The Logic of Liberalism

The Logic of Liberalism

Let me begin by telling you where the seed for this sermon was planted. It was just after Christmas last year and as I often do when I am driving alone, I was flipping through conservative radio stations. I like to know what they’re saying and thinking, and in case you never tune them in, I can tell you that they are deeply, dismissively, and often angrily critical of all things liberal. And, every now and then, someone offers an argument or critique that is really quite thoughtful and compelling.

As an aside, I have to tell you that I also sometimes watch Christian evangelists on television, and every now and then I get an idea or a good story from them too.

Now, my much beloved partner Tammy has no stomach for this. She will literally and loudly groan in disgust if she walks into a room and I have been watching Benny Hinn channeling the holy spirit and pushing people over with a touch of his hand, or if Pastor Creflo Dollar is giving another one of his deeply impassioned sermons to my rapt attention. She has the same reaction to conservative radio.

So there I was listening to whatever station it was, and the commentator was going on and on about how the liberal position was completely irrational. He was convinced that there was no logic to the liberal position, and seemed to be genuinely flabbergasted that anyone could possibly take it seriously because it was contrary to the most basic sense of right and wrong. Couldn’t liberals see that they are leading the country astray?

Actually, they guy I was listening to was rather tame compared to some others who are convinced that liberalism is actually evil and all liberals are sick and twisted with malevolence. (I hope you don’t think I’m kidding. This stuff is on the airwaves every day!)

Surely, I thought as I drove, it is not so hard to articulate a logical argument for liberalism! Surely, I thought, it would be good exercise and maybe a good sermon too, to formulate an articulate and reasoned response to the critics of liberalism!

If only it were so simple.

I have to tell you in preparation for where I’m going with this that I am a third generation democrat with deep family roots in civil service and organized labor around Chicago where I grew up. My father carried me on his shoulders at the 68’ Democratic national convention when he marched with the Veterans for Peace and the police broke us up with tear gas and Billy clubs. I grew up Unitarian Universalist in a time when our congregations were deeply involved in the civil rights movement and local social activism, and I have childhood memories of my parents in the kitchen, solemnly listening to Martin Luther King on the radio. I am liberal to my core.

All my life I have had serious and persistent issues with authority, an uneasy distrust of power and the people who seek it, and an almost knee-jerk, negative reaction to excessive wealth. I have always thought it proper and appropriate that a democratic nation of free people should have some form of a social contract to provide for its sick, destitute, and disabled citizens. I am a member of the ACLU, Amnesty International, and the Interfaith Alliance. I support Moveon.org, Project Vote Smart, and the Citizens Project, among other things. It has never occurred to me that I could be anything other than a full-blown, tax-and-spend liberal. Being a liberal is my family heritage, my religious tradition, and my guiding philosophy. I’m proud of it.

In fact, if they issued cards for liberals like they do for the ACLU, I would almost certainly have one, but I probably wouldn’t carry it because that might be too much acquiescence to authority. Or something like that…

Surely, I thought, surely this religious, social, and political stance that has so defined my life has some clear and logical reasons behind it! Listening to the radio that day, I told myself I would find those reasons, I would articulate them clearly, and I would share them with you so that all of us might then share them far and wide in response to commentators like the one I was listening to.

I have to tell you that I have rarely taken on a more difficult, a more educational, or a more enlightening subject. In an attempt to articulate the logical basis of modern liberalism I have had to journey into areas of history, political theory, economics, concepts of human nature, and systems of morality that I had no idea would play so directly into what liberalism is and how it has changed over the past two hundred years. I have had to significantly lower my ambitions.

Don’t get me wrong. I cannot imagine being anything other than a liberal, and while there is much that I learned in preparation for this morning that I will be chewing over for a long time, I am still a liberal. To be honest though, my liberalism has become much more nuanced than it was just a month ago. And, to be perfectly clear, what I have been wrestling with is social and political liberalism. Nothing I have learned has put the slightest chink in my liberal armor when it comes to religion.

So. Some background is necessary, and some definitions. My Encarta encyclopedia defines liberalism as an “attitude, philosophy, or movement that has as its basic concern the development of personal freedom and social progress.” My dictionary defines liberalism as, “belief in progress and reforms.” Terrific! I say. Who could deny that freedom is a worthwhile goal, reforms are necessary, and progress is good?

But let’s go a bit deeper with this. Just exactly what do we mean by personal freedom? Early liberalism, and I’m talking about liberalism up to the mid-eighteen hundreds or so, focused primarily on freedom from coercion, especially from any interference or control the government might try to impose. The constitution of our country was expressly and exquisitely designed to keep government out of individual lives, out of religion, and out of commerce and trade. The preamble to the constitution is simple and strait forward, clearly stipulating the purposes of the government: to create a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. It is a document straight out of liberal thinking and the period known as the Enlightenment, and it trusted implicitly in free market capitalism. It was a stunning achievement.

As time went on however, the free market in the United States developed into local and regional monopolies that controlled prices, goods, services, and employment. Many industries, notably those involved in manufacturing and mining behaved abominably, paying starvation wages, price gouging, paying only in company scrip, mandating company housing at rates the company would set. The situation became indistinguishable from indentured servitude for millions of nineteenth century workers.

Somewhat in response to this, there began a shift in political thinking. This resulted in the establishment of public education in the 1840s, the formation of labor unions in the 1880s, suffrage for blacks in 1870, for women in 1919, and the establishment of the Federal Reserve Bank in 1913, among other things. There was an active Social Gospel movement in which Universalists were deeply involved, pushing progressive movements in prison reform, disaster relief, mental health care, and abolishing child labor.

In the nineteen thirties, The New Deal of President Franklin Roosevelt brought about a sea change in political philosophy and the way the government functioned. Suddenly, government was not just a protector of individuals against coercion by others, (something it had never done well anyway) but an economic regulator, and a provider of employment, social services, and insurance. The New Deal brought not only the most massive social spending in the history of the world, but also the first anti-trust legislation to limit the size and scope of monopolies, the regulation of interstate and international commerce, the establishment of health and safety standards for foods and goods, it controlled pricing and supply with selective subsidies to certain industries, declared a minimum wage, created Social Security, insured banks with federal funds, and mandated labor standards. If you think the Bush administration is interventionist and power hungry, they can’t hold a candle to the unprecedented and as yet unequalled expansion of governmental powers that occurred under Roosevelt!

What happened can be described as a shift, from an emphasis on personal freedom and hands-off government, to one of intervention and imposed justice. More accurately, it was a shift from a pro-individualist theory of people and government, and toward an interventionist, pro-state, or social democratic conception. Critics and conservatives at the time called it a form of socialism, and in many ways it was, especially when compared to what had been before, and compared to what had been originally intended.

Here we begin to see some of the tension that is inherent in modern liberalism. On one hand, as its name implies, liberalism stands for freedom and liberty. But in its modern incarnation, it actually functions fairly coercively, taxing everyone whether they wish to be taxed or not, regulating industry, controlling commerce and trade, setting the value of currency, affecting interest rates, standardizing education, licensing the airwaves and broadcast bands, funding specific programs, research, arts and sciences, controlling substances, and any number of other active interventions into the lives of private individuals and the capacity of a supposedly free society to determine its own direction! And, you may agree with and support every one of these interventions! But in truth they function as limits on freedom even as they seek to provide protections for freedom. All of us should be asking if that really is the purpose of government in a free society.

Here we also see some of the most persistent tension between the liberal and conservative viewpoints. The social theories that led to the New Deal recognized the observable truth that there are other forces besides government and religion that prevent individuals from being free; physical limitations, circumstances of birth, arbitrary social realities like racism, classism, nationalism, sexism, and etc., there are economic limiters like poverty, the volatility of unregulated markets, and the demonstrated willingness of the economically powerful to exploit workers. These are real and pressing issues that have a direct impact on the public good. In theory, liberals believe that the government interventions that address these inequalities, even if they do so at the cost of certain freedoms, are worth the price.

In general, thoughtful conservatives, (not the Rush Limbaugh variety), are not so optimistic about the ability of government to solve these problems with legislation, although this has changed recently with conservative attempts to legislate morality when it comes to things like directing tax dollars to religious institutions, putting prayer and creationism in public schools, and discrimination against homosexuals.

In general, conservatives decry government intervention in commerce, trade, and economic development, believing that the sacrifice of economic freedom is too high a price to pay for an arbitrary and questionable egalitarianism. Whose egalitarianism, they ask, and who decides? Does everything have to be accepted? Are there no sacrosanct moral standards?

Of course there are! Everyone agrees that there are moral limits to human behavior that a free society cannot tolerate. And, everyone agrees that the state has some role in regulation. The discussion, such as it is, is over where do we draw the line, and how deeply in the sand?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is a bit more precise in defining liberalism than the examples I gave earlier. It says that, “Liberalism can be understood as (1) a political tradition (2) a political philosophy and (3) a general philosophical theory, encompassing a theory of value, a conception of the person and a moral theory…” Well and good. But, herein is also another part of the problem. Deep at the heart of both liberalism and conservatism are theories that have very little if any logical basis. Both sides of this discussion are (in fact) mostly feelings and personal preferences that have deep roots in foundational beliefs about human nature, human capacity, and systems of morality.

Liberalism places a high value on egalitarianism and attempts to level the playing field by legislating a more-or-less neutral political background for the widest possible variety of human cultures, preferences, lifestyles, beliefs, and viewpoints. Liberalism tries to avoid making value judgments on the contents of these preferences, believing that in a free society all cultural and moral preferences must be treated equally under the law so long as they don’t impose upon or limit the preferences of others.

The down side of this is that it leads rather inevitably toward a moral relativism that pushes the conservative comfort zone. Conservatives question the validity and even the possibility of a neutral background for cultural or other human preferences. They contend that this so-called neutral background is nothing more than just another cultural or human preference, and that the very idea of a truly neutral background is contrary to human nature. We will always be inclined to give preferential treatment to specific others, they say, and to pretend otherwise is preposterous. We will always and naturally favor our selves our families and our friends, seeking preferential treatment for those close to us. People, they say, will naturally tend to associate with people where there is some shared affinity, and will stay within a shared value system and a common understanding of behavior and morality.

Some conservatives go so far as to argue that politically correct liberalism is nothing more than a sophisticated disguise for another form of totalitarianism -- that discourages real debate, limits free enterprise, and stifles a truer expression of human differences within a bland and forcibly imposed multiculturalism! They argue that liberalism actually squashes a deeper and more substantial liberty!

It all gets very complicated very quickly, and we have only scratched the surface.

I have been offering a critique of liberalism, but please don’t take that to mean I have become any less liberal. Rather, I have become more thoughtfully liberal, and this is not a bad thing. I could just as easily have taken on a critique of conservatism, but that will have to wait until another day.

In the end, I have arrived pretty much where I started. After a great deal of thought, I find that if sacrificing certain economic and political freedoms are the cost of an authentic, thoughtful, and realistic attempt to feed the hungry, house the homeless, educate the populace, create opportunity for traditionally disenfranchised people, and a good faith effort at raising millions out of poverty, I will pay that cost, and pay it gladly. It is morally wrong to sustain a system that sustains poverty and inequity, and I don’t think conservatives adequately recognize the reality of what happens to the working poor in a free-market system that is absent of regulation or oversight.

What I have learned in the process of trying to articulate the logic of liberalism is a much deeper appreciation for the diversity of political opinion that underlies our deeply divided nation. And, while I still find the actions of the Bush administration to be misguided at best and reprehensible at worst, I have to tell you that I no longer begrudge conservatism in general.

Rather, I have been most impressed with the sheer genius of a democratic system that allows this moral and cultural discussion to take place in a more or less civilized manner. And, while I am deeply distressed at the dismissive and derogatory tone that the national conversation has recently taken, I am deeply hopeful, if not entirely convinced, that the system can handle it if we use it and if we trust it. After all, we are having this argument in the newspapers and at the polling place instead of on some battlefield, and that is a very good thing.

I have come to believe that it’s supposed to be this way! The democratic system was specifically designed to allow us to live in the creative tension between competing ideals and philosophies. It helps keep all of us on our toes, and in the end I believe that this tension will lead to the most creative solutions, especially if we all remember that the system only works with widespread and active participation.

Thank God(!), if there is one, for the U.S.A., and may the blessings of liberty shine on for a thousand years.

Amen