Danube Institute Podcast JD’s Ladder of Love | View From The Danube #4
What is the proper order of love?
Is it the one thing that irreconcilably separates liberals from conservatives?
How much can ordinary retail politics ever be built from deep moral philosophical foundations?
And how far are we from Real Existing Post-Liberalism?
This month, on View From The Danube, we’re tracking recent events in America, in the context of an intellectually self-confident re-assertion of conservatism. This is “the religious right” thumping their Thomas Aquinas.
Host Rod Dreher is joined by his guests to discuss the astonishing executive presidency of Trump’s first month. From DOGE to USAID to DEI to Robert Kennedy, this has been a revolution in the head like little else.
But the thing that Rod picks up on is the battle royale of JD Vance versus Rory Stewart over the ‘ordo amoris’. The proper order of love.
Is there, Rod wonders, a deeper battle underway between liberalism and conservatism? Are we really injuncted to love everyone equally? Or is the truth that we have special obligations to our family, friends and neighbours?
In short, is Stewart the last godforsaken yelp of the disappearing liberal world order?
The View From The Danube is the keystone video podcast of the Danube Institute, a Budapest-based think tank that aims to bring Conservative perspectives from the Anglosphere together, in the heart of the European capital of Conservativism.
It stars Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option and Living in Wonder, a senior fellow at the Danube Institute; John O’Sullivan, former speechwriter to Margaret Thatcher, the founder and President of the DI; and Calum Nicholson, the Director of Research.
This week, they’re joined by Liliana Śmiech, Director General for International Affairs at the Ludovika University of Public Service.
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