World News Korner

It is time for liberals to proudly reclaim their identities.

Courtesy of Salon:

“Liberal” became a dirty word in American politics for two reasons. First, a combination of Democratic leaders perceived as ineffectual — George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis — helped tarnish the term. However, these individuals alone did not cause liberalism’s disappearance; after all, one does not see a similar aversion to conservatism because of Nixon, Bush and other Republican failures. The second and more important reason was that conservatives successfully conducted a campaign against the term, transfiguring it from a philosophy of freedom and social mobility into a bureaucracy-loving, freedom-depriving, taxation-and-entitlement ideology of largesse. Conservatives linked liberalism with the turmoil of the ’60s and stagflation of the ’70s, as well as the various foreign policy crises of that decade, and liberals themselves disowned the term. In vulgarizing the word liberal and polluting its definition, Republicans put Democrats on the permanent defensive. It was an act of staggering political genius.

The lesson Democrats took from George McGovern’s disastrous 1972 showing, Reagan’s overwhelming 1984 victory (where he won 525 electoral votes and won every state but Minnesota, Walter Mondale’s home state) and Bill Clinton’s successive victories was that conservatives were right. Liberalism had to be abandoned as a term and as an ideology. Democrats could compete with Republicans only by adopting conservative language and logic. After all, wasn’t Mr. “New Democrat” and “the era of big government is over” the first Democrat since FDR to win reelection? As George Orwell wrote in his famous essay, “Politics and the English Language,” “language can also corrupt thought. A bad usage can spread by tradition and imitation even among people who should and do know better.” Democrats had let the opposing party define their politics, vernacular and even policies. In effect, the GOP was given a monopoly over language in the 1990s and 2000s, and thus a monopoly over the very contours of political debate. Democrats should have known better.

So muddied had the term become that even 25 years after Ronald Reagan’s victory, ostensible liberals like Barack Obama ran away from the label. To preempt criticism of his liberalism — unsuccessfully, as the more nefarious and implausible charge of socialism awaited him — candidate Obama spoke of Ronald Reagan as a transformational president. When Hillary Clinton was asked during a primary debate in 2007 whether she identified as a liberal, Clinton answered in the negative, preferring the term “progressive.” Top Obama advisers berated liberals from the White House, with Robert Gibbs dismissing “the professional left” and Rahm Emanuel calling liberals “fucking retarded.” It was as if the intellectual richness of the liberal tradition — ranging from Adam Smith to John Rawls — and its manifold policy accomplishments had all been expurgated.

As both the label and the philosophy of liberalism return to the fore, Democrats should self-confidently reclaim the term. They should be protective of the term’s meaning and use it unabashedly, the way Republicans do of conservatism. They should remind the electorate of liberalism’s inextricable connection to the American experiment. In a sentence, they should become liberals again.

I could not have said it better myself.

Liberal numbers are growing stronger everyday, and soon it will be conservatives who dare not identify themselves as such.

Well except for the deep south of course, those guys are going take quite a little while to finally join the rest of the country.

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