[lbo-talk] What Is a Liberal?

Carrol Cox cbcox at ilstu.edu
Wed May 5 11:42:27 PDT 2010


How does a liberal or anyone, really get otherpeople, unconvinced and uncommitted, to share his or her worldview?

The following is a rough, and incomplete, draft, which I hope I can improve on in future posts, but I think it gesuters in the right directiojn.

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What is a Liberal? And by this I mean actually existing liberals in the U.S. today. I would presume the first step in answering this is to sub-divide liberals. What are the actually existing speices of Liberal?

First there are the millions who self-consciously vote for candidates they consider liberal. (Which means, somewhat circularly, that a liberal politician is someone lliberal voters vote for.)

Then there are liberal intellectuals, mostly in the universities but also journalists, columnists, etc. They conceive themselves as trying to ask and answer the question at the top of this page: how are they to persuade others to share their views.

And then there are the liberal politicians, who I presume first ask, how are we to get people to vote for us (independently of what they may be thinking). I'll leave them out except insofar as they overlap the other species of liberal.

The 'ordinary' liberal, it seems to me, believes above all that it is important to have the right opinion on public affairs. Hence all the chatter about "being informed" and "thinking for oneself." He or she must believe, whether it is the case or not, that her opinion on a given issue is informed, not merely a repetition of her parents' belief or not merely because (a) she is a Liberal and (b) Liberals must believe such and such.

So firstly the 'ordinary' conscious liberal trys to have the correct opinions and expresses that corrctness by voting for the good candidates.

This 'ordinary' liberal _also_ believes in progress, that society (and the human species) tends on the whole to move towards more enlightenment, more human social arrangements. This is necessary to support the acceptance of tiny and inadequatre steps "forward," for they are steps, no matter how tiny, along a determined path. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.

To sum up, the liberal citizen believes in informed but passive support of true causes, and in progress, or that the society is on a path leading forward if it is only followed. Thus in the mid-1940s a southern liberal could write a book entitled _Color Blind_, and place her hope for racial peace in the courtesy of Southerners, who would eventually recognize that courtesy called for courtesy to all races.

Liberal Intellectuals. The liberal intellectual is marked by his/her conviction that it is important to answer the question, How does a liberal or anyone, really get otherpeople, unconvinced and uncommitted, to share his or her worldview? For example, a Liberal who holds Marxist beliefs and believes in revolution will be convinced that it is important to perusuade others of the truth of Marxism. She will also believe that it is important to peruaude others of the goodness and the workability of socialism.

Beyond this central conviction of the necessity to persuade the the unconvinced and uncommitted to a true world view, Liberal Intellectuals vary greatly, and probably one cannot find further defining traits. Shag's hisotoricist account is interesting and probably accurate but ahistorical in finding the core or meaning of liberalism in the past. The sources of liberalism must be first located in the present.

Carrol



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