Liberalism as a Way of Life: Alexandre Lefebvre with Helena Rosenblatt

Where do you get your values and sensibilities from? If you grew up in a Western democracy, the answer is probably liberalism.
Conservatives are right about one thing: liberalism is the ideology of our times, as omnipresent as religion once was. Yet, as Alexandre Lefebvre argues in Liberalism as a Way of Life, many of us are liberal without fully realizing it-or grasping what it means. Misled into thinking that liberalism is confined to politics, we fail to recognize that it’s the water we swim in, saturating every area of public and private life, shaping our psychological and spiritual outlooks, and influencing our moral and aesthetic values-our sense of what is right, wrong, good, bad, funny, worthwhile, and more.
In conversation with historian Helena Rosenblatt, Lefebvre discusses how so many of us are liberal to the core, why liberalism provides the basis for a good life, and how we can make our lives better and happier by becoming more aware of, and more committed to, the beliefs we already hold.'
About the panelists:
Alexandre Lefebvre is Professor of Politics and Philosophy at the University of Sydney. His books include Human Rights as a Way of Life.
Helena Rosenblatt is Professor of History at the Graduate Center at the City University of New York. Her latest book is The Lost History of Liberalism: From Ancient Rome to the Twenty-First Century.
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[@_thanksdavid_]

Death-Qualified juries actively select for hypocrisy on the basis of deference to impartiality. Unlike every other criminal trial where all attorneys are able to select juries on cause with relation to bias on the matter of guilt,
In cases of pre-meditated murder where the death penalty is prospective (according to the prosecutor), attorneys are able to dismiss jurors on cause for not being impartial on the matter of deciding between killing the defendant and giving them life without parole.
The other side of that equation is that jurors are effectively selected for a narrative "good liberal" ambivalence with respect to killing the defendant, as if being biased for killing a person and a bias for not killing a person were equally extreme poles between which jurors stood to collapse the is-ought distinction. Like we weren't all biased against killing every person we interact with everyday, and by virtue of you still being alive, so were they.
Also, what do you call it when 12 people gather in a room over the house of days and weeks to deliberate on whether to kill a defendant and then ultimately decide to do so?
About as pre-meditated as it gets.
In practice, all liberal impartiality selects for is a lack of self-awareness.