{"id":33,"date":"2026-05-16T13:06:23","date_gmt":"2026-05-16T13:06:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=33"},"modified":"2026-05-16T13:06:23","modified_gmt":"2026-05-16T13:06:23","slug":"the-revolutionary-center-how-to-revive-liberalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=33","title":{"rendered":"The Revolutionary Center: How to Revive Liberalism"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Gabfest Reads is a monthly series from the hosts of Slate\u2019s Political Gabfest podcast. This month, John Dickerson talks with Adrian Wooldridge about his new book The Revolutionary Center: The Lost Genius of Liberalism<\/em>. Their conversation explores what liberalism really is at its core, how both the political left and right have drifted into illiberalism, and what ordinary citizens can do to restore faith in liberal principles and institutions.<\/p>\n

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This partial transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.<\/p>\n

John Dickerson: What we\u2019ve been discussing somewhat, is the ways in which people become illiberal, even though they think they\u2019re champions of liberalism. By which I mean not just progressivism, but conservatives as well. There\u2019s the kind of choosing to be a liberal and then stumbling into it. Is that a useful way to think about it?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Adrian Wooldridge: Absolutely. I think one of the most extraordinary things that\u2019s happened to the United States in recent years is that this demonization of \u201cliberalism\u201d that I associate with, let\u2019s say with Ronald Reagan\u2014people saying \u201cliberal, liberal, liberal,\u201d in order to say liberals and namby-pamby people are against our values, that started out as a political strategy. And it was about gaining short-term power by demonizing a certain sort of people, but then they tended to be fairly patrician elites. And the people who use those phrases\u2014Reagan was a tolerant sort of person; George H. W. Bush was a patrician liberal, he was a liberal; George\u00a0 W. Bush was a liberal\u2014they used this for strategic reasons, and they weren\u2019t, in their personal conduct or in their politics, illiberal in any serious sense.<\/p>\n

But now there are a group of people around Trump who are not just opportunist critics of liberalism, they are philosophical critics of liberalism. They think liberalism is destroying America because it\u2019s gone so far\u2014not just because it\u2019s gone so far in the direction of libertarianism, but because liberalism by its very nature, according to Patrick Deneen, must go in the libertarian direction. It must become a philosophy that\u00a0 corrodes collective faith, collective beliefs, and becomes excessively individualistic. So the road to the streets of San Francisco in recent years, where you\u2019ve got drug addicts lying around and doing all of that is not an accident. It\u2019s absolutely where liberalism must inevitably lead you. That\u2019s what the post-liberals think. I think that\u2019s profoundly wrong, but that\u2019s their critique.<\/p>\n

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