Liberalism’s epistemic crisis enabled Donald Trump’s victories

Episode Summary

 Donald Trump is now once again the president of the United States, but his victory in 2024 was more than just a victory for himself or the Republican Party, it actually is part of a larger advancement that is happening across many different countries around the globe for right-wing reactionary parties who are sometimes incorrectly referred to as populist.

(These parties are not populist, in fact, because their policies that they pursue have no material benefit to the people who vote for them. But instead they use vulgarian rhetoric to pretend to be populist.)

Despite the fact that these far-right parties have policies that are hurtful to their own voters and to their countries that have elected them, they have been able to win because the center-left and the further-left are caught up in a philosophical crisis of liberalism itself. And that's because liberalism as a philosophy has never actually been able to fight successfully against reactionary philosophy in the political realm in the English-speaking world. Instead, the last time that it won was 200 years ago when it defeated monarchism, which was an explicitly king-based approach.

But reactionaries like Donald Trump and his henchmen are not explicitly pro-monarch—at least to the public. They certainly are that way in private, as many of their political theorists like Curtis Yarvin and JD Vance have freely admitted. That is why understanding how to defeat a form of monarchism that argues through democratic means is proving to be an incredible challenge for liberalism and socialism.

On today's episode, I talk about some of these challenges and the historical origins of them with Matthew McManus. He’s a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan, a previous guest on the show, and he’s got a new book out now called The Political Theory of Liberal Socialism.

The video of our January 21, 2025 discussion is available, the transcript is below. Because of its length, some podcast apps and email programs may truncate it. Access the episode page to get the full page.

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Audio Chapters

00:00 — Introduction

11:30 — How liberalism and the left grew apart during the Cold War

17:52 — Nietzsche