POLITICS JANUARY 30, 2013
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For more than twenty years, the word “liberal” seemed to have disappeared from the political world. But President Obama’s speech appears to have revived it—even though the word did not appear in his inaugural address.
In the aftermath of his speech, "liberal" was suddenly everywhere—by the right (with derision) and by the left (with relief). Most interestingly, the word appeared prominently in the mainstream news outlets that have typically avoided using a term that had evolved from being a basic political descriptor to a loaded piece of jargon used as an epithet by Republicans as avoided as a liability by Democrats.
“OBAMA OFFERS LIBERAL VISION,” a New York Times banner headline blared. “For His Second Term, a Sweeping Liberal Vision,” said the Los Angeles Times. “A Speech That Embraced Liberalism,” added Politico.
If anyone found the usage inappropriate, they didn’t make much of a fuss. What made liberalism alive was not the word, but the many issues that liberals have waited for decades to hear from a president: inequality, poverty, illegal immigration, gay rights, and many other liberal promises that have been ignored or overlooked for years. Obama may not have said “liberalism,” but he made it possible for others to start talking about it again. In his inaugural address, he painted an America that has not been seen in many years:
. . . our journey is not complete until our wives, our mothers, and daughters can earn a living equal to their efforts. Our journey is not complete until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law . . . Our journey is not complete until no citizen is forced to wait for hours to exercise the right to vote. Our journey is not complete until we find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful immigrants who still see America as a land of opportunity; until bright young students and engineers are enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country. Our journey is not complete until all our children, from the streets of Detroit to the hills of Appalachia to the quiet lanes of Newtown, know that they are cared for, and cherished, and always safe from harm.
Whether the president succeeds in these bold efforts, he has attempted—even if somewhat belatedly—to restore our lost liberalism. Already, conservatives have derided Obama’s inaugural address, calling his statements socialism and saying his speech was obsolete. It remains to be seen whether the president can sustain his policies and the liberal ideas he presented in his speech. But for liberalism to become part of our time again, we need to know what liberalism means—in the past and today.
Over a century ago, liberalism meant civil liberties, political freedom with limited government, and laissez-faire economic policy—not making an effort to change the nation. That idea lasted through the nineteenth century. One early twentieth-century scholar, remarking on the history of the Bill of Rights in the nineteenth century, described it as “140 years of Silence.” Only the wealthy and powerful supported those rights.
Before World War I, liberalism—then called “progressivism”—tried to build a broadminded government reaching out to people across the nation. But the growing power of corporations and massive inequality in the nineteenth and early twentieth century made liberalism almost meaningless. Not until the 1930s, when Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal used the word, did Americans—and their government—make a more powerful “liberalism." The New Deal was an effort to give ordinary citizens rights that had been almost forgotten. That definition of liberalism remained powerful from the end of the New Deal into the 1960s.
The turmoil of the late 1960s—the battles of civil rights, the fiasco of Vietnam, the unraveling of the American economy—created a new radicalism of the right and a left that made liberalism seem obsolete to many people. Liberalism has not yet fully revived from that era into our time. If liberalism remains an ideal, it still remains a weak one.
But the liberal creed remains one that even many conservatives, if they thought about it, might agree with. Modern liberalism means liberty for speech and the press. It means freedom of religion and a separation of church and state. It provides equal rights under the law. Other elements of liberalism have begun to emerge in our own time: protecting the environment, securing social security and health care, stopping unnecessary wars, supporting the poor, feeding the hungry, helping the homeless.
Most of all, liberalism in our time means the support of equality. For many years, liberals ignored economic and social inequality—certain that their efforts would fail. As in the nineteenth century, the twenty-first century has produced the greatest inequality in the history of our nation. That is why Obama’s speech sent many people talking about liberalism again—happily for many, outraged for others.
Some liberals have shown arrogance. Some have given up. Others have over-reached. But at its best, liberalism has been a pragmatic system that could help create a society that helps those in need and works against our growing inequality. Four years after Obama became president, he may have finally launched—at least for now—a robust fight for what most liberals believe.
9 comments
If the term "liberal" is indeed making a comeback, it's bad news for proper English usage. As noted by the author, in earlier years (and still throughout most of the world), "liberal" was more closely associated with the attitudes and policy preferences we term "libertarian". The term was appropriated, inappropriately in my view, by American leftists who wanted to distinguish themselves from socialists and communists who were increasingly tainted by association with the horrors of Stalinism as it became more widely known. It's a bad fit. What people really mean by "liberal" today is essentially a pro-Big Government attitude that has very little to do with the actual root, which is of course Liberty. Such folks are much more accurately described as Leftists.
- Robert Powell
January 30, 2013 at 6:03am
I am trying to resist asking Mr. Powell if her wrote his plaint with a feather quill pen. I am afraid that battle of label is lost. Yes, there is some value in noting in American terms the evolution of "liberal" (classical, as they say, as in Adam Smith) from its laissez-faire absence of policing or regulating market excesses. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . It is a term meaning broad, wide, far-reaching----and this once meant all are included in the "liberty" to be unregulated, be they immigrant or corporation. "Freedom" to make an anti-union personal contract no matter what. I really wonder if libertarianism, per se, is a central aspect of this evolving definition, at least as I understand it. (And a Brit would give it yet another slightly different term, since in its classical sense--or some variant thereof---it is still in use as a hybrid term in contemporary British poli sci and history.
- atlasqq
January 30, 2013 at 10:27pm
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The word "liberal" reminds me of Warren Beatty's film about Jack Reed, Reds. At the beginning of the film, Reed visits Portland where he is invited to the "Liberal Club" to give his view on what WWI was all about. I prefer "progressive", but it's out of favor among progressives (and liberals) as being too timid. Anyway, it's ironic, this debate about words used by progressives (liberals) to identify themselves, since "conservatives" have so debased the language that their favorite terms often have meanings that are the opposite of the way they use them, conservatives having become practitioners of political manipulation through the (mis)use of words (Orwellian as it's known). As for Jack Reed and the Liberal Club, the presiding officer expressed his view that WWI was all about "freedom", while Reed expressed his view that WWI was all about "profits". Orwellian then, Orwellian now, that's the mark of a true "conservative".
- rayward
January 30, 2013 at 6:59am
Not only might conservatives like liberal ideas - they are liberals! Both American progressives and conservatives exist within the range of thought typically referred to as "classical liberalism". This label refers to any system of thought which takes the rational individual as its starting point. Very few Americans take any other starting point for their political thought.
- dclinkman
January 30, 2013 at 7:38am
The italics don't bother me as much as the lack of dating. Even the paragraph spacing can be overcome by typing about 45 to 60 periods (all reduced by TNR to single spacing between, no matter how you type them).
- atlasqq
January 30, 2013 at 10:22pm
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Does the comments section now put everyone's statements in italicized quotes? I keep thinking that everyone is lifting quotes out of the above articles. Sort of jarring.
- maxhencke
January 30, 2013 at 2:01pm
It does, and doesn't date them. I hate it. Oh, and try a long comment. No paragraph breaks, either.
- ReganaD
January 30, 2013 at 9:40pm
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Mr Brinkley uses a reference to some unnamed scholar who referred to the "140 years of silence" on the Bill of Rights. I tried to track this down and it led me to discover that Mr Brinkley and a couple others, have quoted each other and even themselves on this thought but without ever identifying who this anonymous scholar was. It just entered the shorthand historian's lexicon, it seems. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I finally tracked it down in a footnote of yet another book which listed a work by Stephen W. Gard, "The First Amdendment: 140 years of Silence," Master of Law thesis, University of Chicago, 1972. Maybe it is time to give Gard a bit of credit at last! (Although he seems to be talking about one amendment, not the entire Billof Rights, but that may be immaterial.) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Or if someone has a better source/reference than this, please supply it to us here. )ts)
- atlasqq
January 30, 2013 at 10:18pm
Here is a nice description of the Liberal both believing and doubting by Alexander Meiklejohn, which I have been quoting for years from his book Education Between Two Worlds and which provides a striking contrast to what might be called the Conservative cast of mind shown in the argument from caution (unintended consequences)and in the argument from tradition, both Burke's:////// "...Liberalism both believes and doubts, and “…indicates a pattern of culture which criticizes itself... It has customs and standards of behaviour. But it also has...the attitude of...questioning its own dominant beliefs and standards... The liberal both believes and doubts...and... if an individual or a group will hold fast both to custom and intelligence, then its experience will inevitably be paradoxical and divided against itself. The being who seeks intelligence is a divided personality.”////// I lean towards this more mind-based notion of Liberalism. For its content has shifted from its origins as a laissez faire doctrine more in common with libertarian ideas of freedom from government and economic freedom to, over the 20th century, more "progressive" ideas about the virtue of government, the need to regulate commerce and the felt obligation to provide a citizenry with a decent social safety net, and thus having more in common with Democratic Socialism.////////// I believe in the social safety net as a hallmark of a just society and in that sense agree with it as a specific content of political Liberalism as we understand it today, apart from it as a habit of mind, as described by Meiklejohn. And if that's what's meant by Liberalism's morality being located in its search for justice then I agree. For Meiklejohn argued that the doctinal legacy of human fellowship from a philosophically outmoded Christianity is the proper understanding of the moral foundation for the political order promised by democracy////// In these senses, "generosity" captures the open mindedness of both believing and doubting and the humanity evident in a social safety net and a commitment to helping the poorest amongst us. The content and boundaries of the net and of the helping hand are always a matter of debate but the underlying commitent is there regardless.//// Back to Liberalism's habit of mind: Trilling himself says, in line with Liberalism holding fast to belief and doubt, his misson is "putting under some degree of pressure the liberal ideas and assumptions of the present time" and urges the necessity of the "essential imagination of variousness and possibility, which implies the awareness of complexity and difficulty."/////
- basman
February 1, 2013 at 5:56pm