Robert P. George on Free Speech, Philosophical Liberalism, and Conservatism After Trump
The Good Fight
Yascha Mounk
4.7 • 963 Ratings
🗓️ 28 May 2022
⏱️ 66 minutes
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| 0:00.0 | To understand why we should have a right to free speech and to understand the content of the right to free speech, what counts as within it and what is outside it, we need an understanding of the good or goods that are protected by the right |
| 0:16.9 | to free speech and I think the one that is most fundamental, it's not the only one, but the one |
| 0:20.4 | most fundamentally protected by free speech, both in universities and in Democratic |
| 0:25.2 | republics, is the good of truth and truth-seeking as an aspect of our well-being and fulfillment |
| 0:29.9 | as human beings. |
| 0:31.9 | And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. |
| 0:37.0 | Today I would like to share with you the contents of chapter 5 of my new book of the Great Experiment |
| 0:48.0 | why diverse democracies fall apart and how they can endure. |
| 0:55.0 | As a German Jew, patriotism does not come naturally to me. |
| 1:00.0 | And yet I have changed my mind about the virtues and the importance of patriotism over the course of the last decades. |
| 1:11.0 | I have changed my mind because I saw the way in which the very worst people were able to use the powerful symbolism of a nation when the best, the most aspirational kinds of people retreated from that ground. |
| 1:29.0 | I changed my mind because I'm seeing over the course of his past terrible months. |
| 1:37.2 | How powerful a motivator patriotism can be for people in Ukraine to volunteer to defend their country against an unjust invasion from |
| 1:48.3 | Vladimir Putin. |
| 1:50.2 | And I changed my mind when I read George Orwell, one of my heroes, |
| 1:55.1 | sit down in the midst of World War II to the seemingly unlikely task of writing a defense of patriotism. Because as he wrote, if British intellectuals had |
| 2:06.6 | succeeded in the goal of robbing us of patriotism in the preceding decade, the man of ESS would now be patrolling in the streets of London. |
| 2:17.0 | But of course, there is also a big question about what kind of patriotism we should embrace because Vladimir Putin too would claim to be a patriot. |
| 2:28.2 | Here's the real contribution I'm trying to make in this part of my book. |
| 2:34.0 | Now, one historically influential notion is ethnic nationalism. |
| 2:39.0 | It is to say that people are defined by a common dissent and that this is at the core of what a nation is and should remain. |
| 2:48.0 | I obviously reject that notion. |
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