“Social Change is Really Hard” || David Brooks and Sam Moyn on radicalism and moderation

As we enter the midterm elections, Americans seem increasingly ready to move on from the Trump era, but there remains great disagreement about what should come next and how we might achieve it. Intellectual historian and law professor Samuel Moyn is among those who believe that liberals have become too timid about driving social, political, and economic change. If the Trump era was in part a response to the failures of centrist moderation, as Moyn suggests, then we may need something more radical to get us out of it. David Brooks is one of those centrist moderates, chastened by the many examples when radical change has led to tragic outcomes—including the example of Trump himself. In this week’s episode, David and Moyn discuss emancipation, fallibility, and the disagreement beneath the disagreement.

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