Jonathan Cohn of TNR offers a brief history of contemporary liberalism and how “liberal” became a dirty word.
The subject couldn’t be more relevant, as this piece by Rick Perlstein shows. There’s much talk right now about supposed Democratic zeal to “defund” the troops; Perlstein discusses how politicians like Hillary Clinton, deathly afraid of the accusation, are doing their best to inoculate themselves against it. We’ve gotten to this point, Perlstein argues, thanks to “the most perversely successful propaganda campaign in American history” — resulting in the conventional wisdom that liberal Democrats, contrary to Republican wishes, defunded the Vietnam war effort in the early ’70s. As Perlstein shows, this is an outright lie. The relevant anti-escalation votes in Congress at that time reflected a solid bipartisan majority.
It isn’t just the right that has spun “liberal” as negative, however. During my time in graduate school in the mid-’90s, it was clear that for students on the radical left, the one thing more widely and routinely detested than conservatism was liberalism. Fred Halliday has a particularly good riposte to two of his critics, Fouzi Slisli & Jacqueline Kaye:
…I wonder on what basis it is — in the early 21st century, in light of the evident moral and political bankruptcy of so many who denounced liberalism in the last century — that my critics are so relaxed in their use of the term “liberal” as a term of abuse.
I would have thought that the opposite might apply, and that those who are from different, socialist and left, traditions might — even as they criticise liberalism for the vacillation and evasion that so concern Slisli & Kaye — reflect a bit more on what they could learn from liberalism.
Perhaps I am affected by the fact that in Tehran in 1979 a few months after the Islamic revolution, I witnessed mass demonstrations by “Hizbollahis” supporters of the Islamic Republic, mobilised to crush the left, parading under the slogan “Death to Liberalism!” Within weeks, they went on to imprison, torture and kill my friends and comrades. If opposing such violations in the name of universalist principle makes me a liberal, so be it.
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