Nathan Pinkoski: If you change the institutions, it changes the people inside them

Across the Western world, migration, identity, and belonging have moved from policy questions to existential ones. The political and moral assumptions that held our societies together for decades are starting to unravel.

Now, there is deep tension between those who want to defend the open, liberal order, and those who believe its openness has gone too far – eroding belonging, stability, and moral coherence.

What comes next? Are we watching the liberal order evolve, or decay?

To reflect on this, Nathan Pinkoski joins Inside Policy Talks. Pinkoski – a Canadian-born, US-based a political theorist whose work traces the decline of liberal constitutionalism – is a senior fellow at the Center for Renewing America. He's taught at the Universities of Florida, Princeton, and Toronto.

On the podcast, he tells Peter Copeland, deputy director of domestic policy at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute, that much of today's discourse on liberalism's unravelling has centred on the role played by ideas. However, Pinkoski says he views institutions as another vital part of this conversation.

"Something else that changed at the latter part of the 20th century is we stopped thinking about liberalism as a system that required us to have a particular set of institutions," says Pinkoski.

"We love the grand story of these different ideas that are kind of moving through time," he says. "But we have to remember that for Plato, for Aristotle – when they are describing the character of a regime, what matters is how the law shapes the soul. And if you change the law, if you change the institutions, you're going to change the kinds of people that are inside them."