Sean Carroll

You already said a lot about this, but let's be super clear about the relationship between liberalism and democracy.

You could have one without the other, but they're closely intertwined.

This is always an issue, though, for liberalism and democracy.

They're both philosophies of pluralism in some way, letting people have different values, letting people vote for different candidates.

And they are vulnerable to handing over influence and power to anti-liberal, anti-democratic strains.

And what do you do about that?

And the public school systems, you could say very similar things about, right?

Yeah.

I've said things like that myself.

But the minority rights question is a tricky one, I always think, because of course, I think that the standard liberal thing would be like human beings should get rights.

They should have rights no matter what group they're

in.

One way at a practical political level of fighting for those rights is what has become known as identity politics, which in some ways is not a liberal way of thinking about things.

How do you think about the relationship between liberalism and identity politics?

Well, we're seeing, for instance, trans rights are treated very differently in different countries.

I mean, there are definitely examples where democratic elections can be leading to a group of people denying rights to a certain minority.

I think the good liberal has to have a way of fighting against that.

I'm not going to remember the exact quote, so you can fix it for me.

But you have made the slightly contrarian take that professional politicians should have more influence.

So what's the alternative to the primary system for we Americans who just think it's the only