Why I Am Not a Liberal (with apologies to Frank O'Hara)

A friend of mine recently turned me on to an interesting article about Paul Krugman, written by Benjamin Wallace-Wells for New York Magazine.  It was entitled “What’s Left of the Left.”  I recommend it, but I’m not going to discuss its main points here.  I have another agenda.

As I read, what struck me as odd from the get-go was the apparent failure of both the writer and Krugman himself to distinguish between “the left” and liberalism.  To me these have always seemed different things and worth keeping distinct.

While I do consider myself a lefty, it’s always been impossible for me to identify as a “liberal.”  It gives me the willies just to try it on for size.

Now, I’m aware of the long and storied history of liberalism in political philosophy.  I value the classic liberalism of the 19th and early 20th centuries with its emphasis on personal freedom, equality, limited government intrusion on individuals’ lives, and the obligation of the haves to help out the have-nots by paying a significant tithe on their income (aka the welfare state).

But that’s not what I’m talking about.  If most of the liberals I know about even have a political philosophy, it’s just a pale echo of something that once was.  (By the way, that trick is called “synaesthesia.”)

In any case, I’m interested in knowing why I think about things so differently from your garden-variety liberal and Republican.  Why I don’t fit into either of these camps.  Why I don’t think either has much to offer the Republic.  If I’m going to continue to be this way, there has to be a reason.

Liberals usually seem a little pathetic and fuzzy-headed to me.  They won’t fight the good fight to make sure we don’t invade Iraq, but then they whine about it when it’s very difficult to get out quickly.  They’re always a day late and a dollar short.  Any thinking person knew the war in Vietnam was hopeless and wrong in 1963.  Socialists like A.J. Muste knew it.  The Catholic Workers knew it.  But liberals didn’t do anything until 1968 or 1969 (Fulbright being a notable exception), when the rising flood of body bags started making the ostrich strategy untenable.  Liberals talk to me about banning “hate speech” because it hurts people’s feelings.  Liberals tell me I have to say “African-American” instead of “black.”  Liberals want everyone to be free, but they don’t want “them” moving in next door.  Liberals are hand-wringers.  One typical liberal, also an Ivy League history professor, told me when we were in the thick of the first Gulf war, “One simply doesn’t know what to do!”  Right.

Liberals buy into the system and stake out a position contrary to the that of the conservatives.  They are reactive.  They oppose things about which nothing is likely to be done – within the system, anyway.  They take positions that are easy and unlikely to cost them much.  They tend not to get arrested for chaining themselves to the gate.  They throw really boring wine and cheese parties.

Are there any liberals in national politics?  If so, they let George W. get elected twice.  They let the health care public option be scuttled.  They let our young people continue to die in Iraq and Afghanistan.  They let our planet get pillaged by robber barons.  They let all this happen and feel okay about it because they were against it.  Maybe.  But being against it isn’t enough.

Okay, I’m exaggerating.  Maybe I’m using too broad a brush.  But this is what I think every time I listen to a liberal acquaintance talk about an issue and every time I hear a liberal politician on the boob tube.  They accept the system we’ve got and tell themselves they’ve got to work within the system, which means very little changes.  Obama is a liberal.  Pelosi is a liberal.  They say you have to “govern from the center.”  Bullshit.  You have to figure out what’s right and just and fair and work your ass off to make that happen.  You have to lay it on the line.  Otherwise you’re just full of hot air and no better than the scumbag on the other side of the aisle.  Worse.

The “Left” is something different, at least in my world view.  The fact that we don’t distinguish between the two is depressing, and telling.  We get the term from the way the legislature seating was arranged around the time of the French Revolution.  The people on the left side of the room were radicals.  They thought the revolution was pretty much a good thing.  They didn’t accept the system; they wanted a new one.  The Marxist “Old Left” was definitely aiming for a revolution in which the workers would reshape society and do away with class.  The basic ideology of the “New Left” in the 1960s was also revolutionary in its own way, though its more coherent exponents like C. Wright Mills and Herbert Marcuse weren’t exactly old-school Marxists.  They thought that the radical student movements of the day held more promise.

I didn’t get involved in this world until 1969, when I was in high school.  But it was all around me even before then.  My parents both explicitly identified themselves as anarchists, and one of my 8th-grade papers, I recall, was on Mikhail Bakunin.  In high school, I wrote another on Prince Kropotkin.  In the summer of 1968, I was at St. Mark’s Church at a Joan Baez concert when she suddenly announced, in tears, that tanks were rolling into Prague.  Politics was all around me, and dissent.

By the time I was in 9th grade, I was deeply involved with the Fifth Avenue Vietnam Peace Parade Committee, the Moratorium Committee and the War Resisters League.  My parents had taken me to many antiwar demonstrations when I was a kid, including the October 1967 event where the Yippies tried to levitate the Pentagon.  (We didn’t have much success.)  I remember Dr. Spock spoke.  I was 11.  By 1969, I was spending a lot of time at meetings in smelly lofts, where discussions got quite lively.  I was named a “marshall” of the Moratorium march on Washington in November where, among other things, I manned a donation bin and got my picture on the cover of the Guardian, a lefty paper.  I also got tear-gassed, which, if you haven’t had the pleasure, was pretty awful.

In 1970, I phoned in a bomb scare to my high school from a supermarket around the corner.  It was part of a loosely organized (and I’m being generous) plan to mobilize student activism and shut down New York high schools.  Within 10 minutes, hundreds of kids and teachers and secretaries poured out the front doors, which was quite a sight to behold.  I was very pleased.  Once the building was emptied, and the cops had started their search for the bomb, crowds of us were hanging out on 15th Street drinking Yago Sangria and singing songs.  At a certain point, cops with riot gear were stationed at the front doors – as though this drunken, stoned, disorganized throng could do anything dangerous.  Fun-loving as we were, a few of us went up to talk to the guards, and with no warning at all they charged.  We ran away, they gave chase, and the crowd totally panicked.  Not very fleet of foot even then, I got caught and smacked on the thigh by a cop’s rubber truncheon, the pain of which I will never forget.  He ran past me after other escaping 14-year-olds, and I lay on the ground with hot pain tears in my eyes, feeling angry but proud.

This is the way it was.  It was a time in our history, and I was a teenager looking for meaning, a sense of belonging, the chance to be a hero, which is something a lot of us want, especially when we’re young.  No value judgment here, but we weren’t liberals.  We had nothing to lose – no families of our own, no money, no houses, no cars, no careers.  But we had been radicalized, some of us anyway.  And we had a cause.  It was fun, lots of girls, plenty of weed, a sense of common purpose.  Some were more serious and committed than others.  But I was a believer.

After high school, my involvement waned.  I refuse to register for the draft, which was going on because of the war in Cambodia.  I finally caved in when counselors at the War Resisters League told me the FBI would arrest me soon, and it wasn’t worth it because the war would be over in a few months anyway.  Later I saw my FBI file through FOIA, and it is amazing how much time and money they spent watching me, even at a time when my political activism was dwindling.  In college I was part of a few demonstrations and sit-ins, but not many.  Then, long afterwards, when I was a graduate student instructor at Columbia, I was involved in some things having to do with making the university divest itself of interest in companies that did business in South Africa (that was where I met and sang with Pete Seeger).  I did a few other things, but my commitment was waning.  I still felt the pull, but my life began to be about my work and my family.  It happens to all of us, I guess.

Still, it’s in my DNA.  It’s part of how I view the world.  To this day, I am convinced that most politicians, especially on the national level, are corrupt.  They have to be, that’s the system.  I am convinced that they will say anything to get elected and then we just forget, and the news media help us forget.  And on it goes.

I am also convinced that to be a Republican you have to be either stupid, ignorant or profiting mightily from Republican policies that favor the wealthy (i.e., corrupt).  No one with half a brain can believe some of the things that come out of their mouths.  I have never, and I mean never, heard a Republican policy that I agree with or that I think isn’t about getting re-elected, greasing the major donors, or feeding the fat cats at the expense of the rest of us.  They are a party of hate and division.  Their environmental policy is disgusting and short-sighted (and by the way, what is it?).  Imagine a party that has for all this time denied the reality of global warming!  Their tax policy is unspeakably unjust.  Their stances on social issues are, as a whole, ignorant of what life is like for most people in this country, fueled by the need to appeal to their constituency’s worst fears and hatreds, and intellectually barren.  They are the running dogs of the economic elite, the major multinational corporations and the powerful trade lobbies and will say and do anything to keep doing that job.

More than this, I believe that the two-party system of representative democracy we have in this country doesn’t work for the good of the many, at least at the highest levels of government.  Sensible policies like investment in green sources of energy are shot down year after year.  Anyone with a brain in their skull knows that petroleum is getting more expensive to produce every year and that we will run out soon enough.  That coal is not a viable option if we want to survive.  Decisions are being made again and again that say, in effect, “I don’t give a shit about my children’s generation and my grandchildren’s generation.  They’re just going to have to fend for themselves.  I’ve got mine, and that’s what I care about.”  This is not what a civilized society does.

So, for me modern-day liberals and Republicans are two sides of the same coin.  Which is why I remain, at heart, a lefty.  I can’t call myself a radical, as I once did, because I don’t do as much as I should to foment radical change.  I am lazy, greedy and somewhat confused about what I can contribute.  But here’s some of what I believe:

• I believe that individuals should be allowed to say anything they damn well please, whenever they please, no exceptions.  The movement to ban “hate speech” is appalling to me, because what you want in these situations is morespeech, not less.  Give hate-mongers a forum, so everyone will know what they stand for.  Don’t make it go underground, where it will get stronger.
• I believe that having an abortion is a spiritually corrosive act, especially if it’s used as a form of birth control; but I believe the individual has to make that ethical decision for herself, not the government.
• I believe that rich people and corporations should be taxed and taxed and taxed until there are better opportunities in this country for everyone.  I don’t care what any supply-side asshole says; no one needs to net more than a million dollars a year.
• I believe that a presidential and congressional election system that privileges those with the money to buy votes by offering only two candidates and making sure that only they get to talk to the electorate is a rigged system.  Do we really believe that of all the smart, informed, experienced, courageous and committed people in this country, George W. Bush was the best we could do?  For two terms?  That, my friends, is a fucked-up system.

An oft-quoted (unfortunately mainly by militias these days) passage from a 1787 letter by Thomas Jefferson to William Smith:

God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion. The people cannot be all, & always well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13. states independent 11. years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century & a half for each state. What country before ever existed a century & a half without a rebellion? & what country can preserve it's liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon & pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots & tyrants. It is it's natural manure.

I am not arguing for a violent overthrow of the U.S. government.  Our third President is.  I love the line “The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive.”  Sounds a lot like Teabaggers.

I think it’s worthwhile from time to time to remember that one of our founding fathers was worried about the complacency of the citizenry.  That the policies we abhor, and the impotence we may feel, grow at least in part from “lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty.”

And the fact that this rings so true and seems so relevant to our present dilemma may be one of the reasons why I am not a liberal.