Philadelphia Society

We're going to develop first principles and we're going to believe that that will affect the politics that are possible down the line.

Not because every single voter is out there reading National Review or, you know, listening into the debates that are happening on the Philadelphia Society or Federalist Society stages at their meetings and conferences or something, but that the ideas that are out there do saturate the culture and sort of get into the national bloodstream in a way that affects how people think through what politics is for and what they're looking for from a politician.

I also acknowledge that peak woke happens after Donald Trump's first election.

Okay, this is true.

He wasn't even 60 years old yet, but he was not in good health.

Uh, he was once the president of the Philadelphia Society, uh, which has long been known as, uh, a major, major think tank for American conservatism on the whole.

Uh, Russell Kirk, Bill Buckley, um, the historian Forrest McDonald, a lot of people have been involved with the Philadelphia Society over the past 60 years.

Um, Bradford was nominated by Ronald Reagan to serve as the chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities in the early 1980s.

Uh, he did not receive that job because, uh, he had written essays in opposition to the Abraham Lincoln administration.

Get us started.

I'm now president of the Philadelphia Society, which is-- some people say it's the American Mont Pelerin Society.

Um, it-- at our meetings, three or four hundred people who are classical liberals and conservatives get together, and many of them would like to reclaim the label of liberalism, because in most of the world, liberalism is a label that attaches to what, what we call classical liberalism, and public choice is a branch of that.

But I, I wanted to start out by defining what I think liberalism is because I think public choice is an offshoot of that.

That's the reason that I cite Patrick Deneen.

I think he has partly correctly diagnosed this problem.

I, as, as I, I had said before, president of the Philadelphia Society, and I have seen something in the past three years that actually has made me much more frightened and much more militant, and that's why I think I-- whereas I used to agree with you and be more optimistic, I'm now pretty pessimistic, and the difference is this.

The young conservative people, twenty-five, thirty years old, and there's dozens and dozens of them in the room.

Hold on.

Well, I will mention to the listeners that I was at the Philadelphia Society meeting last weekend in suburban Virginia.

And I said, John, you won't come until it meets in Philadelphia because he thinks the Philadelphia Society should be all about Philly cheesesteaks.

And that got a lot of funny looks because they don't have a sense of humor about it.

They

That's my boiled down definition.

And so he's making this case in the pages of National Review, in his book review, i- in his, in his, the stuff that he's writing in his books, and, um, at speeches at the Philadelphia Society.

He's at, you know, present at the founding of all these conservative institutions, and he is an, a real influence on a whole generation of the sort of founders of American conservative institutions of various kinds.

He lives up in Woodstock, New York, in this secluded like mountainside farmhouse.

Or d- or I forget if he was a bourbon drinker or a scotch drinker, but, um, and, uh, and sitting by the fire and discussing ideas, debating ideas.

And so he has this incredible, he has this incredible formative effect on so many of the people and institutions that come to be the conservative movement in America as we know it in the second half of the 20th century.

And this idea, this dual, dual commitment to liberty and virtue, you will find it baked into the mission statements of like every conservative institution from this period, the Philadelphia Society, the American Conservative Union, the Heritage Foundation, the s- the Federalist Society, like the Young Americans for Freedom.

You go down the line, and they're all these-

This dual commitment to liberty and virtue became the consensus position on the American right, especially in sort of the intellectual and institutional world.

So all of the think tanks, publications, advocacy organizations, the Young Americans for Freedom, the American Conservative Union, Philadelphia Society, the Federalist Society, all these institutions that form to try to among conservatives in America or on the right in the United States to advance their commitments, their mission statements are all basically very fusionist.

They're all about liberty and virtue, order of liberty, personal responsibility, limited government, free markets.

It's very recognizably fusionist.