Well, we don't disagree about the role of radicals in establishing liberal goals. Rads are, as you and Charles say, the most consistent libs, in fact, fully consistent libs have to be rads.
However, you diminish the role of actual (non-rad) liberals who did good things. For example, as Bert Cochran shows, the CP was important in building the UAW, also the Trotskyists, but Walter and Victor Reuther and lots of rank-and-rile militants were no kind of commie. Likewise the CP had a big role in building the UMW, but John L. Lewis was not a radical, nor were the later reformers like the martyred Jock Jablonsky or Arnold Miller. The ACLU has had it shameful moments (like kicking the CPer Elizabeth Gurley Flynn off the executive committee in the 40s), but on the whole its record in defending our liberties has been magnificent. There were CP advisers around the civil rights movement, but most of the leadership, much less the membership, was not radical on matters other than racial equality until fairly late in the game (after the March on Washington, say).
Outside the movements and back in the ruling classes or their executive committee, despite all their limitations and terrible crimes, FDR and even Truman and Johnson fought for and in some cases helped win great advances. The New Deal, the Square Deal, and the Great Society were nothing to snort at; neither was the Warren Court.
I don't see why in general you refuse to identify liberalism with, say, John Dewey -- yes, he had his bad moments, like support for US imperialism in WWI, but the CPers who helped build the UAW and the UMW supported the Stalin-Hitler Pact, the No-Strike Pledge, and the Smith Act (against the Trotskyists) -- rather than with Woodrow Wilson. If you're going to ignore the rad's dark side, the libs are entitled to the same benefit. As J.S. Mill says, compare like to like.
And at the end of the day, there is the fact that whatever the doomsters here and on right may say about the End of Liberalism, this is an idea with a long winning record in US politics. It's worth fighting for. Personally, I can't bear the mealy -mouthedness of "progressivism," an old Pop Front bit of doubletalk; if we're rads, let's say so (I do); if we're socialists, let's be up front (I am). But we are also, most of us here, liberals in my sense, and that's a notion with no worse a pedigree in terms of blood and cruelty than radicalism or socialism, and a set of ideals, sometimes partly realized, that oppose blood and cruelty.
--- Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
>
> On Jul 5, 2007, at 12:13 AM, andie nachgeborenen
> wrote:
>
> > I am out of patience with people who say that
> > liberalism is a Bad Thing because of Ted Sorenson,
>
> Uh, that's not what I said at all. I said you were
> giving too much
> credit to the likes of him. Radicals pushed for a
> lot of the stuff
> you cherish as "liberal," while actual liberals have
> given us much
> worse. E.g., Palmer raids and loyalty oaths.
>
> Doug
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