Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 327 | Cass Sunstein on Liberalism

Episode Date: September 1, 2025

"Liberalism," divorced from its particular connotations in this or that modern political context, refers broadly to a philosophy of individual rights, liberties, and responsibilities, coupled with respect for institutions and rule of law over personalized power. As Cass Sunstein construes the term, liberalism encompasses a broad tent, from Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher to Martin Luther King and Franklin Roosevelt. But liberalism is being challenged both from the right and from the left, by those who think that individual liberties can go too far. We talk about the philosophical case for liberalism as well as the challenges to it in modern politics, as discussed in his new book On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom. Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/09/01/327-cass-sunstein-on-liberalism/ Support Mindscape on Patreon. Cass Sunstein received a J.D. from Harvard Law School, and worked as a clerk for Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. He is currently Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard. He served in several government roles during the Obama administration. He is recognized as "by far the most cited legal scholar in the United States and probably the world." Harvard web page Google Scholar publications Substack Amazon author page Wikipedia

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and more savings on every fill after that. Join the Shell Fuel Rewards program in the Shell app and enjoy life with more. Your nearest shell station is closer than you think. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. You probably know, just if you're a human being, much less if you listen to Mindscape, that the status of democracy in the world today is troubled. We have threats against democracy. We have arguments being made quite explicitly that democracy is falling short in one way or another. It's an important thing to talk about. But here in the United States, and in many of the places in the Western world that we recognize as democracies, we're not simply democracies. We are liberal democracy.

And that adjective, liberal, stands for something. It means something. It means that it's not just that people vote, and then whoever they vote for gets to do whatever they want. In a liberal democracy, there are protections for the rights of individuals, for individuals in minorities as well as majorities. There are institutional safeguards against people's rights being overturned, things like that. It's part of a bigger philosophy of liberalism. And I need to sort of work my way into it, of course, because the word liberalism means a lot of things in different contexts. To U.S. listeners especially, there's a very common context of liberal versus conservative. Democrats are liberal, Republicans are conservative, something like that. If you're a little bit more familiar with online discourse and or political science and philosophy, there's a different version of liberal that kind of means libertarian. It means the night watchman state. All that the government is supposed to do is making.

sure people don't harm each other and everything else, according to this version of liberalism, is okay. But there's a broader umbrella that we can talk about that includes both sort of New Deal FDR-style democratic liberalism, as understood here in the U.S., and also the kind of Ronald Reagan-style libertarian liberalism. The core precepts of liberalism in this view come down to that individual rights, diversity, pluralism, institutional, respect, rule of law, kind of way of arranging society whether or not you tax the rich and give money to the poor, that's okay. You can discuss that within the broader umbrella of liberalism. And this conception of liberalism is also under attack, or at least critique, maybe even more so than democracy,

in the sense that on both the left and the right, there is a temptation to say, you know what, these individuals don't always know what's good for them, or they don't always deserve the protections of the government and the institutions and the rule of law. There are some people to whom the nation belongs, and there's other people who don't deserve as much. Those are kinds of attacks on liberalism, and, you know, that's the sort of an attack from the right. attacks on the left might be that liberalism doesn't stand up enough for the rights of disadvantaged groups, of people who are underprivileged economically, or what have you. So I'm on the side that liberalism is a very good thing, and I think it's worth defending,

and so is today's guest, who is Cass Sunstein, who is a very well-known legal scholar and behavioral economics scholar, who he's written a lot of things. He's one of these academics who other academics are a little bit annoyed by it, how prolific he is, but that's all to the good. So we can't talk about Kass Sunstein's life's work in this particular podcast, but he has a new book coming out called On Liberalism. The subtitle is, in defense of freedom. You know, freedom is the idea and idea that is very closely intertwined with the idea of liberalism. In Sunstein's view, we're talking about a version of liberalism that both FDR and Almer Reagan count as. Martin Luther King,

Margaret Thatcher, these are all liberals in this particular definition of the word, and freedom is a big part of it, the freedom to be who you are, to live the life you want to lead. And as you'll see in the discussion, there's a lot of ways in which that conception, even though it sounds kind of anodyne, and of course we can all agree with this, is under attack today. And it's tricky to defend this conception of liberalism, because of course you're going to defend the rights of the people who are attacking it. That is part of your view of the world, that you have to give illiberal voices a chance to be heard in the public sphere. So we're going to talk about, you know, does rationality work in the public sphere? How can you defend liberalism? What are the common threads that

people who we think of as both sort of everyday liberals versus conservatives can agree on under the liberal umbrella and the future of it? You know, are we really in danger here? Maybe Yes, what can we do to protect these values that so many of us cherish very much? So let's go. Cass Sunstein, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. A great pleasure to be with you. You know, you've written a book called On Liberalism, which is one of those books that just the first thing you have to do when you talk to people about it is to say, but I don't

mean that, right? Like you have to be very, very clear about what you mean. So I'm not going to put words in your mouth. What do you mean by liberalism in the sense? I mean the liberal political tradition that John Stuart Mill helps define that includes Ronald Reagan and Franklin Delano Roosevelt that help fuel the birth of the United States of America that helps define Western Europe that has as its antonym communism and fascism that is opposed to illiberal or anti-liberal society. that are not comfortable with freedom and pluralism and individual agency. So that makes sense, but I think some people will be brought up short by the claim that both Ronald Reagan and FDR are liberals, right? A certain kind of American liberal doesn't want to include Ronald Reagan, a certain kind of classical liberal doesn't want to include FDR. Yeah, that's helpful.

So thank you for that. So there are people on the left who associate liberalism with progressivism, and there's nothing wrong with that. That's just a definition. So we might say that there's American liberalism, which Barack Obama was part of, and then there's American conservatism, which Ronald Reagan is part of. And that's not exactly wrong. That's one way to see the world. Or you could think that there are people who are liberal in the historical sense. sense who like free markets and who are classical liberals, as you say, like Friedrich Hayek,

who won a Nobel Prize. And then you think government regulation is terrible, terrible, terrible, and so are high taxes. And that's liberalism and progressives are on that definition illiberal. So to see liberalism in either those terms, that is left of center or classical liberalism isn't exactly wrong, but also not close to wrong is the view that I am pressing, which is that there's a liberal tradition, which is freedom-friendly, which sees freedom of speech and freedom of religion as central, that is compatible with free market thinking. So Reagan is part of the liberal tradition in that sense.

He's on the, I guess, American right, for sure, of the American liberal tradition. and Barack Obama is part of the liberal tradition, too, in the sense that he is enthusiastic about property rights, enthusiastic about freedom of speech and freedom of religion, insistence on the importance of pluralism and keen on individual agency. So I see an army of practitioners, Martin Luther King's part of the army, so is Reagan, so is Margaret Thatcher, And it's an army that has a lot of internal diversity. But it's a good army. It's a noble war that is the liberal war and the internal disagreements among people who are part of the liberal tradition are super important and very much, you know, part of American Western culture. But when I want to put a spotlight on is what liberals share, not least because it's under extremely simple.

serious pressure all over the world these days. Well, that's a great answer because I was going to sort of fret about spending time on arguing about definitions, but you're making a positive case that we should stick with this word because it highlights the similarities among people who would be perhaps naively, not usually lumped in together politically. Yeah, completely. So if we see solidity in the liberal tradition. in Canada, in the United Kingdom, in France, and the United States.

We'll see something inspiring and great, even if we think within the liberal camp, some people, we love a lot more than others. And also one of the things that you emphasize, at least in the beginning of the book, was there's an aspect of the rule of law and maybe even institutionalism playing a big part in this liberal tradition. Yeah, as you say it, it occurs to me what I have. had kind of not had top of mind, which is I actually worked for President Reagan and for President Obama. Oh, okay. There you go. You have authority here.

Well, I can talk about the rule of law for both because I worked in the Justice Department under President Reagan as that kind of kid lawyer. And I worked in the White House under President Obama in a more senior position. And I can report that in both, the rule of law was riding high. So under President Reagan, the Justice Department said frequently in the first, eight months or so of his presidency. You want to do this, but the law doesn't allow you to. And both president personally and Ed Meese, who was the White House counsel, said, if the law is against it, we're not going to do it. Please try to find a way that we can do it lawfully.

But if you can't, we'll move on to something else. And so when the law kind of superintended by the Justice Department said, no, President of the United States said, I got it. And that also happened under President Obama frequently where there was a policy preference. Was there a legal way to do it? Frequently, no. Now, of course, it is the case that some things that both Reagan and Obama did could be questioned as inconsistent with the law, and they lost some in court, but basically both administrations were firmly committed to the rule of law, certainly in the time that I serve there. And take the rule of law to mean that the rules on the books have to be faithfully followed in the world, that you can't apply the rules retroactively so that if someone

does something that's lawful, you can't come along and say, we're going to put you in jail for doing that, that the rules have to be clear and understandable by people, and also that the rules have to be stable enough so that people can order their lives in accordance with them. And that's, I think, an insufficiently appreciated safeguard of freedom. I taught in China a number of years ago. I saw there, you know, for all the amazingness of what China's done, the rule of law is in flourishing there. And so people are really scared.

And one of the points you make is that when these, government departments wanted to do something that was apparently against the law, they didn't just say, oh, we can't do it because if we tried, we would get caught. They said, we shouldn't do it because it would be wrong, and they were sincere in that. Yeah. So there's a morality, which is part of, I think, liberal cultures, which let's call it the morality of legality. And it's essential in government itself, where it might be that you could do something, like issue a regulation, that no one would have the ability to challenge for technical reasons. So you'd get away with it.

But I was involved in a discussion of one of these things. And the majority view in the group was you resign rather than do that. And, of course, didn't get there because people in positions of authority ultimately, didn't want to do the thing that would have gotten some people to resign. And that's not about, you know, not getting in trouble or losing in court. It's that you have a moral obligation to follow the law. And while some people, including yours truly, will sometimes go a little bit over the speed limit, the idea that you flout the law creates something in the brain, which is like a taboo. And so you did mention briefly that one of the reasons why it's important to talk about

liberalism and to define it and defend it is because it is under attack in various ways. So let's lay out the space of enemies here. We have enemies on both the right and the left. What would what would the sort of pro-steelman case for being illiberal from the right look like? Okay, so there's a set of ideas that in one form they're ridiculous and another form they're formidable. So let's start with the ridiculous. The ridiculous idea on the right is that liberalism stands for something like what Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, called the Playboy philosophy. And liberalism means everyone should have sex with everyone else and that self-control.

is a terrible thing and that to indulge your id or to do what pleases you is what liberalism is for. And there are people who think that. There aren't many of them. You Hefner appeared to have thought that. But that's the kind of preposterous conception of liberalism. But it's not hard to find on the part of the, let's say, non-liberal right. In Russia, there's a conception of liberalism, which is that it's decadent and where decadence we could cash out in multiple ways. But let's say it means people don't exercise self-control. The more formidable view goes back to Tocqueville, and I think this is interesting, which is that liberalism, liberal societies, including our country, depend for their stability on non-liberal virtues.

So the idea here, and this is sometimes on the religious rights, sometimes on the secular but very animated right, let's say, is that you need people to be people of faith, to have commitment to their community, to believe in tradition and family, and to do that not because they're exercising freedom that way, but it's just because that's who they are committed to being. And the idea is that liberalism kind of carves up or destroys or swallows the form. of character on which it depends. So in a liberal society, people don't have religious commitments. Religious commitments are scorned.

People don't have commitments to their community. They don't have an assortment of virtues, which social stability depends on. Now, I think that view in the end depends on empirical claims. the view of liberalism is a little like Voldemort and it's eating up these things. I think this is very impressionistic sociology, but it resonates. Intelligent people worry over this. Hey, Pasadena. Are you ready to take control of your financial future?

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I don't know if you saw there was a recent article in The American Mind, which is a publication of the Claremont Institute, with a title, The New Birth of Authority. And it was coming, it was a rightist critique of liberalism, maybe from a different perspective. Like you're giving the sort of heritage, tradition sort of perspective. But then there's also the idea that we just need authoritative leaders.

Authoritative is true weak a word. Authoritarian leaders. Like it's a more efficient form of government to have a person telling us what to do. It was the line being explored there. Is that something you also see as ascendant these days? In some places, yes. So there's some people, some fantastic questions, I really thank you, who have a, something that feels like a deep emotional commitment to authority, and in some forms it seems

almost erotic. And I find that, you know, noteworthy and troubling, but I think that's the right word. And I'm thinking of Roosevelt who said during World War II, they call it a new order. It is not new and it is not order. fair, I think, but let's get into the idea. I was in a non-democratic, not liberal nation not long ago to talk about behavioral economic stuff and health and safety. And the people were super nice and it was all very formal until we had lunch where they got informal. No one was drinking, but they were informed. And they said, you know, democracies can't work. And I said, what do you mean? And they said, you can't do anything. There's every four years it changes. There's no authority. And it can't be stable. And I liked them. And I was impressed with their vigor than sincerity. They weren't saying we need to suppress freedom. That's a great

thing to do. They meant it just couldn't work. So there is this view. I think it's a little like the view as you identify it, that liberalism eats up communal values and faith. They often prosper under liberalism, and if they're not prospering, it's not liberalism's fault, I say. That, you know, the United States has done spectacularly well without being, let's just say, in the main authoritarian, and periods of, let's say, prosperity in the largest sense, meaning well-being as well as economic growth, have occurred without authoritarian leaders. So I think when people say that, it's more psychologically interesting than it is, you know, anything other than that.

But it might be politically relevant. Yeah, I think so. I think so. I think everyone feels it. I can feel it myself. There's some part of the human heart that reads Orwell's 1984. And I think that's why it's such a great book, that the attraction of Big Brother, every human heart gets that, even if they're screaming all the way. So the last line, he loved Big Brother, that was a triumph over. self, that's a horror movie or horror literature. But it's not simple. It's what makes it horrible is it resonates. So the idea that what the wellsprings are unclear, but this is deeply illiberal stuff. I mean, Lincoln said about slavery that what's bad is no one can rule another without that person's consent. That's what makes slavery wrong. And then Lincoln said, that's the shit. That's the anchor of American republicanism.

That's the foundation of American liberalism, you might think. And authoritarianism, a person's ruling another without consent, or if there's consent, it's an alienation of freedom. And maybe this is me reading too much into it or going too far, but I'm interested to hear your take. There's been discussion recently about the manosphere. I don't know if you have had the pleasure of being subjected to that discussion, but the idea that, you know, a lot of young people, men, boys especially, you know, are hearing a message from podcasts and things like that that is full of resentment and a little bit misogynistic and things.

But to me, part of it is just that a truly liberal world order is kind of much trickier to navigate than, you know, simple, conservative. everyone's role is defined world order. And especially when you're in the group who's being a little unbalanced by a change in social mores and customs, you lash out a little bit. And maybe that feeds into the sympathy for illiberal ideas. That's really interesting. Okay. So there are two forms of liberalism in political philosophy. And I think they're very intuitive. One form is that liberalism is a political ideal that says there's freedom of speech, other liberties, no one gets enslaved, everyone has liberty. And then if, you know, there are cultures that are of one form and then cultures of a very

different form, that's completely fine. If there are cultures in a liberal society that aren't liberal, they may be left-wing communes or they might be right-wing some things, but they are themselves not valuing liberal things. They're just living within a society that permits them to prosper because they're liberal. That's political liberalism, and it makes space for manospheres and those who think manospheres are not so good. Now, if people are hurting each other, you know, if there's assault or rape, that would be another thing, but lots of room for stuff. Then there's another idea that I think the Manosphere would be very hostile to, I think, if I understand it. Let's call that perfectionist

liberalism. The word is maybe not ideal. It's associated with Mel, at least in some of his writing, and with a philosopher named Joseph Raz, and it says everyone should be autonomous. It's not just about a political ideal. It's an idea about what a good life is. where everyone has the autonomy to make choices and create the narrative of one's own life. And maybe the Manusphere is partly maybe accepting some aspect of that, but also rebelling against some aspect of that. I think a lot, as you talk about it, and I feel a little like I'm an amateur on this, I think there's something about humiliation and shame that are important things that help contribute to Manosphere stuff. And the right approach to that is to be kind of humble and constructive, that if people feel humiliated or ashamed or that their society is making them feel humiliated or ashamed,

there's that guy whose name I'm blocking the Canadian, Jordan Peterson, is that it? Oh, yes, that's it. You got it right. Yeah, yeah. He's not my hero by any means, but he's resonating. He doesn't feel, I mean, his relationship to liberalism is pretty interesting. I think he is an autonomy and agency type person, but he's tapping into something about bail. shame and humiliation, a lack of respect. Well, I do think this, again, this might be me reading too much into things. I think that there's like a little bit of attention, if not a contradiction here, at the heart of

liberalism. When I was a grad student, I was an astronomy grad student at Harvard. I got the pleasure of sitting in on courses with John Rawls. And, you know, Rolls wanted to separate out this space for people to share the relevant values to live in a political liberal society, but have very different conceptions of the good, right? I worry that that's not a clean distinction that we can actually make. How easy is it to say, okay, we can disagree about all these things, but we can still agree that we should live in a liberal democratic society? Yeah, it's a really serious practical question completely. So let's get at the liberal ideal here,

which I think Rawls is the best exponent of, which is a really serious practical question. And completely, so let's get at the liberal ideal here, which is, that in a liberal society, we don't insist on any particular conception of the good. So some people think I want to be an astronomer because I think the pursuit of scientific knowledge is the best life for me or even something like it is the best light for lots of people. And someone else thinks, I think the best light for me is one of, you know, my dad had a construction company. And he built houses in Massachusetts and a little construction company. He didn't make a ton of money, but he loved it. And that that was the best life for him and the idea of being a lawyer or an astronomer just didn't appeal to him even a little bit. And then if there are people who have a

conception of the good that's associated with devotion to one or another thing, maybe they care about, you know, animal welfare and that's their thing, or maybe they're choosing a life of devotion to God, and this is what they want. And then a liberal society says, you know, there's space for all of that. But you're right that there's a risk that if there are heartfelt competing conceptions of the good, people will end up fighting. And liberal societies are trying to reduce those fights and say, we make space for both of you. Now, the abortion issue was, was, is one where their competing conceptions of the good, broadly speaking, which are just in severe tension. And President Trump says, we just want to return it to the state.

which is, I think there's something liberal in that. So I get that. He's saying, let, you know, Mississippi do one thing and New York do another. And that's kind of a broadly liberal thing. But if you think that abortion is a form of murder, then that won't thrill you very much. Because if X number of states are allowing murder, that's not a society which feel very good about. And if you feel that women have a right to choose, then the fact that the right is being violated in a bunch of states, that's not pleasing, or it's not tolerable or something. So

completely liberal society's struggle to allow multiple conceptions of the good in nations where the ground rules allow space for all. And mostly that has worked in Canada and the United States, in the United Kingdom, and France, and in post-word Germany, and there are many others. So the notion that it's unstable might in the long run turn out to be true. But I want to do a play on Churchill on democracy, you know, who said it's the worst form of government except all the others. But I actually don't like Churchill saying that because it's not appreciative of enough of democracy. It's a little too British and not enough American. The American view will be much more excited about democracy. It's the best effing form of government. And that's because it recognizes freedom.

Well, this does seem to be related to the political liberalism versus perfectionism liberalism debate. Like political liberalism almost seems to be like, well, it's the best we can do, right? Like we're going to have people disagreeing with each other, but we're going to try to construct a system where they don't kill each other at least and maybe even work together. Rather than this optimistic positive program that, no, this way of organizing society is actually good, not just the worst, the least evil. Okay.

So there's one way to think about political liberalism that, some liberals highlight. They call it a modus vivendi. That is, it's a way of living together. And here, let's think of this as honorable and not just expedient, that if you have a society that's large where people disagree on the good to have liberal ground rules, and that's why, you know, political conservatives can certainly be liberals in this sense and are, I have a good friend, by the way, who's quite conservative, who liked a draft of my book, which was kind of him. And he said, I'm a liberal in your sense, too, and that's because I'm conservative. What I want to conserve is liberalism. So the motive of end the idea says it's really like, almost like a peace treaty, where diverse people find a way to live together.

And that's because they agree, you can follow your conception of the good if I can follow mine. and we're not going to bug each other. And that's one view. I think another view is more about respect and humility than about peace treaties. It's that for one person to say to someone who's very different, I'm humble about by conception of the good. Of course, I live in accordance with it. But it's not something I'm going to force you to do because I respect your.

dignity, and I also am humble about my capacities. And so that, I think that captures better the core of political liberalism than the peace treaty view. And it's also more inspiring. So all of us, if we're over, you know, seven years old, we probably encounter people who are very different from ourselves. And there's something, if you find this, there's something, I don't know, the word moving is to cornball, but it's something like that. It's something in that direction about meeting people who are so different and just having a spark of recognition that, you know, we're kind of the same or kind of laugh at the same things or not. You know, I think it's not cornball. I think it's actually necessary.

I think that, and I'm giving my opinion here rather than yours, but. You know, I think that we can't be apologetic when it comes to the virtues of liberalism. I mean, it's both an aspirational goal to imagine the people with different conceptions so the good can live together. And it's a miraculous fact that it's actually worked really, really well. Completely. And it is under threat. I'm thinking a bit about Washington now. So I've had three stints in Washington.

And particularly in the two most recent, I've worked for Democratic. Democratic administrations, my best Senate interlocutors were Republicans, not Democrats. And we both found things we agreed on, and the disagreements, I certainly learned from them. And that was, no, and they're still friends, and that was, of course, an honor. But also, we have different conceptions of the good, but we could work together. So I do actually, I have even more follow-up questions on this, but I feel like we haven't given enough air time to the critiques of liberalism from the left. We gave some conservative ones. So it's a little bit trickier in my mind, a little bit more subtle, but they're absolutely definitely there.

Yeah. So the book actually came originally more from responding to critiques from the left. than from the right. So there are left-wing critiques that identify liberalism with neoliberalism and say that liberalism is associated with free markets, is hostile to equality, is an engine for acute deprivation on the part of people at the bottom, is

Reaganism is the essence the core of liberalism. It's liberalism working itself pure. And if we want climate change and the worst features according to the left of current society,

that's what liberalism gets us. And so that's in my mind, like that's part of the critique that there's just too much permission in liberalism for bad things to happen. I mean, I guess maybe it's the same critique, but not just economic things happening bad, but also personal, cultural things happening bad. Like liberalism lets you be really, really nasty to people, to hold groups of people, to discriminate against people if that's what you want to do. Does that count as a leftist critique of liberalism? That's great. So I was kind of giving a low-grade version of the Marxist critique of liberalism. Marx doesn't keen on liberalism.

But there are people who are very concerned with racism and sexism, someone who's a friend and in some ways a hero of mine, Catherine McKinnon who wrote sexual harassment of working women. She doesn't have anything nice to say about liberalism or, I should say it more cautiously. She is not essentially upbeat on liberalism, though she does have two nice things to say about liberalism. So, and she's, you know, done fantastic work. Her conception of liberalism is that it's associated with a hierarchy with a conception of equality that's too thin. And of course, there are many people who think that celebrating hate speech and corporate speech and sexist speech,

etc. And maintaining hierarchies of these kinds, that's what liberalism does. So let me put it in these very vivid terms. Like you and I, for better for worse, so we didn't plan it this way, we're straight white men, right? And so here we are saying like, oh, I could imagine having a speaker on campus saying truly terrible things, you know, basically saying that people like me don't want to live. But it's just, you know, the market of ideas, we should let them do it. But if one is a member of a group who is actually maybe suffering under those kinds of critiques that they might think of as existential, they might be less sanguine about letting any kind of idea be spoken in that venue.

Okay, that's fair. That there's a debate to be had about free speech and its limits. the liberal view of the limits is very different from the illiberal view. And then we'd have to figure out which is right. I mean, it might be that John Stuart Mill's arguments for freedom of speech prevail where Mill thought that even if there's false or harmful speech, it's really important to learn what other people think, that to keep your own views fresh and alive rather than dead and calcified is a good thing, that to allow the error of false views to emerge through discussion is really important.

That's, you know, these arguments may in the end be convincing. I think we'd need to know the case. If there's someone arguing that men are better in math, let's say, than women on average, bracket the question whether that's true. Do you want to suppress that? I mean, I think it was either Shakespeare or Bob Dylan, probably more likely the former, who said that way lies madness. So what are we talking about suppressing?

I mean, Robert Jackson, the Supreme Court Justice, who wrote the opinion for the court upholding people's right not to salute the flag in the midst of World War II, wrote compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. The greatest sentence ever written by Supreme Court Justice. So we did, compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard. So if there are people who are saying things that are protective, let's say, of unjust hierarchy, be aware of the unanimity of the graveyard. You know, I'm trying to bring up the critique, but I'm very much on your side here. It can be a little bit difficult to find exactly the boundaries of these things, but we should be able to talk about where the boundaries are rather than just assuming it's obvious. So what are the commonalities between the right-wing critique and the left-wing critique? Somehow, I feel like it's something about not trusting individuals to have too much autonomy.

Yeah, I think that's it. It's that individual agency is seen as, you know, something like a problem or not appropriately put at the foundation of what we order our society on the basis of. Now, I think it's on the right, mostly, that the liberal commitment is seen as, you know, only about choice. That's too simple. So liberals agree that there are certain kinds of choices that are properly constrained. So if my choice is to play super loud music at 2 a.m., so people can't. sleep, that can be stopped. Or if my choice is not to buckle my seatbelt, that can be stopped. So liberals have a lot to say about harm to others and about clearly people imposing risks on

themselves that make no sense. But something about agency and individual autonomy, those are part of liberal commitments, but maybe pluralism belongs. as it's twin. Yeah. So this was great in the founding period. The people who didn't want the Constitution said you can't have a constitution in a large society. You need homogeneity.

And that was channeling Montesquia who said, a republic has to be little. Otherwise, it's just going to be too terrible. Everything's going to fall apart. And Hamilton said, this is exactly wrong. that it's in a large republic where there's pluralism, that the clashing of opinions and deliberation will promote circumspection. That's a really liberal thought, that if you have diverse people talking about things, there will be more circumspection. Now, that's not always true, but it's a liberal commitment. Is there something about liberalism that puts a lot,

maybe even too much trust in human rationality and the ability of communication to resolve disputes? It's also a great question. So Habermas, the German philosopher, a liberal, I knew Rawls a little bit also. And Rawls said to me with awe at one point, isn't Habermas the greatest German philosopher the last hundred years? And I'm just a lawyer, so I wouldn't have a good answer to that question. So I said, why do you say that? And he said, well, is there anyone who appreciated liberalism and democracy more clearly? And Habermost's famous idea is the ideal speech situation. The forseless force of the better argument prevails.

And that is an idea about rationality. I'm not sure how to think about that. I mean, if you are a political liberal, who believes in, you know, a set of principles and constraints that liberal societies are governed by, you're not taking a strong stand on rationality, really. So if you think, you know, people love their families and they love their dogs and they love their country, and that's, you know, essential or important to art admirable, it might be that those don't have rational foundations.

So, I'm thinking a little bit of fascists who didn't like rationality in the public domain that much. They liked close affective ties. And so liberals don't like that. They want people to be able to say, you know, I love my country, but this is for reasons I can give. This is not the right direction. Yeah, I guess, I mean, it's clear that just like with democracy, democracy. Liberalism can be construed is more about allowing the values to be different than rather than saying this is the best rational decision-making process. But there are conflicts,

right? I mean, maybe let's put it this way. Sometimes when you have a political opponent, you can compromise and deal with them. Sometimes you just got to fight them. And where do you draw that line? One might critique liberalism by saying that, you know, they're two, reluctant to turn the discussion into a fight. This is completely great. So I'll tell you my second government job. I was overseeing government regulation. There's a White House office that does that.

And President Obama, who taught at Chicago, was kind of left to let me do that job. And so the word regulation puts people to sleep. Think immigration rules or environmental rules or science-related rules coming from any government body. Think of highway safety rules or food safety rules or rules involving agriculture. All the rules have to be approved by that office. And some of them were politically really contested. And this is going to be – I want to puzzle. over your question in light of this. The way, the question, what the regulation should look like

was not fundamentally, what are our values? Are we pro-safety or pro-market? That would be just too abstract. It was what are the costs and what are the benefits of the regulation. So if you had a regulation that would make cars safer, what would you get from it and what would, and how much would it cost? and some of the monetization issues are very challenging. But let's just stipulate that they're not ridiculous, and the challenge can be met. So if a regulation that costs $4 billion and would save one life a year, that would be very hard to defend.

If you had a regulation that would cost $100 million and save a thousand lives a year, that would be really easy to defend, and it was all based on that, not values. So based on that experience, I'm tempted to say that at least in government, some of the value disagreements can be quieted by being very rationalistic about the data and what you get and what you lose. And this was something, the cost-benefit apparatus, I think it's a little bit on the run now that it wasn't like the number one thing of the Biden

administration and the Trump administration is not their number one thing either, but it survives, and it was kind of riding high under both Bush and Obama. And Clinton liked it too, maybe not as much as Obama, but it was riding pretty high there. And that was a way of getting agreement often, I found, among people who were politically diverse. I'd say this environmental rule is going to save X number of lives and not cost a lot. You don't like environmental rules, but you may be like this one. And then the Republicans say either yes or I don't agree with you on the facts. And that's a completely civilized debate to have. What is the data show? Now, on some issues, I'm thinking capital punishment is one. Maybe, probably, an abortion is another. Maybe immigration is inflexion

inflected by this now, just got a vote and see, you know, who has the numbers. And on immigration, we've seen a big shift. And that seems to be the numbers, the voters, not the data. But there's a one conception of democracy, liberal style is the word deliberative democracy, one that places is a premium on political accountability so that the majority wins, but also requires reason given. So if the majority wants to do something that is not justified by reference to some form of deliberation, then maybe the court will step in or maybe we'll think that our constitutional order has caught a virus. I'm certainly, I like the implicit message. I like the implicit message in what you're saying, which is that let's always be on the lookout for common ground where we can

have a discussion, right? Which, of course, we should do. Now, the cynic in me is going to say, like, literally as we're having this conversation, there's this roiling discussion about gerrymandering, redistricting in Texas. And it seems like this is not a let's find common ground kind of thing. This is an us versus them and someone's going to win and someone's going to lose. And is it possible to be like two institutionalist, two rule, it's not even rule of law, but rule of norms or something like that, and say, well, like if the rules let them do it, then we should let them do it. At what point do you just say, like, no, actually we have to use whatever arrows are in our quiver to fight against this. So here's a story. There was one air pollution rule that was super expensive. It's been done and

undone in various ways over the last 15 years. When it was proposed in the Obama administration, it was a very expensive rule, like really expensive. And a member of Congress, a really important member of Congress, wrote a letter to me saying this is a terrible rule, and here are 10 ways in which it's terrible. Don't finalize it. And it was actually a good letter. It was substantive, and it explained why the 10 ways were correct. And in the end, we agreed with roughly six of the ways and didn't agree with four. So this is the only time I did this, on the day the rule was finalized, it was a big deal rule in Washington. I called that member of Congress up.

And I said, we agreed with you on six, and thank you for that. And for we didn't, and here's why. and he said, that's amazing. Really? And he said, that's amazing. He said, with the six, those were the most important. He'll take that, yeah. Yeah, and he said, I'm going to put out a press release, approving of this rule.

And I said, thank you. That's great, but I wanted really not to ask for a press release, but to thank you for your letter and to explain what we did. He didn't release the press release. I think his staff thought, boss, have you lost your mind? Yeah. Proof this environment. But he didn't release a negative press release.

Right. And that was something where there was no tribalism on his part and on the part of the executive either. He wasn't thinking who would win. I don't know whether he thought he had a lot on his mind. So I don't know if he thought on the four we screwed up pretty badly or whether he thought, as you say, I'll take it. I got the majority. I got the big ones. on the gerrymandering, I get it, that there is a sense, you know, there's something, it's not really a war, but it's kind of a little like that, and we have to win.

And tribalism is something that liberals really recoil from. That's, you know, I mean, look at the dollar bill. for meant one. Tribalism is a dirty word for liberals. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so identity politics on the left make liberals nervous.

When people say as a whatever, I think this. Right. Liberals kind of roll their eyes a bit. I mean, they do think, okay, you have some knowledge because you were this. But the fact that you're, you know, let's say a white male, doesn't mean you have to be in favor of whatever white men have historically benefited from. Right. I mean, liberalism definitely does have this assumption of some degree of universality of the human condition, right?

Like, we're different, but we're all, we do share some things. And without that, liberalism, we'll just never get off the ground, right? Completely. Yeah. And as you said at the very, very beginning, from various directions, liberalism is under, threat and maybe it always has been, but the threats seem a bit more effective these days. I'm wondering whether technology has something to do with that. And I'll just tell a quick story. Literally this morning, I saw a link to a new research paper where these folks did the following

thing. They made a social network on their computer. They didn't invite any people. They only invited large language models. So they put a bunch of LLMs and let them talk to each other on the social network. And what they found, and I can criticize the study from a million different ways, but what they found was instant polarization and extremism. And the basin of attraction seemed to be networks of outrage in the social networks. And does that worry you? That kind of thing that, you know, that's not very Habermossian right there. Completely. So let's talk about a phenomenon that liberals worry over. It was discovered by an MIT graduate. student with the improbable name of Stoner.

And what Stoner discovered is if you get a group of people who are deciding whether to take a risk, they end up being more risk inclined than the median member before they started to talk. So his groups, they polarize toward a more extreme position in line with their pre-deliberation tendencies. And the basic finding, which has now been replicated, a zillion times is, on average, group of like-minded people engaged in conversation with one another and end up more extreme, more confident, more unified. I've done group polarization experiments myself with left-of-center groups and right-of-center groups, and you can get left-of-center groups that are kind of diverse

and a little centrist that after they talk to one another, they wish to the left on climate change and affirmative action, for example, and the same happens with right-of-center groups. They go far to the right on affirmative action and climate change because they're engaged in discussion with like-minded others. And social media is a breeding ground for group polarization. And I know that Facebook and Twitter, the artist formerly named Twitter, have worried about this periodically. I think they haven't worried about it enough.

But, of course, either an algorithm can sort you into a group of like-minded people, just thinking about how amazing it would be to increase the minimum wage higher and higher or how terrible it would be to have rent control. And I have my own views in both issues. But you can get people very left or very right just because they're talking with one another. And either voluntary choice or algorithms can create information cocoons. And that's not a happy development in a liberal society. Well, yeah, I mean, I'm going to go further than that.

Like, is it the fact that this has been supercharged by technology? Is this something that is not just kind of frustrating and, you know, annoying that our grandparents are a little bit more extremist than they used to be, but even an existential threat to the idea that people with different values can live together in a liberal society? I think that's fair. I did that the fact that many democracies are struggling, one causal factor is polarization of the kind we're discussing, read through the use of social media and the destruction of general interest intermediaries. I heard a word recently, I hadn't heard before, called the monoculture.

Oh, yeah. It was said by people, I probably should have heard it before, it was said by people who were very upbeat on the monoculture, meaning at least some vehicles by which we all see something that's the same. It might be like July 4th or Martin Luther King Day, or it might be the Colbert Show. Probably isn't, but I like the Colbert show, or it might be some news media outlet that isn't particularly right or left,

but it forms a shared culture. And democracies, I think it's fair to say democracies need some of that, and it's not clear we have enough. Are there active efforts to say, like, okay, technology is putting liberal democracy in a more precarious position than it has been before? Can we do something more clever than just regulating speech on the Internet, which doesn't seem very effective? Yeah. Some of the social media companies have thought at times about how to kind of tweak is probably too soft a word, but something like information that's received by people, so it's to diminish the echo chamber phenomenon. So they have a lot of data on that, and they've done some thinking about that.

This is an area where government, I think, rightly fears to tread, but we could see much better. performance from just one for meta on this. But I do worry that networks of outrage are their business model rather than something they're trying to avoid. Yeah, completely. I did a study with Danny Kahneman, who's very good, was, died not long ago, and David Scotti also very good. So I was a little over and over my head on the statistical analysis, but I had a had some great collaborators about juries and outrage. And this was juries. It wasn't like political people, but we found that groups of people ended up much more outraged after they engaged with one another than individuals who were outraged. So if you're really mad about misconduct,

as you talk to other people who are mad, you go really have a tantra. And we saw that with every scale we use to measure the magnitude of outrage. Well, speaking of business models, I don't want to not cover the idea that once one values individualism so highly, maybe this is more a statement about capitalism than liberalism, but one is more willing to put up with vast inequality and concentration of wealth and things like that. And we tell ourselves a story that it's all just the logical working out of the market when maybe that's not always true. Is this a way? weakness of liberalism that it is too willing to put up with vast hierarchies of power and wealth

and influence. Okay, so I'll put cards on the table. So there's the liberal tent that includes Reagan and Margaret Thatcher that's pretty comfortable with vast inequality. And I think that is a part of the liberal tradition. Then there's the liberal camp, let's call it, which. within the tent that is not comfortable with that. And Franklin Delano Roosevelt believed in a second Bill of Rights in accordance with which everyone would have a right to a job. Everyone would have a right to a decent minimum. Everyone would have a right to good education, he said, and protection against the vicissitudes

of disability, old age, etc. So, in my view, the best conception of liberalism endorses the second Bill of Rights, which has been lost a bit from our culture. The people who are worried about extremes of wealth and poverty would think that's a first step, but it helps everyone at the bottom, doesn't produce enough equality. I think that's fair. I would be worried just personally, not so much about people that are super rich as people who are quite poor and to give people not just a decent minimum. but a chance to go above that. And how to get there is a policy question. And I wouldn't want to say everyone has a legal right to $100,000 cured wealth.

But to engineer situations where people have an opportunity to get there, that's a liberal idea. Well, yeah, I do think that it's pretty defensible to imagine, you know, a social safety net, even within the umbrella of liberalism. I guess what I'm wondering about now, and I haven't thought through it very carefully or even read anything about it, is this distortion of the perfect speech situation caused by the fact that some people have much bigger megaphones than others. Yeah, that's fair. So there's economic inequality itself as a concern of some liberals and some left-wing anti-liberals. Then there's the concern that economic inequality turns into political inequality. And I think that's a very fair concern. And the debate over campaign finance, et cetera, is a way of, you know, trying to come to terms with it.

But we certainly haven't done enough. I mean, it's shocking the extent to which people with a ton of money can get, you know, can form public opinion because of all the resources they have. Well, your senator, Elizabeth Warren, seems to be very, very concerned about the monopolistic, natures of big tech companies. And it brings us to the question, because you've written a lot, obviously, about what government can do to nudge is the favorite word, you know, people and institutions in the right direction. Is that counting as a sort of liberal idea of warrants that we should break up tech monopolies? Because even though it's sort of interfering with those particular people's freedom to do certain things, namely be tech monopolists, it will ultimately

help freedom more broadly. Well, it's clear that monopolies are something that liberals don't like either government monopolies. That's one reason liberals don't like socialism and understanding socialism as public ownership of the means of production. So Hayek, the kind of very pro-market guy, was very much opposed to monopolies. Liberals are also opposed to private monopolies. So that's, Warren is speaking for that part of the liberal tradition. That cough was a strategic one for a hard question that I'm not sure how to answer. So if I cough again, might be the mind is not proceeding quickly enough.

The way to handle tech companies is not determined by liberalism. So Warren is speaking within the liberal tradition, but whether we should break up Apple or Google or meta seems to me not a straightforward question. They certainly have a lot of power, whether things would be better or worse if they were broken up, whether this is AT&T Redux where that was a good thing to do, or whether it's something where there's a lot of competition and it's okay and they're big and they're doing great. but that's a part of a reward they get for being so amazing. I'm agnostic on that. That's perfectly fair. It's actually good, right, to occasionally say that you don't have a strong opinion about one thing or another. One thing you do have a strong opinion about it, and we're winding up the podcast.

I really wanted to give you a chance to expound upon the idea that you talked about in the book on liberalism as encouraging experiments in living. It tickled the scientist in me and reminds me of the sort of idea of federalism as states being laboratories for democracy, right? It's it is that humility that you already mentioned. Like, we don't know the best way to live, the best way to govern ourselves. Let's try different things and see what works. Okay. This comes from Mill. Thank you for raising.

And it's Mills kind of throwaway phrase. but the idea is that in science or social science, astronomy, in life, there are lots of things to try, and you don't know really what works unless there's a lot of freedom to try it. So you might try an experiment that is designed to produce knowledge, and it might fail. I've been involved in plenty of those. but society's better off allowing that. If people want to experiment with a new sport, let's call a pickleball.

Sounds to me pretty unpromising. I love for pretty much. Give me tennis any day, but people really love that experience. They do, yeah. Joy and camaraderie and some exercise to a large number of people. So think of pickleball as a liberal achievement. And this is kind of, of course, a ridiculous example in some ways, but we have a million and one pickleballs.

Right. The sense of knowledge with respect to something that who knew we could have gotten there or some enterprise, you know, down the street where they're selling something. It's a pizza that's really delicious that people had an idea for or a little bookstore. and liberalism cherishes experiments in living. It might be two people, maybe different religions, different ages, and they fell in love, and it was an experiment, and it completely worked out. I mean, it's both the charm and the fragility of liberalism that it does not claim to know what's best all the time, right?

And some people are going to think, actually, I do know what. it's best some of the time, and that will push them in an anti-liberal direction. Right. During World War II, learned at hand, a very good judge with a very weird name, learned in hand, said the spirit of liberty is that spirit, which is not too sure that it's right, and that's really the spirit of socialism. And what's great about it is the words too sure. He didn't say the spirit of liberty has no idea what's right, but it's not too sure that it's right. Well, then for the last question, it's a perfectly obvious one. You wrote a book in part because you're sensing anti-liberal sentiments out there in the world. You wanted to provide a little bit of an epilogia. What is the future? I mean, how, I know that we've all written books. When you wrote the book and when it appears, are not the same day, you know, are things moving in the right direction? Or at least, can we see more clearly how to move things in the right direction? I think compared to when I finished the book a few months ago, I wouldn't say that liberalism is doing better today than a few months ago.

But we are seeing sprouting appreciation of liberalism on the part of extremely diverse people all over the world. And it's partly because you don't know what you've got till it's gone, as Mary Mitchell sang. and in some places, liberalism is gone, and in some places it's at risk, and that makes people think this is something to cherish. So the world isn't looking better, but there's more reason for optimism. If we can just make it through this, we'll have a renewed appreciation for what we could have. I think so. All right, that's a good, I like that optimistic place to end. So Cass Sunstein, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.

Thank you. Great pleasure.