Old Liberals

Liberal

I used to be a Liberal.  I believe in liberal ideals, like the Affordable Care Act with an option for government insurance like Medicare for anyone who wanted it.  Like we ought to have at least two more years of public education available for everyone for free.  That we ought to make a huge government-run effort to fix the environment, with an emphasis on reducing hydrocarbons and making energy from renewable non-polluting sources.

I used to be a Liberal.  I looked to the “liberal lions” of the Senate, Hubert Humphrey and Ted Kennedy, Russ Feingold and Sherrod Brown, as role models and defenders.  Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson were liberals (at least Johnson as far as civil rights were concerned).  And I “thought” that the term “liberal” was changed to “progressive” for political reasons.  Somehow in the 90’s people thought that “liberal” was bad, so they came up with a new term for it.

Progressives

I was listening to former Ohio State Senator Nina Turner last night.  Turner is a co-chair of the Bernie Sanders campaign, and made it clear that unless you were “all-in” on the Sanders’ agenda, you weren’t a “progressive”.  Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, paying off all college debt, and taxes on the wealthy:  all are gospel.  If you aren’t for all of it, then you aren’t a “progressive”.  I like a whole lot of those ideas, but I also have trouble seeing a path for their absolute acceptance by even a small majority of Congress.

In the “old” days, the Bernie Sanders movement would have been considered beyond the “liberal” wing of the Party.  Social Democrats in the German or United Kingdom mold were beyond the scale of modern American politics.  So the Sanders movement has taken the title “progressive” and left the rest of the Democratic as “moderates”.  But moderate means something very different to me.

Moderates

Mike Bloomberg is a moderate.  While he has some more “progressive” notions, like gun control, he is essentially a Wall Street Democrat. Bloomberg is closer to the “Rockefeller Republicans” of old, a moderate wing of the Republican Party that has ceased to exist.  The remnants, with nowhere left to go, became Democrats, just like the former Republican mayor of New York.

Jimmy Carter was a moderate, the Governor of Georgia running to the middle to win the Presidency.  In fact, one of Carter’s biggest difficulties in governing was in gaining cooperation with a Democratic House and Senate, both more liberal than him.  Their inability to reach agreements to govern helped get eight years of Ronald Reagan’s administration.

Bill Clinton and the “Blue Dog” Democrats were moderates.  They were more concerned about balancing the budget than many of the social issues that would cost money.  At the time, they were able to reach agreements with many of the Republicans, who still were in the Bloomberg moderate lane.  

But there seem to be no more moderate Republicans left.  Folks like John Kasich, who appears to be a more moderate Republican today, is really a traditional conservative of old.  It’s just that the Party has moved so far to the right – Kasich looks like he’s in the middle.

There are however moderate Democrats, including many of the new House of Representative members who turned Republican seats in the 2018 election.  It was those moderates who won control of the House, basically filling the vacuum that the “new” Republican Party left in the middle of the ideological spectrum.  These are also the Democrats who most fear a Sanders’ Presidential candidacy.  They know that they can’t move so far to the left to reach Sanders without losing their Congressional Districts.

Semantics

It’s all a question of semantics, but semantics has political consequences.  Just as current Republicans today claim the “conservative” title of old, when in fact they are far right of traditional conservatives, so the Sanders’ camp is claiming the progressive label.  They are far past what a traditional liberal, a Paul Wellstone or Gary Hart would be.  By taking the “progressive” label, they are trying to mainstream what is a more extreme ideology.

That doesn’t mean their ideology is wrong. 

What it does mean is that there is little common ground between the extreme of Social Democrats and even the moderates in their own party.  Where is the compromise allowing a more diverse Congress to move legislation, that the “my way of the highway” purity test doesn’t allow?   In our Democracy, there has to be a way to reason, and compromise, to achieve almost anything.

So I’ll stick with my own label.  I am a Liberal, out of the grand tradition of liberalism in the Democratic Party.  I won’t be pushed into the “progressive” wing, but don’t you dare call me a “moderate”.