Alexandre Lefebvre is a professor of politics and philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of “Liberalism as a Way of Life” (Princeton University Press, 2024).
Nearly 450 years ago, a French philosopher wrote a book that feels like a precursor to “The White Lotus,” HBO’s hit TV show set in a luxury resort that follows various groups of guests as tensions build among them. In Jean Bodin’s “Colloquium of the Seven About Secrets of the Sublime,” a fabulously wealthy Venetian nobleman named Coronaeus invites six guests to his home for a week of amusement and conversation.
By day, the guests stroll the gardens, enjoy lavish meals, play with optical illusions, take naps and read. But by night, when wine begins flowing, things get feisty. Coronaeus, a devout Catholic, planned the week to learn how the rest of the world lives and thinks. This is why his guests are a Lutheran, a Calvinist, a Jew, a Muslim, a skeptic and a philosophical naturalist. Together, they debate everything under the sun — including the nature of the sun itself. Their sharpest clashes concern what it means to live well and the ultimate purpose of human life, as they alternate between attempts at persuasion and the realization of its futility.
Suppose we wanted to repeat the experiment in 2025. More pointedly, let’s put ourselves in Coronaeus’s shoes: a wealthy and comfortable hegemon at a time when his hegemony was challenged. In the 16th century, that meant being Catholic. In the 21st century, it means being liberal while the liberal-democratic order begins to crack. So, if we, like Coronaeus, want to understand how our rivals live and think, who should we invite?
It’s obvious: Liberals should seek out the most articulate and thoughtful representatives of regimes from around the world that are threatening to dethrone liberalism from the political, social, economic and cultural pre-eminence it has enjoyed for roughly the past 75 years. In the spirit of naming names, I’d send RSVPs to Aleksandr Dugin of Russia, the philosopher who has been called “Putin’s Brain”; Wang Huning, the shrewd ideologue who has led Beijing for some 40 years; Steve Bannon of the United States, who, whatever his faults, has channeled Trumpism like no one else; Mohan Bhagwat, head of India’s Hindu nationalist movement; Rached Ghannouchi of Tunisia for an Islamist perspective; and finally Viktor Orbán, who, although currently the Prime Minister of Hungary, seems to relish rowdy gatherings.
Excellent. We have a guest list for a 21st-century Colloquium of the Seven. Now comes the real question: What will we talk about?
Correct Liberal Opinion
Most liberals think they know how such a gathering would go: As soon as politeness permits, our illiberal guests will huddle up to trade tips and strike deals on consolidating and expanding their power. They might, for example, discuss which troll farms most effectively spread disinformation at home and abroad. They would likely sketch out informal trade and travel arrangements should one of their members face international sanctions. No doubt they would swap notes on the best financial institutions for offshoring wealth — personal and national alike, a line they conveniently blur anyway.
Such is the dominant view of the liberal commentariat. Consider two recent high-profile books. The first, Anne Applebaum’s “Autocracy Inc.: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World,” published in 2024, is right on point. These days, she argues, more and more illiberal regimes collaborate — not out of shared ideals but from a “ruthless, single-minded determination to preserve [the] personal wealth and power” of their leaders.
Timothy Snyder is even blunter in his book, “On Freedom,” also published last year. The world, he claims, is divided into two types of political systems: liberal democracies (which embrace positive values) and autocracies (which lack values entirely). The tens of millions of Americans who voted for Trump? They’re “sadopopulists” who enjoy inflicting pain on others more than helping themselves. What about China? Clearly, “the entire country is a kind of prison.” And whenever a country veers away from liberal democracy, the only question is whether it’s using oligarchy to get to fascism (as in Russia and Turkey) or fascism to get to oligarchy (as in Brazil and India).
“The major illiberal regimes worldwide do not lack values or ideals — they overflow with them.”
From this perspective of correct liberal opinion, understanding the illiberal world boils down to a few core principles. First, today’s illiberal regimes maintain power primarily through repression, violence and corruption. Second, their leaders and deputies are driven by the spoils of tyranny: power, wealth, sex and glory. Third — though opinion is more divided on this point — their populations are either systematically deceived by their rulers or, more insultingly, incapable of tolerating the complexity, openness and pluralism that liberal democracy promotes.
If these critics are right, there’s no need to hold a new Colloquium of the Seven. We know what illiberals are about. They are driven by greed, not ideals; anger, not affection; and base interests, not human goods.
A Counterproposal
This article presents a counterproposal: The major illiberal regimes worldwide do not lack values or ideals — they overflow with them. They believe in their values sincerely. So much so, in fact, that each advances a positive and specific vision of human flourishing for its members. Finally, here is my thesis: They are ready and willing to use the soft and hard powers of the state to realize their visions of the good life. They are in the business of crafting souls, or soulcraft.
With this in mind, if I had the major representatives of these regimes at the colloquium table, I’d ask three questions:
1. What is the dominant conception of the good life in your country?
2. Why is it excellent and worthy of devotion?
3. How does — and should — your state advance it?
A weeklong conversation around this could go a long way toward helping poor liberals, like myself, understand the allure, potency, stability and deep human aspirations of my rivals.
The Return Of Perfectionism
Political philosophers have a word for what I’m talking about: “perfectionism,” the exercise of state power to shape and enforce ideals of human flourishing. But what evidence is there that perfectionism is ascendant across the globe?
It’s simple: just look at how illiberal regimes talk and act. China, for one, could not be more explicit. President Xi Jinping has unveiled a new model of modernization aimed at “enriching” the people’s “spiritual world,” and Xi wields breathtaking powers to mold his subjects. On the softer end, beginning in grade school, China’s youth are steeped in “Xi Jinping Thought,” which promotes values like filial piety, diligence and harmony.
A pointier tool is the Chinese Communist Party’s famous carrot-and-stick “social credit” system, which rewards “trustworthy” behavior — paying bills on time, recycling, volunteering — and punishes what the party deems is “untrustworthy,” such as neglecting elder care or criticizing the government.
Most coercive of all was its use of “re-education” centers in Xinjiang, where the state sought to erase and reshape the cultural and religious identities of Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities. More civilization than state, as Bruno Maçães argued, “China is organized around culture rather than politics,” and its state assumes the “paramount task of protecting a specific cultural tradition.” China does not merely seek to win the hearts and minds of its subjects; it crafts them from cradle to grave.
But if China is the first among equals, it is by no means the only perfectionist illiberal regime. In India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government has fused populism with Hindutva, an ethno-nationalist and spiritual doctrine championed by a paramilitary volunteer organization. In Russia, President Vladimir Putin pens long semi-mystical essays on the greatness and vulnerability of the Russian soul. Not to be outdone — especially when it comes to turning a phrase — Orbán declares that being Hungarian is “a task, a mission, probably one of the most beautiful missions in the world” and backs his rhetoric with policies like lifetime income tax exemptions for mothers of two and three children and generous state funding for arts and media aligned with nationalistic ideals. Although the United States may be late to the game, when intellectuals like Patrick Deneen — who argues that “it is the duty of the political order to positively guide” citizens toward the goods of piety and prayer — inspire figures like Vice President JD Vance, it may not be far behind.
My point is that an increasing number of regimes today reject the idea that a hundred flowers should bloom within their borders. They claim to know what constitutes a life worth living, are confident that their vision enjoys popular support, and are fully prepared to wield persuasive and coercive powers to advance it. And if minorities — or even numerical majorities, such as women — protest these visions as discriminatory and unequal, well, too bad. As the Catholic Church once put it, error has no rights.
“China does not merely seek to win the hearts and minds of its subjects; it crafts them from cradle to grave.”
I’ll give liberals a right of reply in a moment. But allow me to truly offend them. No doubt, these regimes exercise tremendous social control and can be violent and corrupt. Many of them also emphasize grievances and resentments more than positive ideals. But I firmly believe that they also champion great human goods — goods that liberalism often diminishes or fails to deliver. Filial piety, harmony and respect for hierarchies are central to the selfhood promoted by the Chinese Communist Party. The post-liberal religious right in the United States, for its part, elevates honor, piety and self-sacrifice. These may not be highly valued goods for liberals. They may even be attacked as root causes of oppression. But they are undeniable human goods, and if we fail to acknowledge their appeal to those who see the world differently, we miss the main drivers of the appeal, stability and spread of illiberalism today.
I’m not defending these regimes. My goal is to understand them. Liberals cannot afford to be continually amazed at the success of their rivals. If liberal democracy is to thrive and not just survive in the 21st century, we must develop a deeper understanding of the attraction of alternative political conceptions and their envisioned good life that competes with it. Modern politics will increasingly center on what we might call soulcraft — the cultivation of a sense of self and character — rather than solely statecraft, which focuses on managing political, social and economic affairs. Like it or not, the central political question of our time may well be about the good life — and who gets to define it.
Good-Fearing Democracies
Now comes the part liberals have been waiting for: their reply. And it’s not just a reply — it’s a full-throated rejection of the idea that a political regime should ever impose a conception of the good life.
What’s so wrong about that? Let us count the liberal reasons. It crushes autonomy by denying individuals the freedom to lead lives of their choosing. It squashes pluralism by forcing everyone into the same mold. And it undermines democratic legitimacy by failing to justify the application of political power to equal citizens. To sum up these complaints into a single word, the problem with illiberal states is that they are teleological.
Let me explain. Liberalism, say liberals, is a special political ideology for one important reason: it doesn’t think society should be held together by a shared goal (or telos, to use the Greek root). A theocracy, for instance, aims to save souls and bring about the kingdom of God. A fascist regime focuses entirely on securing the good of a privileged subset of the population, excluding and oppressing all others. And perfectionist regimes advance a specific model of human excellence—whether rooted in a Confucian self, a Hindutva community, heartland America, a deep Russian mir or whatever else — and channel their resources, honor and power into realizing it.
Liberals want none of that. According to them, the only shared end a country should have, ironically, is to maintain a free and fair society for citizens to pursue, within reasonable limits, their own conceptions of the good life. Indeed, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau once suggested that Canada could be “the first postnational state,” adding, “there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada.” You can’t get more non-teleological than that.
Trudeau’s words may sound like a caricature, but they get at a core distinction in liberal political thought: the difference between “thin” and “thick” conceptions of the good. The idea is that societies have only two real options. Either they enforce a shared, comprehensive vision of the good life — a “thick” form of soulcraft, rich in metaphysical and psychological content — or they adopt a “thin” approach, in which political institutions remain agnostic among competing visions of human flourishing. For liberals, the choice is clear: however compelling the thick version may seem, plural societies must take the thin, live-and-let-live route. To settle the matter, they point to liberalism’s standard origin story — that it emerged in early modern Europe as a way to end vicious wars of religion, in which each side was willing to fight to the death over its vision of soulcraft. That, liberals conclude, is why a just democratic state must remain neutral and inclusive on such contested matters.
“Illiberal regimes are ready and willing to use the soft and hard powers of the state to realize their visions of the good life. They are in the business of crafting souls, or soulcraft.”
Whether liberals see themselves accurately is an issue we will revisit shortly. I don’t think they do, and this confusion — this self-delusion, some might say — is central to why illiberal regimes find them at once pathetic and threateningly unaware. What is clear, however, is that the liberal notion that states should refrain from shaping their members is a historical anomaly. Across the sweep of human history, soulcraft, not individual self-determination, has been the norm.
Soulcraft
“Soulcraft” is not an established term in political philosophy or political science. Yet this idea is at the heart of one of the oldest traditions of Western political thought, stretching back to Plato’s “The Republic.” There, Plato seeks to understand the concept of justice and introduces an idea that profoundly shaped the trajectory of Western political thought: Political regimes shape not only laws and institutions but also the character and personality of their citizens.
In essence, Plato argued that different political regimes — he considered aristocracy, timocracy (a militaristic state), oligarchy, democracy and tyranny — cultivate their own distinct personality type. An oligarchy, for instance, produces oligarchic citizens with characteristic values, desires and sensibilities. Its people revere wealth, measure and award honor with money, and teach their kids that nothing else is worth striving for. The same holds for aristocracies, democracies, tyrannies and all other political systems — each fosters its own distinct personality type.
This isn’t a passive process. Little oligarchic babies don’t just spring from the earth. It takes an entire regime to cultivate them, which is why an oligarchic worldview is codified into laws, embedded in education and institutionalized in countless ways to ensure its ideals are honored and passed down through generations. This is the essence of soulcraft, and Plato is unequivocal: any intelligent regime must treat it as the single most important political task. To ignore it is not merely to politically weaken the regime but for its leaders to abdicate moral responsibility, letting citizens drift away from the way of life these leaders know to be best, to chase illusions of something better.
Plato’s idea of soulcraft didn’t end with him. Modern thinkers draw on it to craft richly three-dimensional accounts of the subjects shaped by new regimes. Alexis de Tocqueville, for instance, explores the soul of the democrat; Max Stirner, the anarchist; Antonio Gramsci, the socialist; Hannah Arendt, the totalitarian. Perhaps the most extreme example, captured in magnificent works by Yuri Slezkine and Svetlana Alexievich, is the Soviet Union as a millenarian laboratory to create a new man, Homo sovieticus. “I am this person,” Alexievich writes in “Secondhand Time,” an oral history of the country’s transition to capitalism. “We’re easy to spot! People who’ve come out of socialism are both like and unlike the rest of humanity.”
Soulcraft is the concept we need to understand our times. Both words — soul and craft — are essential. Soul speaks to spirituality and fulfillment, revealing how political regimes today either fill the void left by the retreat of religion (as in the secular West) or merge with religion to create theological-political hybrids (as in Iran, Israel and increasingly, India). It also conveys how deeply these regimes seek to shape their subjects, transforming not just their opinions or behaviors but their very selfhood. Craft, on the other hand, addresses the methods and resources used to shape souls, whether through political or civic institutions, media strategies or education systems.
This brings us back to The Colloquium of the Seven, 2025 edition. Soulcraft is what divides and unites our guests. Naturally, each will present their own vision of the ideal subject, and there will be lively debate over which model of human flourishing is best. They know, as the Russian-British philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously observed, that “some among the Great Goods cannot live together.” Fundamental human values like loyalty and impartiality, or justice and mercy don’t simply add up into a fabulous and non-contradictory whole. Yet these disagreements pale in comparison to our supposed guests’ shared convictions: First, all states can, should and do craft the souls of their subjects, and second, their liberal host is either culpably naïve or diabolically clever for refusing to admit that liberalism does it just as much as they do.
Liberal Perfectionism
This is the moment when sparks will fly in the colloquium. Nothing infuriates post-liberals more — or adds fuel to their self-righteousness — than liberalism’s pretense of neutrality on questions of the good life. To them, the claim that it welcomes all rivals while refraining from molding its subjects according to a specific worldview is hypocrisy at its worst. Truth be told, here I imagine Bannon cutting in with his raspy, gruff voice: Liberalism isn’t merely hypocritical; it’s bullshit! Liberals know perfectly well that their ideology isn’t neutral or inclusive. They only say it is to persuade, impress or manipulate their subjects into going along for the ride.
“An increasing number of regimes today claim to know what constitutes a life worth living, are confident that their vision enjoys popular support, and are fully prepared to wield persuasive and coercive powers to advance it.”
There is some truth in this invective. Obviously, liberalism isn’t neutral, whatever that might mean. It’s a moral doctrine with strong commitments to freedom, fairness, reciprocity, and tolerance, and any religion or ideology that frontally challenges those values will be outlawed (or at least heavily constrained) by a liberal state.
Neither is liberalism inclusive for a very important reason. For the past 40 years, say the critics, one trend has marked Western culture: the slow and steady creep of liberal values into areas of life having nothing to do with politics. We’re not just talking about the usual suspects of news media, pop culture and universities, but fundamental aspects of everyday existence such as sexuality, child-rearing, friendship and professional life. “Liberalism,” states Deneen in his influential 2018 book, “Why Liberalism Failed,” “is thus not merely, as is often portrayed, a narrowly political project of constitutional government and juridical defense of rights. Rather, it seeks to transform all of human life and the world.”
Hence the bullshit at the heart of liberalism. It pretends to be all hands-off when, in reality, it’s soulcrafting 24/7. It’s there on your phone when you swipe through prospective romantic partners on a dating app, it follows you to work through codes of “respectful workplace relations,” it nudges you toward personal branding on LinkedIn, it floods your inbox with self-optimization hacks, it churns out the algorithmic schlock we binge on Netflix, it packages “empowerment” into practically every grocery store purchase, and it curates the lingo of “tolerance” that polices everyday conversation. Liberalism, it could be said, is the default way of life for most Westerners.
And the tragedy of it all, the critics lament, is that liberalism sucks. It’s a spiritually anemic doctrine that drains life of meaning, purpose and passion. A culture that is built on individual freedom erodes solidarity, loyalty, filial duty or compassion. Its so-called pluralism leaves no room for public honors. And its ideal of reciprocity makes heroism and self-sacrifice so passé. As the fictional founder of a far-right Russian party states in Giuliano Da Empoli’s 2022 novel, “The Wizard of the Kremlin,” Western civilization ended when liberals outlawed dueling — “from there to paid paternity leave was just a small step.”
Worst of all, liberalism is deaf to all forms of transcendence, reducing the goal of human existence to living as long and as comfortably as possible. To quote another Russian, this time the very much real philosopher Dugin declares, “All that is anti-liberal is good” — and he means it. How sad and small is the way of life the West seeks to impose on the world.
Where does that leave the colloquium? Earlier, I suggested that liberals would assume our guests came to discuss grubby strategies for clinging to power. But if I’m right, the conversation would be far more threatening. It would sound something like this: “Listen, liberals, you do soulcraft all the time, so why shouldn’t we? We have better ideals. We have the courage of our convictions. And we’re not going to screw around with fake claims of neutrality and inclusion while running a hegemony that values neither. Our plan is straightforward: ditch liberalism and pursue our values without apology.”
The New Leviathans
How will they do it? The vast powers of the modern state beckon. As John Gray argues, today’s perfectionist regimes are veritable “New Leviathans” — entities with powers so immense they would make Thomas Hobbes or even Louis XIV blush. Security and personal glory are the quaint ambitions of yesteryear compared to states that “aim to secure meaning in life for their subjects” and become “engineers of souls.”
Different regimes vary in their soulcraft, of course. Each has its own conception of the good life and its ideal subject, along with vastly different administrative capacities. To conclude this article, I want to focus on one regime that appears to be on the brink of becoming perfectionist: the United States under the new Trump administration.
It’s early days, granted. The biggest unknown is which of the rival factions within the MAGA movement will ultimately command it. If the libertarian wing — led by figures like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel — prevails, soulcraft is unlikely to take center stage. But it’s a very different story if Christian conservatives rise to the top. They view the so-called deep state with as much envy as contempt, recognizing that if it can be wrested from liberal control, it could become the most formidable tool for Christian soulcraft in the democratic world. In fact, they’ve already published a blueprint for how they intend to use it: “Project 2025,” a roughly 900-page manifesto designed so that a second Trump administration could hit the ground running in January 2025.
“The liberal notion that states should refrain from shaping their members is a historical anomaly. Across the sweep of human history, soulcraft, not individual self-determination, has been the norm.”
If this sounds sinister or far-fetched, just listen to the words of Adrian Vermeule, the Ralph S. Tyler, Jr. professor of constitutional law at Harvard University and one of the world’s leading scholars of administrative law. He is also one of the most influential intellectuals of the post-liberal right in the United States. With his deep understanding of the deep state, Vermeule has developed a theory for how conservatives could harness its power to advance a cultural and Christian spiritual agenda. He calls this vision “integralism” — the idea that the state and society in the United States should be unified with religious moral order. And while many Americans may initially resist such a transformation, Vermeule argues that, over time, and as the law reshapes their preferences, they will learn to love it:
It would be wrong to conclude that integration from within is a matter of coercion, as opposed to persuasion and conversion, for the distinction is so fragile as to be nearly useless. … [W]e have learned from behavioral economics that agents with administrative control over default rules may nudge whole populations in desirable directions, in an exercise of “soft paternalism.” It is a useless exercise to debate whether or not this shaping from above is best understood as coercive, or rather as an appeal to the “true” underlying preferences of the governed. Instead it is a matter of finding a strategic position from which to sear the liberal faith with hot irons, to defeat and capture the hearts and minds of liberal agents, to take over the institutions of the old order that liberalism has itself prepared and to turn them to the promotion of human dignity and the common good.
These words give me the chills. I’m not sure what’s more troubling: the exaggeration that liberalism is just as sacramental, imperial and exclusive as any religion; the casual dismissal of the distinction between coercion and persuasion as “nearly useless”; or the unsettling entailment that despite Vermeule’s assurances to the contrary, “sear[ing] the liberal faith” is likely to lead to escalating violence between liberals and post-liberals.
And yet, these same words also give me what I can only describe as a frisson. The words carry a moral vision, radiate passion, outline a concrete plan, and are grounded in authentic values that claim to foster individual and collective flourishing. They kick the ass of Francis Fukuyama’s smug, diffident, fat “last man” of liberalism to the curb. Don’t misunderstand me — I don’t want this. But I can absolutely see why others might.
Project 2025: American Soulcraft
Much has been said about “Project 2025” — the roadmap for a Republican administration that was developed by the conservative think tank, The Heritage Foundation. Critics have attacked it as “fascist,” “an authoritarian takeover” and a “dystopian view of America.” Yet no major commentator, scholar or journalist has used the most accurate word to describe it: perfectionist.
That word should appear in neon lights above the “Foreword: A Promise to America” in Project 2025, written by Kevin Roberts, president of The Heritage Foundation. Because whatever fans and critics say about this document, its goal is not to advocate for small government. It is about getting the right people — from the highest levels of leadership down to the lowliest of sub-agency bureaucrats — into positions of power to capture the administrative state. “Personnel is policy” is its organizing message.
To what end? In his foreword, Roberts is expansive, citing its aims to reclaim a vision of the good life through the executive branch. A political philosopher might describe the document as Machiavellian means to deliver Aristotelian ends. Consider Roberts’s language and proposals for restoring the nuclear family. Project 2025, he states, “includes dozens of specific policies to accomplish this existential task … It’s time for policymakers to elevate family authority, formation, and cohesion as their top priority and even use government power, including through the tax code, to restore the American family.”
Who knows if all the policy proposals of Project 2025 will be implemented by the Trump administration. Its real significance isn’t as a product of the moment — it’s a statement of how the right envisions power and the good life. When, for example, Bannon states in an interview that the meaning and goal of MAGA is “to protect and promote the spiritual well-being of the American working class,” it’s clear that firebrands like him and conservatives like Roberts are singing from the same hymn sheet. They’re soulcrafters, intent on ruling through the good.
“Much has been said about “Project 2025” … yet no major commentator, scholar or journalist has used the most accurate word to describe it: perfectionist.”
Nearly any section of “Project 2025” could be used to illustrate this point. The chapter that has received perhaps the most critical scrutiny — “Department of Education,” by Lindsey Burke — is particularly revealing. It opens with a bang: “Federal education policy should be limited and, ultimately, the federal Department of Education should be eliminated.”
This looks like pro-libertarian, anti-government and anti-perfectionist stuff, right? It’s not. “Project 2025” targets the Education Department not because of its size or overreach but because it teaches the wrong kinds of values. Captured by progressive “woke” liberal ideals, it’s beyond saving. Instead, its powers must be redistributed to less compromised branches of federal and state government — institutions that will use every tool at their disposal, including executive orders, federal block grants, accreditation, curriculum oversight and civil rights litigation, to impose a moral vision of education and family that is centered on “traditional American values,” including parental authority, optimism, faith and patriotism.
The chapter on the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) makes the same move. “Project 2025” doesn’t just propose a health policy overhaul — it envisions HHS as an instrument of cultural and moral formation. The agency would be repurposed in part to elevate pro-life principles (by cutting abortion funding and redefining abortion as outside the bounds of healthcare), enforce a rigid binary of sex (by banning trans-inclusive definitions and defunding the National Institute of Health’s “junk gender science”), entrench the nuclear family (by “strengthen[ing] marriage as the norm, restor[ing] broken homes and encourag[ing] unmarried couples to commit to marriage”), and reshape research agendas (by funding studies on sexual-risk avoidance while halting data collection on gender identity). The goal isn’t to shrink government; it’s to harness its power to shape America’s moral and spiritual life around a particular vision of the good.
How this unfolds is anyone’s guess. Maybe a Christian conservative coalition will succeed in imposing its vision of soulcraft across the United States. It might be easier than expected. As Joseph de Maistre — an arch-reactionary and personal hero of Vermeule — once remarked, “The people count for nothing in revolutions, or at most count only as a passive instrument. Four or five persons, perhaps, will give France a king.” If only the doomed young Louis XVII — imprisoned for the remainder of his life after his father’s execution — had had The Heritage Foundation by his side, his regime might have stood a chance.
A less aggressive but arguably more radical future could be the geographic decentralization of the United States, where different regions operate under distinct micro-regimes — California embracing thin liberalism, Utah enforcing Mormon rule, Mississippi reviving a racially hierarchical Baptism, and so on. One could argue that the federalist system exists precisely to enable this.
Whether or not such a fracture occurs, it raises profound questions about the geographic reach of different soulcraft regimes. Some — particularly proselytizing religions like Christianity and Islam — seem inherently expansionist. Others, like China’s, assert that while their authority should be absolute within the borders of the old Qing Empire, they have little interest in pushing beyond. So how will these regimes coexist? What new alliances will emerge? And amid all this uncertainty, how should liberals engage regimes emboldened to pursue ever more ambitious forms of soulcraft?
The Colloquium of the Seven, 2025 Edition
It was the liberal Berlin who best articulated the attitude I’m urging for the liberals of today. He invited us to see societies very different from our own, with wholly different ultimate values, as semblables. Never one to shy away from using a French word when an English one would do, the term translates to “similars” or “similar ones,” by which I take him to mean fellow humans — creatures who are like us yet profoundly different. We must, Berlin states, “look upon life as affording a plurality of values, equally genuine, equally ultimate, above all equally objective; incapable, therefore, of being ordered in a timeless hierarchy or judged in terms of some one absolute standard.”
Honestly, what’s the alternative? Take Russia. It’s easy to dismiss it as chauvinistic, misogynistic, racist — or, more reductively, as a kleptocratic outpost, a “gas station masquerading as a country.” That perspective leads nowhere. With such a mindset, how can we begin to grasp Putin’s extraordinary remark back in 2018 about Russia’s nuclear doctrine — an offhand comment that revealed everything: “If someone decides to annihilate Russia, we have the legal right to respond. Yes, it will be a catastrophe for humanity and for the world. But I’m a citizen of Russia and its head of state. Why do we need a world without Russia in it?”
“How this unfolds is anyone’s guess. Maybe a Christian conservative coalition will succeed in imposing its vision of soulcraft across the United States.”
In that moment, Putin justified nuclear war by appealing to the absolute value of Russia’s very existence. Absolute value for whom? For Russians alone, or for the world? Putin didn’t elaborate. Regardless, there is a there there — a self-conception built on pride, even sanctity, for a set of values as genuine and ultimate as our own. They take themselves seriously. So should we.
Did the West’s inability to grasp Putin’s soulcraft nationalism, even after Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, fuel the lack of imagination necessary to anticipate his full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022? Strategically, the amount of blood, treasure and reputation Putin sacrificed to claim a tiny bit of territory and halt NATO expansion has made little sense. But Putin’s published justification for his “special military operation” is clarifying. Russia alone, he states, is working to end the religious, historical, linguistic and civilizational “fratricide” of the two countries. We need only then to connect his remarks to Ivan Ilyin, Putin’s philosophical hero, to see that his war is justified not by realpolitik but by a sacred duty to preserve the nation’s spiritual wholeness. It’s a whole different value system at play than the one we Westerners are used to. “We kind of look the same,” Putin told Tucker Carlson in a 2024 interview, “but our minds are built a little differently.”
Nor is Putin alone in pointing to a uniquely Russian mindset. For very different purposes, and drawing from a slightly earlier moment in history, Alexievich writes in “Secondhand Time,” “Only a Soviet can understand another Soviet.” Perhaps her contention is true. But as a first step, we liberals should try to really listen when our rivals — whether hailing from Russia, China, India, Iran or emerging from within the U.S. itself under banners like MAGA — tell us who they are, what they value and how they seek to shape their subjects to ensure that what they value thrives in the world. That requires a conversation — a colloquium. As with Bodin’s guests, we’re unlikely to reach an agreement or ascend to a higher plane of values. But that was never the point. If we’re lucky, we might, for a moment, see our semblables through their own eyes.
