Sublime

Gopnik stresses the need for conversation and debate. This is the marketplace of ideas, in which better ideas eventually win out, allowing society to advance. This stands against the conservative position that some ideas are sacred (literally or otherwise) and must not be challenged and against the postmodern position that some ideas are dangerous

Modern liberalism has adopted the Jacobin spirit. Having dispensed with traditional moral norms, liberals have transformed the severe quality of conscience into a playpen of desire. Hav­ing denied a religious foundation for human rights, they have left individuals vulnerable to the despotic whims of the secular state. This outcome was predicted by

Others might say that progress is a myth because Nazism, the Holocaust, and genocidal communism all occurred less than a century ago—and after the Enlightenment. This would be reasonable if the argument were that everything that came after the Enlightenment was liberal. In fact, these phenomena show what happens when totalitarianism is allowed to d

Looking at politics horizontally often misses the real story. Calling the Republican Fundamentalists the “far right” suggests that they were defined by their conservatism. But a bunch of their stances—their openness to nuclear war, their support for racial apartheid, their anti-democratic tactics at the convention—were a direct affront to conservat

(A major issue that conservatives even today have yet to solve is how, in opposing the reductions of the immanent frame, they can avoid the perception of being against justice and mercy and can support all humans flourishing.)

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.