Liberalism, and How It Got A Bad Name

I think one of the most provocative columnists in America is Eric Alterman, who writes a column for the progressive The Nation magazine. His regular column, "The Liberal Media", makes a point often to show how much conservatives dominate the American mainstream media in matters of editorializing and opinion.


Anyone who has ever opened a regional newspaper or listened to AM Talk Radio in the United States already knows about liberal demonizing. Conservative mouth-movers like Rush Limbaugh dominate in part because the media is corporate-owned and doesn't want too many myriad voices to be heard. The other reason is that, thanks to decades of prosperity, the United States has become a center-right nation. This was achieved in part because of the threat of totalitarian regimes abroad and the sense that the Right, being most fervently anti-statist, would be better at "fighting off" the Soviets or the Chinese or Cubans or the Nicaraguans or now the Islamic-fascist cells because they were the party with the best chest-thumps on national defense.



Liberals were often too concerned about "squishy" things like civil rights, pre-grade school education for kids, health care programs for the poor and the elderly, etc. Some of these programs, like Medicare for the elderly, were hard fought campaigns that, once achieved and accepted by the public, were taken for granted by the most conservative members of the middle class, the largest voting block in America. They then went back to the conservatives when a right-populist like Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush would come along to convince the electorate that a lot of government tax money was being spent on people who were bad, or it was being wasted.


The funny thing was no Republican candidate of the Reagan/Bush variety cared about wasting money for weapons projects. Even if the Pentagon didn't want a weapons system, like the Abrams Tank or the new F-22 fighter plane, the money was thrown at the system because it created jobs.

A long time ago Republicans cared about deficits. After Reagan, deficits didn't matter so much as long as the rich weren't taxed the way they were in European or other developed nations. Liberals in the Democratic Party had a tough time gaining their footing with the voters as long as the G.O.P. came promising more tax cuts, more defense spending in the hundreds of billions, and lots of talk about being patriotic.


It's hard not to be a "patriot" if all your government asked you to do if you're an average striving middle-class, middle american is to take a tax cut and not mind if some body's Latino or Black kid goes off to fight the wars.

And,oh, I forgot: all the spending combined with and tax cuts. They would balance the budget anyway, because programs like Medicare and Head Start for pre-school kids in working-class areas would be cut anyway. Just throw that in with the "waste" in government spending. Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich and his tax-cuts-for-the-rich pals even had a term for this: "starving the beast". The "beast" being the social safety net designed to save senior citizens, kids and the unemployed (especially in times like this current economic panic) from ruin.

The last Presidents who called themselves liberals now and then (Franklin D. Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson) believed in a strong defense but they also believed in a strong society for all.


"Liberal columnist, blog-ger and author Eric Alterman sits down for an interview with FORA.tv Founder and CEO Brian Gruber to discuss his most recent book Why We're Liberals, the meaning of liberalism, and the state of politics in the United States.

"Eric Alterman is distinguished professor of English at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York and professor of journalism at the Graduate School of Journalism at CUNY, as well as the liberal columnist for The Nation and Altercation blog-ger for Media Matters for America(formerly at MSNBC.com) in Washington, DC, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress in Washington, DC"