What do our opponents mean when they apply to us the label “liberal”? …. If by liberal they mean 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 liberties…. If that is what they mean by a liberal, then I’m proud to say I’m a liberal. John F. Kennedy, accepting the nomination for President from the New York Liberal Party, less than two months before he was elected our 35th President.


Have you wondered why conservative members of Congress today proudly boast about their conservatism, whereas most all politicians do everything they can to avoid being called “liberal”? This fact was in evidence during the final Presidential debate of 2004, when George Bush cited evidence that John Kerry was the most liberal member of the Senate, as if that was some kind of insult. In response to such accusations John Kerry would simply say that he doesn’t believe in labels. Can you imagine John McCain saying something like that after being called a conservative?

The reason for this is that conservatives have managed to paint liberals as the bad guys. They claim that conservatism is the ideology of “personal responsibility”, yet employment has been far higher under Democratic than Republican presidents; they claim that liberals are “soft on defense” or “soft on terror” while they have a sitting president who allowed the worst attack on American soil since 1812 by ignoring multiple warnings of those attacks and failing to respond to them when they occurred; they refer to liberals as “tax and spend”, while two of their most recent presidents (Reagan and Bush II) have run up by far the largest federal budget deficits (See annual change in debt 1941-2009) in our history; and they claim to be the ideology of “law and order” in the midst of the most lawless presidential administration in our history.

Worst of all they have put into common usage the term “liberal elite”, thus pinning all their elitist ideologies on one of the least elite philosophies in existence today. How do they get away with all that spin, claiming that up is down and down is up? Well, they have learned to stay “on message”, and they have received tremendous amounts of help from our corporate news media, which they largely own.

One way liberals have dealt with this issue – perhaps the most benign way of doing it without admitting that they’re liberals – is to simply switch labels. Today it is much more fashionable to call ourselves “progressives” than liberals. The DU does this. One of the most progressive … I mean liberal, magazines in our country, The Nation, does this. “Progressive Democrats for America” have done it. Hell, I’ve done it myself – When writing about liberals I often simply say “liberal/progressive”, as if they’re two different words. But they’re not different words – notwithstanding the many explanations of their differences that have been offered. “Progressive” is simply the word that liberals use to avoid being branded as “liberal elites”.

So let’s look at where so-called “liberal elites” stand on some of the most important issues of our day, compared to conservatives:


Comparisons of liberals vs. conservatives on four of today’s most important issues

War and peace

Liberals:
Conservatives often accuse liberals of being “soft on defense”. Liberals are not soft on defense. When it comes to the defense of our nation they are every bit as vigilant as the most hard line conservative. For example, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, probably the most liberal President we’ve ever had, led our country successfully through World War II, the largest war ever fought.

Liberals are repelled by war, and therefore believe that it should be used only when necessary. They recognize and are very concerned about the ubiquitous death, carnage and destruction that result from war.

They therefore believe in international law as an important means of preventing war. The United Nations Charter contains the basic principles on this issue. With regard to the use of force, the UN Charter takes as its starting point Article 2(4), which prohibits any nation from using force against another. The charter allows for only two exceptions to this rule: when force is required in self-defense (Article 51) or when the Security Council authorizes the use of force to protect international peace and security (Chapter VII).

Liberals also believe that we must seek to limit the influence of the military industrial complex, as former President and Supreme Allied Commanding General in World War II, Dwight Eisenhower, warned us. What President Eisenhower meant to tell us is that there is a very influential group of elites in our country who profit from war and therefore who seek to embroil our country in war, even when it serves no interests but their own. Seeking to limit their influence does not mean that one is “soft on defense”.

Conservatives:
Conservatives are much more prone to seek to embroil our country in war. George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, and their Neocon enablers are the perfect example of this. These people led us to war against Iraq, telling us that that country had weapons of mass destruction and close ties to al Qaeda. Those were lies.

Do conservatives care about the great damage that we’ve done to the Iraqi people as a result of our invasion and occupation of their country? Do they care about the million dead civilians or the four million refugees? Who can tell? They never mention them.


Civil liberties

Liberals:
Civil liberties are part and parcel of the rule of law in our country. They are written into our Constitution for very good reason. They include those proclaimed in our Bill of Rights, including freedom of the press, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, freedom against unreasonable searches and seizures, the right to a fair trial, and freedom from cruel or unusual punishment inflicted by government, among others. Without them we risk submitting to tyranny. Our Founding Fathers recognized this, which is why they put the Bill of Rights, the first Ten Amendments, into our Constitution shortly after it was ratified. Liberals recognize this, which is why they struggle to defend our civil liberties against infringement by conservatives.

The Civil liberties that liberals believe in also comprise those included in the post-Civil War Amendments, which formally ended slavery, prohibited discrimination in law, and gave all Americans the right to vote.

Conservatives:
Conservatives support George Bush’s wholesale violation of our civil liberties as part of his War on Terror. It is ok with them if George Bush orders warrantless wiretapping against American citizens, in violation of our 4th amendment; it is ok with them if George Bush violates our 5th amendment right to a fair trial by unilaterally declaring our citizens to be “enemy combatants” and therefore devoid of all rights; it is ok with them if George Bush approves torture, in violation of our 8th amendment; it is ok with them if George Bush threatens reporters with prison and denies them access to White House spokespersons for exercising their 1st amendment guarantee of freedom of the press; and it is ok with them if they preempt our freedom of speech by limiting protest against our government to so-called “First Amendment Zones”.

Conservatives also fought tooth and nail against the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.


Domestic economic policies

Liberals:
Liberals believe in the part of our Declaration of Independence that says that everyone is entitled to “the pursuit of happiness”. Another way of saying this is that they believe that all Americans should have the opportunity for a fulfilling life. That means the right to health care, a decent education, a safe and healthy workplace, a healthful environment, a secure environment, and a place to live, among other things.

In pursuit of all those things, liberals believe that government has an important role to play. Such a role can involve many things, including: the direct provision of jobs; subsidies for health care, education, and housing; laws that protect the right of labor to organize; placing limits on the rights of corporations to pollute our environment, form monopolies, subject workers to dangerous or unhealthy working conditions, or engage in loan sharking; social security laws to ensure a reasonably comfortable retirement; and financial help (in the form of a social safety net) to those who are unable to work.

All of these things are akin to FDR’s New Deal, which pulled our country out of the Great Depression, brought our country an unprecedented level of prosperity, and created a large middle class.

Yes, this all requires taxes. Conservatives call that “big government”. What it really is is responsible government – government responsive to the needs of the people who elect their government to serve them. If you want to call that “big government” then go ahead and call it that.

Conservatives:
Conservatives claim that they care about people just as much as or more than liberals do. Yet, in their view government has no role in providing opportunities for people. That is the job of the private sector, as far as conservatives are concerned. They claim that it is far preferable for the private sector to provide whatever opportunities people have because the private sector can do it better.

But what if the private sector is not successful in providing those opportunities to people? Suppose that the private sector does a great job of making money for itself, and yet: 47 million Americans have no medical insurance; 36 million Americans are in poverty; 3 million Americans are homeless; union membership stands at a paltry less than 20 percent of the workforce due to the dismantling of laws that used to protect the right to join unions; the cost of a decent education is beyond the means of millions of Americans; and corporations pollute our environment with impunity.

These are issues that conservatives largely ignore because their ideology says that the private sector should take care of all these problems. They believe that government regulation of corporations infringes upon the rights of corporations to make profits. End of story.


The rule of law

Liberals:
Liberals believe in the rule of law. They understand that our Constitution forms the foundation for our legal system, and accordingly they believe it must be protected and fought for.

Conservatives:
Especially under the presidency of George W. Bush, conservatives have shown very little respect for the rule of law. Most important, George Bush has claimed the right to violate or ignore over a thousand laws or portions of laws passed by Congress.

Our Constitution gives Congress the responsibility and authority to enact our laws. It requires the president to enforce those laws, and accordingly, the president is required to take an oath upon ascending to the presidency to enforce them. George Bush has violated that oath by appending over a thousand signing statements to laws, claiming that he has the right to “interpret” them as he chooses. Conservatives see nothing wrong with that.

Conservatives essentially believe that the president should be able to do anything he pleases, as long as he claims that he does it to protect the security of our country. He doesn’t have to show evidence to support his claim. The claim speaks for itself. It is called the “unitary executive” theory, and it has no basis in Constitutional law. Kings have held less power than American conservatives’ conception of the “unitary executive.”

George Bush politicized his Justice Department by firing Republican federal attorneys who refused to prosecute Democrats for bogus charges of “voter fraud” with sufficient vigor. Conservatives had no problem with that.

Five conservative justices on the U.S. Supreme Court ended the vote counting in the 2000 presidential election and proclaimed George W. Bush president. There was no Constitutional basis for their decision. They so much as said so themselves, by making the unprecedented statement that their decision should not serve as a precedent for any future decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court.

The Bush administration outed a CIA agent for the purpose of taking vengeance against her husband, for exposing one of the many lies that they used to justify an illegal war. When a member of the Bush administration was sentenced to jail for perjury and obstructing the investigation into that illegal act, George Bush simply commuted his sentence.

To protect the telecom companies against any crimes that they may have committed, George Bush insists that that they should have full immunity from prosecution for those crimes. So insistent is he on protecting them from prosecution that he refuses to sign the FISA bill that he claims is so important to the safety of the American people unless immunity for the telecom companies is included in the bill. And conservatives in Congress do everything they can to assist him in this effort.

And there were several conservative Republicans convicted of bribery or similar corruption charges relating to activities of the 109th Congress.


Respect for the truth

Liberals:
Liberals brought us the Freedom of Information Act and the Presidential Records Act, which allows American citizens to obtain information on what their government is doing or has done in their name.

Liberals have a great deal of respect for science as a tool that allows the human race to obtain the truth.

Conservatives:
The Bush administration has done whatever it can keep its actions secret from the American public. They have taken aggressive actions to weaken the Freedom of Information Act and to violate the Presidential Records Act. Dick Cheney met with the giants of the energy industry, and he steadfastly refused to make minutes of his meeting public. The Bush administration ordered White House staff or former staff to refuse to cooperate with Congressional attempts to investigate serious crimes. And all of this is supported by the vast majority of conservatives in Congress.

Conservatives have much less respect for science than do liberals. They ignore and dispute scientific findings that demonstrate how powerful corporations are contributing to the dangerous warming of our planet, so that they have an excuse for failing to regulate those corporations. They dispute scientific findings that show how condoms protect against the spread of dangerous sexually transmitted diseases because the use of condoms conflicts with their ideology. And they refuse to allow the publishing of scientific articles that demonstrate the dangers of medical products produced by their corporate donors – for obvious reasons.


Why conservatives call us “liberal elites”

To summarize why conservatives refer to us as “liberal elites”:

We believe that our country should resort to war only when necessary, and that we should never allow it to be used for profiteering; we believe in international law as a means of limiting war.

We believe in the civil liberties proclaimed in our Constitution. We believe that they are worth fighting for and that a government that attempts to withhold them from us poses grave threats to our democracy.

We believe that the purpose of government is to meet the needs of its citizens. Those basic human needs that cannot be met by the private sector should be provided by government, even if that means increasing the size of government and paying for the necessary services.

We believe that the laws of our nation apply to everyone, even to those – especially to those – who hold high elective office. Our President is elected to serve our needs. He is not a King, and it is not our responsibility to serve him.

We believe in a transparent government, not a secret government. Secret government has no place in a democracy. Voting machines that count our votes in secret have no place in a democracy. The use of money to influence our elected representatives has no role in a democracy. And we believe in science as a means to ascertaining the truths we need to know about.

None of these are “elitist” views. Quite the contrary. Conservatives – at least those who rule our country and those who support them – believe in none of these things. Yet they can’t argue against any of them on their face. Instead, conservatives must confuse American citizens in order to win elections. They claim that we are “elitist” and otherwise misrepresent our views because they know that they cannot win elections unless they make the American people believe that down is up and up is down.

We must not let them do this. We must call them on their lies and spin. We must remove from office those who abuse their powers and threaten our democracy. We must insist that our government be transparent and that our elections be transparent. It does not matter that our corporate news media will call us “liberal elites” or irresponsible or “conspiracy theorists” or “unpatriotic” for doing these things. Let them call us all of those things. We must respond to them with the most potent weapon at our disposal – TRUTH.

If conservatives and their corporate news media allies give us liberals a bad name by calling us names and misrepresenting our views, it serves no purpose to say, “Oh, but I’m not a liberal, I’m a ….” That obscures the truth by letting them define us and confirming their views that liberals are something to be shunned. I am a liberal, and I’m proud to be a liberal. So should we all be.