Liberals, You Have to Stand Up to Bullies!

Except those times when we tell you bullies have rights, too. Can't you get anything right?

Photo by Matt Collamer on Unsplash

***This is longer than my usual piece but I hope you’ll bear with me. It’s been a long time coming and I had a lot to say. Comments, as always are open and welcome. I accept adult differences of opinion, but I’ll block the stupid, unproductive stuff. Forewarned.

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Those of you who know me know that whenever the talk gets around to our political affiliations and beliefs, I have no problem calling myself a Liberal. It’s what I am, what I’ve always been, and what I’ll always be. A Liberal. It’s because my beliefs are decidedly liberal in politics, in philosophy, in emotions, in life. But because that word ‘liberal’, used with or without a capital L, is thrown out there so often by nearly everyone who isn’t liberal to mean everything but what it really means, I feel the need from time to time to defend my liberal tendencies.

This is coming up again right here at Substack, where some of us had been working to rid this fine site of real, modern-day Nazis and Nazi-like poseurs. In the arguments using ‘free speech’ as the be-all, end-all in any discussion involving even a hint of censorship, it came down to us nasty liberals again. Apparently, we’re thorns in everyone’s sides—on the right, on the left, and somewhere in between. If only we liberals would mind our own business.

In this latest skirmish, called ‘The Nazi Problem’, this would have been our chance to just shut up about it. But we didn’t do that.

Damn liberals…. Don’t we get that whole ‘free speech’ thing? Don’t we know by now that free speech applies to everyone, even and especially the bad guys? Why can’t we just live and let live? Why can’t we just keep quiet?

We get that a lot. So here I am, a Living Breathing Unabashed Unrepentant Liberal, trying to explain for the umpteenth time what it is we Liberals are really trying to do. Most of it has nothing to do with what they think we’re trying to do. Our agenda is pretty simple. Nothing nefarious about it. Nothing naive about it, either.

I’ve written entire essays about what it means to be a Liberal (see examples below). I’ve inserted important differences between Liberals and everyone else countless times in countless forums and venues. It shouldn’t have been that hard to set in stone just exactly what it means to be ‘Liberal/liberal’.

I keep forgetting this isn’t the first time. It isn’t even the leventy-leventh time. Just now I went looking for some examples of my own explanations, and I ran into so many I’m dizzy from it. Clearly I’ve never stopped being That Liberal. And clearly I’ve never been able to explain it well enough.

So let me try again:

A snippet from Here’s a Thought: Let the Liberals Do It:

 Liberals have a long history of getting things done. We pulled the entire country out of a great depression by hiring our citizens to do meaningful busy-work, by using our charitable might, by giving dignity and hope back to a country mired in poverty and hopelessness.

 We built the unions and gave workers a voice. We put an end to child labor. We fought to give every adult citizen the right to vote, no matter their gender or color. We helped the poor and the elderly by creating Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. We passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act, the Clean Air act, and the Clean Water Act. We ended a recession that nearly destroyed the middle class. 

 We did all that and more against the wishes — and the might — of fat cats and right wingers who sorely wanted what we’re heading for today: a country ruled by non-contributing despots whose only interests are power, greed, and self-preservation.

 We are not that country and we never will be. The Trump phenomenon was an anomaly, destined as a vivid warning in our history books, a long chapter on how close we came to letting our democracy die.

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The quote below, about our doubts and fears, comes from a piece I wrote called Take Me to Our Leader , almost exactly 14 years ago, at my now-defunct blog, Ramona’s Voices. (A blog I ran for 12 full years, from Obama to Biden, without a moment’s deviation from liberal thought.) I’ve included this in case you think I’m not fully aware of all the criticisms about us and you might feel inclined to point them out again…

We lost our glow long ago, when we decided the worst thing we could ever do to ourselves was to get in the position of being considered Socialists.  We even dropped "social programs" from our lexicon lest someone should suspect us of Commie leanings. 

We either forgot or ignored the real contributions unions had brought us since before our grandparents were young, and turned on them just when we needed them the most.  We let the actor Ronald Reagan make the first incision and then stood back, wringing our hands while the strength of our labor movement slowly seeped away.

Our voices were no more than mere whispers when American jobs by the millions moved to foreign countries.  No representative howls from these quarters when American manufacturing and American wages moved toward the downslide while corporate America's profits went soaring through the stratosphere.

We never completely bought the notion that all was right with the world, that our path to prosperity was named "deregulation", that the people in power had even a nibble of a clue, but every time we turned around, someone wicked or more cunning was stealing our soapbox.  So we shut up.  Or so it seemed, for all the good our grousing and complaining did.

For eight long Bushwhacked years we moaned and groaned and predicted the predictable outcomes.  And when they came we got nothing for our troubles except to be able to utter a wholly unsatisfying "We told you so". 

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As if being a Liberal wasn’t enough, I’m also a life-long, never-say-die Democrat. It’s no secret that we Democrats have had a tendency to shoot ourselves in our collective feet:

Some on our side (not me) went after Hillary over that awful, terrible, wicked, foolish word ‘deplorables’, predicting she’d lose the presidency over it—never mind the truly awful, terrible, wicked, foolish words coming out of Donald Trump’s mouth at the exact same time. Then there was the matter of her emails. Turned out to be a big nothing, but even the left latched on. Then there was the absolute lie that she was tremendously unpopular and wouldn’t make a good president. (I’ll remind you, she was running against Donald Trump.) So in the end she didn’t ‘win’, though she beat Trump in the popular vote by many millions. Big mistake.

Some on our side (not me) are doing the same to Kamala Harris. Their claims that she is ineffective and unpopular don’t hold water, yet those ideas are out there blowing in the wind, fodder for the Republicans and anyone else who would like nothing better than to end the Biden/Harris administration, for no good reason that I can see, given their remarkable aid so far in climbing out of the Trump hole.

And now there are some (not me) who have reluctantly slowed down their chiding of Joe Biden for his wimpy acceptance of Trump’s Genghis-like marauding just long enough to tell the President not to use such tough language against Trump lest he alienate those mythical Trump turncoats who might otherwise come over to our side.

And we Liberals sputter and snort and sigh and say in varying audible levels: OMGWhatBullshit. Because we Liberals know bullshit when we see it. We’ve been pointing it out for decades.

That’s not bragging, it’s a fact. Look it up.

Oh, right. You can’t. Because we liberals get thrown in with everyone from Progressives (nice enough, but they don’t like us, either), to neoliberals (Like saying a sweet potato is a potato because they both have the word ‘potato’ in them.), to leftists (who seem to outright HATE us), to everyone on the other side of the political spectrum. Or any side. Nobody really knows what we know: that, as Liberals, we’re not like anyone else. We’d like everyone to stop grouping us into groups where we don’t belong.

Every single thing I’ve ever published, politically and maybe even otherwise, comes from a Liberal point of view. I can say without any hesitation that I know what a Liberal is.

This is who we are:

We are Matt Santos, the character Lawrence O’Donnell created for The West Wing and gave voice to:

"Liberals got women the right to vote. Liberals got African-Americans the right to vote. Liberals created Social Security and lifted millions of elderly people out of poverty. Liberals ended segregation. Liberals passed the Civil Rights Act, the Voting Rights Act. Liberals created Medicare. Liberals passed the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. What did Conservatives do? They opposed them on every one of those things...every one! So when you try to hurl that label at my feet, 'Liberal,' as if it were something to be ashamed of, something dirty, something to run away from, it won't work, Senator, because I will pick up that label and I will wear it as a badge of honor." --
(See full transcript here)

We are JFK:

"If by a 'Liberal' they mean someone who looks ahead and not behind, 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 rights and their civil liberties - someone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal', then I'm proud to say I'm a Liberal."

We are George McGovern, that ‘staunch liberal’ who gained only 17 electoral votes in his bid for the presidency against Richard Nixon in 1972, making it the most lopsided election in American history. (I’ll save you the trouble of reminding me, while I remind you that George McGovern was a good man. A decent man. A man not afraid to call himself a liberal. And to live it.)

I always thought of myself as a moderate liberal, a fighter for peace and justice. I never thought of myself as being all that far out.

Also: I am a liberal and always have been - just not the wild-eyed character the Republicans made me out to be.

Liberals are not Progressives (I don’t know the difference, exactly, but apparently Progressives do), we’re not leftists, we’re not centrists, we’re not wimps, we’re not naive, and we’re not snowflakes. We’re fighters, though the people we fight against would prefer that nobody believes that.

If we hadn’t been fighters we could never have accomplished the things we’ve accomplished as this country grew. It’s not that others weren’t there to help. There were times when even the Republicans went against their power-brokers and their sugar-daddies to do the right thing. But Liberals do the right thing consistently. We work for the people. That’s our hallmark. And if we fail—and we have, miserably—it’s not because we didn’t try to do the right thing. We did try. We do try.

This comes off as bragging, they’ll remind me, but is it bragging to admit that some of us—maybe most of us—try to do the right thing? There was a time when we were proud of doing the right thing. It wasn’t just accepted, it was expected, and we didn’t call ourselves ‘liberals’, we called ourselves Americans.

In a piece I wrote just days before the 2020 election, a piece called The Trump Regime’s Fatal Flaw: They Don’t Understand Americans, I tried to explain why the Trump days will turn out to be an anomaly—and why we couldn’t help but win that November:

The war [WW II)] was a constant backdrop and my parents were among millions who took the war effort seriously. The propaganda of the day was heavily into duty and obligation — every American citizen was called into service. We couldn’t allow one man, one regime, to win his war against humanity.

It marked us, and we were never the same. Our country grew more and more precious as the war years went on. The more lives that were lost protecting us, the more we persevered — for them. And when the war was over and we grew strong again, our pride grew even stronger. We did it! We won!

Generations of us grew up believing we had an obligation to our country. When JFK said, in his 1961 Inaugural Address, “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”, it wasn’t a demand, it was a reminder. This is what Americans do.

We’re in a different century now — 20 years into a different century — and if you cancel out the noise, you’ll find the majority of Americans still believe in some sort of obligatory service. Our obligation is to keep our country strong, not by strong-arming the government, but by strengthening its core principles. By voting as if voting is a serious matter. By entering into public service not as glory-seekers but as true public servants. By working to ease the lives of those who are vulnerable and less fortunate. By recognizing that threats like global warming and raging pandemics are our burdens, our responsibility. Our survival is in our hands.

We are a nation of laws, of regulations, of justice and reckoning. We reject greed and corruption and frown on nepotism. We demand equality, we celebrate diversity, we recognize our enemies, both foreign and home-grown.

I’m not alone in attempting to take on this struggle. There are millions of us who have lived a lifetime of peace and turmoil, and peace and turmoil, and peace and turmoil again, yet have never seen anything like the Trump years. We’re not about to shut our eyes to it. We’ll never pretend it isn’t happening. We’ll never accept that it’s the way Americans want to live.

We’ll do what we can and what we must. In that sense we’re all liberals. Except those who aren’t. And we know who they are.

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