Renewing Liberalism for the Future

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In some way, I feel liberalism never really recovered from the Obama era, when it had this grand victory in electing America's first black president, when it had this thoughtful, deliberate, and frankly quite popular liberal leader, and then it ended in Donald Trump. And not only Donald Trump once, Donald Trump twice . But here's the thing: Donald Trump is not working out. He is not making people want more of what he is . But if he's going to be beaten, if illiberal political forces are going to turn back , I think you're going to need a liberalism that is aspirational again. A liberalism that has moral imagination again. A liberalism that stands for more than not this . And so I've been on this sort of esoteric personal quest, reading all these books in the liberal canon, reading all these histories of liberalism , trying to think through like what in this very, very long tradition is valuable for us right now. And one of the books that came across in the search is called The Lost History of Liberalism. It's by the historian Helena Rosenblatt . And one of the arguments it makes is that before we ever had this word liberalism, in fact, for thousands of years before the word , there was this tradition of being a liberal. And behind that tradition, there was this virtue called liberality. And people thought this virtue was really, really important . As Rosenblatt writes, for almost 2,000 years it meant demonstrating the virtues of a citizen, showing devotion to the common good, and respecting the importance of mutual connectedness. Liberality was talked about everywhere. You can read about it in Cicero, in John Locke, in the letters of George Washington. And yet we never talk about it today. Liberalism as a political philosophy and movement, it completely elbowed out. Liberality is a virtue. As an ethic, a citizen aspires to meet. answer to what ails liberalism, but I do think it's one piece of the puzzle. I found it exciting. I think it's one place to begin an inquiry you're going to hear a lot more of on the show over the next year. Helena Rosenblatt is a professor at the CUNY Graduate Center. She's the author of Liberal Values, Benjamin Constant and the Politics of Religion, as well as the aforementioned The Lost History of Liberalism, which I highly recommend. As always, my email, Ezra Kleinshow at NYTimes.com. Helena Rosenblatt, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Aaron Powell So to the extent people think about liberalism today, which is let's be real a niche hobby, I think they define it as a philosophy of individual rights, of individual expression . You write in your book that the word liberalism did not even exist until the early nineteenth century, and for hundreds of years prior to its birth, being liberal meant something very different. What did it mean? That's right. Being liberal really was not just about believing in a certain or working towards a certain political design. It wasn't just about a constitutional form. It wasn't just about individual rights. It was actually m more about moral development and about a certain character development that they felt was so very important and that a good constitution should promote. And many of them thought that yes, rights are important, but they're important because they allow us to accomplish our obligations to uh they're very much concerned with establishing a good morally good regime. It's amazing how many of the early liberals were actually moralists at heart. Aaron Ross Powell So talk me through the early word here. It's not even liberal, it's liberalitas or wh where does this start for you? Liberalism as a word was coined around eighteen eleven, eighteen twelve and it was first theorized as a concept. People start talking about what is liberalism? Well liberalism is this, that, and not the other th ing in the early nineteenth century in the wake of the French Revolution. It doesn't become this Anglo American tradition until very late in the game, I say middle of the twentieth century? Does it become an Anglo-American tradition? This was something very exciting that I found in in my research. So I decided to trace the word and the meaning of the word all the way back to ancient Rome , which is liberal in ancient Rome, the the root of the word is Libre, right? And the word liber , yes, it means free, but it also means generous, which I thought was so very, very interesting. So if liberal were the really the qualities of freedom, lovingness and generosity expected of a citizen, liberalitas was the noun that went with it. So this was an attitude that was expected of citizens in Rome when you are devoted to the commonwealth, to the common good. One thing that was a bit of an epiphany reading your book for me, I think a lot of things are missing in modern liber alism. My interest in doing this episode and more that I think are going to come is trying to figure out why liberalism feels so exhausted at a moment that it is so needed, and why so many of the books I read about it, so many defenses I read of it, are so arid. They like have no blood in them . But one thing that was interesting here was this idea that liberalism is built on a virtue, not a political philosophy, right? Liberality. And as you just mentioned, that the old definitions of it, and you've had Cicero and John Locke and John Dunn, and they have some kind of inter section between generosity and freedom. But not freedom like we think of it now . So what did freedom mean in this context? It's really about having the freedom to voluntarily And this has dropped out of our conversation. We think of liberalism so much, as you said, of being about individual rights and maximizing our choices. But it was to them also about making good choices. And a good system of government would help you, give you the capacity to make those good choices. That evolved over time. So in the medieval period, it became Christianized. And it's behaving freely the way God wants you to behave, in a generous, charitable way. When you talk about this conception of freedom, this conception of what it means to be liberal. Who are some of the people you quote and what are their arguments? Oh well, as you can imagine, since, you know, it's not a super long book, uh, so I kind of uh move rather quickly and I have to uh make some strategic choices. But as you mentioned, there's there's Cicero and Seneca in these are well known names that have had tremendous influence. What do they say? What is their vision of liberality? So that liberality is about reciprocity, exchange, gift giving, and reciprocity is fundamental. You need to be good to one another. Um very much about what they would call, you know, citizenly v or I call citizenly virtues, things that m make a commonwealth work and adhere. That is not to I don't try to idealize, you know, these these thinkers either. It's because, you know, you had slavery Aaron Powell I think this is quite important and it's something threaded through your book. Um you write at some point that this idea of being a liberal, which comes way before liberalism is a political philosophy, is designed by and for the free, wealthy, and well-connected men who are in a position to give and receive benefits in ancient Rome. And some other things that that emerge as the book goes on, one thing it makes clear is that if today your problem with liberalism and liberals is you find them to be a bunch of smug condescending elites, that problem goes way back. That's always been braided into the issue here. And that there was like uh like it was a set of virtues that was associated with like the noble born and set them apart in a way that would make them the ideal citizens. And that feels to me actually like a quite profound tension at the heart of the project. Yeah, absolutely. You know, they don't even always live up to the ideal. Sure don't. Uh and but they had that ideal and they talked about it. And they designed an educational system, a liberal arts education that was supposed to cultivate these virtues, this liberality in elite boys . But there was a lot expected of the elite as well. So I don't think it was just mere, you know, hypocris y. I'm writing a book right now about Madame de Stales, a great early liberal and a woman, a powerhouse, uh such a fascinating woman right at the it was some say that it was in her salon her, in drawing room, that liberalism was invented. Her name appears as a very important sort of power broker and intellectual in early nineteenth century and then gets dropped out. She is endlessly frustrated by where are the good men? We need some good in the men . Not only to pursue the policies that we need, but to serve as examples. A question echoing through history right now. Yeah. Um I think this is also somewhat inspiring or provocative to think of from our current vantage point, which is to say that one of the problems that early theorists of being liberal are trying to think through is what are the habits, what is a kind of education, what is a form of personal development needed to instill the virtues that will be necessary to hold together complex societies. What is needed to hold together a country or even a city is not easy. I actually think this helps um explain one reason liberals have always been so shocked and uh uh repulsed by Donald Trump himself, not just Trumpism or the Republican Party, but but him , which is like quite deep in the the liberal ory and inheritance. I'm not even sure people totally realize that they have absorbed, is a sense that to make a country work, people have to behave in a certain way towards each other. And the ways in which he flouts the rules of behavior , the ways in which he acts towards other people are almost separate from anything he believes, like a profound challenge to what what liberalism believes of how you make a society work. I think in many ways he is proving that there was something important in that. But this question of how do you instill in a society the virtues necessary to make a society work, understanding that as an actually hard process Aaron Powell Yeah. No, absolutely. And um the fact that they're elitists, liberals throughout their history, have tended to be elitist, but they demand ed a lot. There were a lot of obligations. And they took that extremely seriously. There's a section in my book where I talk about Lincoln. And they thought, you know, at that point they thought maybe a liberal democracy would fail. There was no real example of it lasting. Um, you know, the would the American example of this exceptional example actually work? And Lincoln showed that it could and he did it in this beautiful way, that kind of made people optimistic about liberal democracy. He was not a demagogue. And they recognized that. And it showed that a liberal democracy could survive if it had a leader like this. They also recognized that it was those kinds of leaders are very hard to find. Oh the purpose of the liberal arts education is really to form leaders, to form freedom loving and moral leaders and giving them the tools, rhetoric and history and uh some science for sure, but it's supposed to train citizens uh really through engagement with the classics. In the early times there was a lot of emphasis on being able to speak in public, to speak in a convincing way in public and this is all really to convince people to become citizens and to do the right thing. It sounds terribly idealistic and I don't always w want to again idealize them or say these people were were perfect in every way , far from it. But the ideas were pretty beautiful, and I think we could uh learn something from them. Education is such an important part of this book. Other histories of liberalism I've read actually reveal the same thing that when you go back into the liberal tradition, the purpose of education is hotly debated and held at the center of the project. Today you don't have that discourse in the same way. We talk about whether or not education is working, not so much what it is for. It's almost taken as evident that the purpose of education is to prepare you to get a job. Aaron Powell No, it was not. Today it's uh a lot about vocational training, a lot about preparing students to get jobs. These were considered medi al tasks. Liberal arts was for the leaders in the times and the citizens were the leaders of society in in Rome. In medieval period as well, it was always about something other than preparing you for a job. Isn't Isn't it funny that today when people try to defend the humanities which are you know under siege in many universities uh frankly, and they try to advocate for liberal arts education, that they say, oh well actually there's proof that having a liberal arts education will get you that job. So it's it's the that whole discussion about what a citizen of a democracy means, what it means to be a citizen, what are the values? What is our common language? Uh what does it mean to be a citizen of a democracy? Uh all of these uh questions that are so important have kind of dropped out of our discussion. And people are even embarrassed sometimes. And do you think that's because citizenship is broadly shared now and so it isn't seen as a thing that people have to work to achieve, or do you think that's because that politics doesn't work? People don't like it. People don't want to be told what they have to do to be a citizen? Aaron Powell That's a great question. Um as a historian, I I always apologize for saying history is complicated. So usually there's not just one answer to that uh terrific question. Give me the one that best serves my current purposes. Or maybe another way to ask it is at what point in your view did, the strand of liberal thinking that was about the cultivation and disciplining of the self drop out? Definitely it happened during the Cold War, let's say. It's pretty recent in in the history that I describe in my book, right? But this idea of disciplining the self, we're talking about the collectivity, about your duties, about any government or state getting involved in forming citizens. A public education system that forms citizens started to have a scary kind of ring to it when you've seen fascism and communism and liberals wanted to show like, oh, we're not that. We're not going in that direction. We are not about the state forming citizens. We are about individual rights, about property rights in particular , and I think that really gave probably the impetus to something that was probably happening already. How can we help make stronger communities happen? At JPMorgan Chase, we invest in the businesses making goods right here at home. So the businesses can create more jobs for more people and more goods can get to the communities we love. Make momentum happen. Learn more at jpmorganchase.com/slash imp act. This is the exclusive table with the view. This is your name on the list. This is three times points on dining with Chase Sapphire Reserve and a $300 dining credit. Chase Sapphire Reserve. Now even more rewarding. Learn more at Chase.com slash Sapphire Reserve. I gave my brother a New York Times subscription. She sent me a year-long subscription so I have access to all the games. We'll do Word O, Mini, Spelling B. It has given us a personal connection. We exchange articles. And so having read the same article, we can discuss it. The coverage, the options, not just news. Such a diversified gift. I was really excited to give him a New York Times cooking subscription so that we could share recipes. And we even just shared a recipe the other day. The New York Times contributes to our quality time together. You have all of that information at your fingertips. It enriches our relationship, broadening our horizons. It was such a cool and thoughtful gift. We're reading the same stuff, we're making the same food, we're on the same page. Connect even more with someone you care about. Learn more about giving a New York Times subscription as a gift at nytimes.com slash gift . The critiques you hear today of liberalism go back quite a long way. You have this part of the book where you're describing fights in England in the 1830s. And the conservatives, what they say about the liberals, even then, is that critics of liberalism accused it of meaning the exact opposite of liberality. They accuse liberals of being selfish, egoistic, only interested in the gratification of their individual desires. So , you know, you're describing this tradition that is focused on personal cultivation and the liberal arts. So at what point is this critique that no, you just want to be able to follow your own desires wherever they go and not have anybody tell you not to. When does that enter into the fray? Right at the beginning. It's been shown that liberalism, the actual word was first a pejorative, a term of insult. It was coined in as I said in 1811, but by the enemies of the liberals. Because of what had happened in the French Revolution, and the word liberal, when it refers to something political, is often written with an accent on the E to show it's kind of foreigness. It's something dangerous. It's something and we don't want that. You know, but all of this getting rid of noble privileges, creating which we would call civil equality, isn't that a great thing? They would say, no, that's removing the privileges that they had had for such a long time. So that's being selfish. That's not being magnanimous. And so the Catholics mainly, Catholic counter-revolutionaries, immediately started denouncing liberals for being selfish because they were taking away their privileges. I mean they had a whole slew of ins ulting terms that they used as synonyms for liberals, anarchists, they're against the family, uh they're uh sexually deviant, uh all of all of this because it seemed like they wanted to free up all the in some ways rightly so, the constraints of of the old regime. Throughout the nineteenth century the Catholic Church was probably the most powerful enemy of liberalisms. The popes, one after the other, just spewed, you know, the most vile kind of rhetoric about liberals, about how very bad and sinful the world. They liber alism is sin. I mean, there were works that came out like that. So and I think actually, you know, interestingly enough, today's criticisms, for example, by post liberals and so on, which are many of them men are the Catholic counterrevolutionaries. I I've sat here with Patrick Denine. I mean not literally in this room, but on this podcast. And you know, I was like, where is this coming from with you? And he's like one of these post-liberal, close to J.D. Vance, and he's like, well, you know, the left wants to destroy the family. Yeah. It's like, I don't think we do. But but that is his view of it. Yeah. Um, how much is the tension between the Catholic Church and liberals or liberalism , how much is it around what I think of as like liberalism's first significant political idea? Because so far we've been tracking this almost virtue that is a way for the powerful to think of themselves as developing in a way that is pro-social, if I were to be, I think, straightforward about it. It's not a way to reorder society. But this idea of generosity towards your fellow citizen begins to flower into an idea of toleration when that is more radical. And toleration is a way of reordering society. So can you tell a bit of that story, how we get from, you know, liberality to actual arguments for for toleration, and then how that begins to put you know liberals in tension with religious authorities? Absolutely. Um many key liberals were actually Protestant. This founding group that I talk about in France, Madame de Stal and Benjamin Constant, were actually Protestants, and the Protestants were way overrepresented in terms of numbers in the liberal movements throughout the French history. The reason here is, you know, Protestants in France wanted to uh to be tolerated, to be actually recognized as citizens, which they weren't. So this is a key, one of the key uh sort of developments in the history of of liberalism when it moves from being just what we were talking about the virtues of a like a Roman citizen or a Christian nobleman who should give to the poor and be liberal and magnanimous? To now you're starting to say that we have to be accepting of difference. And you start using liberal not to just define or describe an individual who's magnanimous, but a whole society. Clubs can be liberal because they allow different types of members. Religions can be liberal when they are tolerant. And you can understand them, the church, a Catholic Church in particular gets uh very worried about this when you're going to be um accepting uh that it's not the one religion. But before we go into the Catholic Church's reaction, I I want to spend a moment on this because from where we sit now in the United States of America, I don't think religious tolerance strikes many people as a particular ly radical idea. It is taken broadly for granted . And I'd like you to paint a little bit more of the picture of what is the context into which this argument is beginning to play out. And the relationship to religion is like a fundamental divide in societies, and the stakes are very high for you know people who believe. So just tell me a little bit about what is the situation into which this argument over religious toleration is entering. Well, today we're here very much about, you know, celebrating difference and diversity is a great thing, including uh religious diversity. But what I've found, and one might find this uh somewhat troubling, is that these Protestants that I'm talking about, the early founders of of liberalism really, did not advocate toleration for toleration's sake. Because they are very hostile to or disdainful towards what they call superstition and dogmas. So dogmas have held people back in their opinion. The church, of course, in in France, they were in charge of education, they're in charge of censorship. They basically find, and you can see this in Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, which is really funny, is they believe in a free marketplace of religion. So that if you tolerate our religions, they can then sort of fight among themselves and this is going to lead to a purification of religions and eventually people are going to become liberal Protestants like they are, or Unitarians type or deists, you know. Have a religion. They're not anti religious, but the way you please God is by being good to your fellow citizen, by doing good to the community, not necessarily praying certain times of the day or doing certain rituals or believing in certain dogmas, but being good. So you could see also that certain or not not just the Catholic Church, but certain Orthodox churches would be upset by this because uh literally if this is the case, what what do you need churches for? You can believe in God and be a good person without going to church. I want to look more closely at something you said early in that answer, which is that tolerance, toleration in this framing is not just a nice civically virtuous thing. It's not about being polite. That there is a theory here about the marketplace of ideas. One of the other books on liberalism I've quite liked is Edmund Fawcett's Liberalism The Life, 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, etc., that it's not about being nice. It is about this belief, 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 truth and progress and a way forward Aaron Powell Yeah, absolutely. I'm so glad you brought that up because it's a really important central uh aspect of liberalism is this kind of optimism, if you accept this toleration, progress will be the result. People will improve, society will improve. We need this sort of battle of of ideas to refine ourselves and our way of thinking and there'll be a a better outcome in the future. Yes. So marketplaces of ideas without state interference, without church interference, allow these ideas to compete with each other, including religious ideas, and this will be kind of a purification process. And yeah, they were very optimistic about the future. Today that seems so naive, this belief, you know, in the arc of history, the march of history they talked about the whole time. I mean, they weren't naive and they weren't silly. I know one of the the guys who's one of a hero in my in my book is uh Benjamin Constant and he said we need pleasing illusions. We need pleasing illusions to make us better. Well also to maybe cut into some of that pessimism . This is hard to do well. Liberalism is hard to do well. Some of the collapse and 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. Yes. But I want to get it 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, 1800s have for religion, or certainly religions that they don't belong to, right? A 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 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 a couple that is getting married of the same sex. And so there there is this critique of liberalism that you see throughout the ages, which is that liberals are tolerant of everything but what they consider to be the intolerant. And 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. And it creates backlashes, but it is this very hard problem, like this paradox of tolerance. How do you tolerate people who don't want to be tolerant , how do you then not become intolerant? Can you trace a bit of that? I don't know if they ever solved that problem. They were very uh I mean one has to if you really try to understand the world from their perspective, you know, it was really hard to be a liberal most of the time. It was r it there were such formidable obstacles, such strong enemies, and such intolerance of their views. Uh it w serious stuff to think of the Catholic Church coming back into power, the counter revolutionaries, you know, what what would happen to you? So do you tolerate them? Do you allow them to use the free pr ess to uh attack constitutional government? At what point do you censor? We struggle with this today, and they certainly did then. What in your view is the first society or state in which something that we would now recognize as liberalism takes power? When does it move from a theory outside power as a political philosophy, not as a virtue, into something that Aaron Powell You know, famously in eighteen thirty there's a revolution that brings what's considered a liberal government into power, and it unfortunately fails in the eighteen forty eight revolution in France, eighteen thirty. What happens in the French Revolution? It's the rise of the bourgeoisie. It's the fact that the nobil nobles, the privileges of the nobility are overturned and you have rule of law, civic equality. Marx talks about this. Um communists uh talk about this as being the a bourgeois kind of revolution and and how terrible it is because it became very quickly considered a selfish regime of money Trevor Burrus, Jr. Let's stand on Marx for a minute. What is his critique of liberalism? Aaron Powell Liberalism is really the rule of the bourgeoisie. It's middle class, it's money. If you look at France, he also was really much looking at France, right? Everybody's looking at France. What's going on with the success of revolutions? It's like a laboratory of political ideas, right? So this is a a bourgeois revolution to them, and it's liberals who carry these ideas forward. But what happens in Marx thought is of course once they take over power, they're gonna exploit the workers and uh just b make more and more money and exploit the workers until they will rise up and you'll have the communist revolution and the takeover. But the thing is that there's no way around it. You you need the liberals to take power. You need the bourgeoisie in Marx's view. In Marx's view. So he's not anti this precisely. He's just this is this is the motor of history. It's going to be superseded by the proletariat. Trevor Burrus Where does liberalism begin to become interested in or associated with the actual redistribution of resources in society from the rich to the poor? Where does it become connected to social welfare states? And, you know, when you talk about FDR and that later liberalism, right, and a lot happens between, you know, what we've been discussing and there, at some point this moves away from just being a set of approaches to a marketplace of ideas or, you know, individual virtue, and it becomes connected to a view that power needs to be redistributed and money and security need to be redistributed, when does that begin to happen? Right. So the early liberals were really uh mostly concerned with creating a political system, getting rid of the divine right of kings and having constitutional representative government with guarantees for individual rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and private property rights, rule of law, obviously very important. But as they're also pragmatic people, and over time with the Industrial Revolution, with urbanization, they see new problems arise, right? The idea that there is pauperism, a new word that's invented at the time that means people are stuck, workers are stuck in poverty. And what to do about it. Some people start saying, listen, deregulation isn't working for these people, they're stuck. And with our core values of generosity and freedom lovingness, obviously these people are not free. They're not able to morally refine themselves or to contribute to society in any meaningful way, morally or intellectually. So a government now needs to step in first with factory legislation and such and eventually with some sort of in tax distribution and so on. Aaron Ross Powell There is an interesting dimension there that I think you hear less of today, which is a connection of a social welfare state, everything from education to health care and on and on , as being not just a matter of justice, maybe not even at all a matter of justice, but instead a matter of uplift. You're trying to create the conditions for a cap able , educated, productive citizenry. And something you see in a lot of the early arguments about it is it you see less of the argument, at least in in my reading, that society is unfair. That's more sort of how I would you know argue for a lot of these policies today, and more of the argument that this needs to be done because it is the only way to have a citizenry capable of participating in liberal democracy, you know, able to fight in your wars, right? Like it's a a question of building the capacity of the citizenry. It's very, very concerned with like the uplift of the individual. Absolutely. And it strikes me also that factory legislation at first , for example, uh again in France, was uh you know, when it came to women, you know, shorten the work day, make it a little less harsh for them. Why? Because they'll have better breast milk. They'll be healthier and they'll produce healthier soldiers, basically, boys who will fight in wars. But I want to say there, Germany suddenly starts to play a big role. Their thinkers, they had thinkers who said that this whole idea of free markets and laissez-faire were great theoretically, but weren't working in practice right now. And what you need is to actually study the workers and demographic patterns and prices and salaries and so on and come and and see what's actually going on and then devise policies accordingly. And these ideas were spread and were written about, their ideas were translated and talked about in England and France. It's also there, the power of Prussia, right? So Napoleon III thought he could have a little war with Prussia and make him give him some glory and some popularity. And lo and behold, the exact opposite happened. The Prussians won very quickly. And it was a shock. It was a shock to everybody that France meant to be the most powerful a country in Europe could be defeated like this. And they start to ask why. And they start thinking, well guess what? German soldiers are vaccin ated, they're much healthier, their ro railroads work. Germany is very early to have a state run healthcare program. Exactly. And this catches on. Again, it's because of, you know, but it doesn't come from the liberals initially. I mean Bismarck is the key key mover here. Exact Exactly. And that's an interesting uh twist that sometimes the influences on liberalism are not necessarily from within. The first Napoleon is what made people like Benjamin Constant, the early liberals, say like we need something so that this never happens again. We need constitutions that stop somebody like Napoleon, a demagogue, a dictator from coming to power. And then now it's Bismarck. But look at his policies, look what he's doing to hit the popul ation. They're healthier, they're stronger, they're more patriotic. This is really when there was what came to be called a new liberalism. And they called it that. New liberalism in England, where a group of people started to say, no, we need to learn from the Germans and we need some government intervention to help the workers, to spread the wealth, and that the government has an important role to play in the economy in a just and and liberal polity. So they learn their lessons the hard way that way. Aaron Ross Powell So how then do you have this weird split that makes so much of the conversation about liberalism confusing today, where you have a liberalism in in much of Europe that means laissez faire , that means that you are in many cases opposed to the law for state, and you have a liberalism very much associated with America, maybe coming from Germany, that it's the exact opposite, right? You have this debate between the classical liberals like Hayek and then FDR is, you know, the the central, like arguably most important American liberal. And they stand in many ways for I don't want to say entirely opposite things. They agree on things like free speech and and and you know some other dimensions around rights. But you do have liberalism split into two streams, one of which is profoundly skeptical of the government and sees government as the source of much tyranny and the other which sees government and a more generous government as the guarantor of a kind of freedom. Yeah, that's right. In England, eventually uh the new liberals kind of win out and they drop the new and they're just called liberals, right? And that's what happens in America. They don't call themselves new liberals, they start calling themselves first progressives and then liberals. Wilson, actually, there's a moment you can see where he's saying, calling himself a progressive, and then he switches to liberal. It's quite interesting. In France, they never make that move. So liberalism, without any descriptive term before, it means uh the laissez faire liberalism, small government liberalism. And today in most of the world, that's what liberalism means, right? It's sort of left right of center, free markets, small government. Whereas in America, colloquially it tends to mean big government. Nobody says there for big government, but more interventionism, more of a redistributive state, bigger role for the state. How can we help make healthier communities happen? At JPMorgan Chase, we invest in community healthcare where it's needed most, so doctors can see more patients closer to home and help them grow and thrive. Make momentum happen. Learn more at jpmorganchase.com slash impact. This is the table, the one with the view. This is how you reserve exclusive tables with Chase Sapphire Reserve. This is your name on the list. This is the chef sending you something he didn't put on the menu. This is three times points on dining with Chase Sapphire Reserve and a $300 dining credit that covered the citrus pavlova and drinks and the thing you didn't think you liked until you tasted it. Chase Sapphire Reserve . Now even more rewarding. Learn more at Chase.com slash Sapphire Reserve. Cards issued by JP Morgan Chase Bank and a member FDIC. Where there's so much reason for despair and so much reason to hope all at the same time. Let me say I hear you. I'm Ezra Klein from New York Times Opinion, host of the Ezra Klein Show. And for me, the best way to beat back that bewildered feeling is to talk it out with the people who have ideas and frameworks for making sense of it. There is going to be plenty to talk about. You can find the Ezra Klein show wherever you get your podcasts. Who in your view are the most important American liberal thinkers? If you're thinking of a canon of American liberalism, you of course have to talk about John Rawls, and he comes very late in the So I think more than thinkers. I mean there's John Dewey who's very important, particularly in his liberal education. There are people like uh I mentioned, I wouldn't c call them great innovative thinkers. I mean John Rawls, you o obviously great philosopher of the twentieth century, but on his caliber or on the caliber of j of John Locke or John Stuart Mill, I don't I don't see any. I hope not, you know, American intellectual historians aren't like email me like crazy saying that I'm being unfair. But I I don't think uh America was notable for its liberal theorists until uh quite late in the game. We do have great liberal leaders. I mentioned Lincoln. I mentioned FDR. This is underplayed in our own tradition. Yeah. And I'd like to say more on this because I actually think great liberal practitioners in some ways to me are more interesting than great liberal theorists. I find it to be a problem with American liberalism that it is to obsess with John Rawls. People think that is because I don't like John Rawls. And that's not quite it. I just think that in terms of something that is a hopefully a popular in public philosophy, somebody whose central work is fundamentally unreadable by the public, does not really make sense as a foundation for that. And he's not the foundation for that, right? Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., John Dewey, I do think is actually quite important here, but FDR. You have really remarkable liberal leaders in this country. Many of them, I mean, having written remarkable things about how to think about liberalism, many of them coming from outside the halls of power. I think liberalism is often most interesting when it is in a tense relationship with power. But I I'm curious how you see that that tradition and and how it altered what American liberalism became and and and is. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I think that's wonderful. But if you look at the uh the people I um I look at at the very beginning, you know, there wasn't this great divide between, you know, the great thinkers and the great um political leaders. I mean somebody like they're very pragmatic earlier. They're Sarah's a political figure. He's a political figure, Benjamin Constant becomes a uh a deputy in the Chamber of Deputies , John Stuart Mill uh runs for office. And you know, if you read the speeches, if you read some of the speeches, the the wonderful speeches people were making in those days, you know, drawing on Montesquieu and and Locke and there And they're they're draw you know, they're reading the stuff as well. So there wasn't maybe this great divide between intellectuals and practitioners. What does that tell you in America? What was different about it it here? And and maybe it's worth starting actually with the founders. I think there's a a lot of interesting interesting argumentation over how much to think of the the American founders as inside the American liberal tradition, as in tension with what later becomes a liberal tradition, right? They're obviously claimed by all sides here. How do you think about the founding and with its profound internal contradictions around freedom and human bondage? I've become more and more interested in in American political thought and institutions and history. Unfortunately, because of the way disciplines and uh concentrations work, I'm more of an expert on on European history , but what I've read about the founding and about the founding fathers and what was going on there just fills me with enormous respect and gratitude and I think for the wonderful work that they did being both thinkers and actors and Franklin Jefferson came to Paris and were very much interested also in in French matters and vice versa. The American Constitution influenced early liberals because uh they thought it was an amazing document. And maybe that's the thing that's so wonderful is to see exactly those things coming together, the ideas and the practices coming together in the in theund Fingo Fathers to produce this amazing document. Aaron Powell That's a very glittering answer, but but I think a critic of liberalism would say that what good is your liberalism if it can include slavery in its founding constitution, or in more of the European case, what good is your liberalism if it is so interwoven with colonialism? And I mean, there were many, you know, people who certainly believed in many liberal ideas we're talking about here, who made space for both of those practices within their liberalism. Right. Well, I don't mean to again idealize these um out of proportion, these people peop, these are early liberals, and liberals have never been perfect. They're often suffer from the same prejudices, the prejudices of their time. There are exclusions. There are but how did they grapple with this? I mean we've talked a lot about freedom here. How did they grapple with this? Uh um how did they grapple with this? I think there were I mean other people can speak more intelligently about the US Constitution and the position the slavery within the document and say that this is really a question also of compromise. It's a horrible thing to imagine, but I think there was uh debates going on there and and pol politics going on that are unseemly today. And uh you have John Stuart Mill seeing absolutely atrocious things about how despotism is okay when you're dealing with barbarians or something, talking about uh British imperialism in India. You have Tocqueville, who was okay apparently with uh burning silos in Alger ia. That's uh awful stuff. But at the same time, these uh people were then from within. This was not a liberal position, I would say. This is as many people were saying, you are betraying your own principles, and conservatives were also for even perhaps even more so for colonialism, imperialism. It's horrible to say, but racism was rampant. Sexism was rampant . Um if anyone was against it, if we can we don't you know they were liberals basically well this is the other side of it, where there's a lot of liberal abolitionism there obviously is like the long effort among liberals to expand the franchise, you know, to women and and and and then to um you know people of other races and you know, a lot of fights over immigration. You have this interesting moment in the book where you say maybe the first use of using liberal as a noun, somebody signs a an anti slavery pamphlet, a liberal. Right. It is a tension. Yeah, for sure. So the thing to remember is that for example, when it comes to women, you know, liberals did not really lobby for women's suffrage until very, very, very, very late. They were not at all for giving women the vote until it was almost forced upon them. But on the other hand, the women, when they did fight for admission into uh political rights. They used the terms of liberalism. They went to the guys and they said, Hey, you know, you're not living up to your own principles. You're like an aristocracy, an aristocracy of of sex. You're acting like despots. Um we want to participate. We want to also be citizens. We can have the virtues of citizens. So they use that same language to say we have shared responsibilities and we bring something to the table, something liberal. So they use the language, and I think that's also true with Frederick Douglass and other uh groups that have been prejudiced against and even uh subordinated and oppressed, that they can use the language of liberalism, use the lofty notions and the ideals to argue for their own rights and Aaron Powell What is it in liberalism? What 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 um, 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, a philosophical weapon to expand the terms of inclusion and Well, you know, ideas don't travel in a vacuum. So I would always say that the facts on the ground change, socioeconomic press ures, changes in the economy, wars, all of this creates conditions, creates conflicts, creates crises that liberals then have to confront and deal with. And that goes to you know everybody's talking about the the crisis of liberal democracy today and the crisis of liberalism. Well there's been a succession of crises. Liberalism was born in crisis, uh the crisis of the French Revolution. And so when these moments happen, when there's extreme tension, when there is new problems, it can throw liberalism sort of off its kilter for a while. All sorts of debates occur, become more heated , confused even. There have been moments in liberalism's history where they s literally start and I have lists of articles. What is liberalism? What do we stand for? What is true liberalism? No, that's false liberalism. And they have these debates. And as I said before, that can weaken the movement, but it can also bring strength to it, allow it to evolve. This conflict, a battle of ideas, brings out something new that really responds to the crisis that's on the ground. Are there specific moments in liberalism's history that this moment reminds you of? Yeah. I've even started to think about the original crisis. You know, the the the crisis of Napoleon's despotism, liberals had had such high hopes for establishing a liberal regime based on constitutional rule and uh representative government with these uh rights uh prote cting the individual. And then the revolution derailed into this horrible period of the terror, and eventually they thought that Napoleon would come and save the revolution, so there was a lot of hope that this charismatic figure who claimed to want to save the revolution was making all the right noises. He was going to bring peace to France. He was going to bring back order. He was going to protect all these things liberals had fought for so hard. And then instead he became this despot and a demagogue. And he used war s, you know, to uh divert attention to what he was doing at home. He gave gifts to people, he lined the pockets of his friends, um, he flattered people, gave them power that uh but but at the same time that he amassed power in his own in his own hands. This was profoundly demoralizing to the early liberals that I'm talking about who had this lofty notion of what fre a er, better, more moral, more humane world would look like and look what it um derailed into. So what did they learn from that? They learned that uh you needed certain safeguards in place. This is really when you get like liberalis m as a constitutional way of thinking and balance of power, separations of powers, individual rights, freedom, how important freedom of press is, how important freedom of religion is, Napoleon used religion, you know, to buttress his power. So all of these constitutional ideas really came together then. And they, you know, it happened again and again over the course of the 19th century, that you'd have these very clever, charismatic figures who could speak directly to the people. I understand you, I represent you. We don't need these representative institu tions. We don't I 'cause I speaks directly to you. I am you sort of. I mean that's what a demagogue does and that's what populism is, right? Is that the you don't need the intermediaries. And they were very worried about this. And the system they came up with, constitutional liberalisms, was meant to make it impossible. But that also made them really think more than ever that we needed an educated citizenry. Intellectuals needed to step up. Newspapers needed to step up and educate the public as to what it means to be a citizen of a liberal regime, of a liberal form of government. They wrote articles, Madame de Stal wrote novels in which she was um you could see her trying to foster the right kind of moral inclinations. By that I mean compassion, generosity, sociability, understanding the understanding of shared responsibilities that you needed to educate people to this because without it, without an educated, critically minded, alert citizenry, the people will fall prey to unscrupulous actors, demagogues. This was on their minds the whole time because they saw how vulnerable those liberal constitutions could be. They really depended on a morally educated, civic-minded, an educated and alert citizenship. Aaron Powell 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 po wer and with the status quo and with the 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 seemed 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 partially a 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, but also has left it with very little language. That's right. 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 So yes, they shied away from that word. Individualism really had a n it meant it was kind of a synonym for them to selfishness. And Tocqueville, you'll see uses it that way, I think in, democracy in America. It's just, again, it's an ism. Isms are very often pejoratives . And individuality is more about, you know, becoming the best person you can be, developing yourself , your capacities of flourishing, individual flourishing. Individualism today we've become very much a narcissistic society, unfortunately, I think, the more choices we have, that's better. It's about, you know, I don't want to go on about sounding horrible about us today, but I do feel that we're become very inward-looking and narcissistic. Aaron Powell And what parts of the the sort of liberal path do you think could be helpful in renovating an answer to that? I really think that people are searching for meaning. You mentioned that. And I think that in order to go forward we we can draw on this history that we have and think and kind of recover this moral language of of character, of shared respon sibilities, of moral improvement, looking at all these things that we have now that our people before us for centuries didn't have and think of them as ways see if we can improve oursel ves, develop our capacities, and do good for everyone. You know, it's funny when I talk this way, I'm I'm constantly aware that I must be sounding silly somehow. And it's a reflection of the cynicism that's in the culture Well also isn't there though a a question of well who gets to decide what the common good is and what happens when we d disagree. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. That's the danger. But that's why we have to uh come to a gather at least and discuss it and come to some kind of I think people come together, they kind of can agree on things that are good for everyone. 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 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 have benefited more from how the institutions work . It's ended up very uh connected to power. And you see that a lot in the sort of rhetoric of people challenging it now and the sort of counter-revolutionary ideas that the people on the new right have. But I'm curious how you would describe like liberalism's view of power and what you see in like the various liberalisms that you've tracked that that might be useful at a time when people feel like very and I think quite understandably skeptical of institutions and and and frustrated with the feeling that society is taking a direction that they don't have much influence over. Yeah. Absolutely. Liberalism is best when it criticizes power. That's how it was delimits authority and allows human flourishing for sure. And now there is at least this sense and I think it's probably true that liber als largely have I don't know if they control media and universities, but have a huge influence and power and that it's somehow self-perpetuating, which translates into political power as well. I think the the worst part of that is a kind of condescension or kind of disconnect between these liberal elites that we recognize are there, but their disconnect between the common man, sort of regular people. And I think that is a betrayal of liberal principles, really, because this is not we talked in the beginning about elites and leaders and this is not what liberal elites are supposed to be doing. So I think that and I'm an educator, I suppose part of this liberal elite I was gonna say we're all united. Yeah, so uh me a culpa. I mean I think we can do a a better job here and returning to these principles. One thing that I think is uh useful here, and it's not a 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 citiz en. 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 uh you know, we now believe in liberal democracy, not liberal aristocracy. And I think that having a I think it is going to be very, very hard in this period to have a relationship of generosity in a very divided countr y that politics is very hard to practice well right now. And the liberals who've done it really well, right? You think about, say, you know, Barack Obama in 2008, you know, are really able to on the one hand, hold a vision of moral progress, which is can be a divisive vision, and also hold a vision of an ethic of generosity and decency towards, you know, both the people we agree with and the people we don't agree with. And I think when, you know, the liberal elites as you describe them and not wrongly, but I think in general, one place that that elites of you know all parties and persuasions tend to go very wrong is in losing that sense that they are part of a citizenry and in instead seeing themselves as leaders who know what is best for everybody else and balancing those commitments inside of liberalism, the commitment to moral progress , right? To expanding freedom, you know, to giving people a better life, and the commitment to the kinds of virtues needed to make a complex society thrive without people feeling oppressed or condescended to or pushed out by you. I think that balance, it's not one policy that does it. It's a very, very difficult balance . But I think the great liberals figure out how to do that well. I mean, you talked about Lincoln earlier, and I mean he to think about somebody holding together opposites, right? Yeah leading a a civil war, bloodiest war ever on American soil, and also doing so within an ethic of constant ly trying to reach out and see that there is some solidarity on the other side of this, that there's some way to rediscover bonds of commonality. I mean, it's why his speeches are read today, not because they're bloodthirsty, but That's absolutely true. It is very difficult and we're living in a very difficult moment, uh a true crisis, and we're so polarized. But