Gabfest Reads | Why Liberalism Needs to Reclaim the Center
Political Gabfest
Slate Podcasts
4.4 • 8.5K Ratings
🗓️ 16 May 2026
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this month’s episode of Gabfest Reads, John Dickerson interviews Bloomberg columnist Adrian Wooldridge about his new book The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism. In a moment when American democracy is under assault from authoritarian populists and dogmatic progressives, Wooldridge argues that liberalism itself offers the most resilient framework for pluralistic, self-correcting societies.
Dickerson and Wooldridge discuss what liberalism really is, why both the left and right have become illiberal, and what citizens can do to defend the democratic principles on which the nation was built.
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Podcast production by Nina Porzucki.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to GabFest Reeds for the month of May, 26. I'm John Dickerson, one of the hosts of the Slate Political GabFest. I'm here today with Adrian Woldridge, the author of The Revolutionary Center, The Lost Genius of Liberalism. Adrian is a columnist for Bloomberg, who spent much of his career |
| 0:21.8 | writing for The Economist. He's the author of a host of books over the years, and we're very |
| 0:26.9 | glad to have him. Adrian, it's good to be with you again. GabFest listeners have heard you before, |
| 0:32.7 | but I think this is your first book we've ever talked about on here. So welcome. |
| 0:37.8 | Let's start with one of the challenges you and I have discussed, the term liberal, help us define it. |
| 0:46.9 | And I think we're going to be doing that all through this conversation. |
| 0:49.4 | But what does it mean? |
| 0:51.1 | It's a very difficult word to define. |
| 0:53.8 | It's a very capacious word. |
| 0:55.7 | And it's particularly difficult in the American context because there's been a deliberate |
| 1:00.0 | attempt to demonise, by the Republican Party, to demonise the term liberal, to refer to nambi-pambi, hoity-toity, left-wing, big government, people of dubious morality. |
| 1:17.6 | And that is a problem. And against that, a group of neoliberal, such as Milton Friedman and Hayek, have said, no, no, no, |
| 1:29.8 | that left-wing notion of liberalism is bad. We are classical liberals. And classical liberalism |
| 1:36.4 | means having virtually no role for the government, having an extremely generous role for the |
| 1:41.2 | markets. And I think both of those terms are slightly misconstit. So the left-wing |
| 1:46.8 | notion, big government, and the Friedmanite notion of very small government are both slightly |
| 1:54.0 | misleading. I think you can have big government liberalism, you can have small government |
| 1:59.4 | liberalism. The size of the government, the size of the government versus the market is not the essence of liberalism, you can have small government liberalism. The size of the |
| 2:01.4 | government, the size of the government versus the market is not the essence of liberalism. The essence of |
| 2:06.2 | liberalism lies in individualism. Regarding individualism, the individual is the basic building block |
| 2:16.6 | of society rather than the collective. |
| 2:18.9 | It lies in tolerance, not having an orthodox faith, but allowing people to disagree about metaphysical things. |
... |
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