Liberty, however, is not what liberalism today represents at all. What does it mean, then, when liberals begin to wonder how they can recover from the electoral defeats of 2010? The presumed enemy of liberalism is the Tea Party movement. Yet whatever negative things its enemies may say about it, no one can seriously claim that the Tea Party movement is opposed to individual liberty.
In fact, terms such as “liberalism,” “conservatism,” the “Right,” the “Left,” and “progressive” are simply examples of political baby talk. The Tea Party, as anyone knows who actually listened to what it proposed, eschewed labels. It stood instead for fairly specific principles: lower tax rates, smaller government expenditures, fewer regulations, more robust state governments, less judicial rule-making, reduced entitlements, etc. Moreover, these could be stated in very clear policies: eliminate capital gains taxes, end all earmarks, allow drilling for oil in Alaska, repeal ObamaCare (because, among other things, it violates states' rights), overturn Roe v. Wade and devolve the abortion issue back to the states, and freeze current entitlements.
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Instead, those who oppose the Tea Party (and who often attack the nonexistence “Far Right” or “ultra-conservatives”) stand for the most vacuous pseudo-principles imaginable. Other than the opposing “extremism” (whatever that means) and standing for “social justice” (which was the clarion call of the Nazis as well as almost every collectivist movement in modern times), what do those who profess to hold themselves as “liberals” or “progressives” really stand for? They stand for nothing, really, but angry rhetoric.
So when E.J. Dionne ponders “American Liberalism’s Waterloo,” he says nothing substantive at all. He writes of the difficulty of “governing” America, implicitly assuming that the purpose of politics is for one faction of our nation to govern the other — oblivious to the original purpose of our Revolution and our Constitution, which was to “liberate” Americans from government (our Founders, in fact, were the original “liberals” in human politics.) So Dionne wonders about how Obama can reconnect with his “base” (one is tempted to use the word “cadres”).
Those who cherish liberty, those who were once called liberals as well as conservatives (the two words are contradictory only in the warped, childish, dull thinking of Marx), do not need an enemy to attack, a meaningless insult to vilify those who oppose their policies, or the dreary bogeyman “extremism” to say what they want of government. They are “extreme” only in the sense of the Founding Fathersl. They do not seek “victories” over other Americans in their private lives.
