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You're better off having friends, being happy, and being wrong than you are not having friends, being miserable, and being right.
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And yet, that feels counterintuitive to someone like me who has been trained to think that truth is the number one consideration. I would rather go astray with Plato and my friends than be right with my enemies.
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And, you know, you read that as a liberal, as an intellectual, and you think, "What are you, crazy? There is no truth in politics." And to the extent you think you know the truth, you're acting like a tyrant.
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But can you still love a world in which they exist? We're gonna have to start talking to each other, otherwise we're gonna start killing each other. Welcome to the liberalism.org show.
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I'm Aaron Ross Powell, Senior Director of Liberal Projects at the Institute for Humane Studies.
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In today's episode, my colleague Michael Broderick sits down with Roger Berkowitz, founder and academic director of the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities and professor of politics, philosophy, and human rights at Bard College.
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We spend a lot of time these days worrying that people can't agree on basic facts. Roger's new book, A World We Share, makes a more unsettling case, that what our politics is really missing isn't truth, but friendship.
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Drawing on Hannah Arendt's famously argumentative friendships,
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Michael and Roger get into why respect matters more than agreement, what Arendt meant when she said there's no truth in politics, and where the limits of friendship finally lie. Roger, it's so good to see you.
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Great to see you, Michael. I've enjoyed the book so much. I think I mentioned that to you when we were chatting earlier. It's, uh, it's beautifully written. It's learned, but it wears its learning lightly,
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and it makes what I think is a persuasive case for friendship, uh, both civic and personal, as the proper foundation for a liberal democratic politics.
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[clears throat] But before we get into those things, I wanna come to the person who is at the center of this book,
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and that's Hannah Arendt, uh, someone who was an extraordinary thinker, who lived an extraordinary life and lived out extraordinary struggles.
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So tell us a little bit about Hannah Arendt, uh, and who she was [clears throat] and, uh, tell us what's distinctive about her life and work. Hmm. Well, thank you.
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First of all, it's a pleasure to be here, and thank you for, for having me. Um, Hannah Arendt is one of those rare people who, uh, is equally, uh, distinctive both in her thinking and her biography. Um,
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and I think that that's not surprising for her because her thinking very much comes out of her experience. Um, she wasn't a systematic thinker. She wasn't a philosopher.
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She, she always denied the, the, the, the name philosopher. Um, you know, what she was is, is complicated. She wrote books on-- she wrote a lot of journalism.
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Uh, she wrote books on totalitarianism, on the human condition, uh, on politics, on truth in politics, um, on the American Revolution. Uh, what she really was was someone who, um, saw profound
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problems in the world and thought about them and thought, "How do we think through these problems in a way that we can understand them and potentially resist them?" She's not someone who offers solutions.
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Uh, her book, The Human Condition, is about the problem of, um, the rise of automation and the rise of modern science and how it threatens, uh, human freedom and human action.
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And she says the point of the book is not to offer a solution, it's to think what we are doing, and in thinking what we are doing, hopefully understand it in a way that we can respond to it meaningfully.
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Um, she, she was born in nineteen oh six as a Jew in Germany. She grew up, uh, uh, under, uh, the antisemitic rise of antisemitism.
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Um, she was arrested in nineteen, uh, thirty-three while working for the German Zionists. She had not been a Zionist, but she felt that at that point, the Zionists offered the only political response to, uh, Nazism.
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She fled... She was released. She fled Germany. She was stateless for somewhere between fifteen and eighteen years, depending on how you count.
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And, uh, she worked very, uh, hard with the Zionist, uh, movement in France, got to the United States, and wrote, uh, her book, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which made her famous.
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Um, it's, it's not a book about, you know, what is the cause of totalitarianism, but it's about the different elements that allowed something like totalitarianism to emerge, and I think there, there are, you know--
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Sh-- On the one hand, she identifies totalitarianism with, with, with terror, on the other hand, with ideology.
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But what made totalitarianism as a new form of government based on terror and ideology in her mind possible and even almost necessary was the new experience of human loneliness.
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She says people had always been lonely, but there had never been this, like, kind of mass meaninglessness and la- mass loneliness that emerged in the late 19th and 20th centuries.
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And, and this phenomenon made men, people, uh, need, crave meaning, which, uh, the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, both movements, provided by giving them a, a, what she called a, a coherent fiction.
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Not true, but a coherent fiction that said that they were meaningful, that their lives would be important. She spent her life, uh, trying to think what we are doing. I think that's one of the great mantras for her.
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Um, she says, "There are no dangerous thoughts. Thinking itself is dangerous," one of my other favorite mantras of hers. But she was... I, I just say she was in exile for a whole...
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for most of her life, and a stateless refugee until 1950 when she became a US citizen. And, um, she often said that, "I am not a... I don't love any collective. I don't love the Germans. I don't love the Americans.
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I don't even love the Jews as a collective." She always identified as a Jew, but she said, "I don't love them as a collective. The only people I love are my friends."
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And she really did spend her life nurturing an incredible group of friendships with some very famous people, Martin Heidegger, you know, Karl Jaspers, Mary McCarthy, um, but also some less famous people.
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And, um, and, and these friendships were at the very center of her life. And so yeah, I... the book is in many ways an attempt to understand
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why friendship was so important to her, not by offering a theory of friendship, but by looking at her friendships and trying to pull out of them, uh, some elements of what friendship is and why it matters both in personal life but also in politics.
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Hm. Mm-hmm. Yeah, you, you could, uh... It strikes me that you could look at the book and think, "Is this a book about politics which is also about friendship,
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or is it a book about friendship which is also about politics?" And I think the answer is the second of those two,
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uh, because [clears throat] in, in some sense, friendship is the thread that runs throughout the book and is from not a theory of friendship so much as a model or a framework that we discover how to do politics.
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So I wanna ask you about two different models of friendship that come up in the book. Uh, one of them is what you might describe as, uh,
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admiration and agreement rooted in emotion or sentiment. The other is what you might call, uh, understanding [chuckles] rooted in respect.
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So tell us how these two models of friendship differ and, and this is the important part, which one of them provides a better foundation for liberal democratic politics? Yes.
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So I mean, one of the things that's just, just bracing about Arendt and her friendships is how argumentative she is with her friends
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and how often she challenges them and tests them and says things she knows is gonna infuriate them. Um, uh, she's not... As she often says, "I'm not a warm and cuddly person."
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Um, her idea of friendship is not the emotional, supportive, you know, let me, um, hold your hand- "I speak my mind," she said. Yeah. She says, "I speak my mind, and I'm not shy about it."
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[chuckles] Um, she really is an extraordinary person, you know, in that regard. She, she has different kinds of friendships.
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She has friendships with, um, Martin Heidegger, and she has friendships with, uh, Hilde Franco, who she calls "my non-intellectual friend" to...
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And she says that as a compliment to Hilde, um, "You're my only non-intellectual friend right now." Um, and what she means by that is that she doesn't get caught up in, you know, intellectual rigmarole.
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She actually, uh... You know, they talk to each other honestly, uh, without any kind of, you know, um, subterfuge. And she really does think that intellectuals, um...
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She has a very-- She has a lifelong disdain of intellectuals, um, including the... even though she was one. She, you know, she lived, grew up in Nazi Germany, and so many of her intellectual friends became Nazis.
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Uh, and she came to believe that intellectuals, um, because they are so good at rationalizing and arguing, they can argue themselves into doing things that they should not be doing,
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and so she was always suspicious of intellectuals. Um, it's one of the reasons she... especially professional intellectuals, so it's one of the reasons she never accepted a, a tenure track job.
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She, she wanted to remain independent. She wanted to remain an outsider, and that was very important to her. Um, friendship for her is based in respect, as you said. It's not based in agreement.
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Uh, she disagrees vehemently and vociferously and angrily with many of her friends, and to her, that's part of what friendship is about. In fact, she likes that because for her
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To be a friend means you talk, I listen to you, you listen to me. And it's not that I convince you or you convince me, right? We have this... We, we, we use this word persuasion.
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And by m- at least in my world, most people when they say politics is about persuasion, what they mean is it's my job to persuade you that I'm right. [laughs] And, um, and it's your job to be persuaded that I'm right.
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And Arendt says that's not persuasion, right? That's
tyranny. That's, that's, that's where you say, "I know the truth and you don't." Persuasion is when we both think we know what the truth is,
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and we talk to each other, and we both realize that we agree on certain things, we disagree on certain things, and we both shift, and we both grow, and we find where we
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agree, what we hold in common, and that's the world we share. And so for her, persuasion is... requires that we actually disagree with each other. Um, she doesn't think...
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She has this fundamental view of human nature in which we are all plural.
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Each one of us, every single one of us sees the world from a different perspective, from a different place, and she doesn't think we can ever fully agree.
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And this is, again, one of those parts of her work that I think a lot of her friends still don't understand, people who think they're Arendtians. They somehow still believe that if we all
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read the same newspaper and get the right facts, we will agree about global warming, or about immigration, or ICE enforcement, or about nuclear weapons, or whatever it is. And Arendt doesn't believe that.
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She believes we can all read the same facts, all know the same truths, and we will disagree 'cause we're different and we see the world differently.
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And so the point is not to come to know a true world or be persuaded into a true world or to be manipulated into a true world, it's to talk to each other, and that's the fundamental aspect of friendship for her.
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Conversation between two people face to face in which as you talk, you realize what you agree on and what you disagree on, and then what you agree on becomes the common world. That's the world we share.
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There's a connection between personal friendship and civic friendship, and you navigate that connection artfully in the book. [clears throat] But if you had to give it a little more definition,
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what is it that connects personal friendship to civic friendship? And I want to hazard a guess and say it's respect. Yeah. Because if you try to ground friendship in emotion or sentiment, you'll be disappointed.
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Uh, you'll find people who disagree with you, and you'll find it hard to accept that disagreement rears its ugly head.
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And that doesn't work well in the context of civic friendship or public life because that's where disagreement rears its ugly head all the time. Yeah. [clears throat] So it...
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Doesn't it have to be respect that translates friendship from the personal sphere to the public sphere? That's right. Respect is the, is the hinge of the book. And, you
know,
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you could say, "Oh, respect, we all know what respect is." But in many ways, the book is 130-page essay and inquiry into what is respect, 'cause it's not as simple as, I think, respect. Um, for her,
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to respect somebody is to want them to be who they are and not who you want them to be. So she's constantly saying to her friends, "Here's what I think."
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And if they try and say, "Oh, I agree," she's like, "No, no, no." Or if they try and say, "I hate you," she's like, "You have to respect me."
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The point is she uses this phrase from, from Augustine, "Volo ut sis," I want you to be. Mm. Which she first learns from Martin Heidegger, her, her teacher and lover at the time,
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and Heidegger writes her a letter after their first date. Um, you know, he's older than her and he's her professor, and it...
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He says, "Love is a, is an amazing thing, but it's dangerous, and it's difficult, and it comes down to volo ut sis, I want you to be."
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And he says, "I can render that as a mathematical equation, which is that I want you to be who you are in your essence," and he does it through mathematical symbols.
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And Arendt spends the next 20 years rebelling against this idea because what she says is the way Heidegger understood Augustine was I want you to be as you are
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according to your essence, which I, as your professor or lover, will show you. And what she says is the way he understood Augustine, I want you to be as I want you to be.
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And she came to radically rethink it as I want you to be as you want yourself to be, and I love you as you are in your difference from me, even if your difference from me is really disturbing to me. Mm.
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And that level of personal intimate respect is what translates into the political sphere. Because what it says is, "Look, you voted for this guy and I voted for this guy.
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You believe we should have massed inf- immigration enforcement, and I think that's wrong." We disagree pretty vociferously, and some of those things I take very seriously. Um, but
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I have to learn to talk to you and understand where your opinions come from and why, even though we really do disagree, we actually both want the world to be a good world. Now, there are limits, right?
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There are people who don't want the world to be good world. There are, as we say, technically assholes, if I can use that term. There are crazy people. There are monsters.
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Um, but one of the things that Arendt is constantly reminding us is that there's many fewer of those people than we think. Mm-hmm.
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Most of the people that we look at and say, "I won't talk to them, they're evil," are actually people that if you talk to, you could find a lot of commonalities with. That doesn't mean you'll agree with everything,
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and, um, it doesn't mean you can't judge them, right? But she says before you judge them, you have to understand them, and you can only understand them if you talk to them.
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And, and so this idea of building a political world in which we seek to understand, find the commonalities, understand the differences, and then make a judgment.
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And the judgment can be, "I really disagree with this person, but I can still love a world with this person in it."
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The judgment could also be, "I really disagree with this person and I can't love a world with them in it." From Arendt's perspective, there are very few opinions
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that would lead me to think, "I can't share a world with you." There are actions, right?
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So, you know, I may think the opinions of someone who want to deport people who've been in this country for 30 or 40 years are reprehensible,
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but I can talk to them, and I can at least form a bond with them, and I can try and m- find a middle ground with them, and hopefully they'll change a little bit, and I'll change a little bit, and I'll realize maybe we do need a border wall or maybe we do need, you know, a, you know, not, not open borders.
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But we should at least... If people are here and they've built a good life, and we try and find a common ground, and I believe that common ground is findable. Mm-hmm. But when someone does what I heard about on
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a podcast two weeks ago, they take someone who came here from Cuba,
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had a rough early life, but turned it around and became a plumber and worked for 30 years as a plumber, had three kids, had married, member of a church group.
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Goes to his immigration appointment and is detained and on the next day sent on a plane to a country he's never heard of, that I've never heard of, uh, somewhere in Africa, used to be Swaziland,
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and put in a prison there. I say, look, the people who made this happen, they're not just having opinions, right? They're engaging in acts of brutality
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and unneighborliness and meanness that to me are simply incompatible with, with, with what I understand the United States to be. And so, um, there are people that I may have to say, "You know, no, I, I, I...
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You've gone too far." But there's very few people like that. That's where I think most of us go wrong. Most people, and even some of the people
who maybe put them on the plane 'cause they... They're, they're salvageable.
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Mm-hmm. But we have to... I think it's, we have to be much more open to talking and learning and understanding before we judge people. But this, this romantic idea that friendship's goal is all agreement and- No...
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admiration and magic and light, this is something that has gained a lot of traction, hasn't it? Yeah. I mean, to the, to the point where we've lost this i- uh, we've lost- So-...
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the idea that you can respect someone that you might not like and you might not admire. Yeah. There, there, there's a certain basic level of agreement that you always need, right? If I say to you, "Michael,
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stand on the floor," and you stand on the ceiling, right? We're not gonna be able to have much of a conversation.
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If I say to you, "The temperature in the world has gotten warmer over the last hundred years, and it's large, and at least in part because of human activity," and you say to me, "No, the temperature has gotten colder.
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You know, it's cold today, and therefore you're an idiot," we're not gonna be able to have much of a conversation. You still do need to agree on certain fundam- basic empirical facts.
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Um, it's not that the imp- facts are true in any kind of rational sense. They're empirical. They're contingent. They could be otherwise. But we have to be able to at least,
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you know, look at, you know, your suit and say it's, what, blue or black or whatever it is, and have to have a conversation.
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And, and if, and if someone is basically willing, unwilling to engage in, in those basics, it's very hard to, to bring them into your world of friendship. So there is a truth in politics.
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She calls it the ground we stand on and the sky above us, metaphorically speaking. The truth is the sense that we, we generally accept basic, you know, things that we share.
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There are times when the sh- truths we share are pretty, um, rich. Like I would say from like 1980 to 2005, many people in Western Europe and the United States shared a pretty strong liberal democratic worldview.
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And, you know, you could, you could, you could, you could go on that. You could build on that. Um, and- I- i- it turns out that not s- many people share that worldview as we thought.
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They just were bought off by a growing economy and, and, and then not wanting to rock the boat. But after the financial crisis and, and other things, what you've seen is that that
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liberal consensus, liberal democratic consensus, has largely shattered or fallen apart. And, um, and a lot of liberals are simply trying to reassemble it.
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And part of what I've been trying to say, and what I think this book is really saying to liberals, it's important for liberalism.org, right?
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Is that the liberal worldview is one class-based partisan worldview, largely driven by people who are educated, often highly educated with master's and PhDs,
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and, um, and it has largely been along the lines of, "Let us experts govern the world for you, and we'll make the world better. Leave the governing to us, and we'll take care of you."
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And I think what you're seeing now is a rebellion against that by people who say- [clears throat]... that liberal world- But, but that, it, it worked, didn't it? It worked for a certain amount of time.
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It, it, it, it gave us a lot of good things. It gave... Well, it gave us a lot of good things, uh, although some people enjoyed those good things more than others, right?
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I, I've been to 30 countries in the last 24 months. Liberal world, the global world, was very good for me, right?
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Someone who was a factory worker and has their factory, you know, sent to another country and has suddenly now has to work as a, a gig worker in the gig economy may not think it worked so well.
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And the point is that there's a lot of arrogance among us who say, you know, "Immigration is good for the economy." Okay, yeah. In a certain way, yes, but it's not good for everyone in the economy.
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And, and we have to understand that there's no truth... I mean, you hear these economists say, you know, uh, tar- you know, low, low tariffs and high immigration is good for the economy. Well, it's- That's not true?
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It's, it may be good for economic growth, but that's not good for everybody. And, and the point is that we have to listen to and understand that, that economic growth is not the only factor in the world.
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There are other factors that people care about. They care about community. They care about not having to move every five years to go to another place where the new jobs are.
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They care about, you know, working for the same company for 50 years and having their kids, you know, go into the, the family business. That becomes very hard in, in a liberal, uh, world these days.
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So, uh, I think liberals are going to have to be much more open to hearing non-academic people tell them, "You know, uh, there are other ways of seeing the truth of our world."
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It's not that the, it's not that the non-liberal truth is, is true. I don't think that's true either. But the truth is gonna have
to be built over, and it's not gonna... We're not gonna rebuild the liberal world.
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I think that's a fantasy. And, um, until people in the center left, center right who are educated elites- You mean we're, we're, we're not gonna rebuild the technocratic liberalism of the post-war era. Certainly not.
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But also, we're not gonna build the liberalism of it. There's gonna... Look, from 19- 1980, from 1880 to 1924, we let in a ton of immigrants in this country.
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From 1924 to 1965, we let in almost no immigrants in this country. This country's always gone back and forth. I'm a huge immigration f- I mean, I am, you know... I believe... I love immigration. I love- I know. But
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I think if you think that the next 20 years are gonna have the kind of global movement and immigration that we had in the last 20 or 30 years, I think you're kidding yourself. Uh, I think we're going to have to build...
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We're gonna have to make compromises and build a consensus that's on a very different level than a lot of us would like, uh, a lot of us in this room. And, uh, and that's,
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that's a hard s- pill to swallow for a lot of us. And what Arendt is telling us is, "You think you know the truth. Economics tells us we should do this. We should have low tariffs. We should have more immigration."
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And she's like, "There is no truth in politics. And to the extent you think you know the truth, you're acting like a tyrant." Mm.
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"What you have to do is talk to different groups of people and build where you agree upon, not hope that they're gonna simply be persuaded by your intelligence and brilliance."
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Well, let's, let's drill down into that idea that there's no truth in politics. Uh, I know she, uh, Arendt says that, uh, truth doesn't belong in the realm of politics, but, uh, it, when we disagree w- about politics,
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uh, it certainly seems as if we are disagreeing about truth claims. Uh, you know, who, uh, who won the election? What happened on January 6th? Is climate change real?
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Uh, these are all questions that come down to claims about what's true. So what does she mean when she says that those kinds of questions don't belong in the realm of political discourse? So there's...
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She makes, she talks, she says there's different kinds of truth, right? There's rational truth, two plus two equals four. That's true, but it has nothing to do with politics. Um, there's moral truths.
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One she, she offers from Socrates is, um, "It's better to suffer wrong than do wrong." She says that's a good moral truth.
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She says, unfortunately, it seems like we no longer believe it, but it's also not a political truth. It's a moral truth. She separates morals and politics. There are factual truths, um, like, uh, um,
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Joe Biden won the 2020 election, uh, or, um, uh, eh, you know, in, that U- Russia invaded Ukraine at a certain day.
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Um, and those are factual truths and, and she thinks those are not political truths, they're just factual truths, and she actually says what you need are, um, non-political institutions to,
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uh, to identify and protect those truths, things like law- law courts or, um, journalism or academia.
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And so she wants to hold onto, I think it's somewhat of an old-fashioned idea today, but I, I, I support it, but it's certainly not in fashion, of a non-political realm of...
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And she says that politics has to protect the non-political realm so that those realms can find factual truths that we can build a common world on. But she says, "A factual truth tells you almost nothing," right?
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Like, it may be a factual truth that Ukraine was invaded by Russia on a certain day, but that doesn't tell you whether Russia was justified in invading Ukraine, right?
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I may think it is, and you may think it's not, uh, or vice versa. It doesn't tell us whether, um, Russia saw itself threatened by Ukraine's interest in joining NATO and NATO's interest in helping Ukraine.
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Um, it doesn't tell us whether, uh, the, you know, the global world order, which is supposed to be a rules-based order, seems rules-based whenever the US wanted to impose them on other people, but will-based whenever the US wanted to do whatever it wanted to do.
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The point is that the facts are important, but they tell you very little about what we should do. Mm-hmm. Global warming, right? It's warming. Human involvement in that warming. What should we do? Does it matter if
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a bunch of people on the island of, I don't know, island off the coast of South Carolina lose their homes? Maybe, maybe not. That's not a factual question. That's a political question.
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And from her point of view, there's no truth to that. Mm. There's opinions. Um, and so, uh, she takes it very seriously.
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She says the effort to try and say that there's a true answer to these questions, uh, is tyrannical. Mm. And it always has a tyrannical air. She warns against being a fanatic for truth. Fanatic for truth, yes.
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And there, there's a... I- isn't there... There's a story in, that you, uh, recount in the book about her friendship with Hans Jonas, the philosopher Hans Jonas. Uh, and, uh, they, they were in graduate school together.
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Uh, [clears throat] they developed a close friendship, and, uh, uh, that went on for years. And then, uh, she wrote a book about the trial of the, uh, German, uh, Nazi bureaucrat Adolf Eichmann.
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And, uh, she was critical in that book of the German Zionist movement. And I- I- Jonas read it and was, uh, was aghast. Uh, he felt that her treatment of the, of, uh, German Zionism was unfair, was distorted, and so on.
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And he broke off the relationship for, for, for two years or so. And then they were living in New York. Uh, they were both living in New York. He was living in New Rochelle. She was living in Manhattan.
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And, uh, Jonas' wife said to him, "You're being silly. You, you've had a relationship with Hannah for how many years?
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Uh, this is a deep and profound relationship, and, and, and here you are getting ready to sacrifice friendship on the altar of truth. What are you doing?" So
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he called her, and she invited him over, uh, and, and, and they reconciled together. But that's, that idea that, uh, you know... And, and I think she said to him, his wife said to Jonas in that confrontation,
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"It's just a book. I know you disagreed with Eichmann in Jerusalem, but it's just a book." And that idea that it's just a book is so Arendtian. [chuckles] Yeah.
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Because she's, she's, she's almost saying, "Look, it's, it's better to be... You're better off being happy. You're better off having friends, being happy, and being wrong-" [chuckles] Yeah "...
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than you are not having friends, being miserable, and being right." Yeah. And, and, and yet that feels counterintuitive to someone like me, who is a philosopher- Yeah...
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and has been trained to think that truth is the number one consideration. We should value truth above all. And I think I- I'm not the only one who- No... has that intuition. No, I mean, this is...
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I mean, what I love about Ha- I love so many things about reading Hannah Arendt, but one is she speaks her mind and she has no school. She's not from any school. But she's so...
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She's provocative, and this is one of those aspects of her thought that people have seen but refuse to see fully because it so challenges our fundamental ideas, right? She says that
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this preference for truth over friendship, truth over opinion, goes all the way back to Plato. When Plato saw Socrates convicted by the many in the trial, the hoi polloi, he said, "We need,
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we need to not trust the people and their opinions. We need the truth."
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And so he invented this idea of a philosopher king who goes out, finds the truth, comes back in, and either persuades the people of the truth or Tells them myths to make them do what he wants them to do.
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And she goes, "This idea that the truth is paramount over opinion, and that the
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s- the, the smart people who know the truth have the right to rule over the many people who don't know the truth, who have doxa, who have opinion," goes through the entire history of the Western canon. And
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the lo- You know, w- people have asked me a lot the last six months, "What made you write this book?" And there's a number of answers to that, but one is this. I've been struggling with a line of Arendt's.
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It's a quotation of Cicero that she makes a lot of in an essay called "The Crisis in Culture," in which she says, "I would rather go astray with Plato and my friends than be right with my enemies."
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And, you know, you read that as a liberal, as an intellectual, and you think, "What are you crazy?" [laughs] Right? "You'd rather be wrong with your friends than right with your enemies?
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Wouldn't you rather be right with your friends? Maybe you should change your friends. If Plato's wrong, why are you friends with Plato," right? I mean, that's the way I think a lot of us think. It is.
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And what she says is, "No. First of all, there's no right or wrong in politics. It's always an opinion, and it's more important for me to share
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an opinion with my friends to, to build a world of friendship in which we build a common world in which we agree on certain things than it is to think, uh, well, my friends are wrong and I should be right with this other person."
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Now, you might say, "Oh, so does that mean, like, if you have a friend, you have to... and they wanna destroy the world with a nuclear bomb, you have to, you know, support them?"
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And, and I think the answer is no, because- But it's a judgment, isn't it? But it's a judgment. And, and the answer is no, because there's a difference in opinions and deeds. Right?
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She has this important distinction that she makes in two chapters of The Origins of Totalitarianism. One chapter is called Race Thinking Before Racism, and the other is called Race and Bureaucracy.
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And what she says is, people like Gobineau and others who started to think in racial categories, we call them early racists or racists. She goes, "They were thinkers. They were trying things out.
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They were playing around. They had thoughts, some of which became dangerous later on, but none of them sought to kill people based on their theories." "There's a difference between
people," she says, "of
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dangerous and yet, um, brilliant thoughts and people of brutal deeds." Mm-hmm. And, and she makes that distinction pretty carefully. Um, uh, you know, if you wanna really,
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uh, destroy the world or destroy a certain race of people or destroy a certain group of people, from her point of view, that's not something I can reconcile to. That's a judgment I can't make.
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In fact, I can't love a world in which you are in it. But if you make- And that's the limit of friendship. And that's the limit of friendship. Yeah. Yeah, so... Yeah. No, and, and so these are hard questions.
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She, you know, she doesn't give you a plug-and-play model for how you determine whether you can be friends with Stephen Miller or, or Donald Trump or Hasan Peak Piker or whoever it is that is the hard person in your world, right?
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Um, you know, who are the people that you can't be friends with? But can you still love a world in which they exist? Well, I think i- if you're talking about opinions, yes. Mm-hmm. Right? I mean,
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you know, I'll use the hard case for me, someone like... I mean, I'm just gonna be honest about where I come from, right? I mean, it's very hard for me...
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Well, both, someone like Hasan Piker, who's an anti-Semite, and, and someone like, um, Stephen Miller, who seems to be in favor of incredible brutality in the name of making this, uh, in, in s- and getting rid of people he doesn't want in this country.
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Um, these are people whose opinions really, really piss me off. Um, both sides, right? Uh, but my guess is that if I were to sit down and have a conversation with both of them, I could find common ground.
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And so if we're talking about them being professors and colleagues of mine in the faculty dining hall, yeah, I can talk to them. But if they're in power,
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and they're picking people up off the street in ma- with mass raids, people who've been here for 30 years and have not committed a crime, and sending them to prisons in countries no one can pronounce,
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that's not an opinion. That's someone who's committing an atrocity, to my view. And I can't then say, "Oh yeah, let's just go have dinner." Mm-hmm. And that's the limit- Mm. -to me. Mm-hmm.
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Well, I know that we're running short of time, but I want to end on a hopeful note. Uh, and I think you use the word hope in the book.
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Uh, you say that, that a politics of friendship holds out hope for the future of a free society. So it's not a solution, but it is hopeful.
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So, uh, tell us what is, what is the bull case for a future, uh, of,
uh, of freedom through friendship, personal and civic? So,
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you know, I go back to someone like Alexis de Tocqueville on, on a question like this, right? And Tocqueville says that the spirit of freedom comes out of the townships.
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Um, and it comes out of the townships because in a township, a group of people get together, they have a meeting, and they say, "I want a new church." And the other guy says, "I want a road."
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And the other guy says, "I want a firehouse," or whatever. "I want a teacher. I want a policeman." And they talk about it, and they figure out a way to work together. Sometimes these town-
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these little towns are quite racist, right? Sometimes they're quite anti-Semitic, or anti-Muslim, or anti-Catholic, or whatever it is they are, and yet the spirit of freedom comes out of them.
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And what Tocqueville says is that these township freedom, he calls it coarse, and he says it's at odds with the civilizing values of the center, of the, of the central, of the, of the higher government. And yet...
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And, and he says there, "But there has to be a balance in some way." Um, I think the genius o- of the American Constitution, as Arendt understood it, was its federalist spirit and structure
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in which you could allow different states and different parts of the country to live differently, um, for a whole host of reasons. Uh, on the one hand, on the left, a distrust of local government around race issues.
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Justifiable, right? And on the other hand, on the right, maybe a, a, a, a, a justification for centralization for, um, imperialism and military escapades.
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We have, um, increasingly become one central government and one political community such that,
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uh, whether you're on the left or the right, everyone thinks that they have the right answer for abortion on, for everybody, and that everyone in the country should live the same way, and everyone thinks they have the right answer on the question on immigration and, and other issues.
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I think we're at a point where, um, y- one side is not gonna convince the other side right now. And the hope, the bullish case that I have
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is that if we actually start creating institutions for people who disagree to talk to each other on a local basis, but also on a, on a larger, more national basis, we will start
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making allowances for people in different places and different communities living differently.
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And we may hold our nose while we do it and be very upset at the way people in Alabama are living their lives, and they may be very upset at the way we're
living our lives. But we have to learn to respect each other,
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and they'll respect the way we treat trans people, and we'll have to respect the way they treat people who are pregnant. And I know that's not a popular view in a liberal world, um, but I, I think it's an Arendtian view.
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And, uh, and I think over time, right, a new consensus will emerge, and I'm hopeful that it'll be closer to my consensus, but I don't know. Um, but my hopeful bull case is that
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we will all start having to talk to each other, coming to respect each other, and becoming more humble in our, uh, thoughts that we should impose our truth on everybody else.
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The moralization of politics, the truthification of politics, is what Arendt is arguing against, and we have moralized and truth- truthalized, um, uh, um, politics, where for her, politics is about conversation and plurality and not about truth.
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And so my hope is that as we- we're gonna have to start talking to each other, otherwise we're gonna keep start killing each other. And, hey, look, that may happen, too. I'm...
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We're, you know, we're already doing that in some places, and, and I think there's a real chance of a civil war or of, of a political violence, which is already happening.
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But if we're going to avoid it, we're gonna have to start actually doing the hard work of sitting down and talking to people. I know, you know, we have a...
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The Hunter Arendt Center runs these forums every year, and we have one coming up Thursday and Friday this week on solidarity. And in it, we have, um, a group, a, a panel with, you know, one of the more liberal
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immigration activists in the country and one of the more conservative immigration activists in the country, and they've been working together for a year talking, having dinner in groups, and they're building a common ground and a common legislative agenda between them that they can agree on.
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Neither of them are gonna be happy with it, but more importantly, their supporters are gonna be deeply unhappy with it.
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But that's the kind of work that I think needs to be done, and that's what I call political friendship, and it's how friendship builds solidarity amidst plurality as opposed to impose truth.
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So, so that's how, that's how I see the hopeful bull case, which some of people may not think of as a bull case, right? I'm very aware of that. Well, we have to leave it there.
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But Roger, thank you for talking to liberalism.org. It's a pleasure to see you and be with you. It's always a pleasure, Michael. Thank you. And I look forward to next time.
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If you enjoyed this conversation, you can find more like it, along with original essays from contemporary liberal scholars, at www.liberalism.org.
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