ABOUT LIBERALS
In his book Don’t Think of an Elephant, George Lakoff' says that we Liberals must first define our basic moral
values and then present our policies and programs as means to fulfill these
values. The
following is a clear and simple expression of our Liberal values and how they
differ from Conservative values. In
recruiting members of our Lake Hills Liberals, we have presented each one with
these values and each agreed. Our values
are the basis for everything we do.
Our Liberal Values
We believe that:
· All Americans should have the freedoms and opportunities.
· We each have the responsibility to protect the freedoms
and opportunities of all other Americans.
· We and our government should be competent and
compassionate,
taking
care of ourselves to the best of our abilities and
helping
those who have fewer freedoms and opportunities.
· Our
We believe in community, equality,
freedom, opportunity, rights, equity, justice, fairness, responsibility,
competence, compassion and cooperation. More simply, we believe that we
constitute a community whose members have equal opportunities and
responsibilities. Our main difference from Conservatives is that they
believe that people different from themselves should have fewer freedoms and
opportunities.
We believe that our rights (freedoms
and opportunities) are only limited by the rights of others. We may disagree on
the details: For example, who are members of our American community? Are
fetuses considered to have the same rights as people? When should children have
the rights held by adults? Should fathers have the same parental rights as
mothers, even before the birth of their child? Do we include only citizens, or
also legal immigrants, or also illegal immigrants? How much should our freedom
of expression be limited when it offends others? How many rights should
criminals be forced to give up? How much should threats to our security allow
us to limit our rights?
One
question is whether our compassion should focus upon helping specific
disadvantaged groups, or whether it should focus upon changing our
institutions. But this is generally a
false dichotomy. We have to administer
first aid to those who need help now. We
also have to find what is causing their injuries and prevent it. Being competent requires both short and long
term solutions.
Liberals
have provided both. Conservatives have
generally opposed both. For example,
they opposed giving poverty program money to the poor (because it motivates
them to stay poor) and opposed hiring counselors and others to help the poor
become more self sufficient because the money didn’t go directly to the poor.
Historic Liberalism
Our liberal values originated as part
of the enlightenment of the 18th century. They were expressed by
Our Declaration of Independence
contained “All men are created equal.” and “With due
respect for the opinions of mankind …“. But ‘all men’ did not in practice
include men without property, nor women, nor slaves of African ancestry. Our American
expression of liberal values as ’life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’
emphasizes community less than the French expression of ‘liberty, equality and
fraternity’.
Many
Victorious Struggles
Liberals
have won many struggles to extend and enhance our freedoms and opportunities,
against opposition from conservatives.
·
1690’s - John Lock struggled to
place parliamentary limits upon the English King and this occurred.
·
1770’s - Our liberal colonists
led the struggle against the English and their Tory supporters (who were the
conservatives of that time) to free us from colonial rule.
·
1800’s – Due
to liberals, the right to vote was gradually expanded to include men without
property and our national legislators came to be elected directly by voters
instead of by state legislators.
·
1830’s – 1860’s – Opposed by southern
conservatives, liberals supported abolition of slavery. Through our devastating Civil War, slavery was abolished.
·
1890’s – Liberals called
populists opposed exploitation of farmers and others by giant corporations. Robert La Follett fought
monopolistic pricing by railroads.
Theodore Roosevelt obtained trust-busting legislation to dismantle large
monopolies.
·
1890’s – Muck-raking journalists exposed many abuses of
consumers and workers which led to liberals passing regulatory legislation and
agencies
consumer protections.
·
1890’s – 1920’s – Liberals supported
legalizing property, voting and other rights for women. Conservatives opposed them. Women obtained these rights.
· 1930’s – Responding to the great depression, liberal FDR and his New Dealers won the struggle
against conservatives to regulate markets, provide a safety net (including
social security) and ensure the rights of labor to organize. After World War II,
macro-economic Keynesian fiscal policies were adopted to counter business
cycles.
· 1940’s - As occurred during and immediately after previous wars, liberties were
threatened in the name of security.
Japanese Americans were interned in concentration camps. But President Truman began racial integration
of the military. As the cold war
mounted, conservatives increased their attacks upon liberals, but McCarthyism
has become a bad word.
·
1960’s – Liberals mounted a civil rights movement to eliminate legal supports for racial
segregation. President Johnson managed
the passage of civil rights legislation
·
1960’s – As poverty amid
affluence was noted, liberals led by President Johnson initiated the ‘War on Poverty’. Poverty was much reduced;
to increase again under conservative Reagan, reduce under liberal
·
1960’s - Against corporate
opposition, liberals won the passage of much environmental legislation, including
the endangered species, clean air and clean water acts.
·
1960’s and 1970’s – Liberals led the
struggle to end the Vietnam War.
·
1980’s – Legislation to assist
our elderly and handicapped people was passed
·
1990’s – 2000’s – Liberals struggled
against Christian conservatives to grant equal freedoms and opportunities to
gays and lesbians. Gays and lesbians are
gaining more rights. More than 60% of
younger Americans now support equal rights for gays and lesbians.
· 2000’s – The newest group to have its freedoms and opportunities
opposed by conservatives are our immigrants.
Beginning in the 1820’s, conservatives placed restrictions for the first
time on immigration to
Just as we couldn’t
enforce prohibition of alcohol, we can’t enforce prohibition of immigration in
response to work opportunities.
Conservatives have only hurt themselves by losing the votes of our fast
growing immigrant population. Liberals now support legalizing immigrants who come,
take needed jobs, and will help support our social security.
Liberals have always won, often only after long
and costly struggles and sometimes setbacks, as are occurring now with our
increasing poverty rates. We can wish
that liberals had undertaken some of these struggles earlier and won more
quickly, but history can’t be redone.
Our task now is to
struggle strongly to enhance freedoms and opportunities for not just all
Americans, but for all humans. We have many
unfinished tasks, including removal of dictators, peaceful settling of disputes
between and within countries, enforcement of human rights internationally,
provision of adequate safety nets, protection of our environment and. reduction
of corporate oppression.
Our
liberal values can be easily used as a basis for our liberal positions
concerning: tax policy, balanced budgets, social investments, social services,
protection of civil rights, equal gender rights, women's pregnancy choices,
same-sex marriage, environmental protection, regulation of corporate and other
responsibilities, regulation of campaign contributions and lobbying, and most
if not all other positions shared by most liberals. By extending our community
to include all of our world's people, we base our foreign policy upon the same
values.
Our American Dream
Our American Dream is: If we work hard
and smart, we should be able to prosper.
We should be competent, taking care of ourselves to the best of our
ability so as not to be a burden on others.
We should be compassionate toward our less fortunate. his overlaps with our liberal values. We should all have the same freedoms and
opportunities. We should be competent.
Most Americans Hold Liberal Values
Overtime, our values have been defined
to include an increasing number of freedoms and opportunities for an increasing
variety of people.
Most Americans are liberals. Due to the
mischaracterization and demonization of the term ‘liberal’ by conservatives,
some Americans who hold our liberal values are afraid to identify themselves as
liberals. They identify themselves instead as ‘progressive’, or ‘populist’. The
problem is that these terms are not as well defined as ‘liberal’ in terms of
values which Americans have struggled to realize since before the American
Revolution. Thankfully, the demonization has not affected most liberals.
‘Liberal’ is being used by an increasing majority of them.
Teachers,
local, state and federal employees and other providers of social services are
liberals, whether or not they have applied the term to themselves. Any provider of social services is
inconsistent if they also support uncompassionate conservatives, who
continually seek to reduce funding for social services.
Political Orientations and Party Affiliation
Expressed simply, Americans identify
their party affiliation as 33% Democrats, 33% Independents and 33% Republicans.
Virtually all Democrats are liberals, that is, they hold liberal values. Two
thirds of Independents (22% of all Americans) lean toward liberal values. One
third of Independents (11% of all Americans) lean toward conservative values.
Virtually all Republicans lean toward conservative values.
Thus, about 60% of liberals identify
themselves as Democrats and 40% identify themselves as Independents. The 40% of
liberals who identify themselves as Independents instead of Democrats may do so
because they dislike the lack of ideological purity that must occur in a
successful political party, the failure of the Democrats to clearly express
their values, and/or their disorganization. As Will Rogers said, “I don’t
belong to an organized party. I’m a Democrat.”
Since more than half of Americans are
liberals, who almost always support Democrats, why have Republicans won so many
recent elections? Superior Republican message clarity and political
infrastructure is partly responsible. In addition, Republicans more often favor
our wealthy and powerful and have been more willing to reward campaign
contributors, such that they raise many more funds, although this corruption
may hurt them.
Liberal vs. Conservative Values
We liberals believe in community,
freedom and responsibility. Conservatives limit their definition of all three. By contrast, conservatives reduce the number
of people whom they consider to be members of our American Community. They are less tolerant of diversity. They define some of our people as second
class, who should not have the same freedoms and opportunities as the rest of
us. Christian Conservatives try to
impose their religious values on everyone, thus reducing our religious freedom.
They are less compassionate. They support the wealthy and powerful instead
of equality. They argue against using
government to provide needed services which cannot be provided well by
individuals or private businesses. They
argue in principle (but not in practice) for individual as opposed to
cooperative effort, and are less compassionate.
Conservatives limit community
membership to people like themselves in their often red-state rural, small town
and suburban residences. They deny many freedoms to many people, but would
grant freedoms to corporations. They deny responsibility by people,
corporations and government to not infringe upon the freedom of people
different than themselves. They would abolish regulations, which protect
workers, consumers and community members from corporate irresponsibility.
A society based upon our liberal values
would be stable, free and prosperous. A society based upon conservative values
would be the opposite. This is demonstrated by the changes in our society since
the conservatives took control in 2000.
Traditional Conservatives
Most
traditional Conservatives (who could be called Red State Conservatives) live in
rural areas, small towns and homogeneous suburbs, with little ethnic diversity. Gays and poor people are likely to be in the
closet or to have left for more accepting urban areas with more opportunities.
They
limit their belief in freedom, opportunity and compassion to people like
members of their homogeneous communities.
Their understanding of our American Community excludes many who differ
from themselves. They don’t understand
the need for programs which address urban challenges which result from large
dense heterogeneous populations, including poor and other people who have fled
from their communities. They regard
compassionate programs as wasteful handouts to the unworthy, driven by
vote-seeking liberals. They oppose
immigration of people different from themselves. Even though our senatorial system produces
more federal expenditures in Red States than these states pay in federal
revenues, they support less government, less taxes and less regulation. They doubt that governments can be competent
and believe that compassionate social services should be provided only by local
governments or better yet, privately supported.
Traditional
Conservatives trust unregulated markets and support balanced federal budgets.
Originally isolationists, Traditional Conservatives parted from Libertarians to
become Cold War supporters who supported military competition with the
Michael
Lerner’s The Left Hand of God and Thomas Frank’s, What’s the Matter with
Christian Conservatives
After
Barry Goldwater carried only
Christian
Conservatives (particularly prevalent in southern states) want to restrict
freedoms and opportunities for everyone to only those sanctioned by their
religious doctrines. Holding Old
Testament and Pauline based doctrines, they want to restrict the freedoms of
secular people, Christians, liberals, women, gays, etc.
Influenced
by the Culture of Discontent promoted by hate radio and television and by
Christian Conservative ministers, many Christian Conservatives have expressed
their discontent concerning secularism, bigness in government and private
organizations and globalization as conspiracy theories concerning intellectuals
(so-called cultural elites), communists (defined broadly enough to include all
liberals), Jews and others who are presumably responsible for the trends they
oppose.
Libertarians
Libertarians
include many secular White men who view themselves as successful. Not recognizing the contributions that their
parents, teachers and others have made to their success, they imagine
themselves as self-made. They don’t
believe in community nor in compassion.
They
view life as a competition in which everyone should make their own success or
suffer the consequences. They don’t
believe they should pay FICA or other taxes to support others. They support freedoms for themselves with
limited government, no safety net and low taxes. However, they may support programs from which
they benefit (such as veterans’ benefits or Social Security, arguing that they
have earned them through their military service or employment. Libertarians believe in civil rights,
especially freedom from government regulation and intrusion into their lives. They also tend to be isolationists, not
wanting government to get involved internationally. Our best known libertarian is Congressman Ron
Paul.
New Conservatives
Although there is not a mass movement
of New Conservatives (often referred to as neo-cons), they include President
Bush and many of his top officials, as well as many Congressional
Republicans. They believe that the
In seeking power, they have
transgressed all politicized our executive branch (including the justice
department), appointed incompetent political followers to offices, disregarded
science which refutes their messages, deceived our public, and corruptly given
enormous numbers of large no-bid contracts to those who have donated to their
campaigns, also giving them greatly reduced taxes and reduced monitoring
contract performance and tax compliance.
Our New Conservatives can best be described as Deceptive, Incompetent and Corrupt.
Disgruntled Conservatives
Like
liberals, many Traditional Conservatives and libertarians are now disgruntled
with the deception, incompetence and
corruption of the neo-con Bush administration, including the federal
deficits, growth of government, the Medicare drug legislation, FEMA
incompetence, our vigilante Iraq War, and invasions of privacy. Some Traditional Conservatives are realizing
that their values are more like liberal values than neo-con values, although
they find it difficult to support Democrats after decades of opposing them.
Some
Christian Conservatives are disgruntled because Bush gives lip service to their
causes just prior to elections, but has been able to enact little of the
legislation that they want. Some want to
leave politics to focus on religion.
Others are adopting more liberal environmental and socially
compassionate stances. They are fragmented. The 30% of the voters who still support Bush
may include 15% Christian Conservatives, 10% Traditional Conservatives and 5%
Libertarians.
Profit Focused Enterprises
Business enterprises are not a
political group, but they provide primary support to Conservative political
infrastructure, candidates and office holders.
They focus upon making profits, with other values having lower priority.
Competition for profits influences them to infringe on the rights of their
suppliers, employees, customers and others. We allow them to have the same
freedoms a people, such that their powerful resources are used to unfairly
influence us and our governments.
We should attempt to encourage or
through regulation require that enterprises give a higher priority to the
rights of others. They should pay for their negative impacts upon others. We
should limit their influence upon our values and upon government policy.
Hawks and Doves
War is the most extreme intrusion into
the freedom of those it victimizes, both combatants and non-combatants. Hawks
allow defense and war a higher value than many rights and compassion, while
Doves are unwilling to allow defense and war to infringe upon our rights and
compassion as much. There are more hawks than doves in
Both Democrats and Republicans split
between doves and hawks, but the Democrats have a higher proportion of doves
and the Republicans have a higher proportion of hawks. But fear of foreign
threats may override liberal values. So Harry Truman,
Using the ‘cold war’ and the so-called
‘war on terrorism’ as threats, the Republicans have been able to attract some
of the votes of the Hawkish liberals. They have thus won some elections even
though there are fewer conservatives than there are liberals. The failure of
the Vietnam War convinced people to convert from hawks to doves. The failure of
the current Iraqi War may also convince people to convert to doves.
Responding
to Conservative Attacks
Instead
of defending their own values and policies, conservatives often prefer to
attack liberals. They use such epitaphs
as extremist, elitist, representing special interests, socialistic, and weak in
defending our nation from violence. We
should not respond defensively as whinny victims. We
should respond aggressively as proud mainstream liberals.
We liberals are
mainstream. We represent the best of our American
traditions expressed by our declaration of independence; constitution; and
victorious struggles to abolish slavery, protect farmers and other workers from
railroad and other trusts, protect consumers from unsafe products, guarantee
the rights of women to vote and own property, provide safety nets to protect
people from economic cycles and other misfortunes, eliminate legal
discrimination against blacks and other minorities, provide opportunities for
our poor, provide equal freedoms and opportunities for all people of whatever
sexual orientation, and provide legal pathways for immigrants to obtain work in
our United States. Public opinion polls
show that a majority of Americans agree with our liberal values of liberty,
equality, responsibility and community.
We
are not elitist. Just compare the
composition of the delegates to the 2004 Democratic and Republican
Conventions. We are inclusive, including all of the various groups cited above,
whom the conservatives have attempted exclude from rights (freedoms and
opportunities) enjoyed by the rest of us.
As
liberals, we support the public interest
which consists in enhancing freedoms and opportunities for all, and especially
people who have fewer freedoms and opportunities for the rest of us. The conservatives are the ones who support
special interests by corruptly granting huge benefits to the powerful and
wealthy.
Unfortunately
some liberal supporters do have special interests which they demand our liberal
politicians cater to in return for their support. Some examples are labor union protection of
their health care benefits has been a major obstacle to securing universal
health coverage; automobile workers have joined their employers in resisting
raising vehicle mileage standards; teachers and other public employees have
sometimes placed a high priority on job security at the expense of competence;
senior citizens have resisted taxation of social security benefits even for
wealthy seniors. Legislators whether
liberal or conservative vote themselves benefits far beyond those they provide
to their constituents and exempt themselves from laws that apply to
others. Catering to these demands is not
liberal and should be strongly resisted.
Loyalty to our friends and
supporters should not extend to allowing them to take advantage of others.
We support competence by
people and by government. We believe that
within their capabilities, people should be self-supporting and supportive of
others. We want to provide help to
people who are attempting to help themselves.
We find it difficult to help people who irresponsibly refuse to do their
share. With limited resources, we want
to help others where our help will make a difference. In so far as our institutions reward those
who help themselves, we don’t want to help others who don’t need our help. Nor to we want to waste our resources trying
to help those who refuse to be helped.
We recognize that it is often difficult to distinguish who belongs in
which triage category.
We have always supported
free private and public enterprise, only resisting the capitalist premise that the
only bottom line is that top decisions should be made by and returns from
production mostly accrue to the providers of capital. We believe that where necessary to stop
external costs imposed by unfair, unsafe and polluting practices upon workers,
consumers, suppliers and others, effective regulations should be imposed. We also believe that powerful businesses
should be stopped from corrupting legislators through lobbying and campaign
donations to obtain benefits at the expense of our public.
We
believe that our present Bush administration and Republican-controlled congress
is deceptive, incompetent and corrupt, beliefs now shared by 2/3rds of
Americans. We strongly favor open transparency in government, competence for both
our people and our government and honesty.
We
believe in strongly defending our
country against violence, including finding cures for diseases, protection
from drunk drivers, reducing the availability of guns primarily used for crime,
effective responses to natural disasters, and attacks by domestic and foreign
terrorists. We believe that such treats
should be countered legally through research and police action, with military
force only rarely necessary and then conducted through international
auspices. We believe that these threats
should not be used as an excuse for extra-legal or legal extreme government
secrecy, invasion of personal privacy, unnecessary military procurement of
weapons suited only to conducting wars against non-existing technologically
advanced militarily powerful enemies, or for partisan attacks on the loyalty of
opposition politicians. We strongly
believe in strengthening our police and other first responder resources.
Following
George Lakoff’s suggestions, we should not accept conservative framing of discussions,
including their using such terms as moral majority (when conservatives
represent neither), liberal media bias (which is demonstratively not true),
socialized medicine, death tax (which is really a tax upon inherited unearned
large wealth, much of which escapes taxation anyway through using original
values without capital gains), reform (which often means lowering taxes and
increasing benefits for the powerful and wealthy), and numerous other terms.
Instead,
we should continually refer to our mainstream liberal values, inclusiveness,
our general welfare, competence and compassion, cost-controlled Medicare for
all, birth tax (which is the amount of per capita federal tax faced by every
newborn) and similar terms which accurately portray our values.
We
should aggressively promote our beliefs while disclosing the deceptive attacks
and frequent hypocrisy of our opponents.
We should be Happy Warriors. Let
them be Whinny Victims.
To Win
Elections
Most
liberals were disgusted by the outcome of the 2000 presidential election. Instead of running on the Peace and
Prosperity produced by the Clinton-Gore administration, Gore offered numerous
small programs to benefit specific voting audiences. As a result, Bush was able to run against
Gore’s big government programs instead of having to present his own
programs. With more money, better
organization and more committed religious conservatives, Bush was able to win
enough states that chicanery in
We
liberals were even more shocked in 2004 to see Bush win not only the electoral,
but also the popular vote. How could
this occur when polls show that a majority of voters prefer Democratic Party
positions on the issues? How could so
many voters vote against their own interests?
Many analyses have occurred, suggesting the following.
John
Kerry and other Democrats never attacked Republicans, so they were forced to
spend their energy defending themselves.
It is necessary to play both offense and defense. Democrats do not unite to express shared
slogans and messages, as the Republicans do so well.
More
generally, democrats have not clearly expressed our values from which they
derive their political policies and actions.
We have substituted policy statements for narratives which illustrate
our values, challenges and policies. We
have not clearly identified ourr differences from conservatives. Nor have we attacked conservative values,
beliefs and actions. Instead of finding
and expressing the broad themes on which they agree, we have endlessly debated
over details. We have let single issue
groups influence them to take extreme stands over details that alienate
voters.
Converting Conservatives to Liberals
There is generally a greater return
from getting least involved Liberals to the polls than trying to convert
Conservatives. But the way to convert
conservatives is to express our values and the ways in which they agree and
differ from them. The discussion works
best when it leaves general ideology to focus upon specific instances where our
values apply and what (policies) must be done.