Now that conservatism, neo-conservatism and Republicanism have proven to be miserable failures, a vacuum exists in the political and academic worlds. Right-wingers and left-wingers are shifting around for new ways to define themselves, and so-called moderates are trying to decide which bandwagon to jump on.
Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, is the quintessential liberal academic. Every so often he publishes a polite, well-meaning tome with words like “moral obligation,” “sense of purpose” or “dialogue on values” in its subtitle. The chins wag for a while in academia about the book and then the discussion dies without exerting one scintilla of influence on the political direction of the country.
In some ways, Wolfe is like Charlie Brown, trusting that this time Lucy won’t pull the football out of the way. He actually believes that liberals and conservatives can sit down together—with a children’s table down the corridor for the moderates—and settle our differences like civilized human beings.
To Wolfe’s credit, though, he also believes liberalism’s day has arrived—with caveats. He makes his clarion call in a new book, The Future of Liberalism (Knopf). While it would be nice to think that the time is ripe for his ideas to flourish, something tells me America is not in the mood for polite discourse, nor is the corporate media prepared to discuss complex political issues on any but the most infantile level—as witnessed this past week in the stimulus bill coverage.
Don’t get me wrong: Wolfe’s book is engagingly written and worth reading as he places liberalism in historic context, citing all the usual suspects (Rousseau, John Stuart Mill, John Dewey) and eventually works himself up to redefine liberalism for the post-Bush world. He makes a persuasive case for the universal appeal and proven success of liberalism and boldly says it “remains to this day far more attractive than its leading alternatives.” Wolfe believes that the future of the country depends on liberalism being successfully “recovered,” which is “the surest path toward both individual freedom and a collective sense of purpose.”
Isn’t it fascinating, then, how such an appealing and successful political philosophy has been so demonized?
Where I part company with Wolfe is his insistence that liberals suffer from “a crisis of confidence.” Crisis of frustration would be a more accurate term for it. That is, the right wing has taken us to the brink of disaster, destroyed our economy, waged illegal war, violated our Constitution, ruined our global reputation, stolen our wealth and hidden it in offshore bank accounts, sold our public lands and endangered the future of the planet. Yet the right wing still dominates the political discourse. Each week on the Sunday gasbag shows, the lineups still consist of a fake liberal, moderate Democrat, two blatant conservatives, one raving neoconservative and one fascist. I see no one on these shows who truly represents the 70 percent of Americans who now, whether they know it or not, support liberal positions.
Bill Scher, of Liberal Oasis and Air America, summed it up nicely in a conversation we had a couple years ago. “When you give up a bedrock word like ‘liberal,’ you have signaled to the rest of the country that there is something bad about it,” Bill said. “That just leaves it wide open for conservatives to define it on their terms… They’ve actually refined a way to advance the cause of mis-defining it. When you think you’re in the minority, you’re more likely not to try. However, liberals talk about providing better government, saving Social Security and serving the people. We are clearly in the majority. It is not even close.”
Maybe if Alan Wolfe is invited on one of the gasbag shows, he will decide the time is ripe to stop being polite.
