomplish their goals. True, nineteenth century German bourgeois thought did not produce as much radical ferment as its English and French counterparts, but Weber's liberal doubts about the people's capacity to rule were not
restricted at the turn of the century to germanophone observers. Kloppenberg, as a social democrat who thinks of himself as liberal, looks for larger contexts i e. The particular, the particularity, the particularities of German history for his own ideological use to detach the liberal tradition from traditional liberal views that
he finds distasteful. Yeah, that's that's just a common it's a common trick, right, Yeah, It's just a dismissal of It's a dismissal of the opinion or belief of somebody because of a social opinion or because they come from a different culture, they have a different cultural background. Simple stuff like that. Yes, yeah, unlike today's liberals traditional one. Well, and when you look at it's also wrong. I mean Prussia, Prussia had a welfare state Prussia. Yeah, so it's but
and it seems to operate very well. Why because it was homogenous as society people.
Yeah, yeah, they thought of themselves as part of a greater community rather than a bunch of you know, individuals from from all over the world.
Exactly. I've been talking about that. I've been reading from Imperium Yaki and he talks about that. He talks about how as soon as as soon as you have two cultures clash within within one one land, you're going to even by trying to repair that rift, it actually makes it worse.
Right Yeah, yeah, it can't be done. Yeah, which is like, this is why things are so bad now, not only because we have the all these you know, cultures coming into one place to try to but we also have like hysterical experts who think that they can. They they are the ones by doing more, they have more tools at their disposal. They are the ones that can finally unite all these cultures. And that's why it's especially beat here.
Yeah. Unlike today's liberals, traditional ones entertain deep reservations about popular rule. A belief that democracy leads inevitably to socialism was common to French liberals at the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, and it is equally apparent to Lakey, Pereto, Weber, and other liberal observers at the end of the century. Preto and Lakey feared that democracy would bring forth a trade union approach to economic policy. Unless put under some
kind of control. Democratically elected trade unionists would add to unemployment by driving up wages, which would then harm the most expendable workers. Democratic spokesmen would also agitate to impose tariffs on foreign goods, and this would hurt domestic consumers, while unleashing reprisals from those countries whose goods were being excluded.
Also unfamiliar to you, yea. The effects from such economic measures would then be blamed on the owners and captains of industry, and social democratic governments would cite this accusation to justify their confiscation of the means of production. The Finnasia sequel prediction about trade union democracy revealed the persistent liberal fear about a seizure of property that would take
place at the urging of socialists. Despite the French Revolution of eighteen forty eight, in which bourgeois and social democrats went from being allies to violent enemies, a liberal view did persist that democratized governments would become radical ones, socialism or rampant social order would accompany the advent of a
universal franchise. Thus, Fitzjames Stephen declared with finality in eighteen seventy four, quoting, the substance of what I have to say to the disadvantage of the theory and practice of universal suffrage is that it tends to invert what I should have regarded as the true and natural relation between wisdom and folly. I think that wise and good men
ought to rule those who are foolish and bad. To say that the sole function of the wise and good is to preach to their neighbors, and that everyone indiscriminately, should be left to do what he likes, should be provided with a rat with a rateable share of the power, sovereign power in the shape of the vote, and that the results of this will be the direction of power by wisdom. Seems to me the wildest romance that ever got possession of any considerable number of minds and glow.
Yeah, this is a critique of the entire twentieth century American spirit. I mean, the idea that we're going to disseminate political power to every I mean, look at the people, like you want to give every person the vote, Look at the people that you're giving the power to, I mean, and then the idea that this is going to result in a wiser governmental direction is absolutely insane. He calls it a wild romance, and I think that's kind of
understating it. But this is basically the mentality that captures the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, and all major you know, voices and advocates within within that entire regime ideological sphere. This is the Americanist impulse in the world, is to share political power with every person. This is why the civil rights regime is so crucial to the way the American power sees the world. But it has been proven
so fundamentally wrong. I can't think of anything more disastrous than handing out the ability to vote to all of these all these groups that have been very easy to radicalize. I mean, Paul, even Paul S. Gottfried who's writing this.
You know, he talks about the fact that he would have opposed the central mandate, you know, the national mandate, that that all blacks have the vote, because he recognized that these people would could very easily be radicalized and they could be fueled in order to pursue you know, various you know, far left objectives. And so this is exactly what's happened. We've lost wisdom in at the same time as we've gained the right to vote for more and more people.
Yeah, these ten lines on paper just perfectly described the religion of civic nationalism in America.
Yeah, exactly. And this and this is this is a not only is this against like, you know, the Democrat Party, but this is specifically against the impulses of the neo conservatives, the conservative incorporated, not just neo conservatives, but conservative establishment conservative you know, uh, you know, political commentators. This is this is against them, specifically, they're the ones that are pushing for the Martin Luther King view of the world.
Yeah yeah, Martin Luthervig Yeah.
And Abraham Lincoln yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, Abraham Lincoln wouldn't have been you know this bad.
Yeah yeah, yeah, he yeah, he would have given the differences.
Yeah, he wouldn't have given them the right to vote, for sure.
The well, I guess the mythological Lincoln that we hear about.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
Like Steven Lakey feared that democracy, by overwhelming and sweeping away any national leadership, would leave to capricious and unstable government. He predicted almost twenty years before it happened, that the House of Lords would be disempowered, and in the eighteen nineties he also warned that quote the disassociation of the upper classes from public duty is likely to prove a danger to the community. Yeah, no, Boyd said, nobless abuge.
Just that goes right out the window, and it's what kept society going for centuriesennia from millennia, right liberal critics of mass democracy offered differing but equally grim predictions about the disposition of power in a democratic age. In the eighteen seventies, Stephen could find no cohesive group of political leaders that might create stable rule in the world as imagined by John Stuart Mill. His opponents were mere dreamers who liked the radicals. The term by which he did
degated Mill in his circle. Look forward to an age in which an all embracing love of humanity will regenerate the human race. Not only is it you get this kind of egalitarian language, but you also get a you get a theological language thrown in there as well. Of course, though the radicals complain of the political of the petty social arrangements in Victorian England, they lack the hardness of mind Steven observes to change things for the better. In time,
they would be swept aside by better organized fanatics. Another liberal critique of democracy, widespread among the doctrinaires of the eighteen twenties was its primitive character, which made it unsuited for the nineteenth century. Charles Remusot and Guiseeau both stressed the idea that democratic republics were a product of classical antiquity. Given their need for cultural homogeneity, severe public morals, and highly restricted citizenship. Popular polities did not seem destined to
flourish in the nineteenth century. We need to read that again. Given their need for cultural homogeneity, severe public morals, and highly restricted citizenship, popular polities did not seem destined to flourish in the nineteenth century. Why would they flourish now?
Right exactly?
Yeah. Unlike Guiseau's democratic Unlike Useau's democratic critic and traveler of the New World, a Lexus Totakville, the doctrinaires did not believe that the European future belonged to democracy. They viewed the American experience as as sui genries. According to Gizo, Americans had established popular sovereignty because they had been able to build a regime without an inherited class system. Phil's depiction of localism as the essence of American democracy seemed
to confirm Guizau's judgment. It offered a political picture that Guizeau and other doctrinaires thought had no bearing for France or for Europe in general. A Europe of highly centralized nation states required a stable social pillar drawn from the
educated bourgeoisie in order to maintain political stability. Democratic primitivism, as revealed in the chaos of the French Revolution was the political alternative Guizau complained into which his democratic critics would plunge France and the rest of Europe.
So I don't know if people caught this or read this out of it, but you know, getting to know gotfried over the years. The way I read this is it is basically that it's insane for America to export its own model, which by the way, is a complete aberration from its original model. But it's insane for America to export its own model back to Europe. These things don't work. I think localism in America is has a history, has an organic history that is just completely non transferable
to the Old World. So you can't. You can't transport that. That's why nationalism in the Old World in Western Europe makes much more sense than localism does in terms of dealing with the political emergency. Whereas nationalism in America, you know, for whatever, you know, political, whatever political advantages we can gain from it right now, it's over the course of the last two hundred years, it's tended to be more
progressive than anything. But you can't. So you can't. But you can't export the original Tokuoville's model of local democracy back to Europe. It doesn't work like that, and the attempt to do so is basically let in all of the radicals, and it's led in all of the far left movements and allowed them to capture power.
Yeah. The doctrinaires pointed portentiously to the Jocoman rule in seventeen ninety three as a precedent for democratizing experiments. As Gizo explained in the essay de la democracy that duns on society modern air. Democracy is a cry. Democracy is a cry of war. It is a flag of the party of numbers placed below, raised against those above. A flags sometimes raised in the name of the rights of men, but sometimes in the name of crude passions, sometimes raised
against the most iniquitous usurptions, but also sometimes against legitimate superiority. Yeah.
Yeah, democracy knows no higher principle.
Basically, While Tokville and Guizeau underlined the link between American democracy and America's decentralized republic, a new and faithful view of the American regime surfaced in the theorizing of George Bancroft eighteen hundred and eighteen ninety one, Jacksonian Democrat, Jacksonian Democrat career diplomat and author of the ten volume History of the United States. Bancroft admired German idealist philosophy, which
he popularized in the United States. As a young man, he had studied in Gottengen, Berlin, and Heidelberg, and while in Germany he had become intimately familiar with the historical speculation of Hegel. His own work incorporated several unmistakable Hegelian themes that history showed the progressive unfolding of the divine personality, that this process was reflected in the advance of human liberty, and that liberty had developed most fully in the Protestant
Germanic world. For Bancroft, unlike Hegel, however, this progress toward liberty reached its culmination on American soil. Bancroft presents the American people as the ultimate bearers of divine, divinely ordered liberty, and makes this point explicit at the end of his History of the Formation of the Constitution of the United States eighteen eighty two, quote, A new people has arisen
without kings or princes or nobles. They were more sincerely religious, better educated, and of nobler minds, and of purer morals. Than than the men of any former republic. By calm, meditation and friendly counsels, they had prepared a constitution which, in the union of Freedom, with strength and order, excelled everyone known before.
It's interesting, It's a fantasy. It's a fantasy, but you know, it's it's funny to me that people can take the American situation in the nineteenth century, eighteenth century, or the eighteenth century or even earlier, and in disregard the ethnic and cultural roots of that society and basically universalize it, bring in tons of people and expect to remain the same,
you know. So the idea that that you can take this you know, you know, fantastical situation and just universalized it has been the foundation for all sorts of you know, egalitarian terror in the Western world.
A discussion I've been having privately with a friend of mine recently is whether the United States as a colony could even transport the culture, the high culture of the home country to the colony.
Right, it proved, it proved, you proved that you couldn't do that. Yeah, well it couldn't. It couldn't outlast the first generation that had you know, absorbed it firsthand. You know, that the longer those things are separated, and the more you know foreign elements you interject into something, you can't you can't keep that up.
Well, you also have to take into consideration that while this uh, while this new colony is growing, it's the enlighten the enlightenment injected into it. You're getting all of these ideas injected into it which are going to clash with its original high culture. I don't know the conversation,
the conversation goes on. The spirit of the people, thus described, was held to be democratic, and Bancroft described to Americans a collective wisdom which found expression in their political architecture. The American Federal Union, as he saw it, was no mere convenient state, but the only hope for renovating the
life of the civilized world. The political institutions fashioned and inspirited by America's democratic people assumed in Bancroft's writing a mystical quality, and his insistence that the voice of the people is the voice of God led Tokeville to remark that Pantheism is the religion most characteristic of democracies. Yeah, the American capacity for self government that Bancroft exalted was not in the end, the American propensity for local self rule.
Bancroft glorified a national democratic will, and his history of the United States ends appropriately with a topic consolidating the union. According to Bancroft, an American people and an American national government were both incotly present even before the colonies formed a nation state. Quote for all the one of government, they're solemn pledged to one another, and mutual citizenship and
perpetual union made them one people. And that people was superior to its institutions, possessing the vital form which goes before organization and gives its strength.
Yeah, this is sort of the foundation of like propositional nationhood, right, Like it's these things were formed independent of our own past, you know, and anyone can anyone can jump in and be part of it, be part of the people.
That I'm gonna go one because starts talking about Okay, one does not have to strain to find here a Jacobin imagination hidden behind Hegelian language. A consolidated American national govern a powerful executive representing the popular will, and a global civilizing mission are the visionary exceptions that one can
read into Bancroft's patriotic scholarship. Although his history of the United States deals predominantly with the colonial period, it points more toward the American future than back to the eighteenth century. Bancroft is celebrating the progress of the democratic spirit as embodied in the American nation. In the process, he replaces an older American liberal constitutional identity with one that Guizeau and Toakville might have associated with their own eighteenth century French Revolution.
Yeah, the original vision of the American situation was basically replaced by neo Jacobinism, for sure.
While Bancroft celebrated the triumphant course of democracy in America, others, among them European liberals, grew increasingly agitated about the inevitability of popular rule. I actually this we're starting a new and we only have a few pages left, so we're just gonna you don't mind going to the Okay, all right?
This news section is entitled liberal Pessimists. While Bancroft celebrated the triumphant course of democracy in America, others, among them European liberals, grew increasingly agitated about the inevitability of popular rule. This anxiety, in some cases became more pronounced As the twentieth century began to unfold and social problems in Europe appeared to be worsening, the most detailed critical treatment of democratic rule produced by European liberal was Transformation of the Democracy.
By this, I'm just translating that from me by the sociologists economists. Pereto. Preto's example, as John Gray remarks, makes dramatically clear how the pre nineteen fourteen liberal mind was placed irreversibly at a crossroads. In the face of a democratic franchise, riotous trade union strikes, and the intrusive presence of public administration, some liberals embraced authoritarian solutions of the host.
Pereto was perhaps the best known and the most deliberate, as can be judged from his social writings.
It's funny. It's funny that today's liberals, you self describe liberals. They'll never talk about that, the importance of an authoritarian solution in the midst of a crisis or emergency. You know, it's really interesting how they never bring that up.
In Transformation, he outlines the characteristics of the democratic epoch and its relationship to the period that had preceded it in the nineteenth century of parliamentary regime had come to Italy as the result of a faithful alliance between a demagogic plutocracy and the popular classes, both that opposed a rule of landed wealth and the ecclesiastical establishment, but drew apart after a liberal, cost institutional and unified Italy had
come into existence. Thereafter, the labouring class had worked to seize the wealth of the liberal middle class, and by the twentieth century hit it also turned against the parliamentary institutions on which the plutocracy had built its political legitimacy. In the aftermath of the First World War, from which Italy had emerged on the side of the victors but financially crushed, unions took over the railroads, iron works and
factories in Milan and throughout the industrialized North. Red Guard units were formed to police the worker occupied areas, and though these units carried out the summary executions of the enemies of the working class, the national government, then under revolving premierships, avoided military force. There was political calculation behind this hesitancy. The largest block in the postwar Italian parliament was a socialist who in nineteen nineteen had voted to
nationalize key industries. They and the Catholic Social Democrat Popolari held enough votes to bring down any government, and both were afraid of estranging their constituents by releasing armed forces against the Sindicilasti syndicalists. Meanwhile, land peasants landed, landless peasants brong. Do you know what that word.
Means, Broccianti, I think it's just the landless, the peasants.
Like, okay, we're grabbing land from large estates. As a paralyzed national government conferred on these expropriations ex post facto approval, Paredo vented particular contempt on Giovanni Gioliti, the aged Prime minister who formed his fifth and most disastrous government. Among amid these trials, Paredo mac Giolitti's cowardice when he responded to Redguard violence with the statement that intervention would be tantamount to capital punishment, which would be inappropriate at the
as in time. Parreto contested Gilti to those fascist squadrons who, in the fall of nineteen nineteen moved against the Red Baronies in Bologna and Pole Valley. For Peretto, the plutocracy had become timorous and moronic, and the only groups which now seemed capable of exercising power were nationalists and union leaders. Quote.
Among the propertied class, the sentiments of self defense and property are largely spent and have begun to transform themselves into a nebulous, uncertain social responsibility which others call social duty, used interchangeably with work, now defined as a right. In some parts of Italy, workers invade the land and perform useless tasks, thereafter claiming the right to receive wages which the owner has a duty to pay them. I guess that's labor theory of value. Huh. The response of many
bourgeois is approval. Elsewhere, Parreto notes that the hatred and combativeness manifested by the union ast towards the propertied class no longer elicited resistance. Quote. On one side of the class divide, one sounds the trumpet and moves on to the assault on the other one. On the other, one bows one's head, capitulates, or better yet, joins the enemy
and sells one property for thirty pieces of silver. In two political commentaries published in nineteen twenty three, following the fascist advent of power, in October nineteen twenty two, Peretto expressed the hope that Mussolini's regime would restore economic and
political order. In January nineteen twenty three, he perceived as the major difference between past and present governments that one ignored economic issues, paying attention to demagogic sentiments and particular interests, while the new government is seeking to re establish an equilibrium between social forces. At the same time, Perreto warned against the danger of taxing heavily those who were salary read or small landowners, and he recommended that modern moderate
unionists be consulted in setting economic policy. In September nineteen twenty three, he also suggested how the fascist regime might be might best reform the structure of government. Pereto urged Mussolini to maintain a free press, let the crow's call, but be indefatigable in repressing rebellious deeds. Experience demonstrates that leaders who embark upon this path of censorship find headaches
rather than benefits. It may help to imitate ancient Rome, not occupy oneself with theology, but attend only to actions. Parreto also advocated the putting into place of a new parliament which would express popular sentiments without crippling the executive. Though he readily admitted the failure of Italy's earlier parliamentary experience, he nonetheless thought that the new regime should not operate
without elected institutions. He believes such institutions necessary to stabilize and legitimate the fascist order.
So, and Paul, here's going on a long winded example of you know, the tendencies of the democratic tendencies of you know, the fascist experiment. Basically, I think he's trying to demonstrate that democracy and liberalism are not always mutually. They're not always like you can have aspects of liberalism and democracy within non liberal democratic political orders.
Yeah, that's exactly what I'm reading here In assessing these comments written shortly before Pereto's death, that is important to keep in mind to critical factors. First, there was no reason for Peretto and others to believe in nineteen twenty two that the Italian fascist rezime regime would later go berserk and ally itself ideologically and politically with Nazi Germany.
In the early twenties, the Italian fascist express either racist or anti Semitic ideas, and they were willing to offer leadership in a country that had broken down economically and was on the vergi of political collapse.
I actually personally disagree with this part. I think that Italian fascists, I think, like so many regular Europeans over a thousand years, had you know, racial prejudices. Yeah, well, you know, and I mean maybe they didn't consider it as like official part of like you know, a political agenda or anything, but like they were aware within their own context of you know, the dangers of multiculturalism, multi racialism, and also you know, the Jewish threat.
You know.
To say that the Jewish threat is a post nineteen thirties or nineteen forties European phenomenon, I think is overstating it.
Yeah, to say that Italians were not aware of the of the Jewish question right exactly is Yeah. Second, Parreto saw his own class to bourgeoisie as spent and demoralized, and though he hoped to preserve some of its creations, particularly a free market, a free press, and religious liberty, he did not believe that his own social class would
be able to do so. He therefore thought it was necessary to turn to what he, like Machiavelli, designated as the lions, bold warrior forces to save what had been devised by those who had become foxes, parliamentary schemers and finessing plutocrats. What Pereto saw happening in Italy seemed to belong to a broader civilizational context. Throughout his writing, he used the concept of uniformities, which he applied to both economic and social affairs, and which he claimed to have
derived from an experimental research method. The long term invariability of the income curve and the equivalent advantages of to producers of a perfectly organized monopoly and of an unimpended, unimpeded free market are two such laws that are worked out in Prereto's major economic works. In Trezado the Social General, he developed a theory of psychological predispositions to explain social behavior.
In this analysis we find six such predispositions, which Prereto called residues and associated with changing movements and ideologies, also known as derivations. The six residues underlying group behavior are the instinct for combination, the persistence of aggregates, the desire to manifest one's beliefs sociality, and the integrity of the individual.
The integrity of the individual and the sexual drive. It is the instinct for combination and related residues three and four that actuate groups on the rise, while the persistence of aggregates and the concern about individual interests are most characteristic of established elites. Paredo discussed those residues operating within Italian society in the context of his social observations. He believed that the waning of liberalism, conspicuous in his own country,
was taking place throughout the industrialized West. The liberal bourgeoisie had lost its assertiveness in the face of its insurgent working class and of other democratic forces expressing instincts for combination and group solidarity. In the First World War, according to Pereto, the parliamentary plutocrats had triumphed over the German military aristocracy, but had succumbed to the democratic classes, without which they could not have hoped to win the war.
The only force now able to resist a revolutionary socialists, Preto maintained, were the nationalists, who drew upon the same residues prevalent among the socialists. Socialism and nationalism seemed to be related derivations, both resulting from residues leading to collective action Among his last published remarks were those on Italian constitutional reform, addressed to the new fascist government on September
twenty fifth, nineteen twenty three. Under democratic ideology runs the current of fascism, which overflows at the surface, but beneath that runs a countercurrent. Beware lest that countercurrent overflow. Beware lest you bestow upon it power to power by trying to close it off completely. Bretto believed that the fascists and their socialist enemies were harnessing the same democratic enthusiasm that in now declining liberal society had given up trying
to oppose. He felt that the fascists would have to coexist with social democracy, but hope they would do so on their own terms. Bredo's appeal to some aspects of liberal heritage occurred in the face of what he took to be an irre irrevocable, irrevocable political change. The march towards democracy would continue no matter what, and the decadence of the Roman plutocracy was only a portete of the
destiny tower above our own plutocrats. An activist and redistributionist democratic government was about to arrive, and, unlike Lackya generation earlier, Parretto had no doubt that a corresponding elite was arising to take charge of modern democracy. Political upheavals did not transpire randomly, but were the work of purposeful elites who took advantage of their consequences.
Of course, yeah, I mean, it's just classically theory. Yeah.
Faced by the Italian nationalists and the priesthood of the social proletariat, Parreto opted for what he considered to be the more moderate democratic leadership. In fact, he chose what turned out to be less far sighted of the two aspiring democratic elites. In the twentieth century, it was the exponents of working class democracy, not of democratic nationalism, who
made the more compelling claim to represent liberal democracy. Significantly, social democratic planners took over a form of discourse more closely akin to Perettos than to that of Italian fascism fascists in Scandinavia, England and the United States. They appeared to experimental scientific methods in education and public policy, and they presented their takeover of civil society as an act
of liberating individuals and upholding their rights. But they also appealed effectively for several generations to democratic legitimacy, unlike the Italian fascists, who were forced to manufacture popular endorsements for
their plans. It is not surprising that by the end of the century, social democratic planning had given rise to what Charles Croudhammer calls reactionary liberalism, holding fast to the structures and constituencies of the welfare state come What may more interesting is the fact that this liberal democracy held up for more than half a century in the most prosperous and literate areas of the world, with popular approval. This result indicates that some European liberals read the political
future with clearer eyes than others. Despite his demonstrated polemical skills, Fitz James Stephens Stephen underestimated J. S. Mill's capacity to plan a popular regime. Mill did not intend to leave the uninstructed masses to do it as to do as they please. Maurice Colling notes that Mills staked his democratic hope on a religion of humanity quote, a better religion than any of those which are ordinarily called by that title unquote, and on a new claricy which would work
to instill a universal faith in rationality. Unlike the Anglican clergy and most of the English professariat. Mills claricy would propagate scientific method and political sociology, seen as the true science of society. This elite would arise in response to social need and to the spread of secular rationalism. It would train citizens to emulate its own rationality and bring them into fellowship with the advocates of social progress everywhere.
Yeah, like he's described, he's describing the rise of like the managerial state. You know, the ability for the reasoned experts using rationality in their own training to basically create something ongoing and something that was more stable.
Calling further argues that Mill's devotion to intellectual freedom was conditioned by his concern about great minds being crushed by mediocrity. Mill was less of a libertarian than someone looking out for the highest nature's noblest minds and the advancement of scientific truth. Note that Mill favored extensive state intervention in the economy and the ongoing redistribution of incomes. He also hoped that his own elite would take charge of the
general culture. It would thereby become possible to teach a his own utilitarian ethic, which Mill assumed would bring forth a new social morality. All enlightened citizens would eventually accept the utilitarian notion that the good is that which maximizes general happiness. But as Calling perceives, the highest end that men here were imagined to pursue in quest of pleasure
was whatever Mill and his confreres desired for themselves. They never doubted that their own social preferences would come to prevail in a democratic age. Clearly, fitz James Stephen and his younger brother Leslie Stephen, though both sagacious critics of Mill, did not see fully his authoritarian side. They did not grasp the inquisitorial the inquisitorial certainty which Calling exposes at
the core of his method of inquiry. Nor did they appreciate the dogmatic way in which Mill generalized about subjects he never studied. Mill knew little in detail about the history of British society in the two hundred and fifty years before he was born. His denigration of its polity and religion was based neither on close observation nor on exact historical knowledge.
Well, if that doesn't describe the current liberal spirit like they just, they have no bearing in history of no idea. What happened they just have the solutions will of course include much worse solutions than Mill ever put forth.
Well, and to know what happened, they'd have to understand why.
Yeah, yeah, for sure.
And that's one question no one wants to ask anymore. It's like, oh, this happened, Well, why did it happen? Well, because people are mean.
Yeah, exactly, Okay, you can't look at specific political dynamics. You just have to rely on generalities like that. Yeah.
Finally, Mill's liberal critics underestimated the power of his vision of a new claricy crafting and directing in democratic order. However we may have been his grasp of the past, Mill evoked a society of democratic planners which would arise after his death. His twisting of historical data and fudging of laws of human progress were of less significance than
Mill's ability to foresee mass democracy at work. No other mid nineteenth century figure, including Tokville, exhibited such understanding of the dawning democratic age, even if that understanding, in Mill's case, was ideologically colored, and only one European liberal, Max Weber, revealed comparable insight in plotting the likely course of modern democracy. Unlike those liberals, who trembled over the fate of property and parliamentary civility. Faber associated democratic life with the aid
with the iron case of iron cage of bureaucracy. Like Pereto, he was willing to entrust democratic government to plebisatory leaders not because of the fear of anarchy, but because of his dread of bureaucratic despotism yeah very In an off quoted letter from Weber to the sociologist of elites, Robert Michelle's, at the end of the First World War, Weber questions the intelligence or honesty of those who exalt the will of the people. He goes on to admit that genuine
wills of the people have ceased to exist. For me, they are fictitious. All ideas aiming at abolishing the dominance of man over man are utopian. In nineteen eighteen, Weber observed even more incisively, in large states everywhere, modern democracy is becoming a bureaucratized democracy. And it must be so, for it is replacing the aristocratic or other titular for officials by a paid civil service. It is the same everywhere.
It is the same within parties too. It is inevitable, despite the attempt by Weber's critics to attribute such are marks to the anemia of German liberalism. What they indicate is Weber's deep perception of a secular trend, the intertwining of mass democracy and public administration as the shape of things to come.
Yeah, this is such a powerful narrative. I mean, the entire ethos of conservative Incorporated and the liberal establishment is that America represents like the triumph of individual freedom. And I think Weber is much more perceptive to the fact that actually what it represents is the triumph of the managerial state, the triumph of the administration, the triumph of bureaucratized or what you know, bureaucrats basically just running people's life and trying to arrange the world in the way
that they see fit. And that's exactly this spawn. This administrative state that Weber had his sits on, basically spawned the multiculturalism in which we exist. We don't exist in a world of increased individ dual freedom. We exist in the world of mandated cultural degradation. You know, That's what we existed, and it's and it's handed down, it's politically derived.
I mean, I think the people that say, like Aaron McIntyre and others who say that culture is downstream from politics recognize the fact that the administrative state, the thing that Max Weber learned about, is characteristic of the American function in world affairs. You know, everything, our culture, everything is handed down from politics. Everything is handed down from above, and it comes from not individual freedom, but from breureaucracy. Yeah.
And in order it has to be that way if you understand that the managerial state, it's one purpose is to perpetuate itself. It has to control everything, it has to control the culture, it has to guide everything.
Yeah.
Yeah, and that's why the you know, was Jonathan Bowden famously saying, the only way you change this is to clear it all out.
Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So I think I think the overall lesson here for Paul is that liberalism and democracy are not the same, but their unity is the particular characteristic of American totalitarianism. The attempt at at unifying these two themes has created an ideological hegemony that people don't know how to oppose, that the dissident right is only now figuring out how to oppose. But this is this is one of the sacred caws of the American ideology is the union of democracy and liberalism.
And the real genius of it is the fact that you you have this left right paradigm, this democrat Republican paradigm, let's call it, where they do not realize that they're both operating within the same system, and that all conservatives are working to do is to conserve this system exactly. Yep. If they're if they're working to concern to keep any
of it, they're perpetuating the system. So there's a certain genius to its design and that you have if you only have two factions that are that are allowed to genuinely fight within it, they're both working to they're both working to keep the system going.
Yeah, this is why like people, I mean people as they're becoming more radicalized on the right, you know, the recognizing that there's something more substantial needs to be done. But I've never found I've never found the solution really in Republican politics, you know, Republican party politics. I mean, sometimes it's fun, but really that's not where change has
to happen. Because both of these parties are reinforcement mechanisms for this regime, and it have to be It's built into the cake like that, you have to clear it out.
Yep. So all right, man, promote whatever you want. Thank you well, first of all, thank you for this. This is great and I didn't know it was going to go this long, but thank you for.
Yeah, Paul is such a dense a dense writer, so's it's really hard to get through sometimes. But at contramordor is my Twitter and then my name CJ dot sub stack. You can you can find me there, and that's basically. I also do the Chronicles magazine, which is small now and we're making some changes for next year, so that'll be fun.
We always have a fose magazine podcasts, right yeah.
Chronicles magazine podcasts, and so we're doing some more stuff next year for that, but in anticipation of that, you can always check it out on YouTube, et cetera.
All right, I'll link to it.
Thanks a lot, I appreciate you