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Editorial See other Editorial Articles Title: Why 'liberal' doesn't quite fit By Jonah Goldberg At the recent CNN/YouTube debate, Hillary Clinton was asked to define what a liberal is and declare whether she was one. "You know," the New York senator said, "it is a word that originally meant that you were for freedom ... that you were willing to stand against big power and on behalf of the individual. Unfortunately, in the last 30, 40 years, it has been turned up on its head, and it's been made to seem as though it is a word that describes big government, totally contrary to what its meaning was in the 19th and early 20th century." "I prefer the word 'progressive,' " Clinton continued, "which has a real American meaning, going back to the progressive era at the beginning of the 20th century. I consider myself a modern progressive." Now, when the presumptive standard bearer of the Democratic Party and the political (and matrimonial) heir to the only Democratic president to be elected to two terms since Franklin Roosevelt says she's not a liberal, it's actually quite a big deal. But first, do note how crafty Clinton is being. She makes it sound as though she's lamenting the unfair transformation of the word "liberal" from lover of individual freedom to champion of big government. How, exactly, does Clinton think liberal came to mean "big government?" Could it have had something to do with her attempt to nationalize one-seventh of the U.S. economy under her health care plan, or maybe with her book, It Takes a Village, which suggests that the government intrude itself into every nook and cranny of our lives? A distorted record? Clinton's answer taps into the common complaint on the left that the word "liberal" has fallen into disrepute not because of the policies of liberals, but thanks to the villainously cynical distortions of conservatives. "The greatest triumph that conservatives ever achieved," liberal columnist Clarence Page recently complained, "is to make liberals embarrassed to call themselves 'liberal.' " Right. The failures of the Great Society, bussing, racial quotas, high taxes, the Vietnam War (both its beginning and end), Jimmy Carter's "malaise," the nuclear freeze movement, lax law enforcement, speech codes, abortion on demand, bilingual education and, of course, Michael Dukakis: We're expected to believe none of these things can be weighed against liberalism. Liberalism, after all, is never wrong. It must be those mustache-twirling henchmen Lee Atwater and Karl Rove who are to blame. One might also ask, if Clinton laments how liberalism has become identified with big government, why it is she wants to revive the progressive label. After all, if liberal is a misnomer for statists, progressive represents a long-overdue return to truth in labeling. In Europe, after all, liberals are the free-market, small-government types. But in America, the same people came to be called conservatives in no small part because they were trying to conserve liberal ideas of limited government amid the riot of social engineering during the Progressive Era that Clinton is so nostalgic for. Indeed, she's right that self-described liberals championed the sovereignty of the individual, which is why the authentic liberals were hated by progressives who believed that, in the words of progressive activist Jane Addams, "We must demand that the individual shall be willing to lose the sense of personal achievement, and shall be content to realize his activity only in the connection with the activity of the many." As late as 1951, Sen. Robert Taft, "Mr. Republican" to his fans, insisted he wasn't so much a conservative as merely an "an old fashioned liberal." Even so, progressives were more desperate to seize the l-word for themselves because they needed it more. They so ruined the word "progressive" — particularly during the excesses of World War I — that they had to abandon it like a rider leaving an exhausted horse behind. By the late 1940s, "progressive" became little more than a euphemism for a Stalinist or at least a useful idiot for Moscow. The next progressive era The irony is that now that liberals have similarly run the l-word ragged, they want to hop back into the saddle of the well-rested progressive label. Conservatives shouldn't get in the way, if for no other reason than some of us Adam Smith tie-wearing right-wingers are tired of hearing socialized medicine described as a liberal idea. Nevertheless, it's worth recognizing that what we call liberalism is experiencing something a little more substantive than a re-branding exercise. The labels we choose have meaning. For several years now, liberalism has been becoming more radical, at least in its rhetoric. Ever since Al Gore's vein-popping tirades in his 2000 crusade against "powerful interests," populism — the other p-word in liberalism's family history — has become ever more popular in Democratic ranks. John Edwards' recent rant that "they" — whoever "they" might be — were trying to keep him silent about the plight of the little guy was an intriguing echo of the paranoid style of American populism (a style often on display in the ravings of Lou Dobbs on CNN and Bill O'Reilly on Fox). Intellectually, meanwhile, Clinton's hardly alone in embracing the progressive label. Denizens of the left-wing blogosphere call themselves progressives, the leading liberal think tanks — the Center For American Progress, the Progressive Policy Institute — and prominent left-wing journalists also invoke the progressive tradition. In short, these changes in liberalism reflect a renewed sense of confidence in government activism. It's too soon to tell how attractive "modern progressivism" will be at the ballot box, but even now it's clear that intellectually the country is lurching leftward. In the short term, this reflects the failure of the Republican Party to secure its hard-won victories. In the longer term, this may provide a new opportunity for the heirs to authentic liberalism — today's conservatives — as they often thrive when lovers of big government, by whatever name they go by, overreach. After all, the Democrats lost a 40-year monopoly on the Congress the last time Hillary Clinton was really in charge of something. Jonah Goldberg is editor at large of National Review Online. He is a syndicated columnist and a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.
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#1. To: farmfriend (#0)
Jonah can't tell the difference between liberalism, marxism OR capitalism because liberals sit back and let marxists vs. capitalists take over. Marxists vs. capitalists is apparently trying to leverage the stupidity of religion into disneyish lemming-like displays of glowing corporate largesse, but liberals don't care, they aren't that religious. The whole zionism thing, it's just survival of the fittest to them. The incurable hard-core peaceniks can't relate to the holocaust except to drop out of the crowd and head for the hills. The hippies think only toxic murderous cancerlike scum can rule the world, bunch of jesus-hair freaks dancing naked in the woods.
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