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This is what bugs me. The internet is filled with blog posts and message board discussion about who's liberal and who isn't.
We're told Pres. Obama needs to pick a liberal for the vacant Supreme Court post. Anything less just won't cut it. But liberal by whose definition? Theirs?
What makes their definition any better than mine or yours or Pres. Obama's?
In fact, it isn't like liberalism is black and white. It's not universal. You can be liberal in some degree and conservative in another. Does that make you any less liberal overall? Probably not.
So what is liberalism and why do these people get to decide who is and who isn't liberal?
Well for starters, in their view, Pres. Obama is not a liberal. Not in the classical sense and certainly not in the modern sense. His policies contradict everything they believe in liberalism - or so that's what they'd have you think.
But classic liberals weren't liberal across the board. Surely we can agree with that and yet they are often used as the definition of pure liberalism in discussion to thwart Pres. Obama's liberal cred.
Well to get an understanding of what liberalism means and where it stands historically, we need to define it and not just broadly - which is easily done here.
Liberalism, specifically American liberalism, has its roots in what America is - a Republic. The Founding Fathers were liberals in the sense they advocated liberty. Yet even there we find contradiction because the U.S. Constitution was not an advocate of liberty for a good portion of individuals. That came later.
Was Thomas Jefferson any less a liberal because he owned slaves, even though he was one of the most outspoken in his promotion of Republicanism in the U.S.? Probably not.
Of course, liberalism at the founding of our country and where it is today has changed greatly. Modern liberalism really found its footing in American history during the Progressive Era, a movement spearheaded by a Republican, Teddy Roosevelt.
Roosevelt was a liberal by definition. His New Nationalism established the belief of social welfare and the need of a powerful federal government to regulate the economy and guarantee social justice. But was Roosevelt any less a liberal because of his imperialist world views? If he had been president today, the progressive movement, which is often built around the anti-war movement, would have denounced him as a warmongering imperialist.
In some instances, they already do and some won't even dare claim him as a progressive.
Woodrow Wilson is another president who established a great deal of modern liberal policies both domestically and internationally. Domestically, we saw it with his vigorous fight to break up monopolies and use the federal government to encourage competition among smaller companies, therefore not allowing larger companies to overshadow the economy. Internationally, he established the League of Nations, which was the foundation for the United Nations.
Yet Wilson wasn't perfect. He was a known racist and an outspoken critic of women's suffrage (though he changed). Liberal? In policy. In action? Debatable - but you can't deny he played an important role in creating the modern liberal movement in American politics.
Of course, the most known and widely accepted liberal president is FDR. Roosevelt enacted a great deal of core liberal policies with his New Deal and even today is pretty much the end all when it comes to liberal governing in America.
But wait. Even by the standards of many progressives of that time, FDR wasn't a true liberal. Huey Long, a fiery populist from Louisiana, became one of the most vocal critics of the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s. Long had supported Roosevelt originally because he believed he was the only candidate that would bring about redistribution of wealth, a cornerstone of Long's political beliefs.
Soon after FDR was elected, however, Long abandoned the president because he had no intention of redistributing the wealth. Long was famously quoted as saying, "Whenever this administration has gone to the left I have voted with it, and whenever it has gone to the right I have voted against it."
Sound familiar?
Long became that vocal critic of Roosevelt's policies because he believed they weren't liberal enough. Or didn't do enough. He also said that FDR's National Recovery Act was nothing more than a sellout to big business.
It's history repeating itself, folks. Here you have a president dramatically changing the economic philosophy of the country and yet a good number of progressive and populist figures of the day felt he was doing too little or selling off America to big business. FDR. Selling America off to the corporatist. Ridiculous notion, isn't it? So even then, back in the 30s, we had liberals telling us who was and wasn't liberal.
Beyond that, though, Roosevelt was known as a lifelong free-trader. Yes, a free-trader. In today's politics, being an unabashed free-trader makes you A) a DLCer and B) a corporatist.
Was Roosevelt either?
Here's a liberal icon being denounced for being too conservative by the left and supporting something today that no true progressive could ever fully embrace - free trade. Then you had Roosevelt's passive policy toward lynching (he never used the WH's power to push anti-lynching legislation, even though he promised during the campaign that he would) and of course, his most despicable act - the internment of Japanese-Americans in camps throughout the U.S. during WWII.
That might be the worst civil rights offense in modern American history.
Yet today he's still a liberal icon.
Again, who gets to decide this?
What makes one a liberal? As we've seen, there has never been a true and pure liberal as president. Each has their flaws and each has their policy differences with the ideology. They are human, after all and we would expect as much, right?
And that's why you can't define what liberalism is based on just a set of certain circumstances. Just because you might be more left than Pres. Obama does not mean he isn't liberal. It isn't that easy. It isn't just what you think.
So when someone says they want Pres. Obama to pick an outspoken, unabashed liberal...I've got to wonder what they mean by that.
Do they mean a liberal by its original definition? Liberal by our Founding Father's interpretation? Liberal by Teddy Roosevelt, or Woodrow Wilson or FDR standards? Liberal by whose definition?
Because as we've seen throughout history, liberalism evolves. It isn't just one set of principles without progression. It, with the times, changes. Liberalism today is far different from the liberalism we saw in the 1960s. And that liberalism is hardly the same as the liberalism we saw in the 1930s.
In the 19th Century and part of the 20th, liberals embraced free trade. It was, after all, economic liberalism. Conservatives? Not so much. The Republican Party, who had a stranglehold on the American presidency until 1912, had strongly opposed free trade. Pres. William McKinley said this when discussing it:
"Under free trade the trader is the master and the producer the slave. Protection is but the law of nature, the law of self-preservation, of self-development, of securing the highest and best destiny of the race of man. that protection is immoral…. Why, if protection builds up and elevates 63,000,000 of people, the influence of those 63,000,000 of people elevates the rest of the world. We cannot take a step in the pathway of progress without benefitting mankind everywhere. Well, they say, ‘Buy where you can buy the cheapest'…. Of course, that applies to labor as to everything else. Let me give you a maxim that is a thousand times better than that, and it is the protection maxim: ‘Buy where you can pay the easiest.' And that spot of earth is where labor wins its highest rewards."
I guess he's a liberal.
My how times have changed.
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