At dinner last night a friend's comment about "being right and being ignored" reminded me (somehow) of this conversation between Cass Sunstein and Tyler Cowen
In particular,
COWEN: Now, your new book On Liberalism is primarily a defense of the liberal concept, but if someone asks you, what’s the most likely scenario for liberalism being self-undermining, what’s your worry?
SUNSTEIN: Low probability. The likelihood is that we’ll be undermined by anti-liberal and illiberal forces, not self-undermining. I think it’s fair to say or to worry that liberalism doesn’t create the conditions for its own self-perpetuation, so it’s not as if it’s self-undermining, but it doesn’t necessarily maintain itself [emphasis added]. The reason is that a society that is flourishing needs a lot of stuff in it, including norms of cooperation, norms of charity, norms of mutual support. Liberalism, in my view, doesn’t undermine those things, but other forces can undermine them, and it’s not clear liberalism has the resources to respond.
Given the times we are in, I do very much worry about our not having the resources to respond.
I enjoy the "Conversations with Tyler" podcast. The participants mostly assume you know what they know and, since I don't, this results in me very often pausing the audio and searching for a primer on what was just said.
