The Permanent Problem

Liberal values and institutions now face aggressive challenges from both right and left extremism, so how should defenders of the embattled liberal center respond? It's become clear now that the question exposes an important fault line running through today's contemporary center-left and center-right. On one side are those convinced that the rise of extremism represents a misguided response to serious and neglected problems afflicting contemporary society, and thus that it is now imperative for liberals to move boldly to identify and address those ills. On the other side are liberals who think that their side is losing ground largely because of a failure of nerve -- a lack of confidence in their own ideals and an insufficient supply of fighting spirit. Each side thus has reasons to think the other is making matters worse: the latter fear that conceding that the extremists have a point will only add fuel to the fire, while the former believe that complacent denialism brought us to this point by creating a vacuum for extremists to fill. In today's episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Jonathan Rauch joins host Brink Lindsey to explore this internal division within liberalism and look for ways to bridge it. Their starting point is on opposite sides of the divide -- Lindsey's book The Permanent Problem offers an unsparing diagnosis of deep problems within contemporary liberal societies, while Rauch has written repeatedly on the dangers of excessive liberal self-criticism -- but throughout the conversation they probe for common ground while clarifying where they disagree.

Virginia Postrel has made a career out of seeing the extraordinary in the everyday -- from the growing importance of "look and feel" in the products we buy, to the power of glamour to arouse our sense of longing, to tracing the history of humanity through its production and use of textiles. In this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Postrel joins host Brink Lindsey to discuss how the unleashing of everyday ambition has given us a world of everyday abundance -- and why that world, for all its material blessings, still fails to satisfy. In a wide-ranging conversation, Postrel and Lindsey review how the early American republic transformed ambition and restlessness from traditional vices into the source of world-transforming dynamism, reminisce about the Bicentennial and compare it to the fizzle of the recent Semiquincentennial, review the wide variety of ways in which humans seek to "matter," and speculate on the coming impact of AI and the future of mass full-time employment.

America is experiencing an epidemic of loneliness: marriage and birth rates, the number of close friendships, time spent with friends, and community involvement more broadly are all in decline. Phil Levin is helping to lead an interesting new movement away from all this self-imposed isolation and back toward social reconnection. Operating on the principle that every social problem is an entrepreneurial opportunity, Levin sees housing innovation -- in particular, making it easier for family and friends to live with or near each other -- as a promising way to help reknit the social fabric. He helped to start Culdesac, which builds car-free neighborhoods from scratch, and he is the founder of Live Near Friends, which helps people build or buy housing with people they know. And these business ventures grew out of his own experience with "co-living" arrangements in the Bay Area. Levin and Lindsey discuss Levin's personal housing experiences, the barriers facing people who want to follow his example, the factors driving growing interest in co-living, the disparate groups of people attracted to this lifestyle, and the prospects for group living arrangements to seed broader social revitalization.

In the heady days after the collapse of the Soviet Union, many imagined that we had arrived at the “end of history” now that liberal democratic capitalism had chased all ideological competitors from the field. Just a few short decades later, things look very different: autocracy is on the march around the world, and liberal democratic institutions and values are under assault in the United States and other advanced democracies.

Adrian Wooldridge, my guest for this episode of the podcast, offers the consolation that we have been here before. In his new book The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism, Wooldridge relates how the centuries-old liberal political tradition has gone through repeated cycles of advance and ascendancy, decline and decadence, and self-criticism followed by renewal. Adrian and I discuss how the basic elements of liberalism — focus on the individual, tolerance of pluralism, and suspicion of power — have persisted through these cycles even as liberalism regularly has reinvented itself to deal with the novel and ever-changing challenges of modernity. We examine how a combination of staleness and overreach has brought on the current crisis of liberalism, and we look ahead to the institutional reforms and cultural shifts that can lead to liberal renewal.

All of the blessings of modernity, Ryan Avent argues in a fascinating new book, rest on faith. It is our faith in others, our ability to trust strangers we will never meet, that makes possible the large-scale cooperation that has given us science, modern economic growth, and liberal democracy. But if everything depends on our ability to weave and maintain particular webs of complex meaning, what happens when we allow those webs to weaken and fray? In his book In Good Faith, Avent contends that the dysfunctions and discontents plaguing 21st century democracies reflect such underlying neglect. We have been seduced by what he calls the "Modern Faith" -- the belief that good system design and proper incentives are all that is needed to keep society running smoothly. In this episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Avent and host Brink Lindsey discuss the Modern Faith's critical blind spots, explore the interplay of culture and institutions in shaping social change, and ponder whether anything can replace the cultural grounding provided by organized religion.