In the second episode of Liberty Fund’s new Future of Liberty podcast, hosted by Mitch Daniels, Daniels welcomes Reason magazine’s Editor-in-Chief Katherine Mangu-Ward to discuss the ever changing role of journalism in a free society.
The Reading Room
Future of Liberty Podcast Notes: Katherine Mangu-Ward on politics
Mangu-Ward offers several challenging ideas that are well worth exploring.
Third Parties. Daniels asks Mangu-Ward to distinguish “small l” libertarianism from “capital L” libertarianism, which leads to a conversation on third parties in American politics generally.While she is hopeful that someday the duopoly may be breached, she’s not hopeful. She says,
I would certainly love to live in a country where there was a robust third party that had libertarian leanings, and I don’t think that’s a crazy idea…our electoral system is jointly owned by the two major parties and they have all kinds of tools and tricks to keep third parties out, not just libertarians, but green party, reform party, independent candidates, the most powerful of which is excluding them from the debate stage.
It’s sometimes hard to remember that the two parties we know today were not always in that position. What do you think the prospects for a viable third party in the United States are? What obstacles besides the debate stage must a third party overcome to be a viable candidate? What would it take to convince you vote for a third party candidate, and how might your answer change in a federal versus state or local election?
Voting. Speaking of voting, Mangu-Ward is a well-known abstainer. Daniels asks her to explain why. She replies that she thinks voting is over-valued as a civic act, but she also cites moral reasons for abstention. Yet in what might strike some as a contradiction, she also thinks participating in the political process is important. She says,
You should care about who governs you, but people kind of have this idea that they can just go and pull the lever and they’ve done their civic duty. And I think first of all, there have been vanishingly few elections that were decided by one vote, there’s just a mathematical issue here. You’re not the guy that’s going to decide the election. But then there’s also I think a kind of moral question, which is how do I interact with a system that I think is fundamentally unjust or produces bad outcomes?
Daniels thinks Mangu-Ward is going to have to keep fighting on this question. How do her reasons for not voting stack up with you? Again, how might your answer (like here) depending on the level of the election (i.e., state versus local)? Mangu-Ward cites her morality-based reason for not voting. To what extent is there a moral argument in favor of voting, and how would you describe it?
Social media/free speech. At about the fifteen minute mark, the conversation turns to the relationship between social media companies and the government, initially in terms of the COVID pandemic. According to Mangu-Ward, “one thing that we learned coming out of the Covid pandemic was social media companies really cooperated with and were coerced by in a kind of reciprocal way that’s hard to disentangle the public health establishment.” She and Daniels debate which was the greater villain, and which side did more to keep information from the public. Mangu-Ward ultimately calls upon the public choice tradition to understand how these relationships evolved, arguing the “sinister conspiracies and or supervillain type explanations” don’t do us much good.
What does this part of the conversation suggest the relationship between social media companies and the state should be? To what extent do social media platforms owe something in terms of public trust? In what ways do technological innovations- whether social media or large language models- enhance or deteriorate individual freedom? Are you an optimist, like Mangu-Ward, a pessimist, or something in between?
Education and technology. Daniels turns the conversation around technology to focus on young people. Mangu-Ward explains why she thinks [federal] restrictions on social media for children are a bad idea, and then why she thinks online education has been really good for young people. How does she reconcile these two positions? Her answer in part comes down to parenting; she also asserts,
I don’t think anybody is saying the pure perfect utopia would be one where no one ever leaves their basement. But I do think we so often are comparing the way that online learning plays out in real life to some kind of imagined ideal of in-person universal public schooling. And that’s the wrong comparison.
What are your thoughts on technology in schools? What should the role of parents be in terms of social media use, phones in school, or educational choice? We’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences.