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Former British Columbia finance minister Kevin Falcon, who ran a close second to Christy Clark for the BC Liberal leadership in 2011, says the party might now be best led by a caucus outsider who could overcome criticisms of the party's record in government.

Mr. Falcon, whose name frequently comes up as a potential successor to Ms. Clark, says he's not interested in running, having retired from politics in 2013.

The BC Liberals are preparing for a leadership contest to replace Ms. Clark, whose resignation took effect last Friday. The campaign will likely focus on what factors reduced the Liberals to a minority in the provincial legislature, setting the stage for the NDP to take power, and what direction the party must go to recover.

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Mr. Falcon said it would be difficult for anyone from the previous government to take over the party. "That's going to be the challenge for candidates that are coming from the existing MLA cast," he said in an interview. "It's not impossible; it just makes it more challenging to be that change candidate. I think outside candidates probably have that advantage."

However, Mr. Falcon, an executive vice-president with the B.C. investment company Anthem Capital Corp., says he won't be seeking the job.

"I am not going to be a candidate for the leadership of the BC Liberal party and while I appreciate all of the calls, e-mails, texts and people stopping me on the street and encouraging me to run, my circumstances are similar to what led me to retire in the first place," Mr. Falcon said.

"I have two young daughters and a very satisfying career in the private sector."

Mr. Falcon quipped that his "days are being destroyed" by having to respond to all the people calling about a leadership campaign that is not going to happen.

"I'll never get any work done if I have to return all the calls and e-mails."

Among the calls have been outreach from the leadership prospects, largely members of the BC Liberal caucus, who have said they are considering leadership bids.

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Ms. Clark won the BC Liberal leadership with 52-per-cent support, compared with 48 per cent for Mr. Falcon, who had considerable support in caucus over the one MLA who backed Ms. Clark. Mr. Falcon had previously served as ministers of finance, health and transportation, as well as deputy premier. He spent a dozen years as a member of the legislature. Ms. Clark led the Liberals to a surprise win in 2013. Mr. Falcon did not seek re-election.

This past spring, the New Democrats and Greens joined together to oust the Liberals in a confidence vote, prompting the Lieutenant-Governor to ask the NDP to form a new government.

John Horgan is now Premier and the Liberals find themselves in opposition after 16 years in power.

As defeat in the legislature became a near certainty, Ms. Clark's beleaguered Liberals tabled a Throne Speech in June that offered a wholesale remake of the party's election campaign.

Mr. Falcon said that Throne Speech presents a challenge to the party.

"That recent Throne Speech was not helpful at all, to say the least," Mr. Falcon said.

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"By adopting the NDP-Green platform holus-bolus, it went against 16 years of largely principled policy leadership."

Ms. Clark, asked about that issue in a final news conference as leader, said the party's next leader would be free to break with the Throne Speech she presided over a point that others in the party have also made.

Mr. Falcon said integrity and transparency need to be front and centre for all candidates seeking the leadership, making specific reference to campaign finance reform and how government operates.

He also advised boldness in policy to address "legitimate issues" of affordability, especially in the Lower Mainland.

"That means really bold and new ideas in transit, in housing, in daycare all of those issues that are going to be important for urban-suburban voters."

He also said there needs to be a debate about how to raise government funds. "People talk often about how we spend government's money, but people need to focus about how we generate it.

BC Liberal caucus members Sam Sullivan, a former Vancouver mayor, former advanced education minister Andrew Wilkinson, ex-transportation minister Todd Stone, former education minister Mike Bernier and Jas Johal, a former TV reporter elected to the legislature this spring, have said they are considering runs for the leadership.

Outside the caucus, Iain Black, the former labour minister who is now president and CEO of the Greater Vancouver Board of Trade, has said he may run. Tory MP Dianne Watts, formerly mayor of Surrey, says she is being urged to run, but has not made any decision.

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BC Liberals' new leader should be an outsider, former politician says - The Globe and Mail

Televangelist Pat Robertson said it's possible Fox News host Eric Bolling, who allegedly sent lewd photos to colleagues, is a casualty in a liberal effort to take down Fox News.

Robertson said Monday on his Christian "700 Club" TV show he doesn't "have a lot of first-hand information" on the sexual harassment scandals rocking Fox but they could be the product of a conspiracy to "destroy" the network.

"I'm not a conspiracy theorist," he said, "but it's so easy to see what's being done."

Robertson said he was familiar with Bolling and considered him to be "a straight arrow" and "a dedicated Catholic."

Bolling was suspended by Fox last week after it was reported that some current and former colleagues claimed he had sent them text message photos of male genitalia, believed to be his own.

In the course of the last year, star anchor Bill O'Reilly and the late Roger Ailes, the network's founding CEO, were also terminated following allegations of inappropriate sexual behavior.

Bolling, O'Reilly, and Ailes all denied the allegations.

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Pat Robertson suggests Eric Bolling was framed by anti-Fox News liberals - Washington Examiner

Common Dreams

Liberals Strike Back... Against Single Payer Common Dreams In the name of political reality, some liberal pundits, politicians and policy wonks are scolding progressives to give up on Medicare for All. There are many ways to achieve "universal coverage," we're told. "Overhauling" the entire system is too hard ... and more »

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Liberals Strike Back... Against Single Payer - Common Dreams

Five and a half years ago, a mustachioed Justin Trudeau rose from his seat in the corner of the House of Commons opposition benches to challenge the Harper government on cuts to scientific research.

Mr. Speaker, I have a simple question on ozone monitoring, based entirely on what the minister of the environment himself has already said, Trudeau declared on Nov. 24, 2011.

Then-environment minister Peter Kent was portraying cuts to Canadas crucial and world-renowned ozone monitoring networks as simply consolidating and streamlining, Trudeau began.

The Liberal MP for the Montreal riding of Papineau then flashed a document signed by Kent that contradicted the Conservative minister's position. Hopefully not an unreliable source, he quipped.

Justin Trudeau, then in opposition, challenges Peter Kent, then the environment minister, about the Harper government's cuts to ozone monitoring on Nov. 24, 2011. House of Commons video

It was a sly reference to the day before, when Kent had told then-Liberal environment critic Kirsty Duncan she should "use more reliable research" after she questioned the Tories over a briefing note titledfittingly enoughozone monitoring cuts.

Trudeau and Duncan would spar with Kent several times that week over the issue.

At one point, Trudeau even challenged Kent by asking whether he knew what ozone actually was.

"I just need to know that he understands the issues," Trudeau asked.

Fast forward to 2017.

The Liberals are in power, Trudeau is prime minister and Duncan is his science minister. Kent has swapped positions with them on the opposition benches, assuming the mantle of foreign affairs critic for the Conservatives.

With the science-defending duo now at the controls, Canada boasts about scientific breakthroughs in ozone research, and the government claims it is unmuzzling scientists, undergoing a fundamental science review, launching a search for a chief science advisor and creating a $2-billion investment fund for post-secondary institutions, among other initiatives.

Trudeau's cabinet launched these initiatives after campaigning in the 2015 election to restore evidence-based decision-making in government. This followed years of criticism that the Harper government was putting science on the back burner and making decisions that benefited the oil and gas industry in Western Canada, where the Conservatives have deep political roots.

The criticism culminated with scientists mourning the "death of evidence" in a mock funeral march on Parliament Hill to protest the Harper government in July 2012.

One might be tempted to think that after all this, the cuts to ozone monitoring would have been restored. The reality, however, is more complicated.

In responding to National Observers questions, raised in June, about whether the cuts had been restored under the Liberals, a spokesman for Environment and Climate Change Canada first denied that cuts had ever been made.

After further questioning, Environment Minister Catherine McKenna's office would later acknowledge in July that ozone monitoring stations had indeed been closed. But her spokeswoman would still argue that the efficiency of monitoring hadnt changed as a result.

Kirsty Duncan, then the Liberal environment critic, challenges Kent about the cuts to ozone monitoring on Nov. 23, 2011. House of Commons video

The reaction to this chain of events has been one of frustration or vindication, depending on who's reacting.

Thomas Duck, an associate professor in the department of physics and atmospheric science at Dalhousie University, said the government's claim in 2012 under former prime minister Stephen Harperthat Canada could sufficiently monitor ozone while still closing monitoring stationsreminded him of the position it was now taking under Trudeau.

"Does the Trudeau government really want to take ownership of what Harper did? said Duck.

The NDP said the Liberals weren't honouring their commitment to restore scientific integrity in government post-Harper. The Trudeau government thinks theyve kind of ticked the science box on their to-do list and now theyve moved onto other things, said science critic Kennedy Stewart.

Duncan and Trudeau question Kent about the cuts to ozone monitoring on Nov. 21, 2011, kicking off a week in which they would repeatedly question the then-environment minister. House of Commons video

The Conservatives, meanwhile, see it as an example of the Liberals saying one thing in opposition and another thing once in government.

"Environment Canadas scientists have apparently convinced the Liberals that the monitoring of atmospheric ozone, as amended by our Conservative government on the advice of the same scientists, is appropriate and effective," said Kent.

Duncan and Trudeau's offices declined comment. McKenna's spokeswoman, however, attempted to draw a distinction between the two governments' approaches.

Our government has been clear from the outset that were taking a different path from that of the Harper government, which set targets with no plan in place to meet them, and undertook no action on climate change, said Marie-Pascale Des Rosiers.

"Canada continues to operate one of the largest stratospheric ozone monitoring programs. This program meets our operational requirements."

Canada monitors ozone both up in the Earths atmosphere, where the ozone layer helps block harmful ultraviolet radiation, and closer to the surface, where the reactive gas has been linked to health problems and smog.

It was cuts to atmospheric ozone monitoring that drove the controversy during the Harper government. The monitoring is done using two different technologies, brewers and ozonesondes, that measure different aspects of the ozone layer.

The statement signed by Kent during the Harper government confirmed that the two measures complement, but dont duplicate each other. As Duncan explained in 2011, that means they can't be optimized and streamlinedonly cut."

The Harper government ended up overseeing the closure of two ozone monitoring stations, at Bratts Lake, Sask. and Egbert, Ont.

It also moved the World Ozone and Ultraviolet Radiation Data Centre, one of six centres that form a global atmospheric monitoring program, out of the environment departments science and technology branch to the meteorological services data management system. The data centre is run by the department with the support of the World Meteorological Organization.

National Observer asked the department whether cuts to ozone monitoring had been restored. Spokesman Mark Johnson responded that the departments monitoring of ozone was not cut.

Rather, portions were transferred to another group that continued with the delivery, Johnson said. "Environment and Climate Change Canada continues to be committed to research and monitoring related to stratospheric ozone." He added stratospheric ozone observations "are made at eight sites across Canada."

The problem: There used to be 10 such sites.

Duncan pointed this out in 2012, when she complained at a House environment committee meeting that activity at the Bratts Lake and Egbert sites had "ceased."

The status of the monitoring sites also appear on the world ozone data centre's website, hosted by the Canadian government. The website shows that Bratts Lake and Egbert stations stopped producing data after 2011 and have remained dark.

Johnsons statement also confirmed that the ozone data centre was still in the meteorological service, but that scientific oversight is provided by science and technology branch scientists and others.

McKennas office eventually confirmed that the department did once have 10 stratospheric monitoring stations. But Des Rosiers said a departmental analysis showed Canada can deliver robust stratospheric ozone monitoring with eight stations.

This is why two stations were closed in 2012. The remaining eight are sufficient for robust monitoring of stratospheric ozone, said Des Rosiers.

Canadas commitment to monitor stratospheric and ground-level ozone has not changed and neither has the efficiency of the monitoring.

National Observer then asked the department for a copy of the analysis mentioned by McKenna's office.

It declined to respond, but Des Rosiers followed up with an email saying that the government was "committed to science" and that it didn't receive "negative feedback" on the Canadian ozone monitoring program at a recent international conference of ozone research managers hosted last March in Geneva, Switzerland.

Dalhousie's Duck questioned how the department could claim that it hadn't lost a valuable resource in the shuttered Bratt's Lake and Egbert stations.

He pointed to two scientific papers released last year that both reference data from the Bratt's Lake and Egbert stations. One paper was led by the environment department, while the second was from an international collaboration. "Clearly the data are of continuing scientific importance," he said.

Duck, who says he co-founded a university consortium that took on responsibility for an instrument that was jettisoned in the Harper-era restructuring, also argued there were other scientific reasons for wanting launches of ozonesondes, a type of weather balloon, at the two stations.

In addition to ozone, ozonesondes can also be used to examine atmospheric pollution like emissions from oilsands, or pollution around Toronto, he said. They help differentiate between ground-level and ozone-layer sources, argued Duck, but "the loss of these two stations impacts our ability to do that."

He said Bratts Lake was "the only ozonesonde station immediately downwind from the oilsands." Although there is an operating station in Edmonton, geographically closer to the oilpatch, winds tend to blow from west to east, putting Bratt's Lake more downwind in terms of weather patterns, he said.

A network of stations would be the best approach, he argued, but "given how few stations there were around the oilsands to begin with, the loss of Bratts Lake [is] really grievous."

At the same time, Egbert was the only ozonesonde station in the vicinity of Canadas most-populous city, Toronto, he said. Taken together, "This suggests to me that the stations were cut for non-scientific reasons," said Duck.

Finally, he questioned the assertion that the ozone date centre had true scientific oversight, arguing a drop in data demonstrated otherwise.

Usage of the centre has declined since the management changes in 2012, he said, pointing to the centres own data for Brewer Ozone Spectrophotometer, a Canadian invention used around the world to measure UV, that shows a drop-off since 2012.

Johanne Fillion, communications officer at the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada, said the ozone monitoring cuts were an example of prioritization in Ottawa.

Our feeling is that with ozone, its not because they dont care, its because it wasnt the top priority when they arrived [in government], she said.

But Kent said "sarcastic questions and denunciations" from the Liberals in 2011 over atmospheric ozone monitoring were "uninformed and wrong."

"Their statements today are in line with any number of policy positions in opposition that Liberals now contradict," he said.

For his part, Stewart said the Liberal government isnt waging a war on science, but he said their policies have almost all the same effects of Harpers war on science.

He said federal scientists appeared to be ecstatic that Harper was gone, but he is now starting to field calls from some of them who are concerned that longstanding policies havent changed.

I dont think youll see death marches on Parliament Hill, but you will see more upset scientists.

With files from Mike De Souza

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Trudeau Liberals change their tune on ozone monitoring - National Observer

In the summer of 1917, Walter Lippmann strutted into Washington as it prepared for war. Both he and his young country were ready to prove their worth as superpowers. He was 27 and newly married, recruited to whisper into the ear of Newton Baker, the secretary of war. Lippmanns reputation already prefigured the heights to which it would ultimately ascend. None other than Teddy Roosevelt had anointed him the most brilliant young man of his age.

Following the timeless capital tradition of communal living, the Lippmanns moved into a group house just off Dupont Circle. Their residencewhich they shared with a coterie of other fast-talking, quick-thinking, precociously influential 20-somethingsinstantly became the stuff of legend, the wonkish frat house of American liberalism. Denizens included Felix Frankfurter, the Harvard Law professor who went on to make his mark with forceful crusades on behalf of unpopular causes, and then with Supreme Court opinions and a wide array of well-placed protgs.

Dinner conversations at the rowhouse extended late into the night. Older minds gravitated to these meals, eager to watch a new vision of government being hammered out. Among the eminent guests who welcomed a respite from stuffy, self-important Washington were Herbert Hoover, Louis Brandeis, and Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. It was Holmes, a regular and enthusiastic presence at the table, who gave the place a namethe House of Truth.

The legal historian Brad Snyder has reconstructed the glories of this group house in a bulging, careful study of its inhabitants. Though The House of Truth drowns in detail, Snyders account usefully maps a hinge moment in American political history. Progressivism, that amorphous explosion of reformism in the early years of the century, had come and gone. Thinkers like Lippmann and Frankfurter increasingly referred to themselves as liberals, by which they didnt mean advocates of laissez-faire governance. Their use of the label connoted something closer to its present-day meaning, and their faith in governments capacity to improve the world was boosted by the war. Liberals believed that Americas entry into the global conflagration would transform their country. The experience, they hoped, would rouse a new spirit of solidarity. It would corrode the ingrained Jeffersonian hostility to the state, and would permit America to exert a beneficent influence beyond its borders.

These messianic hopes were quickly shredded by brutal realities: the savage nature of martial nationalism, the suppression of dissenting opinions, the way their hero Woodrow Wilson permitted the imposition of vindictive terms on vanquished Germany. The pessimism acquired during those harsh years became foundational to liberalism, too, endowing it with a newfound passion for civil liberties and the rights of minorities. Liberalisms enthusiasm for the state was painfully tempered.

One of the essential qualities of liberalism is that it always disappoints. To its champions, this is among its greatest virtues. It embraces a realistic sense of human limits and an unillusioned view of political constraints. It shies away from utopian schemes and imprudent idealism. To its critics, this modesty and meliorism represent cowardice. Every generation of leftists angrily vents about liberalisms slim ambitions and its paucity of pugilism. Bernie Sanders and his followers join a long line of predecessors in wanting liberalism to be something that it most distinctly is not: radical.

Liberalisms enemies on the right cultivate precisely this confusion. They have always tried to smudge liberalisms identity, to insinuate that it exists on the same continuum as communism and other terrifying ideologies. And, in truth, liberalism wasnt always entirely clear about the gap that separated it from the left. Before the disappointments of World War I, many of the earliest liberals styled themselves as radicals. They shared the primary concerns of the activist left (womens suffrage, the labor movement) and championed the same assault on the repressive mores of Victorian culture. For a brief, Edenic moment, liberals and radicals carried an almost identical sense of possibility about the world.

In Young Radicals, Jeremy McCarter (with whom I briefly worked at the New Republic, the magazine Lippmann helped establish in 1914) has written an extremely readable, theatrically narrated group biography of the men and women swept up in the optimistic prewar spirit. Its a romantic account of a romantic period. Among McCarters subjects is a young Lippmann, back before his Washington group-house days. Fresh from Harvard, he went to work for the socialist mayor of Schenectady, New York, and mingled with poets and revolutionaries in Greenwich Village. He became a favorite of the heiress Mabel Dodge, who presided over bohemias preeminent salon in her lowerFifth Avenue apartment.

Young Radicals isnt intended as an intellectual historyits a study of the politically engaged life. McCarter sets out to answer the urgent questions that preoccupy critics of liberal expediency: Where do idealists come by their galvanizing visions of a better world? Why do they give up health, safety, comfort, status to see those visions made real? In the process, his book helps chart the emergence of a sharp divide between staunch radicals and ambitious liberals, as Walter Lippmann and his old comrades go their separate ways. Over the course of McCarters narrative, Lippmann assumes his role as the archetypal liberal thinkeror, from the perspective of his leftist former friends, the epitome of the self-satisfied establishment.

The hero of McCarters cast of radicals (which also includes Alice Paul, John Reed, and Max Eastman) is the most formidable of Lippmanns critics, and in almost every way his antithesis. While Lippmann exuded the suavity of his Upper East Side breeding, Randolph Bourne was rough-hewn, emotive, and winningly vulnerable. He described himself as a puny, timid, lazy, hypochondriacal wretch. An obstetricians forceps deformed his face at birth; a childhood bout with tuberculosis twisted his spine and wrecked his gait. When Ellery Sedgwick, the editor of The Atlantic, invited Bourne to lunch at the Century Club, he canceled upon Bournes arrival, terrified at the prospect of being seen with him. (That didnt stop Sedgwick from assigning Bourne pieces.) A self-styled outsider, Bourne wrote beautifully about the comforts of friendship and the value of marginalized opinion.

Overcoming abandonment by his alcoholic father, Bourne studied at Columbia with John Dewey and imbibed his mentors ecstatic faith in democracy. His most lasting essay, Trans-national America, was published in this magazine in 1916. It poetically celebrated what we now call identity politics. Bourne shunned the idea of the melting pot. Instead, he imagined a cosmopolitan nation in which new arrivals would resist assimilation and inhabit their ancestral traditions. America is coming to be, not a nationality but a trans-nationality, a weaving back and forth, with the other lands, of many threads of all sizes and color. Freed of the pressure to fit into a monolithic American mold, immigrants would help create a new national culture. Bourne dreamed that it would be more creative, more tightly bound by mutual understanding. A beloved community was the phrase he borrowed (from the philosopher Josiah Royce) to describe his vision.

Bourne and Lippmann, nearly exact contemporaries, were never close friends. But Lippmann encouraged Bourne to write for the New Republic. And Bourne looked at Lippmanns intellectual ease and sweep with admiration bordering on envy, even if his own thinking propelled him in quite a different direction. He called Lippmanns Drift and Mastery, his 1914 case for imposing scientific order on society, a book one would have given ones soul to have written.

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War brought an end to Bournes idolization. Although he never publicly attacked Lippmann by name, he hurled spears at him, excoriating liberal intellectuals for dragging America into the conflict. It was a war made deliberately by intellectuals, Bourne fumed, arguing that they championed the war only so they could exploit the mobilization efforts in order to build the national government of their dreams. (War is the health of the state, Bourne aphoristically argued in a manuscript found after his death.) In the proximity of power, the intellectuals felt the thrill of being on the craft, in the stream, even though they didnt fully believe in the wars underlying justifications.

When Bourne denounced Lippmann and his ilk, he leveled a charge that has dogged liberal elites ever since. He skewered them as disingenuous and greedy for power. They supported immoral policies for their own purposeswhich they considered loftywhen they should have known better. Decades later, the broadsides against the liberal hawks who lent their imprimatur to the Iraq War echoed this sentiment. And Bournes indictment anticipated the accusation of callous cynicism directed at Bill Clintons criminal-justice policy, seen as a ploy to win back white working-class voters. Barack Obamas response to the financial crisis, which let bankers slip away unpunished for their misdeeds, roused similar ire.

Over his career, Lippmann provided plenty of examples that validated the core of Bournes critique. As Snyder tells the story, Felix Frankfurter turned on his roommate from the House of Truth for similar reasons. Frankfurter worked tirelessly to save the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti from the accusations that sent them to death row. He eloquently transformed their fate into the quintessential liberal crusade of the 20sand was apoplectic that when he tried to enlist Lippmann in his effort, he struggled to rouse him from his icy evenhandedness.

Yet however valid Bournes reasons for scything Lippmann and the liberal intellectuals were, there was also something juvenile about his attack. Indeed, Bourne himself might have described his defiance that way. His earliest essays advocated youthful rebellionand denounced the oppressive hold that the middle-aged exerted over society. Youth is the incarnation of reason pitted against the rigidity of tradition, he wrote. His beef with his seniors had some of the glibness of a teenage tantrum, and so did his attack on the liberal intellectuals. He simply couldnt countenance the notion that Lippmann might want to lead American policy in a more humane, internationalist direction out of motives that were public-minded as well as vainglorious. Its true that Lippmann took smug satisfaction in his audiences with the president and in the attentions of Wilsons most trusted adviser, Colonel Edward House. Yet he didnt hesitate to brutallyand influentiallyturn against Wilson for botching the aftermath of the war.

Bourne will always make a readier hero than Lippmann. In the last days of 1918, as the war drew to a close, he died of the Spanish flua tragic end that had nothing to do with the intellectual exile he endured during the war, but that added to his aura of martyrdom. Bourne spent the last year of his life pushed out of magazines that had once welcomed him, with hardly any outlets for his thunderous denunciations. His death froze him in the fresh-faced state of youthful rebelliousness that he celebrated.

The radicals of the prewar years are good grist for inspiring yarns. But to what end? Many of the protests of these years were aesthetic gestures, statements of nonconformity rather than expressions of a political program. John Reed, Lippmanns Harvard classmate and another of McCarters protagonists, was a burly adventurer who went off to chronicle the Russian Revolution. The thrilling firsthand account he produced, Ten Days That Shook the World, was romantic and admiring. Lenin, who blurbed the book, rewarded Reed for his powerful propaganda by burying him in the wall of the Kremlin. Though you would hardly guess it from McCarters tender treatment, Reeds career is a cautionary tale of the reasons to fear idealism and high-profile protest merely for the sake of rebellion.

What makes Lippmann unappealing is his detachment, the cool logic that prevented him from shaking his fist at the status quo with Reed-esque fury. (Lippmann mocked Reed in a witty hatchet job in the New Republic, Legendary John Reed.) At the same time, that detachment produced enduring results. His hastily written books might not always thrill like a Bourne essay, but to watch him wrestle with the deepest questions about mass psychology, the behavior of corporations, and the value of tradition is to discover punditry as a philosophical discipline capable of lasting value.

Take the essays that Lippmann published in The Atlantic just after the war, collected in the slim book Liberty and the News. Lippmann wrote anxiously about the rise of what we have come to call fake news. He drew attention to the way the media spread rumors and deliberate lies, and he sounded the alarm about a public ill-equipped to sort through conflicting facts. He was concerned about filter bubbles and the power of gatekeepers. He tried to rally journalists to rise to the challenge, exhorting them toward greater professionalism and a higher sense of purpose. Preserving liberty, he argued, required redefining the concept. Liberty is the name we give to measures by which we protect and increase the veracity of the information upon which we act.

In the midst of our current convulsions, Lippmann has returned as an object of disdain. Not Lippmann the man, of course, but the technocratic spirit he once championed and embodied. To counter the rising authoritarian tide, the temptation is to run far away from that spirit. Indeed, protest and anger are essential bulwarks of democracy. And theres no doubting the moral blind spots of the reigning elite. But a truly radical solution to our crisis is actually the old liberal one, to reestablish the legitimacy of disinterested experts, to restore the institutions that provide a basis for common conversation. The path to Bournes beloved community now runs through Lippmann.

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Why Liberalism Disappoints - The Atlantic