American Liberalism

An interesting bit of history here, courtesy of Eleanor Roosevelt.

My first recollection of hearing the word “liberal” used disparagingly was in a GHW Bush (41) speech he gave in my then-home town, Los Angeles suburb Woodland Hills, in 1992 when he was running against Bill Clinton. He claimed that Clinton was such an extreme liberal that his environmental policies would result in our being inundated with spotted owls.  Needless to say, the crowd wasn’t buying it, and Clinton went on to win the state by 1.5 million votes, leaving many of us wondering why Bush had come here in the first place.

This did nothing to hamper the use of the word “liberal” to denigrate an opponent, however.   In fact, this is the true core of U.S. politics; regardless of who winds up running in 2020, the race, in its essence, will come down to liberal vs. conservative.  One either believes that government should play a role in environmental regulation, standing against dictators and their oppressive regimes, fair, lawful and humane immigration policies, respect for the free press, helping those who are least able to take care of themselves, the removal of big money from politics, providing our children a high quality education, refraining from aggressive wars, taxation that favors a strong middle class, and all the rest–or one doesn’t.

I just checked a few of the 159 million articles that resulted from my Google search for “Americans have liberal values,” and then looked at “Americans have conservative values.”  It seems that Americans tend to be more liberal than conservative, which, perhaps is the reason Trump lost the popular vote by almost 3 million ballots.