Defending Liberalism with Adam Gopnik

Why Is This Happening? The Chris Hayes Podcast

MS NOW, Chris Hayes

News, Versant Media, Versant, Ms Now, Nbcnews, Why Is This Happening?, The Chris Hayes Podcast, Chris Hayes, Politics, Government, Society & Culture, Msnbc, Withpod

4.6 • 8.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2019

⏱️ 55 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Liberalism is the ordering principal of American government, and yet liberalism is embattled. After the end of the Cold War, it was widely believed that liberal democracy would spread inexorably, but instead new challenges to liberalism have emerged. Across the world, authoritarian governments flourish and some countries have begun to backslide away from liberalism. Even here at home, liberalism’s critics on the left and right have found renewed strength. This week Adam Gopnik, author of the new book A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism, sits down to discuss the roots and tenets of liberalism and the serious challenges our liberal democracy now faces. Email us at [email protected] Tweet using #WITHpod Read more at nbcnews.com/whyisthishappening RELATED LINKS: A Thousand Small Sanities by Adam Gopnik On Liberty by John Stuart Mill On the Subjection of Women by John Stuart Mill How the South Won the Civil War by Adam Gopnik Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 by Tony Judt

Transcript

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0:00.0	Every time the Thardarians come to power, there's an opportunistic left response to think,
0:04.5	oh, we can, that'll be good in the long run. That'll heighten the contradictions. We'll be able to
0:08.9	take advantage of that. That never happens. What happens is that it only that kind of
0:13.9	passivity and that kind of opportunism only feeds the right wing law to crafts. Nationalism isn't
0:19.1	something that you can, you can play games with or you can play dice with. It's always a huge danger.
0:24.4	Hello and welcome to Why is this happening with me? Your host, Chris Hayes. You know, with
0:31.2	Bud listeners, I don't know if this is an annoying tendency of mine, but I'm just going to go with
0:35.2	it, which is that the older I get, the more inclined I end like tell stories about like back in the
0:39.0	day, back back in my day. I have a particular inclination to do this with our staff, many of whom are
0:45.6	under 30. Shameless Hughes is sitting in for Tiffany Champions today who's looking up at me and
0:51.0	nodding. Matt Toater, I think, is more like my age, right? Yeah. So here's a back in my day story.
0:56.8	Back back in my day in the Bush administration in the, in the sort of post 9-11 poster
1:02.0	rack war, the net roots, there was this big fight over the term liberal and a kind of consensus
1:08.4	view that the term had been so destroyed by conservatives and made into such a caricature
1:13.7	that it had to be jettisoned in favor of progressive. And basically like no one call themselves
1:18.8	liberal anymore, no one talked about liberalism or a liberal approach to things. It was all progressive,
1:23.7	progressive, progressive. And that I think is more or less stayed the same. I think progressive has
1:29.7	become the kind of standard word, but it's also the case that the word liberal is really slippery.
1:35.3	All these political terms are between two different things, right? Liberalism in the American
1:40.1	political context, which are people that are sort of on the center left who are, you know,
1:45.2	believe in like higher taxes and redistribution and the sort of platform of the democratic party
1:50.8	and things to the left of that unionization, et cetera. And then there's liberalism in a broader
	...

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