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Yeah, you have to tolerate a lot of things that you think are intolerable, and they have to tolerate you, and that does not generate a strong sense of community.

Uh, R.R. Reno, the editor of First Things, says, you know, uh, "Liberalism hates strong gods of various sorts." And that is a genuine critique that's been around right since the beginning of liberalism.

I think that I'm now convinced [laughs] that there is a sort of generational cycle that the people that want to live in a liberal society the most desperately are people that don't live in a liberal society, that live under a dictatorship.

So the people of Eastern Europe that lived under communist dictatorships were just overjoyed when they could now vote, they could move freely, they didn't have the kind of tyrannical restraints, uh, on their activities, and they really wanted to join Europe because that was the home of, uh, of liberalism.

If you go to the Ethics and Public Policy Center, for example, in Washington, you'll find there aren't very many Jewish people there.

Or First Things, Richard Newhouse, I mean, on the Protestant side.

But on the Christian right side, you have this devotion to Israel because, you know, Israel was given by God and that we should build a temple and so on.

A

But this really grabbed our attention.

Yeah, I mean, I wrote about this for First Things.

And the thing that's really frustrated me is that there's this polarization where, and we had a very good piece on this in Compact last week as well, but where there's this polarization between women who feel this weird identification with her And then people who like just want to come down hard and just don't care about the idea that this is, you know, postpartum psychosis and like that, like three children died.

I demand justice and that somebody has got to go down.

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[upbeat music] This is Secret Third Thing, a podcast with me, Virginia Abram.

And German Saucedo.

We're editors working for First Things Magazine, and this is a show about contemporary culture.

On each episode, we'll examine a trend affecting the modern zeitgeist, along with a guest.

Professor Elizabeth Corey teaches political philosophy at Baylor University, where she also directs the Honors Program.

The author of Michael Oakeshott on Religion, Aesthetics, and Politics, and a regular contributor to First Things, Corey has written for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Atlantic, the Chronicle of Higher Education, and National Affairs.

She lives in Waco, Texas.

Elizabeth, welcome.