In the first half of the 20th century, both major American parties had a conservative wing and a liberal wing. The conservative Northern Republicans and the conservative Southern Democrats formed the conservative coalition which dominated the Congress in the pre-Civil Rights era. As the Democratic Party under President Johnson began to support civil rights, the formerly Solid South,
meaning solidly Democratic, became solidly Republican, except in
districts with a large number of African-American voters. Starting in
the 20th century, there has also been a sharp division between liberals
who tend to live in denser, more heterogeneous communities and
conservatives who tend to live in less dense, more homogeneous
communities. Liberals as a group are referred to as the left and
conservatives the right. The Democratic Party is considered liberal and
the Republican Party is considered conservative.
Overview
The American modern liberal philosophy strongly endorses public spending on programs such as education, health care, and welfare. Important social issues during the first part of the 21st century include economic inequality (wealth and income), voting rights for minorities, affirmative action, reproductive and other women's rights, support for LGBT rights, and immigration reform.
Modern liberalism took shape during the 20th century, with roots in Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. American liberals oppose conservatives on most issues, but not all. Modern liberalism is historically related to social liberalism and progressivism, though the current relationship between liberal and progressive viewpoints is debated.
John F. Kennedy defined a liberal as follows:
If by a "Liberal" they mean 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, if that is what they mean by a "Liberal", then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal".
In 1941, Franklin D. Roosevelt defined a liberal party as such:
The liberal party believes that, as new conditions and problems arise beyond the power of men and women to meet as individuals, it becomes the duty of Government itself to find new remedies with which to meet them. The liberal party insists that the Government has the definite duty to use all its power and resources to meet new social problems with new social controls—to ensure to the average person the right to his own economic and political life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
Keynesian economic theory has played an important role in the economic philosophy of modern American liberals.
Modern American liberals generally believe that national prosperity
requires government management of the macroeconomy, in order to keep
unemployment low, inflation in check, and growth high. They also value institutions that defend against economic inequality. In The Conscience of a Liberal, Paul Krugman
writes: "I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by
institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in
democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a
liberal, and I'm proud of it". Liberals often point to the widespread prosperity enjoyed under a mixed economy in the years since World War II. They believe liberty exists when access to necessities like health care and economic opportunity are available to all, and they champion the protection of the environment.
Modern American liberalism is typically associated with the Democratic Party as modern American conservatism is typically associated with the Republican Party.
American versus European usage of the term liberalism
Today, the word "liberalism" is used differently in different
countries. One of the greatest contrasts is between the usage in the
United States and usage in Europe. According to Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr.
(writing in 1956), "[l]iberalism in the American usage has little in
common with the word as used in the politics of any European country,
save possibly Britain". In Europe, liberalism usually means what is sometimes called classical liberalism, a commitment to limited government, laissez-faire economics, and unalienable individual rights. This classical liberalism sometimes more closely corresponds to the American definition of libertarianism, although some may distinguish between classical liberalism and libertarianism.
In the United States, the general term "liberalism" almost always
refer to modern liberalism, a more social variant of classical
liberalism. In Europe, this social liberalism is closer to European social democracy although the original form is advocated by some liberal parties in Europe as well, as with the Beveridge Group faction within the Liberal Democrats, the Liberals, the Danish Social Liberal Party, the Democratic Movement, or the Italian Republican Party.
Demographics of American liberals
A 2005 Pew Research Center
study found that liberals were the most educated ideological
demographic and were tied with the conservative sub-group the
"enterprisers" for the most affluent group. Of those who identified as
liberal, 49% were college graduates and 41% had household incomes
exceeding $75,000, compared to 27% and 28% as the national average,
respectively.
Liberalism has become the dominant political ideology in academia, with
44-62% identifying as liberal, depending on the exact wording of the
survey. This compares with 40-46% liberal identification in surveys from
1969 to 1984. The social sciences and humanities
were most liberal, whereas business and engineering departments were
the least liberal, though even in the business departments, liberals
outnumbered conservatives by two to one.
This feeds the common question whether liberals are on average more
educated than their political counterparts, the conservatives. Two Zogby
surveys from 2008 and 2010 indeed affirm that self-identified liberals
tend to go to college more than self-identified conservatives. Polls
have found that young Americans are considerably more liberal than the
general population. As of 2009, 30% of the 18–29 cohort was liberal. In 2011, this had changed to 28%, with moderates picking up the two percent.
A 2015 Gallup poll found that socially liberal views have consistently been on the rise in America since 1999. As of 2015, there is a roughly equal number of socially liberal Americans and socially conservative Americans (31% each), and the socially liberal trend continues to rise. In early 2016, Gallup found that more Americans identified as ideologically conservative (37%) or moderate (35%) rather than liberal (24%), but that liberalism has slowly been gaining ground since 1992, standing at a 24-year high.
21st century issues
In early 21st century political discourse in the United States, liberalism has come to include support for reproductive rights for women, including abortion, affirmative action for minority groups historically discriminated against, multilateralism and support for international institutions, support for individual rights over corporate interests,
support for universal health care for Americans (with a "single payer"
option), support for gay rights and marriage equality, and opposition to
tax cuts for the rich.
History
Historian and advocate of liberalism Arthur Schlesinger Jr. had explored in depth the heritage of Jacksonian democracy in its influence on Franklin D. Roosevelt. Robert V. Remini, the biographer of Andrew Jackson said:
- Jacksonian Democracy, then, stretches the concept of democracy about as far as it can go and still remain workable. [...] As such it has inspired much of the dynamic and dramatic events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in American history—Populism, Progressivism, the New and Fair Deals, and the programs of the New Frontier and Great Society to mention the most obvious.
In 1956, Schlesinger said that liberalism in the United States includes both a "laissez-faire" form and a "government intervention"
form. He holds that liberalism in the United States is aimed toward
achieving "equality of opportunity for all" but it is the means of
achieving this that changes depending on the circumstances. He says that
the "process of redefining liberalism in terms of the social needs of
the 20th century was conducted by Theodore Roosevelt and his New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson and his New Freedom, and Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. Out of these three reform periods there emerged the conception of a social welfare state,
in which the national government had the express obligation to maintain
high levels of employment in the economy, to supervise standards of
life and labor, to regulate the methods of business competition, and to
establish comprehensive patterns of social security."
Some make the distinction between "American classical liberalism" and the "new liberalism".
Progressive Era
The progressive movement emerged in the 1890s and included intellectual reformers typified by sociologist Lester Frank Ward and economist Richard T. Ely.
They transformed Victorian liberalism, retaining its commitment to
civil liberties and individual rights while casting off its advocacy of laissez-faire economics. Ward helped define what would become the modern welfare state after 1933. These often supported the growing working-class labor unions, and sometimes even the socialists to their left. The Social Gospel
movement was a Protestant intellectual movement that helped shape
liberalism especially from the 1890s to the 1920s. It applied Christian
ethics to social problems, especially issues of social justice such as
economic inequality, poverty, alcoholism, crime, racial tensions, slums,
unclean environment, child labor, inadequate labor unions, poor
schools, and the danger of war. Lyndon B. Johnson's
parents were active in the Social Gospel and he had a lifetime
commitment to it, for he sought to transform social problems into moral
problems. This helps explain his longtime commitment to social justice,
as exemplified by the Great Society
and his commitment to racial equality. The Social Gospel explicitly
inspired his foreign-policy approach to a sort of Christian
internationalism and nation building. In philosophy and education, John Dewey was highly influential.
In 1900–1920, liberals called themselves "progressives". They rallied behind Republicans led by Theodore Roosevelt and Robert M. La Follette as well as Democrats led by William Jennings Bryan and Woodrow Wilson to fight corruption, waste and big trusts
(monopolies). They stressed ideals of social justice and the use of
government to solve social and economic problems. Settlement workers
such as Jane Addams were leaders of the liberal tradition.
There was a tension between sympathy with labor unions and the goal to
apply scientific expertise by disinterested experts. When liberals
became anti-Communist in the 1940s, they purged leftists from the
liberal movement.
Political writer Herbert Croly helped to define the new liberalism through The New Republic
magazine, and numerous influential books. Croly presented the case for a
planned economy, increased spending on education, and the creation of a
society based on the "brotherhood of mankind". His highly influential
1909 book The Promise of American Life proposed to raise the general standard of living by means of economic planning. Croly opposed aggressive unionization. In The Techniques of Democracy (1915), he also argued against both dogmatic individualism and dogmatic socialism.
The historian Vernon Louis Parrington in 1928 won the Pulitzer Prize for Main Currents in American Thought.
It was a highly influential intellectual history of America from the
colonial era to the early 20th century. It was well written and
passionate about the value of Jeffersonian democracy and helped identify and honor liberal heroes and their ideas and causes.
Parrington argued in 1930 that, "For upwards of half a century creative
political thinking in America was largely western agrarian, and from
this source came those democratic ideas that were to provide the staple
of a later liberalism". In 1945, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. argued in The Age of Jackson that liberalism also emerged from Jacksonian democracy and the labor radicalism of the Eastern cities, thereby linking it to the urban dimension of Roosevelt's New Deal.
Liberal Republicans
Abraham Lincoln's presidency, with its emphasis on a strong federal government over claims of state's rights,
on widespread entrepreneurship, and on individual freedom against the
property rights of slave owners, laid much of the ground work for future
liberal Republican governance.
The Republican Party's liberal element in the early 20th century was typified by Theodore Roosevelt in the 1907–1912 period (Roosevelt was more conservative at other points). Other liberal Republicans included Senator Robert M. La Follette, Sr., and his sons in Wisconsin (from about 1900 to 1946), and western leaders such as Senator Hiram Johnson in California, Senator George W. Norris in Nebraska, Senator Bronson M. Cutting in New Mexico, Congresswoman Jeannette Rankin in Montana, and Senator William Borah in Idaho, from about 1900 to about 1940. They were generally liberal in domestic policy, supported unions, and supported much of the New Deal. However, they were intensely isolationist in foreign policy.
This element died out by the 1940s. Starting in the 1930s a number of
mostly Northeastern Republicans took modern liberal positions regarding
labor unions, spending and New Deal policies. They included Governor Harold Stassen of Minnesota, Governor Thomas E. Dewey of New York, Governor Earl Warren of California, Senator Clifford P. Case of New Jersey, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., of Massachusetts, Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut (father of George H. W. Bush), Senator Jacob K. Javits of New York, Governor and later Senator Mark Hatfield of Oregon, Senator John Sherman Cooper of Kentucky, Senator George Aiken of Vermont, Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania, and Governor George Romney of Michigan. The most notable of them all was Governor Nelson Rockefeller of New York.
While the media often called them "Rockefeller Republicans",
the liberal Republicans never formed an organized movement or caucus,
and lacked a recognized leader. They promoted economic growth and high
state and federal spending, while accepting high taxes and much liberal
legislation, with the provision they could administer it more
efficiently. They opposed the Democratic big city machines while
welcoming support from labor unions and big business alike. Religion
wasn't high on their agenda but they were strong believers in civil
rights for African Americans and Women's Rights, and most liberals were pro-choice.
They were also strong environmentalists and they supported higher
education. In foreign policy they were internationalists, throwing their
support to the moderate Dwight D. Eisenhower over the conservative leader Robert A. Taft in 1952. They were often called the "Eastern Establishment" by conservatives such as Barry Goldwater.
The Goldwater conservatives fought this establishment, defeated
Rockefeller in the 1964 primaries, and eventually retired most of its
members, although some became Democrats, for example Senator Charles Goodell and Mayor John Lindsay in New York.
As President, Richard Nixon adopted many of the liberals' positions
regarding the environment, welfare, and the arts. After Congressman John B. Anderson
of Illinois bolted the party in 1980 and ran as an independent against
Reagan, the liberal Republicans element faded away. Their old
strongholds in the Northeast are now mostly held by Democrats.
New Deal
President Franklin D. Roosevelt came to office in 1933 amid the economic calamity of the Great Depression, offering the nation a New Deal
intended to alleviate economic desperation and joblessness, provide
greater opportunities, and restore prosperity. His presidency (which
lasted from 1933 to 1945, the longest in US history) was marked by an
increased role for the federal government in addressing the nation's
economic and social problems. Work relief programs provided jobs,
ambitious projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority were created to promote economic development, and a social security
system was established. The Roosevelt Administration was assisted in
its endeavors by progressives in Congress, with the congressional
midterm elections of 1934 returning a more radical House of
Representatives that was prepared to support progressive, "new liberal"
measures. As noted by J. Richard Piper:
- As the "new" liberalism crystallized into its dominant form by 1935, both houses of Congress continued to provide large voting majorities for public policies that were generally dubbed "liberal". Conservatives constituted a distinct congressional minority from 1933 to 1937 and appeared threatened with oblivion for a time.
The Great Depression seemed over in 1936, but a relapse in 1937–1938
produced continued long-term unemployment. Full employment was reached
with the total mobilization of the United States economic, social, and
military resources in World War II. At that point, the main relief
programs such as the WPA and the CCC were ended. Arthur Herman argues
that Roosevelt restored prosperity after 1940 by cooperating closely
with big business,
although in 1939 when asked "Do you think the attitude of the Roosevelt
administration toward business is delaying business recovery?", the
American people responded "yes" by a margin of more than 2-to-1.
The New Deal programs to relieve the Depression are generally
regarded as a mixed success in ending unemployment. At the time, many
New Deal programs, especially the CCC, were popular. Liberals hailed
them for improving the life of the common citizen, and for providing
jobs for the unemployed, legal protection for labor unionists, modern
utilities for rural America, living wages for the working poor, and
price stability for the family farmer. Economic progress for minorities,
however, was hindered by discrimination, an issue often avoided by
Roosevelt's administration.
Relief, recovery and reform
The New Deal consisted of three types of programs designed to produce relief, recovery and reform:
- Relief was the immediate effort to help the one-third of the population that was hardest hit by the depression. Roosevelt expanded Herbert Hoover's Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA) work relief program, and added the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Public Works Administration (PWA), and starting in 1935 the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In 1935, the Social Security Act (SSA) and unemployment insurance programs were added. Separate programs were set up for relief in rural America, such as the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration.
- Recovery was the goal of restoring the economy to pre-Depression levels. It involved greater spending of government funds in an effort to stimulate the economy, including deficit spending, dropping the gold standard, and efforts to increase farm prices and foreign trade by lowering tariffs. Many programs were funded through a Hoover program of loans and loan guarantees, overseen by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC).
- Reform was based on the assumption that the depression was caused by the inherent instability of the market and that government intervention was necessary to rationalize and stabilize the economy, and to balance the interests of farmers, business and labor. Reform measures included the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), regulation of Wall Street by the Securities Exchange Act (SEA), the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) for farm programs, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance for bank deposits enacted through the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933, and the 1935 National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) (also known as the Wagner Act) dealing with labor-management relations. Despite urgings by some New Dealers, there was no major anti-trust program. Roosevelt opposed socialism (in the sense of state ownership of the means of production), and only one major program, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), involved government ownership of the means of production (that is power plants and electrical grids). The conservatives feared the New Deal meant socialism; Roosevelt noted privately in 1934 that the "old line press harps increasingly on state socialism and demands the return to the good old days".
Race
The New Deal
was racially segregated; blacks and whites rarely worked alongside each
other in New Deal programs. The largest relief program by far was the
WPA; it operated segregated units, as did its youth affiliate the NYA. Blacks were hired by the WPA as supervisors in the North; however of 10,000 WPA supervisors in the South, only 11 were black.
In the first few weeks of operation, CCC camps in the North were
integrated. By July 1935, all the camps in the United States were
segregated, and blacks were strictly limited in the supervisory roles
they were assigned. Kinker and Smith argue that "even the most prominent racial liberals in the New Deal did not dare to criticize Jim Crow". Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes
was one of the Roosevelt Administration's most prominent supporters of
blacks and former president of the Chicago chapter of the NAACP. In 1937
when Senator Josiah Bailey, Democrat of North Carolina, accused him of trying to break down segregation laws, Ickes wrote him to deny it:
- I think it is up to the states to work out their social problems if possible, and while I have always been interested in seeing that the Negro has a square deal, I have never dissipated my strength against the particular stone wall of segregation. I believe that wall will crumble when the Negro has brought himself to a high educational and economic status. [...] Moreover, while there are no segregation laws in the North, there is segregation in fact and we might as well recognize this.
The New Deal's record came under attack by New Left
historians in the 1960s for its pusillanimity in not attacking
capitalism more vigorously, nor helping blacks achieve equality. The
critics emphasize the absence of a philosophy of reform to explain the
failure of New Dealers to attack fundamental social problems. They
demonstrate the New Deal's commitment to save capitalism and its refusal
to strip away private property. They detect a remoteness from the
people and indifference to participatory democracy, and call instead for
more emphasis on conflict and exploitation.
Foreign policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt
In
international affairs, Roosevelt's presidency until 1938 reflected the
isolationism that dominated practically all of American politics at the
time. After 1938 he moved toward interventionism as the world hurtled
toward war. Liberals split on foreign policy: many followed Roosevelt, while others like John L. Lewis of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, historian Charles A. Beard and the Kennedy Family opposed him. However, Roosevelt added new conservative supporters, such as Republicans Henry Stimson, who became his Secretary of War in 1940, and Wendell Willkie,
who worked closely with Roosevelt after losing to him in the 1940s
election. Anticipating the post-war period, Roosevelt strongly supported
proposals to create a United Nations
organization as a means of encouraging mutual cooperation to solve
problems on the international stage. His commitment to internationalist
ideals was in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson, except that Roosevelt learned from Wilson's mistakes regarding the League of Nations.
For instance, Roosevelt included Republicans in shaping foreign policy
and insisted the United States have a veto at the United Nations.
Liberalism during the Cold War
American liberalism of the Cold War era was the immediate heir to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and the somewhat more distant heir to the Progressives
of the early 20th century. Rossinow (2008) argues that after 1945 the
left-liberal alliance that operated during the New Deal years split
apart for good over the issue of Communism. Anti-Communist liberals led
by Walter Reuther and Hubert Humphrey expelled the far-left from labor unions and the New Deal coalition, and committed the Democratic Party to a strong Cold War policy typified by NATO
and the containment of Communism. Liberals became committed to a
quantitative goal of economic growth that accepted large near-monopolies
such as General Motors and AT&T while rejecting the structural transformation dreamed of by earlier left-liberals. The far-left had its last hurrah in Henry A. Wallace's
1948 third-party presidential campaign. Wallace supported further New
Deal reforms and opposed the Cold War, but his campaign was taken over
by the far-left and Wallace retired from politics in disgust.
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 Keynesian economics. By way of compromise with political groupings to their right, this often became in practice military Keynesianism.
In some ways, this resembled what in other countries was referred to as social democracy. However, unlike European social democrats, American liberals never widely endorsed nationalization of industry, but favored regulation for public benefit.
In the 1950s and 1960s, both major American political parties included liberal and conservative factions. The Democratic Party
included the Northern and Western liberals on one hand and the
generally conservative Southern whites on the other. Difficult to
classify were the Northern big city Democratic "political machines".
The urban machines had supported New Deal economic policies, but faded
with the coming of prosperity and the assimilation of ethnic groups.
Nearly all collapsed by the 1960s in the face of racial violence in the
cities The Republican Party included the moderate-to-liberal Wall Street and the moderate-to-conservative Main Street.
The more liberal wing, strongest in the Northeast, was far more
supportive of New Deal programs, labor unions, and an internationalist
foreign policy. Support for anti-Communism sometimes came at the expense of civil liberties. For example, ADA co-founder and archetypal Cold War liberal Hubert 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.
In domestic policy during the Fifth Party System
(1932–1966), liberals seldom had full control of government; for that
matter, conservatives never had full control in that period. According
to Jonathan Bernstein, from 1939 through 1957, neither liberals nor
Democrats "controlled" the House of Representatives very often, although
a 1958 landslide gave liberals real majorities in both houses of
Congress for the first time in twenty years. However, Rules Committee
reforms and others were carried out following this landslide, as
liberals saw that House procedures "still prevented them from using that
majority." The Conservative Coalition was also important (if not
dominant) from 1967 through 1974, although from 1985 to 1994 Congress
had a liberal Democratic majority. As also noted by Bernstein, "there
have only been a handful of years (Franklin D. Roosevelt's first term,
1961-1966, Jimmy Carter's presidency, and the first two years of
Clinton's and Barack Obama's presidencies) when there were clear,
working liberal majorities in the House, the Senate and the White
House".
Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal
Until he became president 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 unions and Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) supported Truman's liberal Fair Deal proposals to continue and expand the New Deal. Alonzo Hamby
argues that the Fair Deal reflected the "vital center" approach to
liberalism which rejected totalitarianism, was suspicious of excessive
concentrations of government power, and honored the New Deal as an
effort to achieve a progressive capitalist system. Solidly based upon
the New Deal tradition in its advocacy of wide-ranging social
legislation, the Fair Deal differed enough to claim a separate identity.
The depression did not return after the war and the Fair Deal faced
prosperity and an optimistic future. The Fair Dealers thought in terms
of abundance rather than depression scarcity. Economist Leon Keyserling
argued that the liberal task was to spread the benefits of abundance
throughout society by stimulating economic growth. Agriculture Secretary
Charles F. Brannan
wanted to unleash the benefits of agricultural abundance and to
encourage the development of an urban-rural Democratic coalition.
However, the "Brannan Plan" was defeated his unrealistic confidence in
the possibility uniting urban labor and farm owners who distrusted rural
insurgency. The Conservative Coalition
of Southern Democrats and Northern Republicans in Congress effectively
blocked the Fair Deal and nearly all liberal legislation from the late
1930s to 1960. The Korean War made military spending the nation's priority.
Stanford University historian Barton Bernstein, in the 1960s, repudiated Truman for failing to carry forward the New Deal agenda, and for excessive anti-Communism at home.
1950s
Combating
conservatism was not high on the liberal agenda, for by 1950 the liberal
ideology was so intellectually dominant that the literary critic Lionel Trilling
could note that "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole
intellectual tradition ... there are no conservative or reactionary
ideas in circulation."
Most historians see liberalism in the doldrums in the 1950s, with
the old spark of New Deal dreams overshadowed by the glitzy complacency
and conservatism of the Eisenhower years. Adlai Stevenson
lost in two landslides, and he presented few new liberal proposals
apart from a suggestion for a worldwide ban on nuclear tests. As Barry
Karl noted, Stevenson "has suffered more at hands of the admirers he
failed than he ever did from the enemies who defeated him". Many liberals bemoan the willingness of Democratic leaders in Congress (Lyndon B. Johnson and Sam Rayburn) to collaborate with Eisenhower, and the commitment of the AFL-CIO unions and most liberal spokesmen such as Senators Hubert Humphrey and Paul Douglas to anti-Communism at home and abroad. They decry the weak attention most liberals paid to the nascent civil rights movement.
Liberal coalition
Politically,
starting in the late 1940s there was a powerful labor–liberal coalition
with strong grassroots support, energetic well-funded organizations,
and a cadre of supporters in Congress. On labor side was the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), which merged into the AFL-CIO in 1955, the United Auto Workers (UAW), union lobbyists, and the Committee on Political Education's (COPE), which organized turnout campaigns and publicity at elections. Walter Reuther of the UAW was the leader of liberalism in the labor movement, and his autoworkers generously funded the cause.
The main liberal organizations, out of hundreds, included the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the American Jewish Congress (AJC), the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights (LCCR), the National Committee for an Effective Congress (NCEC), and the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA).
Key liberal leaders in Congress included Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, Paul Douglas of Illinois, Henry Jackson of Washington, Walter Mondale of Minnesota, and Claude Pepper of Florida in the Senate Leaders in the House included Representatives Frank Thompson of New Jersey, Richard Bolling of Missouri, and other members of the Democratic Study Group. Although for years they had largely been frustrated by the Conservative Coalition, the liberal coalition suddenly came to power in 1963 and were ready with proposals that became central to the Great Society.
Intellectuals
Intellectuals and writers were an important component of the coalition at this point.
Many writers—especially historians—became prominent spokesmen for
liberalism and were frequently called upon for public lectures and for
popular essays on political topics by such magazines as The New Republic, Saturday Review, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harpers. Also active in the arena of ideas were literary critics such as Lionel Trilling and Alfred Kazin, economists such as Alvin Hansen, John Kenneth Galbraith, James Tobin, and Paul Samuelson, as well as political scientists such as Robert A. Dahl and Seymour Martin Lipset, and sociologists such as David Riesman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Representative was the historian Henry Steele Commager,
who felt a duty to teach his fellow citizens how liberalism was the
foundation of American values. He believed that an educated public that
understands American history would support liberal programs, especially
internationalism and the New Deal. Commager was representative of a
whole generation of like-minded historians who were widely read by the
general public, including Allan Nevins, Daniel Boorstin, Richard Hofstadter, and C. Vann Woodward. Perhaps the most prominent of all was Arthur Schlesinger Jr.
whose books on Andrew Jackson and on Roosevelt and the Kennedy
brothers—and his many essays and his work with liberal organizations and
in the White House itself under Kennedy—emphasized the ideological
history of American liberalism, especially as made concrete by a long
tradition of powerful liberal presidents.
Commager's biographer Neil Jumonville has argued that this style
of influential public history has been lost in the 21st century because
political correctness has rejected Commager's open marketplace of tough
ideas. Jumonville says history now comprises abstruse deconstruction by
experts, with statistics instead of stories, and is now comprehensible
only to the initiated, while ethnocentrism rules in place of common identity. Other experts have traced the relative decline of intellectuals to their concern race, ethnicity, and gender, and scholarly antiquarianism.
Great Society: 1964–1968
The climax of liberalism came in the mid-1960s with the success of President Lyndon B. Johnson (1963–69) in securing congressional passage of his Great Society
programs, including civil rights, the end of segregation, Medicare,
extension of welfare, federal aid to education at all levels, subsidies
for the arts and humanities, environmental activism, and a series of
programs designed to wipe out poverty. As recent historians have explained:
- Gradually, liberal intellectuals crafted a new vision for achieving economic and social justice. The liberalism of the early 1960s contained no hint of radicalism, little disposition to revive new deal era crusades against concentrated economic power, and no intention to fan class passions or redistribute wealth or restructure existing institutions. Internationally it was strongly anti-Communist. It aimed to defend the free world, to encourage economic growth at home, and to ensure that the resulting plenty was fairly distributed. Their agenda-much influenced by Keynesian economic theory-envisioned massive public expenditure that would speed economic growth, thus providing the public resources to fund larger welfare, housing, health, and educational programs.
Johnson was rewarded with an electoral landslide in 1964 against conservative Barry Goldwater, which broke the decades-long control of Congress by the Conservative coalition. But the Republicans bounced back in 1966, and as the Democratic party splintered five ways, Republicans elected Richard Nixon in 1968. Faced with a generally liberal Democratic Congress during his presidency,
Nixon used his power over executive agencies to obstruct the
authorization of programs that he was opposed to. As noted by one
observer, Nixon "claimed the authority to 'impound,' or withhold, money
Congress appropriated to support them".
Nevertheless, Nixon largely continued the New Deal and Great Society programs he inherited. Conservative reaction would come with the election of Ronald Reagan in 1980.
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" (provision) in the
Democratic party platform. Black activists, most prominently Martin Luther King,
escalated the bearer agitation throughout the South, especially in
Birmingham, Alabama, where brutal police tactics outraged national
television audiences. The civil rights movement climaxed in the "March
on Washington" in August 1963, where King gave his dramatic "I Have a
Dream" speech. The activism put civil rights at the very top of the
liberal political agenda and facilitated passage of the decisive Civil Rights Act of 1964, which permanently ended segregation in the United States, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
which guaranteed blacks the right to vote, with strong enforcement
provisions throughout the South handled by the federal Department of
Justice.
During the mid-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 were latecomers to the movement for equal rights for
women. Generally, they agreed with Eleanor Roosevelt, that women needed
special protections, especially regarding hours of work, night work, and
physically heavy work. The Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) had first been proposed in the 1920s by Alice Paul,
and appealed primarily to middle-class career women. At the Democratic
National Convention in 1960, a proposal to endorse the ERA was rejected
after it met explicit opposition from liberal groups including labor
unions, AFL-CIO, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Americans for
Democratic Action (ADA), American Federation of Teachers, American
Nurses Association, the Women's Division of the Methodist Church, and
the National Councils of Jewish, Catholic, and Negro Women.
Neoconservatives
Some liberals moved to the right and became "neoconservatives" in the 1970s. Many were animated by foreign policy, taking a strong anti-Soviet and pro-Israel position, as typified by Commentary, a Jewish magazine. Many had been supporters of Senator Henry M. Jackson,
who was noted for his strong positions in favor of labor and against
communism. Many Neoconservatives joined the administrations of Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and attacked liberalism vocally in both the popular media and scholarly publications.
Under attack from the New Left
Liberalism came under attack from both the New Left in the early
1960s and the Right in the late 1960s. Kazin (1998) says: "The liberals
who anxiously turned back the assault of the postwar Right were
confronted in the 1960s by a very different adversary: a radical
movement led, in the main, by their own children, the white "New Left". This new element, says Kazin, worked to "topple the corrupted liberal order". Indeed, as Maurice Isserman notes, the New Left "came to use the word 'liberal' as a political epithet".
Slack (2013) argues that the New Left was, more broadly speaking, the
political component of a break with liberalism that took place across
several academic fields: philosophy, psychology, and sociology. In
philosophy, existentialism and Neo-Marxism rejected the instrumentalism of John Dewey; in psychology, Wilhelm Reich, Paul Goodman, Herbert Marcuse, and Norman O. Brown rejected Freud's teaching of repression and sublimation; in sociology, C. Wright Mills rejected the pragmatism of John Dewey for the teachings of Max Weber.
The attack was not confined to the United States, as the New Left
was a worldwide movement with strength in parts of Western Europe as
well as Japan. Massive demonstrations in France, for example, denounced
American imperialism and its "helpers" in Western European governments.
The main activity of the New Left became opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War as conducted by liberal President Lyndon B. Johnson.
The anti-war movement escalated the rhetorical heat, as violence broke
out on both sides. The climax came in sustained protests at the 1968
Democratic National Convention. Liberals fought back, with Zbigniew Brzezinski,
chief foreign policy advisor of the 1968 Humphrey campaign, saying the
New Left "threatened American liberalism" in a manner reminiscent of
McCarthyism.
While the New Left considered Humphrey a war criminal, Nixon attacked
him as the New Left's enabler—a man with "a personal attitude of
indulgence and permissiveness toward the lawless".
Beinart concludes that "with the country divided against itself,
contempt for Hubert Humphrey was the one thing on which left and right
could agree".
After 1968, the New Left lost strength and the more serious
attacks on liberalism came from the Right. Nevertheless, the liberal
ideology lost its attractiveness. Liberal commentator E. J. Dionne
contends that, "If liberal ideology began to crumble intellectually in
the 1960s it did so in part because the New Left represented a highly
articulate and able wrecking crew".
Liberals and the Vietnam War
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 1972 Presidential candidate Senator 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.
In the 1960 presidential campaign,
Kennedy was liberal in domestic policy but conservative on foreign
policy, calling for a more aggressive stance against Communism than his
opponent Richard Nixon.
Opposition to the war first emerged from the New Left and from black leaders such as Martin Luther King. By 1967, however, there was growing opposition from within liberal ranks, led in 1968 by Senators Eugene McCarthy and Robert Kennedy.
After Democratic President Lyndon Johnson announced, in March 1968,
that he would not run for reelection, Kennedy and McCarthy fought each
other for the nomination, with Kennedy besting McCarthy in a series of
Democratic primaries. The assassination of Kennedy removed him from the race and the Vice President, Hubert Humphrey emerged from the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention with the presidential nomination of a deeply divided party. Meanwhile, Alabama governor George Wallace
announced his third-party run, and he pulled in many working-class
whites in the rural South and big-city North, most of whom had been
staunch Democrats. Liberals led by the labor unions focused their
attacks on Wallace while Richard Nixon led a unified Republican Party to victory.
Richard Nixon
The chaos of 1968,
a bitterly divided Democratic Party, and bad blood between the new Left
and the liberals, gave Nixon the presidency. Nixon rhetorically
attacked liberals, but in practice he enacted many liberal policies and
represented the more liberal wing of the GOP. Nixon established the Environmental Protection Agency
by executive order, expanded the national endowments for the arts and
the humanities, began affirmative action policies, opened diplomatic
relations with Communist China, starting the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to reduce ballistic missile
availability, and turned the war over to South Vietnam. He withdrew all
American combat troops by 1972, signed a peace treaty in 1973, and
ended the draft. Regardless of his policies, liberals hated Nixon and rejoiced when the Watergate scandal forced his resignation in 1974.
While the differences between Nixon and the liberals are obvious—the liberal wing of his own party favored politicians such as 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, New Left
leader Noam Chomsky (himself on Nixon's enemies list) has called Nixon "in many respects the last liberal president".
The political dominance of the liberal consensus even into the
Nixon years can best be seen in policies such as the successful
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 though 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 détente 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 0-465-08332-3) argues that Nixon through his Supreme Court appointments effectively ended a decades-long expansion 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.
Labor unions
Labor unions were central components of liberalism, operating through the New Deal Coalition.
The unions gave strong support to the Vietnam War, thereby breaking
with the blacks and with the intellectual and student wings of
liberalism. From time to time dissident groups such as Progressive
Alliance, the Citizen-Labor Energy Coalition, and the National Labor
Committee broke from the dominant AFL–CIO, which they saw as too conservative. In 1995, the liberals managed to take control of the AFL–CIO, under the leadership of John Sweeney of the Service Employees International Union
(SEIU). Union membership in the private sector has fallen from 33% to
7%, with a resulting decline in political weight. In 2005, the SEIU, now
led by Andy Stern broke away from the AFL–CIO to form its own coalition, the Change to Win Federation, to support liberalism, including the Obama agenda, especially health care reform. Stern retired in 2010.
Regardless of the loss of numbers, unions have a long tradition and
deep experience in organizing, and continue at the state and national
level to mobilize forces for a liberal agenda, especially regarding
votes for Democrats, taxes, spending, union representation, and the
threat to American jobs from foreign trade.
Offsetting the decline in the private sector, is a growth of
unionization in the public sector. The membership of unions in the
public sector, such as teachers, police, and city workers, continues to
rise, now covering 42% of local government workers.
The financial crisis that hit American states during the recession of
2008–2011 focused increasing attention on pension systems for government
employees, with conservatives trying to reduce the pensions.
Environmentalism
A new, unexpected political discourse emerged in the 1970s centered on the environment.
The debates did not fall neatly into a left–right dimension, for
everyone proclaimed their support for the environment. Environmentalism
appealed to the well-educated middle class, but aroused fears among
lumbermen, farmers, ranchers, blue collar workers, automobile companies
and oil companies whose economic interests were threatened by new
regulations. Thus, conservatives tended to oppose environmentalism while liberals endorsed new measures to protect the environment. Liberals supported the Wilderness Society and the Sierra Club,
and were sometimes successful in blocking efforts by lumber companies
and oil drillers to expand operations. Environmental legislation limited
the use of DDT, reduced acid rain,
and protected numerous animal and plant species. Within the
environmental movement, there was a small radical element that favored
direct action rather than legislation. By the 21st century, debates over taking major action to reverse global warming
by and dealing with carbon emissions were high on the agenda. The
environmental movement in the United States has given little support to
third parties, unlike Europe, where Green parties play a growing role in politics.
End of the liberal consensus
During the Nixon years and through the 1970s, the liberal consensus began to come apart and the 1980 election of Ronald Reagan as President marked the election of the first non-Keynesian administration and the first application of supply-side economics.
The alliance with white Southern Democrats had been lost in the Civil
Rights era. While the steady enfranchisement of African Americans
expanded the electorate to include many new voters sympathetic to
liberal views, it was not quite enough to make up for the loss of some
Southern Democrats. A tide of conservatism rose 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 United States and many unions had remained in
favor of the Vietnam War even as liberal politicians increasingly turned
against it.
In 1980, the leading liberal was Senator Ted Kennedy, who challenged incumbent President Jimmy Carter
for the Democratic Party presidential nomination because Carter's
failures had disenchanted liberals. Kennedy was decisively defeated, and
in turn Carter was defeated by Ronald Reagan.
Historians often use 1979–1980 to date a philosophical
realignment within the American electorate away from Democratic
liberalism and toward Reagan Era conservatism.
However, some liberals hold a minority view that there was no real
shift and that Kennedy's defeat was merely by historical accident caused
by his poor campaign, international crises and Carter's use of the
incumbency.
Abrams (2006) argues that the eclipse of liberalism was caused by
a grass-roots populist revolt, often with a Fundamentalist and
anti-modern theme, abetted by corporations eager to weaken labor unions
and the regulatory regime of the New Deal. The success of liberalism in
the first place, he argues, came from efforts of a liberal elite
that had entrenched itself in key social, political, and especially
judicial positions. These elites, Abrams contends, imposed their brand
of liberalism from within some of the least democratic and most
insulated institutions, especially the universities, foundations,
independent regulatory agencies, and the Supreme Court. With only a weak
popular base, liberalism was vulnerable to a populist counterrevolution
by the nation's democratic or majoritarian forces.
Bill Clinton administration and the Third Way
The term Third Way refers to various political positions which try to reconcile right-wing and left-wing politics by advocating a varying synthesis of right-wing economic and left-wing social policies.
Third Way was created as a serious re-evaluation of political policies
within various center-left progressive movements in response to the
ramifications of the collapse of international belief in the economic
viability of the state economic interventionist policies that had previously been popularized by Keynesianism; and the corresponding rise of popularity for neoliberalism and the New Right. It supports the pursuit of greater egalitarianism
in society through action to increase the distribution of skills,
capacities, and productive endowments, while rejecting income
redistribution as the means to achieve this. It emphasizes commitment to: balanced budgets, providing equal opportunity combined with an emphasis on personal responsibility, decentralization of government power to the lowest level possible, encouragement of public-private partnerships, improving labor supply, investment in human development, protection of social capital, and protection of the environment.
Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, adherents of the Third Way
In the United States, Third Way adherents embrace fiscal conservatism to a greater extent than traditional social liberals, and advocate some replacement of welfare with workfare, and sometimes have a stronger preference for market solutions to traditional problems (as in pollution markets), while rejecting pure laissez-faire economics and other libertarian positions. The Third Way style of governing was firmly adopted and partly redefined during the administration of President Bill Clinton. With respect to Presidents, the term "Third Way" was introduced by political scientist Stephen Skowronek, who wrote The Politics Presidents Make (1993, 1997; ISBN 0-674-68937-2). Third Way presidents "undermine the opposition by borrowing policies
from it in an effort to seize the middle and with it to achieve
political dominance. Think of Nixon's economic policies, which were a
continuation of Johnson's "Great Society"; Clinton's welfare reform and
support of capital punishment; and Obama's pragmatic centrism, reflected
in his embrace, albeit very recent, of entitlements reform".
After Tony Blair
came to power in the UK, Clinton, Blair and other leading Third Way
adherents organized conferences to promote the Third Way philosophy in
1997 at Chequers in England. The Third Way think tank and the Democratic Leadership Council are adherents of Third Way politics. In 2004, several veteran US Democrats founded a new think tank in Washington, D.C., called Third Way, which bills itself as a "strategy center for progressives".
The Third Way has been heavily criticized by many social democrats, democratic socialists and communists
in particular as a betrayal of left-wing values. The Democratic
Leadership Council shut down in 2011. Commenting on the DLC's waning
influence, Politico
characterized it as "the iconic centrist organization of the Clinton
years" that "had long been fading from its mid-'90s political relevance,
tarred by the left as a symbol of 'triangulation' at a moment when
there's little appetite for intra-party warfare on the center-right".
Specific definitions of third way policies may differ between Europe and America.
Return of protest politics
Republican and staunch conservative George W. Bush won the 2000 United States president election in a tightly contested race that included multiple recounts in the state of Florida. The outcome was tied up in courts for a month until reaching the Supreme Court. In the controversial ruling Bush v. Gore case on December 9, the Supreme Court reversed a Florida Supreme Court
decision ordering a third recount, essentially ending the dispute and
resulting in Bush winning the presidency by electoral vote even though
he lost the popular vote to Democrat and incumbent Vice President Al Gore.
Bush's policies were deeply unpopular amongst American liberals, particularly his launching of the Iraq War, which led to the return of massive protest politics in the form of Opposition to the War in Iraq. Bush's approval rating went below the 50% mark in AP-Ipsos polling in December 2004. Thereafter, his approval ratings and approval of his handling of
domestic and foreign policy issues steadily dropped. Bush received heavy
criticism for his handling of the Iraq War, his response to Hurricane Katrina and to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, NSA warrantless surveillance, the Plame affair, and Guantanamo Bay detention camp controversies. Polls conducted in 2006 showed an average of 37% approval ratings for Bush, which contributed to what Bush called the "thumping" of the Republican Party in the 2006 midterm elections.
When the financial system verged on total collapse during the 2008 financial crisis, Bush pushed through large-scale rescue packages
for banks and auto companies that some conservatives in Congress did
not support and led some conservative commentators to criticize Bush for
enacting legislation they saw as "not conservative" and more
reminiscent of New Deal liberal ideology.
In part due to backlash against the Bush administration, Barack Obama, seen by some as a liberal and progressive, was elected to the presidency in 2008, the first African-American to hold the office. With a clear Democratic majority in both Houses of Congress, Obama managed to pass a $814 billion stimulus spending program, new regulations on investment firms, and a law to expand health insurance coverage. Led by the Tea Party movement, the Republicans won back control of one of the two Houses of Congress in the 2010 elections.
In reaction to ongoing financial crisis that began in 2008,
protest politics continued into the Obama administration, most notably
in the form of Occupy Wall Street. The main issues are social and economic inequality, greed, corruption and the undue influence of corporations on government—particularly from the financial services sector. The OWS slogan, "We are the 99%", addresses the growing income inequality and wealth distribution
in the US between the wealthiest 1% and the rest of the population.
Although some of these were cited by liberal activists and Democrats,
this information did not fully become a center of national attention
until it was used as one of the ideas behind the OWS movement. A survey by Fordham University
Department of Political Science found the protester's political
affiliations to be overwhelmingly left-leaning: 25% Democrat, 2%
Republican, 11% Socialist, 11% Green Party, 12% Other, and 39%
independent. While the survey also found that 80% of the protestors self-identified as slightly to extremely liberal,
Occupy Wall Street and the broader Occupy movement has been variously
classified as a "liberation from liberalism" and even as having
principles that "arise from scholarship on anarchy".
During a news conference on October 6, 2011, President Obama
said: "I think it expresses the frustrations the American people feel,
that we had the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression,
huge collateral damage all throughout the country [...] and yet you're
still seeing some of the same folks who acted irresponsibly trying to
fight efforts to crack down on the abusive practices that got us into
this in the first place".
Some of the protests were seen as an attempt to address the Obama
administration's "double standard" in dealing with Wall Street.
Obama was re-elected president in November 2012, defeating Republican nominee Mitt Romney, and was sworn in for a second term on January 20, 2013. During his second term, Obama has promoted domestic policies related to gun control in response to the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and has called for full equality for LGBT Americans, while his administration has filed briefs which urged the Supreme Court to strike down the Defense of Marriage Act of 1996 and California's Proposition 8 as unconstitutional.
The shooting of Michael Brown and death of Eric Garner led to widespread protests (particularly in Ferguson where Brown was shot) against perceived police militarization more generally and alleged police brutality against African-Americans more specifically.[200][201][202]
Deroy Murdock questioned statistics stated by some BLM activists over
the rate at which black people are killed by police. Murdock wrote that
"the notion that America's cops simply are gunning down innocent black
people is one of today's biggest and deadliest lies".
Criticism
Since the 1970s, there has been a concerted effort from both the left
and right to color the word "liberal" with negative connotations. As
those efforts succeeded more and more, "progressives" and their
opponents took advantage of the negative meaning to great effect. In the
1988 presidential campaign, Republican George H. W. Bush joked about his opponent's refusal to own up to the "L-word label". When Michael Dukakis finally did declare himself a liberal, the Boston Globe headlined the story "Dukakis Uses L-Word".
Conservative activists since the 1970s have employed "liberal" as
an epithet, giving it an ominous or sinister connotation, while
invoking phrases like "free enterprise", "individual rights",
"patriotic", and "the American way" to describe opponents of liberalism. Historian John Lukacs noted in 2004 that then-President George W. Bush,
confident that many Americans regarded "liberal" as a pejorative term,
used it to label his political opponents during campaign speeches, while
his opponents subsequently avoided identifying themselves as liberal. During the presidency of Gerald Ford, First Lady Betty Ford became known for her candid and outspoken liberal views in regard to the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), pro-choice on abortion, Feminism, equal pay, decriminalization of certain drugs, gun control, and civil rights. She was a vocal supporter and leader in the Women's movement and Ford was also noted for bringing breast cancer awareness to national attention following her 1974 mastectomy.
Her outspoken liberal views led to ridicule and opposition from the
conservative wing of the Republican Party and by conservative activists
who referred to Ford as "No Lady" and thought her actions were
unbecoming of a First Lady in an increasingly conservative Republican
Party.
Ronald Reagan's
ridicule of liberalism is credited with transforming "liberal" into a
derogatory epithet that any politician seeking national office would
avoid. His speechwriters repeatedly contrasted "liberals" and "real Americans". For example, Reagan's then-Secretary of the Interior James G. Watt
said: "I never use the words Republicans and Democrats. It's liberals
and Americans". Reagan warned the United States of modern secularists
who condoned abortion, excused teenage sexuality, opposed school prayer,
and attenuated traditional American values. His conviction that there
existed a single proper personal behavior, religious worldview, economic
system and proper attitude toward nations and peoples not supporting
American interests worldwide is credited by comparative literature
scholar Betty Jean Craige with polarizing the United States. Reagan
persuaded a large portion of the public to dismiss any sincere analyses
of his administration's policies as politically motivated criticisms put
forth by what he labeled a "liberal" media.
George H. W. Bush employed the word "liberal" as a derogatory epithet during his 1988 presidential campaign.
Bush described himself as a patriot, and described his liberal
opponents as unpatriotic. He referred to liberalism as "the L-word" and
sought to demonize opposing presidential candidate Michael Dukakis
by labeling Dukakis "the liberal governor" and by pigeonholing him as
part of what Bush called "the L-crowd". Bush recognized that motivating
voters to fear Dukakis as a risky, non-mainstream candidate generated
political support for his own campaign. Bush's campaign also used issues
of prayer to arouse suspicions that Dukakis was less devout in his
religious convictions. Bush's running mate, vice presidential candidate Dan Quayle, said to Christians at the 1988 Republican National Convention: "It's always good to be with people who are real Americans".
Bill Clinton avoided association with "liberal" as a political label
during his 1992 presidential campaign against George H. W. Bush by
moving closer to the political center.
Reactions to shift
Liberal
Republicans have voiced disappointment over conservative attacks on
liberalism. One example is former governor of Minnesota and founder of
the Liberal Republican Club Elmer L. Andersen, who commented that it's "unfortunate today that 'liberal' is used as a derogatory term". After the 1980s, fewer activists and politicians were willing to characterize themselves as liberals. Historian Kevin Boyle
explains: "There was a time when liberalism was, in Arthur
Schlesinger's words 'a fighting faith'. [...] Over the last three
decades, though, liberalism has become an object of ridicule, condemned
for its misplaced idealism, vilified for its tendency to equivocate and
compromise, and mocked for its embrace of political correctness. Now
even the most ardent reformers run from the label, fearing the damage it
will inflict". Republican political consultant Arthur J. Finkelstein
was recognized by Democratic political consultants for having employed a
formula of branding someone as a liberal and engaging in name-calling
by using the word "liberal" in negative television commercials as
frequently as possible, such as in a 1996 ad against Representative Jack Reed:
"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".
Democratic candidates and political liberals have hidden from the
word "liberal", in some cases identifying instead with terms such as
"progressive" or "moderate". George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney accused their opponents of liberal elitism, softness, and pro-terrorism. Conservative political commentators such as Rush Limbaugh
consistently used "liberal" as a pejorative label. When liberals
shifted to the word "progressive" to describe their beliefs,
conservative radio host Glenn Beck used "progressive" as an abusive label.
Historian Godfrey Hodgson notes the following: "The word liberal itself
has fallen into disrepute. Nothing is too bad for conservative bloggers
and columnists—let alone radio hosts—to say about liberals. Democrats
themselves run a mile from the 'L word' for fear of being seen as
dangerously outside the mainstream. Conservative politicians and
publicists, by dint of associating liberals with all manner of absurdity
so that many sensible people hesitated to risk being tagged with the
label of liberalism, succeeded in persuading the country that it was
more conservative than it actually was".
Labels vs. beliefs
Liberal historian Eric Alterman
notes that barely 20% of Americans are willing to accept "liberal" as a
political label, but that supermajorities of Americans actually favor
"liberal" positions time and again. Alterman points out that resistance
to the label "liberal" is not surprising due to billions of dollars
worth of investment poured into the denigration of the term. A 2004 poll
conducted by the National Election Study found only 35% of respondents
questioned identifying as liberal compared to 55% identifying as
conservative; a 2004 Pew poll found 19% of respondents identifying as
liberal, and 39% identifying as conservative, with the balance
identifying as moderate. A 2006 poll found that 19% identified as
liberal, and 36% conservative. In 2005, self-identifying moderates
polled by Louis Harris & Associates
were found to share essentially the same political beliefs as
self-identifying liberals, but rejected the world "liberal" because of
the vilification heaped on the word itself by conservatives. Alterman
acknowledges political scientist Drew Westen's
observation that for most Americans, the word "liberal" now carries
meanings such as "elite", "tax and spend", and "out of touch".
Philosophy
Free speech
American liberals describe themselves as open to change and receptive to new ideas. For example, liberals typically accept scientific ideas that some conservatives reject, such as evolution and global warming.
Liberals tend to oppose the Supreme Court's Citizens United
ruling in 2010 that a corporation's first amendment right to free
speech encompasses freedom to make unlimited independent expenditures
for any political party, politician or lobbyist as they see fit. President Obama called it "a major victory for big oil,
Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful
interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out
the voices of everyday Americans".
Opposition to state socialism
In general, liberalism opposes socialism when socialism is understood to mean an alternative to capitalism
based on state ownership of the means of production. American liberals
doubt that bases for political opposition and freedom can survive when
all power is vested in the state, as it was under state-socialist regimes.
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 ownership, then there is no need for a rigid and oppressive bureaucracy. Some liberal public intellectuals have, since the 1950s, moved further toward the general position that free markets, when appropriately regulated, can provide better solutions than top-down economic planning. Economist Paul Krugman
argued that in hitherto-state-dominated functions such as nation-scale
energy distribution and telecommunications, marketizations can improve
efficiency dramatically. He also defended a monetary policy—inflation targeting—saying
that it "most nearly approaches the usual goal of modern stabilization
policy, which is to provide adequate demand in a clean, unobtrusive way
that does not distort the allocation of resources". These distortions
are of a kind that war-time and post-war Keynesian economists had
accepted as an inevitable byproduct of fiscal policies that selectively
reduced certain consumer taxes and directed spending toward
government-managed stimulus projects—even where these economists
theorized at a contentious distance from some of Keynes's own, more
hands-off, positions, which tended to emphasize stimulating of business
investment. Thomas Friedman is a liberal journalist who generally defends free trade as more likely to improve the lot of both rich and poor countries.
Role of the state
There is a fundamental split among liberals as to the role of the state. Historian H. W. Brands notes "the growth of the state is, by perhaps the most common definition, the essence of modern American liberalism". According to Paul Starr,
"[l]iberal constitutions impose constraints on the power of any single
public official or branch of government as well as the state as a
whole".
Morality
According to cognitive linguist George Lakoff,
liberal philosophy is based on five basic categories of morality. The
first, the promotion of fairness, is generally described as an emphasis
on empathy as a desirable trait. With this social contract based on the Golden Rule
comes the rationale for many liberal positions. The second category is
assistance to those who cannot assist themselves. A nurturing,
philanthropic spirit is one that is considered good in liberal
philosophy. This leads to the third category, the desire to protect
those who cannot defend themselves. The fourth category is the
importance of fulfilling one's life; allowing a person to experience all
that they can. The fifth and final category is the importance of caring
for oneself, since only thus can one act to help others.
Historiography
Liberalism
increasingly shaped American intellectual life in the 1930s and 1940s,
thanks in large part to two major two-volume studies that were widely
read by academics, advanced students, intellectuals and the general
public: Charles A. Beard and Mary Beard, The Rise of American civilization (2 vol. 1927), and Vernon L. Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought
(2 vol 1927). The Beards exposed the material forces that shaped
American history, while Parrington, focused on the material forces that
shaped American literature. Virtually all political history, according
to the Beards, involved the bitter conflict between the agrarians,
farmers and workers, led by the Jeffersonians, and the capitalists, led
by the Hamiltonians. The Civil War marked a great triumph of the
capitalists, and comprised the "Second American Revolution." Younger
historians welcome the realistic approach that emphasized hard-core
economic interest as a powerful force, and downplayed the role of ideas. Parrington spoke to the crises at hand. According to historian Ralph Gabriel:
Main Currents attempted to trace the history of liberalism in the American scene for citizens who were caught in a desperate predicament. It was an age in which American liberalism set the United States, through the New Deal, on a Democratic middle-of-the-road course between the contemporary extremisms of Europe, that of Communism on one hand, and of Fascism on the other. [...] The style of Main Currents was powered by Parrington's dedication to the cause of humane liberalism, by his ultimate humanistic, democratic faith. He saw the democratic dreams of the romantic first half of the 19th century as the climax of an epic story toward which early Americans moved and from which later Americans fell away.
Liberal readers immediately realized where they stood in the battle between Jeffersonian democracy and Hamiltonian privilege.
Neither the Beards nor Parrington paid any attention to slavery, race
relations, or minorities. The Beards, for example, "dismissed the
agitations of the abolitionists as a small direct consequence because of
their lack of appeal to the public".
Princeton historian Eric F. Goldman
helped define American liberalism for postwar generations of university
students. The first edition of his most influential work appeared in
1952 with the publication of Rendezvous with Destiny: A History of Modern American Reform,
covering reform efforts from the Grant years to the 1950s. For decades,
it was a staple of the undergraduate curriculum in history, highly
regarded for its style and its exposition of modern American liberalism.
According to Priscilla Roberts:
Lively, well-written, and highly readable, it provided an overview of eight decades of reformers, complete with arresting vignettes of numerous individuals, and stressed the continuities among successful American reform movements. Writing at the height of the Cold War, he also argued that the fundamental liberal tradition of the United States was moderate, centrist, and incrementalist, and decidedly non-socialist and non-totalitarian. While broadly sympathetic to the cause of American reform, Goldman was far from uncritical toward his subjects, faulting progressives of World War I for their lukewarm reception of the League of Nations, American reformers of the 1920s for their emphasis on freedom of lifestyles rather than economic reform, and those of the 1930s for overly tolerant attitude toward Soviet Russia. His views of past American reformers encapsulated the conventional, liberal, centrist orthodoxy of the early 1950s, from its support for anti-communism and international activism abroad and New Deal-style big government at home, to its condemnation of McCarthyism.
For the general public, Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. was the most widely read historian, social critic, and public intellectual.
Schlesinger's work explored the history of Jacksonian era and
especially 20th-century American liberalism. His major books focused on
leaders such as Andrew Jackson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy,
and Robert F. Kennedy. He was a White House aide to Kennedy and his A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize. In 1968, Schlesinger wrote speeches for Robert F. Kennedy in 1968 and the biography, Robert Kennedy and His Times. He later popularized the term "imperial presidency"
warning against excessive power in the White House as typified by
Richard Nixon. Late in his career he came to oppose multiculturalism.
