Circling Liberalism’s Wagons | Interview: Adrian Wooldridge

The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg

The Dispatch

Politics, News

4.7 • 6.6K Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2026

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It’s Brit week here on The Remnant, and after starting off with a crowd-pleaser (Charlie Cooke), Jonah Goldberg decided to follow up with someone new. Adrian Wooldridge, global business columnist at Bloomberg Opinion, joins Jonah to talk about the meaning of liberalism, limiting principles, immigration, tolerance, individualism, non-Western liberalism, Big Tech, kids, public broadcasting, FDR, positive liberties, John Stuart Mill, and the transatlantic A\alliance. Show Notes:—Adrian Wooldridge: The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism—David Brooks: Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There—Daniel Burns in National Affairs: “Liberal Practice v. Liberal Theory”—Larry Siedentop: Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism—Jonah’s last book: Suicide of the West—Hannah Arendt Remnant The Remnant is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a non-partisan, conservative perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including access to all of Jonah’s G-File newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention.
0:18.0	Can you digger?
0:27.5	Greetings, your listeners.
0:28.6	This is Jonah Goldberg, host of the Remnant Podcasts, brought to you by the Dispatch and Dispatch Media.
0:32.8	We have been trying to put this podcast together for an eternity.
0:36.2	It feels longer than the wedding scene in the deer
0:38.9	hunter, but the planets have aligned. And so we have the great Adrian Woldridge, who is the global
0:45.4	business columnist at Bloomberg News. Previously, he was the economist political editor, author of the
0:50.5	Badgit column, author of the Schumpeter column, Washington Bearchees, and author of the
0:55.7	Lexington column. He went to all the very fanciest of schools in the UK, and he is the author of a
1:02.2	great many books. Most recently, The Revolutionary Center, The Lost Genius of American Liberalism.
1:09.5	Adrian Wildredge, welcome to the remit.
1:11.1	Thank you for having me. As you were warned, first question out of the boxes, what's your book
1:15.3	about? My book is about the lost genius of liberalism. And the argument essentially is to say
1:22.4	that there was this incredibly rich, powerful, dynamic, self-adjusting, self-improving philosophy of the world
1:30.7	that really starts in about the 18th century and continues to change, evolve over the years,
1:37.4	called liberalism. And this liberalism is very different from what many Americans mean when
1:42.0	they say liberalism, by which they mean sort of left progressivism. But it's also, in my view, a bit different from what classical
1:48.8	liberals will say is liberalism, which by which they mean sort of the free markets, unvarnished
1:54.3	by government intervention. It's a belief in freedom of debate, limitations on power, individual rights, individual self-improvement
2:06.6	that takes different forms with regard to the size of the state over the years. Sometimes it's
2:12.6	big state, sometimes it's small state. But it is always about the individual acting to make the best of
	...

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