Ben Cobley is a journalist, former Labour Party activist, and author of The Tribe: The Liberal-Left and the System of Diversity and The Progress Trap: The Modern Left and the False Authority of History. He has written for The Spectator, UnHerd, The Critic, Quillette, and The New Statesman, and appears regularly on Sky News. You can find him on X @BenCobley and on Substack at Existential Politics.

In this conversation, Ben and I think out loud about the relationship between progressivism and Christianity, how the spirit of progressivism leads to forms of colonization, which is ironic when progressives are decolonisers at heart, why progressivism and capitalism go naturally together, what technocracy is and how the expert class plays a significant role in the political life of a place, while simultaneously reducing the space for political debate, why each of us is called to engage in the world rather than simply believing that things will turn out alright in the end, why the foundational beliefs of the United States make it inherently progressivism, why we can still feel the influence of 17th-century liberalism on modern policies, particularly immigration and much, much more.

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CD86: Miniscript with Rob, Vivek, and NVK

Citadel Dispatch

Introduction

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