Adrian Wooldridge on the Lost Genius of the Political Center

And I think what's got lost in a lot of these very abstract debates is the fact that liberalism is a set of solutions to a set of concrete real-world problems, and that those solutions change over time, that they vary in time. And now the good fight with Yasha Monk. As you know, one of my abiding interests is figuring out why liberalism is in crisis today and how it is that we can renew this political tradition. Well, one of the most interesting and erodite books about this topic was recently published by Adrian Wouldridge. Adrian, a past guest of this podcast, was for a long time one of the key writers at The Economist and is now the global

uh business columnist for Bloomberg opinion. He has written interestingly on a range of subjects, including the contested concept of meritocracy, which we discussed last time he was on the podcast. Now he has really reflected on what liberalism has to offer the modern world, how it has managed to get out of previous crisis posed by industrialization, the rise of mass society and of course the threat of totalitarianism. Why it is that we've ended up in a serious crisis now, what the different strands of perverted liberalism are, from a neoliberal

set of ideas and policies that are incapable of standing up for the broader interests of society to the identitarian attacks on liberalism that sometimes pretend to be liberal on the left. And finally he has a set of interesting suggestions about how liberalism can renew itself in part by regaining a moral language, but promises to deal with genuine social dysfunction and is able to impose limits, moral limits as well as physical limits, when it comes to borders. It is a wide ranging conversation to listen to the last part of it, in which we really diagnose the nature of the contemporary crisis of liberalism and what to do about it, how to respond to it, and in which I press Adrian on the title of this book, which is Centrists of the World Unite, asking him whether there isn't a difference between liberals and centrists, whether it is helpful to confound these two things.

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