In Praise of Liberalism

The liberalism that gives America its reason for being deserves more honor than it’s been getting. Liberalism, however maligned, is at the heart of who we are as a nation. More, America and its liberalism are the world's place of refuge in troubled times. Yet, we ourselves embrace it openly only when we are in trouble, usually because we’ve done something dumb, like now.

Liberalism was born with our Declaration of Independence. It is the acceptance of the ideas of progress, of the autonomy of the individual and of the necessity for the protection of political and civil liberties.

That's liberalism. That’s the reason we fought the Revolutionary War and the Civil War. No one would accuse the tories or the slave holders of being liberal. They are the other side. They are the 1% we are still fighting.

To see the modern disrespect for liberalism, try googling “liberalism.” The search engine's first result is the obligatory Wikipedia entry. Second on the list is: “Liberalism tolerates everything except disagreement with liberalism.” The third entry is as accusatory: “Liberalism: a basic primer – Or Why Leftism is Failure Incarnate.”

Those of us who respect liberalism have our work cut out for us. It is not new or unexpected that the powers-that-be should attack liberalism. Fortunately, the tories and slave holders mess up so badly that we turn back to our liberal roots.

That's the reason the people supported Theodore Roosevelt’s progressivism, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, Harry Truman’s Fair Deal and Lyndon Johnson’s Voting and Civil Rights Acts. That's the reason we have social security, medicare/medicaid, unemployment insurance, and the whole stabilizing social safety net.

In stupid times, like now, property and money trump individual rights. In the gilded age of the robber barons, America abandoned liberalism and industrialized at the expense of the working class. But America turned to progressivism, liberalism by another name. Then the Roaring 20s led again to the same accumulation of money in the hands of the few, the same abuse of the rights of individuals and the same economic cisis. So we had the liberal New Deal.

Each resurgence of liberalism follows upon a period of folly and excess where new wealth is seized by a new elite. We stray from our principles, suffer the consequences and then rejoyce in the turn around and political victory of the people.

In modern times, liberalism rose to meet the turbulence of the 1930s. It then continued and achieved its fullest expression in the 1960s and 1970s when segregation, the legislated power of the slave holder mentality, met a liberalism proud to protect the civil and political and political rights of minorities. But then, seemingly exhausted by so great an effort, liberalism succumbed to the forces of reaction, slipping into the disrepute and rejection we know today.

About 1980 America began this current turn away from liberalism. The “Morning in America” dream spawned the idea that individual political and civil rights did not have to be protected by the government. We were told that we could leave that to the always maximizing, always equilibrating market. Would that it were so. But it isn't.

This problem is not partisan. The surrender to deregulation began under Jimmy Carter but really got going with Ronald Reagan. It kept going through George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton and went wild with George W. Bush. President Obama is not a liberal or he would have jailed the bankers for fraud, the medical industry for criminal price fixing and the military-industrial complex for treason.

American is now stumbling along as a nation and as an economy. In this dumb time, we have again turned the wealth of America over to the rich by starting stupid wars and by refusing to pay taxes. That's why we've neglected the social structure that others sacrificed to build.

The pessimism of the tory, the slave holder and the financier extremely wealthy says we cannot afford to school our children nor offer healthcare to our elderly, much less take care of our poor. It is the wealthy who are calling us to abandon our poor and our needy to the market with its ability to impose a criminal price system.

What is this nonsense about a poverty-stricken America in decline? America is still the richest country in the world. And when I say “rich,” I do not mean just in material goods. Sure, we have the resources, the people and the technology but we also have our liberal history as a country willing to help the down and out, willing to share not just our wealth but also our dream.

Only a determined liberalism will protect the autonomy of the individual and enhance everyone's civil and political liberties. That will put us back on America's and liberalism's path of destiny.