But the meaning of political terms evolve over time. And that's certainly true of American "liberalism".
Helena Rosenblatt takes a stab a positioning the current use of the label in What We Talk About When We Talk About Liberalism Boston Review 09/12/2018. Along the way, she cites several other recent takes on the matter:
- Sean Wilentz, Fighting Words Democracy Spring 2018
- Jeffrey Isaac, Truce Time Democracy Summer 2018
- Doug Rassinow, Leftists and Liberals in the Political Heartland Boston Review 01/03/2018
Rosenblatt gives a useful summary of the nineteenth century usage of the term in Europe and the US:
Like much of our political vocabulary, the word “liberalism” emerged in the wake of the French Revolution. Coined in the early 1800s, it originally stood for a cluster of concepts including civic equality, constitutional and representative government, and a number of individual rights such as freedom of religion, property, and the press. But over the course of the nineteenth century, as a result of inequities generated by industrialized wealth, liberalism split in two. One branch advocated laissez-faire, often of a radical kind. Others, influenced by new ideas of political economy coming from Germany, advocated increasing government intervention to help the poor, calling themselves “social liberals” or “liberal socialists.” They saw no contradiction in this terminology; instead such ideas were thought to be the very expression of “true liberalism” — a common expression in the nineteenth century.Doug Rassinow in his piece briefly recounts the liberal/left tensions in the US in the post-Second World War period. One thing that helps complicate the picture in the US during most of the 20th century is that self-described liberals were prensent prominently in both the Democratic and Republican Parties. Reagan's Presidency represents the turning point where the Republican Party became thoroughly ideologically conservative. Southern conservatives were still a significant if much reduced presence in the Democratic Party for a longer time. Once Bill Clinton won California in the 1992 Presidential race, the Democrats nationally had little need for tailoring their programs to that Southern conservative bloc, which in any case had largely been absorbed into the Republican Party.
I think the Democratic Party, aside from the differences between the corporate-liberal and progressive-liberal wings of the party, still has a kind of "phantom limb" (or phantom wing?) from the one-time existence of that Southern conservative wing. The Democratic leadership still seems to have a sort of instinctive reflex to frame their own positions in conservative/Republican terms, even when it makes no obvious sense.
Rosenblatt's bottom line, the last paragraph of her piece:
The predicament faced by today’s Democrats is therefore not a new one. History tells us that liberals have always been known by different names as they responded to new political and social circumstances. Some have called themselves “progressive,” while others have preferred “socialist.” The boundaries between these terms have been porous, their meanings changeable. If there is a moral to be drawn from this history, it is that even where they argued over the meaning of “true liberalism,” liberals were strongest when they found common ground—especially in the face of authoritarian rulers and demagogues. The 2018 U.S. midterm elections will put that pattern to the test once again.In other words, what is a liberal in American politics? It depends ...
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