Because this is, after all, a philosophy blog, for today’s Substack Live, we went straight into the heart of the thing I keep circling in my essays: how we think about politics, why our categories have collapsed, and what that collapse is doing to our ability to govern ourselves. I tried to pull apart the confusion between classical liberalism and the hollow neoliberal operating system we inherited from the late twentieth century, and why people like Patrick Deneen end up attacking a caricature of liberalism rather than the tradition itself. We talked about founders like Madison, Jefferson, Locke, and Smith and how their understanding of virtue, civic republicanism, and institutional design bears almost no resemblance to the flattened “liberalism” conservatives rail against today.
I spent some time on the epistemic side of this—how humans build categories, how those categories drift, and how political rhetoric exploits that drift until everything becomes indistinguishable from everything else. When people can’t tell classical liberalism from libertarianism, or republican virtue from socialism, you end up with a polity incapable of reasoning about its own foundations. That’s where we are.
From there we worked our way into the establishment—why it isn’t a conspiracy but a culture, a set of elite norms designed for a world that no longer exists—and how that culture’s inability to adapt is leaving us exposed to movements that are far better organized, far more coherent, and far more dangerous than most people in power realize. We talked about technocracy, the failures of expertise when it tries to substitute itself for democratic judgment, and the deeper philosophical problem underneath: that politics is a normative field, not a technical one, and cannot be reduced to engineering.
And through all of it ran the theme I keep returning to: meaning, agency, the present as the only real site of action. The tragic dimension. The necessity of rebuilding a shared moral and epistemic framework before the floor fully gives way.
That’s the conversation. Where we are, why we’re stuck, and what it will take to rediscover the ability to make sense together again.
