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Jonathan Rauch: Hello, my name is Jonathan Rauch. I am a guest host today for the mighty UnPopulist podcast, and I am with Alexandre Lefebvre, whose name I probably mispronounced (it’s got a number of consonants in a row). Alex is a professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney, and he has emerged as easily one of the most interesting, provocative, and original thinkers in liberal political theory today. And The UnPopulist kind of missed his book when it came out. It’s called Liberalism as a Way of Life. It came out in 2024, and The UnPopulist, unfortunately … we missed it. So this is a chance to catch up with Alex since he’s in the United States doing some kind of grand tour. Alex, welcome to The UnPopulist podcast.
Alexandre Lefebvre: Thank you, Jon, and thanks for that introduction. Great to be here.
Rauch: Nice to be in the same time zone with you. So let’s just start with the easy stuff. Who are you and why did you write a book called Liberalism as a Way of Life?
Lefebvre: I’m a Canadian who trained in the U.S. and found his way over to Australia …
Rauch: … Where did you train?
Lefebvre: I trained at Johns Hopkins. My wife and I are both academics and we had a baby and we solved the two-body problem in a lovely city down under. And that’s been the story of us ever since. And she’s about to go off to university, so the next chapter awaits.
So the book, Liberalism as a Way of Life, is my attempt to try to figure out a really basic question, I suppose, which is that for us secular people who live and were raised in liberal democratic countries … that’s how I open the book: Where do we get our values from? What’s the tradition that we could point to to say, that’s more or less where I get my moral compass from, but also my sensibility—as the kids would say, my vibe.
And my sense is that people who aren’t religious really struggle to answer that question. They’ll point to really local stuff, like their family, their friends—and all that is crucial. But there lacks a kind of Bible-size or church-size thing on the other end of what they might point to, for the source of who they are. My guess is that the most economical and reasonable label to give that today for a lot of folks is “liberalism.”
The basket of values that goes around liberalism—like freedom, fairness, reciprocity, tolerance, irony, maybe a little bit of fun, that sort of thing—is I think at the core of who a lot of us are, not just in our political life, but in all walks of life.
Rauch: I’m going to ask two questions in reverse order. We’ll try to get to them both, and you’ll help me remember them. The second is going to be: What do you mean by liberalism? Because I don’t think it’s necessarily what a lot of people think liberalism means. But the first is: Who cares? Which is a more fundamental question. Why do people need a story about the importance and value of liberalism? Why do they need a liberal identity? Why not just go around consuming iPhones and being happy?
Lefebvre: Let me start with the one that could lead me down rabbit holes, but I’ll resist that temptation, which is: What is liberalism? Liberalism is at once a really old thing and a really new thing. It’s a new thing in that it only really started in the 19th century. That’s when people started calling themselves liberal in the recognizably political sense. But as a description of what it means to be a liberal person, that word is very, very old. It’s almost 2,000 years old, and it goes back to Latin and to the Roman Republic and the Roman Empire. It meant someone who is free on the one hand, so we get the word liberty, but it also meant someone who is generous on the other hand, which we get in English—it’s a bit stuffy, but we still use the word—liberality.
And the way I understand liberalism as a quality of character is to try to combine those two things as best we can, to be free and to be generous. That’s the doctrine that came about in the 19th century in an attempt to recover those two tendencies.
But then there are all these different tendencies as to which way it goes. I myself am a guy who thinks about liberalism largely in terms of fairness. In Australia we have this wonderful expression that the point of the state is to give everyone a fair go. And look, who am I to disagree with my adoptive country? So I’m going to go with that as a two-word definition of liberalism: providing a fair go. Do you want to complicate that story, Jon? You’re as much a pro as I am.
Rauch: We’ll complicate it a little bit just by clarifying that your personal school of liberalism, I think many Americans would identify as center-left liberalism, as a more or less progressive form of liberalism. It views the welfare state as pretty essential, for reasons we might get into. But there are also other strands that are also liberal. One is what’s often called libertarianism, which focuses on the size and scope of government and noncoercion. Then there are conservative brands of liberalism, seemingly paradoxically, but not at all. This goes to people like Edmund Burke and Friedrich Hayek. They emphasize personal liberty, but also the space that liberty creates for fundamental traditions and values to form. Does that seem about right as a sense of the spectrum?
Lefebvre: That’s a good lay of the land.
Rauch: So who cares if people have a story about liberalism? I mean, why bother?
Lefebvre: Okay, your question is big, so let me go big in reply. I think it matters to understand our world, and it matters to understand ourselves. My big pitch in my take on liberalism is that liberal ideas and values we typically think of as political stuff, let’s say in shorthand—like courts, parliaments, rule of law, individual rights—that’s liberal stuff. And I don’t mean to deny that, but I think one of the great developments of the last 40 years is that those values, which were once housed or contained within the political or public sphere, started to spread and spread and spread, so that today they inform the usual suspects that conservatives point to, like the university and the media, but also public culture more generally. Every time someone uses a dating app, there’s liberalism in action, of people swiping left or right as their heart fancies. Or whenever you take ideas of fairness into one’s own family life, like saying to my wife, “I’ll do the dishes.” There’s some sort of beachhead, let’s call it, of liberalism in private life.
So the way I regard liberalism is that it has spread from a political thing to a broadly social and cultural thing. Political philosophers would use the word hegemony: something that has managed to bake itself into our ordinary social relations, our sense of ourselves. And that’s what I think liberalism is.
So the “Who cares?” question is important because, first of all, if liberalism is under attack worldwide right now, I think it’s important to be very clear that it’s not just a political thing that’s under attack. It’s a whole civilizational, social, cultural order that is also being challenged at one and the same time, and the primacy of values like freedom, fairness, tolerance, not just in the political sphere, but comprehensively as well. So it’s key to understand our world and what’s at stake if that world as we know it starts to be displaced right now.
“My sense is that if liberalism is failing, it’s not because liberalism itself is fatally flawed, but because liberals, if I can put it plainly, suck at liberalism. We don’t live up to the values that we profess. And we live and honor a kind of sham, fair-weather liberalism—one that people will rightly defect from.” — Alexandre Lefebvre
The second answer is: Look, if a lot of us are liberal deep down—I have this term I coin in the book, “liberals all the way down”—that’s the thing you would point to to explain in large part who you are. Then if you can’t see what liberalism has become, you can’t, in important respects, see what you have become, or what you are, or what you care about, and what kind of person you ought to be. It’s a source of the world, it’s a source of the self, and that’s not a bad answer for why I think we should care.
Rauch: Maybe sharpen that a little bit. There’s a quotation toward the beginning of your book where you say this: “One motivation for my book stems from a sense that liberals could do a much better job of promoting the creed. Only rarely are the strengths and virtues of liberalism talked up.” This is a book that’s written to meet a demand in the moment. And that demand seems to be that liberals don’t know how to defend liberalism. In fact, in a sense, they don’t even know what it is. You use the analogy of the fish that don’t know what water is. Is that the right premise?
Lefebvre: Yeah, that’s exactly the right premise. The premise is that if liberalism is omnipresent, it’s like the water that fish swim in. I use the David Foster Wallace joke of one fish asking another fish, “How’s the water?” and the other fish says, “What the hell is water?” But I’m trying to make that ubiquitous reality all around us a bit more explicit, a bit more thematic, and just a bit more perceptible.
The second point I’d make is that, yeah, I think liberals need to do a much better job not just claiming their tradition and defending what it is, but, crucially, living up to their tradition. There are two strands of thought on the future and fate of liberalism right now. There are the conservatives, and here I’m thinking of the postliberals. Patrick Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed, is just a picture-perfect example of this argument: that there’s something inherently, internally contradictory about liberalism. It’s not stable. It’s parasitic off all of these traditions, and eventually it’s going to suck them of all vitality and it will collapse of its own accord. So liberalism is doomed to fail because it succeeds. That’s the claim. It’s contradictory, as a Marxist would say.
I don’t think that’s true. My sense is that if liberalism is failing, it’s not because liberalism itself is fatally flawed, but because liberals, if I can put it plainly, suck at liberalism. We don’t live up to the values that we profess. And we live and honor a kind of sham, fair-weather liberalism—one that people will rightly defect from. And so my call is for people to become more authentic liberals and really double down on their value commitments, in order to be true to themselves on the one hand, but also in order for this world to present its best face, its most plausible and vital face.
Rauch: So are you saying that the postliberal or anti-liberal critique—that liberalism’s just too thin to sustain itself—is wrong in theory but has turned out to be right in practice? That liberals forgot the kinds of virtues they need to practice in order to sustain this idea?
Lefebvre: The question is a little bit off for me. What I think about these folks on the right is that they have what I might call a transcendent itch. They think that there is a God-sized hole in everyone’s heart. And if an ideology or a system of value doesn’t put God or transcendence at its heart, then it will not satisfy anyone in the dark hours of the night, and people will defect from it. It’s not a serious ideology for serious people.
I don’t think that’s true. I don’t think that people have that necessary transcendent longing—certainly some do. So my claim is not so much that it is a spiritually anemic doctrine. To the contrary, I think it is spiritually robust and fun and full and rewarding. I just think that we don’t live up to it in our day-to-day ways of life.
Rauch: So in practice, we’ve become too thin, too complacent in terms of how we conduct ourselves as liberals. I assume by “we” you mean not just Americans; you mean people in the West, the so-called WEIRD countries: Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic.
Lefebvre: Those are the ones.
Rauch: So there’s a deep critique here. We’ll just hover here for a minute on the critique. We’ll come in a bit to how to be not what you call a member of “liberaldom.” But let’s hover a bit more on what you think is right and wrong—mostly wrong—about the postliberal critique.
It seems to me that the best and most important part of that critique is the oldest part. It goes back to Tocqueville, who comes to America and says, in a liberal democracy, the democracy part is going to swamp the liberal part. Everything will be reduced to the lowest common denominator, and people will become hedonistic, and the country ultimately might not be able to survive. And then you get Nietzsche, who comes along with a much more radical critique toward the end of the 19th century, and he basically says that secular society, which he hates, is destroying Christianity, which he also hates, and that’s leaving a world with only mindless hedonistic consumerism, which he also hates. And that all sounds a lot like the postliberals: Liberalism destroys itself and leaves itself without the supports that it needs—of virtue, tradition, family, and nation—in order to survive.
You differentiate yourself from that tradition by saying, no, liberalism is a thick tradition; it’s just one we’re not living up to. Am I on target there? It’s a rich thesis, so I’m trying to make sure we get it right, we do it justice.
Lefebvre: You’re totally on target. You’re historically on target and you’re present-day on target.
Okay, so the historical bit is something I tell my students on day one of Intro to Political Theory, which is that democracy and liberalism, which we think go together naturally, like peaches and cream—just two things that just fit together—is in fact historically, politically, spiritually, the whole shebang, inaccurate. You had democracy break onto the scene in the late 18th century—French Revolution, American Revolution, but especially salient here is the French. And then you had a whole bunch of people, elites mainly, freaking out about the democratic revolution. They freaked out about popular power and its excesses—this is the Burke stuff—churches being nationalized, orders being dissolved, manners going out the window. But they also freaked out about it in terms of what you said, the Tocqueville bit, which is the general mediocrity: The common man would start to wield cultural power, and that would just be the worst. It would just be a reduction to the lowest common denominator, to the kind of things you’re talking about, materialism, hedonism, and that would be the human telos. It would be what Nietzsche called “the last man.” This is the pitch.
“They [the Founders] warned us: If all you have is the documents and the laws on paper, then you don’t have enough. But they did not believe that liberalism by itself was sufficient to provide that moral grounding. They said, you liberals need to go out and get those values from outside, at least some of them.” — Jonathan Rauch
And the last man is like—you know that movie WALL-E, the animated movie? It’s like the people on the spaceship, where they just basically sit content to drink their Slurpee paste all day, have a screen in front of them, and that’s a good day in the life. And Nietzsche thought that any real human being would revolt against that, himself first and foremost.
So here you have—just bringing in names here, because it’s on my bedside table right there—Fukuyama’s book, his memoir, but the idea that liberalism is really not great at satisfying a whole spectrum of human longings, what he calls thymos, what the Greeks call thumos: striving, recognition, pride, ambition, those sorts of things.
Rauch: As I read your book, there are some core values that liberalism contains that are not just operational, but they’re actual virtues, and they’re important virtues, and you can in fact organize not just a society around them, but a life.
Lefebvre: Yeah, correct. So my read of liberalism is deeply indebted to the philosopher John Rawls. I’m not going to get into the weeds here, but the way I read Rawls is that he basically had one lifelong ambition. As a young man, he was a man of faith, and he wanted to go into the church. And then, for reasons we can discuss, in the Second World War he lost it. He no longer was a believer. And I have a sense that his whole career was trying to recast in secular form the religious tradition that he had left—to try to recreate a secular liberalism, a secular Christianity, through an institution and a psychology that he called liberal democracy. That’s what I want to say: that there are deep spiritual ideas in there that piggyback, yes, of course, on older traditions, but that can be rewarding and gratifying in themselves.
But when you get someone like Nietzsche, who is a very consistent hater—like you said, he hated the last man, he hated Christianity—there’s no recovery going on there. But if you see liberalism as the child or the successor of a long tradition of Christianity that lost certain of its metaphysics and other aspects, then I think we are in pretty good shape to understand why it could still grip us and lead us, and why we would care about it deeply.
Rauch: We’re probably going to the same place, which is: What are those virtues?
Lefebvre: Yeah, okay, we’re going to go to the same place. But first let’s bring in the side character here: the conservatives. The conservatives, I think, see something really, really right. And this is where I begin my book, which is that they too see liberalism as the water we swim in, only they think the water is just a polluted nightmare. It is just the worst kinds of values. And the strongest conservatives don’t just criticize the fallen liberal order that we live in, where iPhones and porn and sports gambling are the telos of a lot of people’s lives. They’re saying, no, no, no, no. Even if we were to take this at its absolute best and its most robust commitments, even those values are disappointing. And so this is where I think [people] like Adrian Vermeule or even Rod Dreher are very formidable critics of liberalism, because they see its omnipresence, but they reject the values at its core.
So where I agree with conservatives is that it’s everywhere. Where I disagree is that the values are poor or insubstantial. What are the values? I tend to think of liberalism as clustering around three values. The freedom and generosity bit that I mentioned earlier are core. And then for me they’re synthesized in a word that English has and that few other languages do, which is fairness: an idea to give every person an opportunity and respect, and ensure that they have the conditions to make their life the best that they could see for themselves, within, of course, reasonable limits and all the rest.
Rauch: So let’s just make sure we understand what these things are. In the book, I think you say freedom, fairness, and reciprocity—not generosity. In an article you wrote more recently, it looks like you add a fourth, which is tolerance or toleration. Can you just say a word briefly about these three, four, or five traits? It’s not important to define them precisely or to decide how many they are. But what is it about these characteristics that provides a moral center for human life?
Lefebvre: Right. Good. Okay, these are deep, hard questions, so let me try to take them carefully. The core line that I pull as grounding my liberalism is from Rawls, and he says that liberalism, defined in its minimal but also its most robust version, is a fair system of cooperation from one generation to the next. And it’s this idea of a fair system of cooperation that I really latch onto, which is that you matter no more than me and I matter no more than you, but we are in this enterprise, in one sense, for mutual benefit. So there is definitely a rational advantage to be had from that. But also we acknowledge each other and respect each other as equal persons with equal liberties. So there’s a true seeing of the other person as an end in itself, and then also seeing us in a scheme so that we mutually benefit.
And liberalism has tried to dine out on that intersection since its very beginning: a rational advantage for us to be together, but also a moral commitment to recognize one another as ends in themselves …
Rauch: … as moral equals.
Lefebvre: As moral equals, yes. So it’s that intersection that liberalism is trying to thread a line through. And that’s as good a way as any, I think, of explaining why it is a system worth committing to and defending.
Rauch: Your value-added, it seems to me, or at least your most ambitious effort, is to say these are not just procedural values that we put in the Declaration and the Constitution in order to function better as a society. These shape us, these mold us morally as individuals; these are morally formative. The postliberals are right that liberalism seeps into our pores, it seeps into our bones and being; it morally forms us. And yeah, that’s a good thing. These are core values around which a life can be organized.
“The way I regard liberalism is that it has spread from a political thing to a broadly social and cultural thing. Political philosophers would use the word hegemony: something that has managed to bake itself into our ordinary social relations, our sense of ourselves.” — Alexandre Lefebvre
At one point, or several points, in the book, you in fact seem to say that for at least some people, the liberal values can be entirely sufficient in and of themselves. You don’t need, for example, transcendent accounts of the meaning of life that religions provide. Am I on the right track?
Lefebvre: You’re perfectly on track. I have the gods and the demigods of my book. One of the demigods of my book is Judith Shklar, who was a political philosopher at Harvard at the same time as Rawls. And she has this intuitively very clear idea of a big, big, big, big change that happens in modern Western thought, but also culture and manners. She talks about the worst things human beings can do. She talks about vices and sins and evils. And what she observes, kind of obviously, is that those change according to different moments of a culture.
She starts her account by saying: look, for a long, long time, the worst thing that we could do in Western cultures, particularly religious ones from the Judeo-Christian tradition, was the sin of pride. The sin of pride is a turning of one’s back against the highest, and from that sin all the other sins follow. So sex isn’t bad in and of itself, I don’t think, for Christians. Sex is bad because it shows us trying to be sufficient and attain our realization without a relationship to the highest axis that we had. So for a long, long time morality and culture worked on a vertical axis.
At some moment in time, she says that shifts. And what starts to happen is human beings really start to care not so much about the relationships that we have to the highest or to the above, but about the relationships that we have to one another, to our fellow creatures. And then the worst kinds of sin or wrong shift dramatically. So it’s no longer things like pride, but for her, it is things like cruelty, hypocrisy, betrayal. She calls them “ordinary vices,” but they’re not. First, they’re not ordinary, and second, they’re not minor. They’re the deepest wrongs human beings can do, but now they’re situated on a creaturely plane.
That’s something that I think liberalism runs wild with. It turns away from one certain dimension of morality to totally emphasize another.
Rauch: So the question becomes: Is that sort of horizontal, interpersonal anchor for values sufficient? And your book seems to imply that for a lot of people it is, that they just don’t need transcendence. They don’t need to see themselves in a great chain of being or in relation to something higher. I think a lot of people will balk at that. They’ll go with you as far as: Yes, liberalism is a way of life. It is a set of values, and we can all be very grateful for that. But they would say—and indeed I am in this camp—liberal values are necessary and important, but they’re not sufficient.
I come to my brand of liberalism not through Rawls, but through the Founders, the vision of Madison and the others. And one of the things that they emphasized continuously, as of course other liberals have, is the importance of civic virtues. They can give us a liberal social order, they can give us a constitution, a law, a set of procedures, but in order to function, liberalism has to be your value set, it has to be your moral being, not just the law. They said that again and again. They warned us: If all you have is the documents and the laws on paper, then you don’t have enough.
But they did not believe that liberalism by itself was sufficient to provide that moral grounding. They said, you liberals need to go out and get those values from outside, at least some of them. And the place you’re going to go for that is your family, your community, your civil society, but above all, your faith, by which they meant Protestant Christianity. So they were not saying America has to be a Christian or religious nation, but they were saying that our liberal system rests on a substrate of other sources of values that can answer questions like: Why are we on the planet? What is the meaning of life? Why is it important to be good? I think that’s probably a more conventional view than your view, which seems to suggest liberal values are self-sufficient. But what’s your thinking about that?
Lefebvre: So I agree with you. I’m there with you 80% of the way, and then the other 20%, let’s talk. First of all, I definitely agree: The Founders are all children of Montesquieu in some important way. Any legal, political, constitutional structure needs to be animated by a deep set of cultural value commitments that can’t just be squeezed from those institutions. So I’m with you on that. And like you said, they tended to place the heart of moral life and the viability of this republic, which I am sitting in at the moment, in enduring religious faith. So we’re good on that.
But now a lot of history has passed. Let me just give some very basic facts that we all know: In the past 40, 50 years, it’s the religious nones—N-O-N-E-S, not N-U-N-S—that are the strongest-growing category of religious affiliation, or in this case, nonaffiliation. And from this perspective, I’m not saying that they derive each and everything about themselves from liberalism. No one in this day and age derives everything about themselves from any particular thing. Even Christians—I’m just taking the dominant faith here—are composed of multiple different inputs, right? If you find yourself cheering for your sports team on the basis of your Christianity, it’s time to take a step back from your Christianity, right? That’s the province of fanatics, and no one wants to go there. We’re all [mishmashes] of stuff. Sure, of course, liberals aren’t out-of-the-factory bots, through and through one liberal thing.
“I think that the cause of this crisis is the failure of our faith traditions—particularly, in America, white evangelical Christianity—to align themselves with the values of Jesus and with the values of James Madison, which are quite close. So let’s not blame ourselves necessarily. Let’s demand that the values-making institutions of society that liberalism relies on do their job.” — Jonathan Rauch
But I’m trying to say that if you had to point to something that would be your moral compass, this is, by and large—that’s the bet I’m making in the book—the thing that you’d point to. And so you can seek your spiritual satisfactions elsewhere and in supplement. But unless you’re prepared to say, Jon, that secular people cannot be spiritually filled, then I think you can make a case that liberalism has robust enough moral values to carry us in 95% of the longings of the human heart.
Now, you point to the 5% where I think, totally, liberalism is vulnerable. It started as a political doctrine, and it has very little to say about the deepest, most urgent questions that we face at some moment. My kid gets cancer, my life falls apart. What’s the meaning of it all? Will I see her again? Those sorts of things. Liberalism has nothing to say about that. And so it can, that’s true, leave us casting …
Rauch: … And that’s a feature, not a bug.
Lefebvre: It’s a feature and a bug. Look, it can leave us casting about that 5% of the time. And maybe—I’m just riffing here—maybe a liberal ethos of the kind I’m talking about couldn’t take place in a truly precarious, violent, dangerous kind of culture, because those occasions when shit goes bad happen all the time there. In a war-torn zone, it’d be hard to be liberal all the way down consistently, as a texture of life. But for us who are lucky enough to inhabit these WEIRD countries that have had a really, really good run, an ideology that leaves you good and strong 95% of the time and leaves you shaky for 5%—that’s a deal I’m willing to take.
Otherwise I feel a bit like you’re some kind of survivalist: You’re always planning for the worst, and you want your morality for that rainy, thunderous day. And that’s not a bad thing. But liberalism puts the gambit on the other side, on a morality for everyday life, let’s call it.
Rauch: So let me sketch out for a minute a place where I think we diverge, but maybe where ultimately we come back together. My general view is that, for a lot of people, or at least for some people in some places, it’s possible to be liberal all the way down. Unfortunately, that’s probably not a majority, or even close to a majority, of humanity. If anything is universal, anthropologists tell us it’s some sort of spirituality or religion.
A second thing we know, to get right to current-day empirics, is that we’ve seen a collapse of Christianity in the past 20 to 25 years in the United States, and we’ve seen its further weakening in other countries. And in parallel with that, we’ve seen, first, a radical rise in the United States of loneliness, anomie, social isolation, unhappiness, depression, anxiety. Now, some of that’s, you know, cell phones; it’s not all religion. But a lot of sociologists say that when you lose group worship, you lose a lot of connectedness, community, and so forth. And that’s what Tocqueville and Madison and the others taught.
But a second thing that happens is you get an international wave of radical authoritarian populism. People are unhappy. Often they don’t even know why they’re unhappy, but they’re lashing out against liberal democracy. And that’s everywhere. And I would argue that’s now become a crisis. Look at Germany, look at France, and so forth. So something is going wrong with the experiment, perhaps, of relying too much on liberalism in and of itself.
It seems to me one of the downsides of the move that you make is that you wind up blaming liberals for the insufficiency of liberalism. If it’s not working, it must be our fault. This gets to liberaldom, which we’ll come to in a moment. If I’m correct, however, that it’s really not the job of liberalism to provide transcendent values, and that there are other institutions in society that need to do that work that are not stepping up, then I think that the cause of this crisis is the failure of our faith traditions—particularly, in America, white evangelical Christianity—to align themselves with the values of Jesus and with the values of James Madison, which are quite close. So I’m saying let’s not blame ourselves necessarily. Let’s demand that the values-making institutions of society that liberalism relies on do their job.
Now, this is not an ultimate disagreement between us, but I think it is a difference in emphasis. Any thoughts about all of that?
Lefebvre: So I guess I would ask a quick follow-up question here. You started the question by pointing to a worldwide crisis of liberalism—you pointed to Germany, you pointed to France—but then your answer zoomed in on the United States and a certain impoverishment of Christianity going on here. For your answer to carry, to link back to the first part of the question, do you think that the impoverishment of Christianity is a worldwide phenomenon, and that that’s what’s landing us here?
Rauch: Yes. I don’t think it’s the only thing that’s landing us here, not even close. There are so many things going on at once. You know, you’ve got social media and cell phones and the urban-rural divide and the diploma divide and so on. So I am not making a monocausal case. I’m just saying that when the predominant religion in the West, Christianity, gets out of alignment with the predominant social organization of the West, which is liberal democracy—when they’re pulling against each other instead of together—everything else gets harder. And that means we liberals have to go to those who are out of alignment and say, wait a minute, maybe the teachings of Jesus could help cure what’s damaging your witness in the faith and also what’s damaging democracy. But no, I’m not monocausal.
Lefebvre: Okay, so listen, I’m broadly sympathetic to this question. If the problem is something like Bowling Alone—how do we get to bowl together again?—and you’re pointing to a multifactorial explanation where there are all sorts of drivers of what has splintered this shared culture of ours, some of them lie in a certain hardening of Christianity, others in meritocracy gone nuts and dream hoarding and the collapse of opportunity, still others lie in certain impoverishments of liberalism … I agree with all that.
“Patrick Deneen’s book, Why Liberalism Failed, is just a picture-perfect example of this argument that there’s something inherently, internally contradictory about liberalism. … So liberalism is doomed to fail because it succeeds. That’s the claim. … I don’t think that’s true. My sense is that if liberalism is failing, it’s not because liberalism itself is fatally flawed, but because liberals, if I can put it plainly, suck at liberalism. We don’t live up to the values that we profess.” — Alexandre Lefebvre
But I just want to keep the scope of my book in focus. My book is a book written by a liberal for other liberals. I’m not trying to get Christians to become more liberal. I’m not trying to get Muslims to become liberal. I’m trying to get liberals to become liberal. And so my target audience is actually, in one sense, pretty narrow. It’s the kind of people who—when I ask my class (I don’t know if I can still get away with this) who’s religious and who’s not, and ask them to put up their hands—at the University of Sydney, where I teach, 80% of hands go up now [as not religious]. So it’s not a minor constituency that I’m talking about. That’s who I’m focused on.
But if we’re trying to address the general systemic problem of why support is hemorrhaging from liberal democracy, I don’t want to do cell phones all the way through—that’s insufficient, and it would be weirdly persecutorial and vindictive—but it’s a core element of the story. That’s what I want to say.
Rauch: This is what I thought and hoped you would say. This is why I said I think we might diverge but then come back together, which is: If you want to say liberals need to be better liberals, more aware of who we are and more out and proud about it, and I want to say Christians need to be better Christians and, in doing that, also better liberal democrats, I think we can both support each other’s propositions. I do think that they both go together.
I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet—or maybe some would say a stick up my butt—emotionally about all this, because I have become so tired of liberal tomes and tracts saying, “Blame liberalism first.” Wherever you see a problem in the world, it’s the fault of liberalism. And some of these tomes will look at the whole world and make the same move that postliberals do, which is, if they see something they don’t like anywhere in the world, they attribute it to liberalism. You know, modernity? That’s liberalism. People are shopping too much? Cell phones? That’s liberalism.
Well, at some point I begin to think that the most important thing, in some sense, that your book gets right is it says, yeah, look, we liberals can and should be better. In many ways, we’ve dropped the ball. But let’s not forget that liberal ideas have been the most freeing and the most productive and the most good set of ideas ever to evolve. So let’s not forget that there’s a baby in the bathwater.
Lefebvre: Yeah, listen, let me express my gratitude here. You wrote one of the first comments on my book that gave it a nice little push, and you said something like—I’m paraphrasing—“Alex Lefebvre admits that liberalism has deep values, and he says, ‘Hell yeah, there are some values,’” and that’s exactly my pitch. So yeah, I’m a very affirmative dude. I’m with you 100%. I think that the liberal tradition is as gratifying and as deep as any of its rivals, and my goal is just to get people to see that there’s juice left in this thing of ours.
Rauch: I’m all for enlightened self-criticism to make the world a better place and solve the many problems that modern liberal democracies face, but I’ve pretty much had it with the liberal apology tour.
Lefebvre: Yep, yep, yep. What’s your favorite book in the genre that comes out swinging?
Rauch: Well, I like a ton. My favorite of the whole bunch is Bill Galston’s book about demagoguery. Instead of turning the camera on ourselves and saying, “What do we do wrong?” it argues that humans are fundamentally susceptible to the wiles of demagogues. Anger, Fear, Domination is the title. We tend to forget that, as smart as we are, as sophisticated as we are, we can be manipulated by the dark arts of malicious political rhetoric. He focuses on that. And that’s very important because so often, I think, liberals are naive about both the intentions and the sophistication of our opponents. And we tend to blame ourselves where, in fact, they’re doing some very powerful dark manipulations. I would point to Vladimir Putin as one example, and I’d point to Donald Trump as another. So that’s a book I think the world of.
Another’s a book by a guy named Robert Tracy McKenzie. It’s called We the Fallen People. And it’s hugely undervalued, but it makes the point that the Founders did not take a utopian view of human nature, that they were deeply influenced by the narrative of the Fall, and that meant that they understood that liberalism would only work if we cultivated virtues. We’re about to come to liberaldom, in fact. But around the time of Andrew Jackson and then subsequently, we flipped the script, and Americans persuaded ourselves that the people are inherently good, so if we follow them, we won’t make mistakes. And this was a tragic forgetting of one of the most important things the Founders told us. And that’s also a very important thing to remember.
But that brings us rather conveniently to the question of how to be better liberals without, you know, investing in an orgy of self-blame. You have this interesting idea that I’ve never encountered anywhere else of spiritual exercises based loosely on the thinking of Rawls—that there are things that we can do positively as liberals to better align our lives with our values. Can you talk a bit about what you mean by that and what you mean by liberaldom?
Lefebvre: Sure. Okay, let me start with the spiritual exercises business. In the pantheon of gods of this book, right up there with Rawls, is one other guy. And it is that most unique of French philosophers who is utterly lucid, plain, and clear in his writing, a guy named Pierre Hadot. He popularized the phrase “philosophy as a way of life.”
His big shtick—he’s a classicist—is this: When he tried to make sense of the ancient world and of ancient philosophy, what he tried to claim is that today we think of philosophy as this abstract doctrine trying to make sense of the universe. And he said, okay, back then it was totally different. Philosophy was really about trying to live wisely. And in particular, philosophy provided all of these concrete techniques to try to get people to live up to their wisdom, as it were, to become wise individuals. And this is super basic, practical stuff. If you’ve ever read Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations, it’s like: Keep a diary; meditate on the day to come so you don’t lose your mind and lose your temper when bad things happen.
“We liberals can and should be better. In many ways, we’ve dropped the ball. But let’s not forget that liberal ideas have been the most freeing and the most productive and the most good set of ideas ever to evolve. So let’s not forget that there’s a baby in the bathwater.” — Jonathan Rauch
So what Hadot did is he reconstructed ancient philosophy, and also religion, as consisting by and large of these very practical techniques. And religion—Christianity, of course—has a whole panoply: prayer, confession, pilgrimages, and the like. This is day-to-day stuff that ordinary believers do to approximate the life of Christ and become pure in their hearts, filled with grace, and the rest. You need to do the work, to use a modern expression.
So when I come along and say, look, liberalism is a way of life, and it is just as spiritually deep as any of these rivals, I then want to propose corresponding exercises that liberals might do to get them to recommit to their professed values. So that’s the big framing of that.
Now, when it comes to the book, I’m of two minds here. I base my spiritual exercises, as you said, in Rawls, the philosopher that leads me. I find that that was, if I can speak plainly, a smart reading of Rawls. It was a clever thing to do, to read this guy in this new way. But I wish I’d taken a little bit more distance from Rawls in those sections of the book and proposed spiritual exercises that might not be quite so Rawls-coded, or internal to his thought, because I think they can be developed. I just haven’t done that work yet. But I try to extract ideas from Rawls by which he urges us to become more impartial, more consistent, listen better to other people, be more other-minded—in part to be better liberals in general, but also in part to live a better liberal life and extract the benefits and flourishings of the kind of life that we at least pretend to commit to.
Rauch: Yeah, it’s an interesting part of the book. I found it stimulating, very fresh, very original, also idiosyncratic. It was interesting that you go to a modern French philosopher. You could have gone to Aristotle for most of this, if not all of it. Aristotle says that we get our virtues from our habits, and we have to develop our habits; we have to work at it. Our virtues are not just floating out there for us to grasp. And Aristotle’s right about that. So in that sense, prescribing a kind of moral regimen for ourselves to make ourselves more aware of our obligations and our values—that’s all to the good.
On the other hand, at the same time, I guess circling back to what I said earlier, for me, the institutions that are really best at performing spiritual exercises are spiritual institutions, and that’s why it seems to me so important to bring our spiritual institutions into closer alignment with our democratic values, because they do align. The teachings of Jesus …
Lefebvre: … But Jon, what would you have liberals do? Faith and belief aren’t liquid. Even if I wished to, I couldn’t wake up tomorrow morning with the belief structure of a committed Christian. It’s not like that. There’s no switch. So for liberals who find themselves outside of a religious tradition and unable, at least in the short term, to commit to one, what sort of spiritual exercises do you think are available to us?
Rauch: Well, going back to what you said originally, Alex, I’m not sure all of us need spiritual exercises. I’m one of those people you just described. Although I’m a Jew, I’m an atheistic Jew, and I only go to synagogue once or twice a year. And I don’t really feel a need to sit down and do spiritual exercises. My life feels pretty complete. If I did, I think your book would be a starting point, though I share your intuition that maybe in the next round, when you come back to it, finding a less philosophically grounded and more practical … talking about, in fact, what civic education looks like. That’s been a huge problem, I think—the collapse of civic education, at least in the United States.
At the same time, I’m not telling anyone to become religious who doesn’t believe in God. That’s the last thing I would do. But what I am saying is pointing to my Christian friends, the large Christian majority in this country, and saying, look, liberalism gives you extraordinary freedom of religion, but it also imposes certain burdens. And one of those burdens is to seek out and elevate those aspects of your teachings which can help strengthen our society, the society in which you’re embedded. So it’s not that I don’t want to call on liberals to do a better job, but I also want to call on the nonliberal parts of our society to do a better job. I want it both ways, is I guess what I’m saying.
Lefebvre: I want it both ways too, so we’re in heated agreement.
Rauch: So as we wrap up, I’d like to just have you say a word or two about your next project, which looks awfully interesting.
Lefebvre: Thanks! I would love to talk to you in particular about it, Jon. It’s going to be called The Good Life State. And the hunch is that, all around the world, I think the oldest ambition of politics and political philosophy is back on the menu, which is that the state is getting back into the business of promoting, honoring certain ways of life that it finds best for its people.
Now, this is the oldest thing politics has ever done. You name-dropped Aristotle a moment ago; let me do it again. Aristotle, in Book One of the Politics, says we have states, we have the polis. And he asks the most Aristotle question of all: Why? Why do we have these things? And then he goes through all the answers that liberal democrats would give. He’s like, we have them to protect rights, to grow wealth, to preserve our security. He’s like, yep, yep, yep, all super important. But then he comes to the real issue. He’s like, that’s not enough. What we have states for is not to promote mere “life,” but to promote the good life. And he has a certain vision of what that looks like, of course. And then that continues throughout Western history. Any theocracy is like this. Confucianism had always joined moral pedagogy with statecraft. So this idea that the state’s in the business of the good life is as old as the hills.
Now, liberals—sometimes imperfectly, sometimes better, sometimes worse—tried to pump the brakes on that idea and said, look, it’s not the state’s business to try to lead people to the highest good, to salvation, to what have you. The best we should do is provide a system of mutual flourishing, a fair system of cooperation, if you like, for individuals to figure that out for themselves on their own terms. So liberals tend to think that state neutrality with respect to the good life is a normal or default human condition, and it is absolutely not that.
And what I believe is happening is that all around the world you have states taking that mantle up again. So for my own book, I’m doing what I call empirical political theory. I’m going to hang out in regimes where I think this is happening in the most interesting, most aggressive kind of way, and I want to write that up from the perspective of the insiders building these moral worlds.
So I spent two months with Orbán on the sinking ship that was the Fidesz party in January and February of this year, and had just terrific access. I was in a regime-allied think tank. Next month I’m going to China for a couple months, and then the rest of my case studies are India, Israel, and the United States. And if they didn’t take hostages and my university had the risk appetite, I’d love to do Russia and Iran as well. But alas …
Rauch: … I would not advise that.
Lefebvre: Yeah, that’s how I know you’re a true friend, Jon.
Rauch: So this is not a work of political theory. This is a work …
Lefebvre: … It’s a work of political anthropology, let’s call it. I don’t know what it’s a work of. But it’s an attempt to try to give an economical, elegant explanation of what’s going on in the world, in the nonliberal world, without resorting to the default liberal explanations, which are that these guys are just a bunch of megalomaniacs or kleptocrats or crooks, and their populations are just benighted or confused or resentful. I want to say that’s part of the story, and important liberal commentators make that the core of the story—Anne Applebaum, Timothy Snyder. But I think that doesn’t have the explanatory legs to account for why these regimes feel vital, why they’re attracting so much support. I mean, very few people vote for the corruption of Donald Trump. His circle is squeezing a lot of value out, but that’s not why the standard voter in Nevada or wherever the hell is voting for Trump. So I’m trying to figure out what it is that attracts them to this, and I believe in part the answer lies in a moral project of trying to recover values that liberalism often is reticent to promote or in fact ridicules. That’s the project—and to try to see how liberalism can respond to this change.
Rauch: It’s an important project, and I think part of why it’s important is it’s the right starting point. There’s more than one right starting point, but I think we’ve done too much of “What did liberalism get wrong? How did we cause these problems?” Those are important questions. But I think people are waking up to the idea that, no, that’s not what principally needs to be explained. It’s more: Why is authoritarianism succeeding? Something is appealing to people around the world. Of course, China is communist authoritarian, but in most places where we’re seeing democratic backsliding, it’s in the direction of the populist far right. And that needs explaining, because you would think if the problem was incomes or the working class being unhappy, they’d be going left, to socialism. So something needs to be explained—something that people around the world are looking for, and not getting, is appealing to them. Galston’s answer is part of that, which is that a lot of these people have mastered the arts of demagoguery. But the question you’re asking is the right one: not what’s wrong with us, but what is it that the other side is, at least in political terms, doing right?
“If liberalism is under attack worldwide right now, I think it’s important to be very clear that it’s not just a political thing that’s under attack. It’s a whole civilizational, social, cultural order that is also being challenged at one and the same time, and the primacy of values like freedom, fairness, tolerance, not just in the political sphere, but comprehensively as well. So it’s key to understand our world and what’s at stake if that world as we know it starts to be displaced.” — Alexandre Lefebvre
I have to ask you: One of the places you mentioned is not like the others, and that’s the United States of America. What aspect of America is it that you plan to study?
Lefebvre: When I went to Hungary, its power elite was contained within 12 blocks of Budapest. And they had message discipline. America is, by contrast, an absolute hot mess, as you know. That’s the draw …
Rauch: … Yes, we like that about it.
Lefebvre: But it depends on which faction. Okay, so let me give a more serious answer. This is maybe the most fraught question, because when the left looks at the right and the right looks at the left, they’re both pointing at each other saying, “You’re doing this bad thing,” but they think that they’re not doing it themselves. So the right thinks that the left has been doing the good life state now for 30 years, but especially for 10 years. Ever since Woke 1.0, that has been a very aggressive promotion of a certain conception of justice, not just as a political mandate, but as a full ethos of what it means to be a responsible, flourishing human being. And so that came with its own policies and its own set of attitudes. And then when the left looks at the right, it’s like, “You’re trying to impose a Christian republic on us,” or “You’re trying to”—whatever thing they want to point to, because there are many different things here. So each side thinks the other side is doing that. I had dinner with conservatives the other night, and that was the main message: “We’re not a good life state; the left is.” And then whenever I meet with the lefties, the message is, “No, the right’s the good life state.” So I think there’s something very hot, messy, toxic—toxic’s the wrong word, it’s too coded—but something very interesting going on in opposite perceptions of the same phenomenon. Does that make sense?
Rauch: Yeah, it does. So you’re going to look at the cultural divide over who’s causing the cultural divide in that sense. Who is really the culture warrior?
Lefebvre: A little bit the culture warrior, that’s right. Both claim that their side really wants to go back to normalcy and to individual freedom, but they see in the other side a desire to impose aggressively, sacramentally, a way of life on others. On the right, some of them are made to measure. You get the integralists, for example, like the Adrian Vermeules, who just feel like they were out of central casting for this project. They want to retemporalize the Catholic Church, and they really want to pivot away from liberal values. But then you get, I don’t know, the speech by Rubio just the other day about how America needs to reclaim thumos and ambition—and whatever you may think of that, there is again a spiritual core to that. Vance always speaks in the language of the soul and the common good. So that’s what I want to study.
But when you say one is not like the others, what did you mean?
Rauch: I just meant that one of those countries is still very much a liberal democracy. It is not riven by, for example, a Hindu nationalism that’s captured the whole government. It is much bigger and more liberal than Orbán’s Hungary. Obviously it’s not communist China. For all its flaws and for all the damage that Trump and MAGA have managed to do, we still are fundamentally a liberal democracy in structure. So I just meant: What aspect of it fits into the larger picture? And I think you’ve named it, which is that here we have a battle in which each side feels that the other is imposing its values in a profoundly illiberal way.
There is another way to read the whole picture, which you’ll hear about, for example, at the ISMA-UnPopulist convention, which is horseshoe theory. Which is: No, actually, you’ve got illiberalisms on the right and the left, and they both are indeed trying to impose their way of life on everybody. One side’s doing it more through culture; the other side is trying to use government power at the moment. But they have that in common, and in fact there is a liberal center, center-left and center-right, which is holding on for dear life to the older ideas of liberal neutralism—not perfect neutralism, of course—but trying to function under a rule-of-law state and trying to allow cultural issues to work themselves out in smaller communities. So that’s another way to tell the story. It’ll be fascinating to hear what you come up with.
Lefebvre: Thank you. I’ll send you notes from the field.
Rauch: Alexandre Lefebvre, so good of you to join us. The book is Liberalism as a Way of Life. It is marvelously readable, it’s sparkling, it’s funny. Alex does not write like a philosopher, and that’s a good thing. Thank you again for joining us.
Lefebvre: That’s high praise. Thanks, Jon.
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