Ezra Klein

One of the other books on liberalism I've quite liked is Edmund Fawcett's Liberalism, the Life of an Idea, I think is the subtitle.

And he makes more than you do of the idea that central to liberalism is the idea that in a conflict-ridden, disputatious society, that you can turn difference into something constructive through argumentation, through the exchange of ideas, that tolerance and other things that are built on it, freedom of speech, et cetera, that it's not about being nice.

It is about this...

which sometimes proves out and sometimes does not go as well as people hope, that you can make disagreement not into something that tears societies apart, but into something that refines them and makes them better and helps people find peace.

Yeah, absolutely.

Also, to maybe cut into some of that pessimism, this is hard to do well.

Liberalism is hard to do well.

Complex society is hard to do well.

Some of the collapse in confidence in that, I think, is misplaced.

I don't think that what happened is all these ideals failed.

I think in many cases we failed the ideals.

But I want to get at something that exists in there as a shadow side.

One thing that is very present in your book is the contempt many liberals in the 1700s, the 1800s have for religion, or certainly religions that they don't belong to, right?

As you say, backwards, superstitious.

And this comes right up into the modern era, right?

Where

there's a real feeling among the religious that liberals look down on them you know among evangelical christians and and others that they try to use a state to change their behavior you can't even refuse to bake a cake for a a couple that is getting married of the same sex and so there there is this critique of liberalism that that you see throughout the ages which is that

Liberals are tolerant of everything but what they consider to be the intolerant.

If they consider you to be intolerant, backwards, bigoted, then they will bring the full force of the state, if they control it, down upon your head.

It creates backlashes, but it is this very hard problem like this paradox of tolerance.