Avik Roy joins host James Patterson to discuss Freedom Conservatism, its “Statement of Principles” and the broader political and intellectual environment. 

Brian Smith:

Welcome to Liberty Law Talk. This podcast is a production of the online journal, Law & Liberty, and hosted by our staff. Please visit us at lawliberty.org, and thank you for listening.

James Patterson:

Hello, and welcome to Liberty Law Talk. Today is August 18th, 2023. My name is James Patterson. I am a contributing editor at Law & Liberty, as well as associate professor and chair of the politics department at Ave Maria University. A fellow at the Center for Religion, Culture, and Democracy in the Institute for Human Ecology. And president of the Ciceronian Society. With me today is Dr. Avik Roy. He is the president of The Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity, a think tank improving the lives of Americans on the bottom half of the economic ladder, using freedom, innovation, and pluralism.

Roy’s work has been praised on both the left and the right. National Review called him one of the nation’s sharpest policy minds. Well, the New York Times, Paul Krugman, concedes, “Roy is about as good as you can get in this stuff. He actually knows something.” That’s high praise. Roy also serves as the policy editor at Forbes on the advisory boards of the Milken Center for Advancing the American Dream, and the Bitcoin Policy Institute. And is a senior advisor to the Bipartisan Policy Center. He’s advised several presidential candidates, including Marco Rubio, Rick Perry, and Mitt Romney. Roy was educated at MIT, where he studied molecular biology at the Yale University School of Medicine. Dr. Roy, welcome to Liberty Law Talk.

Avik Roy:

It’s nice to be with you. Please call me Avik.

James Patterson:

Oh, okay. Yes, Avik. So the reason for our conversation today is because you are one of the principle movers behind the Freedom Conservatism Statement of principles, as well as a broader effort to articulate a freedom conservatism. So for the readers and listeners at Law & Liberty who are not familiar with freedom conservatism, why don’t you explain to them what this project is?

Avik Roy:

Sure. So a bunch of us have, over the last many years, I’m sure including many devotees of this podcast and of the Liberty Fund and of Law & Liberty, have watched with dismay as there has been a rise of authoritarianism, not just on the left, but on the right around the world and in the United States. And I think in the initial going, obviously many of us hope that this would be some temporary eruption that would eventually fall aside as people realize that authoritarianism is not something that Americans really want.

But as time has gone on, I think it’s become clear that the people on the right in particular who like the rise of authoritarianism, who are inclined, who believe that it’s a good thing, it’s a salutary development, have succeeded at moving beyond merely trying to align with Donald Trump’s authoritarian tendencies at times, and instead try to build a permanent movement around authoritarianism. They call it national conservatism, by which they mean that the classical liberal movement is too nice; it’s too willing to engage in toleration of multiple points of view. And that what we really need is an authoritarianism of the right to combat the authoritarianism of the left.

And last year, in 2022, the national conservatives got together and created a statement of principles with 10 planks that they published at their website. They have conferences twice a year, usually one in the US and one in Hungary or some other aligned location. And they have created an organized group of young people in particular, Capitol Hill staffers, people out of college, for whom this is the only kind of conservatism they’ve ever known. For those of us who are older, we take for granted that classical liberalism is a central part of the 20th-century conservative tradition and 21st-century conservative tradition. But for the nationalists, if you’re just graduating from college now, you’re 22 years old, 21 years old maybe, you were just entering middle school when Trump went down that golden escalator. So, you’re not aware of any other form of American conservatism.

So, young people growing up today have had the impression that if you are to be a conservative, if you see yourself on the right or right of center, and especially if you see yourself as an opponent of the left, that nationalism and authoritarianism are the philosophies you need to adopt. And that trend, in particular, has become very concerning. It’s also become very concerning that a lot of politicians on the right have concluded that the way to win a Republican primary in particular, whether it’s running for president or running for Congress or state legislature, is to adopt these nationalist authoritarian positions because they see that as the base of the party. It wasn’t that long ago that the Tea Party was the base of the party, a group of people who were seen as being constitutionalists, people who wanted the government out of their lives. That’s been replaced by this new theory that the base is nationalistic and authoritarian.

And so you put all these things together, all these different trends, and a bunch of other people felt that this was a great concern, “We need to do something about it.” And that the first step in doing something about it was to put together our own statement of principles. Now, obviously, we have the advantage that others in the past have also created statements or principles. The most relevant one for us was the Sharon Statement, which was signed by a group of people at Bill Buckley’s house in Sharon, Connecticut, who ended up creating Young Americans for Freedom, a young organization of libertarians, individuals, and conservatives. And they put together a statement of principle that we took as our core inspiration.

But our goal was to say, let’s create a statement of principles ourselves that, while it takes inspiration from the Sharon statement, is adapted to the political and policy challenges of our time. And also, it evolves and iterates upon that statement of principles in certain ways and allows us to articulate a different form of conservativism than nationalism. And also allows us, by gathering a bunch of signatories, to start building that movement. A group of people that are willing to put their names on a piece of paper and say, “Hey, I’m standing up for these principles.” And thereby, if I look around and I see other names on that list, you know that these are people who are aligned with you, who are your friends, who you can reach out to and connect with, and we can start to build our own organization and network of people who advocate for the role of liberty and freedom in America once again.

James Patterson:

I agree with the concern about the interest in authoritarianism. For Law & Liberty, a couple of years ago, I noted the growth of the Francisco Franco appreciation threads that had emerged in social media. Strange. But the people who often write these threads or are participating in national conservatism conferences, paying attention to the publications and other media that come from national conservativist sources, one of their mantras, one of their rhetorical questions rather is what has conservatism conserved, here meaning fusionism? There’s an answer to that question, I think. What is your answer to that question?

Avik Roy:

Well, boy, we could spend a whole hour on this topic. But I think I would answer it, I would flip your question to its inverse in a sense, which is that the national conservatives believe that America is lost. It’s a profoundly pessimistic movement. They believe that the things that made America great are no longer present, that America is lost. Now, why do they believe that? Why do they believe that America is lost? Now, we could come up with lots of things that, in terms of trends in the United States, we think are negative if we wanted to look at the pessimistic side of things, right? The amount of money that the government spend has gone up. The size of the Federal Register, the compilation of all the regulations at the federal level, has gone up. The deficit and debt have gone up. So there are things like that that are not great.

There are things like entrenched and aggressive political correctness, as we used to call it, and now people call it “wokery” or “wokism.” That’s not just in educational circles but in corporate settings as well. So those are the kinds of things that the nationals point to and say, “Hey, America is lost.”

Now, there’s something that some will say out loud, and others will not say out loud, which is arguably the core animating concern that they have, which is not so much those things, though those things I think all of us would agree we don’t like about the state of America today. But the reason why they say America is lost is because of demographic issues. That is what you hear that some of the nationals say in their own settings and their own journals, and again, particularly the most frank and blunt and open ones who don’t worry about any pushback they might get on this topic. They say the biggest problem with America is that America is increasingly a multi-ethnic, multiracial society. That’s something that they believe will help drive America to lose its fundamental character. That America, in order to preserve its fundamental character, needs to be a white ethnostate.

And that’s why immigration policy is front and center, not just in the United States but in nationalist movements all around the world. Skepticism of immigration, not just illegal immigration, but legal immigration. And this is really a core point, a critical distinction; I think most Americans don’t like illegal immigration, but most Americans like legal immigration. They believe that since almost all of us are descendants of legal immigrants, we understand the role that immigration has played in making America this dynamic, great, prosperous country. So many of the greatest companies and successes we’ve had, economically and otherwise, scientific achievements, our athletic achievements, come from the people who have come to America from elsewhere.

This movie Oppenheimer is in the theaters as we’re recording this podcast. I mean, much of our ability to win World War II and develop nuclear weapons came from immigrants, people who left Europe, who were being persecuted because they were ethnic minorities. And so those are the things that have made America great and continue to drive America to greatness in many ways. There are a lot of good things that are going on in America. We are still the most innovative country in the world. We’re still the cultural leader of the world. We’re still the wealthiest country in the history of the world. We’re still a country where basic freedoms like being able to say what you want. Yes, there are people who are trying to push back, there’s cancel culture, there are all these issues. But fundamentally, we have the ability to record this podcast and say what we want to say.

And yes, there are others who don’t like it when you say what you want to say, but we are still basically a free society. And yes, there are things to improve about that free society, but we are not doing as badly as the nationalists think. And the reason why the nationalists say that we’re lost, already lost, because this is a demographic issue, that, well, America is already not American, if you think America should be a white ethnostate, and that’s why they lean towards authoritarian ideas because they know they can’t persuade a majority of the electorate to go along with reformatting America as a white ethnostate, most Americans don’t want that. And so that’s why they veer towards these anti-democratic, anti-Republican ideas of what America should be in the future.

James Patterson:

Well, the freedom conservatism principles have a lot of continuity with what used to be called fusionism, which is the older version of conservatism that really was part of the original sort of conservative movement following the Second World War of William F. Buckley Jr. and Frank Meyer. And that was regnant during the Reagan years and really had a lasting influence through the George W. Bush administration. Do you see freedom conservatism as a fusionism 2.0, or is it a new stage of conservatism that’s meant to reckon with the things that you just mentioned?

Avik Roy:

I think it’s both, right? For the listeners who are not familiar with the term fusionism, let’s just make sure that we’re describing it. So, you could say there are two forms of fusionism. There is the, you could say, coalitional fusion. So, the American conservative movement of the 20th century was a coalition of people that included libertarians, classical liberals, social conservatives, anti-communists, and a lot of people in between. And that coalition won the Cold War and did a lot to make America the preeminent nation in the world in the late 20th century when we defeated the Soviet Union.

There were people in that movement who would’ve said, I’m not a… And there’s a second, is what I’m getting at, there’s a second form of fusionism, which is what Frank Meyer, in particular, was known for, which was trying to actually come up with a philosophy, a political philosophy that incorporated both classical liberalism and social conservatism into a single philosophy. And his argument was that in order to be truly virtuous, if you’re a social conservative and you care about virtue, one must live in a free society because it’s only through freely choosing virtue that you can actually be virtuous. If someone’s forcing you to be virtuous, you’re not really being that virtuous. That was Meyer’s argument.

And so the thing I’m trying to make clear by getting into all this, the etymology or taxonomy, is that the Freedom Conservatism Statement of principles is open to both kinds of people. So there are signatories to the document who are libertarians, classical liberals. There are signatories to the document who are social conservatives and foreign policy hawks, who wouldn’t think of themselves as fusionists in the Frank Meyer sense of the term. But there are also people who are signatories to the documents who are fusionists. So it encompasses both kinds of fusionism, is what I’m trying to say.

James Patterson:

Awesome. Yeah, I was originally… I’m sorry, an original signer of the document. And I don’t really consider myself a libertarian, but I thought the language was capacious enough to address people who share your concerns about the emergence of national conservatism and its attraction to this or even endorsement of this oddly authoritarian approach to the American republic. So what do you think is the cause for so much interest in this alternative vision, this national conservative vision? You mentioned earlier that part of it is youthful ignorance. Is that everything, or is there more to it?

Avik Roy:

Well, I do think that if you’re the kind of person who’s gone to college in the last seven years, it was really 2015 when this Yale Halloween incident happened that things really started to change. Jonathan Haidt wrote an interesting article, I believe for The Atlantic, where he traced some of this to the rise of Instagram and some of these other relatively newfangled social media tools, where things really started to change, and the cancel culture really took off. And so I think there’s a cohort of people who come out of that environment who’ve been radicalized in the other direction. Right? So if you’re in an environment where you’re told you are a fundamentally guilty and inferior person because you are a white male, a heterosexual white male in particular, then you’re radicalized in the other direction and you feel frustrated because to the degree that your elders are telling you, “Hey, you should believe in freedom and let different sides coexist.” That doesn’t seem sufficient when you feel like you’re being extubated. So I think that’s part of it.

I think also there’s a degree to which Trump’s victory in 2016 was an opportunity for, what you might say, bandwagon jumpers to kind of say, “Hey, here’s the new wave.” The new hotness is to be a nationalist because Trump is at least instinctively a nationalist. I wrote in a piece for National Review recently that I made the argument that, look, almost all of Trump’s domestic policy success came from freedom conservative principles, his tax reforms, his judicial appointments, his deregulation initiative. Those are all freedom conservatism policies that were executed by freedom conservatism acolytes. But to the degree that Trump has tried to break from that Bill Buckley/Frank Meyer consensus and say, “No, we should be against free trade. We should be skeptical of immigration.”

Now, actually, I should parenthesize this because Trump is not actually against legal immigration. He produced a plan in 2019, an immigration reform plan that would be about securing the border, but actually reforming legal immigration so we were improving the quality of immigrants we were getting to the country, in terms of high-skilled immigrants who can really contribute to the country’s economy. So, his immigration plan in 2019 was pretty aligned with what a lot of freedom conservatives believe. But there were plenty of people who saw in Trump an avatar for a nationalist agenda, some of whom believed it from the start, who were always nationalists, you could say. And then others who were perhaps persuaded or converted to become nationalists, because they believed that this was the way of the future, this is the way things were going to go. And I think that’s a mistake because I don’t think that nationalism is the wave of the future. And I think that most Americans, the vast majority, particularly young Americans, are not okay with a nostalgic movement that believes it can recreate the demographics of the 1930s.

James Patterson:

With the politics of the 1930s, too. At least in European politics. So, I’ve noticed that there’s almost no real interest from Trump himself in national conservatism. It just seems to kind of pass him by. It’s a funny thing where they’re appealing directly to him, and he spends most of his time trying to get crowds to cheer for them. So what are some of the principles of freedom conservatism, and especially, how do you see them operating in political institutions or having policy implications for 2023 and beyond?

Avik Roy:

Well, there are a couple of things I’ll say. The first thing to say is that the document makes it pretty clear that the most important thing that freedom conservatives stand for is individual and economic liberty. That’s not only core to freedom conservatism; that’s core to America. To go to your question from before, which is what is it that we’re trying to conserve? What freedom conservatives are trying to conserve are the principles of the American founding, which is that the government exists to secure the liberties of the people, not the other way around. And that is the, in a sense, you could say the core contradiction, but also the core distinctiveness, the core creed of the United States. Which is that the tradition of America, the one that we seek to conserve, is the tradition of individual and economic freedom. That’s what America was founded on, with the notable asterisk and exception of slavery. And that is the principle that those of us who believe in those founding traditions have sought to expand and apply to the circumstances that we’re in today.

The nationalists don’t believe in that tradition. They want to import the Hungarian or continental European nationalism, which is basically that your country is a collection of people who are genetically linked to each other with a common language and a common religion, and that’s it. That’s what a nation is. And there are nuanced versions of nationalism that are not completely incompatible with freedom conservatism. And I wouldn’t even call them nationalist; it’s more like that’s just patriotism, right? For example, you can believe that the United States should seek to advance the interests of Americans, whether it’s in foreign policy or in economic policy or anything else. And the way to do that is to expand liberty. Right? It’s economic freedom that has made America the wealthiest and most dynamic and most prosperous country in the world, the one with the most social mobility and the most opportunity for people from humble beginnings to do well. Those are the things that bind us together. One can have a very robustly pro-American and patriotic philosophy, and yet not be a nationalist in the way that we’ve described nationalism.

And so there are people, I think, in that way, you can look at the statement of principles that we’ve put out and the statement of principles the nationalists have put out and say, well, I agree with the majority of both of these statements, so which side am I on? And there have been a number of columns and articles that have kind of been in the zone, saying, “Well, I don’t want to really take a side here or I think there’s merit to both, so I’m going to just kind of sit this out.” And I think the mistake there is that if you are not trying to conserve the American founding tradition, that’s a core moral issue. Right? The core fight that really matters is do you believe that Americans should be trusted to live their own lives? That families should be trusted to raise their children in the way they see fit? If you don’t believe that, and the nationalists in certain places in their document don’t believe that, then that’s a problem. That is a clear area of distinction.

And so, where does this come down in policy? There are areas, I think, where there are pretty clear examples of where we have policy differences, in areas where there’s more of an overlap or where people who are signing the freedom conservative document may have different views. One example of this is immigration. So, on immigration, there’s a spectrum of views. I would suspect–I haven’t pulled every single person who signed the document on this—but I think if you were, and it’s safe to say, that if you asked signatories of the freedom conservative statement, where do you stand on immigration, you’d see a range of views. On one end might be a hardcore libertarian who says that the freedom to immigrate and emigrate is fundamental to freedom, “I believe in open borders.” There are going to be people who ideologically believe that.

I think there are others, probably the majority, who would say, “I’m for immigration overall, I’m for legal immigration, but America has a right to decide who enters the country and who stays here and who works here. And so we need to have a robust system of legal immigration, but secure our border against illegal immigration.” When you go over to the nationalists, it’s kind of the other half of that debate, where they’re saying they’re very skeptical of immigration overall. They believe that circumstances may often require a full moratorium on immigration. And what’s important to talk about there is that while that’s what they say in their statement, if you actually read what they write in their own journals, the speeches they give at their own conferences, their view of immigration is much more hostile. You hear rhetoric like, “Immigration makes America dirtier.” Immigration, again, despoils America’s ethnic homogeneity and racial homogeneity. A lot of comments of that sort. So while the national conservative statement is carefully worded to maybe mask some of these darker elements of the nationalist movement, it’s clear that that’s a big thrust of theirs.

Another area I’ll highlight where there’s perhaps the most room for disagreement among the freedom conservatism is foreign policy. Obviously, if you’re a purist libertarian, you take a Washingtonian view of skepticism about any and all foreign entanglements, the more Reaganite types in the freedom conservative movement would say, “Look, America’s role as a leader of the world is really important. And while we don’t have the resources or the willpower to be running the rest of the world militarily, we certainly, our leadership of the world, is very important to our freedom and security in the interests of America. And so we should have an internationalist position,” not necessarily what we now call neo-conservatism, the very aggressive nation-building type approach. “But at the very least, we should recognize that there’s value in having allies. There’s value in America securing trade around the world through the power of our navy,” et cetera, et cetera.

So that’s an area where you might see some disagreement. So we’ve been criticized for having a statement that sounds like it could mean a lot of different things on foreign policy. But I think that that reflects the range of views appropriately so. But really, most importantly, creates space for this Reaganite foreign policy, where Reagan did not go around trying to basically rebuild nations around the world. He didn’t invade the Soviet Union. But did he fight the Soviet Union in every way short of war? He certainly did. He tried everything he could to defeat the Soviet Union peacefully. He didn’t just say, “We’re going to ignore what’s going on in Eastern Europe.” He cared about liberating Eastern Europe. So there’s a range of views there. So those are some of the areas where there’s a diversity of views.

I think where there’s real alignment and where there’s real, one of the things that I think is really interesting about the Freedom Conservatism Statement is there are three areas in the document where we mix explicit commitments about what this movement is trying to achieve from a policy standpoint. So there’s three places where we say we commit to X. The first is we say, we commit to deploying economic and individual freedom to reduce Americans’ cost of living. This is something that is a problem. I mean, there are certain aspects of American life that are less expensive or inexpensive compared to what they were in the past, particularly food and clothing. But housing, healthcare, childcare, and higher education have gotten far more expensive because the government has gotten involved in regulating and subsidizing those products and driving up the price. And that’s a big problem for social mobility in America. And I think one of the things that drove Trump’s election in 2016 was the fact that people who are on the bottom half of the ladder, people in the working class, feel like their prosperity is slipping away because of the rise in cost of living.

So I think it’s really important for freedom conservatives, and the signatories agree, that it’s important for the freedom conservatives to show that if you are a working-class American who feels economically insecure because of various things going on in our economy, that the freedom conservatives are looking out for you and we’re fighting for you, and we are working on developing solutions to the problems you have. And that the national conservatives, to the degree that they claim to have any solutions at all, would go in the other direction, make things worse for you. So that’s commitment number one.

Commitment number two is the commitment to a constructive approach to reducing the debt in the deficit. So this is something that’s completely ignored by the national conservatives, and frankly, by President Trump when he was in office, he dramatically increased the deficit in the debt. And has argued passionately that the deficit in the debt don’t matter, and I’m not going to do anything about it, basically. And so this is incredibly important, because young people, people coming out of college today, the deficit in the debt are going to be the dominant problem, economic problems that they face because we’re entering a situation where in six years, five to six years, we’re going to be paying more on interest on the national debt than we pay for national defense. And over time, that problem is going to get worse and worse. It’s going to lead to decreased economic growth, higher inflation, and a bunch of other problems that are going to make America gradually weaker and weaker.

And that, to me, if you’re a young adult just entering the workforce or getting through college, this is the crisis that the nationalists and others of these new waves of the right, the post-liberal right, they just don’t care about it. And so it was very important to us to make a commitment, not only to prioritize the national debt, but to say, “We’re going to commit to developing an agenda that can reduce the debt and the deficit and try to secure the prosperity of future generations.” So that’s commitment number two.

And then commitment number three relates to racial equality. And this is something that we’ve gotten some questions on. So we say in the statement of principles that we’re adamantly opposed to racial discrimination, either for or against any person or group of people. But we also recognize that the legacy of slavery and segregation is still with us and that there’s persistent inequality of opportunity for those who are descendants of the victims of slavery and segregation. And that we, the freedom conservatives, commit to trying to deploy the principles of individual and economic freedom to address that inequality of opportunity.

And so we’ve gotten some questions like, “Well, that obviously means you just want to discriminate against white people, right?” It’s like, no. No. What it means is, for example, universal education savings accounts. Today, we have a system that’s in part a legacy of slavery and segregation, where where you go to school is determined by where you live. And that was a very convenient system in the segregated South, because it meant that if you lived in a segregated part of town, you went to the segregated school with inferior resources, and that protected the all-white areas of town to have segregated schools in that part of town, right? And while segregation is illegal today, the geographic segregation is still extant in a lot of these places. And most importantly, it means that people who live in, whatever your race is, if you live in a poor part of town, the quality of the schools and the quality of your community, it can be more fragmented and fragile as a result.

And so education savings accounts is a race-neutral policy that says, “Hey, we’re going to let you get the best education you can find. We’re going to give you the resources that everybody else has, and then you go out and find the best education you can find with that money, whether it’s Khan Academy, whether it’s a charter school or a private school or private tutors, or whatever you want. And let’s liberate you from that school that you were stuck in by the old system.” And so that’s an example of a policy that’s pro-freedom, pro-choice, pro-innovation, but it also has the disproportionate effect of addressing this inequality of opportunity, not just for poor Black kids in formerly segregated communities, but also poor white kids and poor every kid. Right? So it’s not a racial policy, it’s a racially-neutral policy. And there are so many examples of that.

If you actually focus on policies that address the inequality of opportunity for low-income people in general because the descendants of sex slavery and segregation are disproportionately low income relative to non-Blacks, you’re going to disproportionately help them, but you’re also going to disproportionately help low-income white, low-income Hispanics, low-income everybody. So these are policies that are racially neutral, but that also address the inequality of opportunity that was a consequence of slavery and segregation. I think one of the real distinctions between the nationalists and the freedom conservatives is that this is something that we’re committing to doing. We recognize that inequality of opportunity, for those who, again, descend from this system, is a real problem. And the nationalists say, well, tough luck, basically, “We don’t care about that problem, it’s not important.”

James Patterson:

And not only is it good in and of itself to establish programs that benefit people with a history of segregation and slavery, but also, as they’re benefited by those programs that provides common goods, right? Knock-on effects of their improving economic and social standing. So it’s very strange. But I think it speaks to this issue, you’ve hinted at it and said it a few times, this sort of zero-sum, sort of sense of the American economy or this over American benefits or the country itself.

Avik Roy:

Let me just stop you there, because I think it’s a great point you just made, which is that this idea of a zero-sum world in which there’s a fixed set of spoils that we’re divvying up, that is basically one way to think about the difference between the nationalists and the freedom conservatisms. And if you’re a freedom conservatism, you understand that you can grow the pie. You can grow the pie through economic growth, through trade, through innovation, through ingenuity, through immigration. But all these things can lead to a greater pie and more prosperity for everyone. And the nationalists don’t believe that. They don’t believe the pie is growing. In fact, they believe the pie is shrinking, and that in a shrinking pie, you have to redistribute the spoils in ways that favor your tribe over everybody else’s tribe. So I think that optimism versus pessimism is a really key element of all this.

James Patterson:

I agree entirely. It’s often geographic too. I live in Southern Florida, and, I mean, the accelerating growth in most aspects of the economy here is usually best demonstrated by the number of hiring signs and windows, and wage signs and windows. And so when I read things like the introduction to Patrick Deneen’s regime change, talking about how America’s in a pit. I’m like, “Not here. It’s great here.”

Avik Roy:

And it’s important to understand that there are places, like I live in Texas, the same thing. Texas is booming. People are moving to Texas every day. There are help-wanted signs everywhere. There’s optimism, people are happy, people smile. There are places in America where that’s not true. I think it’s important when everyone has a strong disagreement with somebody else to really try to think about why they disagree. What are their strongest arguments, what are their best arguments? What are they seeing in the world that they’re responding to? Let’s take them at their best and take the most sincere and credible arguments that the other side has. And I think there are communities that are being ravaged by the decay of communities, the Bowling Alone phenomenon, the opioid crisis, right? And that’s what a lot of people are responding to.

Where Deneen goes wrong, tragically wrong, is that he blames this on individualist intellectuals. It’s because these professors and theorists and elites who support individual autonomy, it’s because of that that these poor white people in Ohio and Pennsylvania are killing themselves with fentanyl and not getting married and things like that. That’s the kind of thing that only an intellectual would say. Intellectuals, of course, are often in love with their ability to shape the world through the power of their pens and keyboards, but that’s not actually what happened.

The thing that’s, it’s actually a less facile and harder thing to confront, but an important thing to confront is that one of the big reasons why… there’s a couple of big reasons why marriage and family had broken down, not just in America, but around the world. The most important reason is technology. So, technology produced oral contraception, which started to separate the sexual act from procreation in a way that was not practical prior to oral contraception. And then secondly, there were the technological developments of things like laundry machines and dishwashers and other tools that meant that if you were a family of four a hundred years ago, you had to have a division of labor where there was one breadwinner and one homemaker because it wasn’t practical to manage a household without having someone at home to do those daily tasks, unless, of course, you are wealthy enough to perhaps hire housekeepers and nannies to do all that stuff for you, which of course, very few people were.

Today, with all this technology we have, there isn’t as much of a need. There’s of course, still a need for parents to be present for their children. But in terms of those homemaking tasks, technology has made it easier for us to do those tasks in a way that isn’t as time-consuming. And that fact enabled women to enter the workforce, something that the nationalists really don’t account for. They say, “Well, it’s all these intellectuals with their left-wing ideas that led women to start working.” No, it was actually the fact that you had women who had, thanks to technology, a lot of free time, and they wanted to use that free time productively because they had brains and abilities. And that’s something that has been good for America, broadly speaking. Yes, there are challenges alongside it. But the nationalists basically are saying, “Well, we don’t like this, we don’t like the society, so let’s get rid of the liberationist intellectuals.” I mean, you’re not going to get rid of the liberationist intellectuals; number one, there are lots of them. But most importantly, they don’t contend with the fact that a lot of these social trends are structural.

And that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do anything about them, that we should be complacent about it. We absolutely should be thinking hard about how to rebuild communities that have been disrupted by a lot of these social trends. We should be thinking very hard about that. But it’s just facile and simplistic and frankly wrong to say that the reason why these things are happening is because there are intellectuals in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who think it’s a good thing for people to have a tonic.

James Patterson:

Well, what’s next for freedom conservatism? I think we have a good beat on what it’s for, what policies it has in mind, why it’s ideas, at least in my view, are true and better than those of national conservatism, more of the left. So, where is all of this headed?

Avik Roy:

Well, I think there’s a bunch of elements to it. The first is, of course, we’ve been grateful for all the attention the document has received in the press and elsewhere, and we continue to be open to new signatories. So if you’re somebody who’s active in the liberty movement and connected to an institution, whether you’re at a think tank or a journalist or some other organization that’s involved in the movement in some way, and you’re interested in being a signatory, we’re still collecting signatories, you can go to the about page at freedomconservatism.org and sign on.

We are having a couple of in-person receptions for signatories at a couple of conferences, including the FREOPP conference in November (the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunities). Freedom and Progress Conference in November, in Washington. We are going to continue to stay in touch with both signatories and other people who subscribe to our Substack newsletter to keep them up on activities.

And a lot of the goal here is to build this network. To build the network, to have members of the network be able to get to know each other, to learn from each other, both in person and otherwise. To follow each other’s work. We have a Twitter list that you can also find on our website, where you can follow all the free-con signatories. And the goal is to start building a network where we can, as the national conservatives have done to their credit, they’ve done a great job of organizing, they’ve done a great job of, again, building this network of hill staffers and campaign staffers and things like that, that go out and the activists who go out and try to spread the nationalist gospel. And we need to do that, too. We need to renew our efforts to raise the rising generation of freedom conservatives to evangelize their peers and their communities on these principles.

So, a lot of it is going to be trying to provide those resources for people. Try to flag and promote the work of freedom conservatives. To just give an example from recently, a couple of days ago or yesterday actually, as we record this, Samuel Greg wrote a great piece for Law & Liberty about free trade and an explicitly realistic approach to free trade, elaborating on what we talk about in the statement of principles as free trade with free people. So that’s an example of something that, here’s a guy who’s elaborating. So if you want to know, okay, what does this mean, free trade with free peoples? And of course, his opinion is his opinion alone; he doesn’t speak for the other 200 signatories. But to create that dialogue and that discourse where those of us who are signatories and other aligned people can discuss these issues and flesh out these ideas, so that it’s not just a couple sentences that sound vague, but actually a very detailed set of policies that we can discuss and debate and get behind. I think that’s important.

I think one thing that’s really valuable about this effort is you start to see presidential candidates, other politicians look at this and say, “Hey, I’m a freedom conservative. How can I tap into this network to staff my campaign or staff my office, or just learn from various people who are aligned with this movement, so I can generate better ideas for reforming the country?” So all of those things are elements of what we’re trying to do over the next 12 to 24 months.

James Patterson:

Dr. Roy or Avik, as you’d have it, thank you so much for joining us on Liberty Law Talk.

Avik Roy:

Well, thank you as well, and thanks to the Liberty Fund for all the important work that the Liberty Fund does to advance these principles.

Brian Smith:

Thank you for listening to another episode of Liberty Law Talk. Be sure to follow us on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.