Tag Archives: liberal

A Different Kind Of Homelessness

I recently had breakfast with two former faculty colleagues. The bulk of our conversation focused on the upcoming election, and thinking back on it, a couple of things struck me: despite MAGA folks’ belief that all college professors are left-wing socialists or communists, in a former, more rational time, all three of us would have been considered somewhat right of center.

But of course, the center has moved. A lot.

In 1980, I ran for Congress as a Republican. I won a Republican primary. I was pro-choice, and (to the extent it even came up then) pro-gay rights. For a couple of years after I lost the general election, people came up to me and said things like “I just couldn’t vote for you because you were so conservative.”

My husband and I met as officials in a Republican city administration; when we married, a reporter who covered the city (we had those back then) told me “the press guys like both of you, but you are both kinda right-wing.”

I don’t think I was ever “right-wing” –my positions were more consistent with what was then the GOP mainstream than with the Rightwing fringe of the party–but I was a traditional Republican.

Since 1980 I’ve changed positions on a few issues, because I learned more about them, but my basic political philosophy and approach to policy has not changed–yet today, I’m considered “far Left.”

I stood philosophically still, but the Overton window moved.

Part of the problem is political vocabulary. Americans talk about Liberals and conservatives, but those terms don’t describe our contemporary politics. MAGA and Trump are anything but Conservative as that term has historically been understood. (For that matter, they lack any coherent political philosophy at all, unless grievance and animus can be considered political positions.)

That reality has left genuine conservatives politically homeless. There’s a reason so many prominent conservative Republicans have endorsed Kamala Harris. (When George Will supports Harris, you know the GOP has jumped the shark.)

To the extent Trump has any policy positions, they are anathema to real conservatives. When the GOP was a genuine center-right party, it championed free trade, not tariffs and protectionism. Conservatives wanted limited government– Barry Goldwater insisted that “Government doesn’t belong in your boardroom or your bedroom.”  As Reagan left office, he made a speech about the importance of immigration. In foreign affairs, conservatives were strong supporters of NATO and opponents of dictators–and they understood the importance of joining with liberals in a unified approach to issues beyond the “water’s edge.”

Real conservatives venerate the Constitution and its checks and balances. They celebrate freedom of speech and a free press. When the GOP was conservative, it stressed the importance of respect for democratic processes and institutions, for law and order. Trump and MAGA constantly attack the very foundations of a working democracy– the press, the Department of Justice, the FBI, even our military leadership and especially the integrity of the electoral system. The old GOP might have disagreed with Democrats and liberals about how these principles should be applied, but they endorsed the principles.

Let’s be accurate: whatever else today’s GOP may be, it is not conservative.

As an essayist in USA Today recently put it,

As someone who works in the world of words, I understand that their meaning – and use – can change over time. Yet, something I greatly resent is how the Republican Party has conflated Donald Trump with conservatism… To me, conservatism means a belief in free markets, individual liberty and limited government.

As a result of the party’s move toward neo-fascism and theocracy, authentic conservatives have found themselves homeless. Thoughtful conservatives–appalled by what the GOP has become and unwilling to call themselves Democrats–have nowhere to go. Many of them will vote Blue this year rather than holding their noses and voting for Trump (or, in Indiana, for our Hoosier Christian Nationalists). Some won’t vote at all.

The disaffection and homelessness of genuine conservatives will help Democrats this year, and in a year where our choices really are between good and evil, that’s something to celebrate. But going forward, the transformation of one of the major parties in a two-party system into an anti-democratic cult is a disaster, and not just for real conservatives.

Good policy requires negotiation and compromise among good-faith advocates of varying perspectives. Civic peace requires respect for democratic institutions. This country needs two adult parties equally committed to the democratic process.

It is increasingly doubtful that the GOP can be redeemed from its current status as the new Confederacy, but unless that happens– or a third party somehow emerges– genuine conservatives will remain homeless.

NOTICE: TOMORROW evening at 7:00 P.M. I will introduce a Zoom event featuring four candidates who have the ability to shift four seats in the Indiana House from Republican to Democrat and break the super-majority’s stranglehold:  Josh Lowry, District 24; Tiffany Stoner, District 25; Victoria Garcia Wilburn, District 32 (incumbent); and Matt McNally, District 39. I will begin the event by explaining why one-party rule keeps dragging Indiana in the wrong direction.

You can register here. There is no charge.

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Which End Is The Deep End?

What does it mean to call a political figure “conservative” or “liberal” today? Our political communication has been (accurately) described as a “fire hose” of propaganda and misinformation, and in that chaos, the original meaning of much terminology has been lost. MAGA Trumpers are anything but conservative. (Just ask some of the genuinely conservative “Never Trumpers,” who will explain the significant differences between conservative beliefs and fascism.)

Liberalism used to mean embrace of the political positions first articulated in the Enlightenment–beginning with what has been called the libertarian principle requiring government to respect the rights of individuals–among them, the rights to speak freely, worship or not as they choose, and go about their business without official interference unless government has probable cause to think a (legitimate) law has been violated. Over time, it came to include issues of fundamental social fairness.

Efforts to denigrate the “liberal” label may have begun earlier, but they really gained steam when the late, un-lamented Rush Limbaugh used it as a term of opprobrium, along with his own constructs like “feminazi.”

The debasement of language has certainly had an effect on America’s political discourse. These days, terms like liberal and conservative are more often used as insults than efforts to communicate a point of view. But a column detailing a recent exchange on CNN with Minnesota Governor Tim Walz points to a possible way out of the linguistic morass. Walz responded to what was intended as an attack on his “liberalism” by putting new meat on the bone of that phrase.

Told that he’d been labeled “too liberal,” Walz responded

What a monster. Kids are eating and having full bellies, so they can go learn, and women are making their own health-care decisions. And we’re a top five business state, and we also rank in the top three of happiness.

Look, they’re going to label whatever they’re going to label. He’s going to roll it out, mispronounce names to try and make the case. The fact of the matter is, where you see the policies that Vice President Harris was a part of making, Democratic governors across the country executed those policies, and quality of life is higher, the economies are better, all of those things.

Educational attainment is better. So, yes, my kids are going to eat here, and you’re going to have a chance to go to college, and you’re going to have an opportunity to live where we’re working on reducing carbon emissions. Oh, and, by the way, you’re going to have personal incomes that are higher, and you’re going to have health insurance.
So, if that’s where they want to label me, I’m more than happy to take the label.

Walz took the opportunity to redefine liberalism as the delivery of things Americans want. As the linked article notes, at least 75 percent of Americans favor: green energy subsidies for the cost of equipment to produce clean energy; requiring police officers to intervene when another officer is using excessive force; establishment of a national database or registry of police misconduct; responding to 911 calls related to mental health issues with mental health professionals rather than police officers; taxing capital gains at the same rate as ordinary income for those making more than $1 million; adopting a 4 percent surtax on income above $5 million; adopting a 1 percent surtax on corporate income above $100 million; and making wages over $400,000 subject to the payroll tax; keeping the Affordable Care Act; allowing Americans over the age of 55 to purchase Medicare; increasing SNAP benefits; expanding the earned income tax credit and raising the minimum wage.

That same 75% also agree that DACA recipients deserve full legal status and a path to citizenship, that visas for skilled workers should be increased, and that the U.S. should hire more personnel to speed up processing asylum claims. They also want to reaffirm our commitment to NATO.

Sizable majorities also want to protect abortion and gay rights, and ban assault weapons.

The liberalism of Walz and Kamala Harris are reflections of that widespread public consensus–not, as MAGA Republicans assert, evidence that liberals have gone “off the deep end.”

Today’s liberals continue to support the “libertarian principle” that individual rights and civil liberties must be protected from government interference. But they also recognize government’s important role in providing an economic and physical infrastructure within which individuals can flourish. Government’s role has always been to prevent the strong from preying on the weak (the problem with that “state of nature” Hobbes wrote about). That role extends beyond protecting citizens’ physical safety–it includes guarding against misuses of economic power and includes measures to mitigate economic hardship.

If that’s the “deep end,” I plan to swim in it.

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Clarifying The Stakes

I have often remarked upon the dramatic changes during my lifetime in what people consider “conservative.” I’ve speculated about the causes, pointed to the inconsistencies and hypocrisies of the contemporary GOP, and speculated that the current “conservative” movement (note quotation marks) is basically an intellectually incoherent expression of MAGA’s underlying fear and racism.

The fear and racism are certainly there, but recently I came across an essay in Persuasion that described an all-too-coherent philosophy underlying the current assault on the American Idea. 

Broadly speaking, there are two different kinds of contemporary American conservatism. The more familiar—traditional conservatism—holds that the founding principles and institutions of the American polity remain sound but have been distorted by waves of progressive activism that have eroded our commitment to individual liberty and limited government. The task is to preserve these fundamentals while restoring their original meaning and function. 

The second kind of conservatism claims that America was flawed from the start. The focus on individual rights comes at the expense of community and the common good, and the claim that government exists to preserve individual liberty creates an inexorable move toward moral anarchy. These tendencies have moved us so far from traditional decency and public order that there is little of worth left to “conserve.” Our current situation represents a revolution against the forces—religion, strong families, local moral communities—that once limited the worst implications of our founding mistakes. The only remedy for this revolution is a counter-revolution. Instead of limited government, we need strong government capable of promoting the common good and defending moral common sense against the threat posed by unelected elites.

This proposed counter-revolution has little to do with conservatism as traditionally understood. It seeks not to limit the flaws in our founding principles but to replace them. Specifically, it is a revolt against liberalism, the political theory rooted in the Enlightenment that inspired the Declaration of Independence. This New Right is unabashedly anti-liberal, at the level of philosophical principle as well as political practice.

The essay distinguishes between different kinds of anti-liberalism. Fascism, for example, finds legitimacy in the “culture and spirit of a specific people.”  Then there is what the essay calls integralism, defined as a distinctive form of religious anti-liberalism that originated within Catholicism.

It arose many centuries before the emergence of liberalism, as a justification for the integration of Catholicism and political power that began under the Roman emperor Constantine and was completed in 380 by emperor Theodosius I, who embraced Christianity not only as his personal religion but also as the religion of his realm. At the end of the next century, Pope Gelasius I formalized the Catholic understanding in his famous distinction between priestly and royal authority. In matters concerning religious practice and ultimate salvation, Gelasius argued, political authorities are required to submit to the authority of the Church. 

The essay proceeds to outline the history of this melding of church with state, and its eventual decline, thanks to the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. While MAGA voters are highly unlikely to have heard of integralism, its resurgence among intellectuals on the Right is clearly influencing and shaping our current culture war. “Integralism” is at the root of current attacks on the very basis of the Enlightenment liberalism that undergirds America’s Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Liberal philosophy distinguishes between public and private, and prohibits government from invading the zone of personal autonomy. Liberals may argue about where the line between public and private should be drawn, but they agree that the distinction exists and–more importantly– that it is morally fundamental.

Integralists “reject freedom of religion, and they are prepared to use government power in the name of public morality to control what liberals consider private and individual decisions.” They reject the goal of a legal or public culture that is neutral– that accommodates different beliefs about morality and/or religion.

That philosphical approach explains a lot.

For Integralists, culture war is the only war: seeing neutrality as a myth, they see the battle as Manichean, a war between advocates of personal autonomy and defenders of (their version of) traditional morality. 

This explains one of the most confusing aspects of Republicans’ U-turn from their former commitment to limited government. These “common good constitutionalists” want a government with the power to impose their version of the good society on everyone.

If political power always shapes culture, as increasing numbers of traditionalists are coming to believe, they will conclude that they must seize and use this power—if necessary, without the limits they have long advocated.

It’s a war between fundamental–and irreconcilable–world-views. One is consistent with American constitutionalism; one is unambiguously not.

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Liberals, Conservatives And The Radical Right

 Americans’ misuse of language is a major contributor to our broken politics. Over the years, terms that originally conveyed a more-or-less specific meaning have been emptied of content and turned into labels and epithets. 

Take “liberal.” I used to define my own political orientation as that of an “18th Century liberal” –someone whose political philosophy was shaped by the libertarian premise underlying the Constitution and Bill of Rights–in order to distinguish myself from post-FDR liberals who favored a more activist state.

That political philosophy led me to be a Republican, because “18th-Century liberalism” was then a definition of conservatism. The GOP certainly had “fringe” folks who were racist and anti-Semitic, but the mainstream of the party defined conservatism as limited government. (To quote Barry Goldwater, Republicans believed that government didn’t belong in either your boardroom or your bedroom.)

As Danielle Allen explained on a recent podcast, there have always been varieties of liberalisms.

But you have to start, of course, from the core: the commitment to basic human rights. And then, for me, the question is which categories of rights are at the focus of any given liberalism. You have your liberalisms that really focus on things like freedom of expression, or freedom of contract and free market participation. Philosophers will call those the “negative freedoms”—freedom from interference. Then you have varieties of liberalism that focus on the right to participate, to vote, to run for office, to help shape your community. Philosophers call those the “positive liberties.”

As I have grown older, and watched the effects of Neoliberalism–a radical form of 18th-Cantury liberalism focused on minimizing the influence of government through deregulation, privatization and austerity- -I’ve come to appreciate the importance of government in protecting those positive liberties.

As Professor Allen explained, in ancient times, the right to participation was considered a part of the human good.

The actual experience of empowerment is a component of human flourishing. I am making the case that we need to recover that idea. Absent that idea, our politics is paternalistic and technocratic…. I think precisely because it’s paternalistic and technocratic, it works incredibly well for elites. But for those who have been subject to oppression and domination over time, the point to be made—and it doesn’t matter if it’s David Walker, Frederick Douglass or WEB Dubois—is that we will own and direct and steer our own lives. That requires empowerment at a collective level and it’s not just instrumental. It’s not just about self-protection. It’s about full human dignity…

It is really important to recognize that today’s GOP is “none of the above.” Principled conservatives–a/k/a 18th Century liberals–have fled the party, which is now a chaotic alt-right amalgam of racists, conspiracy-theorists and authoritarians,  unimpeded by the few remaining, spineless remnants of the party’s former establishment.

The alt-right, too ,has a “philosophy.” It  draws inspiration from little known figures on the fringes of history. There was Oswald Spengler, for example, an intellectual who celebrated the “heroic” culture of the West.

Spengler asserted that culture was in danger of being overwhelmed from within by lack of confidence and loss of a sense of identity–and from without by the “downtrodden races of the outer ring,” who had begun to move from the periphery to the center, armed with the technologies shared with them by the West owing to what Spengler characterized as misguided liberal values.

Julius Evola celebrated “tradition, hierarchy, inequality, the superiority of the master class” and the natural state of community that liberalism, democracy, and socialism had destroyed with their glorification of reason, which drained the world of meaning. For Evola, race was destiny.

Francis Yockey, a virulent anti-Semite, argued that world domination is the essential drive of western culture, and the people of the West must live up to that destiny or witness their culture lose its “vitality.”  

Alain de Benoist of France inspired the Great Replacement Theory, which holds that immigration represents an “existential threat” to the white community and is part of a conspiracy to water down and eventually replace the white race as the dominant race in western societies.

Samuel Francis was obsessed with the idea that “the civilization that we as whites created in Europe and America could not have developed apart from the genetic endowments of the creating people, nor is there any reason to believe that the civilization can be successfully transmitted to a different people.”

Most MAGA Republicans, of course, are unaware of the current party’s “intellectual” roots. They are neither liberal nor conservative–just fearful, angry and destructive.

It’s unfair to conservatives to call today’s GOP “conservative.” It is anything but.

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Men, Women And Politics

What was that book about women being from Venus and men being from Mars? Recent polling data suggests that tongue-in-cheek title may reflect real differences. (And no, I don’t mean “differences” in the “viva la difference!” sense.)

Thomas Edsall’s columns in the New York Times are always heavily indebted to academic research. In a recent one, he considered what research tells us about the political gender gap. Here’s his lede:

In one of the most revealing studies in recent years, a 2016 survey of 137,456 full-time, first-year students at 184 colleges and universities in the United States, the U.C.L.A. Higher Education Research Institute found “the largest-ever gender gap in terms of political leanings: 41.1 percent of women, an all-time high, identified themselves as liberal or far left, compared to 28.9 percent of men.”

While there is a lot of research confirming the existence of that gender gap, a problem with surveys of this sort becomes apparent from Edsall’s description of another poll. This one asked the following  question: “If you had to choose, which do you think is more important, a diverse and inclusive society or protecting free speech rights.”

Male students preferred protecting free speech over an inclusive and diverse society by a decisive 61 to 39. Female students took the opposite position, favoring an inclusive, diverse society over free speech by 64 to 35.

There are all kinds of things wrong with this question, not least the absence of a third option that would allow respondents to indicate they found these values to be equally important. But the biggest problem with using this framing to demonstrate that men and women are politically different is what we know about levels of civic literacy.

I am absolutely confident that few of those surveyed really understand how communications are protected by  the Free Speech Clause of the First Amendment, and against whom.

And that brings me to a persistent gripe I have about Americans’ love of labeling opinions “left” and “right” based on questions of this sort. Not only have the definitions of liberal and conservative changed rather markedly over the past decades (I have the same basic political philosophy that made people label me “very conservative” in 1980, and now I am routinely identified as liberal/pinko/socialist), but a number of policy preferences don’t neatly fall into a black and white, liberal/conservative framework.

I will concede that–at this time– there is a significant political gender gap, and it seems to be growing. Differences in party identification have been evident since the early 1980s, and as Edsall says, we can now see that “the political engagement of women is having a major impact on the social order.”

When Edsall asked a couple of scholars to be more specific about the nature of that impact, most responded that most women are less violent and warlike than most men.

“We find that the evidence is consistent with the view that the increasing enfranchisement of women, not merely the rise of democracy itself, is the cause of the democratic peace.”

Put another way, “the divergent preferences of the sexes translate into a pacifying effect when women’s influence on national politics grows” and “suffrage plays a direct and important role in generating more peaceful interstate relations by altering the political calculus of democratic leaders.”…

There are broad value differences between men and women. Women score higher on values defined by care, fairness, benevolence, and protecting the welfare of others, reflecting greater empathy and preference for cooperative social relations.

The column highlighted gender differences with respect to the use of force–differences in how the sexes approach conflict and competition, and how, as more women have entered the political realm, the lived experience of those women has contributed to what scholars term “the feminization” of government and politics.

I don’t want to quibble with the scholarship displayed in this column, which is sound, but permit me a  caveat.

As with all studies and polls, these conclusions are  at best snapshots–accurate (assuming that they are) at a particular point in time. As women enter more fully into national life, including political life, we tend to get more like the men with whom we interact.( I’ve run across some pretty belligerent/warlike women…)

And of course, this goes for the men, too, who benefit significantly from interacting with us. (I don’t like the term “feminize”–sounds wimpy. How about “humanize”?)

I don’t think women are necessarily more “liberal.” I think our life experiences may have made at least some of us a bit more human--and I think we’re making you guys a bit more human too.

And unfortunately, there’s probably not much of a gap when it comes to the ability to accurately describe the operation of the Free Speech Clause…

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