Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
344 | Adam Gurri on Liberal Democracy and How to Fight For It
16 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of Adam Gurri's discussion on liberal democracy?
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I've been guessing that many Mindscape listeners grew up and or live in some version of a liberal democracy. That is to say, some society where there was at least lip service given to the ideals of individual liberty. and the right of different people to vote and create the government and pick their representatives, and some kind of equality of dignity of individual human beings.
It all sounds good, right? It all sounds almost cliché. These are things that would be very, very hard to sort of really strongly object to, you know, that we don't have many people out there. There are certainly some, but there's not that many people out there who are saying, you know what, people are not created equal. Some people are just deserving of more in the world than others.
You're beginning to hear more of those voices out there, but they're still in a minority. But when you think about it, this sort of liberal package, liberal in the broadest philosophical sense of the term, so not just liberal conservative in the matter of contemporary US politics, but liberalism in the sense of these basic ideals of individualism, liberty, and so forth.
It's an audacious idea because you're saying that people can be different. They can be radically opposed to each other in certain ways, in terms of certain values, in terms of certain thoughts about how people should live and the good life and things like that. and nevertheless live together in harmony. Liberalism is a philosophy that is meant to be universal. It's meant to be for everyone.
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Chapter 2: How does liberalism adapt to modern challenges?
And, of course, that's a perfectly important part of the ideas ecosystem, but it does make you wonder about the difference. And, you know, so what is it that made you think at some point, you know, what the world needs is an online magazine about liberalism?
Yeah, I mean, part of it is that I was of a community of people who simply loves writing and thinking about ideas, period. Obviously, in my lifetime, I'm 40. Just the idea of you get a blog, you get online, you know, you find your audience much more straightforward, even if you're not in the ideas industry.
But what happened for Liberal Currents specifically is that in 2016, Donald Trump won the election, as we all know, obviously, I had a pre-existing group of people that we were all writing together with.
And we sort of step back with, at the time we were writing some fairly academic stuff in terms of, and when I say academic, I mean kind of pejoratively in the sense of like, you know, it was continental philosophy and like it was, it was very abstract stuff that wasn't really about politics, for example. Sure. Um, so Trump wins. And a group of us say, we need to shift focus.
And also, there is not really a place that is just for liberalism. And we were looking at what Jacobin Magazine was doing for socialism, which was interesting. Obviously, the situations for the two ideologies are quite different. But there are still reasons why the approach would be valid in each case. So for Jacobin, it was that socialism had become a pariah in American life.
And also after the Cold War was just considered simply discredited. And, you know, they wanted to say, which I think is frankly legitimate, that socialism is a tradition of thought that has much more interesting implications depth to it than just what the Soviet Union did and made sort of like made the brand for a long time.
And Jacobin Magazine is going to be the contemporary home of serious thinking about socialism. That's great. Right. That's great. That was a political statement. I think they launched around the time Bernie happened. and more people were sort of self-identifying and socialist openly. Smart strategy, totally valid thing that they're doing.
In our case, it was more like the opposite in the sense that liberalism was so dominant and so successful for so long that a lot of the core features of it, people had forgotten why we should care about them. They just became kind of assumptions in the background, undefended. And that was to the advantage of its enemies who had to face those assumptions every day from a position of hostility.
And so had to think about angles of attack, whereas we mostly felt like, well, we're well defended because we won. We won once and for all. And a lot of things came to the fore. It wasn't just Trump, right? The trade relationship with China, for example, started raising a lot of questions. People talked about it from an economic point of view, but frankly,
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Chapter 3: What are the threats to liberal democracy today?
They were not right wingers. But they were very critical of especially the individualist aspect of liberalism. And there was a very fruitful conversation there between the communitarian critics and liberal theorists in the 80s and 90s around this. But that's like obscure academic stuff that didn't really reach the mainstream.
The post-liberals are people who are mostly taking the critical side, the communitarian side, and putting a right-wing bent on it, which frankly is not that hard, and taking it mainstream, taking it to bigger audiences.
Which is why I think you need places like liberal currents to take, because like I said, liberal theorists did respond to these arguments before fairly decisively in my point of view. But again, the only people reading them were philosophers, not the general public.
So who are the voices in the post-liberal sphere?
Oh, you know, Deneen is the obvious one.
Also, our audience don't know any of these people's names.
Sorry, Patrick Deneen. He wrote Why Liberalism Failed in the first Trump administration, I think is when that book came out. There's Yoram Hazony, who is an Israeli, who is big in what he calls religious nationalism specifically. Of course, in America that always means Christian nationalism, which is kind of a funny thing because his is obviously not Christian nationalism.
He actually, he's been around, both of these guys were big in the first Trump administration culturally. And we wrote about him specifically in like 2018 or 2019 or something. And he's only gotten bigger since, unfortunately. Yeah. So there's a few guys like this who want to say, well, we've proven that liberalism failed and it's time to move on to the next thing.
And the next thing is very much like the old things. It's just reactionary nationalism.
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Chapter 4: How does Adam Gurri define liberalism?
It's a difficult... Once again, the whole problem, the... predicament of being a liberal is drawing lines between different groups, different rights, whatever. And one of the lines you have to draw is there's people who are influential, but sort of not academically very serious. And when do you engage with them versus when do you ignore them?
Right. Yeah, no, absolutely.
And these people are definitely on the ascendant. There's a lot of, interestingly, the relationship between Catholicism and a lot of this post-liberal tradition, right? Like a weird number of the leading voices are Catholic, sometimes very, very you know, explicitly Catholic, like, you know, we should have a Catholic society.
Yeah, right. Yeah, no, there's the integralists, as they're called, who just more or less believe that the church should run a country, which is a very funny thing to say in America specifically, frankly. Like, in as much as we're a Christian country, we are... We would not be Catholic. Right. We're not Protestant historically, and nowadays we're barely Protestant, right? Right.
Like, we're evangelical, we're Pentecostal.
And does most of like the sentiment in the sort of post-liberal side come from – is it a practical thing? Like you think that power would be better exercised if it was more centralized or is it more sort of a fear of other people making choices you don't want them to make?
Oh, gosh. So what do you mean? What is the motivation behind like a Patrick Deneen or like an Adrian Vermeule would be the integralist side? I mean, it varies because there is differences among this group, right? So... If I were to point to one thing, and it is the thing where liberalism is the strongest, it's difference. Difference is difficult, right? Social difference.
And of course, the communitarians claim that liberalism was not good at it, right? But the communitarian solution is often kind of like the reactionary solution, which is, all right, just give each group their own little space. But the liberal response to that is, that's not possible. Every partition in history has created an internal minority.
Partition and independence are not actually solutions. There are things to be done in the most extreme of possible circumstances. The war of independence in this country was, even though the population was much smaller, one of the bloodiest wars in our history, I think in total terms. It was a very, very bloody war. partition in India and Pakistan, not exactly what I would call a success, right?
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Chapter 5: What role does education play in promoting liberal values?
From the beginning, liberals have cared about both. sort of rights in terms of just the formal, like defending those, but also the kind of society that's produced. So the, you know, Jefferson and people were getting rid of primogeniture and entail, which were a specific kind of inheritance law, which, you know, if you care about property, what do you care about?
the way that it's inherited, right? That should just be between the people in theory if you're just leaving people alone. Well, they cared because they didn't like the idea of intergenerational wealth. They thought that that created a static society and they wanted a vibrant commercial society with a lot of mobility, mobility both physically and socially.
So, you know, I think it's this aspect of liberalism that is actually looking at the nature of the society that's created by the particular people laws um and and uh and rights you know in in the law um that gets underestimated um and that that's that's the part that needs to be emphasized i think that you know sort of the neoliberal um current of liberalism very much under-emphasized that.
They just said that if, well, to some extent, maybe it's less that they underestimated it, under-emphasized it, is that they were very unrealistic about what you could do with just having free trade and freedom of contract and things like that. They thought that that would be enough to produce the kind of society that we want.
Whereas I think many liberals throughout the 200, 300 years of liberalism have recognized that there has to be these sort of piecemeal interventions to make sure that things stay on the right track and are actually open.
It does raise questions about the relationship between liberalism as a political philosophy and economics, which is sort of mostly welfare state capitalism as I understand it. But to what extent are the ideals of liberalism being distorted by economic inequality, by the fact that we have a lot of people who are not very well off and a lot of people who are super duper better than well off?
Yeah. I mean, I think it's pretty clear that they are distorted. Um, I mean, just, just looking at Elon Musk in the last year and a half alone, well, or, you know, if you want to go back to when he bought Twitter, um, and now we have, you know, Ellison, um, looking to acquire, you know, WBD and things like that and use and, and, and just using his personal relationship with the president.
Um, so liberalism, liberalism, one of the core pillars of liberalism is the rule of law.
Um,
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Chapter 6: How do political parties influence democracy?
Okay. So a lot of the criticisms of liberalism make a basic mistake in treating liberalism as if it's synonymous with the modern world. Patrick Deneen and all those people just do that. They think, oh, this commercial society, this mass society, the pluralism, all of that, that's caused by liberalism. But it's not caused by liberalism.
In the past 200, 300 years, the world has been utterly transformed. We call it the Industrial Revolution. Frankly, that's a misnomer. It's much more a revolution in... uh, science, technology and production period of all kinds. Um, and, uh, you know, one aspect of it is that the average person forget about how wealthy they are.
Cause wealth is sort of, you could take different ways of measuring what wealth means, right? Depending on how you want to define it. The average person is more mobile physically. Like we have cars, we have trains, we have airplanes. Um, they, they are, they can communicate over wider distances. I mean, forget the internet. Telephones were revolutionary. Broadcast was revolutionary.
And now, yes, we have the Internet. People have a phone. They can communicate with someone almost anywhere in the world instantly. A small group of private citizens is now capable of taking... Dramatic action of some kind. So it could it could be political action. It could be philanthropic action. It could be a business or it could be terrorism. Right.
It could it could it could be a number of insurgencies and things. The difficulty of governing. A large populations, largest populations ever in history, right? At this point, you know, in most countries now, the smallest countries in the world, well, maybe not the smallest. The average country size now is bigger than like some of the biggest countries, you know, 400 years ago or something.
So very, very difficult to govern these multi-million, hundred million, you know, population countries when very small groups of them can cause trouble for you. So what do you need? What does liberalism offer that the others do not? There's a basic formula for building in responsiveness in the government to what the population is feeling.
So democracy and freedom of the press and freedom of speech and freedom of association are things that actually force feedback loops into the government for what various different groups are feeling at the moment. They also allow organization to change things in the government. If the government has grown stagnant, this isn't just sort of reacting to the trouble that can come from populations.
Populations also do creative things. We can tap talent on a broader level than ever before. So talented people who might have been left out before can organize themselves, run for office or create large corporations and become influential. So you can harness sort of the creativeness of the general population as well through liberty.
And then finally, talking about this social difference aspect, I mean, the basic, because liberalism predates, as an idea, predates the Industrial Revolution. The basic idea is one way that you achieve social peace is by allowing a level of letting people organize among themselves.
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Chapter 7: What are the critiques of liberalism from different political perspectives?
But they're still a very poor country. I mean, they're middle income, but they're not growing fast. And they're a complete kleptocracy. And also, of course, now he's throwing them into the meat grinder of a pointless war. Then China, I mean, China's story, obviously a little more inspirational in terms of how much it's grown over the last 30, 40 years.
And one thing that they did have is an institutionalized mechanism for rotation in power, not democracy, at least not mass democracy. But they had a method for the party to change leaders every few years. But that's broken down, as often happens in these systems.
Xi used his terms to punish his enemies and reward his friends and put them in a position of power to then be able to say, actually, we think you should have another term. It's like falling the center of gravity that happens in these systems back into a personal system.
One of the other unpopular tweets I put up back in the day was I had a poll. Would you prefer to have your country governed by – I proposed it in an intentionally provocative way – by the opinions of the mob or be led by a single wise benevolent person? And it was two-thirds, a single person. Right. And this is my Twitter feed. Like this wasn't the end of the thing.
And so and I point out in a response, I'm like, you know, you people are not in favor of democracy. And people said, oh, no, you said that they would be wise and benevolent. And I had to say, like, that's what they always say. It doesn't always turn out that way.
Even if they are. I mean, look. So speaking of right liberals, Friedrich Hayek, I think deserves to be called a liberal. He really believed in a dynamic open system. He was definitely a right wing one in the sense that he was perfectly comfortable with social hierarchies that would develop in a system of just formal liberty. But he had very salient points about
how little knowledge a single individual could even have. So a very wise and benevolent ruler is still just one person. And they depend upon their, a lot of things to inform them. So what typically happens with a dictator is they sandbag their own administrative apparatus because they're prioritizing avoiding a coup.
And the people in their apparatus are the ones that are most likely to lead a coup against them. So they prioritize playing the sides against each other over having it be effective. But even if the person was wise and benevolent and didn't do that, the apparatus itself will have problems, right? If you don't have free speech and if you don't have these open feedback mechanisms.
So ultimately, there's only so much that one person can do. Yeah. What happens? Let's say you had the best possible dictator. You know, people often put to point to, you know, Lee in Singapore, which I question, but, you know, They've done okay, right? They've done all right economically anyway. They only last one generation, right? They only last one lifetime. What then comes next?
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Chapter 8: What practical steps can be taken to strengthen liberal democracy?
Again, to return to Jacob Levy, my guiding star, his big book was Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom. And the idea between the first two of those names is there's a liberalism that is rationalist in the sense of trying to impose a single way of liberalism on the whole country.
Mm-hmm.
And there's a liberalism that is about pluralism specifically, not just allowing difference, but also actually like federalism and checks and balances versus a more assertive liberalism. And the funny thing is that people think of libertarianism as being minimalist, but it's not. Libertarianism is absolutely a rationalism, which is why they like people like Pinochet in as much as they do.
Not to say that all libertarians do, right? But the libertarians that went for Pinochet, it's because... libertarians often have a very rationalistic idea, which is that everyone should have some categorical property rights, no matter where they are in the country, no matter who they are. And if a dictator comes and imposes that on everybody, great. You know, that's one way to do it.
So that's why that's one failure mode of the rationalist strain. The pluralist strain says, no, like you've got to, have some buttresses against central power. You know, let's have federalism so that some things are administered at a level that's closer to people and more responsive to them likely. And also allows for some differences.
You can have Quebec that has, you know, they mostly speak French and you can have the rest of Canada that mostly speaks English in most contexts. And you can have, Quebec has some laws that are different. Louisiana here actually has civil law, for example, versus common law. You know, you can have these like various differences at the legal level, um, that are healthy, um, for, uh,
taking down the temperature of national politics. Since there's hundreds of millions of people that are voting for and represented by the people in Washington, having to decide for all of them on everything, It's not just a matter of it's bad from an imposing power from the center perspective.
It's also bad from a, well, there's some questions that we could let people make different choices on by having all these different jurisdictions where they have the option of having different choices, right? Yeah. And so Levy's conclusion, which I still believe very much, is that neither approach is correct. You need both. And both have failure modes, right?
So the rationalist failure mode is very much just the enlightened dictator argument. The pluralist failure mode is the one that is most common in American history, because especially before now, the main problem in American history were completely reactionary localities. So like Jim Crow was not really... a national problem.
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