Why Dave Rubin Couldn't Hear Marianne Williamson Properly | Moral Libertarian View

Welcome to Moral Libertarian View, a program where we discuss news events that are worth looking at from the point of view of the Moral Libertarian idea. I hope you subscribe if you are interested.

Today, I want to take a deeper look at the recent interview of 2020 Presidential candidate Marianne Williamson by Dave Rubin. As you probably know by now, most people have declared Williamson the winner in this encounter, an assessment that I agree with. But where some people have labelled Rubin as unintelligent, I actually don't agree there. I think the reason why Rubin didn't perform well in this interview, was because he was too focused on what he already had in mind, and missed the opportunity to have a constructive conversation with Williamson on what she brought to the table. I mean, Rubin did make several very important points throughout the interview, but he couldn't quite turn it into a full-blown fruitful conversation.

For example, Rubin rightly raised the question of government tyranny, the need to limit the reach of government to preserve individual liberty. Williamson also agreed with him there, at least half the way. But then, Williamson also brought up the topic of corporate control, and I think it could have turned into a fruitful conversation about government vs corporate control, and how to maximize effective personal liberty by creating some balance there. Rubin really dropped the ball during the interview by not looking into this deeper. I mean, we do live in a time when corporations are limiting free speech more than governments, so this is an important conversation to have from a classical liberal point of view. I used to be a political libertarian on-and-off, but it was through thinking about corporate control that I evolved into a Moral Libertarian, where the focus is not solely on cutting government itself, but rather on creating the conditions for equal and maximum moral agency for all individuals, which would require checks on corporate power too. Indeed, political libertarianism can be used to create a tyranny based in the private sector, where individual liberty becomes practically absent for most people. I'm not talking about so-called positive freedoms, I'm talking about even basic stuff like free speech and religious freedom. This is not just theoretical: there is a good reason why people who are sympathetic to neoreactionary thinking also sometimes call themselves libertarians, and look up to figures like Hoppe and Rothbard. Of course, what they forget is that a corporate tyranny in the 21st century is going to be culturally 'Woke', and they certainly wouldn't like it.

But back to Rubin and Williamson. I think the main reason why Rubin didn't properly engage with Williamson was that he already had a picture of what she represented in his mind, which turned out to be a wrong picture. Let's go back to Rubin's famous video, Why I Left The Left. In that video, he paints the left as those who support social engineering, play identity politics and the oppression olympics, and don't respect free speech. Rubin has also been hanging out with people who think that kind of attitude is representative of the left, people like Ben Shapiro, Candace Owens, and so on. But in reality, the so-called left is a very big place, just like the so-called right. What Rubin is opposed to is the postmodern and Critical Theory left. While this type of leftist is overrepresented in college campuses, in real life they are only a faction of the broader Democratic coalition. I mean, having had conversations with people like Bret Weinstein and Andrew Yang, Rubin should have known better.

I guess because much of the interview was focused on Rubin's differences with Williamson over reparations, Rubin could have come away with the false impression that Williamson was part of the identitarian left, and hence harbored a Critical Theory style worldview. But if you listen closely, you would find that Williamson's case for reparations doesn't sound like postmodern Critical Theory at all. It isn't based on any oppressor vs oppressed dynamic. Rather, it is based on the idea of spiritual atonement. I actually don't entirely agree with the idea of seeing economics as spiritual, and I think Rubin made a very valid point about the lack of guilt of the individuals who must cough up the money, but you don't even have to be sympathetic to reparations to see that Williamson is not playing identity politics as we usually understand it.