Adrian Wooldridge on the Lost Genius of the Political Center

The Good Fight

Yascha Mounk

News

4.7 • 963 Ratings

🗓️ 14 March 2026

⏱️ 54 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Yascha Mounk and Adrian Wooldridge explore how liberalism reinvented itself through past crises—and what that means for its survival today. Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He is the author or co-author of 12 books, including Centrists of the World Unite: The Lost Genius of Liberalism. In this week’s conversation, Yascha Mounk and Adrian Wooldridge discuss how liberalism emerged as a solution to concrete historical problems, why the fundamental challenges liberalism addressed in the 17th and 18th centuries have returned in new forms today, and what lessons the origins of liberalism offer for defending it against contemporary threats. We’re delighted to feature this conversation as part of our series on Liberal Virtues and Values. That liberalism is under threat is now a cliché—yet this has done nothing to stem the global resurgence of illiberalism. Part of the problem is that liberalism is often considered too “thin” to win over the allegiance of citizens, and that liberals are too afraid of speaking in moral terms. Liberalism’s opponents, by contrast, speak to people’s passions and deepest moral sentiments. This series, made possible with the generous support of the John Templeton Foundation, aims to change that narrative. In podcast conversations and long-form pieces, we feature content making the case that liberalism has its own distinctive set of virtues and values that are capable not only of responding to the dissatisfaction that drives authoritarianism, but also of restoring faith in liberalism as an ideology worth believing in—and defending—on its own terms. If you have not yet signed up for our podcast, please do so now by following ⁠this link on your phone⁠. Email: leonora.barclay@persuasion.community Podcast production by Mickey Freeland and Leonora Barclay. Connect with us! ⁠Spotify⁠ | ⁠Apple⁠ | ⁠Google⁠ X: ⁠@Yascha_Mounk⁠ & ⁠@JoinPersuasion⁠ YouTube: ⁠Yascha Mounk⁠, ⁠Persuasion⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠Persuasion Community Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	And I think what's got lost in a lot of these very abstract debates is the fact that liberalism is a set of solutions to a set of concrete real world problems.
0:11.2	And that those solutions change over time, that they vary in time.
0:15.6	And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.
0:30.9	As you know, one of my abiding interests is figuring out why liberalism is in crisis today and how it is that we can renew this political tradition.
0:37.4	Well, one of the most interesting in Aadite books about this topic was recently published by
0:43.0	Adrian Wildrich.
0:44.6	Adrian, a past guest of this podcast, was for a long time one of the key writers at the
0:50.4	economist and is now the global business columnist for Bloomberg opinion. He has
0:58.6	written interestingly on a range of subjects, including the contested concept of maritocracy,
1:04.8	which we discussed last time he was on the podcast. Now he has really reflected on what liberalism has to offer the modern world. How it has
1:15.0	managed to get out of previous crises posed by industrialization, the rise of mass society,
1:21.8	and of course the threat of totalitarianism. Why it is that we've ended up in a serious crisis now, what the different
1:30.3	strands of perverted liberalism are from a neoliberal set of ideas and policies that are
1:40.1	incapable of standing up for the broader interests of society to the identitarian
1:46.9	attacks on liberalism that sometimes pretend to be liberal on the left. And finally, he has a set
1:53.7	of interesting suggestions about how liberalism can renew itself, in part by regaining a moral language but promises to deal with genuine
2:05.5	social dysfunction and is able to impose limits, moral limits as well as physical limits when it comes
2:14.0	to borders. It is a wide-ranging conversation to listen to the last part of it,
2:19.7	in which we really diagnose the nature of the contemporary crisis of liberalism,
2:24.8	what to do about it, how to respond to it,
2:27.1	and in which I press Adrian on the title of this book,
2:31.0	which is Centrist of the World Unite,
	...

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