Clinton had as a young man gone to Yale Law School, and for decades afterward he pursued the improvement of the world through the instrument of politics and the law. He had embraced a liberalism that was, in the words of the writer Nathan Heller, a “systems-building philosophy,” whose revelation was “that society, left alone, tended toward entropy and extremes, not because people were inherently awful but because they thought locally.” Private individuals couldn’t be relied on to see the big picture of their society, Heller writes, but “a larger entity such as government could.” When he
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