An unpopular political position

I came up in a political generation very much in accord with the balladeer Phil Ochs' biting Love Me, I'm a Liberal. If you've forgotten these lyrics or never known them, they remain worth a look, though some of the topical references may have become obscure. Ochs asserted and we believed:

In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. 10 degrees to the left of center in good times, 10 degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally.

New Yorker staff writer Adam Gopnik's A Thousand Small Sanities: the Moral Adventure of Liberalism is an elegantly written, both gentle and genteel, assertion that liberalism is the ground which underlies whatever progress human societies have made toward justice and equity in the last couple of centuries. He knows his definition of his subject is awkward and heavily qualified, but it seems only fair to quote it in full:

Liberalism is an evolving political practice that makes the case for the necessity and possibility of (imperfectly) egalitarian social reform and ever greater (if not absolute) tolerance of human difference through reasoned and (mostly) unimpeded conversation, demonstration, and debate.

Easier to understand and identify with, perhaps, is this:

“liberalism believes in the imperfectability of mankind. It is a perpetual program of reform intended to alleviate the cruelty that we see around us.”

The book's conceit is that Gopnik is trying to explain to his "woke" daughter why she should consider that liberalism has something to say about the human travails she sees around her. One chapter refutes the right's complaints about liberals' disdain for the wisdom of tradition; another takes on the left's revulsion at liberalism's timidity and half-measures.

The result is a series of aphoristic assertions, many attractive, all begging for more thought. For example:

• Liberalism isn’t a political theory applied to life. It’s what we know about life applied to a political theory.

• amendments are among the proper nouns of liberalism ...

• for liberals coalition and compromise are fighting words, devices to battle by ...

• Being a liberal means being perpetually engaged in a two-front war ...

• Tradition is a very mixed bag of nice things and nasty things ... [liberalism tries to] fix the nasty ones while making the nice ones available to more people ...

I can't say that Gopnik convinces me to adopt an identification with liberalism. Political experience has made me something of an incrementalist -- and very, very practical. I believe we are always struggling for the long term -- with very limited vision of where we are going and what it might take to get there. There are always unanticipated byways and obstacles. Kindness and tolerance are necessary -- but not enough. Both courage and some ruthlessness are valuable in political struggle. Maybe I should call myself a democratic (small "d") pragmatist.

This book acted on me not so much as a prose argument but as an imaginative invocation of some possibilities. It's short, easy to read, and I think many readers might find it thought provoking -- or possibly just infuriating.