Nikil Saval: "Hated By The Right. Mocked By The Left. Who Wants To Be A 'Liberal' Anymore?"

Another largely superficial, terminological tangle trips up political thinking.

   However, there are substantial problems at the bottom of this. Not going to discuss them in depth now, but one of the main confusions some anti-liberal leftists have involves trying to represent liberalism as the position that's pushing the PC culture war bullshit. But the PC left is illiberal--as are the leftists who want to push toward some version of socialism. Neither the hard economic left nor the hard cultural left are liberal. As the article notes, conservatives now claim to be the main defenders of free speech. As it can't bring itself to say: they may be right. Since I'd say that liberalism goes where a concern for free speech goes, it may be that real liberals are now or will soon be conservatives. But obviously that's speculative and hand-wavy and faces some obvious problems.
   You'd think this wouldn't need to be stated...but I guess it does:

America’s version of liberalism has always been a curious one. In Europe, the word has traditionally meant a preference for things like limited government, separate private and public spheres, freedom of the press and association, free trade and open markets — what’s often described as ‘‘classical liberalism.’’ But the United States had many of those inclinations from the beginning. By the 20th century, American liberalism had come to mean something distinct. The focus on individual liberties was still there, but the vision of government had become stronger, more interventionist — ready to regulate markets, bust monopolies and spend its way out of economic downturns. After the end of World War II, this version of liberalism seemed so triumphant in the United States that the critic Lionel Trilling called it the country’s ‘‘sole intellectual tradition.’’ Its legislation legalized unions and, with Social Security, created a pension system; a health plan for older Americans, Medicare, was on the way.

   The liberalism I grew up with was basically civil libertarianism + a more positive/active/aggressive approach to civil rights + a recognition of the desirability of a substantial, but not unlimited, welfare state. Much of the contemporary left--especially the PC left--has fallen off the left edge of sanity. They hold, as a central, though often unacknowledged, principle that there should be no separation between public and private spheres. They are contemptuous of free speech. They think that government power need not be limited, so long as it is used to advance interests of "traditionally disadvantaged" groups. They have no respect for freedom of the press ("Can I get some muscle over here?"). In short, they are much, much, much more anti-liberal than conservatives. By comparison, our disagreements with conservatives are rather trivial. The fact that so many liberals are defending the most anti-liberal view to have come across the American political stage in decades is chilling. But this is exactly what happened during the paleo-PC days of the '80s and '90s. So it's not unexpected. However, the anti-liberal left of the neo-PC movement is much, much more radical than that of the paleo-PCs. And this time around, it's much more alarming and much more dangerous.
   Real liberalism might be helped if it just had a good bit of terminology to rally around--something unequivocally meaning, roughly, standard-issue American-style liberal in contrast to both socialist and PC crackpot. I hate such rhetorical nonsense, but it ought to be catchy or it won't work. Not my forte, that sort of thing. Somebody should get on it.