Do Liberals Want a Beautiful World?

Last month, the Public Culture Project at Harvard University hosted a conversation inspired by two essays in our winter issue on the “left and the good life”: Jon Baskin’s letter “On the Liberal Imagination” and becca rothfeld’s “Listless Liberalism,” a joint review of Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom by Cass Sunstein, Robert Walmsley University Professor at Harvard Law School. Sunstein then wrote a spirited riposte to Becca on Substack. The conversation was moderated by James Wood, New Yorker book critic and Professor of the Practice of Literary Criticism in Harvard’s English department. Their remarks have been condensed and edited for clarity. Note: this dialogue is quite long—if it gets cut off in the email version, click here to read it in full on our Substack.

James Wood: Let’s begin with a quote, as Jon Baskin does in his introduction from The Point, from the literary critic Lionel Trilling, from 1946: “Unless we insist,” says Trilling, “that politics is imagination and mind, we will learn that imagination and mind are politics of a kind that we will not like.” We’re here to discuss imagination and mind in relation to politics, and in particular, to discuss what liberalism’s imagination and mind—its imaginative vision, its idea of aesthetics, of the beautiful and the good—might be. The impetus is the recent issue of The Point devoted to just this question, which includes an article by Jon called “On the Liberal Imagination,” and an essay by Becca Rothfeld, called “Listless Liberalism,” on what she feels is some kind of visionary lack at the heart of contemporary liberalism. Becca was reviewing Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom by Cass Sunstein, both published in 2025. “Fascism,” notes Becca, in her review, “has its aesthetic, but what is liberalism’s? Who is its Leni Riefenstahl?”—assuming we want one.

Liberalism might be said almost to have an aversion to publicly stated aesthetics. But if the right has a powerful critique of liberalism’s failings and increasingly an interest in the common good, then liberalism must fight that fight on the same terms, says Becca. Can liberalism support and adumbrate what she calls an “ample humanism” in which we can see disclosed what is beautiful and sweet, in her words, and sustaining? She charges both books with failing to ask what “life under liberalism is actually like.” If Becca is right about liberalism’s failure to describe an enticing and lovely picture of the common good, we’ll have to ask why, of course, and I assume that these questions will occupy us tonight, as well as the larger question of what we think the common good is. If liberalism is listless—tired, vacant, technocratic, legalistic, or too negative (and I mean negative in that specific Isaiah Berlin sense of a liberalism that defines itself best as freedom from government intervention), is this because liberalism is too heterogeneous to pin down? Is it because liberalism generally holds that it’s not liberalism’s task to tell people what to do?

As Jon Baskin notes in his piece, the leading lights of postwar twentieth-century liberalism—John Rawls, Richard Rorty, Judith Shklar, Martha Nussbaum, and I’d add to that list Iris Murdoch and Bernard Williams on the English side—were largely agnostic about the ultimate questions. That is, in his words, they preferred to leave “the great spiritual and aesthetic projects to the private and semiprivate sphere.” But what are the ultimate questions? And if we don’t want government telling us what they are, perhaps we do still want liberal writers to expand on what they are.

Could it also be that liberalism’s officially uneasy, but actually very smooth, relations with capital are a major source of its contemporary inability to envisage the good life? Liberalism prizes free markets, says Cass Sunstein in his new book, but how free should these markets be, and how much should we prize them? It turns out, in fact, that Cass has extremely interesting answers to those questions. He argues that liberalism is no necessary friend of laissez-faire capitalism. If contemporary liberalism is currently bad at making a case for ample humanism, it’s sort of strange is it not, given that this has traditionally been one of liberalism’s greatest strengths? Isn’t there a tradition that stretches from Montaigne’s humanism to James Baldwin’s? I’m thinking of a line I love from James Baldwin, where he says, “I’ve always thought that the only way for someone to be saved is to be saved by another human being,” and such a tradition might include George Eliot, George Orwell, Tolstoy—maybe not the late, religiously fanatical Tolstoy, but certainly the Tolstoy of War and Peace. And it might include, say, Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity. America has its own profound strand of what has been called “perfectionist liberalism,” which courses through Emerson, William James, and John Dewey, with a distinctive American emphasis on self-creation and cultivation of character over custom. Stanley Cavell called it “not a competing theory of the moral life, but something like a dimension or tradition of the moral life that spans the course of Western thought and concerns what used to be called the state of one’s soul.”

So without further ado, let’s dispute, prosecute and generally share this idea of liberalism’s lack, and also of liberalism’s strengths.

Becca Rothfeld: First of all, thanks, guys, for coming. It’s kind of my dream to have a Trilling revival going on. I’ve never heard Trilling mentioned so much in a public space or with such enthusiasm. I’m going to mention him a few more times, but this is already the happiest I’ve ever been.

The occasion for this conversation is an essay that I wrote for The Point, which came out a few months ago. The essay was a review of two recent books that bill themselves as attempts to reinvigorate liberalism on the eve of its decimation: Abundance by Derek Thompson and Ezra Klein and On Liberalism by our friend Cass Sunstein. It is a mark in liberalism’s favor that the writers of both of the books I criticized in the piece have subsequently invited me to come discuss my objections, and I’m so grateful to be here tonight. That has never happened to me before. Most of the people I pan never want to see me again. So that speaks well of liberals already.

I’m going to begin by summarizing the arguments of the piece, and I’m going to conclude by raising a few questions that I’ve been brooding over since it came out, and there will be another Trilling quote. But before I get into the weeds, it’s important to begin with a terminological note. What we on this panel mean by “liberalism” is not what is meant by, say, political commentators in the Opinion section of the New York Times. We do not mean the Democrats. We are referring to a political philosophy that arose in the seventeenth century as an outgrowth of Enlightenment moral philosophy and various Enlightenment-era conceptions of the nature of the self. Its hallmarks are an enthusiasm for autonomy, a propensity for diversity and a commitment to egalitarianism. I’ve offered a vague characterization of liberalism rather than a more concrete definition because the specifics are very much up for debate, and there are as many accounts of liberalism as there are liberal theorists. What matters for our purposes is that what we are talking about here is very much not the historically particular political orientation of the Democratic Party, much less in 2026 when it is peak listless; rather, a much broader political philosophy that has developed over the course of at least two centuries.

An important divide among liberal thinkers is this: Some of them are perfectionist—that is to say, they think there is a substantive liberal conception of the good life, of the way that we ought to live. Their aim is to construct a political formation that reflects, protects and gives rise to this privileged form of life. Some liberal thinkers, however, are non-perfectionist. That is to say, in their view, it is the job of a liberal state to enable citizens to devise and realize their own conceptions of the good life. This doctrine, according to which the liberal state should not favor or disfavor a particular conception of the good is called the “doctrine of neutrality.” Here is an example of what I mean. Christianity takes a controversial and substantive stance about the nature of the good life. Christianity asks its adherents to believe certain contentious things about the world, for instance, that Jesus is the son of God, and thus asks his adherents to believe certain controversial things about how humans ought to live. For instance, that we ought to worship Jesus or emulate him. A non-perfectionist liberalism permits its citizenry to be Christian, but it remains neutral only insofar as it does not compel them to be Christian. The most prominent liberal thinker of the past century is my other patron saint, John Rawls, who embraced a non-perfectionist liberalism, as do I.

With that said, here’s the basic picture that my piece paints. It is no secret that there has been a violent reaction against liberalism in America and indeed across the Western world for the past decade. When this inchoate seething takes on a philosophical guise, or pretends to, it calls itself post-liberalism. Post-liberal figures like the pundits Sohrab Ahmari, the Notre Dame professor Patrick Deneen, and Harvard’s own Adrian Vermeule, profess to make arguments against liberalism, but what I argue in my piece is that the crux of their distaste is just that: a distaste, a shudder of aesthetic revulsion. What they are reacting against is the texture of life under liberalism. And what is the texture of life under liberalism, or at least the brand of liberalism we’ve been living under lately? Here is a quote from my piece explaining: “Among the marquee mannerisms of recent liberalism we find chains selling salad bowls, mixed-use developments featuring glassy apartment complexes, the television show Parks and Recreation, the grocery store Trader Joe’s, the word “nuance,” glasses with rectangular frames, group-fitness classes, the profession of consulting, news startups focusing not on criticism or reporting but on commentary, and nonfiction that is a little too good for an airport bookstore but a little too slick and credulously economics-heavy for a literary magazine. The smug yet unconvincing performance of non-aesthetics amounts to aesthetics too.”

If this constellation of aesthetic artifacts is what the post-liberals react to and reject, then small tweaks to liberal policy will not assuage them any more than will academic arguments in favor of some of the central liberal tenets. My core objections to the books I critiqued, then, was that neither was really rising to the challenge that post-liberalism raises, which is to show that liberalism can give rise to a better aesthetic, a richer and more beautiful form of life than the one we are currently living under. One major issue is whether to rise to this challenge would require us to depart from non-perfectionist liberalism. I propose tentatively that it does not because I am not calling for the liberal state to mandate a better aesthetics. I’m calling for public intellectuals like ourselves, with some commitment to liberalism, to demonstrate that liberalism can give rise to a better aesthetics.

Now for a few questions I have yet to answer to my own satisfaction: First, what should a good liberal aesthetics look like? There are a few things that it could refer to. I could be talking, as I did in my piece, about the quality of life under liberalism. The texture of life is not unrelated to the art that that form of life produces, but those two are not the same thing. I could also be talking about art, and there’s a number of different forms that good liberal art could take: it could reflect or represent the whole of the liberal order, or the seething chaos that results under liberalism—someone I have in mind is the choreographer Balanchine, who creates an order out of chaotic movements that are dispersed across the stage. It could just be that good liberal art is actually illiberal, representing a strong embrace of a particular form of life, because the point of political neutrality is to allow people to be non-neutral in their private lives. So maybe just Dostoevsky or late Tolstoy is an example of what somebody should be doing when they make art under liberalism. Alternatively, liberal art could advocate for a substantive liberalism. It could demonstrate that pluralism is a positive good. An example of someone who does this is maybe E.M. Forster, whom Trilling described as a “liberal at war with the liberal imagination.” Or it could reflect the dilemma of somebody confronting disparate forms of life, as people under liberalism do, and people under different kinds of political organization infrequently do. An example would be a late Henry James novel, like The Ambassadors, or various Edith Wharton novels, where people choose between the confections of an inauthentic society and a more unconventional path.

My second spate of questions that remain unanswered are: To what extent is the connection between liberalism and bad aesthetics nonaccidental? Does liberalism tend to yield bad aesthetics? Is it likelier to yield bad aesthetics than any other political formation? There are two thinkers I like a lot, who have suggested that it has, and I’m going to read you quotes from both of them. The first is Trilling again from The Liberal Imagination:

Our liberal ideology has produced a large literature of social and political protest but not, for several decades, a single writer who commands our real literary admiration; we all respond to the flattery of agreement, but perhaps even the simplest reader among us knows in his heart the difference between that emotion and the real emotions of literature. It is a striking fact about this literature of contemporary liberalism that it is commercially very successful—at the behest of a liberal middle class, that old vice of “commercialism,” which we all used to scold, is now at a disadvantage before the “integrity” which it once used to corrupt. Our dominant literature is profitable in the degree that is earnest, sincere, solemn. At its best it has the charm of a literature of piety. It has neither imagination nor mind.

And if on the other hand we name those writers who, by the general consent to the most serious criticism, by consent too of the very class of educated people of which we speak, are to be thought of as the monumental figures of our time, we see that to these writers the liberal ideology has been at best a matter of indifference. Proust, Joyce, Lawrence, Eliot, Yeats, Mann … Kafka, Rilke, Gide—all have their own love of justice and the good life, but in not one of them does it take the form of a love of the ideas and emotions which liberal democracy … has declared respectable. … This is to say that there is no connection between the political ideas of our educated class and the deep places of the imagination.

And then in the Sixties, Susan Sontag wrote a review of Simone Weil in the New York Review of Books in which she doesn’t exactly echo Trilling—I’m trying, still, to figure out what exactly the relation between their remarks is, but she says something similar. She writes,

The culture-heroes of our liberal bourgeois civilization are anti-liberal and anti-bourgeois; they are writers who are repetitive, obsessive, and impolite, who impress by force—not simply by their tone of personal authority and by their intellectual ardor, but by the sense of acute personal and intellectual extremity. The bigots, the hysterics, the destroyers of the self—these are the writers who bear witness to the fearful polite time in which we live. It is mostly a matter of tone: it is hardly possible to give credence to ideas uttered in the impersonal tones of sanity. There are certain eras which are too complex, too deafened by contradictory historical and intellectual experiences, to hear the voice of sanity. Sanity becomes compromise, evasion, a lie. Ours is an age which consciously pursues health, and yet only believes in the reality of sickness. [… ]

Perhaps there are certain ages which do not need truth as much as they need a deepening of the sense of reality, a widening of the imagination.

So my question is, to what extent are Trilling and Sontag saying the same thing, and once we figure out what they’re saying, we can figure out to what extent they are correct.

Jon Baskin: I’m going to start just by talking a little bit about the genesis of the issue in which Becca’s article appeared, and the larger topic of that issue, as well as some thoughts I’ve had since we’ve put it together, and some of the responses we’ve got. And then I’ll come back toward the end to some very similar questions to the ones Becca raised.

The Point ran a forum this winter on what we called “the left and the good life”— and by left, we meant left and liberals; there were articles about both. The issue was inspired in large part by an essay we had published about a year earlier, right after Donald Trump got re-elected, by a young writer named Mana Afsari. Mana’s essay was called “Last Boys at the Beginning of History.” The article consisted of series of extended conversations between Mana and young, ambitious Trump voters in Washington, D.C.—young men, mostly, who had expressed an almost unbelievable enthusiasm for Trump. The article drove home for me the extent to which, for a 21-year-old, Trump had been the most important figure in political life since they began being conscious of politics. But there was another theme that struck me throughout the article, which was the sense that a lot of these young people expressed, and which was shared by Mana herself, of being let down by what they had found in left-liberal intellectual spaces, whether those were their grade schools or their universities, which many of them had attended during the first Trump term. They discussed how their professors were coming in and crying during class and doing all this therapeutic moralizing about what was going on, as opposed to actually teaching them about the humanities, which is what they wanted. And despite the fact that, as Mana points out, you could hardly imagine a more anti-intellectual figure than Donald Trump, they had found during this period a kind of openness and richness in certain right-of-center intellectual spaces that they hadn’t found in the left-liberal ones. So this prompted a question for us, in the wake of the defeat—which felt like both a political and a cultural defeat—of progressivism, at least for that moment in 2024. We felt that there was a task here, for us as a magazine. Could we challenge our writers to try to answer some of these serious questions that these young people felt were not being addressed in left-liberal intellectual spaces? Could we ask them to contend with what the good life had to do with the left and liberalism?

Now, I want to bring up one immediate objection some people have to this theme, which is, What are you talking about that liberalism doesn’t have a vision of the good life? Don’t liberals never shut up about what they think is good? It’s an oft-recited criticism that liberals are always moralizing at you, always telling you how to be and what to do, especially coming out of this period of what some call “wokeness”—or what Becca likes to call “in-this-house liberalism.”

In truth, these two strands of liberalism—on the one hand, what we might call hyper-moralistic liberalism, and then on the other, the “neutral” liberalism that consists in a kind of retreat from morality entirely, which we sometimes describe as technocracy today—these two strands have been with us for a long time. And actually they come up in Trilling. He would have used different names. He would have called it “bureaucratic liberalism” instead of “technocratic.” At the beginning of The Liberal Imagination , he talked about how liberals were often attracted to simplified ideas, and didn’t like things that were complicated. So it’s an interesting question whether those two poles of liberalism are in some way related to this problem of not being able to put forward a substantive vision of the good life. In some way, what’s missing from both of them is the ability to just say, This is what we think a good life is, and we’re going to put it up in competition with these other conceptions of the good life. Instead, you get this boomerang between the two.

So how does aesthetics fit into this question about the good life? While I think Becca is asking a very related question, certainly, to the question of the issue, it’s not exactly the same question. To go back to the quote that James read from Trilling in the opening, part of what those people in Mana’s essay were saying was that they found more “imagination and mind”—a larger openness to asking fundamental questions, but also a better way of imagining themselves having agency politically—in these right-wing spaces. Now, to meet this challenge for liberals is not easy for many of the reasons that have already been described, and I’m sure Cass will say more about this next. As soon as someone committed to liberalism begins trying to address these questions of the good life, they run up against the fact that they are committed, in some sense, to not endorsing any positive doctrine of the good life over any others, or at least not a full one. And this comes with a commitment to pluralism.

To come back to the question of what the good life has to do with aesthetics, one of the things I’ve been asking myself is: What creates a powerful aesthetic? It comes from a very convincing way of seeing the world, a very convicted way of seeing the world. I don’t think it necessarily needs to come from a vision of the good life. It could come out of a vision of how bad life is. We certainly know artists that have had aesthetics that arose from either side. But I think there is a question whether liberalism can provide something like this at all. Even in some of the higher points of what I might call “liberal art,” what you tend to find is a portrayal of society as good enough—not exactly beautiful or deeply meaningful in the sense that we often think of when we think of a strong aesthetic. And this problem is particularly acute at a time when liberalism is challenged by actually possible alternatives. So I think one of the things to discuss is whether we might need to reconnect with the imagination, even if it makes us uncomfortable, at a moment when liberals are being challenged politically.

I’ll close by just giving my own two cents in response to the question of this panel: Do liberals want a beautiful world? This is still a tentative response, and maybe I’ll be talked out of it, but I think liberals do not want a beautiful world, at least not as or qua liberals. To put it in another way, I don’t think beauty will ever play the role in liberalism that it might play in certain forms of conservatism or in religious political systems, partly because of the hierarchical, inegalitarian nature of beauty itself. To say something is beautiful is always to rank it above something else. You can redefine beauty standards, but you can’t get rid of them. It’s to misunderstand the concept of beauty to think it could apply to everything equally, or remain agnostic in regard to the plurality of ways of seeing the world. This is, incidentally, I think, why liberals make for ideal literary critics, but not always artists.

But this inability to advance some official notion of beauty also makes it all the more important that liberal societies, in my view, provide a place—and the tools and resources—for the autonomous development of art, culture and ideas. Liberal societies need to show themselves capable of being a home for great art and culture, and this commitment should be regardless of whether these cultural products are liberal in their orientation or not; often they will not be.

This goes to what Becca just discussed, with regard to the Sontag and Trilling quotes about the great works of liberal society often being illiberal. This was one of the lessons of the 2010s, when progressivism did try to extend into the culture and make liberal art, in a sense: I don’t think the results were impressive. And so I don’t think the answer can be that liberals need to politicize art, but rather to make sure that we provide institutional structures and social arrangements that allow for the free development of art and ideas as much as possible. Another way of putting it would be to say that it is especially important for a society that does not offer a fully substantive vision of the good life politically, to create a public culture where we can work out our ideals and values for ourselves, including through art.

Cass Sunstein: I completely love Becca’s essay. I thought it was great, and on to some deep points.

So what I’m going to do in these remarks is say something about what liberalism is, something about aesthetic objects that correspond to liberalism, and then make two conceptual points. And the title of these remarks—you’ll see the connection at the end—is: “Play It Fucking Loud.”

So the three liberal ideals that stand as the holy trinity are freedom, pluralism and the rule of law. If we want an understanding of freedom, we would fixate on freedom of speech and freedom of religion. If we wanted an aesthetic object that captures liberalism’s conception of freedom, it’s Terrence Malick’s movie Days of Heaven. The most beautiful moment in the movie is when the female lead, who’s attached to her lover, almost husband, falls for someone else, and the line is “she loved the stranger.” That’s a moment of freedom. It’s unforgettable. It captures something about her soul and the human soul and the capacity for agency.

If we’re speaking of pluralism, which insists on the diversity of ways of life, the importance of experiments in living, liberalism makes space for this sort of pluralism and celebrates it and finds it beautiful, not threatening or ugly. And the best literary instantiation of the liberal commitment to pluralism is a surpassingly liberal novel—and the most beautiful novel in the English language. Don’t argue. It’s A.S. Byatt’s Possession. That novel is about a current love affair and an old one, which went unnoticed until uncovered by its contemporary protagonists. The two contemporary figures in the novel get together at the end. And the way Byatt describes it—I’m not going to have it exactly right—is the morning after their getting together, our two characters noticed that in the morning there was a strange new smell. It was a verdant smell, a tart smell, and it had some resemblance to the scent of bitten apples. Notice what that’s doing to the tale of the Garden of Eden. It’s turning it upside down and inside out. It’s celebrating the bitness of apples. It’s subtle, but not that subtle. And the idea that the morning after where the Tree of Knowledge has been struck is something that has a verdant smell, that’s lively and open and hopeful, and there’s something about that that captures the liberal commitment to pluralism.

The commitment to the rule of law is more difficult to aestheticize, though we lawyers marvel at its beauty. There is a fictional account which is more complicated than at least this once-teenage reader saw, and that’s George Orwell’s 1984. What makes it a surpassingly aesthetic work is that Orwell sees the human soul’s dueling tendency toward subjection to Big Brother and the desire for freedom from Big Brother. Something that the novel is playing back and forth with all the time is the potential beauty of horror.

We can add to the holy trinity of pluralism, the rule of law and freedom another titanic two: democracy and separation of powers. If we want an image of democracy that’s an aesthetic, we can look to the latest Oscar winner, One Battle After Another. That shooting at the end—if you saw the movie, you haven’t forgotten the scene. It is a beautiful scene. It’s a scene of resistance. It’s the scene that connects with what happened in Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775, and it’s a plea for democracy.

The separation of powers, the fifth of our ideals, is very hard to turn into something beautiful. It was done in the movie Chariots of Fire, which is a movie about two Olympic runners, one deeply Christian, one Jewish—they both steal the show. The Christian won’t run on the Sabbath and says, in ways that reflect the defiance of the liberal spirit, I won’t run on the Sabbath. The Jew, who is excluded from everything, hires a professional and having been insulted and humiliated at every turn, says at one point, I’m going to “run them off their feet.” And the soaring point of the movie is when the mourners at his funeral, the survivors say to each other, well, he ran them off their feet. Chariots of Fire, in its celebration of Christian faith and of Judaism, is a deeply liberal movie.

There’s one answer, let’s call it the “head’s answer” to Becca’s challenge, which is that liberalism allows for and realizes the aesthetics of freedom, pluralism, separation of powers, democracy and the rule of law. But in the end, the liberal commitments aren’t aesthetic commitments. They say, Everyone in this room, go for it. Whatever your conception of the aesthetic is, liberalism says, that’s yours. Make it yours. Exercise your agency. That’s the head’s answer.

The heart’s answer is that liberalism’s peak aesthetic is when Bob Dylan went electric—do you know this reference, even? This was like the most important moment ever, in the world. He played “Maggie’s Farm”: “I ain’t gonna work on Maggie’s Farm no more”—a song of liberty and pluralism. And he also sang “Like a Rolling Stone,” converting the state of rootlessness and of separation and exclusion into a song of freedom, a new national anthem. “How does it feel to be on your own / With no direction home, like a complete unknown? / Like a rolling stone”—sung with joy and celebration. When he was booed in England for not doing folk music, he said to his band, and it’s recorded on tape, “Play It Fucking Loud.” That’s a liberal aesthetic. That’s liberalism’s Riefenstahl.

James Wood: Becca, let me just ask you one thing: “politics are mind and imagination” says Trilling, but obviously enough, if we demonstrate and propose and put mind and imagination into policy in some way, then it isn’t quite mind and imagination in the same way. It certainly isn’t quite the way that that Trilling means when he talks about a culture’s “buzz of implication.” So as the conversation began, very interestingly, to drift away from the question of, “Does liberalism have a vision of the beautiful and the good in public life?”—the common good towards great liberal art we love—one of the questions I had is just where we press down on that distinction. You might say it’s unfair to go to Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson and say you didn’t talk about E.M. Forster enough.

Becca Rothfeld: I think you can say that to anybody at any time.

James Wood: You would, but let’s just get this going as a discussion. It’s this question, which, of course, absolutely bedevils the right-wing critique too, which is a form of: What’s the illness and what’s the remedy?

Becca Rothfeld: I guess the original way you were posing the question made me think that it’s about the relationship between the content of policy and the aesthetic results of policy. And I think that the right-wing has no problem answering, Yeah, we should mandate beauty. We should mandate, like, neocolonial architecture and bad lip filler or whatever. I have strong disagreements with them about what they think is beautiful, but they don’t have a problem with that. A liberal obviously would have a problem with that. You can’t mandate beauty for various reasons, even if justice permitted it, it doesn’t seem like it would be effective. But what I think you can do is have policies that at least permit the pursuit of beauty. Another thing that you can do that Trilling gestures at in various ways, is have policies that are founded on an anthropology that, in turn, is the basis of good art production. What I mean by this is that one of Trilling’s criticisms of what he calls bureaucratic liberalism—what we would call technocratic liberalism—is that it has a really impoverished account of what people are like. He really likes Freud, not necessarily because he thinks that Freud is even correct, but because he thinks that Freud provides us with the resources to create better novels and such. And so I think that you could at least be careful to sort of write policy in a way that doesn’t assume an impoverished anthropology.

James Wood: How would that be? I mean, just give me an idea.

Becca Rothfeld: That’s a great question, and I don’t write policy for a reason. If I did, you know, I would be mandating that people read The Ambassadors.

James Wood: I don’t want to be just pointlessly hard on you, because I don’t have the faintest idea how you do it either. It’s just that I noticed that you—and Jon was also talking about, we’ll have to enable spaces in which [good art can be made], and there’s an interesting way in which, before too long, you’re actually proposing sort of technocratic solutions for the enablement of the beautiful thing that you want, while at the same time critiquing people like Klein and Thompson for talking technocratically about, you know, median home prices and so on.

Becca Rothfeld: One answer to this is that it’s really the opposite. Like, the problem is that people who are doing technocracy in the domains in which they should be doing technocracy, are kind of expanding technocracy into all domains of human endeavor. I’m writing about somebody right now who I think does this. He applies the principles of economics and sort of shallow social psychology—things that it might be reasonable to appeal to in the formation of policy, he applies them relentlessly in the personal domain of human life. And so maybe this is not really an injunction for liberals in their capacity as political liberals. It’s an injunction to leave the liberalism at the door when you’re engaging in private life. And then there are answers like arts funding and stuff—those are obvious and should happen too, of course.

Jon Baskin: I just wanted to add that in Ezra Klein book, the authors leave themselves open partly because they start the book with this utopian ideal.

James Wood: If you wouldn’t mind, letting the audience know about that, just for those who haven’t read it, since both of you sort of started your pieces with the rather terrifying, to most of us, opening of the Klein-Thompson book.

Jon Baskin: The first three pages of Abundance are all written in italics. They’re supposed to be very inspiring. A person wakes up in their apartment—

Becca Rothfeld: They’re in the second person: you. You wake up—and it’s a threat.

Jon Baskin: Alone in a house somewhere, you go and get your—

Becca Rothfeld: Lab-grown meat from the fridge. You pick your herbs that have been growing in your, like, vertical plant grower—

Jon Baskin: You go outside and you see a drone delivering medicine to your neighbor.

Becca Rothfeld: You don’t see a person, there’s no person.

Jon Baskin: Yeah, there are two very detailed descriptions of drones, but no people in the first three pages—

Becca Rothfeld: You don’t have friends; you have your lab-grown meat.

Jon Baskin: And the most horrifying part is, you step outside and you get a ping in your earpiece that you that is attached to you, or something that your friend has just gotten to the airport. So Klein protests that there is a friend in the beginning. But one of the things I felt reading this is, first of all, this utopia is not very—

James Wood: It’s set in 2050.

Jon Baskin: It’s set in 2050. But it is actually not that different from the life a lot of middle to upper-middle class liberals live today. We have a lot of this technology, basically, or access to it. And in fact, it reminds us of many of the things that make our lives quite unsatisfying. The utopian aspect of it is that you’re able to live without any guilt because, you know, all this stuff is produced without oppression. But in terms of the day-to-day quality of one’s life, it actually seems quite impoverished.

My first job out of college, I worked at a think tank in D.C. There are tons of people discussing policy in liberal circles. There are tons of people discussing messaging. These are the two things they discuss constantly. I don’t have an issue with there being a sphere where people are discussing things like how to build more housing very deeply. These are important issues, and I don’t have a problem with Klein and Thompson’s book on the level it describes these issues. But for Becca and I both there was a sense that this technocratic approach to thinking about what is a best liberal society—Abundance presents itself as a kind of regulative ideal that liberals should be embracing both for practical reasons and because they think it will be inspiring—and I think our problem was on that level, of thinking that Abundance could answer those kinds of questions about what kind of life we want to live.

Becca Rothfeld: It also presents a sort of theory of authoritarianism, at times implicitly and at times pretty explicitly. The book’s assumption is that people have turned towards authoritarianism because liberalism is not delivering the material goods. And that was another thing that I think we probably both objected to. We think that delivering the material goods is good, but it’s not sufficient, if you can’t explain to people in a compelling way why the goods are goods. One of the examples I used in my piece is how liberalism delivered a ton of vaccines, but we weren’t able to convince half the population that those were, in fact, goods. So that’s another dispute we had with Klein.

Cass Sunstein: Okay, so I like the Klein-Thompson book. I regard it as a humble plea for reducing barriers to building things. And that’s a good plea.

So, in Vermont, there’s housing scarcity. There’s a guy who’s occasionally at the Kennedy School named Miro Weinberger, who was the mayor of Burlington, which was Senator Sanders’s job for a long time. Weinberger was spectacularly successful as mayor, and he said, We have terrible problems. People don’t have homes, and this is because of regulatory barriers which make it impossible for people to build things. I took the book to be basically about that. The objection that the first few pages are maybe a very thin conception—something like that that seems to me completely fair.

So, I worked in the government three times, and I was a technocrat, I guess. If you want to do something about, let’s say highway safety, you might create rules that reduce the likelihood people are going to be killed, and they’re amazing—it’s technocrats who can help with that. If you want to do something about climate change—I’m sounding a little bit like the first few pages of Abundance, I fear—but these are essential. And TSA Pre and Global Entry, you know, those programs, they’re kind of struggling now, but those were created by technocrats. They’re not going to deliver everything, by any means, but they’re important nonetheless.

So what can be done? One Battle After Another is a liberal cri de coeur. It wasn’t produced by politicians. If politicians tried to produce a movie like that, it would be didactic and wouldn’t be very human. If you look at texts, either literary texts or not, that are part of our culture, they’re frequently liberal in character, and they gave rise to, you know, the civil rights movement, the movement for same sex marriage—a thousand things like that. What I’m saying now has a thousand-flowers-bloom quality, but we find that not exciting only because we’ve heard it so many times. And the challenge, I think, for this generation, is to find a conception of liberalism that celebrates and doesn’t nod bored at the relevant commitments and makes them new and real. Making something new and real is going to make them different.

James Wood: One objection to the Klein and Thompson book is that the notion of abundance is simply one of greater capitalistic efficiency. That their vision of the fridge full of fake meat and so on is essentially a capitalistic one. It occurs to me that if you took Patrick Deneen’s book Why Liberalism Failed and simply replaced every iteration of the word liberal or liberalism with “capital”—capital destroys communities, etc.—you’d have a sounder critique, it seems to me. So let’s just talk a little bit about that.

Cass Sunstein: Deneen—is this a familiar name? Okay, so some of you were nodding, and the rest of you aren’t. Deneen is a post-liberal who thinks that liberalism is responsible basically for what ails us. And this might be, you know, divorce. It might be a feeling of rootlessness. It might be the disintegration of communities. It might be crime. Take your pick: liberalism is responsible for it.

To attribute social terribleness to liberalism is reckless. Liberalism isn’t a force in history. It’s not Voldemort. It’s not whispering behind married couples saying, sleep with your neighbor. It’s not telling fathers don’t pay attention to your kids. It’s not saying to people of faith, you should stop believing in God. This is recklessness. And I’d say exactly the same thing, if I may, about capitalism. Capitalism means people get to own things. So you get to own that green shirt and those blue jeans. Some of you probably own laptops; they can’t be taken from you because there’s private property. To believe in capitalism is to believe in something which is an engine of freedom from fear, which is a defining liberal ideal. The idea of post-liberalism, at least in some forms, is a recipe for subjection to fear, because freedom of speech starts to get smaller, and freedom of religion might get smaller too.

No one says, “I’m a neoliberal,” because neoliberalism is wielded as a word by people who hate liberalism. So, if I may, I don’t understand any of this. I like capitalism. I also think the social safety net is great. Opportunity for all is great. We don’t have nearly enough of the way of equality of opportunity and social safety now, and capitalism needs those things. It’s not a free-standing caricature of itself.

James Wood: Yeah, you know, George Orwell reviewed [Friedrich Hayek’s] The Road to Serfdom, and it’s a very liberal response. In fact, he says there’s plenty of good in this book, because we have to remind ourselves again and again that the collective is not democratic and is often tyrannical, and there’s plenty not to like in the book, because it could be, says Orwell, that if you just leave everything to the market, the market will turn out to be a greater tyrant, because it’s irresponsible, actually, than the collective. That’s sort of what I meant about where liberalism positions itself.

Cass Sunstein: If Orwell negatively reviewed Hayek, I feel like saying, “Mommy and Daddy are fighting!” because they are two of my intellectual parents. I’m not sure what the concrete disagreement between Orwell and Hayek is regarding celebrating the collective. If the collective is saying we’re going to have a clean air act, by all means, Hayek was for that. If the collective is going to say we’re going to forbid racial discrimination and sex discrimination and have an Americans with Disabilities Act, Hayek, I think would be potentially uncomfortable with those things. But so much the worse for Hayek. If so, we need an account by which those things fit with liberal principles, and look no further than Mill’s “The Subjection of Women,” which talks about liberalism standing firmly against a system of caste where people are subordinated on the basis of some characteristic of which one would be.

Becca Rothfeld: Many of the things that we’re describing as problems with liberalism are actually problems with capitalism. In most conversations, I would just describe myself as a leftist. I’m politically aligned with leftists, because I think that John Rawls as a pretty extreme New Deal liberal is actually quite radical. He calls for a mandatory minimum, which is like a universal basic income, but also famously, the second principle of justice is a really stringent redistributive principle. He thinks that every single inequality in material resources needs to be dramatically interrogated and justified according to this very stringent principle. And he says explicitly in A Theory of Justice, that a capitalist system is compatible with the principles of justice, but so is a socialist system. That that has led some people to question whether Rawls is really a liberal. But if you think that the true cause of bad liberal aesthetics is capitalism—I’m sympathetic to some versions of that claim—there is a suite of non-capitalist liberals to choose from.

Jon Baskin: Can I just say something a little bit to the side of this conversation, but related to it? One of the reasons we framed this issue in the way we did about the left and the good life is that the left is very good at doing criticisms of capitalism. I’m not discounting that as an important mode of criticism, and I’m glad there are magazines that are devoted to doing that. But whatever you think about what Cass has said about the defense of capitalism, capitalism gives people a lot of things. There are a lot of goods that people get from capitalism. And the question is, if you are going to ask people to fight for a different system than capitalism, what goods are you going to deliver that are not just material goods?

One of the premises of the issue was that to make a real critique of capitalism, and of a certain form of liberalism, we have to actually inspire people with an idea of what life will be like. And that’s not just a matter of saying you will have more stuff. Because there are leftists who say, by getting rid of capitalism, everyone will have more stuff. I mean, abundance is a leftist ideal too. Fully Automated Luxury Communism is quoted approvingly in the beginning of Abundance. So we were, in a way, trying to reframe both modes on the left, to say there are other kinds of goods to talk about as well, politically.

James Wood: I absolutely agree. I really dislike Deneen’s book and the critique, and I think it’s foolish in all sorts of ways. In fact, I think it’s an attack on humanism, not really on liberalism. But there is one moment where he’s talking about contemporary America, and he says liturgies of nation and the market join together at moments in the calendar, and his example is the worship of Super Bowl commercials, and he’s absolutely right, that there’s something utterly hollow about a culture that unites around talking about the Super Bowl commercials. That can’t be our idea of what the collective good life is. It’s neither beautiful nor is it good.

So let’s just go back to this question of what this common good might be, as defined by liberalism, and what’s beautiful about it. And I want, if possible, to exclude works of art that we just say that we like for their beauty and their liberalism—maybe that’s unfair to do that.

Jon Baskin: Sorry, what’s the question?

James Wood: The big question, the ultimate question.

Becca Rothfeld: …What does the good life look like?

Jon Baskin: Yeah. I mean, this is why I only wrote the introduction to the issue. These aren’t questions that have easy answers. But the term “the good life,” obviously, goes back to Plato and Aristotle, and in ancient philosophy the question of the good life was connected inextricably to the question of what it means to be a human being. There was a pre-political investigation into what a human being was and what a good life was, and then that was supposed to refract onto how to create the good society.

Politics that have a less tortured relationship with having a positive doctrine can translate those kinds of insights more naturally. But to push liberalism beyond some of the non-perfectionist bounds that all three of us have started with here, I think the question of what a human life is is actually a really deep one right now. And historically speaking, you could say that the answers to what constitutes a good life under liberalism has varied depending on what threatened the ability to lead a truly human life at that particular moment. At times, maybe that has been economic inequality, and that’s still a force that threatens us. But for me, right now, it’s technology that is the clearest threat. And one sector of our society that is not hesitant at all to offer a vision of the good life is Silicon Valley. Marc Andreessen says human beings are the greatest resource. Posthumanism is a view that is actually increasingly prevalent in our society. So one of the ways that liberalism can help advance a vision of the good life—and I actually do think this probably has policy implications too, in terms of how we think about regulating various technologies that are emerging, but especially in the cultural sphere—is by considering what it means to lead a properly human life today, given all the obvious threats to that endeavor.

Becca Rothfeld: Can I answer more tyrannically? So I was just thinking like when Jon was talking about how liberalism and criticism have some natural affinity. Actually, I could not disagree more. The greatest tension in my life is that, as a critic, I am constantly making judgments of taste, and it’s a presumption of my vocation that other people should agree with me; I’m inegalitarian. I think that there’s a hierarchy of taste, and I presume to have a kind of authoritarian status when I’m writing a book review. I’m trying to persuade you; I’m trying to get you to agree with me. But I also think that you should think what I think. So, this is only a limited answer about what the good life looks like—I’m not taking a stance about what you should eat or whether you should stay married. (I don’t think you should stay married if your marriage is unhappy.) But my positive view is: beauty is good. The pursuit of beauty is something that you should spend your life doing. You should devote at least some part of your life to the consumption of difficult and important works of art. That’s a substantive commitment about the good life that I have and that I am willing to express.

Cass Sunstein: We actually have a liberal account of the good life, and it’s half homegrown. That is, Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum have a liberal account. It’s called the “capabilities approach.” And the idea in Nussbaum’s hands is there’s a set of human capabilities that are essential to a functioning human life, and some of them are kind of minimal, involving food and environment that works, etc. And others are more maximal, involving affiliation—music and art, I think, come up either explicitly or implicitly in her account of capabilities. And this is, for both her and Sen, emphatically, the liberal account of the good life. It’s probably the best we have. And if everyone had the capabilities that the capabilities approach celebrates and the functionings that allow for enjoyment of the capabilities, then we’d hear a celestial music.