Ezra Klein

There is going to be plenty to talk about.

You can find The Ezra Klein Show wherever you get your podcasts.

So we live in this moment when illiberalism is winning, when illiberalism is in power.

I don't think anybody really argues that.

What has surprised me about it is how weak liberalism has felt in response.

I'm a liberal.

I'm like a professional liberal, one involved in liberal politics.

And I don't think at this moment I could tell you what liberalism's vision is, who its leaders are.

In some way, I feel liberalism never really recovered from the Obama era, when it had this grand victory in electing America's first Black president, when it had this thoughtful, deliberate, and frankly, quite popular liberal leader, and then it ended in Donald Trump.

And not only Donald Trump once, Donald Trump twice.

But here's the thing, Donald Trump is not working out.

He is not making people want more of what he is.

But if he's going to be beaten, if illiberal political forces are going to turn back, I think you're going to need a liberalism that is aspirational again.

A liberalism that has moral imagination, again.

A liberalism that stands for more than not this.

And so I've been on this sort of esoteric personal quest, reading all these books in the liberal canon, reading all these histories of liberalism, trying to think through, like, what in this very, very long tradition...

is valuable for us right now.

And one of the books I came across in the search is called The Lost History of Liberalism.

It's by the historian Helena Rosenblatt.

And one of the arguments it makes is that before we ever had this word liberalism, in fact, for thousands of years before the word, there was this tradition of being a liberal.