Will Liberal Democracy Survive? - with Jonah Goldberg

**Dan Senor** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (0:21)
You are listening to an Ark Media podcast.

**Jonah Goldberg** (0:26)
But I just think it's worth pointing out to people, because if people get this wrong all the time, the Protocols of Elders of Zion, which is the foundational anti-Semitic conspiracy theory, and it's a total BS conspiracy theory, one of the most successful ops the Russians have ever done, it wasn't anti-Semitic to get people to hate Jews. It was anti-Semitic to get people to hate liberalism.
It was saying that if you embrace liberalism and democracy, you're going to let the Jews control everything, you're going to let them into your life, whatever. It was using existing anti-Semitism to discredit liberalism rather than the other way around.

**Dan Senor** (1:14)
It's 1 p.m. on Tuesday, August 18th here in New York City. It's 8 p.m. on Tuesday, August 18th in Israel. Before today's episode, a quick housekeeping note. On Thursday, October 22nd, just five days ahead of the Israeli elections, Call Me Back will hold a live taping at the Streicker Center in New York City, where I'll sit down with Dan Shapiro, Dahlia Scheinlin and Brett Stevens to discuss what's at stake in Israel's 2026 election and what its results will mean for the US-Israel relationship. Tickets have just gone on sale, so if you want to join us, please follow the link in the episode description. Now on to today's episode.
About 250 years ago, around the time of the American and French Revolutions, a political idea began gathering extraordinary force in the Western world. That is classical liberalism, drawing on a range of thinkers that shaped and influenced, and in some cases inspired, each or both of these revolutions. It elevated individual liberty, equality before the law, private property, and limits on state government power. For the Jews of Europe, this transformation was particularly consequential. The spread of liberal ideas helped, not entirely, but helped dismantle centuries of legal restrictions and opened the way to Jewish emancipation, to citizenship, political equality, and participation in societies that had long kept Jews apart. For a time, liberalism, classical liberalism, appeared to be ascendant. But in the turmoil that followed World War I, it faced powerful challenges from both directions, revolutionary socialism and communism on the left and fascism on the right. Today some argue liberalism is under pressure again, a lot of pressure. So are we watching history repeat itself, or at least, as the old saying goes, rhyme? And what does that actually mean for the Jews whose modern emancipation was so closely bound up with the liberal order?
It is easy and often justified to focus on the ideological movements that threaten our freedom and safety.
We will do that in this episode, but it is also worth asking a more difficult question. Why has classical liberalism become vulnerable in the first place? If it has, what are the structural weaknesses which have been exploited by e-liberal forces? To explore these questions, I'm joined by one of the most prominent defenders and students of classical liberalism, Jonah Goldberg of The Dispatch, an author of a book that delves into a lot of these issues, Suicide of the West, which I referred to a lot on this podcast. We'll ask Jonah why Western society has lost confidence in classical liberalism, whether it can recover, and what its possible decline could mean for the Jews. My conversation with Jonah right after this short message.
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