Don't Say the L-Word

When George W. Bush, in last Friday’s presidential debate, attacked John Kerry as being “the most liberal senator of all,” I got nervous, and not just because the President of the world’s only remaining superpower had just referred to his opponent as “Senator Kennedy”. It had never before occurred to me that being “liberal” was a bad thing, and, since I have always considered myself to be so ideologically inclined, my infant life in politics flashed before my eyes. Would I be branded for all my days, stripped of all credibility by this self-imposed semantic burden? Just as I was teetering precariously on the brink of emotional devastation and a career in consulting, I remembered.

I’m Canadian.

Where I come from, liberal doesn’t denote irresponsibility, or inability to govern: Canada’s unashamedly named Liberal Party has formed the government for roughly 37 of the last 50 years. When I left home this September for university in “the States”, I brought with me my Liberal Party membership card: I am a Canadian liberal.

And in American politics, that makes me the antichrist.

There really isn’t anything inherently bad with liberalism, or liberals. It’s the ideology that breeds progressive social policies, like socialized health care and the decriminalization of marijuana, which happened in the Netherlands in 1976. In the 28 years since, Dutch water has not turned to blood, locusts have not ravaged the land, and fire and brimstone have generously confined themselves to scripture.

Despite this apparent benignity, one need only examine the competing presidential campaigns to see how scared politicians really are of the “liberal” tag.

Searching the Democratic National Committee’s website turned up only 10 results for the term. Of those results, most refer to comments by Republicans. Indeed, 3 of the 10 dealt with Alabama Governor Bob Riley’s comment that a “very liberal Supreme Court” is responsible for the recent “degeneration” of the United States. I, for one, wasn’t aware that the United States was degenerating, especially in the time of Lawrence v. Texas, and its court-ordered legalization of sexual relations between consenting adults of the same gender. If this is what Governor Riley calls “degeneration”, I for one am happy to take credit.

The results at the website for the Kerry campaign were slightly less anaemic: the L-word appears 37 times on www.johnkerry.com. Even so, 17 of those occurrences involve the candidate’s defending himself against charges of liberalism from his opponents, and the single reference to Kerry as a “liberal senator” comes from an AP release – written in 1988.

The clearest indication of the negative connotations of the term comes not from the small number of times it appears in the Democrats’ literature, but rather from the number of times it is used by their opponents: 155 times on the President’s official re-election website and 194 times on the homepage of the Republican National Committee. In nearly all of these 349 cases, the GOP attacks John Kerry as being any one of an “extreme liberal”, a “tax-and-spend liberal”, a “clueless liberal”, a “big spending liberal”, a “flip-flopping liberal”, a “limousine liberal”, or, for that matter, “just another Northeast liberal”. The Republican campaign is clearly operating with the attitude that to label John Kerry as a liberal is to smear him in the eyes of the American public. Poll data suggests that that belief is anything but unsubstantiated. In a January 2004 Newsweek Poll, 83 percent of respondents felt that it was somewhat or very important that a democratic challenger to President Bush “should be generally seen as a political moderate, not a strong liberal”, and a 2003 poll by CBS found that more Democrats wanted to see their party nominate a conservative candidate than wanted a liberal nominee. When the Republican Party repeats its mantra that John Kerry is “just another Northeast liberal”, it plays into the part of the American consciousness that has grown to equate liberalism with mismanagement, irresponsibility and indecisiveness.

It’s unlikely that the way the American electorate sees “liberals” will change any time soon. What is certain, however, is that the revulsion felt by a large segment of the population at any suggestion of liberalism will only aid conservative forces that seek to keep American social policy rooted in the past. Whether the cause is a constitutional amendment to exclude gay couples from the institution of marriage, or a ban on federal aid to overseas Planned Parenthood groups, the “liberal” tag will continue to be used to hold back societal progress.

But that’s all well and good for me: I’m Canadian.

Adam Goldenberg ’08, a Crimson editorial comper, lives in Grays Hall.