David Frum: The Republican Party Needs to Embrace Liberalism
The Republican Party Needs to Embrace Liberalism
Classical liberal values have disappeared from the right and are now disappearing from the left. Someone needs to adopt them. Why not the GOP?
November 2018 Issue
David Frum
The word liberal was one of the many casualties of the Vietnam era.
A generation before, Americans competed to own the term. Anti–New Deal Republicans like Senator Robert Taft claimed that they, not their opponents, were the “true liberals.” Former President Herbert Hoover preferred the term historical liberal.
The social turmoil of the 1960s and ’70s ripped away liberal’s positive associations and, in so doing, helped redeem conservatism from the discredit it incurred during the Great Depression. In 1985, Jonathan Rieder, then a sociologist at Yale, vividly described the political evolution of a middle-class Brooklyn neighborhood in which he had lived:
In 1994, Governor Mario Cuomo of New York, a Democrat, lost his last election to a Republican who devastatingly attacked him as “too liberal, too long.”
In defensive reaction, left-of-center Democrats sought to rebrand themselves as something other than liberal. The label that eventually prevailed was progressive. The Congressional Progressive Caucus now numbers 78; it is the largest bloc on the Democratic side of the House of Representatives. There is no “liberal caucus.”
But a curious thing happens when you banish liberalism from your vocabulary. You rehabilitate illiberalism. As politics devolves into what President Barack Obama recently described as “a hostile competition between tribes and races and religions,” illiberalism seems to be spreading—and not only on the nationalist right, but also on the intersectional left.
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If the Trump years have achieved anything positive, it is to jolt a new generation into appreciating the value of the institutional legacies now under attack: Free trade. International partnerships. Honest courts and accountable leaders. Civil rights and civil liberties. Private space for faith but public policy informed by science. A social-insurance system that cushions failure and a market economy that incentivizes success.
Surely these things still command the assent of enough of us that we can continue our usual political disagreements—about health care, about taxes, about how to govern schools and fund roads—without demolishing the shared foundations of the constitutional order.
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https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/the-case-for-liberal-republicanism/570790/
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