Cass Sunstein: evaluation

Transcript context

…Very best books of all time, right? I think it’s great. It is phenomenal. It has a picture, which I think is an accurate picture, of the subordination of one group to another. It has clarity on what that does for the preferences and values of both groups. It has the notion of adaptive preferences in it, which is potentially a liberal idea because it ceases to give authority to preferences. In Mill’s hands, I think it is a profoundly liberal idea. The idea of the subjection of — and then fill in the blank — permeates woke. It is a legitimate liberal insight and precept that this is a problem that needs to be fixed. Even to describe it in those terms is probably inadequate. But it can lead to illiberalism in the form of failure to listen to people, dismissiveness of both the views of the people who are allegedly, or in fact, subordinated and the views of the people who are allegedly, or in fact, subordinating. It can lead to a kind of arrogance of the social engineer, which is worse than that of the technocratic social engineer in the sense that it’s finger-wagging at people. The word “finger-wagging” is too gentle. It’s shaming people all the time. One thing — I think I haven’t gotten this clear enough in my own mind — but one thing the woke left, let’s say, has gone wrong with — both in terms of strategy, but also in terms of how to be in the world — is a kind of arrogant — the word “shaming” is right — shaming of people who are deserving respect. And that is ultimately going to undermine liberal commitments because you’re not showing respect for people. Is this why Hayek turned against Mill? Or you think there’s some other reason? He was too grumpy, too Viennese, too something?…

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