Your liberal credential is put into question, because you obviously believe that the working-class conception of the good life (higher wages, shorter working hours, less fear of unemployment, more safety and environmental regulations, more workplace democracy, etc.) should dominate government and society, rather than the ruling-class one (bigger profit margins, lower taxes on profits, fewer safety and environmental regulations, etc.) or the petty-bourgeois one (meritocracy, technocracy, etc.).
Moreover, there is always a great deal of tension between liberalism and democracy in liberal democracy under capitalism (and perhaps also under socialism, too), as explained by Michael Coppedge below (I do not agree with Coppedge's assessment of Venezuela under the Bolivarian Evolution ["the systematic elimination of constraints on presidential action after 1998 increased the risk that Venezuela would cease to be a democracy by any definition in the future"], but his definitions of liberalism and democracy are useful.):
***** Venezuela: Popular Sovereignty versus Liberal Democracy Michael Coppedge April 2002
The Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies <http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/com01/>
... In order to evaluate accurately the state of democracy during the first years of the Chávez presidency, one must sharpen the distinction between democracy narrowly defined as popular sovereignty versus the more conventional notion of liberal democracy. It is also necessary to look beyond the rules and institutions of Venezuela's 1999 constitution to consider the way they were used. On first inspection, Venezuela still had a liberal democratic regime. Understood more deeply, it was no longer a liberal democracy in every respect. Instead, it became an extreme case of delegative democracy -- a regime in which there is no "horizontal accountability," that is, no effective check on the president by the congress, courts, or other powers between elections.3 The president enjoyed widespread popular support for almost everything he and his followers in the Fifth Republic Movement (Movimiento V República, MVR) did, and this fact qualified his government as "democratic" in the narrow sense of popular sovereignty. But the systematic elimination of constraints on presidential action after 1998 increased the risk that Venezuela would cease to be a democracy by any definition in the future....
Much of Chávez's support was derived from the legitimate democratic ideal of popular sovereignty, which provided some logic to his claims to be creating a more democratic system.17 However, there is a different strand in democratic theory -- liberalism -- that calls for limits on the sovereignty of a popular majority. If majorities could be trusted never to undermine the basic procedures that make it possible to ascertain and give effect to the majority will, liberalism would be unnecessary. But the dominant strain of democratic theory for the past 150 years has assumed that majorities cannot be trusted. They easily give in to the temptation to modify the rules of the game to discriminate in favor of themselves and against the opposition....
Liberal principles therefore justify and in fact require limits on the authority of the government of the day, no matter how clear its majoritarian mandate may be. In order to reduce the risk that a president will abuse a popular mandate, presidential constitutions provide for a diverse array of institutions with various powers to check the executive between elections. These institutions include an independent judiciary, a legislature with a distinct electoral base, and in some states, a division of powers among tiers of government and an independent electoral agency, attorney general, comptroller, and _defensor del pueblo_ (ombudsman). Liberal institutions can be thought of as a kind of democracy insurance policy. Citizens pay premiums in the present, in the form of sacrificing some of the government's representativeness and immediate responsiveness to their wishes. But these premiums purchase assurance that democracy will not fall below some minimal level in the future....
(pp. 1-2, 14-15, <http://www.ciaonet.org/wps/com01/com01.pdf>) *****
The tension between liberalism and democracy becomes more acute in economically unstable and underdeveloped nations like Venezuela, particularly during periods of widespread economic distress and heightened class struggles. Your remarks always suggest that you come down on the side of democracy _if and when_ democracy and liberalism cannot be neatly reconciled and the good life for the working class demands more democracy and less liberalism.
Then, there is also a tension between negative freedom and republican liberty. Quentin Skinner writes in "The Paradoxes of Political Liberty:
***** To be corrupt, however, is to forget -- or fail to grasp -- something which it is profoundly in our interests to remember: that if we wish to enjoy as much freedom as we can hope to attain within political society, there is good reason for us to act in the first instance as virtuous citizens, placing the common good above the pursuit of any individual or factional ends. Corruption, in short, is simply a failure of rationality, an inability to recognise that our own liberty depends on committing ourselves to a life of virtue and public service. And the consequence of our habitual tendency to forget or misunderstand this vital piece of practical reasoning is therefore that we regularly tend to defeat our own purposes. As Machiavelli puts it, we often think we are acting to maximize our own liberty when we are really shouting Long live our own ruin.43
(p. 243, <http://www.tannerlectures.utah.edu/lectures/skinner86.pdf>) *****
The conception of republican liberty as spelled out above comes into conflict with the commonly-held idea of negative freedom which many of us take to be integral to liberalism. Your remarks on various subjects make me think that you would privilege republican liberty over negative freedom if and when occasions demand such priority. -- Yoshie
* Calendar of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>