If the cause were already hopeless, I would agree. But the morphing of the word is quite recent and possibly salvageable. It was a liberal, John Kennedy, who worked to eliminate the 70% tax rate on the principle of softening government strangulation of the economy. By the time Clinton was president, liberalism had lost practically all meaning. It was a centrist, and not a liberal, who reformed welfare for the purpose of compromise and expediency.
http://www.afn.org/~afn30091/songs/s/supertramp-logical.htm
“Now watch what you say or they’ll be calling you a radical,
liberal, fanatical, criminal.”
That’s from the lyrics of a popular song by a UK music act in 1979. That song was quite popular in the US. Clearly the term “liberal” was acquiring a negative connatation in the UK at this time. Thatcher took power on May 4, 1979 as PM. Thatcher and Reagan were very much of the same mold.
Once again, I have to point out that “liberal” was already a dirty word in many people’s minds BEFORE Ronald Reagan took office. Indeed, he was able to win in 1980 precisely BECAUSE so many people had lost all respect for liberals.
Think about it- what sense would any of the jokes in “All in the Family” have made if it weren’t obvious to everyone that blue collar America had already turned rabidly against the Left by the early Seventies?
In the late Sixties and early Seventies, liberals completely alienated people who’d considered themselves proud Democrats, just a few years earlier. Now, if you on the Left would prefer to think that’s simply because of sinister, evil GOP propaganda, go right on thinking that! Frankly, I don’t really WANT you to face up to your mistakes! I don’t WANT you to get your act together! I want you to go right on alienating the working class folks whose votes you need!
With any luck, this time next year, rjung, elvis and diogenes will be right here on this same board, insisting that John Kerry’s loss MUST be the result of some diabolical plot by Karl Rove.
Am I correct in assuming you are conflating “liberal” with “centrist” because of Bill Clinton? If so you might want to reconsider. Clinton, so far as I know, never claimed to be a liberal. He certainly wouldn’t have done so during his presidential career. Liberalism still has meaning it just has little to do with Clinton. He is a centrist. People were claiming he was a liberal in a deliberately dishonest effort to paint him as outside the mainstream. Clinton isn’t liberal. He doesn’t claim us and we don’t claim him.
Um, Archie Bunker should have been your first clue. The left lost popularity mainly because of support for civil rights. You may consider stoping the treatment of “darkies” as subhumans a “mistake” as many blue collar people did and apparently still do but we don’t. We are proud of our accomplishment and wouldn’t take back our sacrifice even if we could.
A simple explanation, there has always be a conflict in this country (and I suppose many other countries) between a regard for personal liberty and a regard for social convention. Sometime during the disorders accompanying the discontent with the war in Vietnam, the sexual revolution and the outbreak of the free speech movement some smart political operative realized that all the things that Nixon’s Vice-President’s so called silent majority did not like could be laid at the feet of people who thought personal liberty more important than undisturbed social order. Those people could be characterized with the general label of “liberal.” It was a liberal idea that young people should have sexual relationships without the benefit of marriage, it was a liberal idea that women should control their own lives to the extent of terminating a pregnancy, it was a liberal idea that women should get equal pay for equal work, it was a liberal idea that a 55 mph speed limit would limit car exhaust pollution and conserve oil, it was a liberal idea that the public schools should not be in the business of advancing simplistic Christianity, it was a liberal idea that people should be free to say rude things in public and show pictures of naked people and fill the airwaves with sexual innuendo, It was a liberal idea that people should be able to see movies of people copulating, it was a liberal idea that as long as it did not frighten the horses people should be allowed to do pretty much what ever they wanted, it was a liberal idea that homosexuals should be afforded the same treatment a the rest of the population, and most importantly it was liberals who push the agenda to afford Black people the same legal, political and social status as White people, it was a liberal idea that people who were unable or unwilling to provide for themselves should be provided for by the government. In other words, liberals were advancing the very changes in society that offended and scared the substantial number of people who were offended and scared by a culture that was becoming increasingly rude, crude, egalitarian, irreligious, sensual and socially conscious. These changes were, in the minds of many, bad things and the people who advanced those things were bad people deserving of contempt because they were attacking the very fabric of the society. Thus the culture wars. It is a political tactic that has traction with what had been a Democrat constituency, working people, small tradesmen, small farmers and church goers. It pulled the socially conservative away from the Democrats and to the Republicans (despite the fact that all the Republicans have given the social conservatives is lip service). It is the late 20th and early 21st Century equivalent of waiving the bloody shirt.
Most Americans do not like to be labelled as “liberal” or “conservative”. We think that we are the middle almost by definition and label everybody else by where they place relative to us. Maybe we’ll admit to some leanings … but we are usually uncomfortable with the label.
“Liberal” became a slur when liberals rolled over in the aftermath of Reagan. When they went after what they percieved as “the middle” instead of trying lead to what they believed was right. Dukakis (the wimp) did it more than anyone else by running away from the label. And instead of being percieved as a centrist he percieved as a liberal and a coward namby pamby. And rightly so.
When labelled by others as a “liberal” or as a “conservative” the best response is “Well, what do you mean by the word?”
I am fiscally conservative and hate the debt that we have built up. I believe in personal freedoms and therefore support the ACLU. I believe that we have an obligation to help those who have not gotten a fair shake. On Political Compass I map out more liberterian than liberal. I do not accept a label as representing me. But I respect someone who stands up for what they believe and conservatives do with more frequency than liberals.
How do you know that’s the case? Can you read the minds of people to determine that what they’re standing up for is or is not the same as what they believe in?
Lest there be any doubt about this just pick up today’s newspaper. What you will see is that on Friday, the day the Senate report on pre-war intelligence came out, the day 4 or 5 more American servicemen were killed in Iraq, the day it was announced that a couple ex-pat Americans had been running a private jail in Kabul which featured prisoners actually strung up by the heals, the US Senate, the world’s most august debating club, took up a proposed constitutional amendment to ban same sex marriage and anything that vaguely looks like same sex marriage and the President of the United States was going to devote his weekly radio address to the vitally important issue of preventing liberal activist judges from changing the definition of marriage.
Clearly that the Massachusetts court said that the state constitution required equal treatment of same sex and different sex couples and that New Jersey has instituted a statutory domestic union system is not the most pressing issue before this country for people who are concerned with the stuff that traditionally constitutes national policy. It is however of vital concern to those people who think this sort of cultural change means that the nation is well on its way to Hell in a hand basket. While Senator Hatch may adamantly deny that the proposed amendment is just partisan politics, the Constitutional debate, President’s talk and the ads pointing out that Senator Kerry voted against the so called Stacy Petersen statute make it it is hard to think that all this is not intended to rally the social conservatives and bolster their faith in the Republican Party, and the Bush Administration in particular as their champion in the struggle against social and cultural change. It doesn’t matter of course if the same sex marriage amendment ever gets out of the Senate. What matters is that the GOP gets to make a statement that it is with the law abiding, God fearing, patriotic people who to not accept the social reforming of the wild eyed liberals.
It is, in my judgement a cynical campaign of division that is not in the nation’s best interest. It is’ however, in the short term interest of the Republican machinery. In the end it makes no practical difference to me or to the Rev Mr Falwell that Adam and Steve can inherit from each other under the rules of intestate succession or that they can consent to and authorize each other’s medical treatment or that they can file a joint income tax return. The difference is that it offends the daylights out of the Rev Mr F and it doesn’t bother me all that much. You can build a political movement on the Rev Mr F’s moral outrage, as irrational as it seems to me. Right now G Bush & Co need to keep the level of out rage up. With four months to go before the election the President is neck and neck with his challenger. Despite the big talk the war in Iraq is not going as predicted and the economy is still sluggish. Right not the President needs to energize his base. Since the social conservatives far out number the imperial capitalists and the advocates of a free lunch tax policy, the President and his loyalists need to throw the social conservatives a bone to reassure them that the GOP is continuing the good fight against the liberal agenda…
There’s always a way around them labels.
In Bob Herbert’s column in the N.Y. Times yesterday he contrasted Dick Cheney (as representative of the “hard right” wing) with John Edwards, a “populist”.
As I’ve indicated a number of times, my own definition of “liberalism” is a willingness to challenge established orthodoxy, whereas “leftism” is support for policies designed to rectify perceived past inequities. Up through the 60s, the established orthodoxy held that the inequities were the way things ought to be, so liberalism and leftism were largely synonomous.
Now we have political correctness, which is not liberal, but a new kind of left-wing conservatism. A belief that “systemic racism” is everywhere has become an established orthodoxy in certain influential circles. A liberal should be skeptical that every portrayal of racial minorities (etc.) is automatically racist. (It’s also worth pointing out that in Russia, the liberals are to the Right of the conservatives, i.e. the communists).
How I think liberal became a dirty word is that coservatives don’t listen when liberals explain their motivation, but simply scan the headlines and perveive Ominous Trends. For example, they see liberals going ater school prayer, Ten Commandment displays at courthouses and schools, manger scenes on city hall lawns, and “under God” in the Pledge and concluded that liberals are out to eliminate religion from “public life” when in reality they’re being sticklers for SOCAS and these are violations that have slipped through. Likewise, conservatives noticed from their ivory tower that throughout the 60s and 70s there were more and more government social programs and their taxes went up and up tp pay for them, so they concluded that liberals were out to make government as big as possible and to punish them for being rich. How often do you hear liberals say, “we’re for bigger government”? What they really say is, “There’s a specific problem overe there–people are hurting–that needs to be addressed, so we need a program to address it. The richest country in the world should be able to spend a little bit more to pay for it. OK, now there a specific problem over there…” and so on.
I’ll conclude by asking, what sense does it make to portray liberals half the time as Big Government tyrants and the rest of the time as naive, wimpy, bleeding hearts?
But Pat Buchanan could also be characterized as a “populist” (that is, a paleoconservative nativist-isolationist populist). And so could Dennis Kucinich and Jim Hightower (left-wing populists). Political labels always seem to get slippery. Which doesn’t mean they’re empty of content – the one thing all brands of “populists” have in common is hostility to the big business interests. “Liberal” used to imply that attitude too, but that part seems to have fallen by the wayside with the rise of pro-biz “neoliberals” like Clinton and Gore.
When no one responds to you, that means you’re right. 
Are they still stupid enough to fall for that? Hmm…maybe. The Religious Right still hasn’t seemed to catch onto the fact Reagan sold them out. Reagan did sing their tune, but didn’t do much of anything to try and deliver for them.
Just to throw my two cents in on the OP, I don’t know when “liberal” became a slur, but I do know that GHW Bush turned it into an art form. Remember how he leveled the charge of “card carrying member of the ACLU”? A bit like calling someone a “flaming homosapien”.
We were fairly leaderless, too, us liberals, card carrying or not. We had to turn to fictional presidents to see someone with a spine respond to the charge. Of course, I speak of The American President, who said simply, “Yes, I am a card carrying member of the ACLU. Why aren’t you?”. Why couldn’t any liberals respond as eloquently? Surely if one can write a script, one can write a speech.
Screenwriters, Hentor, have the advantage that they get to write both sides of every dialogue; so their heroes never get caught flat-footed, unless the writer considers that essential to the story.
I bet Mike Dukakis saw that movie and kicked himself. “WHY? Why didn’t I say that?”