Liberal values and institutions now face aggressive challenges from both right and left extremism, so how should defenders of the embattled liberal center respond?
Liberal values and institutions now face aggressive challenges from both right and left extremism, so how should defenders of the embattled liberal center respond? It's become clear now that the question exposes an important fault line running through today's contemporary center-left and center-right. On one side are those convinced that the rise of extremism represents a misguided response to serious and neglected problems afflicting contemporary society, and thus that it is now imperative for liberals to move boldly to identify and address those ills. On the other side are liberals who think that their side is losing ground largely because of a failure of nerve -- a lack of confidence in their own ideals and an insufficient supply of fighting spirit. Each side thus has reasons to think the other is making matters worse: the latter fear that conceding that the extremists have a point will only add fuel to the fire, while the former believe that complacent denialism brought us to this point by creating a vacuum for extremists to fill. In today's episode of The Permanent Problem podcast, Jonathan Rauch joins host Brink Lindsey to explore this internal division within liberalism and look for ways to bridge it. Their starting point is on opposite sides of the divide -- Lindsey's book The Permanent Problem offers an unsparing diagnosis of deep problems within contemporary liberal societies, while Rauch has written repeatedly on the dangers of excessive liberal self-criticism -- but throughout the conversation they probe for common ground while clarifying where they disagree.