Escaping

The waiting for listeners. This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcast, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media.

I'm very excited about today's guest. We try to get him on about a maybe a month ago, give or take.

Because he had written some stuff that I really wanted to talk about.

And he's just, he's been sort of like Howard Hughes with Kleenex boxes on his feet finishing a book.

So he couldn't come for a while. And one of the reasons why I have some listeners may recall my conversation with you've all live in about.

Yes, scratch in your bingo card.

About Francis Bukiyama's book and about liberalism and you've all says it needed a, that liberalism needs a counterpoint that's not authoritarianism or necessarily nationalism, but actually republicanism.

And my guest today actually wrote a wonderful piece called liberalism is not enough for national affairs, which is probably where you've all got some of his talking points.

Anyway, my, my guest is yes, yet another AI fellow and get off my back if that's a problem for you.

His name is Anthony Mills, he goes by Tony, not only is he senior fellow AI, where he works on the government's role in scientific research and innovation R&D and funding and all that kind of stuff.

He also writes a whole bunch about sort of democratic governments and the role of expert knowledge.

He is way overeducated. He has a PhD in an MA in philosophy from Notre Dame and a BA in philosophy, French and comparable literature from Northwestern where he also has masters in French.

There will be no French on this podcast. And with that, Tony, welcome to the remit.

Thank you, Jenna. Pleasure to be here.

So I actually want to cover a bunch of different things in the time we got, but why don't we just sort of start and again listeners by now know when we talk about liberalism, we're not talking about Michael do caucus or something like that.

We're talking about, you know, the sort of locking in political tradition, broadly understood.

When we talk about liberalism here, we'll be talking about classical liberalism as opposed to aggressivism and we can get into all that. But you wrote a really interesting piece for national affairs called liberalism is not enough. Why is it not enough?

Well, I guess the first thing to say, I wrote the piece because I could answer your question to two, I was going to be to tell you what, why I think it's not enough, right?

It's helpful to give some context to I was watching the debates about liberalism unfold, right? So this idea that liberalism is under attack on the one side of people defending it.

And on the other side, you have people most prominently recently on the right attacking it and arguing specifically that the American political tradition is somehow problematic, misbegotten because it's liberal.

And this debate just really bothered me because it seemed to take a lot for granted that struck me as not obvious. And one of those was the idea that the American political tradition is essentially a liberal one.

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