My thanks to Bruce Miroff for his thoughtful comments. There is much we could discuss, but because our allotted space is quite circumscribed I shall settle here for trying to clarify a few points and to dispel a few misimpressions I may have encouraged—or at least not sufficiently forestalled—in my book.

First, Miroff begins his review with the question “Why have American liberals been losing political contests in recent decades?” He closes his first paragraph by saying that although my argument “is provocative and powerful as theoretical critique and advocacy,” it is “less effective in providing a historical explanation for contemporary liberalism's troubled state.” That may leave the reader with the mistaken impression that my central concern in the book is to explain the decline in liberalism's political fortunes. Although that decline is certainly a worry of mine, my central purposes in the book are to analyze, explain, and critique the changes in liberal public philosophy over the past decades. In the one chapter in which I venture some historical explanation—“Why Did It Happen?”—the dependent variable is the transformation in public philosophy and not any electoral decline that may have been associated with it. I do say and believe that the change I describe and criticize was “one important variable among others” in the decline of liberalism's political success since the time Miroff examines in his own book; and I offer some logic and evidence on behalf of that belief. I claim, however, no more causal contribution than that, understanding full well that the causes of the political decline in question were many and turned largely on matters of race, religion, social and economic demographics, party realignments, and the like, which have been well chronicled elsewhere.

Second, Miroff observes that my “ideal type of traditional liberalism is unduly benign,” pointing out some of Walt Whitman's less attractive views and positions. He is certainly correct in these observations—in part because my model is an idealizing intellectual construct and not merely a historically descriptive one. My favorable invocation of Whitman and certain others was directed toward their more general abstract account of democratic goals and ideals and not toward any particular prejudices they might have exhibited or policy judgments they might have made within their own historical horizons. My stance toward them, therefore, parallels Miroff's own stance toward Abraham Lincoln in his Icons of Democracy (2000), where his judgment that “Lincoln remains the best model Americans have of democratic leadership” (p. 124) is not meant to entail his endorsement of Lincoln's own racial attitudes or particular actions, such as his suspension of habeas corpus. Because the reader might misinterpret Miroff's remark about my “celebrating the optimistic teleology of traditional liberalism,” it is also appropriate to add in this context that I by no means share the belief of many nineteenth-century figures (not only Whitman but also Mill and Tocqueville) that the advance of liberal democracy is driven by some kind of historical telos. The events of the twentieth century should have disabused us of that illusion. I consider the building of a well-ordered democratic society to be a very complex, difficult, and fragile achievement—the success of which is in no way guaranteed by Providence or Reason or any other suprahuman agency.

Miroff also worries that I slight the devotion of American populism and Progressivism to distributive justice in light of their advocacy of policies requiring economic redistribution. I certainly did not intend to gainsay that advocacy. Moreover, I believe that any good democratic society—indeed, any decent society—will have in place programs that are in some respects significantly redistributive. My claim was that, to borrow Richard Rorty's apt words here, they “all meant [by justice] pretty much the same thing—decent wages and working conditions, and the end of racial prejudice” (Achieving Our Country, 1998, p. 59) and not something more ambitiously egalitarian. I also noted with approval that they invoked other democratic goods alongside distributive justice in defense of such policies. This may seem mere academic quibbling, but the reasons offered for redistributive policies carry very real consequences both for the targets and terms of the allocations and also for the appeal of the political rhetoric provided on their behalf.

Finally, I was dismayed that Miroff apparently read my reference to the Selma march in connection with generational differences as somehow implying that the march should be seen “as standard material in the history books, without any special moral resonance.” Quite the opposite. I hope the Selma marchers will always be remembered and venerated. My point instead was that—because our political and moral sensibilities are powerfully shaped by such traumatic “defining moments”—liberals of my generation who experienced that genuine rights Armageddon firsthand tend to carry in our psyches a prereflective disposition to see political problems, conflicts, and choices through a deontological prism, as it were. Since one of my main arguments is that American liberals in recent decades have placed burdens on the concept of social justice it cannot carry while simultaneously slighting important democratic goods whose invocation could serve them well, I find promise in the rise of a new generation of liberals whose own politically formative experiences may encourage them to reinscribe claims about distributive justice within a broader set of democratic goals and aspirations.