ReImagining Liberty

An update on ReImagining Liberty and a preview of my new show, The Inner Life of Liberalism . Subscribe to The Inner Life of Liberalism in your favorite app: Apple Podcasts Spotify All other podcast apps

It’s been a hot minute since the last episode. So let me start by telling you what’s been going on, because it actually tees up today’s conversation. The short version is, I’ve been neck deep in getting a very cool new project ready for launch. It’s called Liberalism.org and is an online magazine of liberal ideas, which I’m leading in collaboration with my colleagues at the Institute for Humane St...

The rise of Nick Fuentes. The self-immolation of the Heritage Foundation. The Great Replacement conspiracy theorizing endemic on X. The right very clearly has a significant antisemitism problem, with anti-Jewish hate spreading from the fringes, to the conservative mainstream, and out into the broader political culture. And this hate interacts with, supports, and leads to further hate, directed at...

The ideologies that shape our world can be awfully weird. The one that combines the most influence with the most weirdness is arguably Rationalism, which grew out of backwater blogs to have the ears, and influence the minds, of people like Elon Musk and JD Vance. To talk about what Rationalism is, why we should care about its beliefs and arguments, and the impact it's had outside those strange cor...

Regimes falter when opposition media is strong. But America's legacy media has failed to live up to the dangers of the political environment and the authoritarianism of Trump's administration. We need stronger opposition media, making full-throated defenses of liberalism. But what does that look like? I'm joined today by Adam Gurri , founder and editor-in-chief of Liberal Currents , which is curre...

Welcome to ReImagining Liberty, a show about the emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical liberalism. I'm Aaron Ross Powell. It's still possible Trump succeeds in his project of authoritarian consolidation, but between the dramatic losses the GOP suffered in the elections on November 4th, the infighting in the conservative coalition, and the Epstein scandal, the prospects for that consolidat...

Today's episode is about the Constitution. It's a clear-eyed assessment of the assaults on it by the Trump administration, and a deep discussion of how we should think about constitutional interpretation and constitutional defense. Things aren't good. There's no denying that. But things also perhaps aren't as bad, at least not yet, as the most shrill of the doomers insist. To dig into all this, I'...

The future of liberalism depends upon the coalitions liberals can build, both to defend institutions now and to reform them when the time comes. As my friend, and past ReImagining Liberty guest , Jason Kuznicki says, "The future is a conversation." So today I've brought on two smart liberals, with very different ideas about what liberalism means in practice, for a conversation about common ground....

Today things get particularly radical, with an introduction to left market anarchism. I'm joined by Zak Woodman , host of the Mutual Exchange Radio podcast from the Center for a Stateless Society . We talk about whether we need a state at all, the dangers a powerful government poses, even if its values are arguably good ones, and why the aims of the left are better advanced through free markets th...

I've got a special bonus episode for you today. In August, I attended the second annual Liberalism for the 21st Century conference in DC, organized by the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism. That's the group that runs The UnPopulist , a publication I occasionally guest host for on their Zooming In podcast. I led a special live recording of that show at the conference, a conversatio...

Cathy Reisenwitz's "Sex and the State" is one of the handful of newsletters I consider indispensable. She writes, from what I'd label a radical liberal perspective, about culture and gender in ways I consistently find illuminating. And she was my guest on episode 50 of this show, on misogyny and the political divide, which remains one of my favorites. So when she and I were recently chatting about...

The political right, including more right-wing sorts of self-identified libertarians, are rather down on feminism. For those right-wingers, their hostility is understandable, because feminist insights challenge truths the right imagines to be natural and immutable, about equality, and gender, and hierarchy. But for radical liberals, feminist theory offers powerful tools for understanding and criti...

An introduction to the people and ideas most central to the ideologies of Trumpism and post-liberalism. The last episode of this show was about what ReImagining Liberty is. With frequent guest Cory Massimino , I talked about the values and perspective behind ReImagining Liberty's approach to liberalism , and how it's distinct from right-libertarianism. Today's episode is a nice companion to that....

A conversation about the the values underlying radical liberalism, and what distinguishes it from more right-wing forms of libertarianism. You can think of this episode as kind of a soft reboot of ReImagining Liberty . Or a back-to-basics. This is a show about politics, but it's a politics grounded in a particular set of values and a particular perspective, and with the political and policy specif...

Today's episode gets a bit meta. I've done something like ninety ReImagining Liberty shows, and hundreds more on other podcasts, but I've never done one on the place of podcasting itself in the political environment. This even though podcasting has been one of the big themes of politics lately, in many ways blamed for the rise, or at least persistence, of the ideologies that have reshaped our poli...

We sometimes talk about technology on ReImagining Liberty, in the context of how it interacts with a liberal society, or how technology can help us defend and advance liberal. The big technology everyone's talking about right now is, of course, artificial intelligence. It's a topic I've written about, but not one I'd yet done an episode about specifically regarding what it means for liberalism. Th...

It's difficult to be optimistic about liberalism's future. Certainly in the short to medium term. We're in an acute period of democratic bac It's difficult to be optimistic about liberalism's future. Certainly in the short to medium term. We're in an acute period of democratic backsliding and authoritarian ascendency. The opposition party, or at least its leadership, has been largely supine in res...

The government's power to see is its power to oppress. The more the state knows about us, the more levers it has to control us. Understanding that connection, its history and its application, is critical if we are to secure our liberties in the face of authoritarian threats, such as the illegal and unconstitutional actions of the federal government in Los Angeles. I'd scheduled this episode—with r...

Equality is central to the liberal project. Thomas Jefferson failed, dramatically and unforgivably, to live up to this ideal, but he stated in correctly when, in a letter, he wrote that "the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately." Liberalism views us as equals, and demands the law treat us as such. The i...

The Trumpist right has a very clear picture of what they imagine masculinity to be, and are quite upset that it's not a picture all men find all that appealing. It's one of violence, belligerence, and professions of heavy labor. Anything else, including the whole of the knowledge economy that has made the developed world rich, is inauthentically masculine, the result of corrupting feminization. As...

The authoritarian right loves to talk about how they're upholding democracy. Trump didn't lose the 2020 election, because if he had, democracy would've been against him. So instead it was stolen from him, his loss a subversion of the democratic process. Now, as a deeply unpopular second-term president, he and his loyalists pretend they are executing the will of the people, instead of horrifying mo...

The first few months of the Trump administration have proven not just how willing much of America was to embrace and celebrate fascism, but how crucial careful, clear-eye, and thoughtful reporting and analysis are to building and sustaining a resistance movement. Few publications have been as essential in this moment as Liberal Currents , which has consistently brought deep understanding, a sense...

As we've talked about a fair amount on the show, gender is at the center of the ideological clashes defining our political moment. Trumpism is, at its heart, a misogynistic movement, and the fractious coalition of philosophies within the Trumpist tent all agree that increased freedom and opportunities for women have been very upsetting for right-wing men. My guest today brings gender into dialogue...

Many very rich men who support Trump fancy themselves heroes from the novels of Ayn Rand. I've never done an episode of this show on Rand's ideas, because I'm not a Randian, and don't think about political questions through anything like an Objectivist perspective. But the fact that so many men breaking the country believe they are Randian archetypes makes her ideas now, I think, worth talking abo...

I wanted to try to do a hopeful episode. The world look pretty grim right now, and many of us feel discouraged. The unlawful and authoritarian actions of the Trump administration keep coming at a relentless pace, and it can be difficult to see any reasons for optimism. It can also be lonely. Someone mentioned to me recently that, in times as dark as these, we need friends, but we also need comrade...