Sublime

to participate in the great decisions of government. There was, Lippmann brooded, no “intrinsic moral and intellectual virtue to majority rule.” Lippmann’s disenchantment with democracy anticipated the mood of today’s elites. From the top, the public, and the swings of public opinion, appeared irrational and uninformed. The human material out of

In a 2016 op-ed for the New York Times, American academic Mark Lilla manages to blame the Trump “whitelash” on liberals, in general, and on Hillary Clinton, in particular. He calls it “identity liberalism.” Liberals, he claims, do not recognize “how their own obsession with diversity has encouraged white, rural, religious Americans to think of

Mill held that truth emerges from an unfettered competition of ideas and that individual character is most improved when allowed to find its own way uncoerced. That vision was insufficient for 20th-century American liberalism.