An Interview With ?A Thousand Small Sanities? Author Adam Gopnik

I was struck by that motivation, the kind of sense of almost generational loss, or fear of loss, and I wanted to know if you saw any parallels to the ’60s, because that seems like another time when liberals felt like this younger generation was going off in a more radical, illiberal direction. — the liberals look extremely good.That’s one of the reasons I raised Bayard Rustin as a hero in the course of the book. To be isolated outside a broader coalition of progressives.” And he was excommunicated, again, from the movement for saying that and he remains a staunch member of the Democratic Party and, not least, vehemently anti-communist throughout his entire career.There’s a sense of defensiveness and loss in your book, but maybe we’re just looking at a very transitory period.There are two things to think about. On the other hand, extreme right-wing triumphalist authoritarianism is actually in power in the country now and has a terrifying chance of remaining in power in the country.So that’s a way in which the situation does not resemble the ’60s at all, or at least not till the Nixon period, and even in the Nixon period, it was not remotely as great a threat to constitutional order and liberal principles as we’re undergoing now. So whatever else may be true, the essential and potent threat is certainly not coming from the left at this moment in history.At every moment I can recall, and certainly historically, liberal democracy has been pronounced—and liberal values and liberal humanism and all the things I’m evangelizing for in this book have been pronounced—dead. In the 1930s, and it’s hard for us to recapture this … every significant intellectual had given up on liberal values and liberal democracy as something that’s clearly vestigial, and that one would have to choose sides between the oncoming fascist right and the oncoming communist left. [It argues that Gopnik should be more receptive to criticisms of liberalism because Obama’s liberalism failed.]My counterargument, with which you alone might be sympathetic, is that Obama didn’t fail; Obama succeeded in every significant sense and where many refused to see how much he succeeded.With every imaginable reason and desire to destroy the Affordable Care Act, they haven’t been able to do it, because it clearly filled a necessary function, and they won’t be able to destroy it, and if somebody gets elected, again, it will only be strengthened, and I am totally confident that within 25 years, we’ll have national health insurance in America.So when I wrote about Obama and when I wrote about things like the ACA, I had a lot of the same sense of besiegement — it’s so hard to explain, no one can be for it because it’s too complicated, all the passions are against it on both sides — so there’s that feeling, and yet it endures. I don’t feel like I’ve identified what it is exactly that allows that pattern to keep happening in history: loss, loss, loss, loss, loss leads to victory in the end.Well, as I say in the book, liberals get nothing accomplished except everything eventually. And at that crucial moment in American history — there’s a pivot in American history; it’s when Douglass makes his not-quite–Fourth of July speech, right? Without us, you simply get crushed by the right.” Maybe liberalism isn’t simply centrism, but what they’re saying is it has more effectiveness when it’s in the center. States with stricter gun control laws had 4% fewer pediatric deaths, and those with universal background checks for firearm purchases in place for at least five years had a 35% lower risk, the study found.How the morning shows are covering Trump’s racist tweetsThis drastic policy change will face many legal obstaclesThe Trump administration on Monday moved to end asylum protections for most Central American migrants in a major escalation of the president’s battle to tamp down the number of people crossing the U.S.-Mexico border.According to a new rule published in the Federal Register , asylum seekers who pass through another country first will be ineligible for asylum at the U.S. southern border. official says racist Trump tweet wasn’t actually racist“I see that as presumably political hand grenades but I wouldn’t go that far, no, certainly not.” Well, we can close the book on this oneTrump’s found a fight he likes, and he’s not letting it goWhen will the Radical Left Congresswomen apologize to our Country, the people of Israel and even to the Office of the President, for the foul language they have used, and the terrible things they have said. When Mulvaney cannot be in the Oval Office for a policy meeting, one of his allies is usually there.Folks who want a new government-run health care system have been pretty clear that it would make the law meant to fix the old system obsoleteDemocratic front-runner Joe Biden today will unveil a health plan that’s intended to preserve the most popular parts of Obamacare — from Medicaid expansion to protections for patients with pre-existing conditions — and build on them with a new government-run public insurance option.Biden would also empower Medicare to directly negotiate drug prices, allow the importation of prescription drugs from abroad and extend tax credits to help tens of millions of Americans buy lower-priced health insurance.The plan — which the campaign says will cost $750 billion over a decade, to be paid for by reversing some of the Trump administration’s tax cuts — is less transformative than the “Medicare for All” proposal advanced by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and supported by some other Democrats, which would effectively do away with private insurance and shift all Americans to government-run health care.“I understand the appeal of Medicare for All,” Biden said in a video posted this morning.