How liberals lost the fight

23:50Lewis Goodall:But then Adrian, people do often feel deep attachment to those identities. They are part of the multilayered identities. Many people do feel more attachment to those groups and those group identities than perhaps they do, even necessarily expressing themselves as an individual, or at the very least, their individuality is deeply anchored in those places. And isn't this one of the sort of problems with liberalism historically, which is that it does have too little to say about those notions of group rights, or indeed, for example, perhaps the most important group right of all, which is class. I think that I'm perfectly happy with the idea that people's identities are to some extent anchored in their identities as members of classes or members of races.

24:29I'm also very happy with the idea that when you have a race to whom a collective wrong has been done, which is the people who've the descendants of slaves, then we need to think to some extent about collective solutions. What I'm not happy with is the idea that the very DNA, the very essence of somebody is determined by these group rights and that they can never change their identity. I think we should always have a notion that people can make of themselves what they will, make of themselves what they can. And some of the greatest statements about this were made by Frederick Douglass, who was born a slave and who made himself into one of the greatest intellectuals and orators of the 19th century.

25:12So people aren't imprisoned by their identities, aren't imprisoned by their class rights, by their class position. And I also think that when you have, you should always, in educational institutions, should always look at the particular set of circumstances that people are struggling against when they're thinking about giving them membership. But I think saying that you should give membership, you know, you should give places to a certain percentage of people because of their racial identity. That's getting worse. So group thinking is only permissible insofar as it allows us to treat people as individuals more sensitively and better.

25:47Lewis Goodall:And I want to talk a little bit more about the kind of real world effects about this, particularly in the United States and the Maga and Trump and so on. Before we do, I suppose what we're sort of circling around and it is the kind of, you know, is always the sort of trade off and the sort of conceptual sort of heart of liberalism and potentially problems which flow from it is basically what we're talking about as a trade off between our rights as individuals and our deep need for security, effectively, in the best way that liberalism can provide that. I mean, Isaiah Berlin said, didn't he, that freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep.

26:19Lewis Goodall:And what he's sort of getting at that, I'm sure he'll describe himself more or less as a liberal thinker himself, but what he's getting at by saying that is that freedom's all very well for some people, and that you can argue that liberalism has another natural bedfellow other than pluralism, which is meritocracy. People rise and fall by their own merits. But of course, people are imbued with certain things when they're born, and other people aren't. And to what extent does liberalism, one of the reasons liberalism might be considered to be empty or lose out by comparison to some of these other, as I say, sharper edged schools of thought is because it has a certain sort of tyranny in its heart, which is that the individual is only the only thing that matters.

26:56Lewis Goodall:And that does not speak to the age we're in, where so many people are not really yearning for freedom. They're yearning for security. I think we have to think very seriously about what we mean by the individual. And I think there's a notion within neoliberalism that sees the individual purely as an atom and purely as a customer making choices and as completely free, completely self-motivated. And I think the notion of the individual in the greatest liberal thinkers and certainly in John Stuart Mill, who I think is a fantastically rich and complicated figure, is much more complicated than that.

27:34they see the individual as something that to some extent is a work in process, progress that can create itself that is always trying to create itself they think that, he thinks, Mill thinks that individuals have lower selves and higher selves that they are fashioned by a culture by a society and that what we need to do as a society is provide people with a liberal education And the liberal education, he emphasises the word a liberal education, means helping them to reach their higher selves and anchoring them in a cultural tradition which gives them a sense of meaning. So he talks, and Matthew Arnold also talks, about this notion of a clerisy, which is a sort of cultured elite which is charged with steering society and preventing society from disintegrating into a collection of atomised individuals.

28:34And I think that is a tradition within liberalism that's been forgotten since the sort of Thatcher neoliberal revolution. Sounds rather patrician. It is patrician. Rather out of fashion. I try and say in this book that one of the things that's gone wrong with liberalism, again, since the 1980s, is this revolt against any notion of cultural authority. That you basically, everybody's tastes are equal. And if somebody wants to spend their life watching pornography all the time, that's just as good as watching opera all the time. And you saw in that, particularly in Thatcher, saying the nanny state, all of this sort of thing.

29:12I think there are certain choices that people make that are not good for them. There are certain cultural values that are better than other cultural values and that the state as a collective should have a certain role in providing subsidizing higher cultural values. And the BBC, you know, Reith had very much that notion of the state doing this and also ought to be willing to use its power to discourage people from eating masses of fatty food, smoking cigarettes, doing things that are harming.

29:42Lewis Goodall:But Adrian, isn't this completely out of step with the mores of our own age? I mean, the mores of our age are defined by an increasingly kind of plebeian, demotic, kind of anti-elite feeling. What you're basically saying is the saviour of liberalism or one of the ways to restore liberalism is to get back to a sort of liberal noblesse oblige where we should just listen to the higher ups. I am to some extent saying this. I think we went too far in a certain direction towards, let's say, non-judgmentalism and also towards saying that any sort of judgmentalism is sort of morally sort of condemnable.

30:17condemnable, you know, it's a sense of superiority. And I think that we need to be a bit more judgmental about people. Remember the phrase, this phrase about the nanny state, the nanny state was first used by a Tory MP who was objecting to the idea of a speed limit, any speed limit at all. He said, this is the nanny state. In fact, the state stepped in, it imposed that speed limit, and lots of people have been saved from a terrible, terrible death.

30:47Lewis Goodall:But in an age where people are so suspicious of elites and political elites, you're saying that actually these people ought not to be so suspicious, we should just judge them if they are suspicious. I'm saying that we ought to have, that we, certain people, ought to be more confident in passing judgment and more confident in explaining it to people because it's better for society and better for them. Because we're better educated? Is that what it is? Because we're thinking about the long term. And I don't think that it necessarily is something that is either impractical or repugnant to a democratic age.

31:21We've done it with smoking and we've massively reduced the amount of smoking by disapproving of it, by signalling to the public that this is a bad thing to do.

31:30Lewis Goodall:So we're going to tell people what to do more? It doesn't sound terribly liberal. I think we do need to. I think when it comes to fatty foods, we need to be more willing to assert public authority. and I think particularly on the issue of the big tech companies I think we need to be more judgmental about them and I don't think this is something that is against the wishes of large chunks of the population. If you look at what most people think about the tech companies they're extremely worried about what they're being allowed to do in the name of freedom, in the amount of pornography that people have access to, the amount of screen time that people have access to, the amount of unfiltered disinformation, you have an enormous amount of pressure coming from the public saying that actually we need regulations to stop this.

32:22We need to stop children having phones in schools and things like this. So I think the idea that the public is just instinctively libertarian when it comes to things that are obviously harming society, I don't think is correct.

32:34Lewis Goodall:Just before we talk about Trump, just since you mentioned it, you talk about that we should be more comfortable, liberals should be more comfortable in saying actually that not all views are equal would you therefore presumably rather support Kemi Badenock when she said that she considered that not all cultures were equal? Because it's an interesting trade off there isn't it? Because again on the one hand you're saying let's be terribly pluralist and everyone's forgotten about pluralism but you're also saying we should be more comfortable in saying that certain views and certain ways of life are superior to others Depends what we mean by culture.

33:07I certainly think that opera is preferable to soap opera, to put it simply. Why? Because I think it is something that has more enduring value, that it provides us with a higher sense of satisfaction. Is that just your prejudice? Not quite just my prejudice. No, I think there are aesthetic judgments that have a certain validity, that are more than just preferences. But when it comes to cultures... Would it be better to read one book of Trollope or a hundred, I don't know,

33:47Lewis Goodall:you know, sort of Catherine Cookson? I think Trollope or preferably Tolstoy or something like that. I mean, I think people should be... Even if you read less as a result? Yeah, absolutely. Reading lots and lots of Catherine Cookson is not a very good thing to me. I mean, it's a very age reference on my part, but like, you know, Jenny Cooper or whatever it happened to be. Because there are certain cultural, intellectual and aesthetic satisfactions that you get from reading great literature that you can't get from reading other great literature. But I wanted to go back to the point about cultures being equal.

34:18If that means that the culture of the West is something that is superior to the culture of the East or Christian culture is superior to Islamic culture. I think that's not true and it's not a helpful way of thinking about the world. We should have a pluralist approach to cultures and that different cultures will lead people to pursuing different ends in life in different ways. And that's something that's absolutely integral to a liberal society.

34:47Lewis Goodall:What about cultures that aren't particularly comfortable with our own liberal culture? then I think we need to be, you know, Karl Popper's paradox of tolerance, that there comes a point when tolerant people can't tolerate intolerance, you know, that you logically destroy your own position. So I think that to be tolerant of Islamic beliefs is absolutely central to a pluralist society and Islamic religion absolutely central to a pluralist society. But if those people are practicing intolerance of other religions, or practicing or imposing a certain set of values on, let's say, women that are incompatible with Western traditions.

35:31I mean, not allowing them to vote freely or to dress freely. I think that's something that we should be willing to say that is not right. To the burqa, for example? No, I wouldn't say get rid of the burqa. As long as people are choosing to wear the... It's the exercise of coercion by certain people and certain other people.

35:48Lewis Goodall:Although that can be quite hard to judge. Very hard to do it. I think it's definitely the case that we have parallel communities in this society, in our society, where you have generations of people who are probably not speaking English, not natural English speakers. They're just so secluded from society. And you have so many generations coming in with marriage from outside society. I think that's not something that we should we should tolerate. So when Kemi Badenoch says that not all cultures are equal, she is making a mistake. If she were to say that there are certain things that we need to do to make the process of assimilation work, and those include making sure that people can speak English, making sure that people are given choice over who they marry and what sort of clothes they wear, I think that's perfectly reasonable.

36:37I mean, that's essential to a liberal society.

36:38Lewis Goodall:Right, when we come back, we will be talking about what liberalism or the lack of liberalism can tell us about Trump's America. Stay with us.

37:08victims of the pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, who were clearly failed by my decision. The pendulum has become turbocharged over the last few days, swinging hither and thither with gay abandon. So where is it now regarding the prime minister?

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38:36Lewis Goodall:So, Adrian, you actually describe in the book the extent to which, in a way, I mean, there's a sort of paradox and an eye isn't there. Liberalism, if there is a country in the world where liberal or liberalism is a dirty word, it is the United States. And yet, of course, in so many ways, the United States is a beacon of liberalism, certainly in the way that it was founded. You know, the constitutional principles and so on are straight out of kind of 18th century liberal principles, John Locke and the rest of it without getting too dense about it. How has this happened? How has it been that liberal and liberalism has become so not just contested, but actively, as I say, an insult pejorative in the US?

39:12The United States is a very peculiar country in the sense that it was founded as not just as a liberal country, but as the greatest experiment in liberalism that Madison and Jefferson and the other people who designed the Constitution took liberal principles about the division of power, the separation of church and state, the sanctity of the individual, and put them right at the heart of the Constitution. there was obviously a problem with slavery and they didn't extend those principles to all Americans eventually they did extend them to all Americans but this was a great liberal experiment far more successful than the French Revolution which was a sort of quasi-successful liberal experiment and then in the late 19th and early 20th centuries they had another liberal revolution in which they extended the role of the state to be able to interfere with business, to stop it from becoming too monopolistic, to provide a certain amount of welfare.

40:09And again, they did that in the name of liberalism, the new liberalism. Woodrow Wilson describes himself proudly as a liberal. But now almost nobody in the United States would be in professional politics would be willing to describe themselves as a liberal. I think the last presidential candidate who ran proudly talking of themselves as a liberal was Walter Mondale, who lost every state but his own. What happened next? And what happened was that there was a concerted attempt by Republicans. The first big person to do it was Ronald Reagan to demonize the term liberal and to say that what liberals were were namby-pamby lefty elitists.

40:57And they applied this term to a group of people. say these are the people who want to tell you what to do as I've just been saying, telling people what to do. Maybe they weren't totally wrong. And these are the people who look down on you. They're social snobs. And this reflected a certain sort of war within America against the sort of the old patrician elites on behalf of the blue-collar workers and business community and things like that. And Ronald Reagan kept going on about this and it sank into people's minds, perhaps because there was a certain amount of truth that these were socially snobbish people.

41:32And then George H.W. Bush starts doing the same thing. Liberal, liberal, liberal. Ironic, given his rather patrician background himself. And liberal sentiments. And so does George W. Bush, again, talking about the L word, liberals. And you have this phrase, very powerful phrase in America, of limousine liberals. It was this idea that a liberal is a socially superior person who looks down on regular people and who doesn't go, you know, playing, who doesn't really belong to the NRA or isn't a regular person. And the Democrats simply retreated from this word liberal as a result of this. So what had been one of the proudest claims in America became a sort of pejorative term.

42:19But then something more worrying comes along because George H.W. Bush demonises the term liberal, But he is basically somebody who doesn't question the fundamental tenets of a liberal society, believes in the division of powers. He believes in the separation of church and state and vigorous argument between people to approach truth. Now you have a group of intellectuals in America who are called post-liberals, who's gathered around Trump, who are actually illiberal in the sense that they want to destroy the separation of powers. They describe themselves as that. They describe themselves as that.

42:55They want to have an orthodox, you know, religious faith as much as possible. And they're sort of post-liberal collectivists. And then they have gathered around this extraordinary figure of Donald Trump. Donald Trump is not a person who sits down reading philosophy or post-liberal philosophy. But he is an extraordinary figure in the sense that he is an American with not a liberal sentiment in his body, not a liberal bone in his body. He's a strongman and all his sentiments are anti-liberal. So you have a very peculiar thing that what starts off as a political strategy of demonization has actually become a movement which is turning the world's greatest liberal country against liberalism.

43:33And if you had to just briefly sum up illiberal democracy and this project and compare it to what is essentially, you know, the vast majority of American political thinking or much political thinking which came before it, certainly at a presidential level,

43:48Lewis Goodall:although there were some exceptions we might talk about. How would you define that difference? How is it best for people to understand this new project, which someone like J.D. Vance, I think, in so many ways might be the sort of archetypal version of or the sort of prime example of? Well, it's very provocative. The way I'm going to present it is a very provocative way, but I'll do so anyway. Carl Schmitt, who I talked about earlier, this 1930s Nazi philosopher, says that society is divided between friends and enemies. That's what politics is about, destroying your enemies. He also said that the most important power of all is the power to declare an emergency.

44:23Once you've got the power to declare an emergency, you rule society. I think the post-liberals in America, certainly J.D. Vance, embody those principles. They believe in friends, enemies. They don't believe in politics as discussion. And they believe that by having the power to keep declaring emergencies or creating emergencies, they can consolidate power around a strongman. and they also I think believe that American culture is in such a state of crisis because of woke and because of the rest of it and Islamification and Islamification it's such a great state of crisis that we need to suspect that you know this is the state of emergency suspend liberal restraints and let the strong man sort this mess out and in particular what

45:09Lewis Goodall:they focus on and they're entirely explicit about this as you say is the way that I think that perhaps they are most liberal or certainly a sort of aberration by comparison to much of what came before is that they do have a theory that executive power i.e. presidential power ought to be unimpeded and sometimes and and that is a that is that is something that that cuts through the heart of their philosophy in which about which they talk about all the time and sometimes and i know you've written about this and i think it's spot on sometimes we in britain europe we sort of look at MAGA and just think it's a sort of set of Trumpian impulses but it's not is it we ought to understand that there is Trump himself may not be guided by or at least he certainly isn't a progenitor of it but there is an intellectual project here at the heart of MAGA and there is a prescription diagnosis for American ills which is very illiberal absolutely there are a group of people who are called as I say who would call themselves I think post-liberals they have very other different names that they call themselves, but they believe that the enemy is liberalism, just as Putin does and Orban did, that liberalism inevitably leads to social disintegration, atomization, a meaningless culture.

46:25The only way to stop that is through executive power, the strong man, and through some way of imposing moral orthodoxies on a fallen population. There's an intellectual at Harvard called a legal scholar called Adrian Vermeule. I generally think that all Adrians should stick together. But in this case, I'll say strongly disassociate myself from his beliefs. But he believes very strongly, very and he's a very serious intellectual in the unitary executive, in the power of the president. It strikes me as an extraordinary thing to believe because the United States was founded as a republic against what they call the tyranny of George III.

47:08Everything was about stopping the tyrant, dividing powers, checks and balances. That seems to be the essence of Americanism. But these post-liberal people want to create a strongman rule. Again, I say because to save America from this from itself. They think it's a fallen government. Now, and the person who is most enmeshed in all of these sorts of networks is J.D. Vance, who is an intellectual, who is a seriously red person, who has thought about these people and who would push Trumpism further if he were elected. The likelihood of him being elected, given the mess that Trump is making in the Middle East, and given Trump's own inclination at the moment to distance himself from Vance, seems to be going down.

47:56But he is the standard bearer of the MAGA intelligence.

48:00Lewis Goodall:And once you understand that and understand this theory of executive power and how they wish to wield it in order to save America from liberalism, cosmopolitanism from itself, you sort of see how it actually connects so much of certainly what the second trump presidency has been about which is constantly pushing the boundaries of executive power trying to sublimate in fact being very successful in sublimating congress pushing judgments of the supreme court but also doing so in cultural institutions right sort of the war against the universities and so on it's about that that constant as you say sort of push and press against who they perceive as america as america's enemies i mean one of the problems with this is i think a A lot of these cultural institutions, including the universities, have tended to move so far to the left.

48:42They're not blameless themselves. That they've left themselves open to that sort of thing. They have nobody. You know, most faculties, the argument is between the far left and the very far left.

48:51Lewis Goodall:Yes, because Trump, if J.D. Vance was sat here, what I suspect he would say is that no, no, no. We're the ones trying to promote pluralism. We're the ones trying to promote genuine inquiry and scrutiny and conversation and debate. They say that it's these cultural institutions which have been dominated by liberals, high liberals, people who think they know better, who are the ones who squash and try and suppress debate. But I would say, again, in the universities, the centre, the liberal centre has been squeezed out by, I think, identitarians and people further to the left. But I think you get a terrible dialectic between the far left and the cultural institutions in America and the J.D.

49:32Vances of this world, which, again, more and more squeezes out the centre. But what you've also seen in America is if you look at the foreign policy doctrine that was in their defense review that came out recently, they basically say that America is engaged on a global level in a civilizational struggle. So they despise the extraordinary liberal global order that was created after 1945 and all the liberal institutions that were created to create a rules-based, stable global order. They say that they're all corrupt. They're all useless. And what we must have is a civilizational struggle. Some of it's on behalf of high Western civilization, but some of it, I think, on behalf of Christianity against against Islam or against Confucianism or the West.

50:18And again, this vision of a collective civilization engaged in war with other collective civilizations, which are wrong or inferior or in some way different and wrong, is a very dangerous way of looking at the world. It's certainly the very opposite of global pluralism. is um just thinking more widely is leadership the problem for liberalism i'm trying to think of the

50:42Lewis Goodall:sort of figures you might sort of call recognizably liberal or advocates of liberalism over the past 10 years i mean macron is the obvious example but macron has struggled politically he's re-elected which is no mean feat in the french presidential system so he's certainly not a political failure although you could argue that his desire to try and bring french politics to a recognizably liberal place has clearly failed. Is leadership a problem or is Macron actually a salutary tale that liberalism doesn't have much to offer? Leadership is a massive problem, but for structural reasons. Because the liberal elite has been in power for a long time, it's acquired a lot of the problems of the establishment.

51:20It's become inbred, it's become divorced from regular people, it's become slightly arrogant. And because this orthodoxy, this Bobo orthodoxy has become rather frozen You have a group of people in power, but not confidently in power. They're the very opposite of Tony Blair was once in power, but very confident and eloquent of being in power. You have people in power, but not really capable of understanding or explaining why they're in power. This is why we need a revolution within the center with new people coming in, presenting new arguments, arguments that I try to make during this podcast. a bit more judgmental a bit more pro-home and less pro-absolute freedom a bit more willing to talk about cultural solidarity and community and things like that and I can't see anybody Macron's very interesting because Macron was sort of like a neoliberal a bit late and Macron also had a personality that was so bound up with his Napoleon complex and things like that that he alienaged a lot of people but he was the last person from the centre who was really intellectually a serious person.

52:28And when he talked about new global architectures, the failure of NATO, some of the failures of the EU, he was very interesting. He just didn't sell it very well. He wasn't as good at that sort of thing. And as I say, because of France being France, he was preaching a doctrine of neoliberalism, which was new in France, but very old elsewhere. It was as if Tony Blair had arrived 15 years later. Yeah, exactly. But what have we got here? We've got Ed Davey. I mean, what you have with Ed Davey is not only just somebody who's intellectually paralysed, because he's basically a mixture of economic and social liberal, but who thinks that the way to make up for that is to dance around and shout and do silly gesture policy.

53:07You need somebody from the centre who is willing to articulate a new blueprint. And if you do that, just as Churchill and Lloyd George and Asquith were doing in the early 20s, you'll very rapidly get a political movement coalescing around you. And I think we're beginning to see some people. There's a man who the mayor of the new mayor of San Francisco came into as a mayor of San Francisco from the progressive left, but said, look, basically said, if progressivism means thousands of people living in tents, shooting up heroin and smoking crack in the streets, that's not what that's a failure. We need to change that.

53:43So these are more responsible, community minded centrists. Is Keir Starmer a liberal, would you say? Keir Starmer is a passionate, convinced liberal for whom the essence of liberalism lies in global international law. I think that's absolutely right. I think he's not vigorous enough in rethinking some of the assumptions of Bobo liberalism. But his heart entirely is in the right place.

54:15Lewis Goodall:um just so finally you talk about needing that sort of revolutionary center and new people to come forward when i think about politics over the last 10 years certainly since the brexit referendum i think in a way that referendum sort of set the seal on what was to come in the sense that what was the sort of central word at the heart of that campaign which actually looks if anything as if it was um rather prescient it was control it was control and the politics certainly since then has become more and more in a world that's become more and more unstable. You've seen electorates yearn somehow for control for governments and for states to exercise control very often to to protect them.

54:58Lewis Goodall:Is the problem with that revolutionary center that you're talking about is that it is very hard to emerge because fundamentally liberalism doesn't have much to say about control. I mean even you yourself say that the most pressing liberal task is not to create a utopia which is to prevent terrible things from happening. It's not much of a vision to inspire people, is it, particularly when people feel scared and that they want control and security? I think that a feeling that we're not in control, we don't have any control of our lives, is absolutely, as you say, at the centre of the appeal of populism.

55:31And I think in order to survive in a world where people are drawn towards populism, liberalism has to answer that quest. And it has to do so in a liberal way, rather than in a totalitarian or populist way. This is why I emphasise the idea that you can make moral judgments, that you can say this way of life is better than that way of life. So if you're saying that taking drugs is bad, that shooting up heroin in the street is bad, and if you act to stop that sort of things they're now doing in San Francisco, you're not just solving a problem, you're also addressing this general sense of lack of control.

56:09So if you say that assimilation for immigrant communities is absolutely the central of what we do, we can't just have parallel communities, you have to have some sort of common culture into which people are assimilated. You're not just doing a good thing, I think, for the health of society. You're also addressing this worry about control, the idea that things are out of control. And the thing that most worries me, which I talk a lot about in this book, is that we now have a collection of digital companies which are driven entirely by profit, which have created a whole collection of algorithms which make us addicted to scrolling, addicted to clicking on this, that and the other, which disseminate information regardless of whether it's true, and which are calculated to make us emotional, engage our emotions as much as possible.

57:04If you have that at the heart of your media complex, then you are instilling in the population a sense of lack of control. And once you have that sense of lack of control, you will have a desire for a tyrant, a strongman to restore control.

57:21Lewis Goodall:So maybe liberalism's best hope is to rediscover something that you started with, which seems to me is a fundamental component of liberalism across time and space, and which a lot of other political ideologies, philosophies do not have, which is a suspicion of concentrated power. Absolutely. And that maybe that is the future to have, to rediscover that, or for a political force to rediscover that lens through which to set up politics. Now, Lord Acton said that power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. I think that's absolutely right. That should be the lens through which we look at strongmen regimes.

57:51We saw Orban corrupted by power and eventually falling because of that corruption. We see Putin massively corrupted by power, but not falling because he just kills anybody who he doesn't agree with or makes their life very difficult. Let's put it like that. but we have now in the private sector a collection of companies which are as powerful as any company since the end of the 19th century if not more powerful and the notion power corrupts absolute power corrupts absolutely should be applied to the private sector as much as to the public sector

58:23Lewis Goodall:the commercial sector and is it not but is it not the just thinking finally about geopolitics is one of liberalism's primary problems in a way this is one way that you can understand Trump and that desire to exercise control and to invest power in a strong man which is that for the first time arguably since the immediate post second world war period in the 1950s early 60s there is a power in the world which is fundamentally illiberal but whose economic model and political model actually from the outside at least might not seem so in the inside but from the outside at least appears to be working and that is China and that therefore in a way Trump and other liberal forces are a kind of response to that that we need a more muscular version of our society to compete with a rising power like that which is not a feature that we've had since those middle days of the soviet union absolutely a lot of people ask me why did i write a book on liberalism when you know it's such a capacious thing that emits so many different varieties of liberalism but one reason to do it is that there are societies now which are self-consciously illiberal societies which want to replace the liberal world order with an illiberal world order and the most important of those is china which is coming up to being as big economically as the united states and as powerfully militarily as the united states so liberalism can finally see itself in the fact that illiberal powers are threatening to take over the world edmund muldridge been a pleasure talking to you thank you very much we're going to go and watch a few soap operas together.

59:53Lewis Goodall:A few episodes of Neighbours after some Tosca.

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1:00:42Lewis Goodall:Well, Adrian's book, Centrists of the World Unite, The Lost Genius of Liberalism, is available now. I, for one, am off to cancel my weekend home and away marathon and watch some Pacini instead. Thanks as ever to our always cultured production team on the newsagent Shane Fennelly, Michaela Walters, Lizzie Ward, Natalie Inge, Anna Georgievich, Jess Williamson, Sam Trudgel and back by no popular demand whatsoever, Arvin Baddwell. Our executive producer is Louis Degenhardt. Our editor is Tom Hughes. It's presented by John Sopel, Maitlis, that is Maitlis, a first name lost at time, and me, Lewis Goodall.

1:01:14Lewis Goodall:We will be back on Monday. Have a lovely weekend. This has been a Global Player original production.