The Informationist

Cri de Coeur

I’m a liberal. I’m proud. I’m angry. And I want my good name back.

Liberalism is a bold and noble pursuit: it seeks to liberate, to liberalize, and to spread the ideals of liberal democracy. True liberals yearn for a world in which every person feels secure enough to take calculated risks, is well enough informed to appreciate the consequences of those risks, and is free enough to act upon his or her own choices. In our heyday, we offered depressed American workers a new deal, war-ravaged Western Europeans a recovery plan, repressed Eastern Europeans a declaration of their human rights, and we declared war on poverty. We made freedom work. We made markets work. We made tolerance and inclusiveness work. We expanded our liberal society from white, male landowners to enfranchise the landless and the poor. We recognized the equality of all people, regardless of faith, race, gender, or sexual orientation. We integrated polyglot huddled masses into a coherent civic entity. We brought liberty and stability to long-warring European and Asian tribes. And though each of these expansions cost substantial money, time, effort, and blood, our gains always exceeded our costs by a vast amount.

Yet somewhere along the line, American “liberalism” appears to have gone awry. Whereas liberals once proudly committed America to pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty, they now seem to sing: “Whatever it is, I’m against it.” Vestigial Marxism perhaps, but hardly liberal. We have allowed the world to confuse liberalism with oppositionalism. Many of those who call themselves “liberal” today stand for nothing; they simply oppose. They state nothing in the affirmative, reject all bold initiatives, and articulate no vision of a better world. They are anti-globalization, anti-Semitic, anti-American, anti-Western, anti-libertarian, anti-market, and above all anti-pragmatic. They are more interested in opposing than in achieving.

Oppositionalist philosophy is intoxicating in both its purity and its simplicity: By definition, only the powerful can enact their policy agendas. Since the powerful will act only in their own interests, all policies must benefit those already in power. The implications are clear. When America goes to war, we should have stayed home. When we avoid a crisis zone, humanitarian intervention was in order. When we support one side in a conflict, justice must lie with the other claimant. Every environmental bill passed is a sell-out to industry; every one rejected would have saved the earth. The most corrupt contractor wins every bid. Tax laws favor only the rich; every change makes them worse. Every investment in the developing world entrenches repressive dictators; every investment opportunity foregone mires people in poverty. Oppositionalism is clean, elegant, straightforward, consistent, and guaranteed to avoid responsibility for anything that might go wrong. The philosophy explains everything—and thus nothing at all.

But liberal philosophy is supposed to explain something. It is supposed to point the way from hard work, savvy investing, and individual freedom to a better world. Liberalism is a commitment to a process, not to an endpoint. It is a belief that a government investment in the infrastructure of civil society, combined with the informed, free choices of society’s members, will lead to a better world—despite a lack of certainty about that world’s precise contours. Modern American liberalism must remain true to its roots. It must combine a staunchly libertarian social policy, a commitment to improving our human capital infrastructure, a pragmatic, non-ideological economic policy, and a foreign policy that promotes liberalization and democratization abroad.

American liberal libertarianism is at least as old as the Bill of Rights. The right to make private decisions, explicitly reserved to the citizenry, underpins many of its specifics: our rights to speak, to publish, to pray, to bear arms, and to be free from arbitrary police procedures. Today, we must stand against those who would censor Internet speech, those who would push religion from private hearts into positions of public authority, those who would increase government intrusions, those who would curtail responsible gun ownership, and above all those who insist that we have no Constitutional right to privacy. As liberals, we must support these rights—even when they appear inconvenient, misplaced, or unpopular.

We also believe that government can be a force for good. Past liberal investments in human capital infrastructure have brought us Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, civil rights, and voting rights—guarantees of basic security, opportunity, and participation. “Big Government” infrastructure investments have brought us rails, roads, electricity, and most recently the Internet—tools that ease the movement of goods, ideas, people, and capital. But every increasingly efficient transfer of goods and dollars creates new challenges for people. We must tailor our educational system to meet the needs of the information age. We must retrain and relocate workers whose skills have become obsolete. We must allow workers to change jobs without risking their medical or retirement benefits. In short, we must develop a social infrastructure that makes it as easy to reallocate our human capital as it is to reallocate our financial capital.

We must be willing to pay for this investment in our future, but to always remember that though “tax and invest” may be wise policy, “tax and consume” is an affront to the American people. If we plan our infrastructure investments carefully, they will create broad new opportunities that make us all richer—as they always have in the past. But savvy investing requires open eyes and an open mind. Liberals revived the economy in the 1930s by raising taxes and in the 1960s by cutting them. In the 1990s we proved that robust economic growth is the best of all social programs. The trick is to vary economic policies as economic conditions change. We must rise today to meet two such challenges: financial insecurity and widespread mistrust. Our investment in civic infrastructure should make people feel more secure, but private investment will flow only when they again learn to trust. We must push for wholesale changes in the rules related to corporate taxation, dividends, interest, and capital gains—all to foster greater disclosure of corporate finances, for trust will bloom only in the sunshine. If we couple increased financial security and shareholder trust with our traditional commitment to trade liberalization and to entrepreneurial innovation, the economy should soar again.

In foreign policy, where oppositionalism stands furthest from true liberalism, the corruption of our ideals is clearest. Oppositionalists—often in the name of liberalism—tend to rally behind brutal, corrupt, repressive “indigenous leaders,” like Saddam Hussein, Yasir Arafat, and Fidel Castro, completely ignoring our bedrock belief that legitimate sovereignty rests solely in the consent of the governed. The nadir of liberal foreign policy came when oppositionalists found common cause with conservatives. In the early 1990s, with much of the world thirsting to liberalize, institutional oppositionalists at the UN exalted coalition, while a conservative American administration labored to preserve the status quo. Together, they granted fascist Syria control of the poor, warring Lebanese; they left “liberated” Kuwaitis to the whims of an absolute monarch; they asked innocent Israelis to die without defending themselves; they recognized Iraqis’ right to be brutalized by their megalomaniacal countryman; they refused to condemn Soviet tanks rolling over Lithuanians; and they sat idly by as one-time Yugoslavians rekindled ancient hatreds. Many of them continue to cite this disastrous period with pride, as a success that they would like to replicate. And yet, few of us have raised our liberal voices to protest this wholesale abandonment of liberalism.

Our current President Bush arrived with values even less liberal than his father’s—amply demonstrated by his authoritarian social policies and his rigidly ideological approach to the economy. But the horrible events of 9/11 served as a foreign policy epiphany. Overnight, he discovered that nation building in the support of individual rights serves America’s enlightened, long-term self-interest—though he assiduously avoids such Clintonian language. Much of his National Security Strategy, published almost a year later, reads as if we had written it ourselves decades ago, when human rights remained the subject of “realist” derision. Yet again, few of our liberal voices welcomed this miraculous conversion. Our silence was striking. Few of us trumpeted our support for this document’s wonderful ideals, thanked the President for wresting his party from its dangerous neo-isolationism, or welcomed the newfound bipartisan support for ideas that we have long championed. Those failures left us in a poor position to insist that the administration remain true to its newly articulated values. They gave our objections little credibility when it veered from its commitments in parts of Asia and Latin America, and positioned us poorly as it begins to deviate from its promising start in the Middle East. Worse still, our silence has allowed oppositionalists to assert that liberals oppose the slow, difficult, costly, liberalization and eventual democratization of the Arab world. And all because our distaste for George W. Bush has prevented us from describing his strategy for what it truly is: a bold, liberal agenda that we should be eager to support.

No, we liberals have relinquished our glorious history to an illiberal band and allowed the proud name of liberalism to become electoral poison. Our abandonment forced the world’s finest contemporary liberal leaders—men like Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, and Shimon Peres—to craft new words and new ideologies from scratch. Our liberal movements—the growing New Democrats, the dwindling Rockefeller Republicans, and the international Third Way—run from “liberalism” like a plague, not wanting to be tarnished by association with oppositionalists. And yet, without reference to our own past glories, many of our successes become unsustainable. Had we allowed Al Gore to run as but the latest leader in a long, proud line of liberals, committed to expanding opportunity and to fostering growth, he would likely be President today. But our abdication of our name and our history made that impossible. Instead, our candidate cobbled together a bizarre agglomeration of Clintonism sans Clinton and populist rhetoric. No surprise, then, that his message lacked either coherence or traction.

In the final analysis, America needs a true liberal movement. The world needs a true American liberal movement. The pieces are all there. We need but assemble them to build it. And if we build it, the voters will come.

Liberals of the world, unite! We have nothing to lose but our shame!

I want my good name back. I’m angry. I’m proud. And I’m a liberal.

Posted by Bruce Abramson from on 02/01 at 10:10 AM in American Government, Politics, and Domestic Policies, Foreign Affairs and the World beyond Our Borders