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For several decades, Cass Sunstein has been one of the most prominent and prolific legal scholars in the United States. A onetime faculty member at the University of Chicago Law School, Sunstein co-authored, with Richard Thaler, the 2008 book “Nudge,” which advocated for government policies that pushed citizens to make certain decisions without restricting their choices. (One example: Asking people who are getting their driver’s licenses whether they would like to be organ donors rather than leaving them to sign up for it on their own.) The next year, Sunstein joined the Obama Administration. He ran the White House Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which essentially made him the government’s chief overseer of federal regulations. (Sunstein, a friend of Obama from their time in Chicago, was initially the subject of right-wing conspiracy theories that painted him as an overzealous nanny-state enforcer, but he ended up disappointing progressives who thought he was too deferential to the free market.)

Sunstein has written a new book, called “On Liberalism,” which is a defense of the idea of liberalism at a time when Sunstein believes it is under threat from both the right and the left. The book barely mentions Donald Trump or contemporary politics, however, and instead provides a defense of a general liberal belief system, which Sunstein breaks down into eighty-five features. Sunstein’s conception of liberalism is quite capacious; it includes New Deal liberals and so-called classical liberals, including Friedrich von Hayek and Robert Nozick, as well as politicians such as Ronald Reagan.

I recently spoke with Sunstein, currently a professor at Harvard Law School, about the book and our current political moment. During our conversation, which has been edited for length and clarity, we discussed how to understand the origins of the conservative movement, his confidence that the Supreme Court is committed to liberal ideals, and his friendship with a man whom many liberals consider a war criminal: Henry Kissinger.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/can-liberalism-be-saved