How is Doonesbury liberal?

Cafe Society
1

I got the Doonesbury@50 collection about a month ago (this after reading the 40th anniversary retrospective I bought from Borders Books & Music and completely ignored for several years). I did read maybe two or three books in the past, most of it during the 80’s, and I did follow the old website right up to the end of dailies, but I had no inkling as to the sheer scope of this work. I can’t stress enough that Garry Trudeau is a master of the craft. I can’t even imagine any other work that’s kept going for so long with only one or two major breaks and evolved with the times and stayed intelligent and thoughtful throughout. (Compare that to Mallard Fillmore, where you need a damn counter for the jabs at Hillary Clinton and inclusive language). One thing that deserves special attention (I remember Tom Tomorrow bringing this up) is the sheer challenge in providing a humorous perspective to the most repugnant subject matter imaginable. Oil companies, social safety net cutbacks, abuses of power, war, terrorism, ignorance, Trudeau nails it almost every time.

On a personal note, I should also point out that no one else in the history of anything has done such a masterful job in making so many evil, unlikable, or just plain disgusting characters not only interesting but occasionally even sympathetic. And not just via the easy outlet of vermin eating vermin (though he does that on occasion, like when Duke shot Zeke after mistaking him for a raccoon). He gives these bad people the same struggles as everyone else, makes them deal with the consequences of their actions, and gives them the same hard choices and sacrifices. One thing he does really well is making a character obviously evil but putting in enough humanity that you can at least understand why others would be willing to deal with him. Phil Slackmeyer may be a fatcat oil executive, but he genuinely cares about his company, and as much as he resents his son he sees his very expensive college education through to the very end. He even sacrifices a powerful government position for it!

Anyway, right now I’d like to ask something that’s been nagging at me for a long time…how this ever got a reputation as a liberal comic. At the moment I’m up to August 1982 (getting close to the big hiatus) and have recently started followed the current Sundays again, and I’m honestly not seeing what’s so extremely leftist about it. Consider:

  • Trudeau is a baby boomer (which he proudly proclaimed in the 40th anniversary book), and most of his core boomer characters (Mike, Mark, Rick, Joanie) are hardworking pillars of the community. Even Zonker eventually ends up with gainful employment and even extends to it to his even more aimless nephew.

  • Mike starts out supporting liberal causes and is pretty much a total loser who can’t get a date to save his life. Then he gradually becomes more conservative, and he develops a successful online career, earns the respect of many, and gets a beautiful, loving, engaging, whip-smart daughter to go with his beautiful, loving, engaging, whip-smart wife.

  • B.D. is an ignorant right wing anticommunist meathead jock who 1. has a full athletic scholarship for his whole time at Walden, 2. gets a smoking hot gal who remains true to him for life 3. routinely gets away with threats, bigotry, and even outright violence, 4. serves in Vietnam and emerges unscathed, and 5. gets to be on the winning side politically for 20 years. That fateful day near Fallujah is the first truly bad thing that happens to him in his life.

  • Feminism is presented in a dim light. There’s a nameless radical feminist in the early going who hassles Mike for no good reason. Nicole, the resident sorta-radical feminist, is an unrestrained jerk. Joanie callously abandons her daughter (which no one ever lets her forget). Ellie is a fanatical supporter of the ERA which even a great many women don’t support, and her struggle is presented as completely Quixotic.

  • No member of any hard-left group is shown in a positive light. Clyde, the Black Panther, is a useless layabout with an obsession with food rivalling the King of Town.

  • Pretty much all the old people are at minimum classy, at most pillars of society. In particular, Lacey Davenport was an impeccably-mannered, compassionate, level-headed, honest Republican congresswoman, which is practically an oxymoron today.

  • The primary religious figure, Reverend Sloan, is likable and respected by everyone; he’s performed nearly all the wedding ceremonies in the strip.

  • Speaking of which, the strip is extremely, almost militantly, traditionalist when it comes to weddings. As a rule of thumb, the more conventional the wedding is, the stronger the marriage is. Mark-Chase, J.J.-Mike, and J.J.-Zeke were all unconventional weddings; the first two marriages ended in disaster, while the third not only is totally joyless, it’s questionable as to whether it even legally exists (neither Joanie nor Alex signed the marriage license).

  • All acts of rebellion are subject to ridicule and fail to accomplish anything meaningful. Prominent examples include Benji (punk rock), J.J. (art, marrying Zeke), and Honey (falling for Duke).

  • Declining academic standards is a subject which gets covered regularly and absolutely reamed every time. Examples include grade inflation, a history class losing students even as the required reading keeps dropping, and drastically reduced courseloads. Aside from Alex and some of her friends, pretty much every student after Mike’s graduating class is a slacker underachiever at best.

  • No politician gets any special favors. Even Barack Obama, who had a Messiah-like level of popularity among nearly all of non-Neanderthal America, got plenty of beatdowns for what he actually did.

  • During the Napster flap, Mike…the voice of the author…came down 100% on the side of the music industry. I recall that Jimmy Thudpucker allowed his music to be freely downloadable in protest and got cleaned out for it.

  • New technology is a rich source of mockery, and even when the characters understand it’s a vital tool, they struggle with it. The very first strip cites a computer slip-up; other memorable episodes include Mike’s hassles with a personal digitial assistant, computerized comics, and of course the Zoom meeting.

So what is Doonesbury’s massive liberal slant? From what I can tell, it’s the notion that politicians should be competent, hurting people is bad, hurting lots of people is really bad, war is bad, injustice is bad, demolishing the environment is bad, the press should do its damn job, etc. Apparently acknowledging the fact that right-wingers have done and continue to do an astounding amount of harm to this country makes one a radical leftist. It wouldn’t surprise me if that is the actual position, at least in the country, but that begs the question of what makes Doonesbury so special in this regard. Is it just longevity? Running in mainstream newspapers?

2

Except Mark’s gay wedding…which surprised me.

3

Doonesbury was establishment liberal at a time when even Clinton was saying, “The era of big government is over”. The positions of the two sides were much closer then, and much closer to the center. Doonesbury was on the left, there was nothing on the right except for the much inferior Mallard Filmore that didn’t have anywhere near the audience. But both were establishment at a time when establishment’s Overton window ranged from center left to center right.

In the meantime, the left has moved farther left and the right has moved in a populist direction. But from a farther left perspective, a moderate, center left liberal like Garry Trudeau can look conservative.

4

I’ve read Doonesbury since the strip went national. I have all of his books, too. There has not been a moment I thought Trudeau was anything other than a liberal.

Doonesbury is a little like SNL. Nobody doubts that are a liberal show. But both draw humor from the world around them. Sometimes that means mocking the liberal side of society, and Democratic Presidents. They are made lightly fun of, though, and Republican Presidents are skewered.

Trudeau is a true satirist, and as impressive as you deemed. Few strips in history have created and maintained the hundreds of active characters readers come to know and love. Each is a real being and each have their faults and foibles. Awareness of those are part of the deal we make with society. Trudeau pokes at their self-images and pretensions as a master satirist must.

He is the current personification of what it means to be liberal, just as Walt Kelly was before him with Pogo. In both, characters just stumbled through life as best they could, but you always knew who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. Both of them wanted desperately for the world to be better than it is. If that isn’t liberal, then nothing is.

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Smoking dope is OK. Being gay is OK. Being opposed to the Viet Nam war was just fine. Women may not talk a feminist line, but many of them act it.

Those may or may not look like liberal positions from 2024, depending on who’s looking. They certainly were in the first years of the strip.

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Lacey (aka Millicent Fenwick) was my Congressperson, and though Republican was reasonably liberal. Princeton at the time was full of liberal Republicans.
You’re surely not thinking that liberal in some way means radical leftist. Liberals are usually hardworking people, after all.

7

What about Honey and Phred?

As for Clyde, the main jab at him was his willingness to become a token black conservative.

8

This was an era when old people were venerated, because they sacrificed a hell of a lot. Their children (the boomers) were the first generation to be born into relative affluence and general peace. Their parents were “The Greatest Generation” who lived through the Depression and WWII and built the prosperity of the 50’s and 60’s. And their grandparents fought in WWI, or were immigrants, or in general had a life much, much harder than they did.

The first affluent generation was very much aware of the debt they owed to their elders. Depicting old people elegantly or reverently was common, and not political.

9

Did you live through the sixties?

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You had to have been there. When it started, having long hair was enough to get kicked out of school or denied a job. Being caught with pot could have you put in prison. The “freaks” were listening to rock but most of the country preferred Tom Jones or Nancy Sinatra. Lawrence Welk was still a huge hit. Men went to work wearing white shirts and ties, girls couldn’t wear pants to school, women would wear nylons or pantyhose with their dresses: never bare legs.

Doonesbury was more anti-establshment than liberal, though the two went hand in hand.

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Does “don’t trust anyone over 30” ring a bell?

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As Walt Kelly once said, “Don’t trust anyone over 30 - feet tall.”

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Don’t trust anybody over 30!

14

Yes, of courae. There was a counterculture that rebelled against authority. There always is. But that was not where the center of gravity of the culture was, except for a very short time when the Boomers were in college and the Vietnam war raged.

But the height of Doonesbury probably started in the Reagan years, when the country had shifted substntially to the right. That’s when Doonesbury started to be seen as liberal and subversive, as I recall. That continued through the 90’s, which was also quite a conservative era. That was when Bill Clinton not only declared big government dead, he contradicted himself by signing the Defense of Marriage Act. And Joe Biden sponsored the 1994 crime bill which cracked down on all the stuff we are un-cracking now. So it was a very different time.

15

Doonesbury started in the Yale newspaper in 1968 as Bull Tales. It went national under its current name in 1970. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning in 1975, the first comic strip to do so.

Ronald Reagan became president in 1981.

16

There’s a lot of stuff overlooked in the OP that I think needs to be added for context.

Mark and Chase got married (in Pago Pago) in 1999. The first legal same-sex marriage in the U.S. took place five years later. Heck, Will and Grace didn’t even come along until 1998.

Mike did eventually develop “a successful online career” but only after his first dotcom startup was ruthlessly brought down by a huge corporation that strongly resembled Microsoft.

In the strip’s earliest, most political years, Mike was positioned solidly between the radical-leaning Mark and the warhawk B.D. Mike has always been the squishy marshmallow center between the strip’s more outlandish characters.

In other words, same-sex marriage good, big business evil, extremism on both sides not good.

17

Yeah, color me also scratching my head at how is Doonesbury’s liberalism questionable. For those of us who “were there” it has always been clearly so.

But as suggested by some prior answers, Doonesbury was and is “Old School” Liberal in its approach. Not Ideological Leftist radical/revolutionary. So digs and swipes at the sillier sides of ideologues and of self-anointed rebels-without-a-clue like JJ, were not out of question, nor was portrayal of a respectable, honorable traditionalist like Lacey.

Even for some of the sympathetic characters there always are some gentle digs thrown in – yes, Rev. Sloan is respected and liked, but for some time he had a running gag of reminding everyone who would listen that he had been profiled in Time and had been at all the big Civil Rights events.

Which IS “Liberal”. But to a loud and currently agitated segment of the public, holding those positions “is” being an extremist, or might as well be, for the purposes of heaping derision and delegitimizing.

18

“I hope I die before I get old.”
“Don’t trust anyone over 30.”
Sure we did.

19

Which was then he was running his Watergate strips. “Guilty, guilty, guilty!” No one I’ve ever spoken doubted Doonesbury was liberal. But IIRC Sam is from a conservative part of Canada, so maybe the memo never got there.

20

No, I’m actually agreeing with you. Doonesbury was always perceived as liberal. That was my point.