One of his leitmotifs is that liberalism is a practice rather than a theory. But there is plenty of new writing too, assembled in style. Gopnik’s aphoristic style will be familiar to New Yorker readers, as will some of the material here, since the book draws on essays he’s written for the magazine (including one based on my own book on John Stuart Mill). In making the case for progress in increments, Gopnik’s gift for coining phrases serves him well: ‘amendments are among the proper nouns of liberalism’ ‘for liberals coalition and compromise are fighting words, devices to battle by’ ‘social contacts precede the social contract’. Progress comes through the collation of ideas and evidence, and the brokering of compromises. Yawn! But while liberals may not be revolutionaries, they are reformers – and they are usually right. Liberals typically offer a nuanced assessment of our condition and an incrementalist programme for its improvement. Radicals on both the Left and the Right make chilling diagnoses of our collective health and offer large-scale, invasive treatments. Sweeping changes sound good, but they tend not to last – or worse, to lead to tyranny. As Gopnik wryly puts it, ‘liberals get nothing accomplished – except everything, eventually.’īut liberal reforms do not occur overnight. We should remember that liberals have replaced hereditary systems of government with democracy, weakened vested interests in the economy, pioneered systems of welfare to protect individuals and diminished the reach of discrimination in all its guises. They need a rallying cry, and Gopnik gives us one. Right now, liberals do not need a philosophy lecture. It is a moral movement to fashion a world for all of us, in our kaleidoscopic complexity, to live, love and learn in. Liberalism is in fact vivid, activist, questing. Another is of the liberal as a kind of lawyer, procedural and technocratic, writing ‘the rules on a board game box’. ‘In the middle of the bar fight, the liberal is writing a blog post about biodegradable bottles or, more likely, trying to start a tasting of artisanal bourbons.’ The liberal as weakling is one of the false impressions Gopnik sets out to correct. ‘There are no atheists in foxholes, and no liberals in bar fights,’ he writes. The intellectual triumph of liberalism led to its political neutralisation.Īdam Gopnik accurately describes how the received view of liberals is as weak, unable even to take their own side in an argument. Victims of their own short-term success, they failed to maintain the energy and passion necessary to fuel sustainable liberalism. The forgetfulness of liberals led them to complacency and presumptuousness. Liberals forgot three fundamental facts about liberalism: a liberal society is a permanent work in progress the work is hard the lure of illiberalism is always strong. Today, with the rise of populism, liberals are walking around like clueless tourists, wondering how we ended up here and what to do about it. When the Berlin Wall fell, their confidence was unbounded. It took liberals just two decades to turn from hubris to hand-wringing.
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