Ezra Klein

Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., John Dewey, I do think is actually quite important here, but FDR.

Yeah.

You have really remarkable liberal leaders in this country, many of them, I mean, having written remarkable things about how to think about liberalism, many of them coming from outside the halls of power.

I think liberalism is often most interesting when it is in a tense relationship with power.

But I'm curious how you see that tradition and how it altered what American liberalism became and is.

Yes, Cicero's a political figure.

What does that tell you in America?

What was different about it here?

And maybe it's worth starting actually with the founders.

I think there's a lot of interesting argumentation over how much to think of the American founders as inside the American liberal tradition, as in tension with what later becomes a liberal tradition, right?

They're obviously claimed by all sides here.

How do you think about the founding and with its profound internal contradictions around freedom and human bondage?

That's a very glittering answer, but I think a critic of liberalism would say that what good is your liberalism if it can include slavery in its founding constitution?

Or in more of the European case, what good is your liberalism if it is so interwoven with colonialism?

And I mean, there were many people who certainly believed in many liberal ideas we're talking about here who made space for both of those practices within their liberalism.

But how did they grapple with this?

I mean, we've talked a lot about freedom here.

How did they grapple with this?

Well, this is the other side of it, where there's a lot of liberal abolitionism.

There obviously is the long effort among liberals to expand the franchise to women and then to people of other races and a lot of fights over immigration.