The Death of Liberalism

FROM THE ARCHIVES (Daily Nebraskan column)

The Death of Liberalism

Jeremy Patrick (jhaeman@hotmail.com)

Daily Nebraskan (www.dailyneb.com)

October 30, 2000

So when a great man dies
For years beyond our ken,
The light he leaves behind him lies
Upon the paths of men.
--Longfellow

My friends, we are gathered here today to celebrate the life and mourn the unfortunate passing of a great and controversial figure in our shared history: liberalism.
The exact cause of death is still unknown, but his ill health appears to have been due to politicians increasingly avoiding him and by the "New Left's" embrace of centrist, pragmatic politics.
If you will allow me to misquote Shakespeare, we come here today both to bury liberalism and to praise him. His life, although fleeting, and his death, although sudden, must not pass unremarked. We are bettered by his having lived and enriched by the memories and challenges he has left for us.
The details of his early years are well known. Born during the 18th Century (a child of rationalism and individualism) liberalism always held two things close to his heart: freedom and equality. His striving for these ideals led directly to the American Revolution and the Civil War, but, after these early successes, he disappeared from society for decades.
Yet liberalism was not really gone, only waiting. He made a sudden and dramatic reappearance in the early 20th Century. You see, my friends, he returned to us in our greatest time of need. This proverbial savior of mankind rescued us from the throes of a Great Depression.
When Americans were literally starving on the streets, his disciples enacted drastic reforms in his name. Social security. Minimum wage. Free access to labor unions.
His great and still controversial successes continued.
In just a few decades, he helped humankind make more progress toward recognizing the essential dignity of the individual than we had made in centuries.
He was instrumental in the Civil Rights movement and strongly advocated free speech, due process, women's rights and racial equality.
His ill health began in the early 1980s. He began to wither under the attacks of his enemies. Soon he was known as "bleeding-hearted," "weak" and "soft on crime." All of society's ills were attributed to him, whether deserved or not, including high divorce rates, drug use, "immorality" and AIDS. There was nothing he could do to retain his image.
His steadfast supporters, the Democratic Party, stayed with him as long as they could, but eventually they abandoned him as well. They considered him a liability and felt they shouldn't be seen with him anymore.
Issues central to liberalism, like abolishing the death penalty and providing expansive welfare aid, were dropped in an effort to appeal to middle-class voters. In his greatest time of need, only a few hard-core activists and intellectuals really stood by him.
In some ways, liberalism was simply too naïve to survive in our 21st Century. He championed the weak and the powerless: the homeless, persons on welfare, people accused of crimes, children attending inner-city schools. Yet their powerlessness became his; these groups were either unwilling or unable to vote, and he suffered for it.
Some of his most successful reforms were simply co-opted by his enemies. Education for all, a persistent theme of liberalism, became the agenda of a political party that once proposed to abolish the Department of Education.
Conservatives, the most strident critics of Social Security in the early days, became its biggest defenders. They became "compassionate," at least to the extent necessary to appeal to the middle-class and the elderly, and robbed liberalism of his greatest strength.
Ultimately, however, liberalism was a victim of his own success. By eliminating the most shocking examples of society's evils, he lost support to eliminate the rest. It was hard for people to understand why he kept advocating racial equality when they no longer read about lynchings or saw police attack protesters with dogs on television everyday. He had trouble convincing people about reproductive freedom when they had either forgotten or refused to acknowledge the thousands of women who died from illegal abortions.
Yet, although he is dead, liberalism's achievements have stood the test of time. His life opened up an unprecedented freedom for intellectual inquiry and debate; a freedom that, although many treasure, few remember its origin.
His great economic reforms, social security and the minimum wage, are still with us today and stronger now than ever before. His most controversial civil rights successes, such as Brown vs. Board of Education, Miranda vs. Arizona, and Roe vs. Wade have been repeatedly affirmed by the Supreme Court.
We should remember liberalism with joy and not despair. There will be other movements and other causes. His spirit will live on, regardless of the label it operates under.
When we think of liberalism, we should smile and be comforted with the knowledge that, if even for one brief shining moment, he made it possible for all of us to dream of something better. And this, my friends, is all one could ever ask for, in life or in death.

(c) 2000 Jeremy Patrick