17. Many liberals are enthusiastic about the contemporary administrative state; many liberals reject it. Within liberalism, there are vigorous debates on that question. Some liberals like laws that require people to get vaccinated or to buckle their seatbelts; some liberals do not. Liberals have different views about climate change, immigration, the minimum wage, and free trade.
18. Liberals abhor the idea that life, or politics, is a conflict between “friends” and “enemies.” They associate that idea with fascism, and with Dachau and Auschwitz.
19. Liberals believe that people with diverse backgrounds and views can embrace liberalism, or at least certain forms of liberalism. Many liberals enthusiastically support John Rawls’s idea of an “overlapping consensus.” With that idea, Rawls called for “political liberalism,” which is meant to accommodate people with very different views about fundamental matters, and which can easily be supported by people on the left, the right and the center.
20. Liberals think that on both left and right, many antiliberals and postliberals have manufactured an opponent and called it “liberalism” without sufficiently engaging with the liberal tradition or actual liberal thinkers. They think that some antiliberals wrongly conflate liberalism with enthusiasm for greed, for the pursuit of self-interest and for rejection of norms of self-restraint. They think that some antiliberals describe liberalism in a way that no liberal could endorse. Liberals agree with the Nobel economics laureate Daniel Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky, who complained of those who try to refute a position by mischaracterizing it: “The refutation of a caricature can be no more than a caricature of refutation.”
21. Liberalism is a wide tent. John Locke thought differently from Adam Smith, and Rawls fundamentally disagreed with Mill. Kant, Benjamin Constant, Jeremy Bentham, Mary Wollstonecraft, John Dewey, Friedrich Hayek, Isaiah Berlin, Rawls, Joseph Raz, Edna Ullmann-Margalit, Jeremy Waldron, Frederick Douglass, Milton Friedman, Amartya Sen, Ronald Dworkin, Robert Nozick, Susan Moller Okin, Christine Korsgaard, Martin Luther King, Jr., R. Douglas Bernheim and Martha Nussbaum are liberals, but they differ on fundamental matters. Some liberals, like Hayek and Friedman, emphasize the problems with centralized planning; other liberals, like Rawls and Raz, are not focused on that question at all. Liberals argue fiercely with one another. Many of the important practitioners of liberalism — from James Madison and Alexander Hamilton to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan — did not commit themselves to foundational philosophical commitments of any kind (such as Kantianism or utilitarianism). This is so even if some of them were, in an important sense, political thinkers.