On January 2, Fausta at the Bad Hair Blog wrote a provocative post, I used to be a liberal, in which she described, in passionate and sometimes intemperate terms, her reasons for no longer considering herself a liberal. In her post, she enumerated a number of issues on which modern day liberals are no longer liberal. She concluded, with some sadness and anger:
Coercion, collectivism, and governmental disregard for the value of the individual have become part and parcel of liberalism.
In response, Barbara O'Brien at Mahablog, in a post titled Somewhere There’s an Idiot, angrily attacked Fausta's post; her first objection:
First off, by now you probably know that whenever anyone says “I used to be a liberal, but now I’m a conservative,” that person is either lying or never actually understood what a “liberal” is. I’ll be charitable and assume this Fausta person falls into the second category.
Since I, like Fausta, used to be a liberal and am now more conservative (a neo-con, perhaps), it occurred to me that Barbara might be correct; I began to investigate what it means to be a liberal. I wrote Barbara an e-mail asking for some posts or links which could help me understand what it means to be a liberal, and she was kind enough to send me a significant number of links.
[As part of the same investigation, I have begun a correspondence with Gary Farber at Amygdala, another liberal blog, in order to see if we can find any common ground between old liberalism (my own) and new liberalism. Unfortunately, he has been under the weather for the last week or so and I am still waiting for his next post on the subject.]
Back to Barbara ...
According to her post:
...liberalism assumes that We, the People, are rational beings who can recognize problems and use representative government as a means for solving those problems, thus achieving systemic improvement in the human condition. Thus, in the 20th century We, the People authorized government to ensure fair labor practices, for example.
She contrasts this with the conservatives who believe:
But in the conservative mind, all checks on the power of the wealthy to get wealthier amounts to “collectivism,” which is the same thing as Communism. Where ordinary citizens are able to use government as a tool to protect themselves from oppression, that (to a rightie) is coercion and just a step away from Stalinism. In a free society, government should step aside so that big corporations can shortchange their workers and rob them of their lives and dignity without interference. To a rightie, “freedom” means limiting the power of government, which sounds grand. But if government truly is of, by, and for the people, what righties really want to do is limit the power of the people.
I must admit I found this description confusing. If "the people" decide to elect Representatives who believe that lowering taxes and cutting regulation is the proper use of government, how is this limiting the power of the people? I perused a fair number of posts by Barbara and numerous other liberals she directed me to.
One blogger, Larry Beinhart made an excellent point, that liberal democracy in the last 40 years has succeeded beyond any other system in bringing peace, freedom, and prosperity to its people:
The biggest problem that Democrats and liberals had was their own success.
They had solved many of the great social and economic problems of the ages.
Unfortunately, when he described the future of liberalism, he fell back on silly, insulting, and nonsensical tropes:
At which point, liberalism was no longer competing against the real world. It was competing against ideal worlds. On the left there was a politically correct, Birkenstock, earnest hippie, post-Marxist utopia. Over on the right, they were having a Reagan dream of Disneyfied Tom Sawyer land, where Nigger Jim understood that they weren’t really racists. One required more than a government could probably do, the other insisted that no government was really needed, being as how folks were so basically good.
As a general rule, once someone stoops to ad hominem arguments, they lose my interest. Calling Republicans "racists" is an old ploy that, even if true at one time, now reflects much more on the accuser than the accused. For proof of that just take a look at the video or transcripts of the Alito hearings from the last few days. The attempts to tar Alito as a racist who also wants to force women into second class status are ignominious and unworthy of such (self-described) stellar characters as our Senators.
Still searching for a good definition of modern liberalism, I read on. In another of Barbara's posts she links to a traditional definition of liberalism:
(The) philosophy or movement that has as its aim the development of individual freedom. Because the concepts of liberty or freedom change in different historical periods the specific programs of liberalism also change. The final aim of liberalism, however, remains fixed, as does its characteristic belief not only in essential human goodness but also in human rationality. Liberalism assumes that people, having a rational intellect, have the ability to recognize problems and solve them and thus can achieve systematic improvement in the human condition. Often opposed to liberalism is the doctrine of conservatism, which, simply stated, supports the maintenance of the status quo. Liberalism, which seeks what it considers to be improvement or progress, necessarily desires to change the existing order. [Emphasis mine-SW]
Now we are getting somewhere. Liberals believe in developing individual freedoms, and since conditions change, their specific programs have to change as well. Unfortunately, the material that Barbara sent me had very little to do with "developing individual freedoms" and overwhelmingly involved attacks on the Bush administration and Republicans. This post, The Republican Assault on Democracy, was written last June and contains these comments:
The official Bush Administration line in foreign policy is the promotion of democracy. Yet the Republicans have launched a full-scale assault upon democracy at home.
....
My point is that liberalism, first and foremost, is a set of expedients (mostly institutional and legal) for minimizing tyranny by setting limits to government power. It also tries to prevent the consolidation of power by fostering the multiplication of power.
I may have missed something but I fail to see how there has been a full-scale assault on democracy in this country. Where are the concentration camps, the censored newspapers? One could argue (and I have) that the greatest threats to free speech in this country have come from the left, with speech codes and hate speech legislation that define hate speech by its effect on the victim rather than any defined quality of the speech. One could also make an excellent argument that the McCain-Feingold law on campaign finance has done exactly the opposite of what was intended and has had the effect of coarsening the speech of moneyed interests while limiting speech of hose with less financial means. These are both free speech limitations that were almost universally supported by modern liberals.
At this point it seems to me that there are a very limited number of "issues" that define modern liberalism, and that there is really no underlying, unifying political philosophy to the positions. In the first of her three part series on liberalism, This Is Who We Are, Barbara as much as admits this, in the process of accusing Conservatives of the exact same thing:
One of the most common dichotomies mouthed on both Left and Right these days -- although mostly on the Right -- is that conservatives know who they are and what they stand for, whereas liberals do not. I agree that American liberalism lost consensus and cohesion a while back, so in a sense it's true that liberals as a group don't know who they are and what they stand for, but I don't think conservatives do, either. I just think they've done a better job of bullshitting themselves that they do.
She ultimately concludes that conservatives are essentially a tribal grouping, a conclusion that could easily apply to her description of liberals. Part II of her series returned to the idea that liberals believe people can use govenrment to solve problems:
The Founders committed an act of wanton liberalism when they wrote the Constitution. Granted, they didn't include a philosophical argument about self-government within the Constitution. They just wrote the thing, and the principle that guided all of them was that people could govern themselves. They didn't need a monarch, or an aristocracy, or a plutocracy, or a party, or even George W. Bush standing over the people, governing them.
We, the People, through the instrument of the Constitution, govern ourselves. And, over time, we've been working out the equality thing, too, although it hasn't been easy.
The problem her is in her introduction of the idea that George W. Bush is akin to a monarch, or some other member of an elite, standing over the people. There is a problem with this that I will address in a moment, but first, to conclude with her final thoughts on This Is Who We Are, Part III:
I contend that this is the bedrock of political liberalism: The belief that people can govern themselves, and that through representative government people can work together to effect systemic improvement in their condition.
Thus, government can be a means for good. And, by means of the government established and institutionalized by the Constitution, we, the people, can work together to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. And, not coincidentally, form a more perfect Union.
Compare/contrast with the axiom of contemporary conservatism: Government can't solve the problem; it is the problem.
The bedrock of contemporary conservatism is the belief that the Founding Fathers were wrong, and that republican government does not work. Plain fact. And it's way past time the Right was called to account for this.
Here again, Barbara runs into trouble; she makes an absolutist statement and then uses it to construct her argument. To say that contemporary conservatism believes Government can't solve the problem is simply untrue. A more accurate statement would be that conservatives believe that there are some problems government is designed to solve and should solve, and there are other problems that government is particularly ill-suited for solving. It seems from reading many posts by Barbara and others that liberals believe almost the exact same thing! Where liberals and conservatives disagree is what kinds of problems belong to the government and what kinds of problems are better addressed through the private sector. What the liberals fail to recognize is that after 40 years of activist, liberal governance, they have won; what Beinhart said bears repeating:
They had solved many of the great social and economic problems of the ages.
What does a political party do when they have accomplished most of what they wanted to accomplish? They either disband (and when does any organization, with a vast cadre of supporters and a vaster empire of money and influence, voluntarily disband just because they have reached their goals?) or find new goals, which means they move the goal posts. Moving the goal posts means that they inevitably over step their mandate. Contemporary liberalism fails to recognize that people like Fausta and myself, and all the other neo-cons, haven't particularly changed our politics. We still believe in equality of opportunity (which is why so many now support charter schools against the perpetuation of creaky, bureaucratic school systems which fail to educate so many children); we still believe in free speech (which is why so many now oppose ill-defined "hate speech" legislation and campus speech codes); we still oppose racism and anti-Semitism (which is why so many oppose the intolerance of so many spokespeople for the left and for so-called mainstream Islam); we still support freedom of choice but have questions and doubts about the absolutist mentality of the pro-abortion on demand groups; and perhaps in our greatest break with modern liberalism, we believe that Islamic fascism represents a genuine existential threat to our way of life and our freedoms.
I would submit to Barbara that even if you disagree with some or all of those positions, you claim to believe in the people's right to rule themselves. Perhaps you should begin to listen to those of us who used to be in your tribe and submit to the will of the people rather than constructing a fantasy world in which George W. Bush is a dictator, civil liberties have been stripped away, and we are mere moments away from a fascist theocracy. If all these allegations are true, show us some evidence that is more reasoned than invective. I am mindful of the fact that no one who blogs about political subjects will lose readers by calling their opponents names, but we all have to share this country, this planet, and all agree there are significant dangers out there (though we often disagree on just what they are).
It would be a relief, and would certainly foster communciation, if each side would stop the name-calling, and I would like to invite (challenge?) Barbara to do so.
Sadly, if your mean spirited post from today poking fun at Samual Alito's wife is any indication this is not likely to happen any time soon.
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