We. Are. Liberals.
Jamelle has a good rejoinder to John McWhorter’s TNR piece eulogizing liberal as a descriptive for mainstream, left-wing American politics. For McWhorter, the Right has so effectively turned the phrase into a signifier for excesses of the New Left and/or the unpopular liberalism of the 70s and 80s that we can no longer rescue it.
Jamelle makes two good points in response. For one, progressive, which is everyone’s favorite replacement term, has all sorts of nasty (and illiberal) historical associations with eugenics, scientism, racism and the like. From an intellectual standpoint, Jamelle is right: I’d much rather associate with liberals (FDR, JFK, Civil Right Movement, New Deal etc) than progressives (Teddy Roosevelt’ss wacko imperialism, eugenics, etc), but arguing over the real history of the term seems kinda pointless. Most people don’t know about or care what a certain political group was doing between 1900 and 1920 and so they don’t make the association that, say, Jamelle or I would make with the term progressive. Liberal, so says McWhorter is a different story.
But I still think we should stick with liberal for a few reasons. One, we really shouldn’t let conservatives redefine out terms for us! That’s weak, that’s bad and it just lets the conservative movement control our own self perceptions. Second, we’re stuck with it. Media outlets will always describe left of center politicians (and especially left of the center-left politicians) as liberals, so we might as well make do with what we have.
Third, I think in the time of Obama, we really could reclaim liberalism as a positive descriptor for left-wing politics. Jamelle points to a monologue from the West Wing where Jimmy Smits righteously goes through the glorious history of liberalism. The victories he lists off can be broken up into three categories.
- Civil and Political Equality — Women’s right to vote, Votings Rights Act, Civil Rights Movement
- Economic equality/equal opportunity — New Deal, Social Security, Medicare
- The Environment – Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, EPA etc
In the Age of Obama, we have, for the first time since Lyndon Johnson, a popular liberal Democrat with a mandate to implement major new policies. Now, there probably isn’t any popular Civil Rights type stuff that Obama could enact that would make liberals popular for a generation, but as far as categories two and three go, Obama has a once-in-a-lifetime confluence of opportunity, necessity, feasibility and popularity. Obama has the chance to refurbish the social safety net with universal health care and to pass major legislation on climate change. If Obama could get universal health care, then liberalism and liberals would be revived in the national consciousness (which is why conservatives fear the prospect so much).
So, best case scenario, a successful Obama presidency does for liberalism what Reagan did for conservatism.
