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A while back, a reformed Freeper posted his very welcome change of heart on this board. One of his comments struck me as very significant -- he said he went to the polls in November of 2004 with the idea of "sticking it" to John Kerry.
That comment resonated with everything I know about hard right wingers in my family; from my hometown of Dallas, Texas; and, through the internet, radio, cable, television and print. What motivates these people is a straightforward resentment of what they perceive as "the liberal."
Within the American culture which is dominated by mass communications, the word "liberal" is primarily an epithet to describe a cultural stereotype -- the annoying scold who wants to punish the majority (with taxation and restrictive laws) for not thinking, speaking, or acting "correctly," while offering therapy, understanding and tax money to lazy and/or evil people. Rush Limbaugh and the Fox News Channel are dedicated to working this stereotype for all it's worth and then some.
Like all persistent stereotypes, this caracature of the "liberal" has a bit of truth in it. We all know or at least have heard of living breathing human beings who are going to scold you for not using the right word (PC) or eat the right food or worry about the right species of vermin that is in danger of extinction. The tone of voice in this scolding is extremely annoying to most Americans regardless of voting habit.
This stereotypical "liberal" is all about micromanaging civilization -- regulating hate speech, throwing tax dollars at social problems like laziness and criminality, telling people what kind of car to drive, telling people what kind of house to live in, what neighbors they are going to have to learn to love.
Above all, for the last four years, the Limbaugh conception of a "liberal" is somebody who wants to reason with terrorists.
However, in the last year or so, I am seeing signs of a "liberal" cultural revival. The right wing hacks who dominate public discourse have been pounding on everybody to the left of Attila the Hun with a redundant visciousness that has become banal -- and you are seeing a new self confidence coming out through Air America, the Jones Network, Comedy Central and among a few other platforms. Within this nascent reaction to the Right Wing hegemony in public discourse over the last 15 years or so, you hear more and more people willing to call themselves "liberals."
This effort to rescusitate the term will have to define itself away from the annoying scold to make any meaningful headway against the political bloc in firm control of America today.
So what does "liberal" mean to liberals?
Unfortunately, there is no short way to answer that question. The paradigm of "big vs. small government" offers no help. Most liberals favor a national health plan but want the government out of your bedroom. Most liberals favor an aggressive governmental policy to secure equal economic opportunity for racial minorities but want to shrink the Pentagon's budget.
The paradigm of "individual rights vs government power" is equally useless as a determiner of liberalism. Ditto "socialism vs. capitalism."
When self described liberals held high office in America two generations ago, there was no talk of nationalizing major industries, and by any but the most dishonest wingnut conception of "socialism" as a slur, there is no push for socialism among Americans who call themselves liberals today.
By the way, polls show that self described liberals make up between a fifth and a quarter of the general population.
The problem with defining liberalism is that the liberal project was almost completed in the USA with the Administration of Richard Nixon.
The self described liberals who came to power with Franklin Roosevelt and who survived the Eisenhower respite offered the country a comprehensive program of Regulated Capitalism. A self conscious reaction to the Great Depression, liberalism stood for the principle that the Government should use its power to rein in the excesses of Capitalism. The "conservatism" which they defeated was exemplified by Mr. Conservative, Robert Taft -- a man who thought it was a mistake to use the government to reduce the human misery caused by the Great Depression.
World War II settled the question of whether we would have a permanent "Big Government" as we looked at a completely changed global order in 1945. The Pentagon needed a perpetually expanding budget to keep the Soviet Union in check, and the the general prosperity that we enjoyed until the first Oil Shock of 1973 pretty well buried Taftian conservatism for at least a generation.
The contrast between FDR's liberalism and Taft's conservatism was semantically sensible. The New Deal was liberal with its use of Federal money to address social problems; it was liberal in its sense of generosity toward the downtrodden; it was liberal in its promotion of Keynesian economic stimulus -- although most "conservative" businessmen had a hard time understanding how these policies actually benefited them. Meanwhile, Taft wanted to "conserve" a social, economic and political order that had been in place for at least 70 years -- or since the beginning of the Republic, depending on how you chose to look at the concept of laissez faire.
The liberal project lost its political majority in the late 1960s due to Vietnam and the racial backlash that followed in the wake of LBJ passing the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and the series of race riots that swept through the urban ghettoes in those "long hot summers" of the late 60s.
Even so, although Richard Nixon described himself as a "conservative," he actually produced the high water mark for the liberal project by creating the Environmental Protection Agency and the Occupational Health and Safety Administration. These vast government bureaucracies addressed two "externalities" of capitalism in the classic liberal tradition of regulation. Nixon even proposed a version of welfare "reform" that would have Federalized the entire project of aid to poor families with a pre-Clintonian stipend that would never expire, although this program never passed.
The current ambiguity of the term "liberal" began to show up as Nixon pretty well completed the Liberal project of providing a Federal guarantee of a social safety net to prevent another collapse of aggregate demand like the Great Depression while preventing Big Business from harming the general welfare. The only major plank in the liberal project that was never added to the modern Welfare State was health care -- an initiative first advanced by Harry Truman, then Ted Kennedy and the last time out by Hillary Rodham.
As the welfare state grew over the decades and as its aura of making "progress" waned with familiarity, it has left liberals with very little to be in favor of. Instead of liberals advocating new initiatives, they are now in the position of wanting to "conserve" a social and political paradigm that has become several generations old.
One consequence of this is that the driving energy that comes from the true believers within a social movement pushes out in new directions -- and those new directions do not remain within the old paradigm. Now that liberalism has given racial minorities their legal rights, we are left with the lingering effects of centuries of official oppression. How do you address this problem? Now that the liberal state created by FDR and Richard Nixon has defeated the Axis Powers and then the Soviet Union, what do we do with the quasi-imperial appartatus that has been flung to the far corners of the globe? How do you address this problem?
In both the case of lingering racism and lingering imperialism, there is no simple liberal program. You will find "liberals" all over the lot on those issues.
Meanwhile, the term "conservative" has gone through even more extreme changes since the studied ambiguity of Richard Nixon.
The greatest hero of 21st Century conservatism is Ronald Wilson Reagan, a man who said that he never left the Democratic Party, but that the Democratic Party left him. A New Deal anti-Communist Liberal when he became the president of a labor union, Reagan never repudiated Franklin Roosevelt.
Since the Gipper left office in 1989, his political faction has gone absolutely nuts. As probably 200 or so posts under this nick argue at great length, there is nothing "conservative" about the Administration of George Walker Bush. It has created the Biggest and Most Intrusive Government in history. It is for free trade one day, it implements protectionism the next. It has cut taxes during wartime in the most radically irresponsible fiscal assault on our government's solvency in history. It has no regard for individual liberty or due process of law. It practices state religion.
I submit that the most accurate term for Bushism is "radical nihilism." Or I guess I'd settle for "gangsterism."
So in this semantic stew, what is a liberal? what is a conservative?
Then, of course, once you throw up your hands and give up trying to make sense out of our provincial "American" conception of these terms, you run into the fact that the rest of the anglophone world never had our conception of the term "liberal" in the first place.
Oy oy oy.
What puts the cherry on the sundae is that Americans know exactly what you mean when you say that so and so is a "liberal." A liberal is defined by her consumer choices! White wine, Volvo cars, exotic salads -- long hack comedy bits still make the rounds contrasting soccer and Nascar or Lite Jazz and Twangy Country Music.
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