What is wrong with liberalism?
January 27, 2008
This post is a little short on citations so you’ll have to bear with me. Citations will come as I think about this some more.
I while back, a colleague of mine were talking politics and I brought up the concept of a social safety net. “I don’t believe in welfare,” he said, “because I don’t believe in subsidizing lazy people.”
“Not everyone who’s poor is lazy,” I reminded him. And of course he agreed. This is Southwest Virginia. We’re surrounded by hardworking people and poverty. And many families of enlisted military qualify for food stamps.
In a comments thread of the previous post, SteveJ characterizes liberal policies as racist because they privilege black people and insist that Democrats aren’t interested in addressing the problems of urban population centers. Of course, from my point of view the policies SteveJ resents are the policies intended to address those issues. But SteveJ is under the impression that Democrats won’t accept criticism of privileged groups and just want to hand them piles of money.
Elsewhere, I’ve had another discussion with someone who differentiates between the old-style “FDR” Democrats — who believed in hard work — and new-style “socialist” Democrats who are just after handouts. Since the New Deal policies of FDR were commonly called socialist or communist and the Republicans (especially the Bush family) have spent almost every moment since FDR trying to overturn these policies, sometimes with the help of so-called New Democrats like Bill Clinton, this image of liberalism seems entirely divorced from reality.
Almost any time I hear a conservative describe my own opinions to me, I get the sense that they’re describing some strange politics from Mars instead. Liberal policy-wonk folks have spilled a lot of ink talking about the difficulty we have in “framing” our positions — that is characterizing them — so that “regular people” can get what we’re about. The problem goes deeper than that. Just changing the frames isn’t going to have an effect. We’ve done a terrible job explaining to people why we support the policies we do. Until we can manage that, we’ll continue to see-saw between poverty and prosperity as generations who didn’t suffer under robber-baron ethics forget why we have all these silly laws and roll them back.
Posted in Basics of Liberalism
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January 27th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
Plain facts of history: 12 years of Republican and big business rule lead us into the Great Depression. A charismatic liberal Democrat guided us through it using all the tools of government to help the people without having the country wind up with either a Communist revolt or a fascist regime as many others did.
Liberalism isn’t about giving stuff to lazy people. It’s about helping everyone survive the excesses of capitalism.
January 27th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
I just think it’s amusing that the last time a Clinton was running for president, it was “the economy, Stupid.”
And also…dig the new look of your blog. :-)
January 29th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
> In a comments thread of the previous post, SteveJ characterizes liberal policies as racist because they privilege black people and insist that Democrats aren’t interested in addressing the problems of urban population centers.
No, I wouldn’t say Democrats in general aren’t interested in addressing these problems. That wouldn’t be fair, although I am convinced *some* in your ranks are concerned solely with the mere appearance of compassion. (”We want people to see that we care. Whether our efforts actually work is secondary.”)
What I am saying is that the left’s solutions have made the problems in the inner city worse, not better. But so many of you guys just keep advocating the same alleged fixes over and over. That’s not rational.
January 29th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
I think you’ll need to expound a bit on that: what policies have made things worse, not better, and how do we keep repeating them?
January 29th, 2008 at 10:05 pm
OK. We can start with welfare and public housing. Welfare has helped usher in a culture of dependence, fatherless households and general depravity. Public housing has given us drug-infested, broken-windowed, trashed-out junkyards where people take little personal pride in their dwellings. These are programs that the left defends to the hilt, even though their failures (and negative unintended effects) are as obvious as the daylight.
When I was a kid back in the 1960s, my grandparents lived in the worst part of the inner city. It was an almost all-black neighborhood and very poor. But the lawns were tended, families were intact and we could play outside safely. It would have been bizarre to hear of an able-bodied woman in that neighborhood completely dependent on the government and having four children by four different men. Or a 17-year-old popping out her second kid. But now, in these post Great Society Days, it isn’t bizarre at all. It’s commonplace.
January 30th, 2008 at 8:35 am
I think providing a social safety net is pretty much a government responsibility, not a “fix.” But I don’t think anyone is pleased with the tenements or the old welfare system.
Perhaps. It might also be related to the extraordinarily widening gap between the rich and the poor, the decay of worker’s rights, the decades-long defunding of anti-poverty measures and education, which is kind of the direction I’m leaning.
I don’t think much of LBJ’s Great Society survived Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. Some of them didn’t even survive LBJ; the programs started to be defunded almost as soon as they began. Then the programs were overhauled by the Gingrich revolution in the 90s. And despite the failures of that I don’t think anyone is campaigning on rolling those reforms back.
Perhaps the reason you think we defend these to the hilt is some conservatives simply want to replace these programs with nothing, which I’m sure would leave us worse off.
January 30th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
> I think providing a social safety net is pretty much a government responsibility, not a “fix.”
We see the role of government differently. I’m with the Founding Fathers on this one. Government exists chiefly to protect individual liberties. The federal government should exercise only those functions outlined in the Constitution and leave everything else up to the states. And government ought to leave the business of philanthropy to private charities.
I’m sure you could muster a good argument of necessity for a government-funded safety net. But we probably agree that the net is much too broad and supports too many able-bodied people.
> And despite the failures of that I don’t think anyone is campaigning on rolling those reforms back.
Maybe not, but whenever someone raises the issue of reform, the left freaks out.
In my home state, the government put a limit on the number of years a person can stay on welfare. The howls of the left were deafening. They said that welfare recipients would steal to make ends meet (not a very kind assessment of these people’s character). Crime would go through the roof. But it didn’t. Studies revealed that these people, when forced to work, actually got jobs. The tenderer-than-thou enablers were dead wrong.
January 31st, 2008 at 9:45 am
Nah, I don’t buy it. There’s also stuff in there about ensuring the domestic tranquility and promoting the general welfare.
We don’t support able-bodied people long enough. If they accept the concept of a social safety net, a lot of conservatives want to see those services go only to the genuinely destitute. (See Michelle Malkin & sCHIP). When people start to improve their situation, we take away far more of the program than they can replace with their own labor. As people start to climb out of the hole, we come along and steal the ladder. Is it any surprise that some people stop trying?
Sorry for your hearing. You realize that those limits are national, right? Have been for a decade?
January 31st, 2008 at 11:52 am
Well, I don’t even know where to start. We see the world very, VERY differently. We understand concepts of “domestic tranquility” and “general welfare” in radically conflicting ways. Our respective conceptions of self-reliance and a “helping hand” are at loggerheads with one another. With such basic departures on such foundational issues, maybe any meaningful dialogue is unrealistic. (Even though you do seem like a real nice guy — probably much smarter than I am, too.)
So maybe just learning to tolerate one another’s views is the best we can do. I’m game for that (on a good day, that is).
January 31st, 2008 at 2:33 pm
Having said that, I’ll leave you with this quote from one of the Constitution’s chief architects:
“The government of the United States is a definite government, confined to specified objects. It is not like state governments, whose powers are more general. Charity is no part of the legislative duty of the government.”
– James Madison, speech in the House of Representatives, January 10, 1794
January 31st, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Steve, a central idea of Democracy is the (admittedly liberal) idea that people from different backgrounds with different concerns, ideas, and priorities can get together and have a constructive conversation about those things. I know it’s been out of fashion for a few years (decades) but I still hold out hope that it’s possible.
January 31st, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Amen.
February 4th, 2008 at 1:33 pm
In the interest of conversation and on the topic of the Constitution and what the Founding Fathers intended, here is the quote:
“We, the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”
That quote is the first paragraph under the title “The Constitution of the United States of America.”
We are seeing now many sad effects of failure to hold these purposes in mind. One is that the government, facing a recession, is proposing an economic stimulus package that includes a check to taxpayers — actually a loan from ourselves to ourselves, since we will have to pay it back next year — so that people will have money to spend. This is a blatant transfer of the government’s massive budget troubles directly to individual citizens. It comes at a time when the most pressing problem consumers have is debt, and it gives the most vulnerable of them more debt. How is that better for the general welfare of people than raising the minimum wage? The recession we are trying to mitigate has come about because of greed at high levels in commodities and services that everyone needs — food, energy, housing, health care and prescription drugs — and in banks and financial institutions that took the money and ran with the sub-prime lending scam. This recession, and the consequences for individual citizens who are caught in the economic mud-slide, have been precipitated by a massive failure of government. Our government is supposed to have as its primary purpose the enabling of its citizens to live well and peacefully, and to raise and educate their children with the hope that those children will be able to do the same.