I think maybe people have taken for granted the sort of basics of liberal democracy and not vocally defended them, not being willing to

champion them as like a genuinely inspiring ideal of how to organize society and not recognize also just how like how recent and how precarious these things are.

So I think that's, you know, part of the problem maybe is taking those things for granted and maybe part of the solution is to really vocally defend them and I think that's you know again part of what you get from rules as a philosophy that can combine that a really inspiring defense of a liberal tolerant pluralist society

with also a robust critique of capitalism as we know it. night.

Hello and welcome to Wies.

It's happening with me, your host, Chris Hayes.

If you were born like I was, 1979 means you came of age, like into kind of political

consciousness right around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, you sort of came into your awareness of politics and particularly political philosophy at that moment, you were living in a moment where

in a sort of historically anomalous way,

there was not a particularly intensely contested fight

over the best model for governance, the best model to how to organize a society in the state.

Fights over that have been happening for as long as humans have been organizing themselves in various different ways and you could

stretch back to philosophers across many different traditions reaching back into the ancients,

different ways of thinking about how to organize a society, how to best organize a society.

There was a strange interregnum and we've interviewed Francis Fukeyama, who's sort of most associated

with this period on the podcast before, in which there was a kind of sense of

liberal market democracy is a kind of consensus an international global

consensus a telos a kind of end point that everything was sort of arcing towards. And I think it's fair to say that

has become profoundly disrupted, particularly over the last decade. And in my lifetime, the most intense debate I've ever seen that's happening both academically

about questions about the sort of best way it were society, but also even more honestly than

academically just in the political

formations of the time we're seeing the rise of what people call illiberal

...