Offline with Jon Favreau - Is America Still a Liberal Nation?

Episode Date: October 9, 2025

Cass Sunstein, Harvard professor and author of the new book On Liberalism: in Defense of Freedom, joins Offline to examine whether small-l "liberal" values like freedom, human rights, and the rule of law will be able to survive an illiberal president. Cass compares and contrasts what Trump and Vance are doing with the actions of the Bush and Reagan administrations, debates whether liberalism is a strong enough antidote to fascism, and reveals his #1 pop obsession.For a closed-captioned version of this episode, click here. For a transcript of this episode, please email [e-mail] and include the name of the podcast.    Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

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The physicists, they just wanted to be physicists under Hitler. They didn't like Hitler. They didn't hate Hitler. They kind of just like physics. and then their colleagues started getting hurt, maybe killed, and deported, their Jewish colleagues, and some of them got in real trouble for some randomish reason. And then what are they going to do? And basically they did nothing.

They did their physics. At one point, a Hungarian physicist who left said, you know what I noticed among my physics colleagues? I noticed they kept calculating the consequences. they kept thinking if we go against Hitler, what good will it do? What risk will it put on us? And what are the costs? And he said, as soon as I saw that they were calculating the consequences and not thinking about morality, I do Hitler would win. I'm John Favro, and you just heard from today's guest, Professor of Constitutional Law at Harvard,

and my former colleague, Cass Sunstein. Cass is probably the most prolific writer, author I've ever met. He's got like a million books, I think, that he's written. I think it's around 50. That's still an incredible number of books. He has written about the importance of dissent, misinformation in the social media age, the government's role in encouraging healthy decision, the rise of authoritarianism in America, the list goes on and on.

His new book, which was published last month, is something that I was really excited to read when it came across my screen, and it's succinctly titled on liberalism. And in the book, Cass delivers a full-throated defense of freedom and liberalism as we know it, a defense that is unfortunately very much needed in this moment. Cass rights to sort of reassert the values of liberalism, freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law and democracy, and also aggressively push back against the rise of illiberalism or post-liberalism, They call it a few different things that has basically taken hold of the MAGA movement. In fact, that the MAGA movement has probably introduced to the Republican Party,

including in thinkers like Curtis Jarvin and our vice president, J.D. Vance, who you've heard me talk about sort of embracing illiberal thinking and actually giving a defense of illiberalism in several of his speeches recently. So I've been thinking about the story that Democrats and liberals at large, again, this is small L liberalism, should be telling about who we are, what we believe, how that story should and can combat the illiberal narrative that's on the rise from the right. And so Cass's book is a really important addition to that debate. And it's really helped my thinking as well. I spoke to Cass about what liberalism is, why post-liberalism has been on the

rise, our information environment's role in illiberalism's rise, and why despite what we're seeing on our social media feed and from the White House, most people still hold these liberal values dear, especially in the United States of America. It's a great conversation. One, I hope you'll enjoy as much as I did. Here's Cass Sunstein. Cass, welcome back to offline. It is so great to be here. Thank you. So you have written more books than anyone I've ever known. I feel like I hear about a new book you've written like once a month, which makes me feel extra bad since I can barely write anything longer than a tweet. Your latest book is called liberalism and defensive freedom. It's a philosophical case for a specific set of political

beliefs, which I want to get into. But first, can you talk about the real world conditions and concerns that led you to write this book in the original, I believe it was 2023 New York Times essay that it's based on? Like, why do you think it's helpful for people to think about politics in terms of what is liberal and what is not? We had back in 2020, we had back in 2020, 23, an outpouring in Europe and North America of illiberal thinking, not triumphant by any means, hooray for that, but especially on the right of thinking that order really is super important and freedom of speech maybe not so central, that the idea of due process was not front and center for some people on the right, the idea of making things right by some politicalites

that was front and center. The rule of law, I think, was not for Project 2025, the number one thing. And it was kind of coming that the rule of law was thought to be a thing, but maybe defeated by other things like, you know, getting immigration straight or getting the politics of the country right. That was more important than the rule of law. So I started scribbling about this thinking that some central commitments in our beloved country were under at least kind of quiet and mounting assault. And when I scribbled that in a New York Times op-ed, I got more notes than I've ever received, I don't receive ordinarily any notes. So if I got two, that would be very exciting. But I got actually more than two. People on the right particularly saying they agree with liberalism

understood in these terms, not that they thought President Obama was great by any means, but they think that freedom's really important and the rule of law too. And to celebrate something, it's a little like celebrating the rise of the Internet, which is obviously on balance. It's a thing, but these things were thought to be under severe pressure. And so those were the conditions under which I started turning it into a book. And fortunately all that pressure, nothing has come from it. You know, we're all, it was just... No, we're now in a place where the rule of law and freedom and pluralism as on the currency, those are riding really high. Yeah, so the essay worked and the book worked as well, so congrats on that. You say that liberals believe, and this is, we should

should say this is liberalism as a political philosophy, not traditionally as understood as just left versus right, liberal versus conservative. You say that liberals believe in six things. Freedom, human rights, pluralism, security, the rule of law, and democracy. What is the argument against believing in those six principles and who's making it as opposed to people who are just saying, yeah, we're for these things, but maybe they're not acting that way? Okay. So you might think that freedom is, you know, broadly not the worst thing in the world, but that freedom of speech is overrated and that if speech is dangerous or threatening, then it's legitimate to restrict it. You might think that freedom of the press is generally a good thing, but to ensure

security and diminish risks is more important. And so to pressure freedom of speech is important. And this isn't like a novel idea that there are nations all over the world that don't put freedom of speech front and center. And our current administration has, let's just say, a complicated view of freedom of speech. And, you know, that's historically a view that freedom of speech isn't the be all and end all. You might think that the rule of law is a lot of machinery. and you've got to do things. And you and I saw that we wanted to do things, but the rule of law under President Obama,

as under most presidents, kind of stands in the way of things. And so you might think that the rule of law is a value that's overridden. And I think it's fair to say that, well, I was in China a few decades ago, and I could see talking to members of the party that the rule of law was something that interested them, but they weren't super keen on. because it would stop them and constrain them and make people able to do stuff that they thought people shouldn't be able to do.

And the rule of law is a constraint on any president. And you might think I'm trying to channel it in the form they'd say, you know, you've got to get the border under control or you've got to do things to make our cities secure. And the rule of law, you know, maybe the president ultimately. has authority over Congress or over the courts, maybe that's inconsistent with the rule of law, maybe that's the right understanding, they might think. You might think that democracy is a value, but you might think that it's not the only value, and that there are things that have to be done to constrain democracy that are necessary for the country to be great again. so these are these are basically like six values that sort of underpin liberalism do you think there are values that underpin illiberal thinking and some of these authoritarian societies like what is the philosophical basis for illiberalism or autocracy or whatever you want to call it that's such a great question so for many there's one word and it's order

Roosevelt said during the World War and Hitler's rise, he said they call it a new order. It is not new and it is not order. But there's in every human soul, I think, an appreciation at least of the value of order in the face of fear. 1984 Orwell's great novel of great liberal novel of liberalism. I reread it recently and what makes it so powerful is that Orwell was actually in his soul ambivalent. He ultimately came out, of course, on the liberal side, but the appeal of Big Brother, it's manifest on the page and it's order and submission. So submission's creepy, I think really creepy in this context, but order. less so. So that's one anti-liberal value that seems like a Trump card. There's another, and I say this

with some regret, and it's faith. So there are some religious, anti-liberal types who think that faith trumps everything, and that that means that the liberal values have to recede or be overcome. And you might think if you have certain kinds of religious convictions that liberalism is like an antonym of what you want and the freedom that liberalism celebrates might endanger certain forms of faith. I really hope not that one thing liberalism is trying to do is allow faith to prosper as it might not if the state is unconstrained. But that's another antonym. Of course, there's a conception of nationalism, which is also very emotional, which might be thought to Trump, freedom, pluralism understood as like lots of different types and democracy. The blood and soil,

that's a form. And struggling to capture a form of anti-liberalism that anyone would have sympathy with, I think it's hard, at least for Americans. But if you think of like a community in which everyone is connected with everyone else and is basically bonded to a narrow set of, let's say, desirable things, it might be, you know, generosity or kindness. And then the liberal stuff seems a little destructive or shouldn't, but it might seem that way and not so central. Yeah, I mean, as you talked about sort of the impulse for order in every human soul, to some extent, you can see that sort of woven through a lot of the debates on specific issues, right? Which is on immigration, there is this impulse, at least most people in the country, you know, they want control of our borders, right?

And it's the debates over crime. And it's, you know, yes, we want to make sure that we don't have massed. agents in the street, throwing people into vans, but we also care about crime and we want safe communities. And yes, we want everyone to be free and pluralism, but also, you know, the world can sometimes seem out of control and that it's changing very fast to people. And so we do want this order of community and bonds and things that faith can provide, or at least organized religion can provide. I thought some of the, I guess, most coherent articulation of this that I've heard recently is coming from the vice president.

And clearly, J.D. Vance has identified himself as a member of the, quote, post-liberal right he's friends with and has been influenced by post-liberal intellectuals like Curtis Jarvin and Patrick Deneen, who wrote what you might describe as the bizarro version of your book, Why Liberalism Failed. What do you make of J.D. Vance and this sort of national conservatism movement? Is it illiberal, post-liberal, something else? Both, I think. I think Vance is very hard to get a grip on. I think partly he's obviously intelligent. He can be aggressive, have you noticed, on an artist formerly known as Twitter. Yeah, I have. He doesn't have a gentle tongue always.

he's thought one thing and then thinks another, and that's fine. That's all of us in a way are subject to that. I think he is in the grip of an anti-liberal orthodoxy, though what its ultimate political shape is TBD, but it seems to be a kind of nationalist lack of full enthusiasm, let's say, for the values of freedom and plurality understood just as like lots of different people who think lots of different things. And I don't know that we've seen anything like it in the United States before, where Vance is now. So it's different from Trump and it's, you know, Trump is less orderly. And Vance seems right now a little orderly. And I do think its intention with American traditions going back to the founding.

Well, it's interesting. I do think that sort of the post-liberal right does have a particular set of challenges in the United States of America. And now those challenges are related to the founding of the country and the founding documents, which you can tell that some of them are wrestling with, including J.D. Vance, with the principles and the declaration, with the Constitution with the Bill of Rights, it certainly seems like America of all places in the world was founded on these very ideals that you're talking about. We were just talking about freedom of religion, right? That is the reason that people came here, right? It's to practice the faith that they wanted to practice. And it almost requires a rewriting or reimagining of America and American

history in order to see this project as anything but an expression of liberalism, right? Yeah, I think so, where, you know, as a kid lawyer, I worked at the Reagan administration. So I saw in the first year Reagan's form of conservative and close up, and they were then very keen on freedom of speech, on freedom of religion, meaning everyone, and really keen in the first year, not throughout, on the rule of law. And there was a kind of deregulatory fervor and low taxes compared to where we'd been, of course. And that was the thing. It wasn't a kind of remaking of our national culture. Yeah. And I do think it's fair to say that's intention with where we've been for the last 80 years. I think it's also fair to say it's

intention where we've been from the very beginning. And even if it weren't, it would be objectionable on the ground that it's disrespectful to people in their diversity and the commitment to, you know, if you're in Mississippi or Georgia or New York or California, you get to go your own way within limits. Can't hit people. Yeah, I mean, speaking of limits. Like, how do you draw boundaries around these principles? Like, when does a political leader or a party or a movement cross from liberal to illiberal? So the rule of law is a pretty simple one. And while people don't jump up and down, you know, for the rule of law, the way they do for freedom of speech, I kind of like them to. There's a sentence from a Supreme Court

Justice named Felix Frankfurter who said something like the history of freedom for English-speaking peoples is in large part of history of procedural safeguards. I don't know why I've remembered that from law school. I remember my feeling when I read that. It's a real bumper sticker material right there. I think that guy's old, really. The idea that freedom is the history of procedural safeguards, I think I remembered it because it was so implausible and crazy.

But think now about people in America who don't enjoy the benefit of procedural safeguards, like today. Yeah. And so Frankfurter was kind of old then, but it wasn't a crazy statement. And that idea, that the idea of the rule of law and procedural safeguards, that should be completely bedrock. And that's kind of the first answer to the question. Freedom of speech, there's my mind's naturally John to Supreme Court justices.

Justice Jackson had a better line than Frankfurt. which is compulsory unification of opinion, achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. And we're not seeing that in the United States, but we're certainly seeing it in Russia and China and elsewhere. And so that has also a foundational quality. Offline is brought you by MintMobil. If you're still overpaying for wireless, it's time to say yes to say. saying no. At Mint Mobile, their favorite word is no. No contracts, no monthly bills, no overages, no hidden fees, no BS. Here's why you should say yes to making the switch and getting

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Taxes and fees extra. See MintMobile for details. What part of today's Republican Party do you see as a liberal and which do you see as liberal, but just very conservative or right-wing? Because I think in a lot of people's minds, thinking, okay, well, are we just calling, if we're calling, like, you know, Reagan and traditional Republican conservative thinking liberal, and we're calling the left liberal too, and then we're basically just putting like Trump and J.D. Vance and Russia and China outside

of this, like where, what part of the Republican Party is liberal and what is illiberal right now in your view? There's a part of the Republican Party that says these regulations that were so amazing, done by the Obama administration. They were perfect. Smart guy in charge of those, yeah. Well, the guy in charge might not have been so good, but they are poems, these regulations. And the part of the Republican Party doesn't like poetry. They want to excise Shakespeare and Keats from the Federal Register.

So that can be liberal. We suffer when we think of that form of liberal conservatism, but it's deregulatory and it's consistent with, let's say, a more laissez-faire Milton Friedman vision. I don't share it at all. That's not my preferred form of liberalism, but it's freedom-loving, and it's consistent with the rule of law. Then there are others, of course, that say we need to have entrepreneurial activity, and if you have high taxes, that's going to squelge economic growth.

So something like the president's tax reduction. are a really good idea, and we want more. That's consistent with the liberal tradition. Then there are other Republicans who are just scared. And so when there's an illiberal thing, like, let's say, an attack on law firms, which is not because the law firms are violating law, but because the law firms are politically incorrect, they self-silence and either acquiesce in illiberal activity

and we shouldn't diminish the horror of that, that to say that a law firm is going to be basically threatened with non-existence because it's been representing people whom the party in power doesn't like. That's, you know, defining of a violation of liberal principles. The Republicans are scared. They don't like it. They might even dislike it, but they're not going to do anything about it. and they're acquiescent in illiberalism. Then there are others, and these are people, you know, evidently in the White House,

who have an account. And I know some people who are adjacent to them and say the account is they were, they meaning the Democrats and Biden, they were doing these horrible things, and now it's our turn. I think the right thing for a liberal to say, liberal meaning people who believe in freedom, and the rule of law is they did that terrible thing, and so we're not going to. But there's a kind of illiberal, anti-liberal revenge, of course.

And that's when you're in the midst of something, it's very hard to know what you're in the midst of. So what we're in the midst of is most unclear, but we're in the midst of something where it's unclear that we're not in the midst of a movement in which rule of law values and free speech values are under severe pressure. So I teach at Harvard. That's where I'm speaking from. And so I haven't been not following the various attacks on the university. And there were initial things from the Trump administration that were kind of ballpark. You know, to say no anti-Semitism, that's fine.

And to say no lawful anti-Semitism, that's more than fine. emphasize the importance of viewpoint diversity at the university, that's, I think, really good and important and array for that. But then some of the things that are being done at the university, they feel like a self-conscious assault on academic freedom. And that, you know, maybe that's not the number one thing that America puts out in its list of the most important things. But that's what uh illiberal anti-liberal be tyrannical authoritarian governments that's what they attack they attack and then everybody gets scared there's an argument that trump and in today's republican party is simply the the logical extreme endpoint of where the party's been headed for

some time, and that the sense of, you know, pulling yourself up by your own bootstraps morphed into survival of the fittest, which morphed into the fittest deciding to use their power to protect themselves and hurt their perceived enemies. What do you make of that sort of slippery slope argument? Well, it might be right, but we could imagine counterfactual Republican success stories, which would be really different from what we're living in, where it could also be said that that was the triumph of the big, made strands of republicanism. So if we had George Bushism succeeding, then we could say that, and we could either love it or not love it. If we had some other strand that was more, let's say, extreme, but not like

what we're now observing, we could say that. I think history is full of surprises and serendipity, and there are a few things we could specify that led President Trump to get where he is that could easily have gone the other way. He, I think, pains me to say it, but he's amazingly, what's the right word? Charismatic? In his own way? In his own way. I was going to say something like, some combination of lucky and good. Oh, yeah. He's both, really lucky and really good, a politician.

And that, it's not clear anyone else could have done that. And he tapped into, as you're saying, some parts of the DNA of Republicans. But those aren't, I think, the only parts by any mean of Republicans, nor are they the primary parts. But he activated them. Yeah, I've been obviously trying to figure out. out how we got to this illiberal moment, maybe for the last 10 years now. And as you say, some of it is, we don't know, counterfactuals, but some of it could just be by chance or who Donald Trump is and what he activated. How much, and this is something we talk about on this

show all the time, how much of the rise of post-liberalism do you prescribe to the rise of social media and our or in just in general beyond that just our shifting media and information environment like has has the is the way that we interact with one another and get information has that highlighted a specific illiberal impulse that was always there or did it perhaps destroy something or weaken something that was holding up our liberal democracy what do you think about that i think so so uh once upon a time the media structure had general interest intermediaries, which would result in a shared conception of truth and maybe a shared cultural understanding of like what's happening this month and what our society is about. And amidst that

power of general interest intermediaries, there would be shared spaces and a sense may be that this one, you know, the Republican is a different group from me, but We have a shared narrative, basically, and we see the world broadly the same way, and they're certainly not enemies or horror movie villains. It started to be clear roughly in 2002 that we were getting information cocoons or echo chambers where people could sort themselves into communications universes of their own device. and I think the importance of this can't be overstated. There was an MIT professor named Nicholas Negroponte who said,

we're going to have the daily me, the people can live in the daily me. And he was so excited about that thing. He said, that's fantastic. If what you want is to learn about Tom Brady all the time, the only thing that interests you is Tom Brady, then you can just have the Tom Brady me. That's your thing. Or if it's Taylor Swift, so too.

And he thought this was fantastic. Some people thought at the time that this is a nightmare, and it's a nightmare for shared understanding and also for seeing people as fellow citizens rather than as enemies or space aliens. And what's happened with the new current social media, some of its algorithms, some of its voluntary self-sorting, Facebook did a study a few years ago that suggested against its own interests, so they published it. that, hooray for them, that it was algorithms were having a bigger impact than self-sorting on the rise of echo chambers and information cocoons. And that's a lot of it. We know if people sort themselves into communities, let's say, of people who think that Vance is Luke Skywalker and except better because he's not naive and kind of gee whiz.

then as they talk about the new hope that is Vance, they will get more confident and more unified and more extreme in their enthusiasm for Vance. So it's a phenomenon called group polarization, which doesn't mean that people split. It means that people get more intense and extreme if they talk only to one another. And gosh, these old experiments of self-sorting

and its consequences, that's welcome to our world. And that breeds rage. It can breed violent thoughts, and it definitely breeds illiberalism. I mean, I think about artificial intelligence and what that's going to do, because everything you just said,

the personalization, the individualism of the information that we're receiving, the news that we're receiving, the group polarization, if we continue to have these chatbots that are sycophantic in nature and constantly telling you that you're right and that everything you're thinking about and reading, you're right on target, and now everyone's getting their own source of information. I mean, there's a version of it where you think, okay, maybe if all the chatbots are based off the same information, then maybe that will be sort of something that can bring us together.

At least we'll have a shared reality again. But it seems like that's not where this is going, at least as of now, because you can see AI becoming ever more personalized, and it's serving as something that cuts people off from one another even more than they are now. I worry a lot about that. I don't know if you've been thinking about that at all. Completely. So a few years ago, I did an experiment in Colorado where we got people in Boulder together

to talk about climate change, affirmative action, and same-sex unions. And we got people in Colorado Springs to do. do exactly the same thing, knowing the Boulder people would be left of center and the Colorado Springs people would be right of center. When we asked the Colorado Springs people what they thought and the Boulder people what they thought just anonymously and privately, they were different to be sure, but there was some diversity in Boulder and there was some diversity on the issues. Colorado Springs, they were apart from each other, but not radically apart. Then what we did was we got the Boulder people in groups of six to talk to each other about what they

They thought about climate change, affirmative action, same-sex unions. We did the same thing in Colorado Springs, and the people in Boulder went whoosh to the left. After talking to each other, just for about half an hour, they ended up being very extreme on the three issues. And the people in Colorado Springs, they look very right, which they didn't before they started talking with them. Kind of created a MAGA community in Colorado Springs just by having them talk to each other. On climate change, they went from being kind of diverse and moderate to thinking it's all a hoax and ridiculous. Okay, so that is a little experiment on a number of years ago. But as you say, AI can produce that experiment like in a heartbeat.

In a moment of rebellion, I asked a large language model whether the Washington Nationals were the best team in baseball, which is completely ridiculous. And it kind of argued with me, but then it eventually said, you know, know, depends on what you're measuring, if you're measuring hard and enthusiasm and promise, maybe the Washington Nationals, which is a horrible team, maybe AI told me, maybe they are the best team in baseball. And you can think that. But I thought, okay. Well, I mean, and the profit motives here are to keep people using these chatbots and to keep them on the platforms, much like those were the incentives for social media. And so you don't want people coming to your AI platform or your chatbot and having them say, oh, that chatbot was an asshole and told me

I was wrong. And so I'm not going to use it anymore because, so I don't know how they solve the problem of how these things get sycophantic. Well, it's just what you say. They want to maximize engagement. And that is, I mean, there are solutions, including creation of spaces in which people speak with one another across lines, and there's technology working on this, the creation of apps, and I hope large language models that emphasize, let's say, the reality of some views of the world that would say, you know, the Washington Nationals, hooray for you for loving them, but they're kind of not so good this. Offline is brought to by Haya, typical children's vitamins are basically candy in disguise,

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with Haya for their best-selling children's vitamin, receive 50% off your first order to claim this deal. You must go to Hayahealth.com slash off. This deal is not available on their regular website. Go to H-I-Y-A-H-E-A-L-T-H-H-com slash off and get you. get your kids the full-body nourishment they need to grow into healthy adults. I saw you say that you describe even the most conservative justices on the Supreme Court as liberals. And I was thinking hard on that for a while because I think that, you know, Alito and Thomas especially are quite extreme and as extreme as many Republican politicians. Why do you say that they're all liberals? And just to take an example, and I'm asking this because you think about the Supreme Court all the time and you have for much of your life,

like how do you think about, say, the decision to grant president's preemptive immunity for official acts in the context of liberalism? Okay. So let's step back a bit. When I gave that answer that all of the justices are liberals, that didn't produce a flood of enthusiastic statements of gratitude in my inbox. I figured that. I figured that might be the case, yeah. Let's start with the immunity decision. That's a grotesque decision, and I still find it staggering. So it's grotesque in terms of the rule of law. And what are the precedents? What are the standard legal sources that justify the view that presidents have absolute immunity and

a large class of cases and near-absolute immunity, presumptive immunity in another set of cases. So this is, I think, at first glance, the right reaction to the immunity decision is incredulity that the court kind of took out of a hat, a rabbit, and I'm insulting rabbits here. It was a legally reckless decision, I regret to say. there are ways they could have gone kind of in that direction that were less reckless there was no legal materials for it chief justice roberts is very smart and he did some kind of ingenious things to make it look more legally grounded than it was i think i know what's going on in the case though i think the court was doing something a lot like bush against gore and this is going to be a sideways view of the case but i believe it to be true that they in bush against gore one view is they were trying to elect the Republican. Another view was they thought the country was swirling into chaos, and they were the only place that could prevent the swirling. And I think that was a large part of it.

Here, there's a part of the opinion where the court talks about the executive cannibalizing itself, where one president indicts the predecessor, then the new one indites the one who indicted the predecessor. And then it's like a cartoon, except it destroys our democracy. And they actually have a paragraph, it's not legally grounded, so it's a very puzzling paragraph. It doesn't say that the original understanding of the Constitution calls for immunity. They didn't say that. They couldn't. There's no good evidence for that. Right.

But they were afraid of a self-cannibalizing executive reaction. I think that's what motivated it. But this was not a very high moment for the court along any dimension. And I think it's fair to say it wasn't a little. liberal moment in the sense of a rule of law moment. Now, there are some fussy things you can say, which the rule of law might be that the precedent is not subject to the rule of law. That could be the rule of law. But there isn't much reason to think that's the right understanding of our constitutional order. So I'm with you on that. That was not a good moment. Now, what I want to

think and what I basically do think is while Alito, let's talk about him, has some, I think, broadly Trump-adjacent views about our culture. He's not on a mission to make America great again. If you look at his opinions, he's using legal materials in a legally, you know, a recognizable way. Freedom of religion, he's very big on it. So that might be, you know, just there's an overlap. between some forms of anti-liberalism and liberals and liking freedom of religion.

Freedom of speech he's big on. So it may be that the test will come and we'll see, but he's a freedom of speech guy. Generally, Alito is working with the rule of law. So in some of the executive power cases, I'm pretty nervous about where they're going, including on due process type things, but the decisions so far seem kind of temporizing. You know, they're not authoritative. They're giving Trump a short-term victory. I don't have high hopes for Alito as putting his self in front of a tank here. But there's much less reason to worry. I think about Alito as a source of horror in the United States than

to worry about others who aren't on the courts. On Thomas, he's an originalist, and I don't share that view by any means, but he thinks the Constitution should be understood to fit with the original public meaning. He's kind of the leading originalist. And I think he also has some kind of culturally Trump-adjacent views, and there's some family stuff that is concerning and maybe worse, I hope not. But I think it's too early to say whether in terms of the rule of law, freedom of speech, freedom of religion. These are kind of roll over and play dead types. And I'm hopeful, this is kind of my nature, but also we haven't seen evidence to the contrary. I'm hopeful that they're not going to be like that. Yeah, when I was thinking

about an example to talk about with you, I landed on immunity because it is true that since the second Trump term, some of the most, some of the decisions that will relate most directly to Trump acting as an authoritarian in ways that, you know, sort of blow through the rule of law and some of these foundational liberal principles, they have either, it's either been like an emergency DACA thing or a stay or they're, you know, they haven't ruled completely yet. And some of the decisions that I very much dislike, which is most of their decisions in the last several years. They read to me as extremely conservative and right wing

and not as illiberal in the sense that, you know, you'd see in China, Russia, countries like that. I agree. And the immunity one's the really bad one. I think it's important to say the court and the Chief Justice in particular, they're

at a very difficult position, one that no Supreme Court has been in, I think, in a long time and possibly in this sense ever, which it's possible, the President of the United States will refuse to obey in ways that are public and, you know, really calling the question. And that makes a dance in the form of some temporizing, not so surprising. So this gets to sort of a bigger question I have about liberalism

and illiberalism. You cite the example of the Supreme Court, and let's say John Roberts is like, okay, I have these liberal principles, even though I'm conservative, and I'm dealing with clearly an illiberal president, and how do I hold this whole thing together? You can zoom out from that, and that's like the whole country right now, or at least half the country. And, like, how do you defeat an illiberal movement with liberal principles? Or to put it another way, like, is liberalism adequate to the dangers presented by illiberalism? well um i guess we'll find out i mean so far in american history the answer is yes i have a book on the shelf that you're looking at it's not a i it's actually real real shelf and one of them is called

the coming american fascism it's from the 1940s and it's not a warning book it's an extremely hopeful an optimistic book saying we need fascism and it's coming and that was a thing that was in the culture in the 30s and 40s and we prevailed

because our culture was firm and strong we also got a guy who was willing to do a lot of stuff but was also committed to freedom of speech and freedom of religion. He did some things with Japanese, that that wasn't a liberal moment. But we had liberal leaders. Now, I mean, okay,

so there's a book that I think bears on your question and bears on everyone who's listening. It's called Scientists Under Hitler. And it's a really tedious book. It's about the physicists, so it's narrower in the title. And it's about how this physicist, they just wanted to be physicists under Hitler. They didn't like Hitler. They didn't hate Hitler. They kind of just like physics. And then their colleagues started getting hurt, maybe killed, and deported, their Jewish colleagues, and some of them got in real trouble for some randomish reason. And then what are they going to do?

And basically they did nothing. They did their physics. And so it's a boring, very long book, but it's not a boring story. At one point, a Hungarian physicist who left said, you know what? I noticed among my physics colleagues, I noticed they kept calculating the consequences. They kept thinking, if we go against Hitler, what good will it do? What risk will it put on us? And what are the costs? And he said, as soon as I saw that they were calculating the consequences and not thinking about morality, I do Hitler would win. Okay, I think that's the answer.

that for all of us, including maybe in some ways both you and me personally, there's a risk. And if people are willing to say, you know, you only live once and there are moments that are moments when things are on the line. And self-silence is not a great idea, even if you don't know that the speaking up would do any good, still you're not going to be looked like those physicists under Hitler. So that's one calculation that people can make. I think the other is people who believe in liberalism and who would consider themselves liberals to say, in the face of illiberalism,

why are we playing by the rules and they're not? And this is the, you know, the dime store example of this is, you know, everyone sort of trotting out Michelle Obama's when they go low, we go high quote, which I always personally think has been misinterpreted over the years. But anyway, but you know, and you can see some of this on the left, right, which is why are we always the ones playing by the rule? Why are we always the ones having to defend institutions that people tend not to trust anymore, even people on our side, because they have not delivered what they are supposed to deliver, or at least

what people thought they would. And if we're facing people who don't abide by the law, who don't care about civility, who don't care about social norms, who don't seem to care about any of these liberal principles, then shouldn't we abandon our principles, or at least, you know, make some exceptions in order to defeat this movement? In one of my government's stance, a more recent one, there was an interagency conflict. One department wanted to do one thing. One wanted to do the other thing. One of the departments wanted to do something illegal, not a criminal, but just violated the law. And the other department said, we don't do illegal things. And the department that wanted to do the illegal things said we can get away with it. There's no court that would strike it down. And the

department that didn't said there's a moral obligation to follow the rules, even if you can get away with it. And that group prevailed. Now, I think it was. the idea that way lies madness is probably the right response to why shouldn't we violate the rules because they do. And it's a little like you lose your soul in the process. Now, of course, if you're about to be killed, you might hit someone really hard if that's the only way you're going to live and maybe self-defense is a defense. The idea of breaking rules, of course no violence

and it creates a spiral of terribleness and who knows what comes of it. So the hope is and history

in America vindicates it that taking the path of you know broadly righteousness wins.

I guess the argument is that it's more it's ultimately more persuasive to other human beings. I mean, you wrote that liberals agree with Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., who championed the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us, but freedom for thought that we hate. And then you write, liberals who insist on that proposition do not claim that people must declare their fidelity to liberal principles, including that one. And it's tricky because it's like if you don't insist that others declare their fidelity to the liberal principles you hold as universal, how, then do you organize a society that adheres to those principles?

Well, up till now, we've done pretty well. And President Trump has lost a ton in court, both in the first term and now. And, you know, he's president. He's entitled to do a whole lot of things. He's maybe entitled to scale back most or all of the climate change initiatives. But there are a lot of things he's not entitled to do.

And courts are saying that. People are saying that. there's, I think the right thing to say is unless you're in circumstances in which survival is literally at stake, you follow the rules and make a bet that the things are ultimately are going to be okay. You're asking really deep questions. So if it's, I don't think we're in anything close to 1930s Germany, we're at something really not seen before, but I think it's not close to that. It's very hard to know what we're in

the midst of. There are certain horrors. I live in Concord, Massachusetts, and the revolutionary war started there, and it wasn't thought by the people who fired the shot hurt around the world about a mile from where I live. It wasn't thought we'll lay down our arms. but I don't think we're at a moment of that kind of close to that kind of what's the right word I don't want to use a word that diminishes some of the terrible things that are happening so it's going to say that kind of urgency you got it exactly that was the word but I didn't use it because for some people in our country and maybe in some systemic ways there there is an urgency I don't know how you feel.

Part of me feels that there are people in the Trump administration, and there's a part of the president's self that could take another path, the path of tariffs unless they're illegal, the path of tax cuts, and not the path of assault on institutions. I worry that I think in the first term that there were a lot of those people around the president and that maybe the president himself has some impulse. pulses, whether they're moral or not, maybe even just for political survival, and because, like, he wants to be loved, right? That could have pushed him in the right direction. I worry that in the second Trump term, that Trump is the moderating force, which is a crazy thing to say, and that the people around him are even more extreme, and that, in fact, they have fallen victim to that sort of group polarization experiment you conducted in Colorado and that we saw when people get together in a closed information ecosystem and are constantly just telling each other, yeah,

this is the way let's spinning each other up and this is Antifa and they're violent. We got to go. I worry about that dynamic taking place in the administration right now. There's no question that's right. So you'll remember in the Obama White House, of course, everyone basically was very pro-Obama, But there was diversity of things on economic issues, and there were internal debates that were pretty heated. And no one, I think, was far right, but there were people who were center, for sure. And that was a constraint. And I completely agree that we all hear, and some of it's in the press, that people stir each other up. And it can happen in any group, but it's a little like what happens online sometimes happens in government offices.

Yeah. And there's demonization. of, it's pretty clear there's demonization of people who are on the left or on the center left, and that, I think that makes no sense

in the sense that if people, you know, this is a little corny, but if people were talking to each other, it wouldn't happen. This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. October 10th is World Mental Health Day, and this year we're saying thank you, therapists, Better Help therapists have helped over 5 million people worldwide on their mental health journeys.

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that really gets to the politics of this. I don't mean to make you be a political pundit, but I mentioned about sort of Democrats defending institutions. And I ask this because this is a book, and liberalism is a political philosophy that very much relies on and grows from institutions. And I wonder how Democrats and anyone else who doesn't like the illiberal drift of the Republican Party and the country right now sort of makes a full-throated case for liberalism and liberal institutions at a time when, most people in the country from across the political spectrum see institutions as broken and untrustworthy. And it seems like, you know, promoting and defending liberalism almost seems like an inherent defensive institutions. Does that concern you? What do you think about that?

Well, that's great. So thinking what direction is the right one, there's an idea of separation of powers, which is an institutional design that people tend to like a lot. It's kind of of abstract. So whether people can march under the separation of powers banner is to be questioned. But the idea of an independent judiciary, that has more human meaning now than it used to. I mean, imagine there's someone who's accused of crime who is subject only to the executive branch. It could be a Democrats' executive branch or a Republican's executive Bridge. That's a nightmare. And the idea that you can get a lawyer and the executive has to make its case to a court and you get a jury. That's, you know, that's institutions and that's defining of

liberty. After some stuff happened in Nazi Germany, a political philosopher named Carl Schmidt and was Nazi friendly, he said, you know, the separation of power stuff is terrible. It's liberal. We're beyond that now, and we aren't beyond that now. So separation of powers is one thing. Then there are particular institutions, and it might be the word institutions is not going to get people going, thinking the way to build is on which institutions people do trust. And it may be that the answer to that question isn't obvious, but do distrust the Department of the Interior when it's trying to figure out what to do with respect to oil spills. If you do, whom do you trust instead? Probably the people of the Department of Interior know

something. It's not an obviously discredited entity. Now, the CDC used to have that status now, and I wanted Secretary Kennedy to be a very good secretary. But there's something you know, very agitated inside his head that's producing agitation in our country. And the right answer to that isn't to think the CDC is a terrible thing. It's to get a CDC that isn't a terrible thing. Yeah. Seems like that brainworm did a real number. You say that liberals like laughter, they are anti-anty laughter.

I will take that in the spirit of a liberal who is very much anti-anty laughter. But I assume there's a political point. intended to make there. What is it? If you look at tyrannical entities and persons, they don't laugh a lot, both because they lose control when they laugh. So there aren't a lot of pictures of Hitler and Stalin laughing. Yeah. If you can find Putin. Trump too. Wow. Trump's never laughing. Yeah. I mean, right, right? And it says something, because when you laugh, you lose control and you're kind of yielding in a way. Yeah.

And so there's that. So laughing itself is like you're losing authority a bit and recognizing, I think, in a way, a quality of at least the person who's making laugh in you. And if

you're being laughed at to a tyrant, that's like a body blow. Because a tyrant depends on fear and superiority and if someone

isn't making a joke at that person's expense we've all probably felt that at times being laughed at maybe even if only by members of our family and it's a little hurts a little bit but it brings you down

and that's important but tyrants don't think it's important so I think you're making me think better than I did when I wrote the sentence, that is more about what's going on with liberals being anti-antil laughter, that liberals believe in the equal dignity of persons, which means that we all kind of lack dignity sometimes, and that's what it means to be human.

And then you get laughed at, or you're laughing and you're a little out of control, you can't stop laughing maybe. And that's a really liberal thing. Yeah, yeah, it is. This is going to sound like a real swerve a non-sequitur to a lot of people listening, but I know you won't take it that way. What are your top three songs from Life as a Showgirl? You know, I've just

started listening to it because I'm kind of more focused on Olivia Rodriguez right now Swift, and All-American Bitch is kind of playing a lot in my household. It's a good album. The Olivia album's quite good. It's really good.

So I've been settled on on your tailor yeah on the on the i've heard about four of them and i'm not really sure i don't have an order yet okay okay yeah we um we were i was actually at i can't believe i forgot to reach out to you i was at harvard last week uh i was at the Kennedy school speaking at the forum and um on the way from and then we had a wedding up in main and um on the way up to the wedding and the drive up emily uh had me and her and my brother and sister-in-law in the car and and the driver and had us listen to every single track and then rate it on a scale of one to five and talk about why we gave each song the rating that it did. So I've been deeply involved in this. I see you got to do that. I did get to do that. I did get to do that.

Ophelia may be the prize winner. Ophelia is quite good. I do think Ophelia's quite good. I think I'm a big opalite fan as well. Cass, it was so great talking to you. The book is called Liberalism and Defense of Freedom. It is a good, quick read but also I found it extremely helpful in really I've been trying to think about what is this new sort of political alignment that we're in and what does Trump and MAGA really represent and what are some principles that we can all sort of hold fast to as a society that are universal regardless of who's in power so that we don't get into this situation again and that hopefully we can get out of this one and it really helps crystallize that for me so thanks for writing it thanks for chatting thank you for that

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