The Book That Changed How I Think About Liberalism

28:20Yes. So marketplaces of ideas without state interference, without church interference, allow these ideas to compete with each other, including religious ideas. And this will be kind of a purification process. And yeah, they were very optimistic about the future. Today, that seems so naive, this belief, you know, in the arc of history, the march of history they talked about the whole time. I mean, they weren't naive and they weren't silly. I know one of the guys who's one of a hero in my book is Benjamin Constant, and he said we need pleasing illusions. We need pleasing illusions to make us better.

28:59Also, to maybe cut into some of that pessimism, this is hard to do well. Liberalism is hard to do well. Complex society is hard to do well. Some of the collapse in confidence in that, I think, is misplaced. I don't think that what happened is all these ideals failed. I think in many cases we failed the ideals. But I want to get at something that exists in there as a shadow side. One thing that is very present in your book is the contempt many liberals in the 1700s, the 1800s have for religion, or certainly religions that they don't belong to, right? As you say, backwards, superstitious. And this comes right up into the modern era, right, where there's a real feeling among the religious that liberals look down on them, you know, among evangelical Christians and others, that they try to use a state to change their behavior.

29:55You can't even refuse to bake a cake for a couple that is getting married of the same sex. And so there is this critique of liberalism that you see throughout the ages, which is that liberals are tolerant of everything but what they consider to be the intolerant. and they consider you to be intolerant, backwards, bigoted, then they will bring the full force of the state, if they control it, down upon your head. And it creates backlashes. But it is this very hard problem, like this paradox of tolerance. How do you tolerate people who don't want to be tolerant? How do you then not become intolerant?

30:32Can you trace a bit of that tension? I don't know if they ever solved that problem. They were very... I don't think they have.

31:06use the free press to attack constitutional government? At what point do you censor? We struggle with this today, and they certainly did then. What, in your view, is the first society or state in which something that we would now recognize as liberalism takes power? When does it move from a theory outside power, as a political philosophy, not as a virtue, into something that is being wielded by those with authority. You know, famously in 1830, there is a revolution that brings what's considered a liberal government into power. And it unfortunately fails in the 1848 revolution in France, 1830. What happens in the French Revolution?

31:51It's the rise of the bourgeoisie. It's the fact that the nobles, the privileges of the nobility are overturned and you have rule of law, civic equality. Marx talks about this. Communists talk about this as being the bourgeois kind of revolution and how terrible it is because it became very quickly considered a selfish regime, a money-driven machine. Let's stay on Marx for a minute. What is his critique of liberalism? Liberalism is really the rule of the bourgeoisie. It's middle class. It's money. If you look at France, he also was really much looking at France, right? Everybody's looking at France.

32:27What's going on with the success of revolutions. It's like a laboratory of political ideas, right? So this is a bourgeois revolution to them, and it's liberals who carry these ideas forward. But what happens in Marx's thought is, of course, once they take over power, they're going to exploit the workers and just make more and more money and exploit the workers until they will rise up and you'll have the communist revolution and the takeover. But the thing is that there's no way around it. You need the liberals to take power. You need the bourgeoisie. In Marx's view. That's Marx's view. So he's not anti this precisely.

32:59He's just, this is the motor of history. It's going to be superseded by the proletariat. Where does liberalism begin to become interested in or associated with the actual redistribution of resources in society from the rich to the poor? Where does it become connected to social welfare states? And, you know, when you talk about FDR and that later liberalism, right, and a lot happens between, you know, what we've been discussing in there. At some point, this moves away from just being a set of approaches to a marketplace of ideas or individual virtue, and it becomes connected to a view that power needs to be redistributed and money and security need to be redistributed.

33:41When does that begin to happen? Right. So the early liberals were mostly concerned with creating a political system, getting rid of the divine right of kings and having constitutional representative government with guarantees for individual rights, freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and private property rights. Rule of law, obviously very important. But as they're also pragmatic people, and over time, with the Industrial Revolution, with urbanization, they see new problems arise, right? The idea that there is pauperism, a new word that's invented at the time, that means people are stuck, workers are stuck in poverty.

34:20and what to do about it. Some people start saying, listen, deregulation isn't working for these people. They're stuck. And with our core values of generosity and freedom lovingness, obviously these people are not free. They're not able to morally refine themselves or to contribute to society in any meaningful way, morally or intellectually. So a government now needs to step in first with factory legislation and such and eventually with some sort of tax distribution and so on. There is an interesting dimension there that I think you hear less of today, which is a connection of a social welfare state, everything from education to health care and on and on, as being not just a matter of justice, maybe not even at all a matter of justice, but instead a matter of uplift.

35:12You're trying to create the conditions for a capable, educated, productive citizenry. And something you see in a lot of the early arguments about it is that you see less of the argument, at least in my reading, that society is unfair. That's more sort of how I would, you know, argue for a lot of these policies today and more of the argument that this needs to be done because it is the only way to have a citizenry capable of participating in liberal democracy, you know, able to fight in your wars, right? Like, it's a question of building the capacity of the citizenry. It's very, very concerned with the uplift of the individual.

35:52Absolutely. And it strikes me also that factory legislation at first, for example, again in France, was, you know, when it came to women, you know, shorten the workday, make it a little less harsh for them. Why? Because they'll have better breast milk. they'll be healthier and they'll produce healthier soldiers basically boys who will fight in wars but i want to say there germany suddenly starts to play a big role their thinkers they had thinkers um who said that this whole idea of free markets and laissez-faire were great theoretically but weren't working in practice right now and what you need is to actually study the workers and demographic patterns and prices and salaries and so on and come and see what's actually going on and then devise policies accordingly.

36:52And these ideas were spread and were written about. Their ideas were translated and talked about in England and France. It's also the power of Prussia, right? So Napoleon III thought he could have a little war with Prussia, make him give him some glory and some popularity. And lo and behold, the exact opposite happened. The Prussians won very quickly. And it was a shock. It was a shock to everybody that France, meant to be the most powerful country in Europe, could be defeated like this. And they start to ask why. And they start thinking, well, guess what? German soldiers are vaccinated. They're much healthier.

37:32Their railroads work. Germany is very early to have a state-run health care program. Exactly. And this catches on. Again, it's because of, you know. But it doesn't come from the liberals initially. I mean, Bismarck is a key mover here. Exactly. And that's an interesting twist that sometimes the influences on liberalism are not necessarily from within. The first Napoleon is what made people like Benjamin Constant, the early liberals, say, like, we need something so that this never happens again. We need constitutions that stop somebody like Napoleon, a demagogue, a dictator from coming to power.

38:07And then now it's Bismarck. But look at his policies. Look what he's doing to the population. They're healthier. They're stronger. They're more patriotic. This is really when there was what came to be called a new liberalism. And they called it that new liberalism in England, where a group of people started to say, no, we need to learn from the Germans. And we need some government intervention to help the workers, to spread the wealth, and that the government has an important role to play in the economy in a just and liberal polity. So they learned their lessons the hard way that way. So how then do you have this weird split that makes so much of the conversation about liberalism confusing today, where you have a liberalism in much of Europe that means laissez-faire, that means that you are in many cases opposed to the welfare state, and you have a liberalism very much associated with America, maybe coming from Germany, that is the exact opposite, right?

39:04You have this debate between the classical liberals like Hayek and then FDR is, you know, the central, like arguably most important American liberal. And they stand in many ways for, I don't want to say entirely opposite things. They agree on things like free speech and, you know, some other dimensions around rights. But you do have liberals split into two streams, one of which is profoundly skeptical of the government and sees the government as the source of much tyranny. And the other, which sees a government and a more generous government as the guarantor of a kind of freedom. Yeah, that's right.

39:41In England, eventually the new liberals kind of went out and they dropped the new and they're just called liberals. Right. And that's what happens in America. They don't call themselves new liberals. They start calling themselves first progressives and then liberals. Wilson, actually, there's a moment you can see where he's calling himself a progressive and then he switches to liberal. It's quite interesting. In France, they never make that move. So liberalism, without any descriptive term before, it means the laissez-faire liberalism, small government liberalism. And today in most of the world, that's what liberalism means, right?

40:16It's sort of right of center, free markets, small government, whereas in America, colloquially it tends to mean big government. Nobody says they're for big government, but more interventionism, more of a redistributive state, bigger role for the state.

40:51who in your view are the most important american liberal thinkers if you're thinking of a canon of american liberalism well who belongs in it you of course have to talk about john rawles and he comes very late in this so i think more than thinkers i mean there's john dewey It was very important, particularly in his liberal education. There are people like I mentioned, I wouldn't call them great innovative thinkers. I mean, John Rawls, obviously great philosopher of the 20th century, but on his caliber or on the caliber of John Locke or John Stuart Mill, I don't see any. I hope not. you know, American intellectual historians aren't going to like email me like crazy saying that I'm being unfair.

41:33But I don't think America was notable for its liberal theorists until quite late in the game. We do have great liberal leaders. I mentioned Lincoln. I mentioned FDR. I think this is underplayed in our own tradition. And I'd like to say more on this because I actually think great liberal practitioners in some ways to me are more interesting than great liberal theorists. I find it to be a problem with American liberalism that it is so obsessed with John Rawls. People think that is because I don't like John Rawls. And that's not quite it. I just think that in terms of something that is a, hopefully, a popular in public philosophy, somebody whose central work is fundamentally unreadable by the public, does not really make sense as a foundation for that.

42:16And he's not the foundation for that, right? Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., John Dewey, I do think is actually quite important here, but FDR. You have really remarkable liberal leaders in this country, many of them, I mean, having written remarkable things about how to think about liberalism, many of them coming from outside the halls of power. I think liberalism is often most interesting when it is in a tense relationship with power. But I'm curious how you see that tradition and how it altered what American liberalism became and is. Yeah, totally. I think that's wonderful.

42:52But if you look at the people I look at at the very beginning, you know, there wasn't this great divide between, you know, the great thinkers and the great political leaders. I mean, somebody like they're very pragmatic earlier. Yes, Sistero is a political figure. He's a political figure. Benjamin Constant becomes a deputy in the Chamber of Deputies. John Stuart Mill runs for office. And, you know, if you read the speeches, if you read some of the speeches, the wonderful speeches people were making in those days, you know, drawing on Montesquieu and Locke. And, you know, they're reading the stuff as well.

43:27So there wasn't maybe this great divide between intellectuals and practitioners. What does that tell you in America? What was different about it here? And maybe it's worth starting actually with the founders. I think there's a lot of interesting argumentation over how much to think of the American founders as inside the American liberal tradition, as in tension with what later becomes a liberal tradition, right? They're obviously claimed by all sides here. How do you think about the founding and with its profound internal contradictions around freedom and human bondage? I've become more and more interested in American political thought and institutions and history.

44:08Unfortunately, because of the way disciplines and concentrations work, I'm more of an expert on European history. But what I've read about the founding and about the founding fathers and what was going on there just fills me with enormous respect and gratitude. And I think for the wonderful work that they did, being both thinkers and actors, and Franklin Jefferson came to Paris and were very much interested also in French matters and vice versa. The American Constitution influenced early liberals because they thought it was an amazing document. And maybe that's the thing that's so wonderful is to see exactly those things coming together, the ideas and the practices coming together in the founding fathers to produce this amazing document.

44:57That's a very glittering answer. But I think a critic of liberalism would say that what good is your liberalism if it can include slavery in its founding constitution? Or in more of the European case, what good is your liberalism if it is so interwoven with colonialism? And I mean, there were many people who certainly believed in many liberal ideas we're talking about here who made space for both of those practices within their liberalism. Right. Well, I don't mean to, again, idealize these out of proportion. These people, these are early liberals and liberals have never been perfect. They're often suffer from the same prejudices, the prejudices of their time.

45:39There are exclusions there. But how did they grapple with this? I mean, we've talked a lot about freedom here. How did they grapple with this? how did they grapple with this? I think there were, I mean, other people can speak more intelligently about the U.S. Constitution and the position, the slavery within the document and say that this is really a question also of compromise. It's a horrible thing to imagine, but I think there was debates going on there and politics going on that are unseemly today. And you have John Stuart Mill seeing absolutely atrocious things about how despotism is okay when you're dealing with barbarians or something, talking about British imperialism in India.

46:19You have Tocqueville, who was okay, apparently, with burning silos in Algeria. That's awful stuff. But at the same time, these people were then from within. This was not a liberal position, I would say. As many people were saying, you are betraying your own principles. And conservatives were also for, perhaps even more so for colonialism, imperialism. It's horrible to say, but racism was rampant. Sexism was rampant. If anyone was against it, they were liberals, basically. Well, this is the other side of it where there's a lot of liberal abolitionism. There obviously is like the long effort among liberals to expand the franchise, you know, to women and then to people of other races and, you know, a lot of fights over immigration.

47:12You have this interesting moment in the book where you say maybe the first use of using liberal as a noun, somebody signs an anti-slavery pamphlet, a liberal. Right. It is a tension. Yeah, for sure.

47:51own principles. You're like an aristocracy, an aristocracy of sex. You're acting like despots. We want to participate. We want to also be citizens. We can have the virtues of citizens. So they use that same language to say, we have shared responsibilities and we bring something to the table, something liberal. So they use the language. And I think that's also true with Frederick Douglass and other groups that have been prejudiced against and even subordinated and oppressed, that they can use the language of liberalism, use the lofty notions and the ideals to argue for their own rights and their own capacities.

48:36What is it in liberalism? What ideals, in your view, what thoughts or principles or shared values create this kind of time bomb aspect of it? Which you see go off repeatedly in history where, you know, you go back in liberalism and the terms of liberalism get argued to blow up the constraints of the last liberalism. But as we said at the beginning of this conversation, this begins as a quite aristocratic ideal. Eventually it becomes, in many cases, a philosophical weapon to expand the terms of inclusion and freedom. What is it that does that, in your view? Well, you know, ideas don't travel in a vacuum.

49:20So I would always say that the facts on the ground change socioeconomic pressures, changes in the economy, wars, all of this creates conditions, creates conflicts, creates crises that liberals then have to confront and deal with. And that goes to, you know, everybody's talking about the crisis of liberal democracy today and the crisis of liberalism. Well, there's been a succession of crises. Liberalism was born in crisis, the crisis of the French Revolution. And so when these moments happen, when there is extreme tension, when there is new problems, it can throw liberalism sort of off its kilter for a while.

50:01All sorts of debates occur, become more heated, confused even. There have been moments in liberalism's history where they literally start and I have lists of articles. What is liberalism? What do we stand for? What is true liberalism? No, that's false liberalism. And they have these debates. And as I said before, that can weaken the movement, but it can also bring strength to it, allow it to evolve. This conflict, a battle of ideas, brings out something new that really responds to the crisis that's on the ground. Are there specific moments in liberalism's history that this moment reminds you of?

50:35Yeah. I've even started to think about the original crisis, you know, the crisis of Napoleon's despotism. liberals had had such high hopes for establishing a liberal regime based on constitutional rule and representative government with these rights protecting the individual. And then the revolution derailed into this horrible period of the terror. And eventually they thought that Napoleon would come and save the revolution. So there was a lot of hope that this charismatic figure who claimed to want to save the revolution was making all the right noises. He was going to bring peace to France. He was going to bring back order.

51:18He was going to protect all these things liberals had fought for so hard. And then instead, he became this despot and a demagogue. And he used wars, you know, to divert attention to what he was doing at home. He gave gifts to people. He lined the pockets of his friends. He flattered people, gave them power, but at the same time that he amassed power in his own hands. This was profoundly demoralizing to the early liberals that I'm talking about who had this lofty notion of what a free or better, more moral, more humane world would look like, and look what it derailed into. So what did they learn from that?

52:07They learned that you needed certain safeguards in place. This is really when you get like liberalism as a constitutional way of thinking and balance of power, separations of powers, individual rights, freedom, how important freedom of press is, how important freedom of religion is. Napoleon used religion, you know, to buttress his power. So all of these constitutional ideas really came together then. And they, you know, it happened again and again over the course of the 19th century, that you have these very clever, charismatic figures who could speak directly to the people. I understand you.

52:48I represent you. We don't need these representative institutions. We don't, because I speaks directly to you. I am you, sort of. I mean, that's what a demagogue does, and that's what populism is, right, is that you don't need the intermediaries. And they were very worried about this. And the system they came up with, constitutional liberalisms, was meant to make it impossible. But that also made them really think more than ever that we needed an educated citizenry. intellectuals needed to step up, newspapers needed to step up and educate the public as to what it means to be a citizen of a liberal regime, of a liberal form of government.

53:29They wrote articles, Madame de Stael wrote novels in which she was, you could see her trying to foster the right kind of moral inclinations. By that I mean compassion, generosity, sociability, understanding, understanding of shared responsibilities that you needed to educate people to this. Because without it, without an educated, critically minded, alert citizenry, the people will fall prey to unscrupulous actors, demagogues. This was on their minds the whole time because they saw how vulnerable those liberal constitutions could be. They really depended on a morally educated, civic minded, an educated and alert citizenship.

54:15I take the current crisis of liberalism to be not any one crisis, but a couple of things, and this is a non-exhaustive list. One is that liberalism in its modern American form became associated with power and with the status quo and with reigning institutions as opposed to being seen as a challenge to them. So the more fed up people got, the less liberalism looked like an answer because it was increasingly people who seemed sort of comfortable with how society was working. I think another crisis is that individualism has gone very, very, very far. And I think the internet and social media and algorithmic media and the fracturing of what we know and our bonds from each other and the weakening of civic institutions and religions and labor unions and all of these things that Bob Putnam and others have documented.

55:10I think that there is a crisis of individualism that has become a partially crisis of meaning, but I also just think requires different ways of thinking about freedom. and I think liberalism in its modern form is very, very skeptical of individual responsibility and communal obligations because it has seen those used for oppressive reasons or used to sort of push people out to the margins of society or to blame them for things that have been done to them. But it also has left it with very little language. That's right. In which to talk about something that is not just individualism. Maybe on the question of individualism, something you describe in the book is that at other times, liberals actually were quite averse to that word, and they preferred individuality, or one I like more, personhood.

56:00I'm curious why they preferred those words and also what you see in that that might be relevant today. So, yes, they shied away from that word. Individualism really had an event, it was kind of a synonym for them to selfishness. And Tocqueville, you'll see, uses it that way, I think, in Democracy in America. It's just, Again, it's an ism. Isms are very often pejoratives. And individuality is more about, you know, becoming the best person you can be, developing yourself, your capacities of flourishing, individual flourishing. So individualism today, we've become very much a narcissistic society, unfortunately, I think.

56:42The more choices we have, that's better. It's about, you know, I don't want to go on about sounding horrible about us today, but I do feel that we've become very inward-looking and narcissistic. And what parts of the sort of liberal past do you think could be helpful in renovating an answer to that? I really think that people are searching for meaning. You mentioned that. And I think that in order to go forward, we can draw on this history that we have and think and kind of recover this moral language of character, of shared responsibilities, of moral improvement, looking at all these things that we have now that our people before us for centuries didn't have and think of them as ways to see if we can improve.

57:34ourselves, develop our capacities and do good for everyone. You know, it's funny when I talk this way, I'm constantly aware that I must be sounding silly somehow. And it's a reflection of the cynicism that's in the culture, right? Why is it somewhat embarrassing to speak about making or improving ourselves and doing good for society, keeping the common good in mind? There's something funny there. And I think that's a shame. Well, also, isn't there, though, a question of, well, who gets to decide what the common good is and what happens when we disagree. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.

58:07That's the danger. But that's why we have to come together, at least, and discuss it and come to some kind of, I think, people come together, they kind of can agree on things that are good for everyone. And then I think there's this question, which has been threaded a little bit through our conversation, of liberalism's relationship to power. And sometimes it is the ideas of people out of power. Sometimes it's people in power. But I think particularly as liberalism in America has become, you know, the movement of people who are college educated and people benefited more from how the institutions work, it's ended up very connected to power.

58:42And you see that a lot in the sort of rhetoric of people challenging it now and the sort of counter-revolutionary ideas that the people on the new right have. But I'm curious how you would describe, like, liberalism's view of power and what you see in like the various liberalisms that you've tracked that might be useful at a time when people feel like very, and I think quite understandably, skeptical of institutions and frustrated with the feeling that society is taking a direction that they don't have much influence over. Yeah, absolutely. Liberalism is best when it criticizes power. That's how it was limits authority and allows human flourishing for sure.

59:27And now there is at least this sense, and I think it's probably true that liberals largely have, I don't know if they control media and universities, but have a huge influence and power. And that is somehow self-perpetuating, which translates into political power as well. I think the worst part of that is a kind of condescension or kind of disconnect between these liberal elites that we recognize are there, but their disconnect between the common man, sort of regular people. And I think that is a betrayal of liberal principles, really, because this is not we talked in the beginning about elites and leaders.

1:00:12And this is not what liberal elites are supposed to be doing. So I think that and I'm an educator, I suppose, part of this liberal elite. I was going to say we're all. Yeah. So mea culpa. I mean, I think we can do a better job here and returning to these principles. One thing that I think is useful here, and it's not a full answer, but it's one reason I found some inspiration in your book, is that I do think some of the very early ideas that get talked about around liberality and an ethic of generosity towards your fellow citizen, yes, they were initially framed as things the aristocracy should practice.

1:00:53But like a lot of things in liberalism, we've tried to expand that. And, you know, we now believe in liberal democracy, not liberal aristocracy. And I think that having a, I think it's going to be very, very hard in this period to have a relationship of generosity in a very divided country, that politics is very hard to practice well right now. and the liberals who've done it really well right you think about say you know brock obama in 2008 you know are really able to on the one hand hold a vision of moral progress which is can be a divisive vision and also hold a vision of an ethic of generosity and decency towards you know both the people we agree with and the people we don't agree with and i think when you know the liberal elites as you describe them and not wrongly.

1:01:44But I think in general, one place that elites of, you know, all parties and persuasions tend to go very wrong is in losing that sense that they are part of a citizenry and instead seeing themselves as leaders who know what is best for everybody else. And balancing those commitments inside of liberalism, the commitment to moral progress, right, to expanding freedom, you know, to giving people a better life, and the commitment to the kinds of virtues needed to make a complex society thrive without people feeling oppressed or condescended to or pushed out by you. I think that balance is not one policy that does it.

1:02:24It's a very, very difficult balance. But I think the great liberals forget how to do that well. I mean, you talked about Lincoln earlier, and I mean, he, to think about somebody holding together opposites, right? Leading a civil war, bloodiest war ever on American soil, and also doing so within an ethic of constantly trying to reach out and see that there is some solidarity on the other side of this, that there's some way to rediscover bonds of commonality. I mean, it's why his speeches are read today, not because they're bloodthirsty, but because amidst all that blood, they're not. That's absolutely true.

1:03:00It is very difficult, and we're living in a very difficult moment, a true crisis, and we're so polarized. But I think giving up on liberals, I know that's not what you're saying, but those post-liberals that we mentioned a while back ago, I mean, I think it's dangerous to start talking about moving beyond liberalism or giving up on liberalism. Liberalism has gone through these crises before, and I think it can survive and come out of this even stronger and better if we renew some of these ideas. But as you in particular have said, you know, we have some liberals have to deliver, you know, with the affordability crisis that you've written about with health care, with the environmental degradation, with concrete problems that liberals aren't solving.

1:03:47So I think we have to find ways to do that. But to inspire people is important, too. I think there is a yearning. Young people, we live in a very materialistic culture. There's so much emphasis on, you know, what you can buy and how you should look and how you should dress. I think people are looking for also some moral uplift. I think that's a good place to end. Always our final question, what are three books you'd recommend to the audience? Okay. I'm always influenced by, in such a good way, the work of Sam Moyne. I don't know if you know his work. I think he's coming out with a new book that I'm looking forward to.

1:04:24But I would like to recommend Liberalism Against Itself, which really picks up on some of the themes also from my last chapter. And it's about Cold War liberalism and sort of why we went wrong in the Cold War, why liberals went wrong. Very interesting. The second one is a fun read, which is Alex Lefebvre's Liberalism as a Way of Life. And it's just delightful, basically telling us that we're all liberals, whether we know it or not. And he draws on comedy shows and TV series and sort of just a lovely uplifting book. And then last but certainly not least is Thinking with Machines. We haven't had a chance to talk about AI, but everybody's talking about it now.

1:05:06And there's so many books out, but if you want to read one book, I think that's the one. It's Basant Dar. It's a story of his life with AI. He was one of the first to teach it and to bring it to Wall Street. And so he talks about its evolution over time and the good and the bad, the risks and the benefits. And full disclosure, he's my husband. I hope I was allowed to do that. Liberals always scratching each other's back. Helena Rosenblatt, thank you very much. Thank you.

1:05:44This episode of The Escrunch is produced by Jack McCordick. Our recording engineer is Amin Sahota. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris with Kate Sinclair. Our senior audio engineer is Jeff Gelb with additional mixing by Johnny Simon. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show's production team also includes Annie Galvin, Roland Hu, Marie Cassione, Marina King, Kristen Lynn, Emma Kelbeck, and Jan Kobel. Original music by Amin Sahota and Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta. The director of Opinion Shows is Annie Rose Strasser.