Ezra Klein

You have this interesting moment in the book where you say maybe the first use of using liberal as a noun, somebody signs an anti-slavery pamphlet, a liberal.

It is a tension.

What is it in liberalism?

What ideals in your view, what thoughts or principles or shared values create this kind of time bomb aspect of it, which you see go off repeatedly in history where, you know, you go back in liberalism and the terms of liberalism get argued to blow up the constraints of the last liberalism.

But as we said at the beginning of this conversation, this begins as a quite aristocratic ideal.

Eventually it becomes, in many cases, liberal.

a philosophical weapon to expand the terms of inclusion and freedom.

What is it that does that in your view?

Are there specific moments in liberalism's history that this moment reminds you of?

I take the current crisis of liberalism to be not any one crisis, but a couple of things, and this is a non-exhaustive list.

One is that liberalism in its modern American form became associated with power and with the status quo and with reigning institutions as opposed to being seen as a challenge to them.

So the more fed up people got, the less liberalism looked like an answer because it was

increasingly people who seem sort of comfortable with how society was working.

I think another crisis is that individualism has gone very, very, very far.

And I think the internet and social media and algorithmic media and the fracturing of what we know and our bonds from each other and the weakening of civic institutions and religions and labor unions and

All these things that Bob Putnam and others have documented.

I think that there is a crisis of individualism that has become a partial crisis of meaning.

But I also just think requires different ways of thinking about.

freedom.

And I think liberalism in its modern form is very, very skeptical of individual responsibility and communal obligations because it has seen those used for oppressive reasons or used to sort of push people out to the margins of society or to blame them for things that have been done to them.