On Liberalism

Let's start with Churchill. He is reputed to have said "Any 20 year-old who isn't a liberal doesn't have a heart, and any 40 year-old who isn't a conservative doesn't have a brain." (This might be apocryphal, and after searching through several Google pages I have yet to find this quote properly attributed to a particular speech or moment in time--it isn't even consistently worded.) Now this can certainly be taken at face value--Churchill was the toriest of Tories, and played highly partisan politics all his life. But I'm also tempted to look at this as something of an excuse he might once have made for the period when he ditched the Tory Party and joined Lloyd George's Labour Party--which was not so much an ideological decision as it was practical: the Tories had collectively dismissed Churchill to the corner of the room, so to speak, and only Lloyd George was offering him any chance at influence and power. So it's definitely tempting to think that, whenever Churchill said this (if he said it), he might have been trying to assign loftier goals to his period with Labour.

But I've often wondered whether there might be yet another way to look at what Churchill said. Was Churchill speaking strictly of parties, or was he perhaps speaking more broadly than that? Liberalism can be defined as a broadness of approach, a belief that there is more than one way to skin a cat, that it is in one's best interest to try any number of solutions to a problem. Conservatism, on the other hand, can be defined as holding fast to certain core principles and not wasting time and resources on other methods. To put it in modern political terms, the capital-C Conservative approach to the economy seems to revolve principally around tax cuts, in the belief that if The People have more money and The Government less, The People will do a better job of spending that money and so buoying the econonmy than The Government ever could. Liberals, however, might argue that The Government's higher taxation, when directed to a wide variety of socially beneficial programs, creates a safety net for all of The People that allows them to better flourish in the long run.

So maybe Churchill meant this: maybe in your youth, when you don't really know anything, you are inclined to just keep trying things in the hope that they'll work; but by the time you've grown and matured, you've already experimented and you have a clearer, more practical experience of what and does not work. To put it another way: Ted Kennedy, at his advanced age, is as conservative in his Liberalism as Ronald Reagan was conservative in his Conservatism. It's not that Kennedy is necessarily right, or that Reagan was necessarily wrong, or vice versa; it's that they lived their lives and made certain decisions and reached certain conclusions, but in the end they both were/are very conservative even while standing on opposite sides of the ideological fence.

Me, I'm a liberal Liberal. But I'm definitely getting more conservative, now that I'm forty--I've seen a lot of things tried that didn't really pan out that well. But there's this live John Lennon recording when he spoke to an audience and said (I'm quoting from memory) "Okay, so flower power didn't work out, big deal, let's try something else." I'm a confirmed Roosevelt Democrat and always have been--and remember that in the first several years of his administration, FDR was willing to try anything and everything to resolve the Depression. When something didn't work out, he discarded it and tried something different. That may make governance a bit more chaotic (a bit?), but when it yields bonanzas like Social Security, then it's hard to argue with the approach. I think of it as governmental empiricism: the evidence of things seen. If an idea works, you will see the results you want to see; if it doesn't work, you see results you don't want to see and you move on. It is, as near as can be, the scientific method applied to government: create a theory, test it, and if the experiment doesn't work then you create a new theory. This, to me, is Liberalism--in the inherently chaotic world of government, it is the most creative and the most scientific approach to the host of problems that government must deal with.

And as you would guess from calling myself a Roosevelt Democrat, yes, I do generally believe in a big federal government. There are things that only the feds can do: if left to their own devices, the Southern states would have never ratified any civil rights legislation. It took, let's be blunt about it, considerable federal bullying for the South to toe that particular line, and I firmly believe that the nation is a better nation because of it--even though the Democrats clearly paid a price for doing the right thing (Nixon's infamous, and highly effective, Southern Strategy).

All of which is in aid of my saying Yes, I am a proud Liberal. And anybody who wants to demonize the word "liberal," or the deeply-considered, deeply-felt reasons I have for being a Liberal, is just wasting my time. You won't ever catch me criticizing a Conservative for being a Conservative per se; there's nothing wrong with the philosophy, even if I disagree with its practical applications. And I wish like crazy that Democrats would wake up and stand up and declare that yes, they too are Liberals, and proud of it. Then maybe we could start to get something done around here.

Addendum, Sept. 19th: Just ran across a website dedicated to true-blue liberals; it'll even allow you to buy t-shirts and blue wristbands proclaiming your pride in liberal ideals. If you're one of us, the site is worth checking out.