On page after page, Gopnik portrays liberalism as the only political perspective that is “open to the evidence of experience.” Only liberals, with their capacity for experimentation and “self-correction,” Gopnik contends, are able to perform ungainly but essential tasks like cleaning up the sewers in nineteenth-century London—an achievement he mentions several times and says saved “possibly millions” of lives—or curbing a crime wave in twentieth-century New York. And yet, even as he presses these points, Gopnik shows his incapacity to attend in any concentrated way to the mire of the actual. Most conspicuously, he neglects the most recent challenges to his story about the “triumph of liberal ideals”—from Brexit to Bolsonaro—with the justification that it is not necessary for him to discuss “obvious contemporary political issues,” since “there’s a lot of that already.” Lame as this explanation may seem on the surface, the reality is worse. Gopnik not only fails to attend to the proximate causes of the “shock” with which his book begins; he seems to want his readers to forget some of its most obvious sources. How else to explain, in a book supposedly meant for a generation that cannot remember a time when America was not at war in the Middle East, the existence of sentences like: “Liberals believe in fighting wars as hard as necessary; ending them as soon as possible; and rebuilding the defeated country as charitably as one can.” Or that, in a book meant to trumpet the achievements of modern liberalism, there are so many pages devoted to the cleaning of the sewers in London 160 years ago, and not one word about the lack of drinking water in Flint, Michigan in 2019.