Why I am a Liberal

Watershed events and issues in American history are of course extremely complex once analyzed, with many parties, problems, and power struggles, but as they exist in American consciousness, they easily take on a moral tone that is not hard to assess. Consider five cases: the American Revolution, slavery, the treatment of Native Americans, the entry into World War II, the civil rights movement, and the opposition to the Vietnam War. In each of these cases, it was the liberals of the day, not the conservatives, who were validated by history, and it is because both their moral stances, and what they got right about the world, that this is so. Let us consider each of these struggles individually.
A truism in American political and cultural life is that the American Revolution, both our waging of the actual war and the adoption of the Constitution, constitutes a unique moral good in not just our history, but in the history of the world. Furthermore, whatever their personal failings and character flaws, the founding fathers responsible both for the war and for the Constitution were acting in a morally good way. In starting the Revolutionary War, the founding fathers had to fight against the popular, majority opinion. In 1775, most of the colonists still considered themselves British subjects, and only wanted reform so that they could be treated in Parliament as such. The founding fathers’ most important struggle was in forging a uniquely American national identity, and it is important to consider what ideas they took into making that national identity.
Let us reflect on Thomas Jefferson, who listed his three greatest achievements on his grave: the writing of the Declaration of Independence, the statute for religious freedom in Virginia, and the founding of the University of Virginia. Jefferson the slave-owner and politician was a complex man, but these accomplishments show that his most deeply held values were liberal values: toleration, equality, and freedom of the mind. Even if the equality and tolerance that existed at the time was a narrow sort of equality and tolerance, applying to only a few, it gave America the opportunity to grow and evolve into a more just, more equal, more tolerant nation. America became the first modern nation to be a secular nation, where everyone could contribute to the public sphere, regardless of creed, color, or class. Although this has never been the case in practice, it has always stood as the promise of America, as what America can be. And it has always been liberals who have pursued this moral agenda.
This liberal view is not unique to Thomas Jefferson; the most important work of most of the founding fathers is rooted in liberal Enlightenment philosophy from Europe. John Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration and Two Treatises of Civil Government, written in the two decades before the revolution, greatly influenced the writers of our founding documents, along with the writings of other European liberals such as Rousseau. It is where Jefferson got the idea that all men are created equal, with the inalienable right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It is what the Bill of Rights is rooted in. Who were the conservatives? They were those colonists who remained Britons until the end, who opposed the adoption of the Constitution and a unified national government, who opposed laws for religious toleration.
On the issue of slavery, the moral stance of liberalism is even more obvious. As far back as the struggles to adopt the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, there was a push to make slavery illegal in America. This dream would not be realized then because of compromises that needed to be made with the more conservative Southern states. No one in America today, liberal or conservative, would contest the moral good of doing away with our slave system, but it was not conservatives who waged the decades-long struggle to abolish it. It was liberals, religious and secular, who were the abolitionists. I am not saying that all of the opinions and motivations of any given abolitionist could be considered liberal, but the struggle was a liberal struggle, to push America closer to realizing its promise. Reconstruction, imperfect as it may have been, was a liberal project to better America, to bring more people into the American identity, to recognize that everyone who lives in this country has equal rights. Reconstruction was betrayed when political compromises were made with Southern conservatives, and generations of blacks and poor Southern whites suffered as a result of that callousness. Many still do.
For a last Nineteenth Century case, there is the appalling way Native Americans were treated by official government policy. Treaties were signed with them and broken, time and again. Wars were conducted against them to steal their land to make room for white settlers and slave plantations. The Trail of Tears, smallpox blankets, the systematic destruction of the buffalo population as a means to deprive them of resources, intentionally by some, out of callousness by others: these were not liberal values. Liberal values are always aligned against greed, malice, and the unbridled use of power.
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, it was becoming obvious that the United States would eventually need to step in to help Britain against Hitler, and President Roosevelt was quietly set on easing the country to this realization. Aligned against him were the isolationists, who believed wrongly that America need not involve itself in European affairs, that America was not affected by them. There were also those right-wingers with totalitarian sympathies, such as Charles Lindbergh, who felt that we should join the war on the side of Hitler to crush Russia. Imagine an America in the second half of the Twentieth Century that had to deal with the guilt of being party to the Holocaust. World War II was one of the moments in our great history when there was true national unity; almost everyone did their part. But we need not forget how different things may have been if the wrong people had been in charge during that decisive time, or how many more lives may have been spared if we entered the war on the side of the Allies in 1939 or 1940; we did not show up until 1942, with much of Europe in ruins, and Hitler’s “Final Solution” made inevitable.
The civil rights movement and the opposition to the Vietnam War are the quintessential liberal struggles of the Twentieth Century in America. Both have been validated by history. Indeed, the relative success of the civil rights movement is an unconditional moral good of recent American history, even though much progress still needs to be achieved. It was a conscious push to realize the Enlightenment values that informed the very creation of our nation. The key thing to highlight here is that it was a liberal struggle against a damnably conservative past. It was the struggle of hope against fear. Southern conservative politicians from Strom Thurmond to George Wallace are great moral villains in American history, because their strategies played to the basest, most fearful emotions and prejudices of the American people. I should be clear that I am not suggesting that differences on particular policies are morally intolerable; there were many complexities and nuances to deal with, as there always are when human beings are involved. However, the tone and mission of the civil rights movement clearly shows the moral good of liberalism over at least some forms of conservativism, regardless of particular instances about which interpretations and disagreements are possible. The Republican Party is still today powerful in this country because of the reprehensible strategies pursued by their politicians, such as Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,”pitting black against white and stoking fear between different groups. We must not forget that much of the power of the Republican Party comes from the defection of conservative Southern Democrats who were opposed to the civil rights movement, to the idea that all men are created equal and endowed with inalienable rights. To stand with them on this issue is to stand against the idea of what America is supposed to be.
Opposition to the Vietnam War was inextricably intertwined, for over a decade, with the civil rights movement. Again, it was liberals who opposed the war, and their opposition has been exonerated by history. The lies told by a generation of American politicians on this matter are now a matter of historical record. Like with the civil rights movement, a small band of disciplined, concerned liberals struggled for years before convincing a majority of Americans that the war was not only unjust to the Vietnamese people, but to the American people as well. Over fifty thousand young American men had to die before liberals were able to convince the American people to turn against the war. Not only did it shatter the lives of countless human beings, but it definitively shattered the American people’s ability to trust in their government. And once again, it was the conservatives who stayed the longest in support of that unjust war.
That is why I am a liberal. It has less to do with particular issues than it is a commitment to the promise of what the future of American can hold. Conservatives have never been committed to a better future; they are inevitably always defending past and present injustices. Conservativism is on the wrong side of history, and morality. There has been much talk of “moral values” recently, as defining the wave of conservative electoral dominance. I see nothing like actual morals and values eminating from conservatives in history. I see greed and the blind pursuit of power. I see fear rather than hope and compassion. It is in compassion, hope, and a commitment to bettering mankind, that America’s future lies. The liberals in every age have always been vindicated. That is why I am a liberal.