Sean Carroll

And you can imagine at least thinking that countries or societies that don't have that are just wrong about it and should be fixed.

So maybe we shouldn't be surprised that there is increasingly pushback against these ideas.

On the one hand, they're cliched.

We learn them, hopefully, you know, when we're very, very young.

On the other hand, they're not obvious and they need some defending.

And there are voices out there that say, you know what?

No, we shouldn't have the individual as the locus of rights and responsibilities.

Maybe the community has rights and responsibilities.

That sounds like, again, a pretty benign idea.

But

If you're saying it's the community that has rights and responsibilities over and above the individual, then you're saying the community can take away things that that individual wants to do or ways they want to live, and that's a slippery slope to some potentially very bad things.

So it's important not just to think carefully about what liberalism says but to put out the positive case for defending it.

We had a very recent conversation with Cass Sunstein about pretty much this topic.

He has a new book out called On Liberalism.

And today's guest is going to cover related ground but in a different way with a slightly different angle.

Sunstein's angle was mostly trying to emphasize the commonalities between people on what a contemporary political discourse would say are very different, right?

Republicans and Democrats or labor and conservatives in the UK or whatever.

Whereas rather than searching for the common ground, Adam Goury, who is today's guest, is going to be more feisty, is going to say that liberals need to be able to stand up for themselves and recognize when certain people are not being very liberal and trying to make intellectually the case that that's a mistake to not be liberal in the face of criticisms of liberalism, both from the right and

where you want to inculcate some values and say like, nope, these values are just correct and those are the values that everybody should have.

That would be sort of a right-wing anti-liberal position.