… is from page 82 of David Schmidtz’s excellent 2023 book, Living Together:
Political ideals are not points of convergence. The liberal political ideal is not that we embrace the same religion but that we don’t need to. The liberal ideal is everyone choosing for themselves. Actual progress, when it occurs, is toward an open future.
DBx: Indeed so. And what unites all non-liberals – left, center, and right – is their insistence on using government to engineer their detailed futures. Of course, the future preferred by, say, Noam Chomsky differs greatly from the future preferred by, say, Sohrab Ahmari. But each man wants to impose his particular, detailed vision of the future on humanity… of course, for the good of humanity.
