Civitas Outlook
Topic
Politics
Published on
March 29, 2025
Contributors
Steven Hayward
John Yoo
Episode
The Three Whiskey Happy Hour

The Three Whisky Happy Hour: Make Liberalism Great Again?

About this episode

As if to put an exclamation point to the crazy story of the week about the Trump national security team adding a hostile journalist to their Signal group chat about bombing Houthi and the Blowups, Steve accidentally texted the Zoom link to this week’s taping to John Eastman (who was otherwise pre-occupied).

In any case, after reviewing the completely out of whack signal-to-noise ratio of Signalgate, and the latest machinations in the lawfare against Trump, we take up as our main subject the question of whether the burst of enthusiasm among a few liberal thinkers to build stuff again—like liberalism used to in the New Deal—has much prospect of success. As Steve notes, Ezra Klein has called for “supply-side progressivism,” but notes that the newfangled “abundance liberals” don’t have a napkin or a curve, and if you don’t have a napkin or a curve, it’s just sparkling neoliberalism. Needless to say, John is mostly oblivious, and Lucretia is unimpressed. But maybe the movement can start with making their own blue hats, “Make Liberalism Great Again!”  Of course, the acronym this generates sounds like a mumble, but isn’t another mumble a perfect fit for Democrats right now?

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