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slash visit Scotland Hello, Prestige Heads, and welcome to prestige. I'm Danny Bessner, here as always with my friend and comrade Derek Davidson.

And we're very excited to welcome to the podcast today.

Alex Sikaris, Alex is a professor of political science at the University of Vermont. And we've invited him to talk about his recently published freedom for all what a liberal society could be. Alex, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks so much for having me. It's a real pleasure.

So I'm going to ask one easy question and one difficult question.

So the easy question is, what made you want to write this book?

And then the difficult question is, what is liberalism?

Okay.

Thanks.

So, yeah, I mean, there's been a lot of books written and books and articles written really since 2016 in the sort of defense of liberalism genre. What happened? Right. And of course, right, the rise of authoritarian populism, not just here in the States, but around the world is an important backdrop for all of that. And I found myself kind of frustrated with the tenor of a lot of this defense of liberalism

stuff.

I thought the predominant tendency was to present liberalism as a kind of pragmatic, moderate

adults in the room sort of alternative to the crazy authoritarian right.

And I think, you know, and so real emphasis on sort of preserving the integrity of our

constitutional order, ensuring the continuity of our democratic systems.

And look, all of this is deeply important, right? I mean,

...