You're listening to the Partial Examined Life, philosophy podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it.

Our question for episode 374 is something like, what's the crisis of little democracy and what's to be done about it?

For our episode, we read Lincoln's Lyceum speech on the perpetuation of our political institutions.

Stephen Pinker's Enlightenment Now, the first section of that book.

First introduction in the first chapter of Patrick Dene's why Why Liberalism Failed, and Francis Fukuyama's

liberalism and his discontents, the essay version that preceded the release of his book.

This is Dylan Casey, considering whether property rights really are required in a liberal democracy

from Madison, Wisconsin.

This is Seth Paskin escaping into romanticism in Lisbon, Portugal.

I don't like the sound of that. This is Wes Allwin, believing in my own perfectibility in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

And this is Walter Sterling, a president of St. John's College in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Well, thank you for joining us, Walter. I probably should have said that at the beginning,

that we had a esteemed guest with us in our episode today. And this is sort of a topical area for us.

And you and I had talked about connecting and having you on the podcast. And the topic

that we both resonated with was this sort of question that's about the state of both our

institutions surrounding liberal democracy, but also liberal democracy itself and the various challenges

to it.

And it's part of the public conversation with respect to whether our form of some explicit

form of government is satisfactory, some of the questioning of the roles of higher

education or of science, that sort of thing. And I've been

wanting to do a episode where we sort of engaged this topic a little more broadly.

And when you and I talked about it, you resonated with that as well. And we came up with a

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