------
Well, techically I think the center was a combination London and Amsterdam. Remember many of the English went to Amsterdam to publish and translate their liberal classics---that later fed back into the English, French and German Enlightenment.
I want to make a point. Liberalism only exists as a viable political force if it is profoundly informed with radical content. And I mean radical in the concrete sense of a confontation with the established order, including violent confrontations. Then it was monarchy, now its capitalism. And liberalism, as I understand it has to be heavily weighted to civil rights, universal access (more than voting) to both the legal and political systems, and a welfare/heathcare/education system.
The other point is that liberalism only finds its best directions when it is critiqued and politically forced to adher to its principles by the Left.
Here is an excerpt from an interview with a disabled guy I've known off and on since the 68-69 melt down in Berkeley. He later went to law school and was later a deputy attorney general for the state of California under Jerry Brown. He was always a liberal and he remained a liberal. But he had some experiences that transformed his understanding of justice and political liberalism.
Donald
In my chair. I was backed up behind--after the shots fired, I went behind the cement planters. And he put a bayonet on me and told me to go, and there was nothing but a cement wall behind me. That type of obscene--not obscene--but absurd, illogical, riotous type behavior. The point of all that was that the police were out of control, and it was a political riot. And Reagan as governor wanted to make sure that he kept the newspapers' headlines going for himself.
Every time the press started to wane, they found something out. Like, for example, on the Third World strike--it was one of several strikes down there--the marchers had been, say, they were a hundred strong, and after two or three weeks they're down to around four or five. And after they're down to four or five, Reagan called in the Oakland police, saying that the university police weren't obeying the law, allowing the strike to go on. And then, of course, they came in and everything broke loose. Everybody started fighting because they had the police and the soldiers attack students on campus. So that was the social life and the political life.
Cowan
So in this atmosphere, the idea of changing things was pretty prevalent.
Donald
Yes. It was changed. Everything was sit-in and make demands, non-negotiable. Good old non-negotiable demands...
...
Donald
There were so many social issues that had to be addressed. Ours was independent living.
Let me tell you one other story that's really interesting that's not directly related to disability, but to the turmoil on campus. During the Third World strike, of course, everybody wanted their classes off campus, and some of the professors accommodated by getting classrooms off campus wherever they could. I, as an economics major, was taking the economics of Marxism course, a class you could probably only ever find at Berkeley at that time. My, of course, "leftie" teacher found a place right off campus, on Bancroft, just about a half a block west of Telegraph. The windows were high, maybe neck-high for people walking on the sidewalk from the campus.
So there was the teacher this one afternoon, in class with tear gas wafting through the windows and the soldiers, the National Guard soldiers, marching up and down the sidewalk with their bayonets and screaming and yelling outside. We were studying the theories of economics and Marxism, off campus. A wonderful setting.
Cowan
Well, what I was going to ask when you brought this up before was, since everybody was making demands, were you beginning to think of your issue as a civil rights issue at that time? Was that your thought? Or just something you thought you needed to have?
Donald
You're asking for perspective that evolved, and at what point in time did we start thinking of it as a civil rights issue. I remember thinking that I didn't want to become a professional crip, as I called it back then. I didn't want to have my whole life centered around this new disability that I had. New friends with old disabilities and me with a new disability, breaking away from that advice that John gave me--don't leave the institution or you'll sink.
And so I--and Larry, who also had a fairly new injury, Larry Langdon--we were off on our own, and we didn't need the institution, so to speak. But we did have our old friends who were going in the institutional direction, like John and Ed. And that was fine. We just had different focus. My idea was to go off and do something else. My focus returned later on.
Cowan
But at the time it wasn't a civil rights issue in your mind that you can think of.
Donald
Yes. Personally, it was. As a movement, no. I remember when there was a reason for me to become involved, like grant writing, I would do it. Other than that, I was just studying and married life and socializing as a twenty-one-, twenty-two-year-old would do...
...
Donald
So that [Davis Law School] was my whole focus for the next three years, from '69 to '72. Access wasn't a problem; getting attendants wasn't a problem I mean, it wasn't an issue. Occasionally, it was a problem. But Davis is a non-automobile campus, so everything was right there.
Deputy Attorney General, California Department of Justice, 1972
Cowan
When you became an attorney, what did you do then?
Donald
Well, at about the time I graduated, one of my classmates told me about openings in the attorney general's office. I was very lucky in that I was reluctant to apply because I wanted to take some time off after the bar and take a trip, and I did. But I did the application, and they hired me. My one and only job application. And I got the job and started after my vacation. So that was fortunate. It was a very good job. I called it the boot camp for lawyers. It's deputy attorney general, where you learn how to write and research and get the basic skills down.
Cowan
Was there any activity in that office on disabled issues?
Donald
It was becoming a political issue because Ed Roberts was the chief plaintiff for all of the welfare cases. His attorney was Ralph Abascal for the CRLA [California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation]. Disability was becoming more and more of a political issue and a legislative issue because, primarily, of Ed Roberts.
Cowan
So you saw these cases coming through the office.
Donald
Yes. And they were of course the chief enemy of the attorney general's office, which was comical [chuckling], from my perspective, because he was a good friend of mine. I didn't get involved in any of those. I was more in other areas, opinion writing and--I wasn't involved in any of Ed's lawsuits.
Cowan
At that time? Or ever?
Donald
In those arenas, in those welfare arenas. I was just a new attorney for the first year or two.
Cowan
Was this still the Reagan administration?
Donald
Coincidentally, it was just as Reagan left and Brown was elected. Brown, I think, was elected in '75 or '6, whatever it was. No, '74, I think. And all of a sudden it was a Democratic governor, and the disability issue was becoming prominent. The attorney general wanted to have a task force on disability issues. He had me establish that, and so I did within the attorney general's office.
Cowan
And who was the attorney general at that time?
Donald
Evelle Younger. A long time ago, huh?''
I don't know if the flavor of what was happening to Donald's concept of social justice is explicitly captured (it is for me, but I knew him and was also there at the time), still it seems to be in there somewhere. This is the real guts of liberalism in its classic French Revolutionary sense. And of course it is precisely this blood and guts on the line shit that is missing in any current understanding of liberalism.
So while I agree in some broad philosophical sense with Justin, I really want to put this whole business in quotes. Liberalism is nothing, without its blood stains.
I guess another way to put it is that liberalism has to be critiqued from the far Left in order to understand itself. In effect it doesn't understand itself when it answers the far right---a place where it now resides. It just becomes a kind of stupid babble about freedom of religion or some wildly equivocal nuance on Habeas Corpus. Fucking duh.
I guess what I am saying is that Liberalism needs its left critics. Here is a last snip, just to give you an idea of the scale of some of these things and how they reach global proportion...
Donald
......Of course, it was a non-paying thing.
Cowan
And that was?
Donald
The Disabled Peoples' International. The idea was to promote independent living throughout the world and to take the models and the information and successes that we had and take them to other countries, and to encourage and foster the development of independent living programs of whatever type--culturally--in every country.
For example, in Zimbabwe we were having some of these discussions about access, and this guy who didn't have any legs started yelling at us. I forget. It was a panel. "How can you be talking about ramps in the buildings? We don't even have any buildings. We don't have any pavement." And so he says, "Access is not ramps and not door widths or stuff like that. We don't even have--." You know, that type of thing. That's the type of thing in translating culturally into whatever it was.
Cowan
You're not part of that group any more? Is the group not existing, or are you just not part of it?
Donald
It's still existing. It has taken on kind of a western Europe flavor now because the personalities have changed and the sources of money have changed. But coincidentally, Ed was always central but always only there half the time, and we never had any money to contribute because all the money came from sources that required it to go to the developing countries. So the United States never had a real strong role other than Ed's and my own. There were efforts. It was mostly Canada because of the Canadian Mennonite Church and the liberal Canadian government and the Swedish government.
So that was going on, and it went very, very well. At the same time, I got a call from a woman who had just become an attorney, Karen Parker, who was a human rights advocate. She went to Boalt Hall and one of her professors was Frank Newman, a California Supreme Court judge who was also an international law professor who took his students to the United Nations to show how it worked. Karen was one of his students. She encouraged me to join with her to take California's successes to the United Nations. And I thought that was an exciting thing.
I was also involved with Disabled Peoples' International, so I jumped on the bandwagon and got funding, and Karen and I went to Geneva to the Commission on Human Rights meeting. I started representing DPI, and I got a call from Stockholm, where they were having a DPI meeting--that I didn't bother to attend that year--and they said, "What are you representing DPI for?" Somehow, they heard what I was doing. I was making speeches at the U.N. Commission on--yeah, DPI. "You aren't authorized. You get your butt here right away."
So Frank Newman, the judge, was there in Geneva, and he says, "I'll give you the money," so my attendant and I--I always travel with an attendant--flew to Stockholm in the middle of the Commission meeting. Boy, were they yelling at me. All my friends from DPI, Disabled Peoples' International. They said, "You don't have the forum." They were really parliamentary-oriented. The chair of DPI comes from Singapore, was a parliamentarian type guy. So I said, "Okay."
So they had their meeting going on, and I immediately started lobbying all the different groups in the DPI meeting there in Stockholm. We were in some camp on the outskirts of Stockholm. And I got them to create a human rights committee and to let me chair. So after about four or five days, I went back to Geneva, and I had the credentials to represent DPI at the U.N. And that lasted for twelve years. And we had some tremendous successes...''
I put this up just to remind people that true liberalism comes from having the state point a bayonet at you, pure and simple.
CG