Old Socialist comments.
Sep 02, 2025
Headline: Cass Sunstein on What Lefty College Kids Get Wrong, the Dangers of Trump and His Own Regrets
Sub-headline: In a new book, the longtime legal scholar offers a defense of liberalism from its critics on both the right and the left.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/08/30/cass-sunstein-book-liberalism-interview-00535620
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Ankush Khardori is a senior writer for POLITICO Magazine and a former federal prosecutor at the Department of Justice. His column, Rules of Law, offers an unvarnished look at national legal affairs and the political dimensions of the law at a moment when the two are inextricably linked.
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Cass Sunstein, a legal scholar with a new book in defense of liberalism, served as C Here he poses for a photo near the White House on March 16, 2011. | AP
Editor: I recall when Mr. Sunstein set a letter to my address that contained two one dollar bills ! He was director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs in the waining days of Obama administration, and like Bush The Elder, he lacked any acquaintanceship with the lives of ordinary citizens. Two dollars tips belong in the Depression Era, or its sucessor the Neo-Liberal collapse of 2007-2008’! I sent the two dollers back! Reader note that Cass Sunstein and Ankush Khardori share in the rerified air of a practiced political confomity!
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Ankush Khardori opines:
Liberalism is under unprecedented attack in the United States. Not liberalism as in the ideology typically associated with the Democratic Party, but the broad and complex constellation of political commitments and aspirations that include respect for individual rights, pluralism and the rule of law, which have long been the foundation of American society.
The threat isn’t new, and it hasn’t just been coming from President Donald Trump or the political right. Prominent figures and thinkers on the left have tried to restrict free speech and enforce ideological conformity.
In a new book to be released on Tuesday, Cass Sunstein, a prolific legal scholar and high-level official in the Barack Obama and Joe Biden administrations, mounts a stirring intellectual defense of liberalism from its critics across the political spectrum. On Liberalism: In Defense of Freedom draws on — and ties together — the work of thinkers like John Stuart Mill and Friedrich Hayek, and it argues that they operate in a similar, broad tradition of liberalism that is in desperate need of revitalization.
In a wide-ranging interview about the book, we discussed why he wrote it and what he sees as some of the most pressing contemporary pressures on the liberal tradition both in the United States and abroad.
“There’s something about the idea of someone who’s in charge, who says ‘Fuck you’ and won’t take any shit,” he said at one point. “That resonates.”
We also touched on the Supreme Court, the state of the legal academy, his biggest regrets from his time in government, and, of course, Prince and Star Wars.
This book began with a guest essay that you wrote for the New York Times back in 2023 that provides a numbered list of propositions or claims that you associate with liberalism. You say that the response to that essay spurred you to write the book. What did you hear, and what do you want to accomplish?
Editor:
Ankush asks:
I’m going to start with a deceptively simple question. In 2025, what is liberalism to you?
Sunstein answers:
Liberalism is a set of commitments to freedom, pluralism, the rule of law, respect for individual autonomy, and security and self-government. Those are the ideals that liberalism represents.
Ankush asks:
So you view this as an intellectual project that can bring in people from across the political spectrum.
Sunstein answers:
I almost called the book Big Tent Liberalism, and I have a little bit of regret that I didn’t.
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Editor: Reader spare yourself the the trouble of reading the Ankush & Sunstein self-congratulatory chatter , by going to the New York Times of Nov. 20, 2023 , which offers a predigested 34 part condensation, of this Politico Diatribe and its auteur, and fellow traveler Ankush Khardori!
Editor: Reader here from October 9, 2014 is Jeremy Waldron’s eviseration of Mr. Sunstein, and his telling reply , to Sunstein’s comment.
It’s All for Your Own Good
Jeremy Waldron
‘Why Nudge?’ by Cass Sunstein
In their book Nudge, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein considered the choices made by ordinary people about their retirement.
Many employees have the opportunity to enroll in a 401(k) plan, in which their contributions will be sheltered from taxes and to which their employer will also contribute. But a considerable number of people do not choose to enroll in a 401(k) plan and of those who do, many select levels of contribution that are far below what would be most advantageous to them. Why? Probably because of inertia. It is easier not to make a decision than go to the trouble of calculating an optimal contribution
Employers sometimes try to educate people to make better choices, offering them retirement-planning seminars, for example. But the lessons of these seminars are soon forgotten: “Employees often leave educational seminars excited about saving more but then fail to follow through on their plans.” And so Sunstein and Thaler suggested a different strategy. Instead of teaching people to overcome their inertia, we might take advantage of their inertia to solve the problem. Suppose we arrange things so that enrollment at some appropriate level of contribution is the default position—the position that obtains if the employee does nothing. Something has to be the default position; why not make it the position that accrues most to the employee’s benefit, “using inertia to increase savings rather than prevent savings”?
Resetting the default position this way is what Thaler and Sunstein call a “nudge.” It exploits the structure of the choice to encourage a more desirable option. The decision is not taken entirely out of the employee’s hands. She can still change it and revert to a strategy of no contributions or diminished contributions to her retirement funds. But in that case she has to make an effort; this is where she has to overcome her inertia.
Nudging is an attractive strategy. People are faced with choices all the time, from products to pensions, from vacations to voting, from requests for charity to ordering meals in a restaurant, and many of these choices have to be made quickly or life would be overwhelming. For most cases the sensible thing is not to agonize but to use a rule of thumb—a heuristic is the technical term—to make the decision quickly. “If it ain’t broke don’t fix it,” “Choose a round number,” “Always order the special,” and “Vote the party line” are all heuristics. But the ones people use are good for some decisions and not others, and they have evolved over a series of past situations that may or may not resemble the important choices people currently face.
Now, every decision we face presents its own “choice architecture,” in which the possibilities we have to choose from are arrayed in a certain order. Some make themselves clamorously known; others have to be unearthed. There may be limited time to make a choice and then some possibilities expire. Or if nothing is done, something may still come to pass: there are default options (as opposed to possibilities a person has to positively choose). There is no getting away from this: choices are always going to be structured in some manner, whether it’s deliberately designed or happens at random.
Nudging is about the self-conscious design of choice architecture. Put a certain choice architecture together with a certain heuristic and you will get a certain outcome. That’s the basic equation. So, if you want a person to reach a desirable outcome and you can’t change the heuristic she’s following, then you have to meddle with the choice architecture, setting up one that when matched with the given heuristic delivers the desirable outcome. That’s what we do when we nudge.
All of this sounds like a marketer’s dream, and I will say something about its abusive possibilities later. But Sunstein and Thaler have in mind that governments might do this in a way that promotes the interests of their citizens. Governments might also encourage businesses and employers to use it in the interests of their customers and employees. The result would be a sort of soft paternalism: paternalism without the constraint; a nudge rather than a shove; doing for people what they would do for themselves if they had more time or greater ability to pick out the better choice.
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Cass R. Sunstein, reply by Jeremy Waldron
On freedom of choice, autonomy, and dignity
In response to:
It’s All for Your Own Good from the October 9, 2014 issue
To the Editors:
I am most grateful to Jeremy Waldron for his generous and clear-headed review of my books Why Nudge? The Politics of Libertarian Paternalism and Conspiracy Theories and Other Dangerous Ideas [NYR, October 9]. Waldron worries that nudging poses a risk to autonomy and dignity, but it is important to see that nudges are meant to promote both of those values. Disclosure of relevant information (about the terms of a school loan or a mortgage, for example) is hardly a threat to human dignity. When people are asked what they would like to choose, their autonomy is enhanced, not undermined. (Active choosing is a prime nudge.) A GPS certainly nudges, but it does not compromise what Waldron favors, which is “a steadfast commitment to self-respect.” Waldron is right to worry about the risk of manipulation, but the whole idea of nudging is designed to preserve freedom of choice, and in that sense both autonomy and dignity.
Cass R. Sunstein
Robert Walmsley University Professor
Harvard University
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Jeremy Waldron replies:
I appreciate this clarification. Many nudges simply involve an improvement of the decision-making environment and of the information available to choosers. Professor Sunstein is right that there can be no objection to that. But in his book, the term “nudge” also comprises attempts to manipulate people behind their backs, using their own defective decision-making to privilege outcomes that we think they ought to value. I think both of us should be concerned about that and about a world in which that more sinister sense of nudging becomes a widespread instrument of public policy.
Old Socialist.
Added 9/3/2025.
Editor: Here is Steven Poole, who offers a telling critique of professional Technocrat Cass Sunstein, of Thu 20 May 2021 02.30 EDT : Reader take the time to explore the full range of Mr. Poole’s evisertion of this Technocrat! I’ll just post the final paragraphs of Steven Poole’s epic eviseration of this Techno!
Headline : Liars by Cass R Sunstein review – in search of the ‘optimal chill’
Sub-headline:Who should regulate false information? A ‘nudge’ expert and former adviser to Barack Obama takes on free speech.
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So if it’s to be the government’s job to regulate lies, what happens when that power rests in the hands of a lying government? Yes, it’s the old quis custodiet ipsos custodes question, which applies just as much to the social media giants whom Sunstein praises in this book for their “inventive” approach to the problem, such as tagging dubious statements with “get the facts” and so forth. But who is accountable when Twitter decides to suppress links, as it did last October, to a New York Post story about Hunter Bide ? In a recent financial statement, though not in this book, Sunstein discloses having done consulting work for Facebook and Apple, so he is perhaps inclined to take a friendly view.
The formula Sunstein arduously arrives at for his new regulatory scheme is as follows: “False statements are constitutionally protected unless the government can show that they threaten to cause serious harm that cannot be avoided through a more speech-protective route.” But this is precisely what autocrats such as Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin claim they are showing when they shut down dissent. We could have a law, Sunstein also suggests, “that speakers may be fined for knowingly spreading lies about candidates for public office”, as though such power could never be abused.
In Sunstein’s world, though, such powers will never be abused (perhaps because of magic democracy), and instead will regulate speech smoothly for everyone’s increased benefit. What shall we call the new government department responsible for such regulation? If only “the Ministry of Truth” didn’t have such unfortunate connotations. Don’t sweat the details, though. “The only question is whether it is possible to administer such a system,” Sunstein writes. “The best answer is that when there is a will, there is a way.”
This isn’t an answer but merely a hand-waving hope, quite apart from the general rule that when you see an American popular nonfiction writer claiming to identify “the best answer” to something, you should check your wallet again. Happily, at least, the best answer to the Covid-19 pandemic wasn’t, in fact, to lecture people about their cognitive failures to understand probability, but more along the lines of what celebrated legal scholar Sunstein told the trusting readers of Bloomberg News less than a month later: that lockdowns actually work.
Old Socialist.
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