Liberalism, Adam Gopnik tells us in A Thousand Small Sanities, “suffers from being a practice before it is an ideology, a temperament and a tone and a way of managing the world more than a fixed set of beliefs.”
While I mostly agree with Gopnik’s characterization, I disagree that liberalism suffers for it. The liberal temperament and default practices for managing the world transcend the partisan political spectrum. Yes, this transcendence can lead to confusion. George Will’s “conservative sensibility,” for example, is essentially a liberal one. But the liberal temperament and way of managing the world also reveal significant common ground on which we can rebuild and reassert the liberal project, the project that was perhaps best articulated in the Declaration of Independence.