Liberalism in the United States

American liberalism (also called modern liberalism) is a political current that claims descent from classical liberalism in terms of devotion to individual liberty, but rejects the laissez faire economics of classical liberalism in favor of institutions that promote social and economic equity. It is generally seen as beginning in the first decades of the 20th century, and achieving a political hegemony in the New Deal years. Its influence began to decline in the 1970s.

American liberalism arose in the early 20th century as an alternative to what came to be known as "conservatism:" the laissez-faire economic philosophy, realist political philosophy, and comparatively rigid social values of the Republican Party. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, a self-proclaimed liberal, offered the nation a New Deal that, with the support of the large majority of Americans, would alleviate economic want, provide greater opportunities, and pull the United States out of the Great Depression. In anticipation of the end of World War II, Roosevelt supported the United Nations as a means of encouraging mutual cooperation (rather than threats and the use of force) to solve problems on the international stage. Roosevelt made many symbolic gestures in the direction of racial equality.

The U.S. brand of liberalism emphasizes mutual collaboration and consensus-building to solve political problems. A liberal in the United States is likely to favor institutions and political procedures that protect and empower the weak against aggression by the strong and guarantee individual freedom from restrictive social norms. Liberals encourage progressive taxation, minimum wages laws, anti-discrimination laws, and social programs.

Early American liberalism

Thomas Paine is considered by many to be one of the earliest proponents of American liberalism. Paine advocated a liberal world view, considered radical in his day. He dismissed monarchy, and viewed all government as, at best, a necessary evil. He opposed slavery and was amongst the earliest proponents of social security, universal free public education, a guaranteed minimum income, and many other ideas now common practice in most democracies.

History of American liberalism after Franklin Roosevelt

American liberalism during the Cold War

U.S. liberalism of the Cold War era was the immediate heir to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and the slightly more distant heir to the Progressives of the early 20th century.

The essential tenets of Cold War liberalism can be found in Roosevelt's Four Freedoms (1941): of these, freedom of speech and of religion were classic liberal freedoms, as was "freedom from fear" (freedom from tyrannical government), but "freedom from want" was another matter. Roosevelt proposed a notion of freedom that went beyond government non-interference in private lives. "Freedom from want" could justify positive government action to meet economic needs, a concept more associated with socialism and social democracy than with prior versions of liberalism.

Defining itself against both Communism and conservatism, Cold War liberalism resembled earlier "liberalisms" in its views on many social issues, but its economic views were not those of free-market liberalism; instead, they constituted a mild form of social democracy.

Most prominent and constant among the positions of Cold War liberalism were:

Support for a domestic economy built on a balance of power between labor (in the form of organized unions) and management (with a tendency to be more interested in large corporations than in small business).
A foreign policy focused on containing the Soviet Union and its allies.
The continuation and expansion of New Deal social welfare programs (in the broad sense of welfare, including programs such as Social Security).
An embrace of Keynesianism economics. By way of compromise with political groupings to their right, this often became, in practice military Keynesianism.

This resembled what in other countries was sometimes referred to as social democracy. However, unlike European social democrats, U.S. liberals never widely endorsed nationalization of industry.

In the 1950s and '60s, both major U.S. political parties included liberal and conservative factions. The Democratic Party had two wings: on the one hand, Northern and Western liberals, on the other generally conservative Southern whites. Difficult to classify were the northern urban Democratic "political machines". The urban machines had supported New Deal economic policies, but would slowly come apart over racial issues. Some historians have divided the Republican Party into liberal Wall Street and conservative Main Street factions; others have noted that the GOP's conservatives came from landlocked states (Robert Taft of Ohio and Barry Goldwater of Arizona) and the liberals tended to come from California (Earl Warren and Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey), New York (see Nelson Rockefeller), and other coastal states.

In the late 1940s, liberals generally did not see Harry S. Truman as one of their own, viewing him as a Democratic Party hack. However, liberal politicians and liberal organizations such as the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) sided with Truman in opposing Communism both at home and abroad, sometimes at the sacrifice of civil liberties. For example, ADA co-founder and archetypal Cold War liberal Hubert H. Humphrey unsuccessfully sponsored (in 1950) a Senate bill to establish detention centers where those declared subversive by the President could be held without trial.

Nonetheless, liberals opposed McCarthyism and were central to McCarthy's downfall.

The liberal consensus

By 1950, the liberal ideology was so intellectually dominant that the literary critic Lionel Trilling could write that "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition... there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in circulation, [merely] irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." [Lapham 2004]

For almost two decades, Cold War liberalism remained the dominant paradigm in U.S. politics, peaking with the landslide victory of Lyndon B. Johnson over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Lyndon Johnson had been a New Deal Democrat in the 1930s and by the 1950s had decided that the Democratic Party had to break from its segregationist past and endorse racial liberalism as well as economic liberalism. In the face of the disastrous defeat of Goldwater, the Republicans accepted more than a few of Johnson's ideas as their own, so to a very real extent, the policies of President Johnson became the policies of the Republican administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.

Liberals and Civil Rights

Cold War liberalism emerged at a time when most African Americans, especially in the South, were politically and economically disenfranchised. Beginning with To Secure These Rights, an official report issued by the Truman White House in 1947, self-proclaimed liberals increasingly embraced the civil rights movement. In 1948, President Truman desegregated the armed forces and the Democrats inserted a strong civil rights "plank" (paragraph) in the party platform. Legislatively, the civil rights movement would culminate in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

During the 1960s, relations between white liberals and the civil rights movement became increasingly strained; civil rights leaders accused liberal politicians of temporizing and procrastinating. Although President Kennedy sent federal troops to compel the University of Mississippi to admit African American James Meredith in 1962, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. toned down the March on Washington (1963) at Kennedy's behest, the failure to seat the delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention indicated a growing rift. President Johnson could not understand why the rather impressive civil rights laws passed under his leadership had failed to immunize Northern and Western cities from rioting. At the same time, the civil rights movement itself was becoming fractured. By 1966, a Black Power movement had emerged; Black Power advocates accused white liberals of trying to control the civil rights agenda. Proponents of Black Power wanted African-Americans to follow an "ethnic model" for obtaining power, not unlike that of Democratic political machines in large cities. This put them on a collision course with urban machine politicians. And, on its most extreme edges, the Black Power movement contained racial separatists who wanted to give up on integration altogether--a program that could not be endorsed by American liberals of any race. The mere existence of such individuals (who always got more media attention than their actual numbers might have warranted) contributed to "white backlash" against liberals and civil rights activists.

Liberals and Vietnam

While the civil rights movement isolated liberals from their erstwhile allies, the Vietnam War threw a wedge into the liberal ranks, dividing pro-war "hawks" such as Senator Henry M. Jackson from "doves" such as Senator (and 1972 presidential candidate) George McGovern. As the war became the leading political issue of the day, agreement on domestic matters was not enough to hold the liberal consensus together.

To begin with, Vietnam was a "liberal war", part of the strategy of containment of Soviet Communism. In the 1960 presidential campaign, the liberal Kennedy was more hawkish on Southeast Asia than the more conservative Nixon. Although it can be argued that the war expanded only under the less liberal Johnson, there was enormous continuity of their cabinets.

As opposition to the war grew, a large portion of that opposition came from within liberal ranks. In 1968, the Dump Johnson movement forced Democratic President Johnson out of the race for his own party's nomination for the presidency. Assassination removed Robert Kennedy from contention and Vice President Hubert Humphrey emerged from the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention with the presidential nomination of a deeply divided party. The party's right wing had seceded to run Alabama governor George Wallace, and some on the left chose to sit out the election rather than vote for a man so closely associated with the Johnson administration (and with Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley). The result was a narrow victory for Republican Richard Nixon, a man who, although a California native, was largely regarded as from the old Northeast Republican Establishment, and quite liberal in many areas himself. Nixon enacted many liberal policies, including the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, establishing the Drug Enforcement Agency, normalizing relations with Communist China, and starting the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to reduce ballistic missile availability.

Nixon and the liberal consensus

While the differences between Nixon and the liberals are obvious – the liberal wing of his own party favored politicians like Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton and Nixon overtly placed an emphasis on "law and order" over civil liberties, and Nixon's Enemies List was composed largely of liberals – in some ways the continuity of many of Nixon's policies with those of the Kennedy-Johnson years is more remarkable than the differences. Pointing at this continuity, Noam Chomsky has called Nixon, "in many respects the last liberal president." [1]

Although liberals turned increasingly against the Vietnam War, to the point of running the very dovish George McGovern for President in 1972, the war had, as noted above, been of largely liberal origin. Similarly, while many liberals condemned actions such as the Nixon administrations support for the 1973 Chilean coup, it was not entirely dissimilar to the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 or the marine landing in the Dominican Republic in 1965.

The political dominance of the liberal consensus even into the Nixon years can best be seen in policies such as the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency or his (failed) proposal to replace the welfare system with a guaranteed annual income by way of a negative income tax. Affirmative action in its most quota-oriented form was a Nixon administration policy. Even the Nixon "War on Drugs" allocated two-thirds of its funds for treatment, a far higher ratio than was to be the case under any subsequent President, Republican or Democrat. Additionally, Nixon's normalization of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and his policy of detente with the Soviet Union were probably more popular with liberals than with his conservative base.

An opposing view, offered by Cass R. Sunstein, in The Second Bill of Rights (Basic Books, 2004, ISBN 0465083323) argues that Nixon, through his Supreme Court appointments, effectively ended a decades-long expansion under U.S. law of economic rights along the lines of those put forward in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly.

End of the liberal consensus

During the Nixon years (and through the 1970s), the liberal consensus was coming apart. The alliance with white Southern Democrats had been lost in the Civil Rights era. While the steady enfranchisement of African Americans would expand the electorate to include many new voters sympathetic to liberal views, it would not be quite enough to make up for this. A tide of conservatism was rising in response to perceived failures of liberal policies. Organized labor, long a bulwark of the liberal consensus, was past the peak of its power in the U.S. and many unions had remained in favor of the Vietnam War even as liberal politicians increasingly turned against it. Within the Democratic party leadership, there was a turn to the right after the disastrous defeat of arch-liberal George McGovern in 1972.

Meanwhile, in the Republican ranks, a wing of the party was emerging well to Nixon's right. The Goldwater Republicans became the Reagan Republicans. In 1980, conservative Republican Ronald Reagan captured his party's nomination for the presidency. His administration would establish a conservative hegemony every bit as durable as the earlier liberal one. By the end of the 20th century, "liberal Republican" would seem almost oxymoronic, and centrist groups such as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) would contend on an equal footing with liberals for control of the Democratic Party.

Philosophy of American Liberalism

Liberals tend to see themselves in the context of their fellow man and woman and assume their rights are no greater and their privileges no greater than anyone else's, regardless of wealth or position [2]. Key liberal values are empathy, compassion, trust, and cooperation [3]. Liberalism is an empirical philosophy that attempts to make changes that will improve life even if those changes run contrary to previously accepted positions. Most tenets are not held with unquestioning conviction. Economic liberalism differs from competing political philosophies not only through different values or preferences but through different epistemologies [4]. Liberalism is open to change and receptive to empiricism [5]. Liberals generally seek a balanced and flexible "mixed economy" occupying that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability is generally denied by both capitalists and socialists [6]. In general liberalism is antisocialist, when socialism means state ownership of the basic means of production and distribution, because American liberals doubt that bases for political opposition and freedom can survive when all power is vested in the state. American liberals also doubt the feasibility of administering a socialist system. In line with the general pragmatic, empirical basis of liberalism, American liberal philosophy embraces the idea that if substantial abundance and equality of opportunity can be achieved through a system of mixed enterprise, then there is no need for a rigid and oppressive bureaucracy [7]. Many of these ideas were initially promulgated by liberal thinkers John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, and John Maynard Keynes and form the basis for the American liberal philosophy. The political godfather of American liberalism, Franklin Delano Roosevelt never publicly embraced Keynes's theories but there were many similarities between the works of the two men [8]. The ideas of American liberal philosophers, such as Keynes, and American liberal politicians, such as Roosevelt, laid the foundation for American liberalism that remains a viable political philosophy embraced by a significant percentage of Americans.

Some positions associated with American liberalism

In the early 21st century, the term "liberalism" in the United States has been applied to a broad spectrum of viewpoints. As the Democratic Party, generally seen as the standard-bearer of liberalism, adopted the more centrist outlook of the DLC, the term "liberal" (applied to the party as a whole) became associated even with more centrist candidates and issues who, for example, support the death penalty or take pro-business positions. For this reason, and because many on the right have so heavily used "liberal" as a pejorative, some Americans on the left of the political spectrum have moved to progressivism.

The following views are associated with American liberalism, though many people who consider themselves liberal would accept some of these views and reject others:

Support for government social programs such as welfare, medical care, unemployment benefits, and retirement programs.
Support for increased funding for public education.
Support for trade unions, teachers' unions, and government protections for organized labor.
Regulation of business - OSHA, against child labor, monopolistic practices, etc.
Support for civil rights:
- Support laws against discrimination based on gender, race, age, religion, sexual orientation, or disability.
- Support laws guaranteeing rights of women and minorities, particularly racial and religious minorities, the disabled, and gays.
- Support for such programs as affirmative action and transitional multi-lingual educational programs for children whose first language is not English.
- Support broad voting rights.
Support for reproductive rights
Support for strong environmental regulations.
Support for public transportation.
Support for minimum wage requirements.
Support for government funding to alternative energy research.
Opposition to the death penalty.
Support for animal rights – as an issue of ethical human behavior.
Support for gun control.
Support for a progressive tax system.

Contemporary uses of "liberal"

Political opponents of liberalism use the term "liberal" pejoratively. Some conservatives commonly use terms like "bleeding-heart liberal", "knee-jerk liberal", and "tax-and-spend liberal". In one of the 2004 presidential debates, President George W. Bush accused his opponent, Senator John Kerry, of being "the most liberal in the United States Senate" [9]. The Conservative Book Service sells a talking doll of author Ann Coulter that says, "Liberals hate America." Republican talk radio host Rush Limbaugh often perpetuates anti-liberal slogans. (See also Politicized issues, Propaganda). Republican political consultant Arthur J. Finkelstein repeated the word "liberal" in negative television commercials as frequently as possible, such as in this mid-1990s example: "That's liberal. That's Jack Reed. That's wrong. Call liberal Jack Reed and tell him his record on welfare is just too liberal for you." [10]

Due to the recent negative connotation of the word, some left-leaning politicians have tended to shy away from the "liberal" label, preferring "progressive" or "moderate" or no label at all. [11] [12] Historian John Lukacs began his 2004 article "The Triumph and Collapse of Liberalism" by framing it around the point: "Consider what happened to the word 'liberal' in the United States. It has become a Bad Word for millions of Americans." [13] [14] Sharon Jarvis' 2005 book The Talk of the Party: Political Labels, Symbolic Capital, and American Life also sought to answer the question "How did 'liberal' become a dirty word in American politics?" [15] Liberal advocates wrote pieces under titles like "When Did 'Liberal' Become a Dirty Word?" [16] [17] [18]

The use of the word as a defining label by the political opponents of liberals is not entirely recent. In the opening statements of his speech of acceptance to the presidential nomination by the New York Liberal Party, on September 14, 1960, John F. Kennedy raised the subject of its use by his "opponents." Kennedy rejected the definition as "someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar." [19] Instead Kennedy defined a "liberal" as "someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the people — their health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil liberties — someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad [20]."

Some anti-liberal slogans attack all American liberals, others attack classical liberals, social liberals, or even libertarians. In the case of "bleeding-heart liberal", there are liberals who embrace the slogan, saying that it is not a bad thing to use government to reduce the suffering of fellow human beings; indeed, some have claimed that Jesus was a "bleeding-heart" liberal [21].

American Liberal thinkers

In the Contributions to liberal theory the following American liberal thinkers are included:

John Dewey (1859–1952)
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945)
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908– )
John Rawls (1921–2002)
Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917– )
Ronald Dworkin (1931– )
Richard Rorty (1931– )
Robert Reich (1946– )

External links

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References

Lewis H. Lapham, "Tentacles of Rage" in Harper's, September 2004, p. 31-41.