I Am the Change, Starting Today

Today is the official publication date of Charles Kesler’s I Am the Change: Barack Obama and the Crisis of Liberalism.  Have you ordered your copy yet?  I wrote about George Will’s column about the book here the other day; the great Fred Siegel reviews it in today’s Wall Street Journal (and remind me some other time to do a separate post on the greatness of Fred Siegel), and you can download a podcast with Charles conducted by Richard Reinsch of the Liberty Fund now up at the LibertyLaw blog.

If you’re still wavering, why not share a sample passage from the introduction to slide into the prose:

Liberalism comes across as defensive and modest, in fact downright conservative, but also inevitable.  Political change can’t lag behind social change for long, and what liberals do is simply mind the gap: they prescribe the minimal adjustments necessary to keep the social organism healthy and whole.  The story has the advantage of de-radicalizing liberalism, and of distracting attention from its actual ideas and from their role in its real genesis and growth.  It’s the equivalent of a policeman saying, Move along, folks, there’s nothing to see here.  Keep moving. . .  The same liberals who push this pragmatic account invariably speak at the same time of their movement’s “ideals” or “vision,” revealing that liberalism as conservative adjustment cannot be the whole truth.

To find out more of the truth about the core of modern liberalism (or “progressivism” if you like), you’ll have to read the book.

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