Welcome, listeners. Welcome listeners to the editor's desk, our regular First Things podcast from here in New York.

I'm Rusty Reno. I'm the editor, and I'm sitting at my, you guessed it, desk. And I have with me for today's episode, Gary Saul Morrison,

Professor of Arts and Humanities at Northwestern University,

and most importantly, author of many fine pieces in First Things magazine.

And today we're going to talk about his October 2020 article,

much commented upon, suicide of the liberals. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for

having me. Thank you. As I said, much comment upon suicide of the liberals. It came out in early fall of

2020 after the summer of 2020, which was a period of remarkable radicalism.

It just this piece about the Russian context prior to the Russian Revolution was just resonated

so powerfully with our readership.

And so I want to go back and take a look at some of the observations that you make about that time period.

You begin the piece really drawing our attention to how brutal and deadly the extremism was of

Russian political culture at the beginning of the 20th century.

Yes, it was a time of radical ideology and radical action, brutal violence, terrorism of a sort that is far beyond anything we

experience or could even imagine when you described the number of thousands of people who were

killed, you know, bombs thrown randomly into cafes with nails in the bombs.

Anyone with a, any government connection or any uniform was likely to have sulfuric acid thrown

in his face and be mutilated. And this was widely celebrated by the intelligentsia.

It seemed like there was an almost sadistic or a love of violence for its own sake or a love of destruction for its own sake that was coursing through the Russian culture or the culture of the left.

Is that fair?

Yes, that is fair.

And what happens in cases like that, I imagine the Russian case is not unique, is that people

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