January 26th, 2009
WHY WE’RE LIBERALS
A Political Handbook for Post-Bush America
By Eric Alterman
402 pages. The Viking Press. 2008.
The Arrogance of the Intellectual Left.
While I was browsing through the Social Sciences section of the small airport bookstore the other day, something caught my eye. It wasn’t a new polemic by Ann Coulter. Nor was it a judicious Dinesh D’Souza tome. It wasn’t the instant classic Liberal Fascism, I already owned that one. No, what grabbed my imagination was a book by the leftist intellectual Eric Alterman, titled Why We’re Liberals. After some internal dialogue with my inner demons, I agreed with them that I would buy the book on the condition that I buy a conservative title as well—a sort of a self-imposed tax on bad behavior. That and I like seeing the look on certain stranger’s faces when they spot the smiling face of Ronald Reagan on my prominently displayed book cover. It’s more effective than wearing a t-shirt that says “eff you.”
Anyway, the conservative book isn’t anything I hadn’t read before, but Alterman’s book has proven to be a valuable addition to my collection. It’s an intelligent, well-written insight into the minds of liberals. The title effectively conveys the book’s content, a broad description of liberal values. This isn’t as common on the left as one might think. Because conservatives tend to be self-conscious about their place on the political spectrum, right-wing accounts of American conservatism’s short history come a dime a dozen. In contrast, the left tends to deny their intellectual heritage, so finding a good book written by a liberal who has actually acknowledged the simple nature of his politics excited me.
Another plus is that it was written by Eric Alterman, a formidable thinker. It would be easy to refute or even dismiss a long attempt to defend liberalism if it were written by one of the left’s worst elements. It’s easy to sit back and laugh at the arguments posited by attention-starved perpetrators of fake hate crimes, the underdeveloped personalities who insist that 9-11 was an inside job, and eagerly fascistic animal rights activists who commit everything from vandalism to arson to get their point across. But just because these types of people can be found on the left doesn’t mean they represent it, much less the best liberalism has to offer. Conversely, Professor Alterman is smart, articulate, and most importantly not prone to emotionalism or counterintuitive conspiracy theories. In short, he’s an excellent representative for the left. Because he’s “normal,” the flaws in his argument will more likely reflect flaws in liberal philosophy, as opposed to his character.
Whether or not it ever catches on with the public, Alterman’s 2008 book is a definitive work. It’s an intelligent exposition of the modern liberal mind, warts and all. As much as any all-encompassing right-wing handbook, Why We’re Liberals directly communicates the logic behind the left’s ideals. Rarely are political writers as forthcoming about their motives without descending into boorish polemics. So without any further adieu, let’s see those gears turning.
Part I: The Definition of Liberalism.
Before discussing a book whose central theme is liberalism, one must understand what the word actually means. But for all that is holy, don’t ask a liberal that. If he doesn’t bedevil you with a laborious speech about labels, he’ll lazily pronounce that liberalism is too philosophically broad to be identified. Others will be even worse, self-righteously proclaiming that liberalism means caring about minorities and poor people. Often they suggest substituting the word “liberal” with “progressive.” This is fine, but it ignores the fact that “progressive” has more stridently left-wing connotations than “liberal.” Joseph Stalin was definitively not a liberal, but he just as certainly was progressive. In general, liberals don’t seem to like conceding that they’re part of a recognizable group. Like someone running from a police officer for no apparent reason, they curiously evade the word that describes them as if it were a pejorative.
In Why We’re Liberals, Alterman spends a good part of the introduction giving a bare-bones description of the roots of liberalism, while eventually defining it as a pragmatic quest for justice, a definition I imagine most left-leaning intellectuals wouldn’t take issue with. But a desire to achieve justice through reason isn’t a philosophy as much as it’s a vague mission statement. Neither pragmatism nor a sense of justice is exclusively liberal.
To put it another way, I could describe conservatism as a quest to preserve life, liberty, and property, but that’s not a school of thought, that’s a wish that can be interpreted countless ways. To greatly simplify the right’s core philosophy, conservatism is a blend of libertarian individualism tempered by traditional morality. It’s not a definition that sits well with all self-identified conservatives, but it does describe in one sentence the foundation of the right. Finding a liberal correlation to that would give Americans a much needed toe-hold on the meaning of liberalism.
Fortunately, Alterman provides something close to that. He describes liberalism as roughly a combination of “rights-based” liberalism and communitarianism. “Classical liberalism” might be a better term than “rights-based liberalism,” but they both connote the same thing: an ideology which stresses freedom from coercion. The ideals which inform the classical left include, among others, an emphasis on limited government, a deep respect for private property, and an animus toward the welfare state. Whenever Benito Mussolini or Mao Tse Tung decried liberalism, this is what they were combating.
In contrast, communitarianism stresses positive rights, rights to things such as education or health care. Often positive rights are alluded to as “agency,” or “power.” From a communitarian perspective, the right to pursue happiness uninhibited by the state is less important than ensuring that everyone is being provided the means to do so. The communitarian side of liberalism has defined the modern era. From the New Deal on, the right to something has been emphasized far more successfully on the left than individual autonomy. This isn’t to say at all that liberals don’t respect individual rights. Self-styled individualists of all kinds have found refuge in liberalism (Nat Hentoff is a voracious defender of free speech) they’re just not as persuasive as the advocates for positive rights.
While faithful conservative philosophy tends to oppose governmental intervention as a rule, the communitarian-dominated left tends to hold political power in high esteem. This leads to one of the most fundamental differences between the left and the right; conservatives deplore government-sponsored injustice in the name of human rights (the Iraq War being a radical exception) while liberals usually consider the price of governmental intervention worth paying to sate an always changing sense of justice. Affirmative action is a great example of this. Conservatives believe the concept of state-sponsored racial distinctions is too harmful to accept, while liberals are much more concerned with the steps toward healing racial injustice AA represents that any of its potential abuses.
A plethora of similar examples can be used to illustrate this dichotomy, including the distinct right-left splits over sexual harassment law, environmentalism, and health care. But conservatism and liberalism are not irreconcilable. I’ve been guilty in the past of positing liberalism and conservatism on opposite poles, but I’ve learned that the left and right indeed converge on the axis of free will. Like puzzle pieces, the libertarian side of conservatism snugly interlocks with “rights-based” classical liberalism.
Human beings share a universal aversion to coercion; Citizens on both sides of the middle intuitively know that dignity cannot exist without free will. This manifests itself on the right as a naked distrust of the overbearing state, and on the left as a rebellion against traditional norms. Both of these are libertarian impulses. In fact, freedom from hectoring do-gooders, whether they represent a government or a community, makes up the core of libertarianism. This explains why libertarian publications such as Reason magazine reliably criticize both the left and the right. America’s true political spectrum doesn’t have Ronald Reagan at one end and FDR at the other. Instead it has traditional morality on the far right and progressive communitarianism on the far left, with libertarianism as the median. The average American falls somewhere in between Mike Huckabee and Dennis Kucinich.
But all of this distracts from the main debate, the meaning of liberalism. Plainly put, what is it? What distinguishes a liberal from everyone else? What one definition encompasses the political left and all of its many factions, while leaving out everything else?
At the risk of sounding glib, the foundation of liberalism is quite simple: an attachment to comprehensive social engineering. To explain what I mean, mandatory sensitivity classes are liberal in nature; they’re attempts to turn callous individuals into conscientious citizens. Global warming treaties intended to preserve planet Earth from nebulous threats by nothing less than remaking how all industries relate to the environment are liberal in nature. So are campus speech codes which are meant to preserve a right to a peaceful academic environment (a positive right). So is using the classroom to make a world a better place through political activism. So are Canadian and European laws which effectively make it illegal to criticize Islam, as seen most publically in cases brought against Maclean’s magazine in Canada and Oriana Fallaci in Italy. While few liberals support each of these efforts (as well as similar ones) none will eschew them all. It wouldn’t be accurate to describe liberalism as an injudicious desire for change, but the solemn conviction that something needs to change can be found in all leftist ideas.
Here we come to the important realization that justifying government intervention for the greater good is perfectly compatible with liberalism. If the left is about anything, it’s about using the state to correct injustice. A liberal solution to high gas prices may involve nationalizing the oil industry. One liberal remedy for conservative dominance of talk radio would be to reconsider the fairness doctrine. While liberalism isn’t inherently in favor of an overbearing state, it certainly recognizes that courts and laws have an unmatched ability to affect change. To the left, the state is neither good nor bad; it’s just a powerful tool that can be used to achieve social justice.
Objections to liberalism often come from confusion over its intended scope. Since “justice” has never been responsibly and consistently defined, its boundaries are always in flux. Take America’s albatross of racial conflict. What constitutes justice for America’s past crimes of slavery and institutional discrimination? Is justice equality? If so, what kind of equality? Equality of status? Equality of opportunity? Equality under the law? What about reparations? Is affirmative action a step towards or away from justice? These often uneasy questions have never been settled, making it difficult for Americans to discern between appropriate and inappropriate resentment towards liberal social policies.
This confusion touches issues much less flammable than racism. As the left-wing emphasis on justice is applied to gender equality, poverty, and a slew of other topics, it shows that the left is mired in a hopeless metaphysical debate over the meaning of “justice.” This quagmire not only affects what justice is purported to entail, but who for. Feminists, who by their political nature insist that more attention be given to women’s grievances, won’t necessarily be concerned with the Hamas’ objectives. Likewise, the militants in Hamas, deeply concerned with bringing Israel to “justice,” may not care at all about women’s rights. On top of that, civil rights leaders may or may not take up the mantle for either of these causes, but will always be focused most on racial justice. After taking into account the influence of environmentalists, animal rights activists, anti-war activists, and a slew of other groups, I now understand why liberals don’t think they’re a definable class. That doesn’t mean feminists, Palestinian rights organizations, civil rights groups and all two thousand of their other cousins aren’t leftist in nature.
Liberalism is a collage. Ideologies such as feminism are distinct from but not alternative to liberalism. For better or worse, all left-wing groups propose giving more power to the state to bring about a just society. Feminism, as one can observe how easily feminists pick up the picket signs for environmentalists, animal rights activists, and seemingly all other left-wing groups, is just gynocentric liberalism. Communitarian minority-rights movements are just ethnocentric forms of liberalism, and so on. Their similar foundations explain why victims rights movements collapse together so easily on the left.
Yet the left’s sense of justice has a single prerequisite: they will only support a victim of injustice if that victim can claim some sort of underdog status. For reasons that may be psychological or personal or simply out of the scope of this essay, liberalism cannot bring itself to defend anything but an underdog. When’s the last time you got the impression that defending America against the international community was a priority for liberals? The left wing narrative insists that Americans and certain demographic groups within America are bullies, and deserve a taste of their own medicine. Conservatives, who are seen as powerful, rich, elitists to liberals, will never find camaraderie on the left no matter how much evidence of media or academic bias they collect.
Even individual conflicts, such as the infamous O.J. Simpson murder trial, are framed by the hard left as group conflicts—a fearful white establishment dedicated to ruining a successful black man. This explains the left’s insistence that our group identity is so integral to our overall character. Without group distinctions, there are no classes of “victims” and “oppressors.” Take away the “us versus them” dichotomy, and injustice becomes a much more evasive and frustrating opponent, one that is too elusive to rally strangers against.
So now we have come, practically via osmosis, to a definition of liberalism: A rational quest for justice for a group or individual perceived to be disadvantaged (heavy emphasis on “perceived”). In this context, “rational” means unbound by tradition; the freedom to go with any social program that works, ala FDR. What makes liberalism diverse isn’t a mythical inclusiveness that defies all meaning, but discernable variations of degree and focus within left-wing activism. Every single left-winger wants to rectify a perceived wrong, but countless definitions of justice proliferate among the left’s coalition of the handicapped and their spokesmen.
By the way, the animal rights movement fits in this framework thorough the personification of inhuman entities. If cattle, dogs, and all other animals occupy the same moral plane as humans, our treatment of them would certainly count as unjust. Environmentalism finds a niche on the left by correctly claiming that whatever threatens the earth threatens all humanity. This weds environmental justice to social justice—anyone who abuses the Earth is abusing the community.
Finally, with this under our belt, we can move on to Professor Alterman’s book.