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 with the structure of the economy has it has manifested in the developed world. And, in doing so, she offers an intriguing challenge to libertarian and radical liberal economic priors. It's one worth engaging with and thinking through.

Alysia Ames is a CPA who has spent her career as an accountant in and around government. She lives in Iowa with her husband and two daughters. Her writing can be found on her newsletter, Accounting for Taste. See the link in the show notes. You can also find her on Bluesky as @fakegreekgrill.

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Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

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 about. Particularly because, as my guest argues, Rand would hate these guys.

Paul Crider is an associate editor at Liberal Currents and an admirer of Rand. But he comes at from an interesting perspective, being on the whole pretty progressive, and decidedly not an Objectivist libertarian. He recently published an essay at The Bulwark about how Elon Musk, far from being a Randian heroes, is in fact a representative of her villains.

Paul and I discuss Rand's ideas and their influence, and then walk through how men like Musk are just the sort of people she loathed.

Discuss this episode with the host and your fellow listeners in the ReImagining Liberty Reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReImaginingLiberty/

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Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

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 comrades. We need people who share a common purpose in defending liberalism and who are working, alongside us, to fight back against those who threaten it.

Which is why I'm so happy today to welcome my friend—and, in the sense above, comrade—Carolyn Fiddler to the show. She’s Director of Communications at the Democratic Attorneys General Association, and an expert in state politics. We talk about what attorneys general are doing to challenge the worst of Trump's policies, and how they've already found some success. And we look ahead to future challenges and the tactics the legal system offers to protect liberal institutions from the forces of the populist right.

Discuss this episode with the host and your fellow listeners in the ReImagining Liberty Reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReImaginingLiberty/

If you enjoy ReImagining Liberty and want to listen to episodes free of ads and sponsorships, become a supporter. Learn more here: https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/upgrade

I also encourage you to check out my companion newsletter, where I write about the kinds of ideas we discuss on this show. You can find it on my website at ⁠⁠www.aaronrosspowell.com⁠⁠.

Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

The right-wing ideologies we see most active in the world right now aren't intellectual by any stretch of the imagination. But there is a rich tradition of conservative political and social philosophy and, as liberals, it's important to understand what its objections to liberalism look like.

ReImagining Liberty stalwart Matthew McManus, a lecturer in political science at the University of Michigan, wrote an article for Liberal Currents not too long ago about the philosopher Roger Scruton's criticism of liberalism from a conservative perspective. Scruton's work is perfect—because of its erudition, accessibility, and exemplariness—for understanding the philosophical conservative perspective.

Today Matt and I use Scruton's ideas as a way to interrogate the conservative intellectual tradition and to argue that conservative philosophy aims less at a society organized around truth than it does a society where certainty rarely faces challenge.

Discuss this episode with the host and your fellow listeners in the ReImagining Liberty Reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReImaginingLiberty/

If you enjoy ReImagining Liberty and want to listen to episodes free of ads and sponsorships, become a supporter. Learn more here: https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/upgrade

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Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

How we navigate the new political environment the voters thrust upon on, and the new regime that seeks to tear up the very foundations of our liberal society, is a matter of ethics. And ethics is bigger than just political questions. It's about how you live, what you aspire to, and what makes for an admirable life, both inside and outside of politics.

My guest today has written an important book about just that. Seth Zuihō Segall is a clinical psychologist who served for nearly three decades as an Assistant Clinical Professor at the Yale School of Medicine and is a former Director of Psychology at Waterbury Hospital and a former President of the New England Society for the Study of Trauma and Dissociation. He is also a Zen Buddhist priest, and if you're a regular listener to ReImagining Liberty, you'll know how much I think Buddhist philosophy contains insights of great value in understanding our current moment.

Segall's newest book is The House We Live In, which explores the crises imperiling American democracy and argues that progress depends on our arriving at a new consensus on what it means to be a good person and lead a good life and re-imagines an ethics suitable for our time.

Discuss this episode with the host and your fellow listeners in the ReImagining Liberty Reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReImaginingLiberty/

If you enjoy ReImagining Liberty and want to listen to episodes free of ads and sponsorships, become a supporter. Learn more here: https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/upgrade

I also encourage you to check out my companion newsletter, where I write about the kinds of ideas we discuss on this show. You can find it on my website at ⁠⁠www.aaronrosspowell.com⁠⁠.

Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

We talk a lot on this show about the benefits of free and open markets and, given the growing hostility to economic freedom, not just from the Trump administration, but from populist governments around the world, we'll continue to do so.

Today I wanted to approach that conversation a little differently from usual though. Most of the time, when people say markets are good, what they mean is that markets make us richer, driven innovation, and so on. But markets do more than that. They make us better people, too.

This is a controversial claim, because so many criticisms of markets will admit that they create wealth, but then chastise them for promoting selfishness and greed, or replacing cooperation with callous competition.

That's wrong, however. And to discuss why, and why markets aren't just economically better, but morally bettering, as well, I've brought back my good friend Tom Palmer. He is executive vice president for international programs at Atlas Network, where he holds the George M. Yeager Chair for Advancing Liberty, and a Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute.

Discuss this episode with the host and your fellow listeners in the ReImagining Liberty Reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReImaginingLiberty/

If you enjoy ReImagining Liberty and want to listen to episodes free of ads and sponsorships, become a supporter. Learn more here: https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/upgrade

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Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

The information environment in which Americans form and discuss their political views has gotten weird. Walter Cronkite is gone. The editorial pages of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Wall Street Journal have lost influence to podcasters, social media influencers, and internet conspiracy theorists. Trump's rise, and return to power, was in large part fueled by figures on the far-right who knew how to take advantage of this changed environment in a way liberals haven't yet figured out.

This means that, if liberalism is to have a political future, liberals need to understand how media today looks nothing like media twenty years ago. And there's no one better at explaining how weird things have become, how they got that way, and how we can navigate through it than Renée DiResta. She's an Associate Research Professor at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown. Prior to that, she was the technical research manager at Stanford Internet Observatory. And she's the author of the indispensable book Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies Into Reality.

Discuss this episode with the host and your fellow listeners in the ReImagining Liberty Reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReImaginingLiberty/

If you enjoy ReImagining Liberty and want to listen to episodes free of ads and sponsorships, become a supporter. Learn more here: https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/upgrade

I also encourage you to check out my companion newsletter, where I write about the kinds of ideas we discuss on this show. You can find it on my website at ⁠⁠www.aaronrosspowell.com⁠⁠.

Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.

Last fall, I had the extraordinary opportunity to travel to Delhi, India, to give a talk to young Indian liberals. The topic was the connection between Buddhist philosophy and liberalism. If you’re a regular reader of my work, or listen to my podcast, you’ll know this connection has been central to my work for some time. I believe that Buddhist ideas give us important tools for understanding not just why we ought to be liberals, but why liberalism is the best political system for make the world better.

This bonus episode of ReImagining Liberty is the audio of that talk. You can also read a transcript of it if you prefer.

Discuss this episode with the host and your fellow listeners in the ReImagining Liberty Reddit community: https://www.reddit.com/r/ReImaginingLiberty/

If you enjoy ReImagining Liberty and want to listen to episodes free of ads and sponsorships, become a supporter. Learn more here: https://www.aaronrosspowell.com/upgrade

I also encourage you to check out my companion newsletter, where I write about the kinds of ideas we discuss on this show. You can find it on my website at ⁠⁠www.aaronrosspowell.com⁠⁠.

Produced by ⁠Landry Ayres⁠. Podcast art by ⁠Sergio R. M. Duarte⁠. Music by ⁠Kevin MacLeod⁠.