“In every American community, you have varying shades of political opinion. One of the shadiest of these is the liberals. An outspoken group on many subjects. Ten degrees to the left of center in good times, ten degrees to the right of center if it affects them personally. So here, then, is a lesson in safe logic.” — Phil Ochs, intro to “Love Me, I’m a Liberal” (1966)
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The New Republic recently ran a series of articles about Liberalism, one of which was authored by Jamie Raskin. The article is accompanied by a photo of “liberals” protesting Trump immigration policies (“no ban, no wall”) — but this was not a picture of liberals illustrating liberal immigration values but of progressives protesting Trumpian policies the party of liberals has now chosen to follow.
This is just one example of an easily-observed phenomenon: that liberals often voice approval for progressive policies while doing the complete opposite. Don’t believe me? Read the Democratic Party Platform, national or Massachusetts versions. It doesn’t matter. Both are filled with voter candy that Democratic legislators then turn around and vote against.
Right out of the gate Raskin admits that “American liberals exist for the most part implicitly — in our work, our arguments, and our values, and not so much in terms of explicit, much less exclusive, political self-identification.” What Raskin acknowledges here is that liberals have certain sentiments but absolutely no coherent political positions — which is much the same thing comedian Lewis Black was getting at when he observed that “Republicans have nothing but bad ideas and Democrats have no ideas.”
Liberals want to have it both ways. They want to be progressives and conservatives, both at the same time. Let’s hear more of what else Raskin has to say:
“We are indeed emphatically liberals because we defend individual liberty, but we are equally progressives because we champion progress for everyone; and these days, we are the closest thing America has to conservatives, too, because we want to conserve the land, the air, the water, the climate system, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, the National Labor Relations Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, public integrity, judicial independence — everything in society and nature that the party of nihilists and authoritarians wants to destroy.”
I concede that some liberals are inclined to many of these things, but few are inclined to defend, say, the “individual liberty” of Palestinians — or to even criticize their leaders for colluding in a genocide. And the political party that represents liberals has done little to defend any of it. Wasn’t it Biden, for example, who ushered Clarence Thomas into the Supreme Court? Has the Constitution ever been any more than an aspirational document for people who can be satisfied with mere verbiage? Doesn’t this same Wonder Document enshrine gravely undemocratic institutions (the electoral college, the Senate) into law? Have Democrats really defended these institutions that Raskin enumerates with anything nearing the same zeal that the GOP shows in trying to destroy them?
But Raskin was right about the conservatism. While Republicans have become a party of radicals who “violate norms” and would tear our institutions apart if they could, liberal Democrats have become the champions of these decrepit, dysfunctional institutions, including our relatively unchanging American foreign policy. While MAGA Republicans question everything from NATO to provoking Russia and China while focusing on domestic issues, liberal Democrats (according to a Pew Research Center study) are only too happy to expand NATO right up to Russia’s door and spend taxpayer money freely at the arms bazaar.
Tellingly, nowhere in Raskin’s essay does he mention foreign policy, the great Achilles heel of Liberalism — because liberal values exist only in an extremely limited geographical bubble. Move outside the borders of the United States and liberals become the most ardent defenders of empire, war, conquest, and colonialism.
Raskin goes on to assign progressive fights to the liberal scorecard. While the ACLU and the NAACP are no bastions of Bolshevism, to be sure, both struggle with “liberal” Democratic Party policies and inaction. Yet they appear on his “liberal wins” column. But liberals can’t undermine the Ilhan Omars and Rashida Tlaibs in their own party while simultaneously taking credit for their progressive activism.
Quoting John Dewey, Raskin writes that the only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy; among the ills that sicken our democracy are gerrymandering (still used by Democrats, as I can personally attest since my own Congressional district is still gerrymandered) and voter suppression (Democrats are currently using an entire catalog of dirty tricks to keep third parties off the ballot in numerous states). The real problem with our democracy is that the rules of the game in the Constitution are flawed and undemocratic. And liberals aren’t interested in changing them.
Raskin goes on to slam autocrats like Putin and Orban who shut down papers and use state powers to crush political opposition. Fair enough. But the hypocrisy of his observation — at a time when Democrats have colluded with Republicans in shutting down protests over Gaza and punishing academics and college presidents for permitting critiques of Zionism and colonialism on their campuses — is sickening.
And speaking of Zionism, liberals are apparently great defenders of this 19th Century relic of ethnonationalism that is so popular with the Orbans and Bolsonaros. Our liberal President, on innumerable occasions, has called himself a Zionist. The party of the liberals unhesitatingly gives Israel whatever it needs to keep its supremacist state in place. This in turn undermines liberal claims to defend liberty and fight authoritarianism. The Israeli government that American liberals enthusiastically support is the most far-right in history and includes outright fascists who every week advocate genocide and ethnic cleansing. There is no individual freedom when an entire people is being carpet-bombed and ethnically cleansed. And there is no individual freedom when the liberal state uses its power to crush dissent over unpopular wars and foreign policy. This is as true today as it was in 1968 when liberals were slaughtering VietNamese and beating protesters.
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Presidential candidate Cornel West weighed in on liberalism last year and, like Raskin, has a complicated relationship with it. On the one hand, he easily sees its weaknesses, but he also has a classical liberal orientation toward it:
“The sunny side of liberalism is its defense of these indispensable rights and liberties. The dark side of liberalism is its blindness to the threats of oppressive economic power, its blindness to militarism and imperialism abroad. But it’s very important that we never view liberalism in monolithic, homogenous terms. I hope we’re able to have a kind of dialectical understanding, so we can tease out what we see as valuable in these various liberalisms, and at the same time keep track of faults and foibles.”
Like Raskin, West identifies human dignity as Liberalism’s most important feature. But instead of massive structural change, including change initiated by conflict and the system’s inherent contradictions, West ultimately believes that civics and morality will straighten it all out:
“In Democracy Matters, I wrote a chapter on the deep democratic tradition. The backdrop of this tradition is the dignity of ordinary people. Each one of them has an equal status in the eyes of something more powerful. They have to undergo education, they have to undergo spiritual formation, they have to develop a sense of civic virtue, but it’s their voice. That’s a democratic voice, with a liberal dimension. We started this dialogue saying what? Without liberalism as a prerequisite in terms of rights and liberties, fascism is the alternative; that’s it. Let’s just be honest about it. But then the question becomes: Are we sensitive enough, and do we have the patience to tease out the resources in our own tradition that can serve as a launching pad for alternatives?”
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Writing in the same issue of TNR as Raskin, Sam Adler-Bell observes that:
“Either liberalism is a necessary but insufficient condition for achieving justice and fairness, or else liberalism is an active impediment to these aims, an “ideology,” in Marx’s sense, whose chimerical aspirations naturalize and perpetuate the status quo.” […]
“I often find myself flitting between these two propositions in my writings and commitments. To be frank, I hope the former is true: that universal rights and dignity not only are compatible with but require a scheme of material redistribution to be realized. But in my darker moments, I fear the latter is more true: that individual liberty will always be, first and foremost, the handmaiden of property, that exceptions to liberalism’s universal pretensions can always be found when they imperil the privileges of the propertied class.” […]
“The timidity of liberals, our obsession with getting things right, our worry about going too far, could generously be categorized as thoughtful discrimination. More often than not, however, our wan, philosophical reticence is really some species of self-deception: a primal, conservative fear of disorder, masquerading as principle.”
There’s that conservatism again. And — completely in conflict with justice, fairness, rights, and dignity — the liberal penchant for warmongering and repression has repeatedly surfaced even in relatively enlightened times.
Adler-Bell points out that it was Truman who signed Executive Order 9835, kicking off the [second] McCarthyite era. Likewise LBJ worked with J. Edgar Hoover to repress the American Left, the Black freedom movement, the anti-war movement, and the Civil Rights movement. And —
“As I write, liberals, including President Joe Biden, are wringing their hands — when they’re not ringing the police–over protests by young people who have taken all-too-seriously certain universal propositions: that Palestinian lives are as inviolable as Israeli ones, as worthy of dignity and protection, and as deserving of the right to self-determination.”
And Adler-Bell sure puts his finger on the patient’s pulse when he writes:
“American liberalism, Irving Howe once wrote, cannot escape its “heritage of Protestant self-scrutiny, self-reliance, and self-salvation. Consequently, American liberalism has a strand of deep if implicit hostility to politics per se — a powerful kind of moral absolutism, a celebration of conscience above community, which forms both its glory and its curse.” This strikes me as remarkably true of today’s Democratic Party. Its loudest boosters take for granted that an aura of moral righteousness attends the party’s actions, and that it is every person’s solemn duty of conscience to walk, soberly and somehow alone, beneath its banner. Liberal politics divorces itself from interest, need, and passion; “from the soil of shared, material life,” as Howe put it. In Biden’s message, one hears a stultifying admixture of high moral panic with utter political banality and sloth. Our existential crisis demands prudent equanimity; we are called to frenzied urgency–but not like that.”
This explains, in part, how even a Protestant “radical” like Cornel West can share many of these values.
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Next up to defend liberalism in the New Republic is Robert Kagan. Those who remember this Machiavellian liar and warmonger who pushed the US to invade Iraq also know that neoconservatives like Kagan and Elliot Abrams hold an esteemed place at the Democratic Party’s actual (not professed) foreign policy table. As a well-known neoconservative Zionist apologist who advocates for American domination of the “White Man’s Burden” variety, and for Jewish supremacy in Palestine, Kagan writes that he is appalled that the Supreme Court would defend white Christian supremacy. To some ears this nonsense is not as glaringly inconsistent as it sounds to mine.
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Finally, rounding out the discussion in the New Republic, Jefferson Cowie wonders if Liberalism has any meaning at all:
“First, nobody can truly agree on what the term means, partially because it has rarely existed in the first place in the United States. “American liberalism,” therefore, has proved to be as much of a nostalgia trap as a forward-thinking enlightenment project. And, when liberalism did work in a politically progressive way, it tended to do so best when it transcended its own logic, ironically achieving liberal ends through illiberal means.” […]
“We begin with the nostalgia trap. The best proof of the fact that we don’t know what we are even talking about is the belief that some classical version once defined American history. What must be regarded as, at best, the most blinkered and, at worst, most pernicious interpretation of American history is Louis Hartz’s staggeringly influential The Liberal Tradition in America (1955). Hartz argues that Americans enjoyed the absence of a class-structured feudal past, which also meant little tradition of militant revolution or reaction. Americans were born free, capitalist, and committed to the liberal ideal. Hartz’s flat, conflictless version of history was always in conversation with European socialism more than the American historical record. It stands as a document of its postwar moment, when the United States needed to make sense of itself as hegemon of the “free” world.”
This 1955 view of Liberalism brings us directly to the 1950’s America both Donald John Trump and Joseph Robinette Biden represent. Whether by beefing up NATO or imposing tariffs, or kicking out the immigrants (which both geezers now appear to be in favor of), it’s the bad old America that was. Not the America of the future.
Cowie rattles off several competing views of liberalism, but each falls back on the old, comfortable “more democracy” argument. In naming many of American democracy’s most glaring defects, even Cowie shrinks from pointing out the obvious — that only radical medicine can treat this habitually sick patient. In the end it is liberalism’s “respect for the individual” that each of Liberalism’s advocates presented here falls back upon.
That’s it. That’s all they’ve got. This is what Robert Paul Wolff was getting at when he wrote his brilliant 1968 autopsy report, The Poverty of Liberalism.
The solution, as old math books used to say, “is left as an exercise to the reader.”
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