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Obama's profile in liberalism Wednesday, Mar 26, 2008 By David Sanders That Barack Obama would eschew the liberal label is not surprising. It is a word easily replaced with something temporarily more palatable to the prevailing tastes of the American public. It's unfortunate that the American left commandeered what historically was a good word. Once it was used to describe many of this nation's founding fathers because of their reverence for freedom, liberty, the natural rights of man and the pursuit of a government and a country that embraced those enduring principles in the face of enormous danger. Obama says that the label is passe anymore and does not apply to him. There always will be this intrinsic need for the left to reinvent itself. Obama isn't the first of his kind to cast off the old and put on the new. For instance, he prefers, like many liberals, to be called "progressive." The irony is rich. Halfway through the last century the American left was eager to rid itself of that label, too. American progressives had a deep history of embracing many of the same collectivist policies their socialist/communist friends embraced on the other side of the globe. And it wasn't just their penchant for big government that American progressives shared with their ideological brethren of Europe. Against the backdrop of World War I, President Woodrow Wilson, chief among those from the progressive era, was the first U.S. President to set up a propaganda ministry - the Council on Public Information. Wilson's Justice Department launched the American Protective League, which was an organization that deputized many Americans to spy on those with whom they had contact in their everyday lives. Journalists were jailed and dissent was discouraged all in the name of the public good. The progressive march continued, culminating with FDR's New Deal, in which he expanded the federal government's reach in to the lives of Americans, undertook a court-stacking scheme that violated the principle of separation of powers and, like Wilson, emphasized the importance of the collective over the individual. So you see that the American left was eager to break with its progressive label. But now liberalism has come to represent all that progressives embraced in more. In the modern context, American liberalism added to its reverence for the collective good, giving us the Great Society and more federal solutions. Added to American liberalism were strains of militant feminism, which built an impenetrable orthodoxy of "reproductive rights" that helped make abortion on demand more acceptable. In recent history, liberalism has taken on more of a counter-cultural essence, embracing those who want same sex relationships to be generally accepted and given special protected status so that unions - or marriages in some cases - of same-sex couples are equal to traditional marriage. It's no surprise that Obama - to whom words matter most - wants to avoid the liberal label. But simply substituting one label for another will not change the fact that, as president, he would lead a federal takeover of health care or raise taxes to a reconfigure a progressive tax structure that punishes capital formation. His spending proposals total $900 billion and will cripple the federal budget. He has said that he will overturn the Defense of Marriage Act, which defines that marriage is a union between a man and woman. He will use the power of the federal government to roll back protections afforded to the unborn. He can call it what he wants, but it doesn't change the fact that his are bad ideas. ------- David Sanders writes twice weekly for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and is a host of the Arkansas Education Television Network's "Unconventional Wisdom." His e-mail address is DavidJSanders@aol.com. |
