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An Incomplete Analysis Of ?How Liberalism Self-Destructed?

Joel Kotkin?s analyses of contemporary America are almost always astute, and his discussion today of Politico of ?How Liberalism self-destructed? is no exception. ?Liberalism?s appeal,? he writes ?has diminished, particularly among middle-class voters, as it has become increasingly control-oriented and economically cumbersome,? and he proceeds to note a number of the nails liberals have been feverishly and foolishly nailing into their own political coffin:

• their abandonment of expanding the economy, ?preferring a mix of redistribution with redirection along green lines?;

• their being held hostage by their ?base of political shock troops, public employee unions?;

• their ?attachment to economically regressive policies such as cap and trade?;

• their eagerness ?to micromanage people?s lives,? leading them to obsess on the ephemeral [such as San Francisco?s war on Happy Meals] while missing the substantial?; and

• generally, their ?failure of ambition.?
  

Kotkin?s analysis is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn?t go far enough, oddly ignoring as it does the deflation or outright abandonment of what had been American liberalism?s animating principles ? its commitment to free speech and colorblind equality.

In that regard I have written far too many times to cite of what in one post (of many) I called ?The Degradation of American Liberalism.? And here, for example, I noted:

From John Stuart Mill on one of the central commitments of liberalism was to free speech. Insofar as American liberals have had a religion, one of its central tenets had always been the sanctity of the First Amendment?s free speech protections. In the late 20th Century, however, much of mainstream liberalism turned away from that formerly firm conviction. Feminists favored laws against pornography. Civil rights advocates favored punishment of hate speech. Campaign finance law reformers even favored limitations on political speech, and leading liberal academics (Owen Fiss at Yale, Cass Sunstein at Chicago) began to argue that the speech of some should be limited so that the speech of others could be enhanced....

And, from that same post:

From the 1830s through the 1960s people who opposed slavery, segregation, and discrimination were firmly committed to the principle of colorblindness, i.e., that everyone should be treated ?without regard? to race, ethnicity, religion. Indeed, this principle was widely regarded as the most fundamental of American core values, what Gunnar Myrdal called ?The American Creed.? Then, in what historically was the blink of an eye at the end of the 1960s, most liberals abandoned that principle and adopted ?race-conscious? remedies as necessary to achieve racial equality....

As I concluded here,

For almost the entirety of its history in this country liberalism has stood proudly and firmly in favor of free speech and colorblind racial equality. This generation of liberals, however, has discarded both of those principles and now spends most of its academic time inventing new ways of trashing them.

What a mess of liberalism they?ve made.

Yes, as Obama might say, they could. And they did.

Full post as published by Discriminations on November 19, 2010 (boomark / email).