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In this installment of a series on liberalism, Benjamin Klutsey, the director of the Program on Pluralism and Civil Exchange at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, talks with Aurelian Craiutu, a professor of political science and director of the Tocqueville Program at Indiana University Bloomington, about the alleged demise of liberalism, moderation as a “fighting virtue,” being a trimmer rather than a crusader, the legacy of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom and much more.
BENJAMIN KLUTSEY: All right. Today we have Professor Aurelian Craiutu [ [link removed] ] with us: professor of political science at Indiana University Bloomington, where he also directs the Tocqueville Program. He is a senior fellow [ [link removed] ] at the Niskanen Center. His research interests include French political and social thought, political ideologies and comparative political theory. He’s the author and editor of dozens of books, including “Why Not Moderation? Letters to Young Radicals [ [link removed] ],” which is the subject of our conversation today.
Thank you so much for joining us, Professor Craiutu.
AURELIAN CRAIUTU: It’s a pleasure to be with you. Thanks.
Predicting Liberalism’s Demise
KLUTSEY: The first question I’ve been thinking about is the predictions about the imminent death of liberalism—which, as you note in the book, is not new at all. Why do we get these predictions every few decades, despite its resilience?
CRAIUTU: A few years ago, with a friend of mine who is also affiliated with the Ostrom Workshop [ [link removed] ]—Dan Cole [ [link removed] ]—we asked ourselves the same question: How long has it been that the death of liberalism has been announced? We actually wrote an essay [ [link removed] ], which was published in the Aeon magazine. It was great fun working together with Dan on this topic.
We found out that predictions of the death of liberalism have been going on for 150 years now, so after 1870s or so. Certainly by 1900 liberalism was proclaimed dead in England: 1900. And it continued through 1920s. Of course, 1930s, there were good reasons to think that liberalism was on its way out. But then it rebounded during the after-war period—1945; 1975 for sure. Also, the end of the Cold War, so to speak, marked a high point for optimism in liberal democracy.
So it’s nothing new. It’s been going on for a long time. But there are certain signs that point to some, I would say, challenges that we’re facing today. Nobody can deny that. It doesn’t mean that liberalism is exhausted. There’s a distinction to be made between predictions of the death of liberalism—“liberalism is dead” for very many reasons—and the need to acknowledge that liberalism is a work in progress.
If you want an author that always reminded us of this distinction is Karl Popper [ [link removed] ]. Karl Popper always affirmed that liberalism is a trial-and-error phenomenon. We try things that—we figure out which works and which doesn’t work; then we try to retain the good sides of the reforms that have worked and try to eliminate the bad sides. That’s the strength of liberalism. It’s a work in progress. It’s based on trial and error. It’s not the recipe for success all the time.
But look, it has worked much better than any other alternative at this point. Liberalism defeated fascism; liberalism defeated communism. We shouldn’t forget that.
Has Liberalism Failed?
KLUTSEY: I would certainly agree with that. But your interlocutors in the book, the two young people on the left and the right that you’re having this conversation with, are fed up with liberalism, right? They want to tear it all down because they think liberalism has failed, and for different reasons.
Is this sentiment ideological, or is it perhaps an emotional, maybe temperamental, response?
CRAIUTU: I think it’s both. Ideological because the two characters that I engage with in a dialogue—fictional characters: Lauren from the left, Rob from the right. Lauren, a progressive educated in Brooklyn. Rob, a Catholic young man educated in the Midwest. They represent two different parts of our political spectrum. On both sides today, we find voices—prominent ones—that declare the liberal project exhausted.
On the right, you have Patrick Deneen [ [link removed] ], Sohrab Ahmari [ [link removed] ] and others: prominent figures who have made this claim over and over again. On the left, you have Pankaj Mishra [ [link removed] ] and, most recently, Sam Moyn [ [link removed] ]: also prominent voices who think about the need to find something beyond liberalism. That call for rethinking the basis of liberalism is, I think, a good one, because you can’t have just the canon of liberal authors or themes that will apply forever.
The temptation to declare the project itself exhausted or dead because such and such things have happened, I think, is something to be opposed. That’s the ideological part. The sentimental part is that, look, young people today don’t feel that their lives are going in the right direction for, again, a variety of reasons.
I have survived communism. I have witnessed the fall of communism in 1989. So for me, liberalism is real. It was real before ’89, and it’s real after ’89. I’m very grateful that liberalism won the victory, the battle against totalitarianism, and it ended up triumphant. For other people today, if they look at the future, they see climate disaster, exhaustion of earth’s resources and so forth, and they have very few reasons . . .
There’s a third reason, I would say, which is a lack of historical perspective. I see, behind you, a book by Deirdre McCloskey. It’s one of the three: “Bourgeois Virtues [ [link removed] ].” It’s very difficult to understand what liberalism is for unless you understand what the virtues are that sustain the liberal project. Deirdre McCloskey has done more than anyone else to highlight that. Moderation is one of them. She doesn’t have much to say about moderation; she likes other virtues.
But be that as it may, to understand the complexity of the virtues needed to sustain the liberal project, you need a historical perspective. Young people don’t have that perspective. They like to take their cues from op-eds, podcasts like this one, and make quick judgments or—I think you need to take the larger project.
Here is where I would say my contribution might be useful. I’m a historian of ideas. “Why Not Moderation?” is a book for a larger public, for a public that is not academic. I’ve written three [ [link removed] ] other [ [link removed] ] books [ [link removed] ] for academic audiences on moderation. (I’ve written immoderately about moderation.)
I think that what’s important is to say, from the get-go, that this is not a virtue like any others. It’s a virtue that has a historical lineage, a vocabulary that has evolved through history. And I think that, to understand why moderation is interesting to the liberal project, I think you need to take a long-term view, a historical perspective—and that takes time. So most people don’t have time to think about this, and they read one op-ed or two op-eds, and they make a judgment.
Experiencing Communism
KLUTSEY: Thank you for that.
Before we get into moderation itself, I want us to continue this trend of conversation on liberalism. You touched on your personal experience with communism and with liberalism—living on the wrong side, so to speak, of the Iron Curtain. Can you reflect on that experience and how that informs your life’s work to preserve liberalism?
CRAIUTU: I think that I would not have written this book (or any other books before, I think) had I not lived in a regime that deprived us of basic freedoms: freedom to travel, freedom to express your thoughts. And I think that I learned, early on, that ideas make a difference. It’s not what we eat that defines us as human beings, as Karl Marx and Marxists think. It’s what we think, what we dream of, what we aspire to achieve; and those are the ideas that inform what our dreams are and what we hope to achieve, and I think that ideas are very important.
I remember I was reading authors that were somewhat impossible to find before ’89 on the other side of the Iron Curtain. I read one economist that has remained very much of interest to me: Wilhelm Röpke. I remember I’ve read a book by him, “The Social Crisis of Our Time [ [link removed] ],” which was written in 1942, which is a book that I’d recommend today to anyone interested in Hayek, for example. (Hayek wrote “The Road to Serfdom [ [link removed] ]” in 1944; Röpke in ’42.)
Those thinkers had, for me, a vital message, which was that there are certain values that need to be defended, certain values that define what open society is. So the concept of open society—we took it very seriously before ’89, and when we had the opportunity in the early ’90s to build that open society, we learned then how difficult it is. How difficult it is to build the institutions of representative government on the ruins of communism.
I wasn’t involved in that construction because I came to study in the United States early on (31 years ago), but I remained involved through my writings. I published in various journals there. I continued to remain present, to some extent, in Romania as well. But I learned, early on, how difficult is this “apprenticeship of liberty.” This is a phrase I took from Alexis de Tocqueville, who is my favorite author of all.
The apprenticeship of liberty requires many things. It requires, first and foremost, courage—courage to swim against the current. But it requires also the ability to work with others. It requires prudence. It requires a certain vision of where you want to go. All those things are quite difficult to achieve.
So for me, before ’89, there was this illusion that liberal democracy would be created almost overnight once the Berlin Wall would fall. Then the hard discovery of reality, which was that building a vibrant, open society on the ruins of communism would be a work of decades. For example, you can’t have a free society without civil society. And civil society does not grow overnight. It’s like a tree. You cannot grow a tree in several months or a year. It takes years.
KLUTSEY: I really like that phrase, “apprenticeship of liberty.”
CRAIUTU: It’s Tocqueville’s phrase.
KLUTSEY: Yes, it’s a beautiful phrase.
Liberalism as Generosity
KLUTSEY: Now, you use José Ortega y Gasset’s view of liberalism [ [link removed] ], which he describes as “the supreme form of generosity.” Can you unpack this definition?
CRAIUTU: I’ve always been intrigued by this definition of Ortega, which appears in his book, “La rebelión de las masas [ [link removed] ],” which is a great book (but published in 1929, so almost 100 years ago). I think that it gives justice to the essence of liberalism, which is a liberal democratic regime. The institutions of representative government give the opposition, those who disagree with us—those who are in power and those who are against power—to argue, to present arguments, to coexist.
Those who have power do not throw the others in prison just because there’s disagreement or different views on what the good society might be. They create conditions for publicity, for exchange of ideas. That is the form of generosity: that, when you have power, you allow the weaker part to contribute to the public debate. You don’t want to stifle that. You want to learn from it, and you allow other voices to voice their opinions.
Also because you think that you never are in possession of the whole truth. Totalitarian regimes are those in which there is a monopoly of truth. One party, one group, one person has the monopoly of truth. In a liberal regime, nobody has the monopoly of truth. There is no single central committee where the truth is located. That is the form of generosity: that people share a public space and the freedoms and the institutions to search in common for the truth, justice and reason. That’s a form of generosity that is liberal.
Defining Moderation
KLUTSEY: That’s great.
Now, on “moderation,” you refer to it as a virtue, but what is it, actually?
CRAIUTU: It’s not easy to define moderation because I think that—first and foremost, it has a long history. It’s one of the four cardinal virtues, along with prudence, courage and justice. It’s not the only virtue.
The best definition I can think of was given by a 17th-century English theologian, Joseph Hall [ [link removed] ], who defined it as the silken string that runs through the pearl chain of all virtues. The silken string that runs through the pearl chain of all virtues. In other words, you cannot be courageous without being moderate. You cannot be prudent without being moderate. And you cannot be just without being moderate. So there’s something that makes moderation the quintessential virtue here.
But I would say that it’s not easy to find moderation because if you look, for example, at the treatment of moderation [ [link removed] ] in Plato’s “Republic,” you remember that he meanders, he transgresses, he leaves questions unanswered or only partly answered in trying to find out what is moderation. I think that the definition there is “balance.” But I’m happy to talk more about it later.
The problem, as I see it, is that moderation forms an archipelago. An archipelago is a series of islands that are connected underwater, but the connections above water are not easy to be seen. There are different faces of moderation that need to be brought to light. You can’t define moderation in one definition. There’s no single definition that I would give.
But I would say that, as a whole, I define moderation as a muscular virtue. It’s a virtue for courageous minds. It’s a virtue in principle open to everyone, but not everyone is capable of living life with moderation or acting with moderation. It’s also something that requires a rebellious attitude. Moderates have the courage to challenge conventional norms and ideas when it’s appropriate and stand for them when it’s appropriate.
I think that all of those things go against the current image of moderation. I’ve said that moderation is a muscular virtue: It’s a fighting creed and a rebellious and firm attitude. Most people define moderation by the opposite, which is that it’s a weak virtue, not muscular. It’s not willing to fight. It’s willing to compromise—wishy-washy compromise. It’s not rebellious; it’s a form of succumbing to the hierarchy, to the status quo.
This was actually an idea that was prevalent in the 1950s. And there’s some truth to that. Sometimes moderation is a form of status quo, of deference to the status quo. But the way in which the authors that I study present it show that moderation can be also a rebellious attitude.
If you want me to give you a name here that I think illustrates best this temperament, is Albert Camus. You’ll find in Albert Camus, especially in his work “The Rebel [ [link removed] ],” you’ll find this definition of moderation as balance and a rebellious attitude. It’s a paradoxical conjunction of two opposites: balance and rebellious attitude. Just to illustrate with a character, I think Camus comes to mind in “The Rebel,” which is a book basically about moderation.
KLUTSEY: What about Martin Luther King?
CRAIUTU: Martin Luther King actually is another interesting example. In the Letter from Birmingham Jail [ [link removed] ], actually, he criticized the moderation of those who were willing to seek compromises with the status quo, opposing necessary civil reforms in the name of, “OK, we need to protect the order of society, and we need to avoid clashes and anarchy.” That was a false form of moderation that Martin Luther King Jr., rightly so, argued against.
Our brief exchange only shows how complex this moderation is because you can point to false forms of moderation that are used rhetorically by actors seeking to block necessary reforms. And there are genuine forms of moderation that promote reforms in society. It has to do with judgment, I think, here. That’s why the last thing I would add about moderation is that it cannot be studied isolated, independent from other virtues. It’s part of what I call a semantic field.
What Deirdre McCloskey does in the “Bourgeois Virtues” project is precisely that: to show that there is a field within which these virtues coalesce and belong to each other. You cannot study moderation without looking at compromise, civility, prudence and whatever else you can associate moderation with. (Justice is another one.) But you cannot understand moderation if you don’t look at the opposites, the antonyms, of moderation: fanaticism, extremism, zealotry and even radicalism, which is not to be equated with fanaticism. You need to understand all of these concepts somewhat connected to each other. One cannot be detached from the larger whole to which it belongs.
Moderation and Tempered Liberalism
KLUTSEY: It’s interesting. Before we started recording, you mentioned Joshua Cherniss, who has been on this series [ [link removed] ]. I’m a fan of his book, “Liberalism in Dark Times [ [link removed] ].” He talks about the tempered liberalism and the disposition that one has to have in response to this liberal predicament that we’re in. As I was reading your work on moderation, it reminded me of this notion of tempered liberalism. Do you find that there are a lot of similarities in these concepts?
CRAIUTU: Yes, I’m a big fan of Josh’s book. I actually was one of the endorsers of the hardcover book. You can find my endorsement on the fourth cover. Actually, I think I even read the dissertation [ [link removed] ] from which it emerged.
Some of the characters in his book, like Raymond Aron [ [link removed] ] and Isaiah Berlin [ [link removed] ], are also characters that I had analyzed in a book that I published a few years before, in “Faces of Moderation [ [link removed] ].” Josh and I have talked a lot about Aron and Berlin, and I learned a lot from his work on Berlin. Those are two characters that appear in both my book and his book. I think that they define a certain type of liberalism that is indeed tempered.
Jokingly, I told Josh and other friends that I think Josh and I wrote basically the same book from different perspectives, if you wish. His book is—yes, it is about liberalism, tempered liberalism, but it’s mostly about moderation. I think that that’s what defines the liberalism of, let’s say, Reinhold Niebuhr [ [link removed] ], Camus and Aron and Berlin from, let’s say, the more radical versions of John Dewey [ [link removed] ], for example, or John Rawls [ [link removed] ]. (There’s a moderate component even in Rawls’ work, if you want to think about where to put him on the map.)
But I think that there is an affinity between what Josh calls “tempered liberalism” and what I call “moderation.”
Moderation in Political Life
KLUTSEY: I see. Very, very interesting.
Now, it seems to me that one of the major challenges of our time is the political context that we’re in and that the political incentives don’t seem to reward moderation. It is really difficult to cultivate this virtue of moderation. What do you think about that? How can we cultivate moderation when all the incentives seem to drive people towards extremism?
CRAIUTU: It’s not easy to be a moderate in your private life. It’s very difficult to be moderate in public life. Let’s be honest: If you run on a platform centered on the concept of moderation, your chances of being elected are zero—nil. Some moderates have left the political scene. Some will leave it in the fall. (Mitt Romney is one of them [ [link removed] ].) And I think that that’s not a good sign for the health of our democracy moving forward.
But there is always, let’s say, time, and there’s always an opening for moderation. The political scene cannot be occupied only by strident voices, by the Marjorie Taylor Greenes of this world. There’s always room for moderation. That’s one thing I would say.
How to cultivate it: Well, I’m a great fan of what seems natural and simple, which is, it starts with us. I would say everyone—I don’t have a bird’s-eye view of how to cultivate—yes, sure, we can create new schools of civics to promote civic literacy. Yes, that’s good. We can cultivate a form of enlightened patriotism: OK, our country is not perfect, but it’s not the worst in the world either. So we need to learn the virtues and the limits: improve it. It’s a work in progress. I love that. I came to America and I believe in America as an idea, OK? It’s not perfect, but I believe in that idea. But that’s not going to carry the day.
I think that it works best if we start with us at the grassroots level, if we try to cultivate those virtues, including moderation, in the interaction with our fellow citizens on a daily basis. I’m a college professor. How do I treat my students? How do I treat my colleagues? That’s important. If I treat them in a way that is consonant with moderation, that expresses what I admire in the authors that I studied, then I think I’ve done my duty. I think that it starts with all of us.
Grassroots organizations are very important. In my book, I praise a few organizations that I think are doing great work at the grassroots level. Braver Angels [ [link removed] ], one of them. More in Common [ [link removed] ] is another one. Heterodox Academy [ [link removed] ] is another one. There are many others. I’m not knowledgeable to list all of them, but I do believe that they do a great work. No Labels [ [link removed] ] used to be a great opportunity. I hope they will continue to be so.
This one, American Exchange Project [ [link removed] ], that sends kids from the middle of the country to East Coast or West Coast, and vice versa, to spend time—people to get to know each other: I think this is how you promote moderation, by building what we have in common or we may have in common rather than what separates us. Many things separate us, OK? You and I are separated by our histories, by our backgrounds; but we have certain things in common and we need to build upon that, upon what brings us together. There are some certain allegiances, certain sentiments that we can foster, and those can bring us a step closer.
‘Allegory of Prudence’
KLUTSEY: Thank you for that.
I was intrigued by your discussion of Titian’s “Allegory of Prudence [ [link removed] ],” which is a really striking painting that depicts prudence. Can you describe this painting and its relevance to moderation?
CRAIUTU: Yes, Titian’s “Allegory of Prudence” is a stunning painting. In the book, I actually secured the rights to give it in color. The publisher, Cambridge, didn’t go for the color, so it’s only black-and-white. There are some inscriptions there that I don’t think anyone can see.
I tried to explain what it is. There are three faces, and then three animals under them, representing three different stages of one’s life. I think that the face in the middle, the bearded man—mature adult face—represents the, I would say, the quintessential, let’s say, moderate: someone who combines the vigor of the youth with the intelligence of the middle age, of course, and the wisdom of the old age. Old age has its own infirmities. Young age has its own limits. Middle age, if you manage to combine all three in one figure, then you bring to light the essence of moderation.
It has to do with judgment, again. I think that this one has to do with judgment that acts differently according to different circumstances. Practical knowledge is part of moderation. It requires memory. That’s why the old age is important. It requires understanding and keen perception of what’s right and what’s wrong. This also is part of the old age—you learn from it. But also it requires, let’s say, vigor, youth, desire; and that’s also youth. So that’s what the middle age can combine.
There are excesses that both extremes must avoid. For example, the young people are rash, imprudent. The old ones are too slow and too conservative in making changes. The middle can eliminate those and combine their virtues in one synthesis. I think that’s the message: that the health of the prudence lies in inner moderation, which is to be found in the conjunction of all this. It’s a synthesis of contradictions, if you wish—of different tensions in human nature.
If you can be that bearded man in the middle of Titian’s painting, that’s force, that’s vigor, that’s wisdom, that’s courage in one.
Being a Trimmer
KLUTSEY: I see.
As I was thinking about your book, one of the key messages in terms of the challenges that emerge from our current moment is that we’re experiencing a tension between the crusaders, on both the left and the right, and then the trimmers, who are the moderates. Did I get that right?
CRAIUTU: Yes, you got it right. I’m pleased you bring this issue of trimming, which has to do with balance, which has to do with equipoise, because this is the most difficult thing to do.
Trimming is a nautical metaphor that can be applied to politics: trimming the sails [ [link removed] ] of the ship of the state to keep it on an even keel. This is what great statesmen and stateswomen can do. This is what bad statesmen and stateswomen cannot do, which is they cannot keep the ship on an even keel. The metaphor comes, for the first time (to my knowledge), in the works of Marquess of Halifax in an essay published, I think, in 1684: “The Character of a Trimmer [ [link removed] ].”
Be that as it may, I think that today, we live in a time of excess in which many of us, including myself at times, are tempted to become crusaders in the name of a certain value, principle or virtue. Some people are crusaders in the name of liberty. You are reminded of Barry Goldwater, who perhaps is the most famous of one, who said that [ [link removed] ] extremism in the pursuit of liberty is no limit, no virtue, no problem, OK?
Moderation in the pursuit of justice—he also talked about it. There are other virtues that can be used for this crusade: social justice is another one. We’ve seen, recently, a lot of crusading done to promote diversity, social justice. All of this can be taken in good direction and in bad direction. Of course we need diversity, we need social justice—a modicum of those—but, poorly understood, they can lead us in excess. And liberty the same, equality the same, inequalities the same. Free market can be taken to extremes as well.
A good politician, a good legislator would be able to trim between these virtues that are all competing. A final synthesis between these virtues can never be achieved. This is one of the lessons of both Josh Cherniss and my heroes, [such as] Isaiah Berlin. There’s never going to be a synthesis—a perfect one—between equality and liberty or justice. There will always be tensions between the three, and all we can do is to navigate between excesses in one direction or another.
What the crusaders want is to impose one virtue as a supreme final principle that will fix that synthesis. That’s the problem. The temptation is there. We see—I see many of my friends on the right who have become crusaders because they believe in certain principles. For example, pro-choice, pro-life: Those two (on the left as well) can become opportunities for becoming crusaders. They are all legitimate concerns and legitimate issues to pursue. When one comes to define everything you do, then you have become a crusader. This is what moderates oppose: the single-mindedness that turns into fanaticism.
A chapter in my book, by the way, does talk about this. It’s about fanaticism. I chose to write about—not about an abstract issue here, but about a character in a play by a French Romanian author, Eugène Ionesco: the “Rhinoceros [ [link removed] ].” Crusaders become rhinoceros. There’s a mob mentality that develops. Then, once you are engaged in a crusade, then you feel like the cause of the mob is bigger than your own cause. Your own cause dissolves, so to speak, and you lose your identity. You’ve become a rhinoceros as well.
That’s what happened in history. In the 20th century, you look at Hitler, Germany, and you ask yourself, “How was it possible for a country with so many intelligent people, with such a great culture, to reach such heights of terror?” The answer is this: lack of moderation, suspension of judgment—and history has spoken.
Moderation Against Intolerance?
KLUTSEY: Obviously, one of the challenges of this is that a lot of my friends would ask, “How can you be moderate towards intolerant people?” When the Hitlers of the world rise up, you cannot deal with this through moderation. It seems underwhelming relative to the problem, right?
CRAIUTU: True. I’ve been asked this question. I’ve been thinking about it. The answer that I gave, and I would give again, is that fortunately we’re not facing Hitlers all the time—Hitlers and Stalins and Mao Zedongs and Pol Pots. They existed in the 20th century, but fortunately, it’s not every day. For people on the right, Biden is not a tyrant. For people on the left, I don’t think—I don’t want to minimize the danger that he represents, but I don’t think Trump can be equated with any of those either.
We need to maintain a sense of proportions here. I think that, yes, when we are faced with great disruptions and challenges to our liberal values, such as, for example, those who deny the legitimacy of elections because their preferred candidate lost, then we need to be very firm and say, “This is a red line. We cannot accept that.” Anyone who believes in the need to respect the rules of liberal democracy cannot and should not forget that we have people who were actively engaged in subverting this fundamental principle of liberal democracy—fair and free elections—and not acknowledging those results would have terrible consequences for our future. That’s a red line. I’m prepared to stick to it.
It’s not like I don’t know how to deal with that. I cannot accept that. I think others shouldn’t accept it either. For me, it’s a simple thing. I cannot forget what happened on January 6 or before January 6. I’m prepared to stand by and repeat what I’ve said before. In a way, the whole book that I wrote here is the kind of, “OK, here I stand. I’m prepared to say what I think in a polite and firm way. Take it or leave it.”
When the Extremists Aren’t Convinced
KLUTSEY: Now, in the end, you don’t necessarily convince Lauren on the left and Rob on the right. Does that satisfy you?
I think the point that you’re trying to make is that sometimes you can’t really convince people who are extreme on either side, and that’s OK. But it’s important to get the argument out there. It’s important to get the discussion out there. Is that right?
CRAIUTU: Right, right, right. And I do believe that we shouldn’t try to stifle voices. These are debates that cannot be settled forever. It’s good. It’s in the nature of our liberal democracy to exchange arguments.
Of course, two plus two makes four. That’s a settled conversation. What is justice? What is freedom? How much equality should we have? You can’t have an algorithm for settling those questions. It’s not geometry. There’s a difference there.
I think that the book is written precisely to reject easy simplifications like capitalism versus whatever—socialism—and those kinds of things, left and right. There’s a chapter in the book, by the way, on eclecticism, that I consider to be very important because I think that—
KLUTSEY: And pluralism.
CRAIUTU: And pluralism, because eclecticism and pluralism define the mental universe of the moderates. I also think that it’s important to reject the single-mindedness that I’ve spoken earlier. People define themselves by one value, or very few values, but one in particular, like small taxes, big taxes, pro-choice, pro-life, immigration, open borders, tough immigration. Those are ways of simplifying reality.
I think moderates want to make it complex, as it is, or remind people you cannot simplify it because the world would not follow your illusions, but you can perhaps get closer to understanding the world if you don’t try to simplify. I think that, at the end of the day, the book itself is a form of dialogue, as you know. I could have written it as a form of, let’s say, an abstract treatise: like this is moderation from A to B. You reach point C and then you are a moderate. I cannot do that. I don’t believe it’s desirable, either.
It’s a form of open dialogue in which none of us, neither Lauren nor Rob nor myself as an author, none of us has the monopoly of truth. We seek something together in common. We seek for possible answers, and we are supposed to learn from each other. I wanted to avoid giving the impression of a holier-than-thou attitude, like, “Let me tell you what moderation is.” No, no. I’m opening a conversation. I hope to learn from you.
By the way, I stand on the shoulders of giants. The book—each of the letters has a carefully chosen epigraph from different authors. What I want to show with that is that we really participate in a conversation that has been going on for a long time that goes from, I don’t know, Seneca, Montaigne, Pascal, Tocqueville. What we can do is to contribute to this debate. I don’t have any illusion that the book will convince anyone to start the movement. This is not a manifesto for moderation. It’s a contribution to a debate that, as you said, Ben, is very important to have.
The fact that we are not having it, the fact that this book has not been reviewed in The New York Times or Wall Street Journal, speaks volumes for me. I would have liked to see a review in any of those, but maybe David Brooks . . .
KLUTSEY: Well, you never know. It might still happen!
CRAIUTU: Yes. David Brooks has reviewed my previous [ [link removed] ] book [ [link removed] ] in New York Times, so I’m grateful for that. No one has deemed this book as worthy of being discussed in that—perhaps because it’s not a good book. I don’t know; it’s not for me to say. I doubt it. I think it’s the topic. The topic itself is seen as not interesting enough, not worthy of being discussed because it . . .
Look, it’s not going to bring you many likes if you write about this. OK, so what? Who’s going to benefit from that?
I think these are important questions that need to be discussed. Why is it that, in spite of the fact that Seneca, Plato, Aristotle, Montesquieu, Montaigne, George Washington, Ben Franklin, James Madison, Tocqueville, Burke—all of these people wrote about moderation. In spite of all that, we still think of it as a milquetoast virtue, as something that is only for weak and powerless individuals. This is a question that I would like others to take up and discuss.
If I had written a book about extremism, about those who think that liberal democracy is wrong, about the Vladimir Putins of this world and others, Viktor Orbáns, then the book would have been reviewed and it would have been discussed much more. So I think this is interesting, and I wrote this book precisely expecting this and precisely seeking to add my voice to this ongoing conversation about what are the virtues that we need to instill—not us, but we need to be present so that our liberal democracy and its institutions can continue to function.
Rules for Radical Moderates
KLUTSEY: You outlined 10 rules for radical moderates. What are your top two or maybe top three? Your favorite ones?
CRAIUTU: A reviewer who wrote an excellent review [ [link removed] ] of the book, Andrew Graham, said these are “wordy”—wordy rules. He noticed, and I’m glad he did, that it’s ironical to write a book about moderation that ends with a “Decalogue” of moderation. It’s very categorical. This was done on purpose.
I would say that, of the 10 rules there that I list, two (since you asked me to mention two)—I would say one is No. 4: Resolve firmly to think politically rather than ideologically.
What do I mean by that? Most of us think with a blueprint, by book. Some of us use one book, one set of rules that we want to apply universally in every occasion. Moderation is not a fixed ideology. There’s no algorithm of that. It’s not a party platform. You say, “OK, you have to have a party of moderates.” Moderation prevents us from thinking or trying to interpret reality in the light of a single value: liberty or justice or equality.
You have to have all of this. You have to have a mix of this. This is what thinking politically is. You have to apply one value more than others in certain circumstances and then other values more than others in other circumstances, which means that—yes?
KLUTSEY: It reminds me of Isaiah Berlin’s “Foxes and Hedgehogs [ [link removed] ],” right?
CRAIUTU: Right. You have to be a fox of some sort and a hedgehog and being fixated on moderation.
Sometimes, for example, you understand that inequalities are a big problem in our society, and you need to fix that. Sometimes you understand that too much equality has wreaked havoc, and you need to correct that as well. Be prepared to change your views when facts belie your beliefs. That’s rule No. 4: thinking politically. It’s a phrase that I borrow from Raymond Aron, the great French sociologist and political philosopher.
The other thing that I—just for the for the fun of it, “Don’t be a snowflake.” It’s rule No. 7. Have a tough skin. Don’t get offended too easily. Reject trigger warnings and the idea of microaggressions. Social life, political life is full of microaggressions. You should not expect not to be hurt, not to be offended. But you have to prepare—you have to be prepared to respond in a civil manner.
I think that that’s important. I would say that you should also be prepared, at the same time, to reevaluate your own beliefs. In one of the letters, I forgot where, this phrase that I’m borrowing from Albert Hirschman, from whom I learned the importance of self-subversion—“A Propensity to Self-Subversion [ [link removed] ].” This is what I like moderates to cultivate. Be prepared to constantly review your views and occasionally revise them and maybe change them. Don’t be ashamed of acknowledging, “Oh, I was wrong. I was stupid. But I learned from you, even if I think that you and I see the world through different lenses.” That kind of thing is very important.
But most of us are snowflakes. Most of us like trigger warnings. Most of us like to talk to people in our echo chamber. We here talking in an echo chamber—Mercatus, what I do—I’ve been a friend of the Mercatus Center [ [link removed] ], but I like to be talking to people at other institutions who do not share this view. I think that that’s a problem of our society today. We are segregated, again, in echo chambers and in these bubbles that make dialogue very difficult. I think that that’s important. Don’t imagine that you are in possession of the final truth. Benefit from your opponents.
That’s so difficult, so difficult to do. When you are in a position of power, you don’t want to listen to those who disagree.
Institutional Affiliations
KLUTSEY: Yes, that’s right. I’ll make a plug for a program that we have here at Mercatus: It’s called the Pluralist Lab [ [link removed] ]. We bring students from across the country together to have conversations on difficult topics—students from different viewpoints, backgrounds and perspectives. It’s been really great to see students engage.
CRAIUTU: I’m very happy to hear that. But I also have to tell you that I’ve received a lot of flack for, for example, being involved in activities of the Institute for Humane Studies [ [link removed] ]. People look at my vitae [ [link removed] ]. I have someone in mind, a perceptive journalist. He says, “Look, you collaborated with IHS. IHS was funded by Koch. And as a result, you are a reactionary.”
I said, “I’m writing the book precisely to challenge this view. This is a litmus test.” By the way, yes, the book is written against litmus tests as well. There are very few litmus tests—though the one that you mentioned, those who challenged democracy, those are important. Using litmus tests to assess who should be your friends or partners of dialogue and who shouldn’t is very dangerous in our society.
I want to point out: my association with Mercatus, symbolic as it may be (or not symbolic), would speak against me. People on the other side would say, “No, you spoke to the Mercatus people, IHS people. You are a reactionary.”
[laughter]
That’s the frame of mind against which we need to speak.
Insights From the Ostroms
KLUTSEY: Exactly.
Now, as we bring this conversation to a close, since you are a student of Vincent and Elinor Ostrom, do you have thoughts on how Ostromian thinking about institutions and liberal governance can help reenergize the liberal project?
I think you have a book in the works on this, but if you can preview some of that for us, that’d be great.
CRAIUTU: We do have a book in the works, and I’ve been trying to contribute to it for some time. It’s a project that I’m pursuing with Dan Cole [ [link removed] ] and Michael McGinnis [ [link removed] ], who were longtime associates of the Ostroms. We’re thinking to write a book about how to defend liberal democracy, but at the end of the day, we all three realize that if there is anything original about that, it’s how to integrate the vision of the Ostroms or some of the insights of Vincent and Lin Ostrom.
Ironically, today, the work of Vincent Ostrom is mostly neglected. Vincent was the theoretical part of the project, but when you talk about the Ostroms, it’s both Lin and Vincent together, so you can’t talk about one without the other. Vincent was the invisible Nobel behind the real Nobel, so to speak.
Two things I would say here is—one of the things that Lin always repeated: There is no panacea. Try to think about social—complex social, economic and political issues without thinking there’s a panacea for all of them. Sometimes the solution is cooperatives, sometimes it’s local organizations, sometimes it’s the local state, sometimes it’s the national state, and sometimes it’s the international. The scale matters. Scale matters. I think that Lin and Vincent, through their studies and their collaborator studies, showed that there’s no single solution for complex issues.
What they help us understand is that, for example, when you hear people talking about fixing healthcare, that’s a way to simplify a very complex issue, and there’s no single solution. Those who want us to have our healthcare system organized along the lines of Denmark don’t understand a thing about how political and economic systems work. Denmark is what? Six million people, four million people? We are 330 million people over such a large territory. This matters.
The other thing is polycentricity. We talk a lot these days about the need to think about scale and about size. There are different ways in which we can solve different issues. Sometimes decentralization works; sometimes concentration of authority works. You need to figure out what works in which circumstances. I think that’s why Lin Ostrom got the Nobel Prize [ [link removed] ]: because she was able to show [ [link removed] ], through concrete case studies, that sometimes police reform works well in one state and worse in another because, well, there are different solutions, different actors, different size scales that matter.
Polycentricity and, I think, this idea that there is no panacea are very important lessons that the work of Lin and Vincent Ostrom can teach us today.
Were they liberals? Yes, of course, they were liberals in the tradition of—the great tradition—and I’m glad that Mercatus has done this for years—of the Austrian economics and public choice. I think the Ostromian study of institutions is the third part of that larger project.
What I would like to see in the future is more attention given to the works of Vincent Ostrom, the theory one, which is a bit neglected today. This will start with what we do here in Bloomington at Indiana University. I’m the chair of the political science department right now, and I would like to honor the legacy of the Ostroms by creating an Ostrom Chair in Political Science. Believe it or not, we don’t have one. We do not have one, at this moment, in the Department of Political Science.
At the time of her death, Lin Ostrom was Arthur Bentley Chair in political science. She passed away 12 years next month. I think that these are the things that we should be doing in the future, at least at Indiana, to, let’s say, honor their outstanding intellectual legacy. I’ve had the privilege of knowing them for some time, but I’ve never been, let’s say, a close associate of the Ostroms. I participated through my work on Tocqueville in the different activities of the workshop.
Looking back, I realized how important they were in the lives of their students and what a great achievement their professional and personal lives were. These were really two individuals who were able to create a huge family of collaborative students. That legacy is precious. You can’t put a price on that. The fact that some of us are still remembering them so fondly—I think many of us—is a sign of their enduring legacy.
KLUTSEY: It would be wonderful to have an opportunity to honor the Ostroms. Kudos to you on that.
Thank you very much for taking the time. I really appreciate this, and I look forward to speaking with you again.
CRAIUTU: I’m grateful you took time to read the book, first and foremost. I don’t expect you to like all of it. It’s an invitation to a dialogue, and I hope that, through your own work, you’ll continue to do what you’ve been doing so far.
KLUTSEY: I like all of it, and I’m glad I got the chance to read it. So thank you.
CRAIUTU: Thank you. I appreciate it.

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