099: An End and a Beginning

An update on ReImagining Liberty and a preview of my new show, The Inner Life of Liberalism.Subscribe to The Inner Life of Liberalism in your favorite app:Apple PodcastsSpotifyAll other podcast apps

It’s been a hot minute since the last episode. So let me start by telling you what’s been going on, because it actually tees up today’s conversation. The short version is, I’ve been neck deep in getting a very cool new project ready for launch. It’s called Liberalism.org and is an online magazine of liberal ideas, which I’m leading in collaboration with my colleagues at the Institute for Humane Studies. It launched on March 12.As part of this project, I’m hosting a new bi-weekly podcast called The Liberalism.org Show. It’ll be half hour interviews with contributors to the site, which means interviews with some of the most interesting minds in liberalism today. You can look for that wherever you get your podcasts.All of this just swamped me, and I had to take a step back from ReImagining Liberty. I’m glad you stuck around through the hiatus.And to bring us back, I’m actually joined today by one of those colleagues on Liberalism.org, Jason Canon. He’s Director of Public Scholarship at the Institute for Humane Studies, and for at least the last year, he and I have been talking non-stop about a shared intellectual project about what it means to think of liberalism as a practice. Or a set of practices. You’ve heard me discuss versions of this in quite a lot of prior episodes, but today I wanted to bring Jason on for a deep dive, and to establish a foundation for future conversations.We talk about what it means to view something as a practice, how practice theory plugs holes in liberal theorizing, why this approach is largely overlooked by contemporary philosophers of liberalism, and what that oversight means missing out on. I loved this conversation with Jason.Join the ReImagining Liberty Patreon to get episodes a week early, listen ad-free, and become part of the Discord community. Learn more here: https://www.patreon.com/AaronRossPowellProduced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

The rise of Nick Fuentes. The self-immolation of the Heritage Foundation. The Great Replacement conspiracy theorizing endemic on X. The right very clearly has a significant antisemitism problem, with anti-Jewish hate spreading from the fringes, to the conservative mainstream, and out into the broader political culture. And this hate interacts with, supports, and leads to further hate, directed at other groups, including misogyny, racism, and ethnic and religious nationalism.On today’s episode, I’ve brought on Elad Nehorai. He’s a writer, activist, and social and political commentator, and founder of Justice Marketing. We have a deep conversation about the role antisemitism plays in the ideologies of the contemporary right, how their continued use of X is normalizing such views among American journalists and media elites, and the prospect of a post-Trump GOP drifting even further into outright neo-Nazism.Join the ReImagining Liberty Patreon to get episodes a week early, listen ad-free, and become part of the Discord community. Learn more here: https://www.patreon.com/AaronRossPowellProduced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

The ideologies that shape our world can be awfully weird. The one that combines the most influence with the most weirdness is arguably Rationalism, which grew out of backwater blogs to have the ears, and influence the minds, of people like Elon Musk and JD Vance.To talk about what Rationalism is, why we should care about its beliefs and arguments, and the impact it's had outside those strange corners of the internet, I've brought back Samantha Hancox-Li. She's a writer, game designer, editor at Liberal Currents, and host of the Neon Liberalism podcast.Join the ReImagining Liberty Patreon to get episodes a week early, listen ad-free, and become part of the Discord community. Learn more here: https://www.patreon.com/AaronRossPowellProduced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

Regimes falter when opposition media is strong. But America's legacy media has failed to live up to the dangers of the political environment and the authoritarianism of Trump's administration. We need stronger opposition media, making full-throated defenses of liberalism. But what does that look like?I'm joined today by Adam Gurri, founder and editor-in-chief of Liberal Currents, which is currently fundraising to take their indispensable publication to the next level. Adam and I talk about the state of media, what it means to carve out principled opposition, and how stronger opposition media can see us through the coming years and towards a future for liberalism.Liberal Currents fundraiser: https://gofund.me/be2b76bf9Join the ReImagining Liberty Patreon to get episodes a week early, listen ad-free, and become part of the Discord community. Learn more here: https://www.patreon.com/AaronRossPowellProduced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

Welcome to ReImagining Liberty, a show about the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical liberalism. I'm Aaron Ross Powell.It's still possible Trump succeeds in his project of authoritarian consolidation, but between the dramatic losses the GOP suffered in the elections on November 4th, the infighting in the conservative coalition, and the Epstein scandal, the prospects for that consolidation are looking more remote.All this makes the "How do we rebuild when Trump is behind us?" question feel less like a pipe dream. Which is why I was so happy to see my friends at The UnPopulist launch their new "Reconstruction Agenda" project, headed by frequent ReImagining Liberty guest Andy Craig. Andy is mapping out what that reconstruction should look like, and what reforms present the best opportunities to strengthen and rebuild the institutions of liberal democracy. Joining me today alongside Andy is Shikha Dalmia, founder and editor of The UnPopulist.Join the ReImagining Liberty Patreon to get episodes a week early, listen ad-free, and become part of the Discord community. Learn more here: https://www.patreon.com/AaronRossPowellProduced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

Today's episode is about the Constitution. It's a clear-eyed assessment of the assaults on it by the Trump administration, and a deep discussion of how we should think about constitutional interpretation and constitutional defense. Things aren't good. There's no denying that.But things also perhaps aren't as bad, at least not yet, as the most shrill of the doomers insist. To dig into all this, I'm joined by Evan Bernick. He's a law professor at Northern Illinois University and has been one of the most thoughtful, persistent, and effective critics of the risible scholarship the Trump administration is using to justify its assault on birthright citizenship.Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

The future of liberalism depends upon the coalitions liberals can build, both to defend institutions now and to reform them when the time comes. As my friend, and past ReImagining Liberty guest, Jason Kuznicki says, "The future is a conversation." So today I've brought on two smart liberals, with very different ideas about what liberalism means in practice, for a conversation about common ground.Matthew McManus is an assistant professor at Spelman College, author of The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism, and frequent ReImagining Liberty guest. Matt Zwolinski is a first time ReImagining Liberty guest, an omission I'm thrilled to rectify. He's a professor of philosophy at the University of San Diego, co-author of The Individualists: Radicals, Reactionaries, and the Struggle for the Soul of Libertarianism, and founder of the seminal—but now sadly defunct—blog Bleeding Heart Libertarians.This episode is prompted by a review Zwolinski wrote of McManus's book, a review that noted their shared values and dug into why, in each of their cases, those values led them to quite distinct policy conclusions. And that's our topic for today. It's a conversation about agreement, disagreement, and how to have productive conversations about liberalism.Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

Today things get particularly radical, with an introduction to left market anarchism. I'm joined by Zak Woodman, host of the Mutual Exchange Radio podcast from the Center for a Stateless Society. We talk about whether we need a state at all, the dangers a powerful government poses, even if its values are arguably good ones, and why the aims of the left are better advanced through free markets than state control of the economy. We end with a call to take anarchist ideas seriously, even if you don't ultimately accept them, because they contain lessons for how to navigate and respond to our contemporary authoritarian moment.Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

I've got a special bonus episode for you today. In August, I attended the second annual Liberalism for the 21st Century conference in DC, organized by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. That's the group that runs The UnPopulist, a publication I occasionally guest host for on their Zooming In podcast. I led a special live recording of that show at the conference, a conversation with journalist (and ReImagining Liberty guest) Radley Balko and commentator Charlie Sykes. I framed the conversation around the second Trump administration as vigorous effort to roll back the Civil Rights Movement, legally, institutionally, and culturally. This led to a deep and spirited discussion. I hope you enjoy this very ReImagining Liberty adjacent discussion.