John Owen will deliver the keynote lecture for the 2025 Grawemeyer Awards Tuesday at 1 p.m. at the Chao Auditorium in the Ekstrom Library on U of L's Belknap campus. He spoke with LPM's Bill Burton about his book.
Bill Burton: Your book examines how democracy worldwide is in trouble, that how democracy has evolved over the years is hurting its chance for survival. How did it evolve?
John Owen: So democracy has evolved really, let's call it liberal democracy. On two and a half centuries or so it's existed. It used to be under a form of liberalism we generally call classical liberalism, that's much more about reining in the state, shrinking the state, getting it out of the way of economic activity and personal liberty. And that worked okay for a while. It certainly wasn't perfect.
And so there came about what some of us called welfare liberalism, which is not getting the state out of the way for the sake of personal freedom, but actually getting the state involved in the economy to ensure more personal liberty, especially of the workers. Welfare liberalism had a good few decades. Really took hold in the New Deal and the 30s, but it began to hit the skids also in the 70s.
And so they're starting really under Jimmy Carter, but after that, Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher and Britain and other leaders in other countries really put this on steroids, something like a return to classical liberalism. And not really. The idea was get the government out of the way again, because it's gotten in the way of personal liberty. It's too regulatory.
BB: You wrote about democracy and liberalism specifically needing to be re imagined. How so?
JO: The story I just told about three different liberalisms turns on this idea that society together, intellectuals, academics, politicians, realize that there's something wrong with liberalism as we're doing it now. Lots and lots of people are left out, are not free, and so we need to rethink what the barriers to individual liberty are right now. I don't have a fully worked out view, but I have a sketch of something I'm calling pluralistic liberalism, and I'm quite struck at the complaints that many on the right and the left have about our current economy, our current politics, the sort of Silicon Valley ethos of move fast and break things. This has really hit not just the big cities, but it's hit the small towns. And it seems to me that the big barrier that a lot of people feel to their own freedom, their own individual freedom, is it's pressure from the economy and from the culture to never to settle on anything, not not actually to commit to anything, any community. A real liberalism for our time, a good liberalism for our time, I think would stop penalizing people for commitment over the long term, and would be more tolerant of it. How to get there? I'm not sure I'm working on that as well.
BB: Your book was published in 2023, and since that time, there have been some changes, most notably in the U.S., with the administration. And the Trump administration, in just its first few months, has implemented numerous tariffs. Much has been said about how that could affect the economy in this country and worldwide, but do those actions also play a role in democracy going forward?
JO: They do. And I want to say my book is, is one of several that come out recently that argues that hyper, well, I'll call it hyper globalization, following some economists, has been excessive, but I don't favor tariffs, or I don't favor unilateral tariffs. I think this is something the United States needs to work out over time with other democratic, especially wealthy democratic countries that, again, are facing similar problems. So the yeah, what, what the Trump administration has done is really abrupt and, I think, deliberately provocative, and I do think it's going to hurt a lot of the people that my book worries about. You know, people who thought they were going to buy a car next month, can't do it and so on.
This transcript was edited for brevity and clarity.
