It’s an intimate challenge because Gopnik to some degree accepts the premises of the illiberal left, even as he mordantly doubts the outcome of its radical politics: “The basic American situation in which the right wing wants cultural victories and gets nothing but political ones; while the left wing wants political victories and gets only cultural ones. … The left manages to get sombreros banned from college parties while every federal court in the country is assigned a far-right-wing activist judge.”

Image Adam Gopnik Credit... Brigitte Lacombe

“A Thousand Small Sanities” is a product of the period that some wit has dubbed “the Great Awokening.” The Awokening is defined less by what it believes and more by what it dislikes — and those dislikes tend to converge upon that vituperated category, dead white men. The founders and heroes of the liberal tradition are indubitably very male, very white and, for the most part, very dead.

Gopnik does not write in their defense. To a great extent, he is almost as uncomfortable with these dead white giants as any intersectional critic. “I’ve tried not to write too much about the famous 17th- and 18th-century English philosophers who helped found the liberal credo, concentrating instead on liberal lives that offer a better guide to living liberal practice.”

You’ll find more here about Harriet Taylor and Frederick Douglass; Emma Goldman and Bayard Rustin; George Eliot and E. D. Morel (a journalist who helped bring to light the horrors of the Belgian Congo) than about Locke, Jefferson, Smith and Bentham — or even John Maynard Keynes and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

This despite the fact that few of Gopnik’s featured characters would have been described in their time as “liberals.” Taylor, Douglass and the others are valuable to Gopnik precisely because they advanced causes that discomfited most of their contemporaries who did call themselves “liberals.” By assimilating what was once radical to his variety of liberalism, Gopnik hopes to prove to contemporary progressives that they can champion the woke causes of the 21st century without surrendering the liberal heritage of free speech, rule of law, scientific inquiry and individual conscience.