Why Liberals Believe in Reform: A Selection from Adam Gopnik’s A Thousand Small Sanities (2019)

“They 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. . . .

The liberal idea of community is not one, as it is for many conservatives, of blood ties or traditional authority. It rests on an idea of shared choices. But the choices, and the sharing, are essential to it, including even a sense of sympathy for those caught on the losing side of an argument. Someone proposes a more equitable world—enfranchisement for working people, blacks, or women, or civil rights for homosexuals—and then makes the resulting reform last by assuring that those who opposed it may have lost the fight but haven’t lost their dignity, their autonomy, or their chance to adapt to the change without fearing the loss of all their agency. In this way, liberalism is the most truly radical of all ideologies: it proposes a change, makes it happen, and then makes it last. . . .

The opposite of humanism is not theism but fanaticism; the opposite of liberalism is not conservatism but dogmatism. Fanaticism is therefore the chief enemy of humanism, and fanaticism in political life is the chief enemy of the liberal ideal.”—Adam Gopnik, A Thousand Small Sanities: The Moral Adventure of Liberalism (2019)