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Demonstrators protest against Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), leader of U.S. Senate Democrats, for not taking sufficient action against President Donald Trump. Photo: Rhododendrites/CC BY-SA 4.0

Episode Summary

For many years, non-Americans have assumed that the right-wing extremism that has powered the political career of Donald Trump was just an American phenomenon. But this is simply untrue. Far-right parties have been elected in nations like Italy, Poland and Hungary, and Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government is a coalition of openly racist and genocidal parties. And for the first time in modern history, far-right political parties are placing first in public opinion surveys in the UK, France, and Germany.

These trends aren’t in place in every country, of course, but they do suggest that there is something deeply wrong with left liberalism as practiced in many nations. That’s especially true in the UK where Labour Party prime minister Keir Starmer has been systematically ceding policy ground to reactionaries like Nigel Farage in a way that would make even Chuck Schumer blush.

Both Democrats and Labour seem to be operating under the impression that making concessions to the right wing will somehow mollify voters but the voting data keeps showing that this does not work. How has liberalism become so moribund? Is it a misunderstanding of how politics works, simple cowardice, or something deeply pathological about liberalism’s philosophical approach to governance versus politicking?

I’d argue that it’s all of these things, and joining me in this episode to discuss is Toby Buckle, he’s host of the Political Philosophy Podcast and columnist who’s written recently about the lingering negative impact of the philosopher John Rawls. We also discuss the concept of “reactionary centrism,” a term that some American progressives have been using to describe people who self-describe as liberal but seem to almost never criticize the radical right. I don’t think it’s an accurate term, even though I agree that it describes something very real.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

03:48 — John Rawls: A philosopher whose liberalism doesn't work in the 21st century

06:18 — Liberalism's unearned sense of victory

09:25 — Conservatism has lost its post-WWII memory of why fascism is terrible and stupid

18:32 — Immanuel Kant's hollowing out of liberalism

25:23 — An introduction to “reactionary centrism” via UK prime minister Keir Starmer

37:16 — Isn't reactionary centrism mostly just conservatism?

49:44 — Sam Harris and libertarianism masquerading as liberalism

01:00:53 — The bad politics of “popularism”

01:09:47 — Most people vote according to values, not according to policies

01:20:08 — Reactionary centrism encompasses conservatism, pathological liberalism, and the amoral

01:25:01 — What the positive liberal case looks like

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: And joining me now is Toby Buckle. Hey, Toby, welcome to Theory of Change.

TOBY BUCKLE: Hey, Matthew, thanks for having me.

SHEFFIELD: Yes, good to have you. Well, so we have a lot to discuss here. I will confess that some of my favorite episodes are the political philosophy episodes. Because, as John Maynard Keynes said, the ideas of dead economists and philosophers animate things much more than people realize.

And so--

BUCKLE: "Madmen in authority, hearing voices in the air are usually distilling their their fervor from some academic scribbler."

SHEFFIELD: Yep, that is right. Yeah. And to that end though, you published two pieces that I think are, worth discussing together. The first one that you came out with was a discussion of [00:04:00] the political philosopher John Rawls, who is somebody who I suspect a lot of people have never heard of. But this guy has a lot of influence on both the UK and the US. So, if you could maybe give a little background for people who aren't familiar with him and then we can go from there.

BUCKLE: Yeah, it's an interesting dichotomy isn't it, in that if you are in political theory, he will be talked about as the most important liberal political philosopher of the 20th century.

Possibly the most important political philosopher sort of period, certainly of the latter half. And yet it's not a household name, right? Rawls has never had the cut through of a Marx, or Rousseau, or something like that. Crowds have never gathered in the streets, chatting his slogans. He has had something of an influence at the elite level.

So I use Obama as an example. Obama has clearly read Rawls and cites him a few times. It's also the type of thinking that would show up in, something like Supreme Court judgments. Something like Planned Parenthood versus Casey is quite Rawlsian in its reasoning. So there's a lot going on with Rawls.

And I'm sort of happy to get into whatever particular areas he wrote big books like, like Theory of Justice is a doorstopper, Political Liberalism is a doorstopper. These came out in the late seventies and early nineties respectively, to give you an idea of timeframe. But the idea I really zeroed in on is this idea of neutrality.

It's actually not how Rawls himself describes it, but it's how we sort of talk about it now. At its simplest, it's the idea that liberalism or the liberal state should be something like the referee of politics, neutrally, fairly deciding siding [00:06:00] between different players in the game, something like that.

And I argued, I think that is a way of understanding liberalism that was always a bit confused, but is particularly maladaptive in the current moment. But there's, a lot of other stuff to Rawls as well.

Liberalism's unearned sense of victory

SHEFFIELD: This idea of neutrality though, it sees liberalism as sort of having assumed the default position of all of reasoning and society, science, et cetera, and says, okay, so therefore now that we won, our job is to manage this situation. And to be the referee, as you said, between all the sides, and all the constituencies. And to position ourselves as above it all in a lot of ways.

BUCKLE: Yeah. So one issue I'd take with that, I'm not saying you are arguing with it, but with that characterization is, yeah, I think that's exactly right.

We've won, now everyone's playing the same game, and so now will be the referee. I think that's sort of the thought process of, like I say, elite liberals. This probably wasn't something that, like a proverbial man on the street thought, but elite, Supreme Court justices, right? Yeah. Stevens was huge on neutrality, for instance.

The problem with that is liberalism didn't win, like people talk about liberal hegemony or the liberal world order, but what, liberal hegemony, what liberal world order, the American constitutional design is partially liberal, but partially influenced by other philosophies are. Society is partially liberal, but partially conservative, partially reactionary. Liberal and what liberal world order, like if you look at the governments around the world, there's only a handful of liberal [00:08:00] ones.

They're mostly conservative author or authoritarian regimes. Like liberalism is one power of amongst many. I don't mean to say it's powerless. We have the ability to get our views out there. We have the ability to wield power. We have the ability to fight, but it's not as if we suddenly reached a point sometime in the nineties or whenever one imagines this to be where liberalism just won.

I don't think that sort of. Victory is possible, but yet that is one of the things that this worldview imagines, or perhaps to put it more charitably, it imagines a fundamental pluralism of comprehensive worldviews, but that there can be a point in the middle what Ians call an overlapping consensus on which everyone agrees.

The center of the Venn diagram where everyone agrees to the basic rules of the constitutional order and that will be stable and permanent. That's sort of the Rawlsian project, and to a degree through like, like I say, maybe the nineties, the early two thousands, you could kind of look at the world and maybe see that like everyone bought into the same set of rules to an extent, but I think it was always a bit elusory to think that consensus could ever be stable or permanent.

You get moments of overlap and then moments where they pull apart again.

Conservatism has lost its post-WWII memory of why fascism is terrible and stupid

SHEFFIELD: You do. And I think the reason that they had this illusion was that, that the political right after Nazim and fascism basically decided, oh, well we can't support these people because they are violent criminals. And so they stopped supporting them. That's ultimately what happened.

But the, memory of that was lost over time. And you see that pretty much in every country. The further away [00:10:00] we get from World War II and the historical, personal, literal memory of fascism, the conservative mind seems more willing to to make common cause with it.

I think this is what we're seeing here. and the problem for, Rawls and other mid 20th century liberals, people who came of age during that time, is that they mistook something that was a temporary lull, a temporary, temporary break of outbreak of sanity, if you will, among conservatives. They mistook that first for them having changed their psychological state. And I it was fundamentally erroneous, as you said.

BUCKLE: I think we, yeah, we no longer have anyone in living memory of World War ii.

That has to be part of it. I'd also add a couple of other things. Through, from the 70s through to 2008, you had like a long period of relatively stable and benign macroeconomic conditions, sometimes called the great moderation. You don't have these big swings in inflation and interest rates, for instance.

You also have a period starting with, I know Goldwater in 64 or something of the southern strategy in which Republicans increasingly poach the white anti civil rights Southern block. But what that means is that instead of views about race being aligned to party, they cross cut parties. So politicians who want to appeal to racism have to do so in a coded way.

They have to use dog whistles like states rights or welfare queens, stuff like this. And I think that allowed an illusion that. We were moving beyond these issues that no one was really a vient racist anymore. Whereas in fact, what it [00:12:00] was, the structures of our political coalitions were acting in such a way that it obfuscated the reality of American racism.

Now, what happened through maybe the Obama period is that realignment ends. Everyone in that southern block is now Republican, and anyone who is anti-racist, or at least it's a deal breaker for them, is now Democrat. And so there's no longer that structural incentive to sanitize your language to talking dog whistles.

Donald Trump can come along and be as overt as he likes about it, and when Donald Trump first starts saying these things in 2016, there's this shock of, oh, you can't say that because historically you couldn't. There would be consequences. Within the coalition that the Republicans managed. But Trump didn't create that reality, but he revealed it.

He revealed a reality in which views on race now directly tied to political partisanship. So, so that's another one. There's a few, but through all of those, the overall picture is the same, which is that for us, our current period feels, it feels disordered and different, well certainly disordered, but in many senses this period of fairly benign nine economic conditions of cultural consensus, of more civilized speech.

That was the aberration. That was the weird, unusual bit. So a long way to come back to where you started. I think you're exactly right. I think the sort of type of political culture. We were raised into, feels like the norm to us because we were raised in it. But that's actually the weird bet or the unusual bet.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, it is. [00:14:00] And the other thing about that post-World War II dynamic is that because so much of Europe was completely trashed, everybody knew that the only entities that could pick up the pieces was the government. Because the private sector was destroyed. It didn't have the money, it had no power to tax. In many cases, their capacities were literally destroyed.

So this was a moment in which it was obvious to pretty much everyone that the government has to step in and we need to not fear it because the government's really the only thing that can help. And that I think, did put, it was the fact though that in the US there wasn't that mass destruction of, the economy that also made it possible more possible for these, reactionary viewpoints to, to have currency.

Because people didn't see the need for government. The thing about government, is that it's supposed to be, at least in the mind of liberalism, it's supposed to be there in the background and you never think about it. It's supposed to be a thing that you rely on but don't really understand and you don't have to understand.

Like that's the goal of Rawlsian liberalism is to create a state that takes care of you and you don't have to know how or why. And the problem is that's unsustainable as a political matter.

BUCKLE: Maybe, although to complicate that story a little, I don't think it's, because I think the story can sometimes be told that like it's just World War II and the aftermath of that, which certainly was a huge part of it.

There's, I mean, there, there's also like ideological foundations and sort of the ideas and theories being laid decades in advance of that, of, as early as like the 1910s, the 1920s liberalism is increasingly [00:16:00] reevaluating how it sees the role of the state. It's increasingly reevaluating how it conceptualizes both practically and morally.

Questions of poverty, of inequality, And, you get the reform movements of that sort of era. And then, through the thirties and so on, you have the age of canes, you have the age of ideas about a more attractive state, gaining a more, active, sorry, state gaining increasing currency, both in elite circles and also sort of the population.

So by the time you come to the end of World War I, there's almost already this blueprint that, economists and elite thinkers have designed about what they want to do with the, new world order. And you get, FDR and all of that. In, the US you get the beverage report in the uk, which really is a sort of fundamental redesign of the society, but it's not something that just came out of nowhere.

This was sort of in the intellectual work for decades. And then, ultimate causality is always really hard, right? With these things. Like why did things happen? But then in many ways, when you get the sort of Reagan and Thatcher revolutions, it's sort of the same in reverse. in that the, ideas, the economic theories, the political philosophies that have been gaining salience and have been gaining elite adherence are the conservative or the neoliberal or the libertarian.

And then of course that reverses it all. So it, it's a story about material conditions and where we were left. In the aftermath of World War ii. Certainly. It's also just a story from an idealist point of view, right? Not, meaning idealist in the sense of [00:18:00] starry-eyed, but idealist in the sense that ideas matter and change the world in that liberal ideas, socialist ideas even had been making real headway in particularly the interwar years, both among the population, but also crucially, elite capture.

And then through the sort of middle of the latter half of the 20th century, a much more conservative or restrictive vision of the state really made headway and captured elites, something like that.

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Immanuel Kant's hollowing out of liberalism

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, I think I would agree with that. and, to, just to go back to one of the things you said initially there that, that, this was a time when liberalism, they, it became apparent.

That, they were winning the war. And it became apparent to them that also if you didn't want Marxism to win, then you had to make some major concessions to the broader general public. so I think, yeah, these are things that happened. but you know, as part of this liberal imagination phase that was there in the, let's say the, twenties, 1920s through the fifties, let's say.

It was a lot of it also was hearkening back to the ideas of Immanuel Kant who was the muse of John Rawls, of course. But in the case of the New World Order that was set up post World War II, I mean. Very much of it. So much of it was a, an attempt to refound the League of Nations, which itself was born out of the philosophy of Kant and his, his project of creating a political philosophy that was so completely denaturated, if you will, that it was [00:20:00] designed-- like this referee posture that you're talking about. This was Kant. Kant was the one who invented this and said, this is what liberalism needs to be because we keep killing ourselves over religion and over territoriality.

And so instead, if we can abstract those things and just sort of put them on the shelf and say, well, liberalism won't touch religion and it won't touch nationalities and culture. That's the ticket to human progress. And in, in, in some ways he was right. But as a political matter this was a disastrous idea.

BUCKLE: Do you think there's a connection? So yeah, Rawls is definitely intellectually sort of downstream of Kant. Here's something I've been thinking of, I don't have a great answer to. Do you think there's a connection between this sort of neutral liberalism versus comprehensive debate and like meta ethical questions?

because what cant's really known for is a sort of rule-based, absolutely.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah.

BUCKLE: Right. Whereas, if you take John Stuart Mill, who I contrast Rawls with, he's obviously a famous utilitarian. Now that's not one for one. I can imagine, you could be a deontological comprehensive liberal or a utilitarian neutral liberal, but they do tend to run that way.

Do you see those things as connected?

SHEFFIELD: Oh, I absolutely do. And, the reason being that, so for Kant, he that for, Mill and the original generation of liberals, what they were trying to do was to create a political philosophy based on human potentiality and to unlock it. And, both to enable the individual to do that, but also to enable the state to, reach aggregate human potential to, [00:22:00] nece necessitate that.

And, as an example, I would talk about the book, looking Backward by Edward Bellamy. That, which was, effectively a socialism. Of, of, a Christian sort. but he called it nationalism, which is interesting. And so this was a, it was a somatic liberalism, if you will, it a liberalism that was aware of the body and aware of, Where one comes from phenomenological, if you will. That's the original roots of liberalism and Kant responding to, given where he was as a German. that was the, crossroads of all of these, the bloodiest wars in human history up until that time, when he was alive. And, so he said, well, we can't risk this, idea of human potentiality.

And what we have to do instead is to re-articulate liberalism as day ontology. So, day on, meaning duty from the Greek. but

BUCKLE: the, yeah, I'm sorry. I probably should have defined that word because that's a bit of a jargon word. If you want to help, do, that for us.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, so so d deontology coming from the Greek word dayon, meaning duty is what he wanted to move liberalism toward.

And the, but the, horrible paradox is that and this isn't the etymological root of the word, but deontology meaning anti reality, that is actually kind of what t liberalism, Andy and liberalism is. It is a denial of human nature and a denial of the attempt to enable it that earlier liberalism was.

And that's fundamentally the reason why liberalism is in such dire straits in the current moment, I would [00:24:00] say

BUCKLE: that's interesting. I mean, I, in none of my public writing on this have really connected it through to meta ethics, but it's worth noting perhaps the both, Rawls and Nozick who were kind of the two philosophers you'd get taught in like an intro to political philosophy 1 0 1 for the longest time, and in many ways were kind of the totems of center-left and center-right thinking for a long time. Rawls, on the one hand you've got fairness, justice, discourse, norms. Nozick, you've got rights, freedom, limited state, right? Both of them start with a rejection of utilitarianism. They both-- Anarchy, State, and Utopia and Theory of Justice-- both start by going, well, obviously utilitarianism is wrong and we're going to distance ourselves from that.

And the reasons they do so are quite weak. Like Nozick has this thought experiment about hitting a donkey on the head with a baseball bat and Sure. But it's interesting they both feel the need to start with that. I don't know how much weight I'd put into that. I, because also, that's not a public debate in any, way.

People aren't factional about this among the population. But it is interesting to hear you draw that link.

An introduction to "reactionary centrism" via UK prime minister Keir Starmer

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, thanks. and I do think that is also this, deontology, this duty based morality. it also is the cause of the, phenomenon that you documented.

The other column that we're going to talk about here today. You had, written recently about. How the, about the political ideology or political tactic of what is sometimes called reactionary centrism in the United States.

Now, I happen to think that term is a very problematic term [00:26:00] and, confusing, of two people who were on the progressive side of things. But nonetheless, what you said, well, what you said in terms of the implications of it are, very true. So, but before we get into why I think that reactionary centrism is a bad term just if you can give us a little overview of your your argument in the piece about the, idea of never holding the right wing accountable for its actions or trying to.

Philosophically oppose them from a moral argument.

BUCKLE: Yeah. So there's been a few different accounts of this. I, it's not my term to be fair. yeah, I picked it up from, it's sort of been a, it's quite a recent term. I think it was coined in early Trump era, I believe. but I just sort of picked it up.

I must admit quite uncritically. One of the things I've argued is pretty key to understanding divisions amongst people who are not overt Trump supporters is the idea of agency and politics. And I've made this key to my understanding of reactionary centralism, although other people have defined it somewhat differently, but I think we all have roughly the same idea in mind.

So agency, do we see the political right Donald Trump as an action or a reaction if we look at, say. Popular dislike of minorities, be it immigrants or say trans people. Do we see that as a backlash to the over zeal of social justice, a reaction or We do. We see it as an action, as a top down propaganda campaign to inspire hatred of those groups.

Now, for myself, I'm firmly on the action side. Fascism is an i, a gentle ideology. It has ideas, plans, and goals for the rest of us. Most of, in fact, the [00:28:00] last decade has been liberals responding to things it has done are not the other way round. But nonetheless, there are many people who have a sort of, I guess at its simplest, you could say, a reaction to woke narrative, right?

Or a reaction to. Fill in the blank of what you find annoying about liberalism if only liberals hadn't done X and provoked the right. So that's why I like, I, I think that's why I gravitated towards the term reactionary. It's the reaction part that defines them. Now, what it means, if you see the world that way, is that you tend to spend a lot of time asking for empathy for the reactive party.

If the writer merely reacting, then well, you've gotta see it from their point of view. Don't you understand? If you were in their shoes, you'd feel the same. And it means we spend very little time at all, maybe none, asking to see it from the point of view of the supposed provoking party. the type of person I'm describing when I say reactionary centurist.

Virtually never. We did, really, never would say something like, well, yes, these woke kids on college campuses protesting are a bit annoying. But look, see it from their point of view. Understand the legitimate grievances that are inspiring them to say that they never say that the right cannot be blamed, but it should be understood.

The left can be blamed and needent to be understood. That's the basic posture, and I pair that with cent because. I do think amongst this tribe, there is an instinctive conformist predisposition to position themselves in the center. Now, what you might be about to go on to say, and what many people have said, and I've heard from social media today is, but they're not really [00:30:00] centrists.

That's more of just a posture, right? Sure, fine. I don't know what's in anyone's soul. And I'm not really claiming to, I would say the center, so I've described the reactionary side, seeing Trump as a reaction, the centralist side. Yeah. A grant is more of an affect. They're not a true centris in that they criticize both sides equally, but they nonetheless like to position themselves as being in the center.

They like to present themselves and I think genuinely see themselves as being the grownup in the room. The sensible one, the one adjudicating it and sorting it all out. It's not a to, it's a bit of a different idea, but it's not a totally different idea to this one of neutrality that we've been talking about.

It is a bit distinct. they like to be the seen as, I think, see themselves as the reasonable one, but it's not, I don't think. We can maybe disagree, agree on this. It's not a principled centralism. So you could imagine someone who's in the political center because that is just genuinely what they think.

Or perhaps someone who has conflicted views. Someone who's socially left and economically right. Say who finds themselves in the middle. By virtue of that, I don't think it's that with reactionary ISTs. because they slide around too much. They argue too many different things. I think it's more like the, they want to be seen as the mature grownup who's in the middle of more.

Dogmatic people. I think it's more like that. But anyway, those are the two sides. And why, that's why it connects for me as a term. because both of those sides have a story to them, the reactionary and the, ISTs. But it's been a persistent sort of way of thinking about the world in both the UK and the us.

SHEFFIELD: yeah, I [00:32:00] think it has. And but so for people who don't follow UK politics, though, I think, you were, you cite your Prime Minister as a perfect example of this Mentality. Yeah. So for those who aren't following the Americans the, I think you have a, very good case in regards to him.

BUCKLE: Was that an invitation to make it?

SHEFFIELD: It was, yes. So please do.

BUCKLE: Oh, okay. Yeah. So our prime minister's called Keir Starmer. He's the leader of the Labor Party, which I guess is a very rough analog, he is like the Democrats. I'm many center, left party, although the UK party system's a bit more complicated, but we needn't go into that.

We've had a long period of conservative rule, I think 14 years. going back to David Cameron's victory in 2010, STAMA came in in. About a year, almost exactly a year ago now. He just passed his year anniversary with quite a significant victory. And this isn't like in the US where there's checks and balances and divided powers.

It's essentially like whoever controls the house of the rep representative wins and nothing else matters. Right? So he has a free hand to do what he wants in a way that really no US president has. now he ran as a moderate, I think he was self-consciously course correcting against, Jeremy Corbin, who was the previous Labor Party leader, who was a strongly left figure and who led the party to a couple of general election defeats in 2017 and 2019.

And so I was, we were all always expecting a moderate, nobody. Like maybe like a Tony Bla or Bill Clinton type figure, right? Like nobody expected this guy to be [00:34:00] like a Bernie Sanders or whatever. What's really become clear since then is the two instincts I described, that the right must be understood and appeased and that you try and find a position in the middle.

Now, over the last year, our right on a number of issues have really fricking radicalized as is happening in many places, right? And Stama has moved in that attempt to find a middle ground wildly to the right, much more so than even any of your more centris democrats have. So on, like, to give you just one example, we're now in the process of doing a bathroom bill in the uk, excluding all trans people from all gendered spaces.

So. In other words, not only can a trans women not use the women's toilets, they also under the, I think, a plausible reading of the new E-E-H-R-C guidance. Can't use the men's either, so just can't leave the house effectively. That is a very, radical proposition that is not just well to the right of star's, previous commitments.

It's well to the right of previous conservative governments commitments. It's well to the right of many us not just Democrats, but many US Republicans. He's also swinging to the right on immigration. And at every stage doing this reactionary centris thing of saying, look, I get it. I understand. I see it from your point of view, which is what reactionary ISTs tell us you're supposed to say to the right.

So he said recently, someone asked him the question, how would you feel if your daughter had to walk past a hotel? Housing refugees, asylum [00:36:00] seekers, which is obviously playing on this idea that non-white men are a threat to white women. Right. That's what the question's implying to which he said, and I quote directly.

I get it.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. As of today, we're going to do anything to her. Yeah.

BUCKLE: yeah. Yeah. There presence

SHEFFIELD: is

BUCKLE: a crime. Easy answer on the table for him, that's your chance to draw a more red line without having to, without having to be, I'm not even saying he needs to be like a radical socialist or anything.

It would be nice, but I think what he could have just said there is absolutely, I would feel fine with my daughter walking past refugees. Of course. Now, that's not to say there's not problems with the current system. There's a huge backlog of asylum cases and it's inefficient. And we handed a mess from the past government and I under, and people are concerned about their taxpayer money being spent on this and they understand all of that.

But let's not validate those really ugly fears. You could have said, listen, I understand there's practical concerns, but it was such a perfect opportunity for him to draw a model red line and he wouldn't.

Isn't reactionary centrism mostly just conservatism?

SHEFFIELD: No, he wouldn't. But, and this, it gets to the why I do think the term reactionary centrism is, misleading and inaccurate.

And that is because it's actually masking two different philosophies or perspectives. and, it's, eliding them. So the, first perspective is conservatism. Like the, so many people in the us, UK and many other countries will self-identify as liberal, but in fact they are conservative.

And we've seen that with, so many people that, when, Joe Biden was the president, they were, people like [00:38:00] Tulsi Gabbard or people like Joe Rogan. there, there's just a lot, so many of these individuals who, when, before Trump. looked, he was able to execute his comeback.

They were self-identifying as, oh, I'm on the left. I'm on the left. But if you looked at their philosophical commitments, their policy viewpoints, their epistemic origins, nothing they believed was liberal. They were in fact conservative the entire time they were libertarian. if you want to be generous to these viewpoints, like Barry, Wise is another one that this is a person who, for her entire career has pre, has pretended, oh, I'm a liberal, I just don't like the left.

And it's like, well then. Then in what way are you a liberal? Tell me how you are a liberal. So, so it masks, so I would say the majority of these people who are described as reactionary centrist are actually conservatives. and the, improper elision of conservatives into liberalism makes it so that they spend their energies fighting the left.

Rather than fighting the crazy lunatics in their own side and the people who agree with them. And so, because they're just like, well, I don't like 'em, so I don't have to fight them. You guys are at least more rea you, you believe in reason, so I'm going to be over here and I'm going to tell you what to do. And it's like, well, that's not quite how it works.

And, and, me as a former one of these people I can, I self-identified as a, conservative liberal, that was what I called myself or a liberal conservative, I guess it depended on my mood, the day, if you ask me that question. And, except for, in my case, I, was honest enough to admit that I was conservative.

And then the, other phenomenon though that I think that is, is [00:40:00] improperly elated in the term reactionary centrism, is that not only does centrism not really exist as a philosophical viewpoint it's also that this tendency is to whatever extent that it's sincere and not just pure, Macheavellianism, to the extent that it actually is sincere.

This is pathological liberalism. That's what it is. And it is this Sian Kantianism that we've been talking about here, that the, because they don't think that, well, let me step back. So it's this, Sian Kian, deontology viewpoint in which. They correctly note that reactionary viewpoints are psychologically disturbed, that they are not intellectually based.

And so their viewpoint, instead of saying, wow, we have tens of millions of people who are psychologically disturbed and in need of severe mental health interventions by the government to help them. Instead of saying that, they say, well, this is just how they are and we have to we have to accommodate their views in some way.

Instead of telling the general public, Hey, these people are fucking dangerous and they're coming for your rights. they don't do that. They're

BUCKLE: very ISTs. I think two things that are pretty universal in that tribe is a real concern about not being rude or mean to reactionaries. You can't say that about them, No. And also this idea, like you said, that they weren't persuadable that yeah, you can't move public opinion if people hate immigrants. They hate immigrants, and we've just gotta. Feed that hunger. I think that's all right. I find it interesting. Like the, are they sincere or like, is this, are they even further, are they like self-consciously fraudulent about this?

I don't know. I don't know what's, in some [00:42:00] ways I find this like the hardest section of the ideological landscape to wrap my head around. because this is like, in many ways the one least like myself, it's like a progressive, comprehensive liberal. I certainly agree. There's not a comprehensive philosophy behind this.

It's not like liberalism, socialism. You can, you've got a whole library of books there, right? That you can go back to as like an intellectual tradition. There's no real intellectual tradition behind centrism, nor do centris themselves even really claim it. It's more like a disposition as to like, are they really conservative?

I think they're certainly, in many cases sympathetic to conservatism and they're certainly annoyed by the left. I almost wonder in terms of like what ideology they are really, is there even, one at all? Like when I look at Keith Farmer, like, does he actually, because I could rewind the tape not that long ago, three or four years ago, and find him saying the exact opposite to what he's saying now and professing the exact opposite values and, it's not even as if there was a moment.

Where he said, you know what, I've really thought about this and I've changed my mind. He's just saying different stuff now. So to

SHEFFIELD: yeah.

BUCKLE: To maybe like to give a another case Obama. Right. I wouldn't call Obama a reactionary centris. He does definitely dabble in this sort of neutralist liberalism. Obama's interestingly actually read rules, unlike a, lot of politicians who are downstream of this.

But when Obama changed his mind on gay marriage, he does this big speech where he said, I used to believe marriage was between a man and a woman, but I sat down and talked about it with my daughters and I really came to, now maybe that's all bs, right? But he felt the need to tell a story about why he changed his values, because Obama.[00:44:00]

Stama perhaps isn't an idiot. And he gets that. That's how normal people think about politics. They think about it through the lens of values, and they want their leaders to have values. Consistency, maybe you change the details on a policy, but we want to know that your core values are stable.

And so if he's going to change something that impacts values, he need, he knows he needs to have a story. Why with Stama, there's no story. I just, I wonder if the guy actually just doesn't have deep values of either sort in any sense. He's just sort of saying what he thinks he needs to say. Like, it's actually as dumb and vacuous as that.

I, I, have no idea. I don't know what's in his head, but somehow if like, like the, just the lights weren't on in there, that actually wouldn't surprise me.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, and here's the thing though. This is why they're conservative. Because that is literally what Edmund Burke said is the essence of conservatism.

That it is not a system of beliefs, but rather a disposition. And if you read your Michael OShot, that's also what Michael OShot says, quote for

BUCKLE: philosophical purposes. It is enough that the conservative sit and think for practical purposes. It is enough that he sit.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah, exactly. and, and so much of the, especially oak shut, because Burke, was more of just a conventional politician in many ways, dealing with specific particular issues. Whereas OK Shot, he didn't have such obligation, so he was able to just, sit there and write political theory. and what he did basically is, provide the intellectual justification for the attitude you just described. And it is conservatism. And because it's the idea that we decide things based upon what is the correct or advantageous idea within the moment. But, [00:46:00] and don't call it on principle because in fact our principle is pragmatism. And so that for, so, so that's why I do think that it's, important to, to stop calling conservatives centrist or liberals.

These are conservatives, and they just don't realize it. So Kirsten Sinema is an example of this of this conservative viewpoint and, but also so is, Joe Manchin, that these are people who they prefer the status quo ante and they don't want change to be too fast.

And they have no consistent ideological program. Well, that's conservatism. It's not liberalism, it's not centrism.

BUCKLE: See, I have a bit of a different model of conservatism and it'd be interesting if you disagree as a former conservative that would maybe put a bit of a distinction between that and what I'm describing as reactionary centris.

Although, I mean, I should say off the bat, I'm not really a pains to defend reactionary centrists in any way. this is not my tribe of people or something I'm at all sympathetic to. So I'm not coming from the point of view of, of, trying to, protect dear old Kia. But, so in my. In my sort of model of the world, conservatism isn't just about a distrust of change.

It's a bit thicker than that. Although this can largely be at a subconscious level. It's about a view of human society as being ordered by things that are beyond our control. That there is in the ideological theorists, Michael freedom's, words, an extra human origin of the social order. Now, this can change in different types of conservatism, back in the day, it could be today in fact, it could be the laws of God, it could be the laws of the free market, it could be the gender binary and the supposedly, [00:48:00] set things that it is to be a man and a woman. And the set social roles that need to, follow from that. It is not that conservatism is opposed to change exactly.

It wants us to return to that underlying social order. Conservatives can be very radical indeed when they feel like we've gotten away from that social order, be it that Thatcher and Reagan revolution, revolutions wanting to do, wanting to bring us back to the laws of the free market or something like Trumpism wanting to bring us back to these purportedly natural hierarchies of race and gender now.

Now, obviously people can share that to a greater or lesser degree. I would say more that reactionary center certainly can drift into that. Certainly there's a clear pathway, reactionary ISTs start as like, oh, I'm in the middle and end as being conservative. We see that all the time, but I wonder if it's dumber than that.

Like they just fundamentally don't have a vision of society or of change, but they know that liberals kind of annoy them, and that when they see conservatives, they perceive them as a bit more authentic and empathetic because they perceive them as male. I think that's a, we can talk about the gender element to that, but I think that's a big part of it.

And they just don't find the excesses of the right annoying in the same way as they find the excesses of the left, but they don't know why. But there's not. I don't know, I don't know what's in other people's heads. I really don't, my gut instinct with a lot of these people is there's really nothing behind the eyes.

But I could be wrong.

Sam Harris and libertarianism masquerading as liberalism

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, I mean, I, mean, it is, yeah, it's hard to say for specific people. I agree with you there. But to your point though about the kind of the larger epistemic vision that, that, is [00:50:00] at play here. so, so the, the conservative economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell actually has a written on this particular topic and in his view, and I think it's largely correct, that he, says that politics is essentially a conflict between two different visions of humanity and human nature, and one is the constrained vision and the other is the unconstrained vision. And so the conservative and reactionary viewpoint is, well, there's just certain things to how humans are, and most people are terrible and stupid. and so therefore the, weak should suffer what they must, and the strong should do what they will.

That is largely the,

BUCKLE: that kind of fits with the story about social order, I've said. Right. They clearly reinforce each other. If there's like a set thing that is human nature, then it would seem to follow from that, that there's a set thing that is society. But if human nature is quite changeable and adaptable, that would also sort of imply that society is and could potentially, that would seem to imply a more futurist vision than a, recal story.

So I don't, I wouldn't, I don't think those two things are in conflict necessarily. Those are just two different, they're two sides of the same coin, I think.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. Well, that's what I'm saying is that if you have the con, the constrained view viewpoint, that is what makes you on the political right. and if you have the unconstrained viewpoint, then that's what makes you on the political left.

and so that's, when we go back to circle back to what you were saying about kind of the, the, NOIC and Rawls idea in, some sense, they actually are on the, on joining the constraint vision. And so it is arguably a form of conservatism that they're advancing in their philosophies, even though they would never say that and never, would, blanch [00:52:00] at the assertion of that, I think

BUCKLE: there's definitely a thing where more people are sympathetic to conservatism than would willingly endorse the label. That's, that seems absolutely, I, don't have like data to that effect, but like that feels intuitively true to me.

SHEFFIELD: Yeah. and I would say probably to some really great examples of that are the, the linguist and popular science writer Stephen Pinker, who claims to be a liberal, but in fact.

Everything he does is about justifying libertarian conservatism. So he's not religious. Yeah, I, agree

BUCKLE: with you when it comes to pinker, I think. Yeah,

SHEFFIELD: yeah. So, so, so, but at the same time, he self-identifies as a liberal. and the same thing is also true about Sam Harris. So during my time on the political right, I saw Sam Harris as somebody exactly like me, somebody who was non-religious, but also realistic about human nature.

Now, and I knew of course, that he described himself as a liberal but you know, the, this is, it does go back to the fact that I think that Saul was fundamentally correct in that. But you have a, you said, had, told me off the air that, you had, listened to Harris quite a bit here. So I'm, curious on your, on what you think about that.

Okay.

BUCKLE: Sam Harris. Yeah, I mean, I followed the sort of new atheist movement for a bit. I, must admit, I haven't listened to Harris in a long time. So, yeah, I think with Harris, you also have a fairly good case of someone with conservative values using liberal language to sort of justify them, right?

Because look, in a sense, right, political [00:54:00] ideologies are many things. They are these value systems, they are. Sense of policies. They are intellectual traditions. They are also just sort of languages for talking. You can talk about rights and freedom and free speech. It's sort of a language you can apply it to.

You can express different ideas in that language and you can express conservative ideas in that language. I mean, how also seems to my mind, and I'm sort of doing the thing of like pretending I know what's in someone's head and I don't of being incredibly thin skinned, like, like it seems like he's got some pushback from people on the social justice left who are angry about what he said about Muslims say.

Right. And he's found that. Criticism so, so enraging, whether let's just table whether it was legitimate or not. So enraging that he's essentially become a quasi fascist, like in response to it. I kind of don't know what to do about that. I think often when people have this reaction narrative, they're not talking about the public, they're talking about themselves.

Like I don't think many people out there are becoming fascists because they had to attend a DEI seminar. I think most people roll their eyes at it like every other useless work meeting and they get on with their day. But like, I don't know, Sam really let social justice criticism get under his skin in a big way.

Like he couldn't let it go, was my impression of him.

SHEFFIELD: I think so. Yeah, absolutely. That is the case that he, blew up at all that and, again, like I, when you go back to his I, to his moral philosophy he's extremely Kantian. And he is kind of a, he's a conservative Kantian, that's what he is. That [00:56:00] he wrote an entire book called, The Moral Landscape, in which he argued that--

BUCKLE: I have read it. Yeah.

SHEFFIELD: --In which he argued that morality could be scientific, and that you could have objectively true moral viewpoints.

BUCKLE: Now, see, I don't hold now these are nonsense with some of the moral landscape in that he's coming from like a sort of consequentialist worldview, which I largely buy, and I think a consequentialist worldview is sort of more correct in a sense, but he's clear target there.

He's a sort of imagined left model relativism, a sort of multicultural mo moral relativism. That's clearly what he's got in his head to go after.

SHEFFIELD: Oh yeah.

BUCKLE: In that book right now, I'd actually agree as an object level point that I don't think relativism is a particularly good foundation for pluralism or multiculturalism.

because I think some people will say, oh, well we don't really know who's right, therefore multiculturalism. But if you don't really know who's right, then what's to say that we shouldn't be respecting Hitler's views? So I think there are better ways of thinking about and justifying pluralism, but I think that's what Sam has in his head and he's going after in that book.

SHEFFIELD: Oh, I think so. Yeah. And it's, I mean, this is the classic atheist reflex though. if you go back through history that, there, there is this reflexive notion that, well, I must have an objective moral basis for my viewpoints. And, I mean, for me, I would, I'm more sympathetic to the, Greeks Sophists or the Epicureans or the, the Academic Skeptics in this regard that I think that we can say that certain things are probably true or functionally true.

but whether something is more than that is objectively true, well, that's actually not possible. And, David Hume [00:58:00] really destroyed that idea, and no one listened to him fully except for the scientists. But, and, but he was actually making it in many ways as a political point. And no one listened.

BUCKLE: I'd also say, and this is a bit perhaps meta ethical, that when in, in the case, particularly of political ideologies, something like liberalism or conservatism, when we ask are they true?

We're kind of asking a series of related but separate questions. are they internally coherent? Broadly speaking as are these sorts of, for instance we just talked about, is the theme of a sat human nature coherent with the idea of a changing society, right? Is the story they're telling a coherent one, is it externally coherent?

Does it seem to be validated by facts about the world? they're also languages You can ask if they're a better or worse language, or more or less persuasive language. You can ask. They're also like guides to life, right? These are sort of toolkits for probably at a largely subconscious level, getting us through our day-to-day and just helping nudges along with the small and unimportant moral decisions that we sort of have to make along the way.

Is it good for that? And those answers might not all cohere down to an ultimate point where it's like this exact version of liberalism. That's the one that's true. One of the points I made to bring it all the way back to the beginning in the Rawls article is this kind of two issues I take with the neutralist liberalism.

One is, I don't think it's very good philosophy. I think the claims that are being made on a philosophical level just don't sit very well together. But the second one is that I, think in the current moment it's less persuasive that if you want to, activate, people to oppose a rising far eye, say you need to appeal to something a bit thicker, a bit more sort of flesh and blood [01:00:00] than this idea of the neutral gentlemanly referee.

You've gotta talk about the types of lives that you want people to have. You've gotta talk about how freedom and pluralism are good, and I like living in a free society, and I don't want to lose this, and I don't want the next generation to, to grow up having worse lives than I do. You've gotta make these sorts of claims, right?

And it's that confluence that makes it a compelling case for me and something that I'd. want to push is those don't necessarily have to go together. something could be philosophically cohesive but not particularly persuasive or vice versa. I think it's that, it's both. I think that it's, that it's bad philosophy and I think particularly in the current moment, it, doesn't seem persuasive.

I, I think that it's both of them makes it a door that I want to push, if that makes sense.

The bad politics of popularism

SHEFFIELD: yeah, I think so. and the, problem with this as a pol political strategy it is both bad philosophy and bad politics. is that from, but from a political standpoint, if you are calibrating your, pol your policies or your rhetoric in pursuit of these elusive or usually imaginary voters that you actually will never reach them because their objections to you are not based on the things that they say. So in other words, if somebody says, well, they, spend all their time obsessing about trans people, or they spend all their time obsessing about how they hate Black Lives Matter.

And if you, and, the US has the same issue, with, there, there are some political strategists who advocate for what they call popularism. Which is that, well, we should only have policies. That are popular. and Matt [01:02:00] Iglesias is an example of somebody who says this.

And the problem is though, that if you only pursue policies that are popular and you dis go discard policies that are unpopular, then essentially what happens is that your policies become less and less popular. Your native policies, the policies that actually are passionate to you, that you care about, those will be discarded as well.

Because the whole point of politics is to argue for your own perspective and why it should be the law. Not, well, let's just do what the people want. No, the people should do what I want and here's why. And it's a fundamental misunderstanding of what politics is for. when you do it this way, and this is why the right in the United States is getting ever radicalized because the left establishment never says, Hey actually public. Here's what our moral vision is. Here's what we want to do for you. And these people are fucking liars and criminals and you should stop them.

BUCKLE: They don't say that the Democrats are in, some of them at least are like Pritzker or something, or a AOC.

I think there are examples within the Democratic coalition who are sort of behaving in the way I handle,

SHEFFIELD: yeah,

BUCKLE: we'd want them to, yo, they're better than labor. Okay. Like Jesus Christ. Nothing will make you Stan as Labor party. I think that's right. I think also you, you talked about putting a values vision forward.

I think people like Matt Yglesias, politics to them is all about policy. It's all about finding a policy consensus. And sure, policies matter. But people also, I think primarily actually judge politics through the lens of values. And what you can often do with these policy compromises is make your values proposition hopelessly incoherent.

Now it's fine to tinker, it's fine. But you can [01:04:00] get to the point, and I think Stama in the UK is a great example of it, where the policies you are putting forward are just so with what Stama is putting forward on immigration or trans rights, is making the values proposition hopelessly and coherent.

He's simultaneously saying that he believes in liberal core values and that he doesn't, and to the right that just appears hopelessly inauthentic and pew and to the left, it feels like a betrayal. Like that's the limit. You have to have a policy vision. Certainly you have to have, here's the things we're going to do with the country, but you also have to have the why.

This is what we're doing it for. And I think people like. Matt, just, it's all about just, well, we'll just give the people the policies that they want and they have no sense of, because they have no sense of the why themselves, because they have no values themselves. They're very poorly placed to understand the motivations of people who do, which is most people and most voters.

SHEFFIELD: Well, yeah, I think that's right. And so, the, like the, Republican party before Trump was in the same kind of, meta political loop, if you will, that the Democratic Party has continuously been, and, Labor is currently that, the Republican party for so long, they had this, anti-government standpoint, which.

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Has liberalism become pathological?