Top Highlights

• Michael Walzer’s The Struggle for a Decent Politics
• Walzer is far too comfortable with the illiberal politics of the new left
• The foundation of Klavan’s dismissal of liberalism is simple enough: the liberal tradition has been robbed of its meaning by hypocrites and thuggish leftist tyrants.
• Klavan’s mistake is to allow the disappointing misuse of liberal principles to calcify into despair. As his own evidence shows, it is not that pluralism and tolerance are themselves the problem—it is that many are using these terms to mask their own illiberal tendencies. Instead of abandoning terms that have worked so well for previous generations,...
• However, underlying liberalism is a clear moral principle that makes the whole system work. A pluralistic society demands people capable of tolerating differences, and such tolerance is impossible to sustain without a serious recognition of the dignity of all human persons: the belief that no matter what we do, mankind will somehow manage to retain...

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