I have been watching and rooting for liberalism and progressivism for decades now. One person who has been doing it for a lot longer, who is educated a lot further, and who boasts a significantly better employment history is the historian, journalist, author, professor, and Nation columnist, Eric Alterman. One could hardly do better if one wanted to get the gist of liberalism, liberal economics/politics, progressive principles, and a fair characterization of “liberals” than to read Alterman. In this blog, I share some of the wisdom that packs his readable book Why We’re Liberals. Here is an example of the truthful and justified case he makes for by liberalism and progressive principles are legitimate and laudable:
One cannot escape the conclusion that the contemporary manifestation of hundreds of years of white racism continues to play an important role in the achievement gap. It’s no coincidence, after all, that the schools with the largest minority student bodies are also the ones with the weakest tax base and the children of the poorest families attending.
Alterman is the media columnist for The Nation, is professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, senior fellow of the Center for American Progress, and blogs for MSNBC (which is entitled, aptly, “Altercation”). He is the author of seven previous books, including The Book on Bush (with Mark Green), What Liberal Media? and Sound and Fury.
Short review of the book, according to Illene Cooper: “Alterman, journalist and proud liberal, readies his readership for the coming day when the word liberal is given a wash and rinse after being slimed by conservatives. Arguing that liberals are so downtrodden they may have forgotten who they are, Alterman provides a refresher course, explaining what liberals believe and why liberal policies are reviled, even though most people approve of their basic ideas as long as they aren’t identified as liberal. His insightful examination of so-called liberal problems (secularism, abortion, dovish foreign policy) leads into an extensive and sharp rebuttal of all the crimes attributed to liberals. …this rock-’em, sock-’em defense effectively proves that not all liberals are wimps.”
That is long, yes, but I wanted to show that he is quite qualified, and to validate that he is on the vanguard of liberal views economics and politics. His book reads like a spirited defense of progressive principles, and is most inspirational. Buy it!
*Liberal* is a positive, not a negative term; we are proud of our long-standing progressive principlesThe following quotations on liberals, liberalism, politics and progressive principles are taken liberally (no pun intended) from his book, but that does not detract from it. Again, I suggest you buy it if you need more information and inspiration about being on the Left and being knowledgeable and proud.
Liberals, particularly religious liberals, have done a poor job of communicating their own bedrock values to America’s religious majority. Following the 1960s the left made the politically suicidal choice of cultural radicalism, which succeeded, over political and economic radicalism, which failed. … Liberals, as Michael Kazin put it, have morphed in the public imagination “from people who looked, dressed and sounded like Woody Guthrie to people who look, dress, and sound like Woody Allen.”
Liberals tend to argue that children, once they reach a certain age, should receive all the information necessary to conduct happy and healthy sex lives, with the understanding that their moral education is the responsibility of their families, churches, and so on. Conservatives, meanwhile, tend to prefer that children be drilled on the lessons of the Bible, and on what pundits call “traditional morality.” That means they are to be taught nothing about birth control, and urged to reject heterosexual sex outside of marriage, and homosexuality under any circumstances.
If you find yourself wondering how Iraq happened, how Katrina was botched, or how U.S economic and environmental policies were so profoundly mismanaged by the Bush administration, imagine a government staffed by all too many Goodlings, “Brownies,” and Doug Feiths — whom former chief of U.S. Central Command General Tommy Franks termed the “fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth” — serving the Bushes, the Cheneys, and the Rumsfelds.
The taxpayer — so beloved by the Wall Street Journal when it comes to preventing government expenditures that actually benefit poor people — is expected to fund this nonsense because, in the area of sex as in so many others, conservative hypocrisy trumps common sense. What is perhaps most infuriating, however, is that conservatives rarely insist that their own elites play by the rules they insist on for others.
The evidence from extensive polling of evangelicals, laments evangelical theologian Michael Horton, “presents survey after survey demonstrating that evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered, and sexually immoral as the world in general.” In a 1999 national survey, the Barna Group found that the percentage of born-again Christians who had been divorced was slightly higher (26 percent) than that of non-Christians (22 percent).
Missing from almost all discussions of the role of religion in public life is what William James famously termed the “varieties of religious experience.” The right wing’s hijacking of religion’s public role in our political discourse is as undeniable as it is inappropriate, and represents one of liberalism’s most serious problems.
Some profound and paramount progressive principles include the true freedom of the individual, the strength of a responsive and democratically-elected government, adequate taxation to meet public and national needs, a robust educational system, and subsidy of cultural creations
More than 60 percent of Americans state that belief in God is necessary in order “to be moral and have good values,” which is about twice the number of Germans and six times the number of French who say they feel similarly. As Barack Obama points out, “Substantially more people in America believe in angels than they do in evolution.”
American liberals need to remember what the great German philosopher Jurgen Habermas has frequently argued: not only must believers tolerate others’ beliefs, including the credos and convictions of nonbelievers, but disbelieving secularists must likewise appreciate the convictions of religiously motivated fellow citizens. Liberals actually have many points of confluence with many cultural conservatives — at least those who reject biblical literalism.
As a parent, I find myself constantly bombarded with messages explicitly designed to corrupt the values of my child for the purpose of corporate gain.
Hollywood producers and rap artists who exploit the violent denigration of women should be condemned by liberals every bit as much as the racism, homophobia, and sexism that are so frequently purveyed on right-wing talk radio.
John Stuart Mill wrote in On Liberty of the use of “moral disapprobation in the proper sense of the term as a useful check on antisocial behavior.” (His example was a father’s squandering his family’s food money.) Where, today, is that liberal voice of “moral disapprobation,” directed where it might not only be most useful but could find common ground with cultural conservatives.
A second avenue open to liberals who seek to reach religious and culturally conservative Americans would be to employ a moral vocabulary when discussing political and economic issues. There is nothing to prevent making a moral case, for example, that it is objectionable to give huge tax cuts to the rich while cutting social programs for the poor and working class when that gap is already at its widest in an entire century. Liberal arguments for universal health care and education are also fundamentally moral arguments, and need not be defended entirely in terms of economic efficiency — though they can be.
Liberal evangelical Jim Wallis correctly points out that the issue the Bible raises most often is not abortion or gay marriage but “how you treat the poorest and most vulnerable in your society. That’s the issue the prophets raise again and again, and Jesus talks about it more than any other topic, more than heaven or hell, more than sex or morality. So how did Jesus become pro-rich, pro-war and only pro-American?”
Indeed, as Warren’s own evolution suggests, it ought not be too taxing for any religious Christian to commit to memory a few of the Bible’s more poetic phrases that have no place in a Karl Rove playbook, much less a Rush Limbaugh rant. There is, for instance, the Gospel that explains, “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty!” (Luke 1:52-53.)
Bradford DeLong on equality, one of the bedrock progressive principles: “An unequal society cannot help but be an unjust society. The very first thing that any society’s wealthy try to buy with their wealth is a head start for their children. And the wealthier they are, the bigger the head start. Any society that justifies itself on a hope of equality of opportunity cannot help but be undermined by too great a degree of inequality of result.”
The “key,” if there is one, is not merely to say the passages [from the Bible], but to say them with genuine conviction. If liberals cannot do this, then they resign themselves to losing, always, in America. This is a free country, but also a deeply religious one. There can be no more Sisyphean battle than to ignore this or try to wish it away. For liberals, this fact should be a blessing, not a curse.
For liberals, religious beliefs provide inspiration rather than dogmatic direction. Our Enlightenment legacy mitigates any claims of absolute truth, particularly one deriving from a literalist interpretation of a particular religious text. Let justice flow, as Dr. King preached, like a mighty river.
No matter what outrage against which the Christian right is busy fulminating, the media not only reports it but does so quite credulously.
Liberals are, indeed, far better at protecting the individual liberties upon which libertarians base their political philosophy than is the contemporary conservative movement, dominated as it is by censorious Christian fundamentalists, favor-seeking corporate CEOs, and neoconservative ideologues dreaming of a global empire.
According to Gewirtz and Golder, the current [Supreme] Court, beginning in 1994, has upheld or struck down sixty-four congressional provisions during the first eleven years of its tenure. When applying the measurement to determine which judges were most likely to strike down the laws passed by Congress, Justice Clarence Thomas was clearly in the lead, followed by Justices Kennedy, Scalia, Rehnquist, O’Connor, Souter, Stevens, Ginsburg, and Breyer, in that order. In other words, all of the Republican-appointed justices were more “activist”…
So is the problem liberal “judicial activism”? Or is it the fact that right-wingers are prone to object to the outcomes of certain cases? Once again, as soon as the evidence is examined, the conventional wisdom collapses in a heap of conservative misinformation, which is parroted by the press and prevents any possibility of a genuine debate on the complex issues involved.
As both individuals and corporations grow more sophisticated in their ability to mask deliberate discrimination, racism becomes harder to demonstrate as a matter of law, or even journalism. But almost every day, those of us who are impressed by evidence find ourselves confronted by extremely worrisome examples of pervasive racial and ethnic prejudice in the United States.
One cannot escape the conclusion that the contemporary manifestation of hundreds of years of white racism continues to play an important role in the achievement gap. It’s no coincidence, after all, that the schools with the largest minority student bodies are also the ones with the weakest tax base and the children of the poorest families attending.
You're reading about progressive principles according to Eric AltermanThe real problem the right wing has with Hollywood is the fact that its cultural and financial center of gravity is liberally located (just as the analogous axes of Houston or Dallas turn rightward). Because these same liberals are also wealthy and pampered and not always perfectly well informed on all the issue upon which they opine — much like the rich everywhere else — they are supposed to embrace the right-wing politics that would benefit their economic self-interest and leave the opinion business to the professionals.
It is true that Hollywood’s wealth notwithstanding, its politics are by and large liberal. Like an Ivy League humanities department or a folk-singers’ convention, Hollywood attracts those kinds of people. They give their dollars to protect the environment, to secure a woman’s right to choose, to promote the rights of gay people to enjoy the same rights as the rest of us, to help prevent the spread of AIDS in Africa, and to oppose virtually every aspect of President Bush’s foreign policy.
Progressive principles according to one of its most renowned proponents, philosopher John Dewey:
The word [liberalism] came into use to denote a new spirit that grew and spread with the rise of democracy. It implied a new interest in the common man and a new sense that the common man, the representative of the great masses of human beings, had possibilities that had been kept under, that had not been allowed to develop, because of institutional and political conditions. This new spirit was liberal in both senses of the word. It was marked by a generous attitude, by sympathy for the underdog, for those who were not given a chance. It was part of a widespread rise of humanitarian philanthropy. It was also liberal in that it aimed at enlarging the scope of free action on the part of those who for ages had no part in public affairs and no lot in the benefits secured by this participation.
It’s not merely bad words, body parts, imaginary cartoon bunnies, and privately made satires that offend the new censors; it’s science itself. The New York Times has reported that some Imax theaters — even those in science centers — will no longer show Darwinian documentaries like Galapagos or Volcanoes of the Deep Sea for fear of antagonizing faith-based activists who find evolution offensive.
The U.S. Constitution makes no reference whatsoever to God. This was clearly a conscious choice on the part of the document’s authors, as it broke with virtually all known precedent, including the Articles of Confederation and nearly every state constitution. God is also barely mentioned in the eighty-five Federalist Papers by James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, written in support of the Constitution, and the deity receives only two mentions in the Declaration of Independence.
Author Michael Walzer on income redistribution, one of the core progressive principles: “At the very center of conservative thought lies this idea: that the present division of wealth and power corresponds to some deeper reality of human life. Conservatives don’t want to say merely that the present division is what it ought to be, for that would invite a search for some distributive principle – as if it were possible to make a distribution. They want to say that whatever the division of wealth and power is, it naturally is, and that all efforts to change it, temporarily successful in proportion to their bloodiness, must be futile in the end.”
While America’s founders lived in deeply religious times, and were, with some important exceptions, Christians themselves, it is almost impossible to find a founder who played a significant role in the creation of the republic who shared conservative Christian views on the role of God and politics; and this includes the evangelical community of the day. America’s founders possessed a panoply of religious beliefs, many of them syncretic, and not given to standard Christian categories.
The most frequent charge one hears against liberals in America today is that of “elitism.” It is not that the charge lacks any truth; some liberals are indeed “elitists.” But what, one wonders, is ultimately so bad about elitism? Do conservatives really mean to argue that the functioning of a society of roughly three hundred million people does not require elites to help manage its affairs?
Perhaps a more useful question would be why is it that the ultimately contentless accusation of elitism — a quality that is usually considered complimentary in the worlds of, say, baseball, law, medicine, and so on — can be so confidently hung around the necks of liberals when conservatives are every bit as — if not more — attached to the very same “elitist” advantages they so decry in liberals.
Eric Alterman comes out swinging in this well-researched and inspirational book on progressive principles, WHY WE’RE LIBERALS
Clearly, most middle-class Americans take their religion seriously. But very few of them take it so seriously that they believe that religion should be the sole, or even the most important, guide for establishing rules about how other people should live.
President Bush’s only veto during his first six years was against a congressional compromise on stem-cell research. The right’s crusading fundamentalism on these issues takes a particularly worrisome tack when it comes to the use of America’s military, for what ought to be an obvious reason: we live in a world where most people do not share our values, and the conflict between those values has the potential to destroy our respective societies.
Despite its limited appeal, its extremist orientation, and its contradiction to the tenets of our Constitution, right-wing religious orthodoxy so dominates our political discourse that many in the media seem to be unaware of any other tradition… Virtually the only kind of religious presence to which most television viewers are ever exposed is the fire-breathing, damn-all-the-liberals theocratic variety.
Some of America’s greatest liberal defenders of progressive principles include Franklin and Teddy Roosevelt, Henry A. Wallace, Robert LaFollette, Paul Wellstone, and Betty Friedan
The Bush administration never did take the job of Iraqi reconstruction particularly seriously. Instead of appointing trained professionals or individuals with knowledge of the region and its people to oversee the vast tasks of rebuilding the country, it placed the responsibility entirely on the shoulders of untrained political hacks whose only apparent qualification was a publicly professed loyalty to the administration itself.
Expecting the military to provide guidance for the creation of a political democracy among people with no experience of it and little or no cultural basis or necessarily even a demonstrated desire to embrace such a system demonstrates disrespect for both the individual soldiers and the institutions they serve. It is a sacred trust granted to an American president to send soldiers off to fight and die. George W. Bush and his conservative supporters have treated this trust with contempt.
Fannie Lou Hamer, Cesar Chavez, Martin Luther King, Jr., Howard Zinn, Whoopi Goldberg, Robert Reiner, Adlai Stevenson, and Gavin Newsom are famous proponents of profound progressive principles
Meanwhile, back at home, the Bush administration was also quietly slashing veterans’ benefits over the next decade by nearly $29 billion, leaving them to languish in a system that demands that they wait weeks or months for mental-health care and other appointments; fall into debt as VA case managers study disability claims over many months; and hire help from outside experts just to understand the VA’s arcane system of rights and benefits.
The Bush administration conservatives who inexcusably abused the trust of our soldiers have done so without any sense whatsoever of personal accountability — a value that we are frequently led to believe is the bedrock of conservative philosophy.
Which are progressive principles? This book lays it all out for the readerAsked by a journalist what sacrifices nonmilitary Americans were making for the war, Bush answered by explaining that Americans “sacrifice peace of mind when they see the terrible images of violence on TV every night.” Asked about this issue by NBC’s Ann Curry on the Today show in April 2008, Laura Bush responded, “No one suffers more than their president and I do.” Suffice it to say that few soldiers serving in Iraq — nor the family members of those who paid the ultimate sacrifice for the administration’s folly — would be likely to embrace either Bush’s definition.
William Bennet, who frequently decries the loss of standards of decency and civility among liberals, calls Limbaugh “possibly the greatest living American” and “extremely sophisticated, extremely smart… He’s very serious intellectually.”
Liberalism is perceived among the politically active to be concerned with abortion, health care, and poverty, rather than Scuds, MIRVs, or Apache attack helicopters. Liberals who do evince an interest in foreign affairs tend toward “softer” issues, such as global poverty, human rights, and environmental threats.
One of the unchallenged assumptions of American politics is that conservatives are not merely more patriotic than liberals, but also far more attentive to protecting America from physical threats to its security. This, too, is a myth perpetrated by conservatives in the media that collapses with even rudimentary scrutiny.
Rush Limbaugh posited his own success as an example of what he termed “middle America’s growing rejection of the elites,” which he defines as “professionals” and “experts,” including “the medical elites, the sociological elites, the education elites, the legal elites, the science elites… and the ideas this bunch promotes through the media.
The conservative pundit Peggy Noonan identifies “America’s elite” as “the politicians, wise men, think-tank experts, academics, magazine and editorial-page editors, big-city columnists, TV commentators” who had the temerity to oppose Bush’s ruinous war in Iraq. The qualities of the “big and real America,” from which George W. Bush (of Harvard, Yale, and Andover) hails, are those that liberal elites would recognize only as native to “another America, and boy has it endured. It just won a war.” [Noonan was writing in early 2003, before the catastrophe that Iraq has become was apparent to all.]
The opposite of progressive principles such as concern for the underdog, social justice, and a distrust of money: “I have been so busy building my church that I have not cared about the poor. I have sinned, and I am sorry.” ~ Rick Warren
The most frequent charge one hears against liberals in America today is that of “elitism.” It is not that the charge lacks any truth; some liberals are indeed “elitists.” But what, one wonders, is ultimately so bad about elitism? Do conservatives really mean to argue that the functioning of a society of roughly three hundred million people does not require elites to help manage its affairs?
Perhaps a more useful question would be why is it that the ultimately contentless accusation of elitism — a quality that is usually considered complementary in the worlds of, say, baseball, law, medicine, and so on — can be so confidently hung around the necks of liberals when conservatives are every bit as — if not more — attached to the very same “elitist” advantages they so decry in liberals.
The most frequent charge one hears against liberals in America today is that of “elitism.” It is not that the charge lacks any truth; some liberals are indeed “elitists.” But what, one wonders, is ultimately so bad about elitism? Do conservatives really mean to argue that the functioning of a society of roughly three hundred million people does not require elites to help manage its affairs?
Perhaps a more useful question would be why is it that the ultimately contentless accusation of elitism — a quality that is usually considered complementary in the worlds of, say, baseball, law, medicine, and so on — can be so confidently hung around the necks of liberals when conservatives are every bit as — if not more — attached to the very same “elitist” advantages they so decry in liberals.
President Barack Obama speaking about progressive principles such as justice, restraint, secularism, rationalism, peace, social security, and open-mindedness: “It’s easy to articulate a belligerent foreign policy based solely on unilateral military action, a policy that sounds tough and acts dumb; it’s harder to craft a foreign policy that’s tough and smart. It’s easy to dismantle government safety nets; it’s harder to transform those safety nets so that they work for people and can be paid for. It’s easy to embrace a theological absolutism; it’s harder to find the right balance between the legitimate role of faith in our lives and the demands of our civic religion.”
Conservatives insist that inequality is a non-issue; the economist Tyler Cowan wonders “why we should worry about inequality — of any kind — much at all.” What matters, he argues, is “how well people are doing in absolute terms”— and not whether Smith makes ten times more than Jones. Bruce Bartlett, also a conservative, concurs: “If my real income does not fall, how am I hurt when Bill Gates makes another billion dollars?” Such arguments are almost perversely naïve.
The views that motivate many to oppose affirmative action are frequently based on misinformation. According to an extensive poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, between 40 and 60 percent of all whites believe that blacks are now doing as well as or better than most whites in areas of employment, income education, and access to health care. Given that mind-set, they naturally oppose any and all measures to address the problems of racism. Whites who do have accurate views of black circumstances show far greater sympathy for political solutions designed to address these issues, including efforts by the courts and law enforcement to ensure that laws are followed.
As the liberal education expert Richard D. Kahlenberg explains, forty years of studies have demonstrated that the socioeconomic status of the school a child attends is, after family economic status, the single most significant factor in determining future success in school. As he puts it, “Blacks don’t do better sitting next to whites; poor kids do better in middle-class environments.”
Looking at class rather than race is not only far more politically palatable than reverse racial discrimination, it brings us closer to the nub of the problem. According to a study conducted in 2003-4 by the Civil Rights Project at Harvard University, 76 percent of predominantly minority schools were high poverty, compared with only 15 percent of predominantly white schools.
Are we, in America today, really arguing that it is the job of today’s poor white students to pay for the wrongdoings of generations past?
You're reading about progressive principles according to the book WHY WE'RE LIBERALSUnarguably, liberals made some horrifically misguided decisions regarding taxpayer monies during the 1960s, when it appeared that prosperity was the rule and the growth of the U.S. economy was all but limitless. …Yet these mistakes — as costly and irresponsible as they may have appeared at the time — pale in comparison to the fiscal and economic nightmare that so-called conservatives have intentionally inflicted on the nation.
For working people, wages and salaries now make up the lowest share of the nation’s gross domestic product since the process of collecting this data began more than sixty years ago. In the period since 2000 the number of Americans living below the poverty line has increased by nearly a third. Meanwhile, the average CEO of a Standard & Poor’s 500 company took home $13.51 million in total compensation in 2005,….
The great Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski likes to tell his players that people remember 30 percent of what they hear, 50 percent of what they see, and 100 percent of what they feel. Former Republican pollster Frank Lutz made this point in typical Republican fashion when he instructed GOP officeholders, “A compelling story, even if factually inaccurate, can be more emotionally compelling than a dry recitation of the truth.” This disjunction is well known to every viewer of The Daily Show or The Colbert Report.
Substantively, conservative foreign policy arguments are often unsophisticated. When dealing with the problems and issues that inevitably arise in relations between nations, few conservatives will admit to the slightest concern about what Thomas Jefferson called “the good opinion of mankind.”
A liberal foreign policy necessarily involves some mixed measure of diplomacy, foreign aid, breadth of knowledge — attention to transnational threats like global warming, refugee migration, and famine — and so forth: all issues useful to those who would tar those proposing them as “soft.” When liberals try to play on the conservative field, they often forfeit the game even before the first coin toss.
As the great liberal philosopher Adam Smith observed in 1776, it is the job of government to create public works and institutions “which it can never be for the interest on any individual, or small number of individuals, to erect and maintain… though it may frequently do much more than repay [the investment] to a great society.” The point is quite obvious when one considers the value of public schools, roads, defense, parks, clean air and water, and the like, but these values are largely taken for granted until a moment like the Bush administration’s AWOL performance during the horror of Katrina reminds people of one of the primary reasons they need a government in the first place.
Authors who write about progressive principles in economics include Robert S. Reich, Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen, Carl Conrad, Jared Bernstein, Gar Alperovitz, Noam Chomsky, and Paul Krugman
The devotion of conservatives to America’s military seems to consist, primarily, of two separate aspects: expressing one’s love rhetorically while specifically avoiding service oneself, and refusing to offer appropriate funding or support either for soldiers fighting abroad or wounded veterans returning home.
This [Karl Rove’s explanation that after the 9/11 attacks Liberals wanted to “offer therapy and understanding for our attackers,” and Conservatives “prepared for war”] was nonsense; nearly 90 percent of liberals supported the U.S. military response against al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. Liberals, unlike Rove and his patrons in the Bush White House, tend to believe that when one is attacked, it is appropriate to respond against those responsible, rather than against another group of people in another part of the world who had nothing whatsoever to do with the attack.
One can debate the ethical responsibility of a young person who refuses to fight in a war he or she does not support; having never been faced with this choice personally, I am reluctant to moralize about it. But how is it possible to defend those, like young Dick Cheney, who say they believed in the cause of the war but felt themselves to have “other priorities” in their lives rather than fight it, or George W. Bush, who clearly employed his privileged position in society to ensure a series of cushy postings in the Air National Guard that he did not even bother to fulfill?
In fact, whether boomers or not, liberals and Democrats, it turns out, are far more likely to have served in the military, even when the war in question is one they personally did not support.
Georgia senator Saxby Chambliss, who defeated Max Cleland, a man who lost three limbs to a grenade in Vietnam, by questioning his patriotism, managed to stay out of the military with five separate student deferments plus a medical deferment for a football-related knee injury.
Conservative disrespect for the military features a far more deadly aspect than mere personal hypocrisy. While often eager to risk the lives and limbs of our fighting men and women in war, they are notoriously stingy when it comes to protecting their lives, or even the institutions they serve.
The Bush administration had enough expert analysis accessible to gauge just how difficult democracy would be to export under the best of circumstances. Study after study, easily available to U.S. military planners, provided ample warning of just how daunting a task lay in store. Indeed, just before the war was precipitately launched, a secret CIA report judged the administration’s goal to be, in all likelihood, “impossible.”
Are you a liberal because you want others to have the same opportunities you do – like for real? Are you willing to pay 40% of your income in taxes if it means a robust and functional social welfare state? Tired of wars? Do you bemoan the debt and public religiosity and lying politicians? Do you tend to trust journalists rather than Donald Trump? These are progressive principles
Even by the attenuated standards of what American liberals have been able to accomplish while working through the Democratic Party, constrained by both Republican and corporate opposition, they have managed to amass an economic record superior to that of Republicans, even when measured by conservatives’ own standards.
As we’ve noted throughout this book, right-wingers have not been able to defeat liberals in the public mind on actual issues. If they can no longer demonize those who support these ideas with just an unpopular label, they will be left only with their extremist positions and indefensible arguments.
After seven disastrous years, Americans have woken up to the fact that they have just experienced perhaps their nation’s worst leadership ever. Its combination of gross incompetence, ideological extremism, and deeply embedded corruption has, at least temporarily, discredited conservatives as proper stewards of the nation’s destiny and offered liberals their best opportunity in nearly half a century to make their case to the nation at large.
Liberals misguided obsession with identity politics spawned a decades-long wild-goose chase in pursuit of an antiracist, multicultural utopia as it simultaneously blinded them to the effects of a vicious class war conducted against those in our society least able to bear it. Minorities don’t need their cultural heritage respected, their speech patterns legitimized, and their sense of self uplifted. They need more money, more opportunity, and a dependable ladder to educational and professional improvement.
Other staunch defenders of progressive principles throughout the ages include Helen Keller, Christopher Hitchens, Gore Vidal, Edward R. Murrow, Bernie Sanders, Eugene V. Debs, and Mary Wollenstonecraft
In his memoir, Bill Clinton looked back at some of the most difficult decisions of his presidency and concluded that Americans prefer leaders who appear “strong and wrong” to those that are “weak and right.” This dynamic presents a diabolical dilemma for American liberals.
Jonah Goldberg… on the salutary aspects of war for its own sake: “… here is the bedrock tenet of the [Michael] Ledeen Doctrine in more or less his own words: ‘Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.” Naturally, a policy based on such problematic precepts can cause the occasional disaster, in addition to the death of a great many innocent people, which in turn generates an anger that feeds into a vicious and all-but-endless cycle of death and destruction for all concerned.
Because our political system values macho pigheadedness pretty much as a prerequisite for the presidency, it is all but impossible for liberals to address this topic critically. Examine almost any American election campaign, and you’ll probably see the more conservative candidate accuse the more liberal one of being “soft” — in other words, unmanly — with regard to one threat or another.
Sadly, owing to Americans’ limited attention span for politics along with their limited body of knowledge about issues, they remain extremely easy prey for dishonest politicians and their manipulative consultants, who deal in evocative imagery designed to deceive rather than enlighten the average voter. Election discourse rarely delves beneath the airiest of glittering generalities, discussed entirely in symbolic terms.
Here is a blurb about progressive principles by Arthuer Schlesinger, Jr.: “Liberalism in America has been a party of social progress rather than of intellectual doctrine, committed to ends rather than to methods. When a laissez-faire policy seemed best calculated to achieve the liberal objective of equality of opportunity for all — as it did in the time of Jefferson — liberals believed, in Henry David Thoreau’s words, that that government is best which governs least. But, when the growing complexity of industrial conditions required increasing government intervention in order to assure more equal opportunities, the liberal tradition, faithful to the goal rather than to the dogma, altered its view of the state.”
Those who think the war was a mistake or, worse, that the United States “was committed to war illegitimately” are something else. Because they cannot possibly have the best interests of the nation at heart, the only explanation for their hesitation to embrace Bush’s dishonestly promoted and incompetently executed war as well as Donald Rumsfeld’s counterproductive military strategy and John Ashcroft’s unconstitutional assault on American civil liberties is not only that they are wrong, but that they are illegitimate, unpatriotic, and possibly traitorous.
It is liberalism’s inability to explain itself when it comes to protecting and defending America that offers conservatives the opportunity to win elections no matter how incoherent their ideas or incompetent their implementation.
Since the end of the Vietnam War, liberals have moved rightward and the vast majority of Americans leftward enough that once again, it is the liberal foreign policy agenda that meets with supermajority approval. Liberals, like most Americans, prefer diplomacy to war, desire to protect the environment, and embrace multilateralism whenever possible and unilateral power only when absolutely necessary.
Taxing and spending worked just fine when Americans felt that both were fairly and judiciously applied. The rich and the middle class paid and received their fair shares, respectively, and the poor received emergency assistance and the occasional leg up to the higher rungs of the economic system. It was only when so many Americans came to feel that both taxes and spending failed their test of fairness and assaulted their sense of themselves as decent, nonracist, nonsexist, nonimperialistic individuals that such policies grew to be politically unsustainable.
While George W. Bush enjoys the dubious distinction of presiding over perhaps the largest negative budget swing in American history — from a surplus of $236 billion in 2000, the year he was elected, to a deficit of $412 billion, or 3.6 percent of GDP, four years later — he could not have accomplished this without the collusion of the conservative-controlled Congress.
The notion that these are fiscally conservative values at work is clearly preposterous. The 1,752-page Bush-Republican Congress transportation bill, for instance, turned out to be the single most expensive piece of public works legislation in U.S. history, replete with 6,376 earmarked pet projects by individual legislators. Back in 1987, when the president contemporary conservatives most revere, Ronal Reagan, vetoed what he considered an unconscionably pork-laden highway and mass transit bill, the offense had a mere 152 earmarks.
As the economically conservative Financial Times of London observed after [George W.] Bush’s second round of tax cuts was passed, “On the management of fiscal policy, the lunatics are now in charge of the asylum.”
These quotes about liberalism in America and American history come from the readable book *Why We’re Liberals*, by Eric Alterman
Wealthy people and their corporations own newspapers and fund think tanks, public affairs television, university chairs, advertising campaigns, lecture series, and the like. Poor people do not. With few exceptions, these same organizations and institutions represent the views of the wealthy. “It’s all very well to sympathize with the working man,” William Raney Harper, the first president of the University of Chicago, once remarked. “But we get our money from the other side and we can’t afford to offend them.”
Ultimately, the choice is not between one philosophy of government that supports policies of “tax and spend” and one that does not. Rather, it is between one that taxes and spends for the good of the wealthiest 0.1 percent of us or one that attempts to address the concerns of the other 99.9 percent.
Without selling out their political principles, they agreed to disagree with others in their party about gun control, abortion, and gay marriage and focus instead on those issues that united them and a broad swath of the American public. In achieving these goals, liberals demonstrated not only impressive political pragmatism but some newfound political muscle.
The results of [George W.] Bush’s ideologically driven go-it-alone foreign policy have reminded Americans of the liberal virtues of burden-sharing, cooperation, and compromise, both with one’s allies and, when possible, with one’s adversaries… Similarly, the Katrina catastrophe provided a crash course in the value of government — so frequently derided by conservatives and so tepidly defended in recent years by liberals.
In other words, the administration’s fatal incompetence, before and after the flood, was not merely predetermined, it was purposeful. Katrina provided Americans with an example of what happens when neat conservative rhetoric collides with messy reality: a teachable moment if ever there was one. It was matched by equally appalling performances regarding Iraq, Medicare, the nation’s budget, and on and on.
Liberals believe that, when operated efficiently and honestly, democratic government contributes to conservative dogma. Public expenditures on education, science and technology, health, and many programs for children are critical forms of investment, with a demonstrable history of long-term payoffs. Government also contributes to our wealth in other ways.
Aided by a media establishment that forswore its traditional watchdog role in favor of that of a cheerleader, some confusing paper ballots in Florida, and the Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court, conservatives took history’s driver’s seat. These same conservative leaders used the opportunity presented by the trust bestowed upon them to pass far-reaching laws and start ambitious wars without anything remotely resembling the skepticism and scrutiny with which our democracy has traditionally greeted such radical proposals.
Liberalism surpasses other ideologies by combining realism with a grounded form of idealism, one that embraces reform rather than revolution but insists that no matter how highly we may think of ourselves, we can always do better. American liberalism circa 2008 is a patriotic creed, but not one that is blind to our nation’s flaws and limitations.
Read about socialism, social justice, economic opportunity, liberal politics, economic liberalism, and other progressive principles in my other blogs
