PODCAST

ReImagining Liberty

The emancipatory and cosmopolitan case for radical social, political, and economic liberalism. Hosted by Aaron Ross Powell.

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All Episodes

088: An Introduction to Anti-Liberal Ideologies (w/...

ReImagining Liberty ·

2025/08/25

An introduction to the people and ideas most central to the ideologies of Trumpism and post-liberalism.The last episode of this show was about what ReImagining Liberty is. With frequent guest Cory Massimino, I talked about the values and perspective behind ReImagining Liberty's approach to liberalism, and how it's distinct from right-libertarianism. Today's episode is a nice companion to that. Not just because it also features a frequent guest, this time my friend Matt McManus, but because it runs

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087: The Values of Radical Liberalism (w/ Cory...

ReImagining Liberty ·

2025/08/19

A conversation about the the values underlying radical liberalism, and what distinguishes it from more right-wing forms of libertarianism.You can think of this episode as kind of a soft reboot of ReImagining Liberty. Or a back-to-basics. This is a show about politics, but it's a politics grounded in a particular set of values and a particular perspective, and with the political and policy specifics downstream of those. Ever since the election, I've spent a lot of time on those specifics, as well as

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40:44

090: Podcasting's Political Power (w/ Landry Ayres)

ReImagining Liberty ·

2025/08/15

Today's episode gets a bit meta. I've done something like ninety ReImagining Liberty shows, and hundreds more on other podcasts, but I've never done one on the place of podcasting itself in the political environment. This even though podcasting has been one of the big themes of politics lately, in many ways blamed for the rise, or at least persistence, of the ideologies that have reshaped our political culture and institutions.I'm delighted to bring on Landry Ayres for that. You

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50:30

089: AI, Cultural Tools, and Pluralism (w/ Ted...

ReImagining Liberty ·

2025/08/04

We sometimes talk about technology on ReImagining Liberty, in the context of how it interacts with a liberal society, or how technology can help us defend and advance liberal. The big technology everyone's talking about right now is, of course, artificial intelligence. It's a topic I've written about, but not one I'd yet done an episode about specifically regarding what it means for liberalism.Then I read an essay by Ted Underwood, a professor in the School of Information Sciences,

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084: Liberalism's Radical Future (w/ Andy Craig)

ReImagining Liberty ·

2025/07/18

It's difficult to be optimistic about liberalism's future. Certainly in the short to medium term. We're in an acute period of democratic bacIt's difficult to be optimistic about liberalism's future. Certainly in the short to medium term. We're in an acute period of democratic backsliding and authoritarian ascendency. The opposition party, or at least its leadership, has been largely supine in response. A backlash is rising, but it's an open question whether it'll be enough, and soon enough, to make

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47:35

088: Liberalism's Radical Future (w/ Andy Craig)

ReImagining Liberty ·

2025/07/18

It's difficult to be optimistic about liberalism's future. Certainly in the short to medium term. We're in an acute period of democratic backsliding and authoritarian ascendency. The opposition party, or at least its leadership, has been largely supine in response. A backlash is rising, but it's an open question whether it'll be enough, and soon enough, to make a difference.But it's also not a time to give up all hope. There is a backlash. The current regime is deeply unpopular. And a ton of

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51:44

087: Classical Liberalism and Michel Foucault (w/...

ReImagining Liberty ·

2025/06/30

Liberals, particularly classical liberals and libertarians, have too narrow a view of power. They focus on government force, or the threat of government force, and ignore all the other ways power is exercised in society. And the way classical liberals and libertarians imagine the fully autonomous self is at odds with our deep cultural embeddedness and the social construction of our identities, our ways of seeing, and the concepts through which we come to understand ourselves and the world.That's the

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083: Classical Liberalism and Michel Foucault (w/...

ReImagining Liberty ·

2025/06/30

Note: There were some issues with my guest's audio that make a few of his answers difficult to hear. So he kindly wrote out his answers and sent them to me. Those appear below in the show notes. Liberals, particularly classical liberals and libertarians, have too narrow a view of power. They focus on government force, or the threat of government force, and ignore all the other ways power is exercised in society. And the way classical liberals and libertarians imagine the fully autonomous self is at

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082: Reclaiming the Internet (w/ Mike Masnick)

ReImagining Liberty ·

2025/06/23

What's happened to Twitter, or now X, is the clearest example of why it's actually not great that so much of our digital communication is controlled by just a few firms and, through them, the whims of guys like Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg. These single points of control not only mean a product we love today can be unlovable, or just gone, tomorrow, but also give more dangerous actors, like governments, avenues to use that centralization against us.The alternative is to revive what the internet once

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