"a lot of what the West is ever going to be"

AEI

"'Do you think there are a lot of new ideas in politics?'

"'No, I, I certainly don’t.  I’m a conservative.  I think very little has been learned since St. Thomas finished compiling the connection between Aristotle and Judaism and Christianity.  At that point we basically knew a lot of what we’re ever going to know.  You know.  You add to Aristotle’s Ethics and Politics the insight that God created the heavens and the earth, and you got a lot of what the West is ever going to be.  I do think there have been new ideas in politics since then.  I think liberalism properly understood is a new idea that is a very good idea.  Not that new anymore, but it’s newer than classical politics.  It was an innovation that was genuinely, that opened genuinely new vistas in the human experience and was fantastically worthwhile.  I also think that there have been bad innovations since that time.  There, you know, totalitarianism was not, the possibility of it was not evident to classical philosophy.  But. . . .'"

     Yuval Levin, as interviewed by Jonah Golberg on The Remnant podcast, "Theory, properly misunderstood," 4 July 2024, at 41:36.