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 socia