The Boring Liberal Dad: A Selection from Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities (2019)
“The liberal response to left-wing radicalism has, historically, always been rhetorically weak—even though, historically, it has also been demonstrably correct. I doubt that I can fully remedy that. . . . The objections we liberals can offer always feel as feeble as a dad telling a teenage girl that she should be very careful riding in cars with other teens who drink. You sound like a schmuck compared to the cool boy who drives seat-belt-less with artfully tossed Hunter Thompson paperbacks on the backseat. But that dad is simply, invariably right—driving drunk is an insane practice, and the liberal reproach to leftism is right, too, on more or less the same basis: driving intoxicated on the rhetoric of revolutionary change is crazy, especially in light of all the road fatalities already recorded. The romantic utopian visions, put in place, always fail and usually end in a horrific car crash. . . .
When liberals take the credit for the accomplishments of the social democratic state—for national health insurance, social security, and the welfare blanket that keeps people comforted, a better term than safety net—we’re merely being accurate. Social democrats are socialists who saw the liberal light. . . . Social democrats are not democrats who went socialist, but, historically, socialists who went liberal. In France and England and elsewhere, they struggled and engaged often bitterly and even violently with communist and other far-left groups, rejecting their insistence that only after a revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat could social justice happen. Instead, the social democrats learned, obeying the rules of parliamentary democracy gave access to social change on a fast track and without the concentration camps and the mass killings. . . .
Liberal faith in free speech need not be absolute to remain liberal. Tolerance is a positive virtue, but it has limits . . . . As with everything in human disputes, limitations on speech depend on the particular: we have to look at it case by case and specificity by specificity. Criticism of religious ideologues may be very different than Holocaust denial, even if both are forced under the heading of ‘hate speech.’ That there’s no escaping the specificities of the world is the foundational liberal instinct, even in its way more foundational than freedom of debate. There’s no looking past the particulars. We have to make significant minute discriminations between, say, people who are being invited on a college campus simply as a means of provocation and those who are teaching and have a right to unfettered expression even of the most unorthodox opinions. We have to distinguish between genuine hatred directed at an ethnic group and bold blasphemy directed at an ideology. We have to distinguish between insulting someone’s beliefs—something none of us enjoy but which all of us have to endure—and threatening someone’s safety. These may seem hard distinctions to make. They often are. But what liberals believe is that parsing particulars is the work of social sanity. . . .
Liberals believe in reform rather than revolution because the results are in: it works better. More permanent positive social change is made incrementally rather than by revolutionary transformation. This was, originally, something like a temperamental instinct, a preference for social peace bought at a reasonable price, but by now it is a rational preference. The nameable goals of the socialist and even Marxist manifestos of the nineteenth century—public education, free health care, a government role in the economy, votes for women—have all been achieved, mostly peacefully and mostly successfully, by acts of reform in liberal countries. The attempt to achieve them by fiat and command, in the Soviet Union and China and elsewhere, created catastrophes, moral and practical, on a scale still almost impossible to grasp.”—Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019)
