'Painting' the Stain
They're back.
We are again being "entertained" by TV commercials attacking candidate Barack Obama and his 'liberal friends' - Chuck Schumer, Chris Dodd, Joe Biden et al. As usual these commercials never tell us what's wrong with being 'liberal', they just use the phrase in the sneering way they've been using it for 30 years - as an indictment, a slur, a poisonous label signifying anything anyone wants to think of as bad, evil - and worse- UNAMERICAN!!!
The slurring began when conservatives started talking about "bleeding heart liberals" who throw money at programs to keep everybody happy…and then progressed to "pinko, Commie liberals". The words of Ronald Reagan, doing the best imitation of a President in modern times and using his "B" movie abilities as an actor to 'communicate' with the right reading of a word or sentence to make sure we get his meaning, simply said that liberals would enslave us in Socialism making government our masters and the masters of our children and our children's children. - and he was talking about Medicare at the time.
The combination of these ingredients and the strange silence of the liberal community, not just the politicians but the entire community, have so hardened the slurs and made them so acceptable, that for the past generation none of the obviously liberal politicians will even acknowledge that ideology, pretending to prefer the term 'progressive' - as Hillary does so often. (What's a little bit amusing in an otherwise sad state of affairs, is that way back in the mid-2oth Century, 'progressives' had a far more liberal connotation than liberal. But in our 'highly educated' America, who would even know that today?)
Democrats in general, (who remembers the handful of liberal Republicans anymore?) have run so far from the idea of liberal that they've adopted the ideology of triangulation perhaps (sadly) the real legacy of the Clintons - and so it's difficult to know what they really believe in anymore. And that fact is as true here in New York as it is across the nation. That failure to identify a belief system has kept Republicans in power for more than a decade and threatens to do so again , at least in the White House.
In other sections on this website, we have defined the meaning of liberal as those who believe in the strength and value of freedom and justice for all and the existence of a level playing field of opportunity for all. And we have described those programs launched before and after the Second World War, that made America the greatest power in world history. All of them came from a liberal philosophy.
Liberals brought America civil rights and women's rights (No liberals, no Barack, no Hillary - and even, no Sarah), ending legalized racial segregation and gender discrimination.
Liberals brought us Social Security and unemployment insurance.
Liberal brought us the GI education bill and the importance of raising teacher salaries.
Liberals brought us Medicare and Medicaid.
Liberals gave us Head Start and free legal services for the poor. And a national food stamp program.
Liberals have fought for cleaner air and water, and for recognition of the dangers of global warming.
Our food is safer, our workplaces are safer, our academics are freer to teach and most everybody can get into a college.
All of this - and more - coming from a liberal philosophy and always pitted against the power of conservatives who wanted little to do with any of this and worked hard to defeat all of it.
If liberals - once so proud to be recognized as such - have so enhanced the quality of our lives and the greatness of the American society, why have we allowed the ridicule and the scorn to continue to stain the meaning of liberalism and its cause?
New York Times columnist, Bob Herbert, likens the strange silence to a form of self-hatred and links it to the feelings and views of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas and being Afro-American.
It's an interesting link though not explained in any way. Why should liberals feel a self-hatred? Do minorities get to feel this self-hatred because they've refused to fight back at the right time and in the right way and are then torn apart and seem to have no comeback?
There are those who liken the strange and seemingly quiet acceptance of those millions of Holocaust victims to this idea of self-hatred. This is especially true when one considers the fight-back ferocity of Polish Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto. They fought back against their fate with every one of their lives. Why didn't the millions of Jews being sent by train to their deaths rise up against their oppressors in the same way?
It is a question that's never been successfully answered but there are those who think that this seeming passivity was due to an inherent belief in the human condition: Human beings unable to accept the existence of evil that lives within all of us and so unable to imagine that a group of politicians could genuinely plan the extinction of an entire population.
In our time, genocidal efforts continue in Africa and it is still difficult to believe the number of deaths and maimings. Yet they continue and the World offers lip-service and little more.
Maybe liberals could not and cannot believe the essential hate that exists in so many Americans for the very programs that have helped and still help so many of us - including those who hate them.
Maybe liberals cannot believe that Americans today actually vote against their best interests because they've bought a series of lies - like the existence of WMD's or Saddam being responsible for 9/11 - and can't bring themselves to reject them as lies even when they are exposed as lies. (Can the demographic of "older white women" who supported Hillary Clinton in the primaries actually support Sarah Palin knowing of the differences between them? Or was that Democratic primary support always about something else "...even Hillary is better than a black man as President?"
Maybe the essential ignorance (or stupidity) of the majority of Americans who voted to reelect a George W. Bush is even greater today.
Does the Orwellian idea of the big lie - black is white, up is down, etc . or the Rovian idea that just repeating lies and distortions and the American people will buy them because they are not smart enough to know they are lies - or the Schultzian (Peanuts) idea that "We have met the enemy and he is us" - all work today better than they ever have?
Certainly Americans must realize that we no longer have a Fourth Estate working to present us with facts and truth. No matter what media we visit today, that's a role long ago abandoned when the weight of a poor education finally reached managing editor-levels, never mind TV reporters with communications degrees or the paid-pundits who represent a specific view on every issue. Few of them understand the issues well enough to know how to find the truth.
Maybe it's time for liberals to wake up and see that because everything eventually comes around again, Republicans and Big Business driven by the freedom of their power and the voraciousness of their greed, playing with our financial stability and security, today represent only a different form of robber baron than they represented when the founders of the Liberal Party established it in the mid-1940's.
Maybe we need to understand the kind of country we're really living in today - and get to work to save it before it really is too late. And we'd better start with Education because those old cliches that public education helps to make a more informed citizenry and that those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it, are truer now than they've ever been.
Martin Hassner,
Executive Director
Web Site Editor
