Then I began to think about my mother's father, my grandfather, who was a congressman in the early part of the 20th century, a populist from Alabama. And my father's story, which had opened up a lot of thoughts in me about what happened to . . . I was reared on. The answers seemed to be pointing me backward and I began to look into the life of my grandfather and his political career and then much more broadly into American history in the 20th century. And a kind of pattern or connecting thread began to emerge that tied together the story of my grandfather, the story of my father and really explained to me what happened to liberalism . . .
Some people define it as a set of positions on the issues.
That's not the way I like to define it, because that becomes too dogmatic, too rigid. It began as a political philosophy . . . That was 18th-century liberalism. It underwent an enormous, seismic shift in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, which was the period of my grandfather's career, when industrial society forced liberals to reconsider whether the freedom of the individual from coercion was enough to insure happiness for the governed. . . . The history of the 20th century is the history of government overreaching, and liberalism becoming less and less popular as people identified it with an intrusive power which took away too many of their freedoms . . .