Liberalism is under unprecedented attack in the United States. Not liberalism as in the ideology typically associated with the Democratic Party, but the broad and complex constellation of political commitments and aspirations that include respect for individual rights, pluralism and the rule of law, which have long been the foundation of American society.
The threat isn’t new, and it hasn’t just been coming from President Donald Trump or the political right. Prominent figures and thinkers on the left have tried to restrict free speech and enforce ideological conformity.
In a new book to be released on Tuesday, Cass Sunstein, a prolific legal scholar and high-level official in the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations, mounts a stirring intellectual defense of liberalism from its critics across the political spectrum. On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom draws on — and ties together — the work of thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek, and it argues that they operate in a similar, broad tradition of liberalism that is in desperate need of revitalization.
In a wide-ranging interview about the book, we discussed why he wrote it and what he sees as some of the most pressing contemporary pressures on the liberal tradition both in the United States and abroad.
“There’s something about the idea of someone who’s in charge, who says ‘Fuck you’ and won’t take any shit,” he said at one point. “That resonates.”
We also touched on the Supreme Court, the state of the legal academy, his biggest regrets from his time in government, and, of course, Prince and Star Wars.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
I’m going to start with a deceptively simple question. In 2025, what is liberalism to you?
Liberalism is a set of commitments to freedom, pluralism, the rule of law, respect for individual autonomy, and security and self-government. Those are the ideals that liberalism represents.
Liberalism has been attractive to people on the political right. Ronald Reagan was very much a liberal. It’s been attractive to people on the political left. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was very much a liberal.
For all their disagreements, the idea of pluralism, freedom, basic individual security — those are things that unify the liberal right and the liberal left.
So you view this as an intellectual project that can bring in people from across the political spectrum.
I almost called the book Big Tent Liberalism, and I have a little bit of regret that I didn’t. The publisher knows best and thought that that would be an off-putting title, but it is the case that the free market right is part of the liberal tradition, and the Great Society left, associated with Lyndon Johnson, is also part of the liberal tradition.
The disagreements between those who think the Great Society was a terrific idea and those who think it was terrible are really important disagreements, but they’re disagreements within a family.
This book began with a guest essay that you wrote for the New York Times back in 2023 that provides a numbered list of propositions or claims that you associate with liberalism. You say that the response to that essay spurred you to write the book. What did you hear, and what do you want to accomplish?
I’ll say a little bit about the origins of it. I started writing notes to myself that were just a numbered list, and I thought it was too academic to be suitable for an op-ed and too unfootnoted to be suitable for an academic journal.
I didn’t know what to do with it. I sent it to a couple of friends. One of them said, “You should send it to the New York Times.” And I thought that was an unlikely venue, because I thought it was just too long and too academic, but they were kind enough to publish it.
I’ve never received such a flood of notes.
I got notes from people on the political right who said, “I agree with all of this,” or “I agree with almost all of this;” people on the right who said such things as, “I’m a conservative, and because I’m a conservative, I’m a liberal. I want to conserve liberalism.”
The person who said that didn’t mean that he would vote for Barack Obama. He would have no enthusiasm for Barack Obama. He didn’t mean that progressive leftists were people he embraced. He meant the liberal tradition that respects freedom of speech, freedom of religion, the rule of law. Those are things that his conservatism is closely identified with.
That’s just one person, but the number of people on the right who wrote me was very high.
I got people on the left who said there are a lot of illiberal leftists out there who are not respectful of freedom of speech and pluralism. Some of the people on the left were academics who said that universities are, in their view, flirting with illiberalism with respect to religion and speech. They said they endorsed the idea of recovering and maybe making new a tradition that says that if you want to say something that is anti-leftist orthodoxy, that’s not just tolerated. It’s welcome.
To see the right saying, “I agree with this,” alongside people on the left — people who vote for Obama and not vote for Republican presidential candidates saying, “I embrace this” — I thought, well, maybe I should do something larger about the topic.
Your book addresses a long list of issues. Some of those are philosophical in nature. It also addresses practical issues in our government and in our political moment, where we are facing what you would describe as threats to liberalism. What do you see as the most significant threats to liberalism in the U.S. right now?
I’ll get to right now in a moment, but when I wrote the book, my eyes were on the 1930s and communism. I was thinking about the rise of fascism. Hitler called out liberalism in terms of something he was against.
I visited China and saw many amazing, great things, but also illiberalism in practice. Some of the frightening aspects of illiberalism are on display in a country which has also had fantastic achievements.
I was thinking of contemporary Russia and President Putin as an exemplar of anti-liberal, illiberal thinking and also killing political enemies. That was on my mind.
When I wrote it, I was thinking about illiberalism in terms of theory — that is, the Marxist and postmodern left, both in its ridiculing of liberalism and its enthusiasm for restrictions on speech on campus and elsewhere that defy the liberal tradition — and I was thinking about the anti-liberal right in the United States, which has a long tradition, [particularly] those who think of liberalism as at the heart of what ails America.
In terms of current practices that followed the writing of the book, I wouldn’t describe this as the number one threat, but I would describe it as a threat: the restriction on diversity of expression at universities. Some of it is literal — shouting down speakers and such — but some of it is an orthodoxy on the left, where if students or faculty say something or think something that is inconsistent with the orthodoxy, there’s a social norm that kicks in that is antithetical to their freedom. That’s very not good.
I try in the book to avoid calling out contemporary American politicians. I don’t think I mentioned current Democrats or Republicans as illiberal, though there certainly are some.
[Trump’s] attack on the law firms is very troubling, because clearly the law firms who’ve been singled out are law firms that aren’t politically correct, by the lights of those who are singling them out for attack.
I think that is a more severe threat than it might seem, because it has effects generally on the legal profession, where you think your livelihood and profession are at risk if you run afoul of people currently in power. That’s dangerous to a fundamental part of our political culture.
The idea that universities should not be tolerant of antisemitism — if the antisemitism is inconsistent with law, that’s fair and correct. Universities should not tolerate discrimination on the basis of religion. That’s fair.
It’s also fair to be concerned about an absence of political diversity on campuses. That’s completely fair.
But the attacks on universities have been outrunning the concern with antisemitism and concern with political diversity in a way that is a threat to academic freedom. We’ll see where that ultimately goes, but that is a form of illiberalism that is, I hope, to be avoided by both Democratic and Republican administrations in the future.
These are young people on college campuses who are developing ways of thinking and interacting with the world, and some of them will go on to positions of power and influence. I wonder if this is a way of thinking that is going to be perpetuated in our society.
I worry about that too. I’m hopeful that we’re going to see a rebirth of liberal insistence on freedom of speech and freedom of religion and respect for people of diverse views, emphatically including people of faith.
I’ll tell you two stories, if I may.
I was teaching a first-year class just a few years ago at my law school, and we were discussing early in the semester some opinion by Justice [Antonin] Scalia. I referred to the opinion with admiration and respect. It was a really good opinion. And the students started laughing.
They thought that I was clearly contemptuous of Justice Scalia and I was making fun of something. It was as if the notion of Justice Scalia, to a number of the students, was that he’s on the other team, and we can’t admire or respect him. I thought, “What is going on here?”
To speak of an admirable opinion with admiration is kind of obvious, and to see the students thinking he’s making a joke of some kind, I thought there’s something wrong there — both that they thought that and that they thought everyone in the room would like their displaying contempt for Justice Scalia. That was not a good moment.
I should say that generally, I found my students at Chicago and Harvard to be open to views of multiple kinds. I really like it when someone will say, “I agree with Justice [Clarence] Thomas on this, and I agree with Justice [Elena] Kagan on that.”
The other story is about a student who came into my office one day and said she wanted to write a paper on how the law constructs the body. I thought, “Oh, OK.” And I said, “What do you mean?” And she looked at me with incredulity and said, “The law doesn’t construct the body?”
A lot of things have changed since I was in law school, evidently.
I said to her, “I don’t have a position on that yet. What would it mean to say that the law constructs the body?”
It’s clear that in some class, the idea that the law constructs the body was taken as self-evident and thrilling, and the student hadn’t asked what the sentence actually meant.
This was a student who’s very smart, so it wasn’t like the person wasn’t able to figure things out. She completely could.
That idea that there’s a formulation of something that gets in the head and is said with conviction, even though its meaning is obscure to the person who has conviction of its truth — that’s not ideal.
I do think that the universities I’ve been lucky to be a part of are generally doing a terrific job. But there are forms of illiberalism that are reflected in the laughter at a demonstration of respect for Justice Scalia and, in let’s say, the failure to give critical scrutiny to the statement that the law constructs the body, though, for all I know, there may be some sense in which the law does that.
Let’s go back to the law firms, which you touched upon earlier. What do you make of the deals that some large law firms entered into with the White House?
Let me give two pictures of a settlement.
One picture of a settlement would be that the sanctions deployed against the firm have a legitimate basis, and that the firm is agreeing to respond by, let’s say, doing pro bono work of a kind that isn’t kowtowing to any particular political anything, or a law firm agreeing to follow the law where it hadn’t been doing that before. That’s okay.
A second conception is that someone sees a law firm as a political adversary because they’re on the wrong side of too many issues, and the firm gives up money and autonomy because it’s under threat that is very inconsistent with our best traditions — the idea that, let’s say, a future Democratic administration goes after a Republican law firm because it did Republican things and threatens them with all sorts of sanctions, and the firm agrees to do Democratic things instead of Republican things.
That would be dangerous and horrible, and my understanding of what’s happened is closer to the second picture than the first.
If this happened in another country, the media would report it as state-sanctioned bribery and extortion.
I hear you.
I worked in the executive office of the president under President Obama, and I had involvement in a lot of executive orders. If there’s an executive order that goes after a law firm, typically in both Republican and Democratic administrations, that would be stopped or would be softened so much that it wouldn’t be plausible to say that this was an effort to go after a political adversary.
I can’t even imagine what an executive order against the law firm would look like that would survive standard internal lawyer and policy scrutiny.
I worked a little bit, actually more than a little bit, as a young lawyer in the Justice Department on executive orders under Reagan, and they were really scrubbed. So I don’t quite understand the internal processes.
That’s put very nicely. Here’s how I think about it: I think there is an element of bad lawyering in the White House right now. Four losses this quickly in the lower courts on this issue is quite an indictment.
I was at the Office of Legal Counsel [in the Reagan administration], and there are a number of things that the new President Reagan was committed to, some of which were legally fine. You could find a way to do it that would be solid as a rock. Some of it was really hard to find a way to do that was legally solid.
Ted Olson was my boss. He was the head of the Office of Legal Counsel. He died recently, a complete hero. Mind you, Ted Olson wasn’t left of center. He was definitely conservative and extremely enthusiastic about President Reagan.
He was a liberal in the sense that we’re discussing, part of which he was really committed to freedom of speech and pluralism, part of which was he was dedicated to the rule of law.
He would say to President Reagan and White House Counsel Ed Meese, “You can’t do that. We can’t do that. There’s no legal way to do it.”
It was as if, when he said that, it wasn’t only — though it was partly — we’ll lose in court. It was also that there’s a morality of legality.
Reagan and Meese would both say, “Okay, we’ll do something else.”
There’s been a flurry of activity within the regulatory agencies. The Trump administration has fired Democratic appointees at independent regulatory agencies. They have fired rank-and-file federal employees by the tens of thousands. They have stopped enforcing some federal laws and regulations.
You’ve spent a good deal of your life working both in and outside of the government on the regulatory state and how we should construct it. Are we seeing the end of the post-New Deal regulatory framework?
What a great question.
Let’s note that if you think something like the post-New Deal regulatory framework is terrific and to be preserved, you might be a liberal who thinks that it could be administered in a way that’s consistent with the rule of law, that it can be disciplined in a way that makes sufficient room for freedom and individual agency. I think that’s some version of what President Obama thought.
Or you could think that a lot of deregulation is in order, whether we’re dismantling the New Deal system or instead coming up with a new and more freedom-friendly regime.
If you want to dismantle the New Deal legal order, can you be a liberal? I think the answer to that is definitely yes.
If you think we shouldn’t have an Environmental Protection Agency at all, that it should be all handled at the state level, or you think that the idea of a Department of Energy is silly, those are within the domain of liberalism. We didn’t have an EPA until 1970. We didn’t have a Department of Energy until around 1980.
I think what we’re now observing is more scattershot than a dismantling of the New Deal order.
So maybe we have to disaggregate. The attack on independent agencies, I think, could be consistent with the New Deal order. It’s just shifting authority from people who have a degree of immunity from the president to people who are subject to the president.
Democratic presidents occasionally have been upbeat about that idea, but they haven’t pressed it, partly because the legal question was at that time most likely to be resolved against them. The Supreme Court has shifted on that.
It depends on how long the list is of agencies that we’re getting rid of. I think we’re unlikely to see so many agencies gotten rid of that we’d see the New Deal order in history’s ash bin, but certainly Roosevelt’s vision of what the government is for isn’t commanding nods of approval from the White House.
One way to get at this that concretizes it is that Roosevelt, in 1944, delivered what I think he regarded as one of the most important speeches of his life, which called for a second Bill of Rights. He said there should be a right to a good education, right to freedom from monopolies, right to protection against the vicissitudes of disability and disease and old age, a right to Social Security.
The second Bill of Rights, whether or not people know about its existence, has oriented a lot of our national debates where a lot of the ingredients, Republicans have been basically committed to.
It’s not clear that the second Bill of Rights, if people know about it in the current White House, that they are excited about it, but you don’t need to be excited about it or approving it to be a liberal. Hayek was a great liberal thinker. I think he might have been okay with the second Bill of Rights, at least when he was younger. He may have shifted against it as he got older.
The attack on the New Deal institutions is so far partial, but the rule of law-ness of it is highly questionable.
Some of the courts have said this: Congress gets to decide what agencies exist. The president can’t dismantle the State Department. The president can’t say that the Department of Agriculture doesn’t exist anymore.
We’ve seen things that are dismantling that raise serious separation of powers issues, and I think it’s fair to say that — put to one side whether the New Deal institutions are appropriately maintained — liberals like the separation of powers. They believe that the law-execution authority is different from the lawmaking authority, and we’re seeing them a little combined.
There is an element to liberalism that allows us — encourages us even — to consider how much space regulators should give to individuals in society.
But there is also an element in the liberal tradition of compassion and empathy and wanting to ensure that human beings can flourish on their own terms and at least have the minimal tools available to them to do that — sustenance, water, things like that.
I had thought that any president would be proud, as I think President Trump was in the first round, to be overseeing a USAID that’s doing a great deal of good to save vulnerable people and to put our country’s generosity on view for people all over the world.
Hope springs eternal. It feels like the dismantling of USAID was so fast and furious and so reckless that it would have to be rethought, including by the president.
In terms of the liberal tradition, there are a couple things to say.
You’re right that there’s a strand of the liberal tradition which is focused on the commitment to individual dignity — which is water, clean air, minimal resources as something that it’s appropriate to provide. Hayek himself, often thought to be the classic neoliberal market guy, agreed with a minimum for people. He was for that in The Road to Serfdom. That is part of the liberal tradition.
Also, there are two great liberal Supreme Court decisions. One is the Barnette decision, where the court said that kids could refuse to salute the flag under First Amendment principles, where Justice [Robert H.] Jackson said, “Compulsory unification of opinion achieves only the unanimity of the graveyard.” That’s the best liberal sentence the court ever wrote.
And then the steel seizure case, where the court said that President Truman couldn’t seize the steel mills and steel factories. That was a separation of powers decision. It wasn’t an individual rights decision. The president needs congressional authority to do that.
To dismantle a government agency that is congressionally created, you have to work really hard to come up with an argument to defend that that speaks in respectful terms of the separation of powers. Now, there was some agile work done on USAID. There have been lawyers on the government side who’ve worked hard, but let’s just say, in terms of respect for the rule of law, these weren’t the moments you’d introduce to Mars to show what the United States was capable of.
Something you said interested me when you were talking about the Supreme Court on individual expression and freedom of religion. I’m in your camp. I want people to realize whatever spiritual horizon they want to be on.
But in recent years, we’ve seen the Supreme Court elevate the concept of freedom of religion to a point that it now occupies such a high priority in their framework that you have anti-discrimination laws that are effectively being nullified.
If you say, for instance, that you know you don’t have to sell the cake to such and such person, because your religious belief is that what they’re involved in is wrong, you can make that claim in almost any context and in a variety of forms.
Has the Supreme Court gone too far on this? Is there some rebalancing in the grand scheme of things that you’d like to see?
This is a great question.
Circa 1985, there was a consensus that the Establishment Clause was a fierce barrier to anything that was favorable to religion as such, even if there was an argument that it was neutral. If it was funding religion and also secular, the Establishment Clause might well stand in the way, and there was also a consensus that we had to understand the Free Exercise Clause in a way that didn’t veer into an Establishment Clause violation. That is, if you understood the Free Exercise Clause to give favorable treatment to religion, that would create an Establishment Clause problem.
There was a great scholar who became a federal judge and then left and is now a great scholar again, named Michael McConnell, who was my colleague at Chicago, and he did spectacular work, saying that the 1985 consensus was wrong and that the Establishment Clause was being over-interpreted to forbid sufficiently neutral stuff.
What the court has done is kind of loosened the strictures of the Establishment Clause and increased the power of the Free Exercise Clause. I feel very open-minded about whether where we are in 2025 is better on balance than where we were in 1985. I do think the softening of the Establishment Clause barriers is probably a good reading of the Constitution — that the court had gone a bit overboard in the 1980s.
I share the concern that in the cases of conflict between discrimination and free exercise, there are real puzzles, and it’s not clear what the right answer is. If you have someone who, let’s say, is burning dogs as part of their religious heritage, the anti-dog-burning laws can kick in, and that, in my view, is legitimate, that the state has a sufficient interest.
In the cases where a religious institution is discriminating, the question is whether that’s analogous to animal abuse. I think reasonable people differ on that, and so I don’t feel all up in arms about what the court is doing.
I think these are puzzles. Liberalism is on both sides of this. You can be a liberal and think either.
You worked in both the Obama and Biden administrations. What do you think got us to this moment in political terms, where someone like you feels an urgency to write a book about liberalism?
The impetus for the book was not immediate current events.
It was seeing left-of-center illiberalism, both in academic theorizing at the University of Chicago and where I heard people talk about liberalism in ways that I thought were unfair. That’s when I started thinking about it. Right now, we have anti-liberals on the left and anti-liberals on the right.
In terms of politics, my association is odd, which is Star Wars. I think the much-disliked prequels had something about human psychology right, where the notion of disorder and swampness and gridlock in a capital lead people to want strength — someone who will set things right.
I think we’re seeing that all over the world, where either there actually is disorder of one or another kind, or the description of the world as out of order can be made to resonate, even if it doesn’t have perfect accuracy. I think there’s something in psychology that is highly responsive to the notion of a strong leader who can set things right.
That can be a recipe for illiberal success, as in nations outside this country, and it can be a recipe for tolerance of or relative indifference to liberal practices.
The book is really meant to be about liberalism and what it is and why it’s important, and not meant to be for or against any political person. It’s very informed by the American conservative tradition insofar as it’s liberal.
I listen to conservative radio almost every day in Boston. I learn from it, and I hear some juxtapositions in some of it. It’s very jarring when you hear from people who are typically on the center and the left saying we have pieces of tyranny around us and there’s reasons to be fearful of what’s happening, and then the host or someone else will say with joy, as if it’s almost the crescendo of a Prince song, “Freedom is back.”
Prince was too inventive to have a cliché like that, but it has exhilaration in it, and I’m thinking, what’s going on in that juxtaposition?
There’s something about the idea of someone who’s in charge, who says “Fuck you” and won’t take any shit. That resonates. Sometimes it resonates on the left.
Do you have any regrets about any of the decisions that you made while working in the Obama and Biden administrations?
When I was in the Obama administration, I was full-time for four years. I regret that I didn’t get aggressive enough about paperwork burdens on people.
That’s not a high enough level of regret to speak to the moment, but I do regret that I was overseeing the Paperwork Reduction Act, and there are people seeking medical services, there are doctors, there are truck drivers, there are would-be entrepreneurs who are besieged by paperwork. While I did try to reduce it, I wish I’d tried harder.
My biggest regret — and it’s not something I blame myself entirely for, but I do blame myself a bit for it — one of our programs for climate resilience, it’s called the BRIC program. It’s actually a Trump creation, and it was designed to give communities a competitive process by which they could get federal resources to be protected more against flooding, extreme heat, wildfire, etc.
The Trump administration created it, and then we made it bigger [under Biden], and then it was abolished by this Trump administration. I think this Trump administration, on reflection, should like it, because it’s in the national interest, it’s connected with some of the president’s concerns. And you don’t need to use the word “climate.”
I regret that we didn’t put it on sufficiently firm ground, such that it would have bipartisan support if they wanted to reduce the funding. That’s completely fine, but it’s a program that helps people in Texas, it helps people all over the country, and I regret that it wasn’t stabilized as an enduring part of American government.
