I'm John Batchel with Tom House. He's editor-in-chief at the Vital Center. He lectures in politics at Princeton University. And he's, importantly, the co-author with his colleague James Patterson, of a new book coming this spring, why post-liberalism failed published by the Acton Institute. Now, I understand post-liberalism. This is a Catholic, this is a Catholic understanding of power, not to fear power.

Power in the hands of people who are well-informed and humble is a desirable thing.

That's almost utopian, not quite, because it has examples in history, the Pope being one of them.

But the Pope's office being one of them.

But we come to the failed part of your book.

There I want to hear, is Orban enough of a fail to say fail?

Where else is – what does the failure look like, Tom?

Well, in the book, we go through all these various historical instances of previous attempts at something like post-liberalism by Catholic people involved in politics.

And we say, well, the thing is, from a Catholic standpoint, any kind of political movement should at least, you know, there's room for debate about like like, the nuts and bolts politics among Catholics, right? But, you know, some people are,

you know, and it's not that, like, for instance, not, it's not the case that monarchy is always

inherently bad, right? That you need to have a Republican form of government, even as a matter of

principle from the standpoint of Catholic social ethics. But from the standpoint of prudence, I think with the modern state,

some form of representative democracy is probably the only, you know, representative democracy

is the only prudent thing in the context of a modern state, probably.

Maybe you could have some sort of weak monarchy, like in the United Kingdom,

where you have some more of a figurehead monarchy.

That's perfectly fine.

And there's room for debate about the nuts and bolts.

But any kind of politics that you set up at least has to be plausibly consistent with

sort of the principles of Catholic social ethics, right? So what we find is either these,

these hardcore reactionary Catholics are almost always a minority, right? So, but they always

punch above their weight, right? They punch about their weight because

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