The Liberal Backbone

Ever since I published my book Patriots of Two Nations in 2020, I’ve been working on another one — a much bigger one, as it’s turned out.

And I’m still working on that big book. But with American democracy facing its greatest crisis since the Civil War as a corrupt autocrat returns to the presidency, I want to do my part, however small, to help right now.

So I’m going to try an experiment: writing a shorter, more tightly focused book, and publishing it in real time. I don’t know if this is going to work, but I’m going to set myself the goal of releasing chapters of this book as I write them. They’ll appear as posts and podcast episodes, like this one.

At the risk of being about as presumptuous as a writer can be, I’ll say that my plan is something like what Charles Dickens did when he first published The Pickwick Papers in a newspaper, chapter by chapter.

There are many reasons why we are where we are, and in this little book I’m not going to try to address all of them. Instead I’m going to try to answer what I think are two of the most important but most poorly understood questions we’re facing:

How did Democrats, and liberals in general, get so bad at politics?

And what can they do about it?

Yes, the right wing media bubble, bigotry, and other factors contributed to Donald Trump’s victory. But Democrats have their own advantages, advantages they often squander, starting with the fact that most Democratic policies are popular with large majorities of the American public. The trouble is, Democrats, and liberals in general, are not.

I hope you’ll consider taking part in this experiment. As I publish each chapter, please feel free to give me any comments, suggestions, or corrections you have to offer. Patriots of Two Nations became a better book than it might have been because of the generosity of advance readers. You’ll find those readers thanked, from my heart, at the front of that book.

My working title for this new book is The Liberal Backbone. What follows here is my first draft of Chapter One.

Here we go — I sure hope this works.

Chapter 1

What, if anything, do liberals stand for? It can be hard to tell.

And it has been for a long time.

Back in 1941, Robert Frost described a liberal as someone who never takes their own side in a quarrel — and Frost was far from the first to notice.¹

Two decades earlier, Carl Schmitt had declared that if you asked liberals to choose between crucifying the Messiah or a bandit, their response would be “a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation.”²

It’s bad enough when you have to admit that a beloved poet and fellow liberal had a point. It’s so much worse when it’s a top Nazi lawyer.

One of the strongest arguments for liberalism is its openness. Above all, liberalism is an ideology of freedom — hence its name, derived from the Latin word for freedom, libertas. And openness to nearly all ideas is essential to freedom as liberals define it. For this reason, a liberal society is often called an open society.

But openness also invites the endless dithering for which liberals are notorious. And openness also leaves them open to attack.

There could hardly be a worse time for that. Across the world, liberalism is under attack. In the world’s leading liberal democracy, it has suffered a grievous defeat with the re-election of Donald Trump.

A crucial factor in Trump’s triumph was his supporters’ belief that he stands for something. In particular, they believe, he stands for them. Even if they don’t like him — and many don’t — they voted for him anyway.

“He may be a bastard,” as the old saying goes, “but he’s our bastard.”³

By contrast, many voters see liberals as standing for nothing — or for anything an opponent claims they stand for. In the Trump era, that’s included stealing elections, opening the border to hordes of criminals and terrorists, destroying the economy, sending boys home from school as girls, both communism and fascism somehow, and much more, going back to Barack Obama declaring Sharia law.

Liberals often dismiss or even laugh at such claims. But a more politically useful response would be to ask, “Why do so many people believe them?”

As usual, there’s more than one answer to such a question. A popular and valid one is the power of pervasive disinformation.

But why is the disinformation not only pervasive, but persuasive?

In large part, that’s because for many voters, liberalism is a blank screen on which its enemies can project any image.

Even liberals have a hard time saying just what it is they stand for. If you ask them — or ask yourself, if you’re a liberal — you may very well find that what you get in response is a list.

Any or all of the items on that list may sound admirable: freedom, equality, tolerance, the rule of law, and so on. Even liberal politicians give answers like this, and will even run their campaigns on lists: lists of values and lists of promises, addressing lists of interest groups.

There are exceptions, but the exceptions tend to prove the rule.

After Obama’s exceptional campaigns in 2008 and 2012, Hillary Clinton’s in 2016 showed what happens when Democrats revert to their mean.

The candidate was a highly qualified technocrat, expert in all aspects of governing and, I’m confident, driven by a genuine desire to do good. And there were many causes of her loss, as with any loss, including blind chance.

But an important one was that her speeches were all too similar to PowerPoint presentations: one list after another.

No one is inspired by a list. No one believes in a list. And no one stands for a list.

To stand for something is to be willing to fight for it, and maybe even die for it. That’s the origin of the metaphor: where you’re standing is on a battlefield. Those who aren’t standing are running away, or being cut down.

And yes, I am speaking metaphorically. For liberals, actual violence must be the very last resort. In addition to being history’s most successful ideology of freedom, liberalism is history’s best alternative to violence.

But as some of history’s best leaders have demonstrated, nonviolence does not have to mean passivity. And courage doesn’t have to require shedding blood, although some have been willing to shed their own.

For most of us, most of the time, courage simply means stating, and showing, what we believe in.

So what do liberals believe in?

That’s what I’m going to address here.

This is about what liberals actually stand for, and how they can stand up for it — something too many seem to have forgotten how to do.

We’re going to rediscover the liberal backbone and, I hope, straighten it out.

Photo by Alexander Gardner, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

1. “I’m liberal. You, you aristocrat, / Won’t know exactly what I mean by that. / I mean so altruistically moral / I never take my own side in a quarrel.” Robert Frost, “The Lesson for Today.” Available at https://ddink55.wordpress.com/2011/03/24/the-lesson-for-today/
2. Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922), chapter 4.
3. Said in various versions by various people. More information at Quote Investigator: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2021/02/24/rascal