How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik deBoer

Author:Fredrik deBoer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2023-09-05T00:00:00+00:00

6 MEET THE GOODIES: WHY ARE LIBERALS THE WAY THEY ARE?

Consider the liberal.

Or perhaps I should say, consider the liberal once again. Reconsider the liberal, if you will. Few groups have been analyzed more often than the liberal, the American progressive, the center-left Democrat. They are a group of unique sociological interest, in part because most people who perform sociology hail from that tribe themselves. The word itself is notoriously contested; the boundaries of the category are certainly squishy, and the term is seemingly used as a pejorative more often than in self-identification. Some libertarians and conservatives demand that they are “classical liberals,” following in the lineage of John Locke and Adam Smith, but many of their beliefs are the opposite of what we mean when we say “liberal” now. In the Clinton ’90s, many Democrats fled from the label, seeing it as a vestige of the left-wing excesses of the 1960s and ’70s. In the mid-2010s, the insults began to pile up from the opposite direction as a new generation of strident socialists derided their more centrist peers. Everyone recognizes that liberals are an influential group in American politics, but few seem willing to carry the label. And yet “liberal” remains a word of potent explanatory power, contested though it may be. I have spent much of this book discussing the activist left, but, in the long term, the numerically far larger group of American liberals will do more to shape the future.

For my purposes here, I’ll use “liberal” to describe those left-leaning Americans who defend capitalism as long as it operates under regulatory constraints and with appropriate redistributive mechanisms. They may be routinely critical of Democrats, but vote for them just as routinely and disdain third parties. They concede that our meritocracy is imperfect and frequently produces unjust results, but defend the meritocratic ideal. They’re reliably forward-looking in regard to social norms, forever chasing the identity vanguard, but tend to practice traditional family formation themselves. They believe broadly in economic justice and will typically include higher taxes for the wealthy in that concept but become reliably vague when it comes to how much higher taxes should be and who qualifies as “wealthy.” They tend to be arch institutionalists, favoring expert opinion and remaining doggedly invested in establishment news media, frequently deferring to the wisdom of the CDC, the Democratic Party’s power structure, and MSNBC. They are left-of-center but right-of-left. They are the liberals.

Conservatives, of course, have been examining the liberal mind for as long as movement conservatism has existed. But analysis from the left-of-center provides us with a huge amount of material as well; liberals are a group that has been subject to constant anthropological examination. And as much as they are mocked, derided, and parodied, the successful liberal of the 2020s remains an aspirational figure.

The Democratic Party is the left-leaning American party, and most left-leaning Americans vote Democrat. But it’s important to say that when I speak about liberals, I’m not talking about the average Democrat. In public polling, a majority of Democrats do not self-identify as liberals.

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