The Contradictions of Liberalism

The associate pastor of my church recently observed that, in addition to our having no choice about the family we are born into, we have no choice about the community.  Our community includes those we know well and those invisible to us, people we like or intensely dislike, those we agree with and those whose opinions we hate, those we need and those who need us.  Relationships exist with all those around us, whether we like it or not.  We delude ourselves, she concluded, by thinking that we can create our own community consisting only of people we like and need.  Our only real choice is the quality of our relationships with others.  She was right of course, but hers is a truth we mostly forget.  Excluding and hating the bad guys seems so much fun.  Liberals like to think that “it takes a village to raise a child,” but some like to select the villagers carefully.  It’s one of the contradictions liberals are prone to.

I’m reading right now, reluctantly, a book, “What’s the Matter With White People?” by Joan Walsh.  I say reluctantly because, though I agree with a lot of what she has to say, the book is such a constant flailing of Republican targets, and is filled with such venom against them, that I wince as I read it.  It’s like reading a blow-by-blow account of one of those 75-round boxing matches from the time of John L. Sullivan.  Her vision is of a battle in which unwitting Democrats constantly over the years are being tricked and splintered by those duplicitous Republicans.  I would be equally appalled by a Republican counterpart to her book.  The targets are broad and much too easy to hit, aiming from either direction.  Ms. Walsh is of Irish heritage, as partly am I, and reminds me of the old Irish joke, “Is this a private fight, or may anyone join in?”  There, I’ve probably just created another tiny splinter group.  And her book is a prime representative of the contradictions of some liberals.

Modern liberals are known for their emphases on community, planned social action to improve the lot of the disadvantaged, and an active role for government in doing so.  Their vision is of a democratic society in which individuals, each of them a bundle of minority opinions on a variety of issues, all of them equal before the law, work together to create change for the betterment of all.  The success of the democratic process that such a vision entails depends on the willingness of all to work together and achieve compromise between conflicting values.  One of the best examples of both the difficulty and potential of such a process occurred some years ago in a community meeting involving a fierce and acrimonious debate over zoning for a proposed subsidized housing development.  The proposed housing’s chief attacker was an elderly white lady, filled with fears and anger, and the chief supporter was a young African-American minister.  Suddenly, to my and everyone’s shock, the young minister got up in the midst of one of her diatribes, walked over to her and hugged her, saying “I’m so glad to see the pride you have in the place you’ve grown up in, and your determination to keep it from being harmed.  I just want you to know that I’m proud of this community too and also want to keep it from harm.  And we'll work hard for that.” She was flabbergasted, but her attitudes changed overnight, and she became a proponent of the change.

Walsh lamented how the intense fragmentation among liberal interest groups prevented developing and legislating the social action program they all sought.  Each group fought for its own special interest, regardless of the needs of others. In doing so, they often were their own worst enemies.  In particular, her book is about the loss of the blue-collar working class from the liberal New Deal coalition, in large part because of racial conflicts stemming from their competition for the same jobs in a dwindling job base.  Her “bad guys” were of course Republicans who deliberately pitted working class groups against each other, but she doesn’t recognize that exclusionary advocacy in itself was a major contributing factor (though she rightly praised Martin Luther  King, Jr. for his inclusion of people of all races in his advocacy.) 

And the greatest need, a prosperous, quality community for all, requires inclusion of all, but fierce advocacies for that community can entail exclusion of those with whom we disagree. That is what we see on both sides of the aisle these days.  Republicans and Democrats are equally guilty of vilifying and excluding each other, making progress of any sort impossible.  But at least the Republicans have the excuse that the exclusionary behavior is consistent with their individualistic ideology.

Walsh, our representative liberal, starts her tirades with a lament that liberals have lost their focus on needed economic progress that would produce more jobs and have focused more and more on cultural changes, from a woman’s freedom of choice to inclusion of minority groups to gay marriage.  She concludes it by lamenting all the cultural conflict that stands in the way of economic progress and wondering whether democratic progress is possible in a multicultural nation.  Does she sense the contradiction there?  She seems blind to the possibility that a growing economy could bring prosperity to all, and in the process reduce cultural conflict, or that acceptance of the poor and disadvantaged does not make a community whole by itself if it does not include acceptance of those already doing well.  Or that appropriate government action is the issue, not size.  Even the appropriate size of armies changes as technology evolves, and there is nothing necessarily incompatible with a smaller, highly efficient government and highly effective treatment of social ills.

The problem that both she, as the representative liberal, and the arch conservatives share is viewing the issues at conflict in terms of a zero-sum battle over a constant or dwindling pie.  Neither seeks to persuade the other in the other’s own terms that a victory can be shared.  Instead each seeks to find a way for the other to lose, expecting that their loss will be his victory.  At my wife’s recent college reunion, one speaker commended another for always, from college days on, starting out by asking about any deal, what’s in it for the other guy? That had turned that question asker from a poor boy into a highly prosperous publisher, respected by all.  We all need to keep finding ways for everyone, including those we may regard as enemies, to win.