Liberalism’s epistemic crisis enabled Donald Trump’s victories

Episode Summary

 Donald Trump is now once again the president of the United States, but his victory in 2024 was more than just a victory for himself or the Republican Party, it actually is part of a larger advancement that is happening across many different countries around the globe for right-wing reactionary parties who are sometimes incorrectly referred to as populist.

(These parties are not populist, in fact, because their policies that they pursue have no material benefit to the people who vote for them. But instead they use vulgarian rhetoric to pretend to be populist.)

Despite the fact that these far-right parties have policies that are hurtful to their own voters and to their countries that have elected them, they have been able to win because the center-left and the further-left are caught up in a philosophical crisis of liberalism itself. And that's because liberalism as a philosophy has never actually been able to fight successfully against reactionary philosophy in the political realm in the English-speaking world. Instead, the last time that it won was 200 years ago when it defeated monarchism, which was an explicitly king-based approach.

But reactionaries like Donald Trump and his henchmen are not explicitly pro-monarch—at least to the public. They certainly are that way in private, as many of their political theorists like Curtis Yarvin and JD Vance have freely admitted. That is why understanding how to defeat a form of monarchism that argues through democratic means is proving to be an incredible challenge for liberalism and socialism.

On today's episode, I talk about some of these challenges and the historical origins of them with Matthew McManus. He’s a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan, a previous guest on the show, and he’s got a new book out now called The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism.

The video of our January 21, 2025 discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full page.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

11:30 — How liberalism and the left grew apart during the Cold War

17:52 — Nietzsche and liberalism's meaning crisis

23:21 — Socialist traditions' better understanding of marginalization

30:49 — Charles Mills and critical race theory extend rather than reject Western philosophy

32:33 — Thomas Paine vs. Edmund Burke

36:54 — How socialists failed to build institutions

41:37 — Radical leftists haven't realized the necessity of persuasion

47:56 — Democrats also refuse to explain or persuade

53:12 — Liberalism has never developed the ability to politically defeat reactionism

Audio Transcript

The following is a machine-generated transcript of the audio that has not been proofed. It is provided for convenience purposes only.

MATTHEW SHEFFIELD: I think before we get too far afield into that into the actual contents of the book, let's talk about what do you mean by liberal socialism as distinct from liberalism and as distinct from socialism.

MATT McMANUS: Sure. Well, there are a couple of different things to say about that just being very simply.

I follow people like Alan Ryan or Michael Friedan or Peter Lam on the socialist end of things who point out that it's very easy to take narrow understandings of what liberalism and socialism entail.

And to say that they just are one thing or, you know, whatever flavor of liberalism or socialism I happen to be committed to that's the real flavor. And what all the authors I mentioned stress is that these are big ideologies that have a lot of different permutations, members attitudes that you can see within them.

And that's reflective of the fact that they've been around for hundreds of years now. So there are a lot of different people who have identified as liberals and socialists [00:04:00] at event calls. quite different things about that. Now that doesn't mean that just anybody can be a liberal or anybody can be a socialist because they say the odd liberal or they say the odd socialist thing.

You know, think about the people's public of North Korea, right? Nobody would exactly call North Korea either a people's republic or any kind of. Republic, really or, you know, National Socialism, right?

For example, you know, Fascism is quite a different ideology to certainly Democratic Socialism or even Authoritarian Marxism but these groups have, these different philosophies and ideologies have family resemblances to one another and in the book I point out that, broadly speaking we can say that All different liberals regardless of their specific convictions tend to be beholden to principles like liberty for all, equality for all, certainly formal legal equality for all and certainly in the European tradition solidarity for all would also be another important liberal principle.

Now what I point out in the book is that liberals have understood this commitment to liberty and equality and potentially solidarity and fraternity for all in very different ways. Just to give one example Ludwig von Mise, the great Austrian economist fierce defender of capitalism said, look, all that equality should mean is equality under the law.

All right. We don't take this kind of old aristocratic approach suggesting that some people should be entitled to more rights, more opportunities More, you know economic advantages than others because that's not exactly conducive to the kind of market society that we want to see instantiated but beyond that, you know von Mises and many more right wing liberals would follow him in this would say once you kind of allow market functions to play themselves out.

Obviously you're going to see extraordinary forms of inequality emerge. And that's a okay as long as, you know, we've established this initial respect for each individual by ensuring that they have equality under the law, but, you know, Von Mises perspective is by no means the only one that you see in the liberal tradition and I would say in many ways it's not even particularly representative as a lot of historians of liberalism will tell you. Going all the way back to John Locke, but certainly when you look at people like Mary Wollstonecraft or Thomas Paine let alone John Stuart Mill, who I write a lot about in the book [00:06:00] they'd all insist that being a liberal means that you have to be committed to a much deeper kind of equality than just pure formal equality under the law.

So And we can get into a lot of the reasons for this but these kinds of liberals, obviously historically and down to the present day have been a lot more friendly to the suggestions or arguments of figures in the socialist tradition who also have stressed that formal equality under the law is restraining for an awful lot of people, not least And then just to move on the other end we can say very similar things about socialism.

Socialism is a mature enlightenment doctrine very much like liberalism in that respect. Socialists saw themselves as trying to carry on in many ways the enterprise of liberalism by ensuring that Equality and freedom weren't just formally achieved but were achieved in material practice for all.

And socialists understood what that was going to mean in very, very different ways also, right? Obviously some extremely brutal socialists like, say, Stalin understood this to mean, well, we're gonna have a command economy where everyone's behavior is gonna be very tightly restricted because that's gonna be the only way for us to secure a sufficiently high level of economic growth in one country to save socialism from the imperialism and imperialism.

Of the Western powers. And we all know how that story ended up, right? Ah, there's absolutely nothing liberal you can really cause to say about the Soviet union or other authoritarian command economies. Ah, but there are other kinds of socialists Democratic socialists Social Democrats, etc.

etc. Who are much more insistent that, no, to be a socialist means to be committed to the basic canon of liberal rights, indeed, many socialists would insist that, them. One of the good things about socialism is that they could take liberal rights more seriously than many liberals did, particularly things like the right to freedom of assembly which many socialists emphasize should mean that if you want to form a union, for example you should be able to do so without the state stepping in to crush that and These figures are obviously, of course, much more friendly to liberalism and the institutions of representative democracy than the kind of command economy socialists that [00:08:00] more people are probably more familiar with at least in in the United States.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, and as you discuss in the introduction that in the, in the current moment there, there's really neither side of this, you know, dialogue that's now been going on for more than almost 200 years between liberalism and socialism. Neither side really fully understands how to deal with a politicized, non explicitly, know political system. Street violence filled right, you know, so, so reactionism, as we have it today is a different, it's, it's a different flavor compared to how it was from and Hitler. and it's more democratic flavored, or at least, you know, is less overtly you know, violent so far. and it's presented a real challenge because neither side. Seems to understand how to generate meaning in the population or even to be aware that they need to do so. And let's talk about that or how you see that first and then get further.

McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. So There's a lot of things to be said about that.

I think I'll start from a conceptual level and then move to a bit more of a concrete one.

So my argument in the book and in my previous book, which you were actually also gracious enough to interview me on the political right and inequality is that the political right is quite different as a tradition from either the liberal or the socialist tradition.

And anyone who explores its canonical authors will see this come through very, very, very clearly, I think. Starting with people like Joseph de Maistre moving down through Hayek Heidegger, you know, down to Curtis Yarvin you know, and you name it. And I tend to agree, actually with F. A. Hayek's definition. This is his definition of conservatism, but I think it applies to the broader right which is that to be right wing is to hold that there are recognizably superior people or for that matter, recognizably superior groups in [00:10:00] society and they're entitled to more, right?

More agency, more power, more wealth more affluence more opportunities for political participation you name it. And this has given way to a vast array of right wing ideologies all of whom understand recognizable superiority in extremely different ways, right? Some people like Randians think that while recognizable superiority is demonstrated when you prove yourself in this almost quasi Nietzschean way in the testing ground of the market and you demonstrate that you're a John Galt type figure rather than a second hander who, for the most part just benefits from what better men than you have been able to produce.

Other people As we see now tend to understand recognizable superiority along much more ethno-chauvinist or even religious lines, right? You know, our religion is superior to others and consequently it should be given more weight in political and social structures than Judaism, than Islam, etc, etc.

Our, our country is being Superior to all others so there's nothing wrong with us threatening Panama or Greenland of all places with annexation if it's going to expand our imperial horizons and strengthen our country's hand in the world. And I think that once you understand the right in terms of this commitment to recognizable superiority you can grasp the distance between a lot of versions of right wing thought and the traditions of liberalism and socialism which both in their own respective way emerged out of this enlightenment commitment to the idea that all people are equal and should be treated as free as consequence of this initial moral commitment.

How liberalism and the left grew apart during the Cold War

McMANUS: Now, in terms of the struggles that liberals and leftists, I mean the left generally now, not just socialists have been facing today, I think there are an awful lot of different reasons for that. But I'm just going to give one that I think is germane to the thesis of the book. So, I was really inspired by Samuel Moyne Yale professor who some people might be familiar with He's written some very interesting books on human rights, international humanitarian law, but he wrote a very good book recently Liberalism Against Itself talking about Cold War liberalism as he frames it.

[00:12:00] And what he stresses is that, well, liberalism in its birth was fundamentally a very progressive revolutionary creed and he says there's really no other way to understand it, right? In the European continent liberalism was widely associated with the French Revolution which as the name suggests was a gigantic revolution that upended the Ancien Regimes and tried to establish a relatively egalitarian republic and also inspired sister revolutions in places like Haiti.

Important to always foreground the Haitian revolution, which undid slavery on the island, not often appreciated by many or even look at the American revolutionaries, right? There's sometimes been this effort to kind of paint the American revolutionaries as kind of Burkean conservatives in some way.

Russell Kirk, for example, tried to do that. But I think that Sheldon Wolin is correct in saying without a doubt, they had many conservative inclinations. But we also need to recognize that they legitimated their revolution on enlightenment principles. They knew that only about a third of the American population at the time supported what they were doing.

Another third were loyalists or Tories as they called them or were indifferent And they still thought that what they were doing was right. And not only did they initiate that revolution Wolin points out that they actually initiated a second revolution in America when they dropped the country's first constitution and decided to replace it with an entirely new constitution through deliberative and representative processes.

So, these kinds of revolutionary creeds according to Moyn really were quite hopeful and optimistic in their orientation, which is why they're mature Enlightenment doctrines. They felt that it was possible. exercising human reason to build societies that would more integrally instantiate this commitment to freedom of all for all and equality for all.

Now, of course,

SHEFFIELD: oh, and I'm sorry, just to interrupt a sec but somebody that you do talk about in the book extensively, who does fit into that argument, that it wasn't just a, it wasn't a conservative project, it was obviously Thomas Paine, the guy who, who popularized the idea of revolution against the crown you know, was very, very influential, even [00:14:00] though operationally, he, he wasn't as involved with the government, creating it but, you know, his project and the people who supported him, they, it was extremely democratic.

McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely, and I always encourage people, like, look, go read Common Sense, right it's a short read, it's only, you know, 50 or so pages.

It was so popular that they used to read it to American revolutionaries just to inspire them before battle, and, you know, he makes very clear that he thinks the equality of all human beings is just prima facie obvious aristocracy is a ridiculous system of government and only a fool in the 18th century would be naïve enough to buy into any of this kind of mystical reasoning about the divine right of kings, et cetera, et cetera.

And as you point out in the book, I point out that Paine even went further than this later on arguing for something like a proto welfare state, which we can get into later if you want. But just to kind of return to why liberals and socialists are struggling I'll try to be a bit more brief, you know, I'm a professor, I, I like to kind of give all the facts about things to access, probably.

Anyway, you know, Moyn points out, look, these were all liberalisms of hope, right? They said that, look, human beings are clearly flawed and have many, many, many flaws, problems, right? I don't think anybody would argue against that. But by and large the concentrated exercise of human reason can improve society.

And what he argues is that starting in the 1950s but really coming to the fore in the 1970s you saw, you know, Many liberals, Cold War liberals, start to, in fact, internalize a lot more conservative arguments from people like, for instance, Edmund Burke and say, no, actually, we need to really constrain the aspirations of liberalism because too much hope and too much ambition is potentially going to lead to the same kind of disasters that we're seeing in the Soviet Union right now, and they really want to kind of rein in both the democratic and the egalitarian thrusts of a lot of liberal policy and were quite successful in doing so, right?

Moyne associates, for example, this kind of Cold War liberal ideology with the eventual support on the part of both parties for at least a long time with neoliberalism, neoconservatism, et cetera. And I think that this was fundamentally a massive mistake and I'll explain why. [00:16:00] By and large, the number one critique that the right has always made of liberals and liberalism has been that it is a kind of boring, pedantic politics that is fit only for shopkeepers.

It's relativistic and nihilistic and it doesn't kind of aim our politics at anything that's higher than the material gratification of people's basic needs. This is the objection that you see, you know, Edmund Burke make, where he says, you know, French revolutionaries don't seem to understand that a society is a lot more.

Than just a compact in the sale of Pepper, right? It's, you know, this kind of gothic grand alignment between the living, the dead, and those yet to be be born, right? Or, again Nietzsche, right? Who used to call John Stuart Mill a blockhead because, you know, he's committed to this idea that we should maximize utility for all.

And Nietzsche thinks, you know, how foolish and boring and oriented around producing last men. Now I think there are ways for liberals to respond to every single one of those objections. I wouldn't be a liberal or a liberal socialist if I didn't think they could. But by limiting the aspirations of liberalism the way that the Cold War liberals insisted upon, right?

We really, really double down into the kinds of attitudes and behaviors that make us a lot more vulnerable. to these accusations, right? They're suggesting that, you know, we're nihilists, materialists, don't think that there's really much improvement to society that can take place. And consequently, liberalism lost a lot of its reason for being by ceasing to be a liberalism of hope and becoming a liberalism of constraint.

narrowness I think there are good reasons to be moderate, but excessively anxious, let's say about the potential to improve the world. And until liberals can inspire hope in people once again in a better kind of society than they have right now to use Moyn's term, we shouldn't expect to see our creed last into the 21st century and besides, you know, survival is not good enough, as he puts it I think very eloquently at the close of the book.

Nietzsche and liberalism's meaning crisis

SHEFFIELD: Well, and one person who you mentioned in this context is Friedrich Nietzsche, who did talk about some of this, and his [00:18:00] analysis in terms of where the ideas for civil rights and liberalism come from, he believed that they came from Christianity, and that was obviously false. I mean, obviously, clearly, the ancient Greek sophists and, you know, Socrates and even Plato, with his idea that morality was independent of divine command theory, clearly contradict what Nietzsche was saying, but nonetheless, obviously, there were some public trappings of Christianity in regards to liberalism, and so he was right in that sense.

So he's wrong about the origins of liberalism, but he is correct in a certain sense that for a lot of people, they do want to have a higher sense of purpose to be a part of something larger than themselves and to derive internal inspiration from external meaning.

And that to me is what the epistemic crisis that liberalism is having as well. Did you want to get into that?

McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. So Nietzsche is a fascinating thinker. I think this is as good a place as any to say that there are a few different motivations behind writing this book and a lot of them were agonistic, right? A great deal of the motivation behind the book was what I was just gesturing to, right, this deep concern on my part that liberalism has lost its ability to inspire a sense of hope on the part of the broader population. Which is one of the reasons why we're seeing liberal regimes really struggle with trying to contain or frankly at this point, even hold back the kind of ascendancy of right wing populism in the United States and elsewhere.

But another big motivation for writing this was I spent a lot of time reading authors on the political right for the previous book and various other works that I'm that I was doing. I'm writing a new book on the right right now. And one of the crude accusations that you'll see in online right wing spaces today is precisely that, you know, Liberalism and Socialism and Communism and Communofascism, they're all one and the same thing, right?

You know, James Lindsay makes that kind of accusation, you know, a billion times a day, right? Kamala Harris is a communist Joe Biden is a communist, you know, and all that's kind of bullshit, and I want to make that very, very clear, right? However, right, [00:20:00] if you read more insightful right wing thinkers, people like Nietzsche or Heidegger who I think Anybody would say are profound philosophers and social commentators even though I emphatically disagree with their work or even consider them to be, frankly, evil men and certainly in the latter case since Heidegger supported the Nazi regime, right?

And they also insisted, actually, look if you look deep enough into Western history and the canons of our most profound thoughts.

What you'll recognize is there is this deep affinity, according to both of them, between liberalism and socialism. To use the kind of Nietzschean expression you gave, Nietzsche said look liberalism and socialism and democracy and feminism, you know, can't forget that one they're all, as you put it just secularized iterations of this Christian slave morality. And They have continued in spite of the metaphysical collapse of belief in a kind of Christian ontological worldview, but nonetheless, the kind of ethical impetus for egalitarian persist. You know, his famous discussion of liberalism in various books was again, as a nation, as, you know, a kind of orientation fit for shopkeepers, women, Christians, cows, etc, etc.

And in The Will to Power and other books like The Antichrist, he used to say, Socialism is also just nothing but Christianity with the residue of Rousseau, right? This idea that, you know, the wretched of the earth you know, will know that God is on their side. That kind of thing. And here's Heidegger's expression.

He puts it in a somewhat different way. He says, look Post Descartes there has emerged this very technical attitude about the world that he associates with scientific rationalism that holds that the world is just a collection of things and human beings are the source of all value and we should organize the world of things using scientific and technical expertise to try to gratify as many as possible.

Human desires as possible, and he says, Look, understood from that point. This is from his introduction to metaphysics. Liberalism and socialism are [00:22:00] metaphysically the same or Russia and America are metaphysically the same, right? All that liberals and socialists are arguing about. Despite all the hoopla about how important this distinction is, is what's the best way to build a refrigerator and what's the best way to distribute a refrigerator.

But we do know that we want refrigerators and we want as many refrigerators as possible and as many people should get refrigerators as possible. That's it, right? And he had no time for this because he thought it was, again, spirit, spiritually decadent and kind of constituted, as he put it in the same book the ascendancy of the reign of the mediocre, right?

Rather than the most kind of spiritually attuned people Which, of course, he associated with the German Volk and, of course, the Nazi regime, right? Now, I do not think that either of these two critiques of liberalism or socialism have nearly the weight to them that Nietzsche and Heidegger think they do.

I think there are very, very good ways to answer this. We don't need to get too much into this. But I think that they are saying something true. When they point out that there is this affinity between liberalism and socialism in the sense that they are humanistic, egalitarian doctrines committed to the rational organization of society and the world for the betterment of all.

I would just cut out their gloomy ending to that and say, well, what's wrong with that? Right? Actually, I think that that's, that's pretty good. And once you understand that the distance between the two traditions narrows quite a lot. And I would say that there's an awful lot that they can learn from one another.

If people take the time to listen.

Socialist traditions' better understanding of marginalization

SHEFFIELD: yeah, and that is kind of the, the latter proposition of the, of the book. And one of those is that the socialist tradition has things to learn from the liberal tradition, but it also does have a better understanding of. The rights of groups that had been historically marginalized by liberal regimes, so, and you have a whole chapter on feminism and liberalism, so let's let's get into that.

McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. Right. So there are a few authors that I talk about in the book that really foreground this. One is Mary Wollstonecraft. And then the other is a self described black radical liberal Charles Mill. So I'll just run through their thinking briefly. So [00:24:00] Mary Wollstonecraft as many people know is famous as the author of a vindication of the rights of women Understandably so, right? It's a heroic work in many respects and one of the main criticisms of that, that's leveled in that book is precisely that, look Male liberals at the time of the French Revolution insist very importantly and very understandably on the rights of man.

But they never seem to be all that disturbed that one full half of the human race is bound by constraints that are far more fundamental than any that have been imposed upon men historically. And they also don't seem to be all that bothered for, for doing anything about that. Right? And Wilson Craft, of course, insisted very strongly that if we take seriously the idea that men should get rights under a Republican regime, then she also insisted that women should also get those rights, precisely because women have the same potential for rationality as men.

Although it needs, of course, to be cultivated by education. And she had some very interesting and advanced thoughts on that, inspired by people like Adam Smith and and I suppose, you know, her intellectual foil Jean Jacques Rousseau, with whom she had a complicated relationship. But what I point out in the book is that Wilson Craft was also quite notably a fierce critic of economic inequality.

In a vindication of the rights of women she insists that it's actually from This reverence for property that almost all the moral defects in our society flow. She's very emphatic about this. And this is the point that she actually takes from Adam Smith, of all people in the theory of moral sentiments when he says this propensity to reverence the rich or describe onto them these almost mythical qualities is the source of almost all the Corrosion of our moral sentiments and our moral virtues.

SHEFFIELD: certainly see that now with the Donald Trump inauguration, Which just took place as we're recording this.

McMANUS: Well, that's one of the reasons I decided to bring up that point, but yes, exactly, right? you see people just you know, bowing down before our new billionaire class. And then, you know, there are more billionaires in this administration than any other time in U. S. history. It's very hard not to think that [00:26:00] she has a point, right?

And Wollstonecraft was not a socialist yet, right? And In part because that term hadn't been invented, but she insists emphatically that, look, a society with a more equal distribution of property will be a more liberal society in the same way that a society that grants rights to women will also be a more liberal society.

Why? Well, because when you take away these stark economic inequalities, A, you ensure that the poor have an opportunity to benefit from it. develop their rational capacities in the same way that the rich do now which would be a very valuable thing. And also because, and here she John Stuart Mill follows the same point.

She says there's something extremely illiberal about this kind of slavish attitude of subordination that appears in very economically unequal societies. You know, the people that people have to bow and scrape before the aristocrats or bow and scrape before their bosses. And she says, you know, good liberals shouldn't want that, right?

They should want to greet each other. Almost in this kind of masculine way, you know, she was accused sometimes of being kind of almost macho in her writing you know, where you treat each other as dignified equals and you show respect for one another and nobody's required to brown nose or submit themselves to another person and I think that there's quite a bit to this argument, right?

And again, John Stuart Mill picks that up later on. Now in terms of Charles Mills, this is really where the point about how liberal societies have treated people quite unequally, contrary to their rhetoric, comes to the fore. So Mills is the author of a very interesting book, The Racial Contract, which everyone should read.

It's very short, it's only about, you know, 150 pages. And one of the things that he points out is, look, Liberal regimes, by and large have done quite a bad job in terms of securing racial equality or sometimes they've actually been at the forefront of systems of racial inequality. A very good example of this would be you know, the United States, right, which had an apartheid regime in the American South from the 1870s, moving all the way up into the 1960s.

Some people like Alexander Casar, author of The Right to Vote in America, [00:28:00] have even pointed out it's hard to call America a mature democracy, in the ultimate part because most people weren't even able to vote, or sorry, many black people weren't even able to vote in American elections prior to the 1960s, right?

Pretty distinctive. And what's interesting about Mill is he makes these accusations not just about existing or long standing liberal regimes. He points out that many liberal theorists of note, people like Immanuel Kant, John Locke, etc., obviously the American Founding Fathers, also developed these very complicated but very self serving kind of intellectual mechanisms to justify various forms of racial subordination, right?

By suggesting that, well, we said that all men are created equal. You know, slaves are three fifths of a person, so, you know, they don't really get the benefit of that.

SHEFFIELD: mean those people.

McMANUS: Yes, we didn't mean those people, because they're not,

SHEFFIELD: to.

McMANUS: yeah, because they're not really people at all, right?

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. And Emmanuel, yeah, as you said, it's kind of repugnant on some of that stuff.

McMANUS: yeah, yeah, which is real shame, because you know, I love Kant. I'm just gonna be really overt about that, right? I think he's a brilliant thinker. And I've learned a lot from him and there's a lot to learn from him. But yeah, you read some of his comments in his anthropology and you're like, boy, that's not even a little racist.

Like that's moving on to like you know, Southern planter levels of of racism. Right. But what I really like mill for mills, excuse me is that he says, look just because liberalism. In practice and in theory had these very fundamental flaws doesn't mean we should abandon our commitment to liberal principles.

The principles understood the right way are extremely sound and extremely attractive including Kantian principles, right? He was deeply influenced by Kant. So he said, what we need to do is engage in a kind of imminent critique, you know, to try to make Or to develop a kind of liberalism, what he called black radical liberalism that would be sufficiently attentive to racial inequality and that would actually instantiate these principles of, again liberty for all and equality for all in a way that was meaningful for everyone rather than just for the white majority or in some places like South Africa, the white minority.

I [00:30:00] say that, you know, because now that we're basically ruled by Elon Musk, it's something to, to consider a little bit about, right? And Mills also aligned this with support for a kind of market socialism saying, look obviously, you know, any kind of radical liberalism is, can have no truck with a command economy of the sort that you saw in the Soviet Union.

That's just incompatible with freedom. But a society that, you know, kind of looks like Sweden, Norway, or Denmark you know, there's a very robust safety net, high levels of unionization worker co ops, etc., etc. That's, there's nothing incompatible between liberalism and these kinds of mechanisms, you know, what he called market socialism.

Now sadly he died before he was able to develop any of these ideas at great length And it just kind of leaves you tantalizingly kind of invested in this project or interested in this project. So, you know, other people are going to have to fill in the blanks about what that might mean in practice in terms of a Millesium project, but it's very attractive, I think.

Charles Mills and critical race theory extend rather than reject Western philosophy

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and that's, I think, in part why these far right activists and politicians don't want people to actually read him, you know, all this stuff about critical race theory

McMANUS: Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Well, Charles Mills was kind of the epicenter of a lot of that and his work. It's not at all the way that the far right characterizes that he's, you know, very clearly in favor of racial equalities, not trying to, you know, create some sort of black supremacist or, you know, whatever kind of thing that they like to say. So, yeah, I'll underscore your point there that it's definitely worth checking out.

McMANUS: Yeah, and I just wanted to add to that, right just take a dig at the far right you know, there's sometimes this rhetoric I still hear, sounds a bit like Alan Bloom from the 1980s bullshit where people are like, oh, you know, these critical race theorists just don't appreciate American history, or they don't appreciate Western history, I'm like, no, if you go and you read Mills, what's very, very clear throughout all of his work is the enduring respect he has for people Like Immanuel Kant, like John Stuart Mill like John Rawls, right, the great American philosopher he wrote a great length about them and was very overt about his own intellectual debts to their genius, right?

But he said, you know just [00:32:00] like you should appreciate that family member of yours who also has some very serious flaws and knowing them well means knowing their good sides and their bad sides. There's nothing wrong with saying, you know, Immanuel Kant was a great genius and who had extraordinary things to say about epistemology and metaphysics and moral theory and also a horrible racist, right?

And if we want to redeem what's best in the Kantian project or the liberal project, and Mill thinks, Mills thinks there's an awful lot that's there then we need to get rid of these flaws. And that's not being disrespectful to Western or liberal history, it's being respectful enough to carry on the story.

Thomas Paine vs. Edmund Burke

SHEFFIELD: Well, it is, and it's also, you know, the, the other kind of approach that the modern reactionaries have toward history is that they actually don't want to study it. They don't want to actually know the arguments. They just want to have this, you know, kind of, version than what they imagined that it was.

So, in other words, they don't want people to actually look at what Thomas Paine had to say. They lie about, you know, most of the American founders religious viewpoints, which were decidedly Christian at least in terms of you know, their, the Christian theological claims even though they tended to not be against it for, for the population.

So you know, it's, it's, it is this, you. It's this fake version of history that they're selling people. And this, you know, hagiography, viewpoint of, of a lot of these founders, because you know, it doesn't, it doesn't detract from their good ideas. The fact that they had some bad ones, because frankly, that's everybody.

Everybody has some good ideas and some

bad ones, and that's up to someone else to decide where, where they think, you know, INR or Euros or anyone else.

McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely. And actually, this is germane to one of the important debates in the book that I talk about just kind of plug the early chapters a bit. You know, we talked a bit about Thomas Paine, right? So Thomas Paine engaged in a a fierce and very acrimonious debate with Edmund Burke who's widely regarded as one of the founders of Anglo American [00:34:00] conservatism.

Now Burke is a complicated figure. A lot of people point out that throughout most of his career he was undeniably a moderate liberal, right? Supported reforms had some very nice things to say about the American Revolution, although it's widely debated whether he supported it or just said it's understandable why they are revolting, but they probably shouldn't do it.

But as my friend Ronald Beaner puts it in his book on civil religion he seems to have been scared by the French revolution into thinking that liberalism was moving into excessive a direction. And there's certainly some good reasons to believe that with regard to the Jacobins, right? And started supporting more conventionally or clearly kind of Tory principles.

Now the reason that this applies is in the Reflections on Revolution in France and also some of his letters Burke really insists time and again, and also in a speech to Parliament, that it's extremely problematic when people look too closely at the origins of nations. And this isn't just an idle observation of his.

The reason he says it's too bad when people look at the origins of nations is because it means they're starting to inquire into. First principles about what legitimates the state and the social order, right? Like, well, how do we wind up where we are right now and should we obey existing authorities?

And Burke said, by and large, you know, we should treat these as settled issues, right? We don't need to look too much into this. And we certainly shouldn't be asking questions about whether we should obey existing authorities. Whether we can approve them or not is a different question, right? But obedience, that's something you should take for granted.

Paine was really emphatically different where he said, no, we should actually. Treat history seriously and go back and look at the origins of states and he said there are a few different reasons for this. One of them is just intellectual accuracy, right? We want to actually know how these countries were founded, but he also had a political and polemical point where he said Part of the reason Burke doesn't want you to look too deeply into this, or people like Burke, he didn't say this directly about him is because when you look at the origins of, say, the United Kingdom well, how did the existing regime come about?

It came about because William the Conqueror crossed, you know the English Channel with a few thousand mercenaries defeated, you know, Edward Godwinson at the Battle of Hastings, butchered most of the people in the [00:36:00] country and said, I'm the king now. That's the way it's going to be. And of course, Payne's point is when you understand the origins of the English monarchy this way as steeped in blood and violence, all of a sudden, you know, this, these calls to be supplicatory to the King look a lot less attractive because you're like, well, he's just a man who's the descendant of a butcher, right?

And in the same way, I think you see similar kind of valences in these debates around things like critical race theory today, right? A lot of conservatives take this kind of Burkean line of, it would just be better if we forgot all this kinds of stuff and moved on. Whereas, you know, critical race theorists Or critical theorists who focus on race like Mills would say, no, no, no, we should actually look at some of that bad shit that happened because it does bear upon the kinds of approaches we should take to things today.

And it explains a lot about, for instance, why there's so much economic stratification on the basis of race in the United States in 2025.

How socialists failed to build institutions

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, but at the same time, so these are, these are critiques that are made of liberalism by the more, we'll say, socialistically inclined people but you also do, you know, talk throughout in different places about how the traditional socialists, they don't know how to advocate. well, especially in the current day that they, you know, and you can certainly see this. I think anytime you look on social media or on you know, lots of socialist publications or, or multimedia products is that, you know, they, they, they will point to opinion polls and they'll say: 'well, look, people support our viewpoints so therefore all we have to do is just talk about them a lot and then we'll win.' And that's not, how democracies work because people don't actually, a lot of people don't vote on the issues. They don't even know what the issues are.

In fact, I think the state of Missouri is perhaps, which is where I graduated from high school is the, one of the worst examples of this, because they [00:38:00] keep passing ballot initiatives that are very progressive. In a number of ways, whether it's protecting abortion rights or raising the minimum wage banning gerrymandering, things like that and then they also vote for Republican legislators and governors who are to repeal these things and, and to restrict them.

And there's just this paradox and you know, the, the further left perspective doesn't seem to understand you can't just, you can't just talk about the issues only, that's not enough.

McMANUS: No, absolutely right. And I mean, to your point about support for universal health care for all.

I'm a zealot for universal public health care for all in the United States, right? I want to make that very clear. So I have my own orientation about this. Indeed, you know to paraphrase George Orwell about democratic socialism it seems like such a common sense measure to me that I'm, you know, quite surprised it hasn't instantiated itself already, or I would be surprised if I wasn't aware of some of the kind of powers that be that inhibit its instantiation.

But we, you know, when people point to opinion polls and say, well, 67 percent of Americans want the government to provide something like public healthcare or healthcare for all, it's always important. And I will say this as a social scientist, right, or a political scientist. Yeah, you know, people will support that until, you You pair it with would you be willing to pay X, Y, or Z more in taxes or enact these kinds of transitions which will mean there'll be alterations in the way your insurance scheme work as we kind of transition to this new model, all of a sudden that support will just crater or change.

So, you know, it's, it's a more difficult case to make to the public than, you know, what some of these figures are, are making out. Right. Now in terms of what the left can do in the United States in order to try to win a broader audience I don't know, you know, I'm you know, I've done my fair share of like practical political activism, you know, I've marched in I've knocked on doors, you know, I worked for the New Democratic Party in Canada on a few different occasions.

And you know, but I'm not, you know, somebody who's really focused on things like political optics, etc. What I could say from a theoretical perspective, which is what I'm [00:40:00] most familiar with, is a lot of the left rhetoric that I see in the media, intellectuals make in the United States is subject to two flaws, right?

The first flaw is a lot of people seem to try to outdo themselves in what Richard Rorty once called the kind of America sucks kind of contest, right? You know, just pointing out all the ways in which this country is bad. And look, I think America has done a lot of bad things like my own country, Canada, like a lot of countries in the world, right?

But I think if you start by asserting that, you know, this country sucks right? A, a lot of people aren't going to listen to you. And B, even people who might be inclined to be sympathetic to you probably won't listen to you because this induces a kind of pessimistic attitude about where you live.

And if you start to say things like, well this country has just always been bad and it's incapable of improvement, then a lot of people are just going to wonder like, well, why should I even bother trying, right? You know, your own kind of rhetoric suggests that things aren't going to get better or that people are inclined to make things better.

So I might as well just stay home vote Republican.

SHEFFIELD: That is what happened in the 2024 election that Trump, you know, got basically the same number of votes as he did in 2020 and Kamala Harris did not because a lot of Biden voters stayed home. They were not

interested

McMANUS: Exactly, right?

SHEFFIELD: Reason.

McMANUS: and this is where I actually do agree with Edmund Burke about

this one issue. I don't think he has other things that he's right about.

But he says that

he doesn't use this term, but I will. You know, leftists have this propensity sometimes to love humanity in the abstract too much and particular people too little, right?

And I think that to a certain extent you need to kind of See the redeeming features of wherever you live and certainly the people that live within it if you're going to engage in a convincing kind of progressive activism. So I think that's one problem that a lot of people indulge in, right?

Radical leftists haven't realized the necessity of persuasion

McMANUS: Um, and then the second main problem that I've noticed with a lot of left theorizing, which is related to the first problem, is very often there's something that intellectuals like to do, because it seems very fashionable we keep calling for radical transformations of the status quo that are understood as we need to adopt fundamentally different principles than what we have here and kind of carte blanche everything just because our foundational principles, our foundational institutions they suck so much [00:42:00] that they can't be redeemed, right?

Now, I think that there is more substance to some of these critiques than others, but I tend to agree with Michael Walzer, who's problematic in other ways, right? But when he says, look, if you're going to engage in critique, the most useful and almost invariably the most convincing kind of critique is what he calls imminent critique.

And what he means by that is he says, Look if you can show someone that the principles they claim to be beholden to lead in a direction that is other than the one they've been going thus far, they are way more likely to buy into your project than if you come to them and say you need to drop everything that you've believed in your life thus far and embrace a whole new set of principles, because what you believe so far is just really shit, right?

Some people might be responsive to that, you know, I've met them, but most people will just be like, you know, well, fuck you, right? You know, go somewhere else. And this lights back to the liberal socialist idea that I bring up because I say look, if you read something like Gary Dorian's Democratic Socialism in America, what he points out is A lot of the ideals that I argue for in the book, and Dorian argues throughout his various work, aren't foreign to America. They're very much American ideals, right?

It was MLK Day yesterday. MLK proudly identified as a democratic socialist and said look, whether you call it democracy or you call it democratic socialism there needs to be a more equitable distribution of wealth in this country for all of God's children, right?

And I think that when you say, look, if you really believe in equality and you really believe in liberty the way that almost every American I know does then you should want A society that is much less governed by plutocrats and oligarchs than it is right now. And a society where freedom and liberty also means that you have certain kind of rights in the workplace and in the economy.

That many people don't right now because they often go to work and all of a sudden they enter into spaces that look an awful lot like what Elizabeth Anderson calls Private governments or private dictatorships where people can't speak their mind, have no rights and more or less, again need to [00:44:00] scrape and subordinate themselves to their bosses in order to get by.

So this imminent critique, I think of the way people understand principles in a more narrowly conservative way, I think is the best way to go forward. Say, look, if you believe in these kinds of American ideals of freedom for all equality for all, basic rights it should lead in this more leftward direction rather than again saying you should drop all your principles and adopt these entirely different ones instead.

Yeah,

SHEFFIELD: yeah, I think that's right. And, you know, to that end, it's also it's relevant that to me, at least further left political rhetoric tends to no. Experience or desire to appeal to anyone who is not a liberal, so they have no ability to speak to centrists or understand how to verbalize, you know, terms in their, in their preferred meanings.

And then, of course, have no ability to you know, to correspond, well against reactionary radicalism, because you know that, and I think you keep seeing that over and over why this is why there is a lot of you know, movement from the, from these far right, far left figures who were originally far left, like Jimmy door coming over to the far right, because they share that hatred of America.

They share this hatred that, you know, that, that ultimately their antagonism is what motivates them more than anything else. Because they don't have an affirmative vision, or at least one that they understand, they have no, well, they have no theory of change, frankly, if I may say.

McMANUS: absolutely, right? I mean I always point this out, right? One of the reasons why the Civil Rights Movement was as successful as it was, with all the qualifications that are entailed by that, and, you know, the Civil Rights Movement was, I think, undoubtedly, the most successful left movement in the country's history, certainly on race issues, although, as mentioned, MLK also had an economic program that we've fallen well short of, is that it appeals to, like, this very broad, basic religious terminology and a religious set of values that many Americans, certainly religious [00:46:00] Americans, find very attractive, right?

And MLK, I don't want to read too much into this, was very good at this kind of eminent critique although from the standpoint of an activist and a A religious preacher rather than a theorist, although he's very learned in people like Paul Tillich, important to note that. Where he'd say things like, look, if you really believe in Christian principles the way that I know a lot of Americans do, or you believe in rights the way that every American does, why is it that we don't really seem to be taking those nearly as seriously?

as, you know, we should be. It sounds a lot better coming from you know, MLK, right? But I think that that's just a very hard argument for a lot of people to resist the allure of because many of us, deep down, want to feel like we're people of integrity, and we want to feel like our country, our communities are living up to their stated principles.

And when somebody points out to us just very blatant examples of instances where we're not doing that. It's hard to deny this push to want to actually be the kind of people that we say that we are and, you know, to go back to the kind of liberal socialist theme again, it's mostly a scholarly book in a lot of ways, you know, a retrieval of a political tradition that I think is thoughtful.

It has some extraordinary authors within it including close, ordinary American authors like the philosopher John Rawls, or the great liberal thinker John Stuart Mill the two Johns, as I'm taken to, to calling them, right? But, you know, it was also an effort to kind of restore a sense of hope to the liberal tradition by saying, look we are past the time where liberals can afford to be, you know cautious, anxious or to suggest just very minor kind of majorist approaches to the reformation of society.

People very clearly are adopting these kind of nihilistic attitudes across the United States and much of the Western world right now, where they don't think that things can be better. So a cynical project that says we can't make things better for everyone, but we might be able to make them better for you if you look like us or you believe like us.

That has very attractive and liberals need to have the kind of ambition and vision to say no, we can make a world that is better for you and the best way to do that is to make a world that is going to be better for everyone.

Democrats also refuse to explain or persuade

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, well, and also [00:48:00] to articulate why things haven't better. So, you know, and I think the recently concluded Joe Biden administration is a good example of that, because there were a number of initiatives that he wanted to do but were thwarted by members of his own party, like Joe Biden. Here's the cinema or the Supreme Court. And he never, and he never really spoke up about that, that this was, that his plans were being flouted. And that is such a dramatic contrast when you look at Donald Trump's rhetoric, that when people stop Donald Trump from doing something, you know, he will. Blast them for, you know, every single day for weeks. And then, you know, thereafter he will repeat that narrative at least a couple of times every week from then on. And, you know, whether, and I think the best example of that was with the COVID 19 pandemic. So, I mean, objectively speaking, Donald Trump. that did one of the worst jobs among any major, you know, industrialized country in the world as a chief executive to respond to the pandemic. We had the most deaths per capita of any major country yet. You know, a lot of people just gave him a free pass on that because he was

constantly

providing them a, a a blame, a

blame deflection narrative to say, look, this is my fault. I didn't do this. This is a Chinese virus. This is, you know

McMANUS: flu, right?

SHEFFIELD: or what I'm saying.

McMANUS: The Wuhan flu, I remember, yeah.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, that's right. Yeah, we're that. Yeah. So he's always giving an explanation for why he's not accomplishing and that's something that it seems like that left wing politicians generally are not interested in doing because they assume that the public will know

why

things didn't happen. And, you know, and that's,

that's a very dangerous delusional assumption, if you ask me.

McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely, right? And

for me

One of the key indicators of the disconnect of the Democratic Party with not every [00:50:00] ordinary voter, I mean, they still won a lot of votes, but enough ordinary voters was this kind of paternalistic technocratic attitude you saw some of the senior figures adopt.

I'll just give a couple, well, I'll give a kind of glaring example of this. So, in an early 2024 interview Hillary Clinton was asked what She would say to voters who were hesitant about voting for Joe Biden a second time, this is before Kamala Harris became the candidate.

And Clinton's attitude was get over yourself, I think is the term she used, right? You know, Donald Trump is a lot worse. We're a lot better. So the choice is just very clear. And. I agree that Donald Trump was worse than any of the Democratic candidates. I want to be very clear about that, right?

But I thought to myself, what a condescending and patronizing kind of attitude to take towards voters, since the implication is kind of that they owe you their vote, because you're the least bad option. There's no sense that it is your job as a politician to constantly make the case to the voters as to why they should put their faith in you, right?

Which it should be a very natural kind of idiom for progressives who believe in democracy, believe in representative government, and accountability. I don't think that this kind of autocratic mindset is one that should be a natural fit to our value system, right? And I saw a rhetoric like that Not all throughout the campaign, but pretty consistently throughout the campaign and every time it did I would talk to some conservatives and they would be outraged by it and I would talk to swim voters who would also be outraged for it because they felt that it demonstrated how disconnected the Democratic Party was from the concerns of ordinary people contrast that, right, with FDR and 1936 when he would say things like all the financial overlords of our country, I'm paraphrasing, right?

Absolutely despised me and I welcome their contempt, right? Because he felt that he's, you know, working for ordinary people. Or think about Bernie Sanders today. There was a poll that came out the other week that showed that he was far and away the most popular senator in the United States.

And even people on Fox have nice things to say about him. I think part of that is because [00:52:00] regardless of your commitment to The principles that FDR or Bernie Sanders stand for there's this sense that they are speaking in a candid way to voters about what they believe in they recognize who their opponents are, and they're not afraid to call them out On behalf of their constituents.

Right. And to your point about Joe Biden, never really pushing back against some of these constraints on his first term imagine if Biden, you know, had been more militant and saying you know, the reason why, you know, a lot of people in my own party don't want this to pass is because we're beholden to very, very big donors and they don't want the kind of foundational change that I and other people think we should fucking have, and that Americans are entitled to because they're long overdue.

Not sure exactly that's the way they would express it, but you get the gist of it, right? And I think that this more, if not agonistic at least solidaristic approach to politics that is democratic in its kind of ethos and rhetoric is a much more powerful way to go forward than this kind of nebbish technocratic aloofness that suggests that the reason we should vote for Democrats is because it's her turn, or his turn because they're the most qualified candidate.

That's the way we should go, going forward.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, no, exactly.

Liberalism has never developed the ability to politically defeat reactionism

SHEFFIELD: And but just to go back to Nietzsche for a moment here, because I think his, his thought is really the animating impulse of today's right wing. And that's what is so, has been so challenging for you know, liberalism slash socialism to respond to because, know, the liberal political order was, It was was born by defeating, you know, classical monarchy, essentially, now we have this, you know, completely reborn version of that same attitude, which is much better at articulating its vision and in a way that is appealing to people who have, you know, authoritarian sentiments. you know, and, and psychological research indicates that there's somewhere about at least a minimum of 30 percent of [00:54:00] people who have so called authoritarian personalities. So that's an automatic population base, regardless of what they say or what tactics they may engage in. and so this is, you know, this is an experience that, neither liberalism nor socialism has ever had to defeat and argue against. Reactionism and said they've always had to defeat monarchists.

McMANUS: Yeah, absolutely and I think this is something that you can only really grasp if you

I spent a lot of time reading and listening to figures on the right and I don't just include you know, the kind of banal populists like Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson, whoever it happens to be.

I mean, actually, like, very serious right wing thinkers like Nietzsche, like Joseph de Maistre like Heidegger, or Carl Schmitt, yeah or in the United States, you know people like Russell Kirk Leo Strauss, you know, a lot of valuable things that we learned there. But, you know,

The political right has been aware of this problem for a very long time, right?

Because, foundationally liberals and socialists should have an advantage in arguing for a kind of society where the many will rule. Right? Or where the 99 percent will organize the eco