Ezra Klein

But it also has left it with very little language in which to talk about something that is not just individualism.

Maybe on the question of individualism, something you describe in the book is that at other times, liberals actually were quite averse to that word and they preferred individuality or one I like more, personhood.

I'm curious why they preferred those words and also what you see in that that might be relevant today.

And what parts of the liberal past do you think could be helpful in renovating an answer to that?

Well, also, isn't there, though, a question of, well, who gets to decide what the common good is and what happens when we disagree?

And then I think there's this question which has been threaded a little bit through our conversation of liberalism's relationship to power.

And sometimes it is the ideas of people out of power.

Sometimes it's people in power.

But I think particularly as liberalism in America has become, you know, the movement of people who are college educated and people benefited more from how the institutions work.

It's ended up very connected to power.

And you see that a lot in the sort of rhetoric of people challenging it now and sort of counter-revolutionary ideas that the people on the new right have.

But I'm curious how you would describe that.

like liberalism's view of power and what you see in like the various liberalisms that you've tracked that it might be useful at a time when people feel like very, and I think quite understandably skeptical of institutions and frustrated with the feeling that society is taking a direction that they don't have much influence over.

I was going to say, we're all here.

One thing that I think is useful here, and it's not a full answer, but it's one reason I found some inspiration in your book, is that I do think some of the very early ideas...

that get talked about around liberality and an ethic of generosity towards your fellow citizen.

Yes, they were initially framed as, you know, things the aristocracy should practice, but like a lot of things in liberalism, we've tried to expand that.

And, you know, we now believe in liberal democracy, not liberal aristocracy.

And I think that having a, I think it's going to be very, very hard in this period

to have a relationship of generosity in a very divided country.