Is classic American liberalism dead?

Great Debates
1

I was reading this article Liberalism: Can it survive? and wondered about the future of liberalism. I’ve voted Democrat and Republican in my time and I’m not particularly wedded to the left or right. I believe strongly in civic virtue and individual responsibility, but realize that people sometimes do need help to get by in a fast, complex, and often merciless society.

In reading the linked article, however, some of the themes the author discusses do resonate strongly, especially his discussion of the absolute withering contempt for Bush and the fury of those who are outside looking in, not only at Bush himself, * but at all those who supported or voted for him.*

There really does seem to be a “don’t get it” aspect to modern liberal sentiments as to why people voted for Bush, where that portion of the electorate that did choose Bush are largely written off as fools or dupes.

Is liberalism going really going to get any popular traction with this angry, insolent, blaming attitude?

What’s going to replace classical American liberalism?

2

The classical liberalism that preceded it, hopefully.

3

Dream on. I sure don’t see THAT happening anytime soon.

Parties and movements are considered ‘dead’ on a fairly regular basis. This is just more hype from a guy needing a column.

Remember, the margin for error is still low for either side. We could just as easily be talking about the ‘resugency’ of liberalism in last November had gone the other way.

Write me about the death of the left when it’s 60-40 or better.

4

That is extreme liberalism the author refers to when he says that they want a valueless society, I don’t think people agree with extreme conservative values anymore than they agree with extreme liberal values.

And liberals do have values. Pro civil rights, pro human rights, pro universal healthcare, pro choice.
“Liberals, he says, are not inspired by any vision of the good society; the liberal agenda consists of wanting to spend more, while conservatives want to spend less. And the lack of new ideas and the absence of influential liberal thinkers, he says, are obvious.”

Conservatives spend alot too, they just borrow and spend (Reagan and Bush) while liberals tax and spend (Clinton). Thats not much of a difference.

There are no liberal thinkers that i’ve seen though. Begala and Carville are just mouthpieces, no new ideas from them.

5

See this thread:

“Is American liberalism “dead as a governing philosophy”?”

also:

“What is the difference between a liberal and a leftist?”

6

The hell it isn’t. You have to pay interest on what you borrow.

7

I’ve asked this before but never gotten an answer, so here I am to ask it again. We’ve heard many claims that liberals today are purely negative, without any positive ideas about how to run the country. But I’ve never seen anybody provide any reason to believe this is true. Can anybody provide me with such evidence?

During the last presidential campaign, one candidate ran positive ads detailing his plans for what he would do when he was president. The other candidate ran a campaign that was completely devoted to smear tactics. The candidate with the positive campaign was the liberal, John Kerry. The candidate with the negative campaign was the conservative, George W. Bush. How does this fit in with the theory that liberals are all negative and nasty?

So liberals have a withering hatred of not just Bush, but also anyone who voted for him. Witheringness is relative, but one thing’s for sure. Nothing that any liberal has said about Bush and his supporters comes anywhere close, in terms of vitriol, to what all popular conservative pundits pour forth every day. Has any liberal said that conservatives are “all either traitors or idiots”, as Ann Coulter said about liberals? Have liberals demanded that their supports murder George Bush’s family, as the National Review demanded about the Clinton family? Did liberals respond to the terrorist attacks by saying that they were a good thing since many conservative had died? That’s what the popular conservative voices
(Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and WorldNetDaily) all said.

Liberals have no thinkers right now? How about Barbara Ehrenreich? Thomas Friedman?

8

True, we paid $321 billion in interest on the national debt in 2004. But the idea that conservatives are anti-spending and liberals are pro-spending is not true, they just differ on how they get the money to spend.

9

I found this quote in the article interesting.

"We are seeing the bitterness of elites who wish to lead, confronted by multitudes who do not wish to follow. "

That explains the liberal view of the success of the Republicans since 1994 in a nutshell. Essentially, “if you don’t agree with us, you must be stupid.”

This board is an enclave of people who are educated and articulate, expousing what they believe passionately. The problem is, the number of people who agree with them is less than fifty percent and shrinking. And just like moving too far right, the further left you go, the fewer of the great unwashed will follow.

Many of you are now saying “but for Ohio.” Perhaps. But the bottom line is that GWB was as vulnerable as a Republican president can get and still won. Without a poorly performing economy or other negatives, a Republican president has a base of support that exceeds that of a Democratic counterpart. The migration south and west to Republican strongholds continues, bringing about a larger majority in congress and the increased number of electoral votes that come with them.

Also, I forsee another horrific terrorist attack coming within the next few years. We all know which party the public prefers at the reins to deal with that issue.

Additionally, the culture war that nobody wants to acknowledge continues, with another “silent majority” going to the polls to put Republicans back in office.

For every person that thinks that people like Ward Churchill are “bold visionaries”, three think they are opportunistic idiots. The United States will never be a socialist utopia, no matter how badly some people would like it to be. There are a couple of cultural earthquakes on the horizon in this country. One is the culture war which continues in the background…and the other is resolving the desire of the public to have ever increasing services and lower taxes. The party that reflects the desires of the majority with regard to these issues will be in power for another generation.

Who do you think is ahead in the race at the moment?

10

These broad brush claims are always wrong-- all liberals are X or all conservatives are Y. I don’t know how you can measure how much negativity one side has vs the other, but it makes sense that the minority party is going to be perceived as more negative-- they have to rally AGAINST the majority party.

Bullshit. Both candidates ran positive and negative ads. Bush may have run more negative ads than Kerry (not sure this is true, but I suspect it is), but so what? Both guys were slinging mud a good part of the time.

How can you expect anyone to take you seriously when you propagate crap from blogs like the “NR wants to murder the Clinton family” myth? I suspect you are referring to this article, which one would have to twist into a pretzle to come to the conclusions you did. There is vitriol flying on both sides, and you have to be partisanly blind if you can’t see it. Witness the recent “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for” comment by Dean, now the head of the Democratic party. Not “I disagree with…”, or “I will fight against…”, but “I hate…”.

It’s politics, and politics is dirty business. Pretending that your side consists of a bunch of saints is beyond laughable.

11

But if the majority part engages in more negativism than the minority party, then it doesn’t make sense.

Bush ran positive ads. But other than a minor buy at the ned of the campaign, he never spent serious money on them. Trust me. I spent my summer job working in a bar, and thus was unable to escape from the television. Lacking anything better to do, I kept track. 86 Bush ads, 86 negative Bush ads. Nothing positive.

Kerry ran negative ads. Yes. But only in the final two months. The vast majority of his ads were positive. At the Democratic Convention, Kerry ruled that there would be no on-air attacks against Bush. At the Republican Convention, Bush gave us Zell Miller (among others). My point stands.

Saying that you hate the leaders of the party (and it was clearly directed against them, not against the average Schmo voting Republican) is a hell of a lot different than saying you’re happy that thousands of people died, or that you want all your political opponents arrested. And as for Mr. Derbyshire, I’ll post the offending paragraph, and let our friendly dopers decide whether or not one needs to “twist it inot a pretzel” to reach the conclusion that I did.

If I meet anybody who’s pretending that their side is a bunch of saints, I’ll let them know.

Look, fella. I’m not saying that the Democrats are perfect. I’m saying that on a niceness to nastiness scale, they’re a hell of a lot less imperfect than the Republicans. The premise of this thread was that America is supposedly turning against liberals because they’re wholly negative. I pointed out that that’s not true, because if Americans were turning against the political philosophy that’s the most negative, they’d be turning against conservatism. Thus, the premise of the thread is wrong.

12

Democrats? I thought this was about liberals. Bill Clinton wasn’t a liberal, but Barry Goldwater was. I was hoping this would be an interesting discussion of political philosophy in an American historical perspective. But it looks like it’s headed toward being yet another pissing contest between the two American monopoly parties.

13

ITR: You can go ahead and think that Bush never spent “serious money” on anything but negative ads, but you’re going to need more of a cite than what you observed in your bar for anyone around here to believe you.

Funny, you forgot to post the sentence he wrote immediately afterwards:

14

To get back to the original post, I think American liberalism isn’t dead so much as currently stuck in the past. LIke an aging hippie (or Fidel Castro), American liberalism seems to be unable to get past the “glory days” of the 1960s. The classic liberal view is that America had started down the road to utopia, until the Reagan-Bush counterrevolution derailed progressivism. I think that if liberals want to become relevant again, the answer isn’t yet another chorus of “We Shall Overcome”.

15

So how do you “recapture progressivism” in a way that appeals to people? Liberals (however construed) seem incredibly angry about the current political landscape, but have not (IMO) taken the initiative to define an appealing competing platform for potential voters, other than “Bush is an asshole! Bush is a facist! How can you not oppose him!”, which doesn’t seem to be getting much traction.

16

Mises called himself a classical liberal, but he was really more of a libertarian.

17

All right. To settle the issue of what Mr. Derbyshire did say, let me summarize his logical argument in simple, plain English. This is what the last two paragraphs of that column say.

  1. Chelsea Clinton shows all the signs of being evil, just like her parents.

  2. Despotisms had ways of dealing with the families of evil people.

  3. I don’t agree with despotic governments in general, but i do agree with their methods of dealing with bad people, such as Bill Clinton.

  4. In Nazi Germany, Society Russia, and Imperial China, when the government decided to kill a political enemy, they also killed of that person’s entire family.

  5. Here in the United States, we have a better system of not killing off the entire family of people we hate.

  6. The American system of not killing of the entire family of people we hate has some advantages.

  7. The American system of not killing of the entire family of people we hate also has some disadvantages.

  8. One of these disadvantages is that Chelsea Clinton is still alive.

Is that, in your opinion, a fair summary of what Mr. Derbyshire said?

Add it all up, and the logical conclusion is that Mr. Derbyshire believes that Chelsea Clinton should be dead. If her survival is a bad thing, then the opposite of her survival, which is to say her murder, must be a good thing.

18

ITR champion, John Derbyshire incorporates a good bit of humor and hyperbole into his writing. His comments here need to be read with that in mind.

Assuming, of course, that you want to be fair and equitable about this.

19

John, no matter what the “conclusions” of that article, it is one of the most disturbing things I’ve read in a while.

And the fact that it is published by NRO, a supposedly respected right-wing publication, is even more disturbing.

How do they let guys like this write?

I happen to agree with conservatives on several issues, but stuff like this is disgusting and beneath contempt.

I hate people like this moron, and hate everyone who thinks like him.

20

No. Liberalism will become popular when they appeal to the majority of Americans…something that, despite the hopeful yearns of a few, is not the case today…and is unlikely to change if they continue down the same old tired paths they have been trying for the last 2 decades at least.

Ask 50 people this on this board and get 100 answers. For my part, I think ‘classical American liberalism’ is dead as a major force in the US…it will never become a major force in American politics again IMO, not as it currently stands. Now, they might be able to repackage themselves in some new clothes (and a new name) and make a go, especially if they CHANGE a little (ironic that the ‘liberal’ movement in America is the more hidebound and unwilling to change, to adapt, to modify its message and to actually look and see what the PEOPLE want…IMHO of course :)). The very word ‘liberal’ has connotations (not just with the right wing foaming at the mouth crowd either) of poor fiscal responsibility, anti-gun ferver that goes beyond ‘control’, a certain antipathy towards business say, inflexability and unwillingness to compromise on environmental issues with reguard to productivity, inflexablility or at least a total unwillingness to compromise on abortion, social programs that may be well meaning but that are bloated and don’t do what they were intened to do (and in some cases are perceived to not work at all), etc etc.

Admittedly some of the ‘liberal agenda’ is very good and strikes a definite cord with the majority of US citizens (even me)…however, taken as a whole I think there is simply too much baggage, too many sacred cows that are unpopular with the majority of citizens and which ‘liberals’ are unwilling to compromise on in the least. They are doomed in their present incarnation…again, IMO. Time will tell.

If the DEMOCRATS wish to get back into power then they need to marginalize their left wing and definitely dump the ‘classical American liberalism’ from their main agenda…like the Republicans marginalized their right. I know that most on this board don’t see it that way, but thats how I see it…the Republicans pay lip service to their far right, and sometimes not even that, and they cater to the center…not just during the national election phase either, but even during their primary. In many cases (like abortion IMO) they just let the far right assume that the Republicans still support them. The support is personal, not institutional, i.e. Bush MIGHT agree that abortion is a bad thing (I’m actually unsure as I’ve never seen a definitive statement by the man saying anything substantial or laying out any kind of solid position…which kind of makes the point)…but he’s hasn’t done anything and he’s not GOING to do anything about it and neither are the other Republicans in power.

And the key is, most people don’t THINK he or the Republicans are actually going to do anything on it or myriad OTHER supposed ‘classical American conservative’ issues. I don’t expect to see a movement at the federal level to dump the controls on gun ownership either, for instance, or ammendments forbidding schools to teach evolution, make burning the flag a capital crime ( :wink: )…or myriad other hot button issues that are near and dear to the far righties.

No? I’ll take bets now on whether or not 4 years from now ANYTHING has changed at all reguarding legalized abortion in the US. The Republicans have got all the playing cards here, they have the presidency AND control both houses…yet I’ve heard nothing serious about either overturning RvW OR making abortion illegal. I haven’t even heard anything serious about stopping ‘partial birth abortions’, a huge hot button issue with the far right.

-XT