Tracing the rise of illiberalism

Thomas Main's new book The Rise of Illiberalism explores the philosophical underpinnings of this toxic political ideology and documents how it has infiltrated the mainstream of political discourse in the United States. By the early twenty-first century, Main writes, liberal democracy’s failure to deal adequately with social problems created a space illiberal movements could exploit to promote their particular brands of identity politics as an alternative.

While illiberalism has found a home across the political spectrum, it is far more prevalent on the right — so much so that it appears to have taken over the modern-day Republican Party as evidenced on January 6, 2021. We explore those ideas with Main this week and also revisit the foundations of liberal democracy as outlined in the Declaration of Independence.

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The Rise of Illiberalism

Thomas Main on Twitter

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‍Michael Berkman
From the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University. I'm Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem
I'm Chris Beem.

Jenna Spinelle
I'm Jenna Spinelle, and welcome to Democracy Works. This week, we are talking with Thomas Main, who is the author of the book, the rise of liberalism, just published by Brookings press. And as we dig into the foundations that underlie liberalism, and liberalism, we really I think, need to go to the Declaration of Independence. And we talked a lot on this show and have talked a lot about the Constitution and the Federalist Papers and those types of things. But I don't think we've really spent much time on the declaration over the course of the time we've been doing the show,

Chris Beem
The declaration is law. And really, the bulk of the document is laying out these grievances against King George. But the first two, three paragraphs are pretty important. They basically set the foundation for American governments. And he says the issue is illiberalism. So if you're going to you know, that's a negative definition. So you have to know what liberalism is. And so best way to do that is to go back to the source that he goes back to, which is the declaration

Michael Berkman
Chris, you're right, that much of the Declaration of Independence is a list of grievances, I often think of it as, or at least a reminds me of celebrations of Festivus, and the area of grief. And the

Chris Beem
Only Jefferson would appreciate that

Michael Berkman
Well, maybe Seinfeld read the read the Declaration of Independence, because it is quite a list of grievances. I don't want to focus on those I think I think we're we want to spend a little bit of time before Jenna's interview is on the basic Enlightenment principles that are laid out in the Declaration of Independence, because that's really, you know, it is, of course, a statement of the colonists independence from the crown. But its language also draws heavily upon Locke, and other enlightenment scholars in laying out very different sorts of foundations for building governments. And you know, sort of Hobbes the notion of a leviathan that can just overwhelm everything to a very different idea. And I think it's captured best in just the second paragraph. And this, of course, is the part of the Declaration of Independence that everybody knows best. And we hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. Chris, when you think about the Declaration of Independence and enlightenment, what are you hearing in that particular paragraph?

Chris Beem
Well, it's really, really dense, isn't it? And you're right, every word is tense, right, inalienable. I mean, I bet you most Americans have no idea what that means. But what what that means is that because you have these rights, and because they are given to you as a product of your humanity, you cannot you cannot take give them away, and they cannot be taken from you, as a human being you have them. So that is the foundation on which everything else kind of proceeds, right. And to say it's self evident means, you know, if you understand the term human human being, if you understand what a human being is, you just understand that those rights are there. And so that is the ground for a democracy. Everything else follows from that.

Michael Berkman
Yeah, if it actually if I just to pick up on what you're saying, Chris, I actually say two truths are self evidence. Right, the first truth that's self evident is that all men are created equal. And then the second is that they are endowed with an unalienable rights. But then I want to go a step further on, because I think it's really important. And that is to say that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men. Now, I always read this as a really important development and foundational statement about democracy. And that is that the government is set up, to protect your rights, not to step on your rights, not to deny your rights, not even to develop those rights, because there aren't because they are self evident, but rather to protect those rights.

Chris Beem
And as long as those rights are respected, then the people will give the government its consent. Once the government fails to do that, then the people because that's the job of the government if it fails to do that, not only do the people have the right, they even have the you know, I mean, some says the obligation to say no to this company. And to come up with a different form.

Michael Berkman
And so what I think is so interesting about Tom mains work that we'll hear about shortly, is that it picks up on this verse section. Mm hmm. And is basically trying to argue that there's this political phenomenon in our country. And I'll let you draw out the argument a little bit more. And it's complex,

Chris Beem
So there's all kinds of contention is part or its constituent of a democratic product of politics, people are going to disagree, and they're going to fight about those disagreements. That's just democracy. But throughout American history, the vast preponderance of people have accepted the idea that the kind of grounding principles of American democracy, not just that there is some kind of equality and we can talk about what that means. And we probably should. But the idea that there is some kind of fundamental political equality, the idea that there are fundamental human rights, electoral democracy, that people choose their governors, and but they remain sovereign, that there's a rule of law that applies to everyone.

Michael Berkman
Right. And he's doing this by drawing on the rhetoric, the actions, the beliefs of a wide range of groups that he's kind of grouping together right under this notion of illiberalism. So whether they be fascists, or Neo fascists, or hardcore Nazis, or the John Birch Society, or just an anti semitic group of some kind, right racist group of sometimes bringing them all together under this general idea of liberalism.

Jenna Spinelle
I think that's a you, both of you did did a great job of sort of laying out the framework for his arguments. And let's go to the interview to hear some more. So here is the interview with Tom main.

Jenna Spinelle

Thomas Main, welcome to Democracy Works. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thomas Main
Hi, I'm happy to be here.

Jenna Spinelle
So excited to talk with you about your latest book, The Rise of liberalism. And I know you have sort of published along these lines before your last book was the rise of the alt right, which came out in 2018. can you start us off by talking a little bit about how you got from that book to this new one?

Thomas Main
Yeah, well, you know, I wrote the rise of New York right after I had finished another big project, and was looking for something to do. And then I became aware, newly aware of these radical, radically anti democratic websites and movements. So I buy through and at that time, that when I got interested in it, a lot of people, when I talked to them about my interest, they say, Oh, this No, no, it's such a small group of people, or other just slipping off their, you know, populist conservatives. Cool. So I wrote the rise of the alt right to dock the size of the movement, which was considerable, and how radical it was. And then also, I wanted to talk about what to do about the rise of what I call a liberalism, which is simply the rejection of any or all of the principles of liberal democracy. So I decided, you know, a more comprehensive analysis of, you know, a deeper discussion of where these ideas came from, right, especially their ideas about identity, and the problem with their ideas about identity, and then a discussion of what to do about that. The rise in the penetration of these liberal ideologies. That's, that's what I wanted to do in the rise of liberalism.

Jenna Spinelle
You used a couple words there that I think are sometimes used interchangeably in more popular media accounts of these topics. And that's it liberalism, and populism. Can you walk us through similarities, differences, how we should think about each of those things?

Thomas Main
So first of all, liberalism is in my definition, it's extremely radical. It's an ideology, right, which explicitly steps forward and rejects one or more of the principles of liberal democracy, and what are the principles of liberal democracy? You know, they're summed up very nicely in the second paragraph of the Declaration of Independence. So it's political egalitarianism, right? Everybody has the same political status, human rights, right? electoral democracy, but just consent of the governed. It's the rule of law. Okay. Nobody is above or outside of the rule. And it's an ethics of controversy and a political culture that are based on tolerance and rational discussion. So that's a liberalism and to reject any of those principles is extremely radical position. Now populism is a rather good Different I know I'm not sure I can put my finger on on our definition of it, you know, it focuses seems to be mostly on appealing to one slice of the population. You know, in the United States of America populism expresses itself as kind of a desire to protect and advance the interests of the white working class. Now put that way, populism isn't, you know, it's neither here nor there. But what has happened is in the United States, populism has now become closely wedded with the liberalism and populism is much more problematic than it necessarily needs to be.

Jenna Spinelle

Right. And you spend an entire chapter in the book sort of taking a deep dive into the audience for illiberalism looking at websites and blogs and other accounts that folks may gravitate toward? Can you just give us a sense of the size and then the scope of this sort of getting back to what you were saying earlier about this being more than just a fringe element out there?

Thomas Main
This is a key element. I mean, and you can still see, you know, for instance, of some some months ago, Tucker Carlson said, Well, how large is the audience for white Suprematism of York, right? Oh, it's so tiny, the number of people would fit into a football stadium. So I wanted to test that hypothesis. So and it was in his very important point, when you ask, how big is a movement? Or how big is the audience for ideology? Everything depends on compared to what? Right? So if you say, Oh, this website received 20 million visits per month? Well, is that a lot or a little? Right? Well, you don't you know, it all depends on what other websites are receiving. So what I did is I found a place, it's called Media bias, fact check, which sorts all sorts of websites ideologically, okay, from the right, or let's say from the left, okay, which is, you know, mainstream traditional progressivism or liberalism, as it used to be called through the left center, the center, the right center, and the right, okay, so they sorted hundreds of websites in that way. Okay. So I had that. And then I put together a list of what I call you liberal, right sites. Okay. And how did I do that? Well, I went to sites that boldly stepped forward and said, oh, there we are, all right, or Hello, there. We're neo Nazi, you know, or, or otherwise specified their illiberal orientation. I went to those sites, I looked at the sites that those proceed site listed in their blog roles and links lists, okay, I collected catalogs of sites, from places the Southern Poverty Law Center and the anti Defamation League. And I went through them, I sorted through them, I pulled out what I thought were the sites that were truly illiberal. And but let's so so what ends by the way, there's a right wing of liberalism, and there's a left wing of liberalism, you know, left wing liberalism is things communism, Maoism, anarchism, and so forth. Anyhow. So when you do this, and you end up with identified, I think it was 215, hardcore, right wing illiberal sites. And they had an audience, but and by the way, you can buy data on web traffic to site which is what I did. So I just, I put the data, and I discovered that in the first 11 months of 2019, these hardcore right illiberal sites received on monthly average, about 186 million visits per month. Well, is that lighter, a little? Uh, well, it's about 30%, the size of the audience for mainstream conservative sites like National Review and such places, it's about 30%, the size of that audience, it's about 19%, the size of the audience for mainstream sites, like the new Republican in the nation.

Jenna Spinelle
So you have from what you've described, spent more time on these sites in this world, and certainly than I have, or I'm going to guess many of our listeners have, can you just talk a little bit more about what you saw some some of the takeaways from your time in this particular corner of the internet?

Thomas Main
Well, many of these sites are very, very rad and, you know, we're not talking about your, you know, your grandfather's conservatism. No, we're not talking about conservatism that's, you know, similar to that of Ronald Reagan, but just a little bit more crude. I mean, let me let me let me give you some quotes from various sites, okay. The notion that all All men are created equal is nonsense. Right? That's the front of the American Renaissance. Right. And which is, which is a right that you know illiberal right website. By the way, if you had to put your finger on a single concept that sums up the illiberal, right? It's this idea that all people are not created equal. Okay, you know, Greg Johnson, who is the editor of counter currents, publishing one of the most radical and a philosophical or right sites, he says the true right rejects egalitarianism, route and branch. Okay, on electoral democracy, the sites reject electoral democracy, Zero Hedge, which is a liberal site that gets about 22 million visits a month on average, they say, democracy is pitting of individuals against each other leads to moral degeneration and impairs capital accumulation. Okay, and you know, it would be easy to go on. Okay. But the point here is, this represents a very conscious understanding of the principles of liberal democracy and a very conscious rejection of them.

Jenna Spinelle
So what changed? You just said, you know, this, people have not always thought this way, or at least not as many people have always thought that way. What's different now, that wasn't true 30 or 40 years ago?

Thomas Main
Well, I would tell you this, there was always on the right, a LM what back then wasn't known as a liberalism, it wasn't known as the old right. It was known as right wing extremists. And this would be the things like the John Birch Society, there was a publication The American mercury, which was anti semitic, okay. And there were other fringe movements like that, but they had a relatively small audience. And Bill Buckley at National Review, we've succeeded in creating a platform for conservative ideas that rejected anti semitism, overt racism, explicit rejection of liberal democracy. And by the way, this isn't necessarily meant as a defense of the National Review. You can think whatever you want to about it. But it is clear that for instance, you know, Buckley devoted an entire issue of the National Review to rejecting the birchers Okay, now, Buckley could make this stick. And why is that because hey, if somebody submitted a anti semitic article, you know, an overtly racist article, Buckley would just reject it. So it didn't get into the pages of National Review. So what this means is that it and by the way, creating a digital platform is much less capital intensive than putting together a magazine. Right. So now, it's now it becomes cheap and easy for these fringe groups to reach a mass audience. And moreover, the platform's on digital media did not engage in the kind of gatekeeping that the editors of the old mainstream conservative magazines used to do. And that was much more difficult to do, because it's very difficult to keep track of all the sites on the Internet and say, Okay, this one, this neo Nazi site over here, we're taking it down, that's harder to do. So that's number one number. But number two, it wasn't just a creation of digital media. Also, starting around 2000, there were a series of shocks to American politics, you know, starting with 911, right. And then there was the second Iraq War, there was the financial meltdown of 2008. Okay, there was, you know, immigration, which had been continuing for a long time in the United States from 65 on, finally, people start to notice the demographic changes that's happening, and you know, you have the white working class feels correctly or that free trade policies and other policies have overlooked them. And also, you know, you have the election of a black president, which for some people was an enormous breakthrough, and for other people was a deep shock. So anyhow, what happens is, you have these shocks to the system, convince at least a lot of people that, hey, you know, the old fashion ideologies are not working anymore. That opens up a willingness people become more receptive to new ideas. That's especially true on the right, because all of these many of these shocks hang on the watch of George W. Bush. And so it was mainstream conservatism that took a lot of hits. So the point is this. You had the shakeup, the apparent challenge of the mainstream political ideas, right? It happens on the watch of mainstream conservatives, right, you have the rise of digital media, right? And, and also you have the endurance of this small group of extremists, all that came together and the right wing extremists, now rechristened as the alt right or liberalism or whatever term you want to use, they finally managed to find an audience.

Jenna Spinelle
He talked at the very beginning, one of the principles of liberalism, liberal democracy is, you know, valuing electoral democracy, just consent of the governed and those types of things. Using that part of the frame, can you talk us through how you get from, you know, what you've seen on illiberal websites and on these fringe media to the big lie? And you know, what we're seeing now, in terms of the current crisis that American democracy is facing?

Thomas Main
I would say, this kind of a trickle down process, you know, in general, how do ideas and by the way, I am firmly in the camp of political scientists who believe that ideas are an independent political resource. You're distinct from money, organization, votes, okay? And ideas, the ability to step forward and say, Hey, I know how to handle this problem and make a convincing argument for it. That's a source of power. Okay. So how do ideas have any impact at all on policy and an electoral politics? Well, these ideas get by experts, right, and very high levels of abstraction, you know, Nobel Prize winning economists and so forth. And then there's a whole kind of process, right? whereby these ideas get simplified somewhat by intellectuals, right? They get tinkered with so that they apply to specific policy issues, right, they get picked up by the mass media, and eventually ideas, like, for example, the market oriented sort of analysis of that, too, became so popular and so widespread in the 1980s. That was the result of this kind of trickle down process. So you'll have something like that happening with this new set of, you know, I wouldn't call them intellectuals or experts, they're more like, the more like lumping intellectuals and pseudo experts, right. But they're, they have these websites where they crank out their idea. And you know, and so some of these people are or people of ability, however limited, they crank out the the ideology, and then the ideology slowly gets watered down a little bit. Right, and becomes easier to be disseminated. And your crucially, the most overt explicit statements of illiberalism like all people are not created equal, or you know, really, the white race is really the important race, black lives really don't matter that much. Well, that's that sort of stuff is not suitable for dissemination on broadcast or cable TV. But however, very importantly, also associated with liberalism is not only a set of ideas, but a distinct rhetorical strategy, right? Because one of the key principles of liberalism is politics is war. And adversaries are literal traders, right? So if that's true, your rhetoric is going to be a rhetoric of it's going to be a weaponized rhetoric, it's going to be a rhetoric that doesn't really seek to persuade anybody but to attack.

Jenna Spinelle
There's also I think, a deeply rooted sense of identity here and and what it means to be an American to have an American identity. Yeah, can you can you talk more about that?

Thomas Main
So let's talk about different types of identity politics. Okay. First of all, one type of identity politics is the type of identity politics you see associated with, let's say, BlackLivesMatter, or with the mainstream feminist movement, or with Latino groups, okay. And, you know, these these groups, what you have, there's really nothing new about this form of identity politics. If you read James Madison is Federalist 10. He talks about, he doesn't talk about interest groups, he talks about factions, right. And of course, it's well known that he celebrates the creation of factions at because that a pluralistic political environment like that he thinks makes for political liberty, and he talks about different types of factions. He talks about a manufacturing faction, a landed faction, a trading faction, an agricultural faction, and he talks a little bit about religious factions, but he doesn't talk about factions that are based in ethnicity or race or sex. Okay. So the rise of those sorts of factions is a relatively new phenomenon, right and in principle is not you know, if black people organized to advance their interests if women organized to advance their interest that's not fundamentally different from if manufacturers organized to advance their interests for example. And so if you if for instance, if you look at go to Black Lives Matters website you will see a which says, you know, this is a very close paraphrase We are on unapologetically black, right? But however, in order to love other people, we must first love and care for ourselves. So that so that's not an anti white sentiment, that's simply saying, Hey, we're one group amongst others, and you know, other groups fine, you know, we eventually will, you know, we'll be, you know, we'll find a way to love them. But you know, for the moment, what we want to do is get our own act together. So that kind of identity politics is really not terribly unproblematic. I mean, it's true that many people oppose the formation of black and Hispanic and feminist groups. But it principle it's all easily compatible with liberal democracy. However, the identity politics of the alt right is entirely different. Right? It's, that's properly called identitarian. ISM, it says, first of all, my identity is entirely based on my race. Okay. And politics is entirely one of promoting the interests of my race, at the expense of other races. Okay. And moreover, my race is superior to the other races, and is locked in a zero sum combat with other races for political power. Alright, so that kind of identity politics that's positively lethal to liberal democracy, however, there is a form of identity politics, right, which I think addresses some of the issues that motivate identitarians, they want to find some unifying factor that pulls the many interest or the many factions of a pluralistic politics together. And that in and of itself is not a bad ambition. What's What's bad is when you when you you know, define that unifying force as race. Now, so is there such a unifying force? Is there an American identity? The answer turns out to be yes. And if you look at the empirical work that's been done by Deborah shield crowd, she's done an extremely important work, where she poll Americans of all different backgrounds, and races and ethnicities. And it turns out there is a set of ideas that the vast majority of Americans believe, and that can be thought of as an American identity that kind of unifies everybody. And those ideas are one an embrace of the liberal tradition, right? To what chilled crowd calls civic republicanism. This is the idea that, hey, Americans work in their communities, they join groups to make their communities better. That's kind of like the Tocqueville alien sense of American activism, there is incorporation ism, which celebrates what we now call diversity. And then unfortunately, you know, there are there is an element of culturalism, with aka good old fashioned racism, that a lot of Americans do believe that to be an American, you need to be white. So that's the ID of American identity, which has to be balanced, and combated by the other positive features of American identity.

Jenna Spinelle
And so that gets us to the what do we do about it question.

Thomas Main
All right. First of all, I would say that one way to deal with the demographic changes, and the changes wrought by globalization and free trade and the rise of groups, blacks, women achieving a levels of political power they hadn't had before. One way of dealing with that of trying to smooth the transition to a new American Majority, right is for intellectuals politicians to argue that these developments are essentially consistent with the American identity. Right? You know, clearly, the corporation just element of the American identity can obviously be put to good use to say, Hey, listen, we've incorporated all sorts of groups into American politics, you know, including the ethnic groups that came over in the 19th century, early 20th century pay, we can do the same thing with rising new groups like blacks, Latinos and women. However, I also think structural reform is absolutely essential. Okay, so a couple of things. First of all, it has to be admitted the Constitution, one of the great creations, political creations of the human mind, you know, it's got certain features of it, like the Electoral College, okay, like equal representation in the Senate or like the fact that there is no explicit right to vote in the Constitution, these things have to be dealt with. Okay. And also the, you know, the Senate and quasi constitutional provisions like the the filibuster. So what we have to do is we have to work for to achieve a truly realigning election on the level of like 1964. That was the last time that you had a smashing electoral victory that produced majorities in both houses of Congress and control of enough state legislatures, right, to make constitutional reform possible. So I think constitutional reform is very important. And I also think there has to be some reform in internet regulation. As things now stand of a digital provider, a provider allows someone to make libelous or racist statements, right, then the digital provider is held harmless, it's kind of the way that a bookseller is held harmless. If he sells the book, or she sells a book that contains libel, you can sell you can sue the publisher, you can sue the author, you can't sue the bookstore. So the problem with that is it gives the digital platforms no incentive to moderate themselves. And I think that things have to be changed so that the platforms like Google, like Facebook, etc, have more of an incentive to moderate and edit themselves.

Jenna Spinelle
So you've just laid out a whole bunch of potential reforms there, both in terms of ideological or you know, ideas, and also structural reform. How optimistic are you about any of this coming to fruition anytime soon?

Thomas Main
I'm kind of a cockeyed optimist. I mean, my sense is that, you know, unlike other countries that have seen the rise of illiberal populism, right, I think, democratic institutions, and liberal ideas are just too deeply ingrained into American political culture into the American identity. Right. And I think that the, you know, the quality of ideas counts, you can say anything you want to about the, the free market, Neo liberal ideology that caught on in the 80s. Right. But the intellectuals and the academics who advance that many of them not all, you know, there were there were plenty of hacks, as there always are. But there were there were some serious thinkers coming out of law, for instance, Chicago school of economics, which I'm not necessarily endorsing, I'm simply saying that the level of thought, right, in that movement was pretty high. Well, the level of thought amongst right wing liberals is pretty low. Right? And so I think, you know, this the kind of this the essential failure on simply on a purely intellectual plane of the liberal movement, and also the roots of liberalism understood now as liberal democracy. It's just too deep for there to be a fundamental overturning of liberal democracy in the United States. We may be in for a negative period, but I think we will organize and think our way out.

Jenna Spinelle
We will leave it there that Tom, thank you so much for joining us today.

Thomas Main
Great, thank you so much to

Michael Berkman
Jenna, terrific interview, working and engaging interviewer to work through a complex book that takes on a lot of political theory is so really nice. I want to pick up on something that brings this whole thing into more contemporary times as he does himself thinking about January six, thinking about some of what's come up after January six. What strikes me about contemporary liberalism, compared to some older liberalism is the way that it's worked itself into one of the two major political parties that was really struck by a new story just this week that had to do with Peter Thal, I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly the deal. But anyway, you're the conservative billionaire tech guy, big supporter of Donald Trump, possibly one of the largest contributors to Republican candidates right now going into the 2020 to 2024 cycle. And what the article talked about is how Thiel is directing his money towards candidates who support the idea that the election was stolen, and to support the insurrectionists from January six. And as we talked about on previous shows, if you don't accept the peaceful transition of power, you're basically not accepting democracy.

Chris Beem
I mean, there's no two ways about that. There is all of this kind of fits together. Right? You know, he's talking about people giving up on on democracy, giving up on the idea that everyone has the same rights, giving up on the idea that there is a standard of behavior and rhetoric that is appropriate for a democracy and giving up on even a rejection of violence. All of this is is kind of combined in in what we see as illiberalism right now.

Michael Berkman
So he talks about the media as gatekeepers. And we've also, you know, we've had on the obvious claims of right of how democracies die, and they talk about party.

Chris Beem
Yeah, I wrote that down, too. And what's so important here,

Michael Berkman
I think, is how party gatekeepers on the right, have basically said, anything goes

Chris Beem
Well, and if not the power to change it. Yeah. But they acquiesce to it. Or they've lost any power to change it.

Michael Berkman
Yes. But when you also elevate somebody, like feel as one of our major party donors, right, yeah, he is specifically giving money to those who try to overturn the election. Mm hmm. That is really bringing this illiberalism into the heart of the Republican Party?

Chris Beem
No, I think he I think Tom would agree with that. I think

Michael Berkman
I mean, not to mention, not to mention Trump. Well, that, too, is like The Walking embodiment. Right of illiberalism, right.

Chris Beem
There are illiberal elements on the left. And insofar as they reject some of these core liberal principles, they are the same, but they are not remotely the same. Any of these manifestations on the left are simply incidental compared to the role of these moments on the right. And this is this is a quote I wrote down from the book that I think you know, just says just that, if the penetration of illiberalism into American political culture is a matter of concern, the problem is to be found exclusively on our right flank. The illiberal left is my Newt, entirely isolated and unengaged, the illiberal, right is sizeable, closely connected with mainstream political tendencies, and dramatically more engaged with political discourse than any other ideological tendency. This is not something that he's just asserting. He's using this fairly sophisticated empirical analysis of websites, and and the kind of machinery by which these ideas get moved into the popular discourse to make a fairly, you know, this is his conclusion. They're not the same.

Michael Berkman
So I get that. But I also think that by doing that he may be missing some of the very important manifestations of this illiberalism today, because websites are yesterday.

Chris Beem
Yeah, you're saying, however strongly, he's making his point, you think it has it at least is likely to be even stronger?

Michael Berkman

Because there's an aspect of and I, you know, you could maybe handle this better than me, Chris. But I think I feel like there's an aspect of the liberalism that we've talked about with some other people hear about misinformation about this sort of epistemological polarization about this idea that there's a whole world of people out there who are being exposed to a sort of reality that reality based humans don't see as reality. Right. And I, you know, it's on web pages. Sure. But it's, it's actually, I think, even more so in a lot of other places. Right out if Alex Jones, he may have a website, but mostly he was on YouTube.

Chris Beem
Mm hmm. Well, first, he was on Fox, right. And then he got kicked off. And he got kicked off.

Michael Berkman
Yeah, yeah. And you know, and Q Anon, which is just insidious, right now. And which brings us sort of conspiracism and into this whole thing, they that in the interview anyway, let's really talk about No, that's all on Reddit, or maybe not even on Reddit anymore. Maybe it moved to something that I don't even know.

Chris Beem
And, you know, and I was actually trying to think I mean, you know, there is conspiracism. In senate hearings, the way people talk about Fauci the way he's questioned, there is the presumption, at minimum, the suspicion and maybe the presumption that he is part of an elite that is not interested in serving the body politic, has its own agenda and is out for power for his own group. And we have to expose this and then destroy it.

Michael Berkman
And that's where as he argues that politics comes around to being a war. Yeah. Where the other side is seen as an enemy where there is no there can't be any kind of democratic deliberation. You know, I was really struck. I don't know if this ran during the Super Bowl, or if I just saw it on Twitter as something that was supposed to run during the Super Bowl. But one of the Senate candidates here in Pennsylvania, ran an ad that where the basic, not even the tagline throughout the ad was, was this Brandon thing? How does Let's go, Brandon, let's go, Brandon. So essentially, he's bringing into the debate for this Senate race, just basically calling the just cursing at the president. Right. What kind of liberal discourse is this? I mean, I'm not sure how one reconciles that with the extent to which a liberalism has worked. its way into one of the two major political parties. So I mean, for me to share that sort of optimism, I think would depend somewhat on how a fight that we might see emerging within the Republican Party kind of ends up. I'm not as optimistic as him that the small d Democrats within the Republican Party are going to when he says that we're in for a rough patch.

Chris Beem
And you know, if you call, you know, you could call Guadalcanal, a rough patch, you know, I mean, it can get very bad indeed. But I think it is correct to say that the political culture of the United States of America is not the same as the political culture of Hungary.

Michael Berkman
On the other hand, you know, Florida is about to pass a law that will basically make it illegal for you to talk about being gay. Yeah, homosexuality,

Chris Beem
Yeah, in a classroom.

Michael Berkman
So if part of the point of the Declaration of Independence is that government protects your rights, right? No, not not really seeing it?

Chris Beem
No, there's no two ways about that. It's incorrect, empirically incorrect, to belittle or not take seriously the moment that we are in because he's right. There's a condition of an a degree and an empowerment of a liberalism, that you would have to go back over a century, maybe more to see to see its like in American history. And so I think that is a really good reason to bring him on the show to have him write the book and to talk about these things. So thanks, Jenna, for the interview. And thanks, Michael. I'm Chris Beem.

Michael Berkman
I'm Michael Berkman.

Chris Beem
Thanks for listening.

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