Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

An Interview with Michael Walzer

Liberal Commitments.  Excerpt:

Liberals are people who are best defined morally or psychologically; they’re what Lauren Bacall, my favorite actress, called “people who don’t have small minds.” A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who disagree, who have different religions or different ideologies. That’s a liberal. 

Walzer is an old man living in the past, and what he says is true of the liberals of yesteryear. It has little or nothing to do with the 'liberals' of the present day.

Walzer is the author of an important post-9/11 article, Can There be a Decent Left?


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