"Liberal"

Nice job by Eric Alterman writing in The Nation. It has been stated before, but "liberal" has been coopted by the right to the extent that, despite most Americans' generally liberal beliefs, "conservative" is the only acceptable ideological label in American politics.

Here is the liberals' problem in a nutshell: More than 30 percent of Americans happily answer to the appellation "conservative," while 18 percent call themselves "liberal." And yet when questioned by pollsters, a super-majority of more than 60 percent take positions liberal in everything but name. Indeed, on many if not most issues, Americans hold views well to the left of those espoused by almost any national Democratic politician.

In a May survey published by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 65 percent of respondents said they favor providing health insurance to all Americans, even if it means raising taxes, and 86 percent said they favor raising the minimum wage. Seventy-seven percent said they believe the country "should do whatever it takes to protect the environment.'' A September Gallup Poll finds that 59 percent consider the Iraq War a mistake and 63 percent agree that US forces should be partially or completely withdrawn.

Nevertheless, extremist right-wingers, including a few apparent criminals, enjoy a stranglehold on our political system and media discourse. And so the majority views of the American people are treated with contempt by pundits and politicians alike. To give just a minor example, New York Times columnist David Brooks--the writer who best understands the dynamics of the contemporary Democratic Party, according to the smart boys at ABC's The Note--began a recent screed with the proclamation: "After a while, you get sick of the DeLays of the right and the Deans of the left." Note the implied equivalence between the corrupt and extreme Tom DeLay--who regularly compares the Environmental Protection Agency to the Nazis--and Howard Dean, a balanced-budget fiscal conservative and ally of the NRA whose "radical" position on Iraq now puts him to the right of most Americans. Or how about the treatment meted out by smarty-pants pundits to Al Gore, one of the few politicians who have given voice to majority American positions on the war, the environment and the dishonesty and ideological obsessions of the Bush Administration. Brooks termed him "unhinged." Fred Barnes said he was "nutty." Charles Krauthammer, speaking, he said, in his capacity as a psychiatrist, called him on "the edge of looniness."...

Read the rest. It's good. But two further points:

1. Most "Liberal Democrats" aren't even liberal. The Democratic Party has allowed itself to be coopted or assimilated. A few pundits and many in the American public call for a Democratic platform as an alternative to the right-wing nonsense, but it still hasn't come. Maybe the reason is that there is none that does not resemble the right?

2. Liberalism is amorphous not only for its avoidance in a public discourse in which the screeching of the right has taken its rhetorical toll. It's also amorphous and ambivalent because it is not truly an experimentalist "left" alternative. There is no left in the US, where we would define left as concerned with progressive forms of democracy, social well-being, and innovative economic and environmental reforms. We don't know what the public good is, and this is because we have essentially one failing view of it. It's then easy to fall back into religious political conceptions (Robertson, Dobson, etc.) or loud-mouthed rants (Limbaugh, Coulter, etc.) to find some sense of meaning to public and social life. This is the most simplistic approach to what are complex problems. Some on the left understand the complexity of the problems we face collectively, and even some on the right. The next step is to find how the left's best ideas are connected to the public's own concerns and to make that link in the language of the public.

UPDATE (23 October 12:20pm):

I want to add one point here in somewhat different terms than those discussed by Barba and Eric Gordy above: the public knows. It needs articulation. It is largely liberal. Why can't we progressive-lefty-liberal folks speak that language and give those concerns their articulate-ness?