An enlightening, frustrating conversation on liberalism (with Adam Gopnik)

The Gray Area with Sean Illing

Vox Media Podcast Network

Society & Culture, News, Politics, News Commentary, Philosophy

4.6 • 10.8K Ratings

🗓️ 27 June 2019

⏱️ 106 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Liberalism is as distinct a tradition as exists in political history, but it suffers from being a practice before it is an ideology, a temperament and a tone and a way of managing the world more than a fixed set of beliefs.” That’s from Adam Gopnik’s new book A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism. It is, by turns, a bracing, charming, insightful, irksome defense of the most successful political movement of our age. Liberalism is so successful, in fact, that its achievements are taken for granted while its shortcomings throb through our politics. What caught my eye about Gopnik’s book is his argument that liberalism is a temperament more than an ideology, an approach more than a prescription. As I read his argument, it felt to me that he had identified something essential and often missed in discussions of agendas and plans. But he was also developing a definition of little use in settling the core debates of our age, a liberalism that could be seen as too flexible to mean anything in particular. And so, as liberals do, we argued it out. This conversation has something to thrill and frustrate every listener. In that way, it’s like liberalism itself. Book recommendations: Life of Johnson by James Boswell The Open Society and Its Enemiesby Karl R. Popper No Other Book: Selected Essays by Randall Jarrell Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	liberalism as a living tradition has done more to have a corrective conscience instilled
0:06.2	in all of its institutions than any other system of human management, much less human government
0:11.0	that we know of.
0:24.2	Hello, welcome to the live broadcast network.
0:27.3	I feature a lot of critiques of liberalism on this show.
0:30.6	You've heard critiques of liberalism from conservatives.
0:32.9	You've heard them from sort of illiberal Catholics, like the Patrick Deneen folks.
0:37.9	You've heard them from folks on the left.
0:40.4	I don't in an explicit way tend to have that many defenses of liberalism,
0:44.4	but for an ideology that is getting quite as embeiled as liberalism.
0:49.0	It's probably worth doing.
0:50.3	I was thinking about this because I got sent Adam Gopnex book, a thousand small
0:54.2	soundities, which is a really thorough going defense of liberalism as both an intellectual
0:58.4	tradition and in its American liberal as in the kind of main left end of the political
1:04.6	spectrum instantiation.
1:06.8	And it's a book I have to say it's a book I struggled with.
1:10.0	I was reading it and I hadn't intended when I got it to have them on the podcast.
1:15.0	And I was reading it and first of all, it's a part of me that really thrilled to it.
1:18.7	It was describing something that helped very true for me.
1:23.1	And that I thought does not get described it a kind of fuzzy liberalism,
1:26.9	a temperamental liberalism because so much in American politics collapses down into the
1:31.7	binary of yes or no on like this bill or that bill, yes or no on the left approach or
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