>I am a liberal and I think
> you should be too and many of you probably are. As is
> Doug, anyway, whether he likes the term or not: we
> both believe in competitive elections, universal
> suffrage, and extensive political and civil liberties
> -- the basic institutions of political liberalism.
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These ideas aren't exclusive to what you call "liberalism". They were also
incorporated in the concept of socialist democracy. Today, at least in
advanced capitalist societies, they're widely accepted even among the
elites, with only the most extreme right-wing ideologues rejecting them on
principle.
These institutions are dependent on historical context. They require a high degree of national security and social wealth. They have legitimacy only insofar as they don't conflict with social order. They're suspended or limited when social order is threatened.
For all your fealty to these principles, you would do the same. For example, I expect you would have supported, albeit with genuine "reluctance" and "reservations", the limiting or suspension of these rights in France, Russia, and Cuba, in the prevailing conditions of revolution and civil war and even beyond - until you were satisfied that the social changes introduced by these upheavals were no longer in danger of being reversed by an equally or even more repressive ancien regime.
Any disagreements we might then have had would have have turned not on whether free elections, speech, assembly, etc. were desirable objectives in themselves - no issue there - but whether political conditions now permitted their exercise. In other words, the governing consideration would have been historical rather than philosophical. It always is.