What Went Wrong with Liberalism and How We Save it, with Samuel Moyn
49:37 Share

This episode is sponsored by Indeed. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy, just use Indeed. When it comes to hiring, Indeed is all you need. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites. Indeed's sponsored jobs helps you stand out and hire fast.

With sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. And it makes a huge difference. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs.

When we recently used Indeed for a job vacancy, the response was incredible. With such a high level of potential candidates, it was so much easier to hire fast and hire well. Plus, with Indeed's sponsored jobs, there are no monthly subscriptions, no long-term contracts, and you only pay for results. How fast is Indeed? In the minute I've been talking to you, 23 hires were made on Indeed, according to Indeed data worldwide.

There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at indeed.com slash intelligence squared.

Just go to indeed.com slash intelligence squared and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. That's indeed.com slash intelligence squared. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring.

Indeed is all you need. This episode is sponsored by Oracle. Even if you think it's a bit overhyped, AI is suddenly everywhere, from self-driving cars to molecular medicine to business efficiency. If it's not in your industry yet, it's coming fast. But AI needs a lot of speed and computing power. So how do you compete without costs spiraling out of control? Time to upgrade to the next generation of the cloud.

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure or OCI. OCI is a blazing fast and secure platform for your infrastructure, database, application development, plus all your AI and machine learning workloads. OCI costs 50% less for compute and 80% less for networking. So you're saving a

pile of money. Thousands of businesses have already upgraded to OCI, including Vodafone, Thomson Reuters, and Suno AI. Right now, Oracle is offering to cut your current cloud bill in half if you move to OCI. For new US customers with minimum financial commitment, offer ends March 31st. See if your company qualifies for this special offer at oracle.com slash squared. That's oracle.com slash squared.

Welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Leila Ismail. Our guest today is Samuel Moyn, who is Chancellor Kent Professor of Law and History at Yale University and the author of many books on the history of ideas and politics in the 20th century. His latest book is Liberalism Against Itself, Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times.

And joining him in conversation to talk about it is researcher and writer Adam McCauley. Let's join Adam now with more. Welcome to Intelligence Squared. I'm your host, Adam McCauley. Today I'm honored to be speaking with Samuel Moyn. Today we have the unique opportunity to bring his latest or most recent book, Liberalism Against Itself, into conversation alongside the latest inflection point in American politics, the return of President Donald Trump.

At the heart of Moyne's recent work is a deft and devastating act of critical reflection, a kind of philosophical due diligence about the very character of liberalism. Moyne trains his attention on key intellectuals in the 20th century and works to unpack how their efforts to shore up liberalism's defenses against Cold War enemies ultimately hollowed out the revolutionary and potentially hope-inspiring nature of the wider liberal project.

To be clear, Moyne doesn't assert that liberalism is dead. Instead, he highlights how its slow and steady decline has been the result of self-inflicted wounds, and that work for its restoration demands imagining a liberalism attentive to its wider history and born anew to address the challenges of today. It is my pleasure to welcome Sam Moyne to Intelligence Squared. So Sam, I wonder if I could take you or us back to the start.

Your scholarship has delved deeply and engaged thoroughly with liberal philosophical thought across time. But where did the motivation and spark of insight for this book come from? Well, it came from the first election of Donald Trump, which blindsided liberals and not just American liberals. Financial Times journalist Edward Luce immediately published a book in response to the Brexit vote and

Trump's election called The End of Western Liberalism. And American Patrick Deneen wrote a notorious book called Why Liberalism Failed, as if it were clear and definitive that it had done so. And so a big referendum on something called liberalism broke out as a kind of diagnosis of

how Trump became possible. And it's really in response to that debate that I wrote this book. So can you sketch perhaps the thesis or the general arguments of the book for our readers? Maybe outline maybe how you see the fuller liberal philosophy of the early 20th century and then what happened next and maybe some of the reasons that those changes occurred.

Yeah, you put it well. It's an attempt to kind of thread the needle because what you got in that debate after Trump's election was excoriation of liberalism on one side and extenuation on the other. And what I wanted to say is actually

liberalism has something radical about it in its origins in the 19th century through the early 20th century, though it was an above disastrous mistake. And then something bad happened and

And liberalism is kind of reaping what it sowed in the middle of the 20th century by turning to a much more libertarian stance, especially on economics, but that's not its only problem. And so what I do in the book is look at how this catalytic transformation happened to liberal thought

in the middle of the 20th century, so-called Cold War liberalism arose. And I try to suggest that it's at least partly responsible for the woes of liberalism today. But, you know, we could go back and get some of the stuff that was prematurely abandoned and would have to, you know, correct

all the chapters of the liberal past to make it viable now. Yeah, especially here as we sort of stand on the precipice of a new American administration peering uncertainly and perhaps increasingly anxiously into the future. Many of us are in search of strategies to navigate a politics that seems to be emptied of moral and ethical substance, narrowed maybe in scope and pretty short on ambition.

And it's tempting to draw, I think, perhaps as you have, and the book certainly does in the background, the causal arrow between this Cold War period and perhaps the defenses that liberals within the tent, as it were, tried to erect and contemporary American politics. But it's also, I think, quite

let's call it difficult, if not complex, to really compare modern, let's call it democratic politics in the United States to whatever this idea or vision of liberalism might be. And I wonder if you could just speak a little bit to how you see the comparison between these two spaces. What about democracy as we understand it maybe at present is

mirrors and matches that bigger project? And where is it deficient, perhaps, given the breadth we could see? It's best to begin with when liberalism originated and what it stood for. What I try to say in the book is that what many of us learned in school or university, that liberalism dates back centuries, John Locke was one of its founders, doesn't really persuade most

historians anymore and we should look at those who first coined the term liberalism in the early 19th century and what they had to offer is let's say the first emancipatory uh plan for modernity to make everyone um free and equal um able to chart their own lives as as they see fit

Now, actually, those founders were not big fans of democracy because they thought, well, how could you do a good enough job voting, let alone planning your life unless you were educated and equipped to do so nowadays?

all liberals or Democrats, that took a huge amount of struggle. But when we look more closely at liberalism, and this is not just in the United States, actually, tons of power is transferred to elites. And that's true if you look at the moribund legislature or if you look at, you know, the ruling classes in places like central banks and supreme courts.

And what I think I wanna suggest is that though not perfect, we should look at this moral core that the original liberals were offering who said ordinary people can be at least at some point trusted to rule themselves. And you note that after Trump was elected both times, a lot of folks said, well, wait, should we even have democracy?

if the people are making these choices. And so there's always gonna be this temptation to doubt whether we should, you know, even ask ordinary people what they think. And what I see in the original liberals is at least the hope that ordinary people could live meaningful lives and that the state could exist to give them the wherewithal to live, you know, interestingly and responsibly.

Yeah, I think it's such an important point because it also distinguishes, I think, two things that often get confused, right? There's actually the process and procedure of government or governance, as it were. And then there are the ideas, the philosophies that underpin or provide a foundation for how we expect perhaps that procedure to unfold and who is seen and who is a member of individual spaces and or authorities to make decisions about what that present or future might look like.

What I find fascinating, and again, this is as someone who has read sort of all of the texts, but wrestles as well with, you know, what do we make of it in our present moment? Your book takes us back to the Cold War, which is, of course, another critical inflection point in politics in the 20th century. And it's also a moment, I think, as you tease out quite well, that intellectuals are coming to terms with the Second World War. And they're coming to terms with what the implications of a war like that might be, and

And in response to this mounting fear of the state, right, actually the mounting fear of government, perhaps a capital G sense, someone like Isaiah Berlin introduces and advocates for something like negative freedom, right? A conception that emphasized freedom from the state instead of freedom for anything specific, perhaps.

And that may not be giving him credit, but ostensibly it's to limit the state's influence in the private lives of its citizens. This foreclosure, you suggest, provided space for neoliberalism and libertarianism to sort of gain purchase.

And I wonder if you could just take us through the implications of this and what those forces looked like, how they sort of advocated for themselves and how they became, let's say, the lowest common denominator that everybody sort of agreed to in that period and where it moved from that point on.

yeah great question so i mentioned that liberalism in the 19th century had offered itself up as the the first emancipatory scheme and of course socialism was the second and we should remember that liberals sometimes evolved into being socialists or helped invent the thing great example is john stuart mill whom we read um as a liberal and rightly because he insisted on limits to the power of

of government over individuals. But, of course, he evolved into a socialist. He died as almost a Bernie bro and, you know, current speech. But when we get to the 20th century, what liberals learned over

over that time about the need for distributional fairness, a welfare state, like educational institutions, which again, you know, liberals invested most of their energy into constructing, is almost forgotten. And the reason is that folks like Berlin were

let's say, so concerned by the appeal of the Soviet Union that they stripped liberalism down in their writings to the claim that it's just about limits to the power of states interfering with individuals, as if actually he didn't himself believe in the state doing a lot. So he hated Friedrich Hayek, the founder of neoliberalism in the middle of the 20th century, and

you know was nasty about him in various letters and in fact it seems as if berlin was personally a supporter of labor or social democracy but he never wrote about it and so his writings if you read his classic essay two concepts of liberty you're right he comes off as if his sole concern

He has limits to state power as if he weren't for the expansion of the state that liberals were for in the middle of the 20th century. And so my claim is that he ends up overlapping with the neoliberals he personally hated. And then when neoliberalism took the reins in our societies in the middle of the 1970s, folks like Berlin had left liberals no kind of theory of their project to

to fight back because he himself had said liberalism is about keeping government off of our backs and maybe from interfering with our bank accounts. It's so fascinating too, because I think, you know, you reference the work of Judith Sklar in this book as well. And she's got this line that says, or she essentially excoriates the neoliberal movement

Not that it was too enamored with market economics, but that it was too conservative in its politics, right? I think that speaks to this narrowing of maybe the imagination around the project itself and what it might become. She also, I mean, she doesn't stop there. A lot of your work sort of unpacks what appears to be mostly a lifelong task of trying to make sense of, if not disentangle and clarify perhaps the true shape and scope of the liberal project.

But she criticizes the liberal movement, particularly within this mid-20th century setting, as shirking other philosophical commitments, right? Specifically abandoning its belief that people can control and improve themselves and collectively the social environment. She worried, as you write, that the liberal project abandoned its support for things like human creativity, spiritual development, and even the support of finding human purpose, right?

And that strikes me as particularly evident in contemporary politics. There's a lot of questions about like, what is this all for, as it were, if it if its results don't sort of either provide a fuller understanding and feeling of purpose in one's own life, but also doesn't seem to be trending anywhere specific in terms of goals of the state and the larger sort of, let's say, promise of politics.

So I wondered if you might, you know, how do you see this in our contemporary moment? Are we living in sort of the aftermath, as it were, of this lack of imagination? Where do you kind of look for either the cause or potentially some hope to right the ship here?

It's a great question because it seems philosophical as a question, but actually you look at the critics of liberalism like Patrick Deneen and they say the root problem with liberalism is it doesn't tell us why we're here, what our lives are for. And it fails to provide meaning or a kind of message about

about the kind of broader purposes of the social compact. And I say that Judith Schklar is kind of the heroine of my book because even though she's best known, like Berlin, as a Cold War liberal, and she coined immortally this phrase, the liberalism of fear, meaning fear of state power and the violence that states inflict.

When she was young, she was actually a critic of the invention of Cold War liberalism, including by Berlin, who was actually a teacher of hers. And she says a lot of stuff that I think is really useful. One is that she says that...

And neoliberals, though they seem just one sect within the liberals of the middle of the 20th century, kind of define the whole transformation because they're so pessimistic and they're so suspicious of change.

state power. She says that liberals, as you mentioned, are kind of adopting the view that the state should be a referee above the fray and never have a view about what's best for everyone, but just say, well, you can believe in whatever you believe in private as long as you don't kill one another in public and don't use the state's power to do so.

and kind of neglected how 19th century liberals like Mill believe that individuality is the kind of emancipatory purpose of our lives, that liberals had been the first to offer and make credible and appealing. And so when you look at today, it's not just individuals.

when it comes to economic unfairness that figures like Mill are, I think, more relevant to us than figures like Berlin. It's also when it comes to this question of how do you appeal to voters?

You know, there's been a temptation to just blame them or hate them because very often they're setting back their own economic interests. But then we have this puzzle. Why are they voting for Trump? And I think a part of the reason is that Trump is very good at scapegoating enemies and creating some problems.

reasons like immigration, why allegedly workers are suffering. But I think there's a deeper reason, which is that liberalism has lost even its sense that it should appeal, even if you like, spiritually to people and give them a sense that not just that we're all in this together economically, but that

liberalism is about making your lives better and more interesting and worth living. I think it's fascinating. And also the cast of characters that you pull together in this book, I think is quite telling. And I'm going to take a, let's call this a slight pivot as it were into maybe the intersection of culture and politics for a moment.

But you have this interesting line of inquiry in the book that connects the work and consequence of Sigmund Freud with a kind of political stoicism that flourished among some liberals. And you write that the canonization of Freud forces us to consider sort of exacting self-management as the essential liberal commitment of the period.

And if you fast forward to our present moment, there is a surging public interest in stoicism. It has a strong sort of cultural and self-improvement bent, but it does appear to be on the rise. But I often wonder whether this cultural stoicism belays a perverse philosophy of resilience, a form of self-moderation adopted by individuals who feel politics don't serve their deeper purposes, but which also fails to prompt action in service of meaningful reforms.

And I wonder if you could just talk about this balance in our present moment, where if not apathy, a kind of disenchantment with political participation might stand as a limit to action and reform. That's an amazing question. So this figures in the book as part of the last chapter where I basically try to argue that liberals gave up hope. And it's not like they

you know, gave into despair, but they said liberalism should be about, you know, the avoiding enthusiasm. And that's why there's a connection to not just Sigmund Freud, but stoicism, this ancient philosophy that our goals should be freedom from disturbance. Like no matter what's going on out there, no matter how bad it is, in a sense, if it doesn't matter to me,

then I won't be afflicted. Now that's, you know, some people have argued something that the privileged can say since it's just hard to see if you're really suffering how you can immunize yourself against it. But the deeper criticism is I think the one you're getting at, which is that it's not that it's privilege, it's that it's apathetic when we should care

Our lives are completely bound up with what happens in the world, and we're hostage to our time and our place and everything good and ill that happens, and that's why we have a stake in it. And this Stoic approach of saying, well, just disclaim interest in a sense as if you have no stake is just false to our experience.

I mean, many people couldn't achieve that kind of dispassionate relationship to their lives and times. And I don't think people should try. So liberals should really stand for the idea that, no, history matters and disaster can happen, but so can emancipation if it's something that we care passionately about and struggle for. And it's just very sad that the Cold War liberals...

took the Soviet Union as a cause for saying, well, liberals should have people disengage because we don't want them to get so excited that they back the Soviet Union. But what about backing liberalism and its version of emancipation? They gave up on that in a sense. I think the mistake haunts us and haunts this moment where you have so much apathy in response to Trump's second victory.

It's 2025, a new year and the best time to turn your great idea into a business. Shopify is how you're going to make it happen. Let me tell you how. Shopify makes it simple to create your brand, open for business and get your first sale. Get your store up and running easily with thousands of customisable templates. All you need to do is drag and drop. Their powerful social media tools let you connect all your channels and create shoppable posts.

Imagine what's possible when learning doesn't get in the way of life. At Capella University, our game-changing FlexPath learning format lets you set your own deadlines so you can learn at a time and pace that works for you.

It's an education you can tailor to your schedule. That means you don't have to put your life on hold to pursue your professional goals. Instead, enjoy learning your way and earning a degree without missing a beat. A different future is closer than you think with Capella University. Learn more at capella.edu.

This episode is brought to you by Amazon Prime. From streaming to shopping, Prime helps you get more out of your passions. So whether you're a fan of true crime or prefer a nail-biting novel from time to time, with services like Prime Video, Amazon Music, and fast, free delivery, Prime makes it easy to get more out of whatever you're into or getting into. Visit Amazon.com slash Prime to learn more.

I think too, you know, back to the 1970s, which sort of takes us right into the, sort of the Cold War era itself. And I wasn't necessarily going to ask this question, but now that we're here, I kind of, I kind of want to unpack it a little bit because it's mentioned in the background. You know, the way in which I see the evolution of perhaps the major debate in, in liberalism or what a form of liberalism could or should, should be really comes down to the, a question between John Rawls and Robert Nozick, right? There's this, there's

There's this fundamental tension, and I think reified in different ways in our present moment by, let's call them the Silicon Valley crowd, who perhaps very much buy into a Nozick-style understanding of what the...

let's call it the structure, the infrastructure of politics ought to provide you. But I wonder for the listeners and for my edification too, if you're comfortable just to tease out what these two pictures look like, because it may not be the only story in the game here, but it's certainly the one that we can find perhaps the biggest delta or gap between, for instance. Yeah.

Yeah, so you're referring to a kind of mid-Cold War debate that arose among these two Harvard philosophers, John Rawls and Robert Nozick. And, you know, as I would interpret it in light of my book, in a sense, that's a bit of a kind of belated debate. Rawls stands up for the welfare state.

He inherits a lot from Cold War liberalism, but where he differs is that, unlike Berlin, he gives a very elaborate argument for redistributive politics. And yet, class has haunted our societies more

since his book was published. It's like, you know, his principles of fairness were better honored before he wrote than ever since he published. So he, in a sense, he provides the swan song of the welfare state. Nozick, his colleague, stands up for Hayek's theories in a more abstract way,

but in a way that economically has won out, where the tax, effective tax rate, especially on the wealthy, has crashed. People really do think that if they're privileged, they should be left alone, no matter the consequences for everyone else. And so, in a way, Nozick, who wasn't regarded as having won the debate philosophically, in a sense, has won it politically.

And I think we're seeing that resolution is disastrous in a kind of slow, you know, like a slow sense. You know, we we it wasn't visible at first. And, you know, Ronald Reagan was elected by a majority. And yet the very people who.

who are now voting for Trump have been hurt badly by Nozick's neoliberalism. And so my own view, like much of the left, is that liberals, if they want to be credible, need to break with that, their own adoption of that

outlook, a very libertarian neoliberal outlook and return to something emancipatory and redistributive. And finally, in a sense, let Rawls's theory reign in politics the way it never has. I think one of the most cutting sort of implications perhaps of the Nozick style sort of approach, this

heavily minimal government that's there to do just the bare necessity to keep everybody perhaps alive in the street and not unfairly hampered by broken contracts or whatever else you want to, you sort of want to interpret that as. It does mean that the state itself seems to have very little, if no space to expand, to do anything meaningful, substantive or otherwise in the world. And I think that's quite telling and perhaps that echo, you know, still resounds today.

I wanted to take you kind of probably on a tangent to that question, but very closely aligned, as it were. You write in the book that the turn from the welfare state, right? So this is very much the Rawlsian sort of perspective to the successor political economy from idealism to neoliberalism, you call it.

really hinges on Cold War liberalism. And elsewhere, you know, scholars like Ellen Wood have written about capitalism's distinctive economic logic and that it's been accompanied by its own cultural and ideological formations, which themselves depart in significant ways from the ideas or the cultural baggage we might think that follows the Enlightenment.

I just wonder, given the prominence, and again, you know, I often find the lowest hanging fruit question in this scenario is always to take it back to economics. But still yet, with the prominence of our capitalist system, I wonder if it suggests a kind of crowding out, right, or a shrinking of space into which the liberal intellectual project can grow or flourish.

And so I'm just, you know, from your perspective, maybe you could tease out the relationship between the logics of economics here and the logics of politics. What's made possible by the current sort of status quo? And does something fundamental have to change in the character or fabric of capitalism or neoliberalism for us to make meaningful political change? Great. So, you know, one place to start an answer to that amazing question is just to the

to remind people that you know Robert nozick himself harked back to 19th century liberalism he loved laissez-faire the night Watchman State as he said and of course it's true that states were much more minimal in the 19th century than in the middle of the 20th precisely when Cold War liberalism was born

And yet, you know, my response is to say that if you look at liberal thinkers, and I've mentioned Mill, but you could also throw in Alexis de Tocqueville and many successors in what was called the new liberalism in England or progressivism in the United States.

really did try to argue that the state had a purpose and more than that, liberalism should not just be in economics anyway. I mean, economics is just a means to an end.

And the question is, what are our ends? And once again, when we look at at least some of these earlier liberals, they insisted that the end was emancipation and lives of creativity. And so I agree with you that in our current situation, it would be a mistake to just say, you know, liberalism should break with neoliberalism and stand for more redistributionism.

than it has because it has other resources to offer. And above all, it has to, you know, return to treating economics as an end to, you know, the the sorry, as a means to the end of of free lives. And so, you know, look at the educational system, of course, look at economics as

a way of equipping individuals and groups to launch themselves into, you know, lives of creativity and significance. And it's this kind of picture you really don't see among liberal politicians who in the last, you know, 40 or so years have really adopted a neoliberal perspective and maybe tried to soften the blow for the very worst off, although not much of that

And so I'm totally with you that economics matters, but in a way, liberals should stand for the idea that, you know, it's just one domain and it's a really important one. And when people are hurting economically or feel themselves to be stagnating, of course, they will punish liberals.

And the latest reelection of Donald Trump is just one more lesson for them. But that doesn't mean liberals should reduce their views to just like redistributive theories of economic fairness. Life is in the end. I think voting is never just about economics. Yeah. And it also seems to be a losing proposition, you know, especially in our

age of austerity, as it were, or our concerns about whether or not there's enough to go around to begin with. And in full appreciation of the fact that so many of our challenges require cooperation in ways that previously we've never sort of had to demand, and that's perhaps both domestically and internationally, there's a lot more at stake than merely what the ledger reads at the end of every month or the end of every year. And yet an allergy perhaps in

the chambers of power to have a conversation that is more expansive, that is more about the ends that one seeks and whatever vision of a better world you might want to bring into being. You know, I don't want to endorse sort of individuals speaking rhetorically and for rhetoric's sake alone, but it is telling that there doesn't appear to be enough oxygen in the room to have those conversations today, which might strike some people as

the most dangerous, perhaps, observation we'll make. Back in my youth when Bill Clinton was president, he famously began to talk about the politics of meaning, and he was influenced by certain authors he had read. The trouble is, of course, that in that case, he didn't

really, in a sense, mean it. It was just rhetorical. And meanwhile, he was embracing neoliberalism and trade deals and deconstructing even the minimal welfare state that Americans have. And I would, you know, observe something similar of

Barack Obama, a later Democratic president, because one of the main ideas in my book is that liberals don't just have to claim to be for emancipation. They have to, in a sense, give a credible vision of

you know, where we stand in the history of collective freedom. And I talk a fair bit about, you know, Cold War liberals and how nervous they were about appealing to historical emancipation because the Soviets, again, were doing it and claimed to be in the vanguard of history and so forth. And yeah, when Barack Obama...

becomes president, he does begin to, you know, cite Martin Luther King Jr. to the effect that the arc of the moral universe is long but bends towards justice. The trouble is that he talked that talk but didn't walk the walk and famously, you know, the arc of the moral universe ended up in the first election of Donald Trump. And so, it's always crucial to, you know, make

make sure these ideas aren't unmoored and made more like propagandistic and that they have policies to match. And I think it's there that the left has been failing most of all. Yeah, it's hard too because you understand kind of, let's say, the bundle of topics that would come along with a conversation, a meaningful conversation around conceptions of justice are fundamentally more difficult to manage at a macro political level than some of these easier concepts

questions of economic reforms and who gets what. And in some ways, that hidden or invisible market out there is to blame for anything that goes awry in the economic sphere. Far less clear who's to blame for something that goes wrong if you seek particular ends towards justice. But on that note, I want to take us perhaps back towards the end of your book and you write about

this inadequacy of imagination, which I think is central to this question of liberalism and certainly central to the conversation we've had thus far. And related to this, in my mind, is your treatment, and I think with great intellectual respect for the literary critic Lionel Trilling. What struck me about his story, though, was his reverence for a kind of classical education and his teaching in Columbia, which is still home to what we might call the important books tradition.

And this tradition ensures that students gain a familiarity with, well, what was once, let's say, the canon of Western, but more recently, increasingly non-Western political thought. But, you know, the tension here is that this tradition has also been associated primarily with the American Ivy League. And I wonder if it suggests an uncomfortable collision here between classism and education. And from your current station, and not to, you know, this might be an underhanded question, but as a professor here in Yale...

I wonder if you might speak to the duty of educational institutions today in the context of supporting intellectual inquiry across the board or perhaps across the entire expanse of the liberal project and beyond, and how that or how education is central to the reimagining of politics going forward.

Well, I'll just mention that I spent most of my career at Columbia teaching grade books. And so we have a lesser program at Yale, but it's completely fair to indict these American universities for their elitism. And they're really, you know, historically finishing schools or grooming institutions for the elite. And I think that reflects very poorly on college.

liberals who have not, you know, adequately broadened educational opportunity. Now, universities are about to be under assault in the United States because they're seen, I think, falsely as outposts of something called wokeism. But actually, they are dangerous in a sense because these great books are what, you know, really much of what you might teach in any critical spirit is

in any educational institution is dangerous. Emancipation is dangerous for those who hold sway. But the trouble is liberals haven't, in a sense, stood up for the fire they're bringing, and they've restricted it to the privileged few. And

That wasn't always the case. One of the greatest American liberals, John Dewey, was trying to make good on this old premise in John Stuart Mill and others that everyone needs to be educated as part of the equipment they need to launch their lives. And the trouble is that what

Ivy League students get everyone should get it's just that liberals have actually made you know the these these privileged educational institutions more and more exclusionary just because so many other parts of the American educational system are in dire straits and that's true I think not least of state universities

because those are being, you know, increasingly defunded. I am a product of the University of California at Berkeley, once the greatest, I think, of the universities, but is still great. But, you know, it's been losing funding and it makes it increasingly difficult for it to compete. And really, you know, whatever happens there, I think, you know, starting with

kindergarten and primary school liberals need to recommit to funding of public institutions in order to make this common liberal venture something that voters will back when the schools are so bad. In a sense, it's a self-fulfilling prophecy that you would want to defund them, whether or not providing

the emancipation liberals are supposed to be promising and really, you know, liberal societies, if they're run by an elite will betray their own promise. So you're raising a crucial set of questions and it's, they require a harsh verdict. About great books, I am ambivalent because, you know, I think, you know, you can bring a critical spirit and

and draw a emancipatory lesson from any any set of materials but it's also true that great books now include figures like Karl Marx some of the most critical of liberalism and everyone at Columbia or Yale reads Mark some of the few people to actually do so and

And so, you know, I'm for broadening and retaining a great books curriculum as one part of what every citizen might, you know, someday, you know, expect as part of his or her, their education. Yeah. I also think it's, it's so important to have that, at least that debate around the value of the humanities today, perhaps more so than ever before. If, if for no other reason than it seems a lot of the forces in the world today are pressing and,

and not without reason, towards STEM subjects. Of course, science, technology, and mathematics are important, except they're incredibly technically rigorous and incredibly useful. They are means to all kinds of ends. But humanities, to me, stands for an open conversation or debate about what those ends are, and the extent to which we seem to be jettisoning our responsibility

to educate ourselves or to at least make ourselves aware of how little we really do know about the breadth and scope of ideas out there. That seems to be a losing proposition. I mean, science can in the end never tell us what to do with its,

it's breakthroughs. That's up to us. Strangely, it's the same critique that the liberals sort of suffered, right? The fact that liberalism didn't give us anything tangible, not because it couldn't, but perhaps because liberals didn't and didn't sort of move far enough. I think that's insightful. I think I could probably steal the rest of your day and it would be incredibly enjoyable on my end. But given that we are on a timeline here,

As we stand poised with this new sort of incoming Trump administration and amid persistent debates over the nature of the liberal or rules-based international order, from someone who currently sits in the United States, I'm just curious and has educated themselves and invested themselves in inquiry in these projects.

What are the sources of hope for you in restoring and broadening or enriching the liberal project? Do you see flickers out there of individuals trying to work towards an alternative understanding or vision of what this project might look like? Or just from your perspective, what might a restored liberal project start to do, start to appear like? What would it offer us?

Well, you know, we haven't really talked about international affairs where I think there's a lot more aggressive criticism to make of liberals who in some sense never set up a liberal international order, even though in response to Trump, they began saying they had done so. But, you know, your question is really much broader and it's about sources of hope, whether domestic or international. And I think that in the end,

The saving grace is that the critics of liberalism have no alternative. Often they hanker for some status quo anti-liberalism, like Patrick Deneen seemed to present the Middle Ages as a viable alternative to modern emancipation, raising the question, well, didn't

you know, the Middle Ages fail as well. And more than that, I think there seem to be no credible answers forthcoming from liberalism's critics for the sins of liberalism. I think that they're sometimes very good at identifying

Most important, I think there's generational change. And as I mentioned, when I was a young person in the 1990s, Cold War liberalism was in many ways rebooted. And it's a tragedy that that happened because liberals, in a sense, lost their chance to look in the mirror and correct themselves before it was too late for Trump. But it's never too late in a broader sense.

a sense. And generational change as I see it makes possible a new generation of liberals who reinvent that politics beyond its mistakes in the past 50 or so years. And what that will look like is very hard to say. But if you combine these two facts that there doesn't seem to be a viable alternative to it, it can win

at the polls as Donald Trump did, but it can't institutionalize something that's, you know, meaningful and works, especially on the economic front. Then liberals have a chance, and the question is whether they keep missing their opportunities to answer their critics. And I'm of the belief that young people are very well positioned to, in a sense,

look hard at liberalism and try to imagine what it should be now that it has failed for a time. I also think too, maybe not to be too hopeful, but at least to find the silver lining here, that maybe this is a moment where liberalism goes on the offense instead of plays defense. Perhaps that's precisely the

the change in perspective that needs to happen for us to invigorate a program that could be far grander and more rigorous and robust than maybe we've seen it in recent years. I'm for that, but, you know, it just begs the question of offense in the name of which liberalism, because you could argue that, you know, Cold War liberalism was quite offensive.

especially as time passed. And the first response to Trump of the liberal resistance was incredibly offensive in the sense of targeting Trump legalistically and informationally. The trouble is that it didn't have, in a sense, the right message

to be convincing and voters rejected that version of offense. So I'm for defense when it's warranted, but offense requires a rethink, not just of tactics, but of like the grand strategy. What are we trying to achieve? What values? Which liberalism needs to be advanced through offense? But I'm otherwise with you. So Sam, it's been an immense pleasure to host you here on Intelligence Squared.

Samuel Moyn's latest book is Liberalism Against Itself, Cold War Intellectuals in the Making of Our Time. This book and as many others are available online or at a bookstore near you. To our listeners, a hearty thank you from me, Adam McCauley, and all of us at Intelligence Squared. Until next time. Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by me, Leila Ismail.

Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what Big Wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you.

That's right. We're cutting the price of Mint Unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three-month plan only. Taxes and fees extra. Speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. See details.