Even this guy who worked for Jimmy Carter knows it.....
Stop Calling Them Liberals
John L. Perry Thursday, Oct. 10, 2002
The dirtiest word du jour on campus right after World War II was "reactionary." Its desirable antonym, "liberal." What a difference half a century makes!
In those intervening years, the American left-of-center has been captured by radicals who are the worst sort of reactionaries.
The right-of-center, whose precursors were often unfairly denounced as reactionaries, has now become a citadel for authentic liberals.
It is time for conservatives to refrain from referring to radical-leftists as "liberals."
When Liberals Were Liberals
A reactionary in the mid-1900s was someone (usually over 30) perceived as heel-digging to thwart being dragged kicking and cussing into the brave, new post-war world, intent upon back-pedaling to the good, old pre-war days that were seldom as good as reminisced.
A liberal was someone (usually under 30) perceived as standing foursquare for freedom, liberty and justice enshrined by the Founding Fathers, intent upon applying those precepts to a new American beginning.
Reactionaries were reviled as selfish roadblocks to the future, yearning to turn the clock back to anything other than what was found in the Declaration of Independence, Constitution and Bill of Rights.
Worth Fighting For
The general idea of liberals, as most collegians 50-plus years ago perceived themselves, was to put into practice what American forces in Europe and in the Pacific fought and died to keep alive.
Thanks to the GI Bill, campuses were enriched by an influx of veterans, some still wearing a flight jacket or battle fatigue stained with blood of fallen comrades and all determined to make up lost time in building their interrupted lives.
"Conservative" and "moderate" were words that seldom found their way into political discourse at favorite off-camps haunts.
Fall and Rise of the Far Left
There was of course an extreme of the left, its denizens recognized as the communists they were, routinely discredited by each new revelation of the god that failed them in Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's Red China. Few in number and even less in influence on campus, they were tolerated but rarely embraced by most who considered themselves liberals.
When the Communist Party fell into the disrepute of a sick joke and was inexorably absorbed by the quicksand of time, that opened the way for liberals to occupy virtually the entire field to the left of the right, which had shed its own lunatic fringe.
Then, two unsavory things began to happen to earlier liberals: New "liberals" solidified their control over the machinery of the national Democratic Party. And into its ranks seeped ragged remnants of the old, along with bustling activists of the new, leftist-radicalism.
Home Becomes Unrecognizable
Those radicals elbowed out many Democrats who still adhered to the much-earlier brand of liberalism. The Republican Party picked up by default a number of disaffected Democrats. Others stuck around as nominal Democrats, increasingly alienated by the new leftward lunge of radicals running and ruining the national Democratic Party.
The 8-year-long Bill Clinton nightmare left many genuine-liberal Democrats in shock, shame, revulsion and despair. By then, the ultra-left had taken over the Democratic Party nationally, even as radical Islamists had hijacked much of an entire religion.
Are most of these new-left Democrats out-and-out communists? Not likely. Those old Marxists at least had the conviction to be steadfast to some sort of ideology. This current crop of radicals is without coherent direction or philosophic belief.
Red Fascism
Their agendas resemble in many ways those of European socialists, who have made such a mess of things on that continent. Theirs is a chic caricature of socialism Marx would have a tough time recognizing, a willy-nilly statist-collectivist belief in manipulating lives in conformity with politically correct agendas of the moment jumped up to satisfy insatiable splinter groups. The resemblance is as much fascist as Marxist.
In their own insidious ways, these new leftists are nonetheless subversive not in the Cold War sense of beavering to incapacitate America for the greater glory of the Soviet Union. Yet they are as dedicated as any old-line communist to undermining what the United States has always stood for.
They are wreckers. They want to destroy. They want to discredit and bring down America. They are far less articulate about what they want in its place. If they have any theoretical communist kinship it is with Leon Trotsky, who believed that for things to get better they first had to be helped to get worse.
Soiling Their Own Lineage
They are only too happy to blame the United States as the root cause of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Anything that lessens America emboldens and elevates them. Their current devil is George W. Bush not so much because he is of another political party as because he symbolizes the best of America, which is what drives them and their fellow America-traducers up the wall in rage. They manage to manifest themselves inside the skins of shopworn Hollywood performers whose real lives are even more obscene and dysfunctional than some of the roles they portray.
People such as they have infected every society throughout history. This latest flock of misanthropes in our midst is particularly noisy, bold and dangerous because they possess access to vast wealth and frightening segments of the American media of mass communications.
They call themselves liberals! What dictionary are they using? Obviously not the one that defines "liberal" as: "favorable to progress or reform in accord with concepts of maximum individual freedom possible, especially as guaranteed by law and secured by governmental protection of civil liberties free from prejudice or bigotry "
Reactionaries Redux
Today's far-leftists, masquerading behind the purloined garb of liberalism, are the epitome of bigots, pitting race against race, class against class. They find abhorrent the rule of law as set forth in the Constitution and demand radical-leftist judges willing to usurp the legislative function reserved to Congress.
Do they want bona fide reform? Horrors, no! What they call reform is to plow under the precepts of the Constitution.
These self-anointed liberals are no less than early-21st-century reincarnations of mid-20th century reactionaries. They find themselves, in ideology and actions, more at home with Joe Stalin's commissars and Benito Mussolini's black shirts than with Tom Paine's revolutionaries.
Their theft of the "liberal" label is unconscionable.
Keeping Strange Company
Just as unhealthy is the folly of contemporary conventional wisdom in institutionalizing the liberal label on these reactionaries, who revel in the unearned nomenclature. Ironically, it is here that leftist-controlled news media and many constitutional conservatives walk arm-in-arm.
Leftists love the sound of "liberal" and flock to wallow in it. Conservatives may think they are pronouncing a curse by calling them liberals, when they are actually giving radical-leftists protective coloration they don't deserve.
Instead, those true to the conservatives cause should open their doors and minds for genuine liberals to join them in taking their rightful place in the circle of supporters of what the Founding Fathers had in mind for America. The obligation to make common cause with authentic conservatives lies equally upon genuine liberals.
More at Stake Than Names
Whatever those two now choose to call themselves isn't what matters most. What does matter enormously is how they conduct themselves, as logical partners in defending the Constitution against the onslaught of the elitist radical-left.
Together, they can constitute the new, broad political majority that America has been awaiting.
Apart, by whatever names, they risk being reduced to ineffectual political minorities which is precisely where the strategists of the radical left want them.
John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com and an "unreconstructed Adlai
Stevenson liberal" who served two Democratic presidents, Lyndon B.
Johnson and Jimmy Carter.. |
