Why wouldn't something very much like that work today?

Because it was just as vacuous and mealy-mouthed then as it is now. The problem is that nobody can really define this term "liberal". That's why all Kennedy could do is say something lame like, "If 'liberal' means X, then I'm for it; if liberal means Y, then I'm against it." How you could see this uncomfortable semantic dancing and hairsplitting as a principled embrace of the term "liberal" is beyond me. It's obvious that Kennedy was having just as much trouble with the fuzzy label "liberal" back in 1960 as people have had with it since then.

"Liberal" is a bastard term with a bizarre and convoluted history, and is uneasily associated with several distinct ideological tendencies at the same time. Maybe the New York Liberal Party had something definite in mind, but few others have. The term sometimes gestures vaguely in the direction of amorphous hopes for a more tolerant, more forgiving, less ruthless, gentler society. Other times it seems to have something to do with egalitarian economic reform. But the definable policy content associated with the term is in constant flux, and even differs from person to person. What's the point of hanging on to junk language like this?

"Liberal" - like "conservative" - is a security blanket that some people feel a need to cling to. ("Progressive" isn't much better.) People like to have a name to attrach to the totality of their confused beliefs, because it creates a fictive identity, makes them feel less confused than they really are, and in the American context it allows them to maintain the morally satisfying illusion that the two parties represent two distinct ideological sides, rather than loose, fluid coalitions of temporary fellow travelers.

The argument of your book is one that I have been hearing for at least 20 years. It's tired. You're wrestling with some sort of 60's demons that really don't mean much to people anymore. It's time to give up the ghost. To hell with "liberal".

Really? Has cultural liberalism's fondness for talking down to, taking for granted, and condescending to working class voters been "ameliorated"? You need to spend more time with the Obama freaks over at Kos and other sites (Daily Show too). The condescension is very much alive, which is precisely what has made Hillary Clinton's campaign -- a strategic disaster from day one -- into such a bear to knock out of the game. The arrogance with which Hillary's blue collar voters are dismissed as non-thinking "low information" voters supporting Hillary either because they've heard her name or are racist, is as fierce as it ever has been.

I like Eric's general point; liberal ideas beat conservative ideas and it's time to stop running form the label.

I'll quarrel with his history, however.

Eric writes:
" liberals made a series of fundamental mistakes beginning in the mid-sixties. They were arrogant. They were "elitist." They did treat white working-people--their primary political constituency--with disdain. They were insufficiently sensitive to the cultural concerns of everyday American, particularly with regard to issues relating to religion, and even more particularly with regard to abortion. And they became wrapped up in the divisive politics of identity that made it impossible to communicate with much of the country or cooperate with one another."

This is the conservative narrative of what went wrong with liberalism, and repeating it as such it supports a conservative analysis of policy. To say that liberals disdained white workers begs the question of "which liberals" in the 1960s did this. The Nixonian "silent majority" strategy reached out to the middle-class suburbs, which have been the swing battleground ever since, not the working class of the cities and near suburbs of places like Pittsburgh, Detroit, Boston, Cleveland, and so on, which continue to vote for Democrats. Busing, not pro-choice, was the entering wedge for Republican inroads into the white Democratic vote in those cities, and the right did pitch itself as populist vs. "elitist" judges who ordered the busing plans, but the funny part of that story is that the northeast and industrial midwest stayed democratic. Suburban districts in those cities trended Republican, but were already leaning that way and they did so for all of the anti-urban policies that the GOP stood for. In terms of the Electoral College, however, the rustbelt where the working-class supposedly lives, stayed Blue.

Since 1992, the industrial states of Wisc., Mich, Ill., Penn, NJ, and NY have voted Democratic every time. Ohio has flipped back forth. Carter picked up most of these sates in 1976. The GOP won most of them in the Reagan elections and in 1988, but they won almost every sate in those elections (Dukakis, who did the best of the 3 Dems running in the se years won 9 states, including Ny and Wisc.)

It was the South and the interior West that swung to the Republicans. In the South the GOP was the business elite plus the suburbs plus the rural race voters. In the mountain West there was no typical white industrial working class to disdain, but there were plenty of tax-cut happy libertarians who resented fed control of so much public land. As Larry Bartels pointed out in reply to Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas, the white working class has not quit the Democrats, but the GOP manages to claim them as some kind of authentic american like the yeoman farmer of yesteryear, to mask who they really, are the party of the rich and the suburbs and the nativists.
http://www.princeton.edu/~bartels/kansas.pdf

I would submit that it was not liberals like Humphrey, McGovern, and Ted Kennedy who disdained the workers, but rather the move-to-the-center New Democrats who, beginning with Scoop Jackson and Jimmy Carter in 1976 campaigned on the theory that they party had become too liberal to win a general election. As Democrats took up conservative policies on trade, unions, and business regulation it became easier to assume that on class issues little separated the parties (T. Frank's point), but it wasn't the liberals who confused things.

If Eric was talking about economic policy as the source of disdain, however, I might be more sympathetic to his storyline. Instead, he argues that it was on culture that liberals earned the elitist and arrogant labels. "Elitist" and "arrogant" are conservative turns of phrase that try to make up into down. Was it really elitist to legalize abortion? The same goes for the other social issues of the past four decades which in one way or another extended the civil rights revolution to include more and more Americans. The rights revolution alienated some white voters but it wasn't elitist to strengthen the equality of all citizens before the law.

In the end, Eric argues that Democrats need to embrace the liberal label, and this is a good idea. It might be more accurate to say they need to live up what the label stands for as well.

Okay, Dan K, does this mean then that you'd replace "Democrat" with "liberal"?

If so, does that automatically describe the philosophical/programmatic orientation of the Democratic Party?

As it stands, the GOP is essentially a conservative party (and even some mainline Republicans disagree with that, given how radical Bush has been).

The Democratic Party is more or less a liberal oriented party (Social Democratic?) with a moderate-conservative faction called the Democratic Leadership Council, of which HRC and BC are members.

You wrote:

"Personally, I am not a big proponent of "limited government" - at least not in the present context. I want more government regulation of the marketplace, more government involvement in large public investment projects, and more activist legislation from government to achieve egalitarian economic outcomes. I am not a devotee of free markets, or a true believer in the miraculous powers of the invisible hand undirected by deliberate social choices, but like to think I have have a reasonable appreciation for both the uses and benefits of free markets, and their substantial limits."

Which is nominally a "liberal" position. Traditionally, this has been the Democratic Party position, especially since the New Deal.

One of the reasons, as you probably know, that the Dems are a more liberal party is due to the fact the civil rights position that the party took in the 1960s chased out the white southerners who voted with their feet to become Republicans.

Pols like George Wallace were more "populist" on economic issues and conservative on other issues, especially race.

Or—and I hate to use this concept—are we watlking about "brands"?

You say I'm a "Democrat" and one automatically knows that you're for A, B & C. Say "Republican" and you're for X, Y & Z.

In brands, you already have a certain built-in expectation of what the product offers and as well as certain associations, experential and psychological.

"Why wouldn't something very much like that work today?"
Because for example the media would do exactly this:

Take "if that is what they mean by a "Liberal," then I'm proud to say I'm a "Liberal."

And turn it into headline saying "DEMOCRAT X ADMITS BEING PROUD TO BEING A LIBERAL" and in one foul swoop not only misquoted, but also suggested that it is in someway a controversy.
The extent to which the mass-media has bought into 'liberal' being akin to calling someone a heathen is scary.

Re Wkd's response to Eric's statement about elitism.

I think that some of the charges regarding the Democrats being "elitist" were due to the fact that some of those changes came at the expense of people at the bottom and middle, and not at the top. American politics is based on a zero-sum game: if black people get something, say, from affirmative action programs, that means that whites—especially those in the lower and middle classes—have to lose. However, those implementing and carrying out the policies tended to be upper-middle to exceedingly well off.

Which is why upper class whites, even GOP people, don't have a real problem with that kind of elite recruitment. Most of them benefit from under-the-radar forms of elite recruitment that have been traditionally reserved for whites: legacy status at college & universities regardless of their academic merits.

I don't think that Democrats should ever have to apologize for expanding the social and political franchise to blacks, women, and others. However, there has been a tendency for people in power and influence not having to suffer through the outcomes of certain policies decisions they have advocated or implemented.

A good example is Viet-Nam. Look at who went to war: working class & lower middle class youths, black, white, Latino. On the other hand, if you had a college deferment, you could be out on the street protesting. During WWII, nearly every male was called into service. I think this is at the root of some of the resentment that certain classes still have towards a certain era of Democrats.

It's like the Brahmin, Yankee class of the Civil War era that cried over slavery and the positions of blacks, but could buy their way of the war for their sons. However, the Irish working class had to serve. This led to one of the worst riots in American history: The NYC Draft riots of 1863. The Irish went after that class but their wrath was essentially served upon the weakest group in that city: blacks.

Um... Okay, so if we're at an epochal turning point in our politics, and "liberalism" polls badly and everybody hates it and it doesn't really accurately describe the political philosophy of its alleged adherents so much as an Enlightenment-era European gestalt, why can't we just dump it for "progressive," which has the benefits of being both accurate and aspirational? If the Republicans could get everybody calling it the Democrat Party and worrying about how the Values Voters wear their Jesus this week, surely we can accomplish this rebranding? Obama was made for that stuff.

Brian Williams: "Senator, the voters seem to be accepting the fact that you're a coughGODDAMNAMERICAcough secret Muslamofascist, but the National Journal says you're also the nation's Most Liberal Senator. What will you say to reassure them?"

Barack Obama: "Thanks, Brian, but we prefer the term 'progressive,' because we're a forward-thinking party that cares about advancing the lot of our nation and the world, and our opponents would like to keep us all so scared we regress to an infantile state and have to start wearing diapers again."

Ding Ding Ding! And conservatism is down for the count!

"Liberals," the American left, have suffered what has been described as "black propaganda by the redefinition of words." "Liberal" was redefined and is now understood to be something it is not; and that something is understood as bad.

Taking back the term -- restoring its actual definition -- would work. It would take broad agreement, a concerted effort and some time, but it would work.

And some of what it would take to make it work -- defining/re-defining what the American left is or wishes to become -- is vital work that needs to be done in any event.

The American left's real problem, however, is not rehabilitating one of its historic labels. It's developing a political economics that is an alternative to capitalism.

America hasn't had much of a political left since FDR's first two terms. It has had the world's strongest cultural left (as in modern American culture), and perhaps its strongest civil left (as in civil rights), and this is to its great credit. But it has had no political left to speak of for nearly seventy years.

There can be no politics of the left without an economics of the left. Capitalism is of the right, and belongs to the right.

Without its own, viable economics of the left, the left has no alternative to capitalism. This is why it zigzags from one unworkable form of socialism to the right, then back to another unworkable socialism and then back again to the right. Picture a zigzag that goes two steps to the right, then one step back toward the left, then another two to the right.

We've been seeing this motion accelerate not only in America but in all of the first world countries. All of these countries are experiencing a crisis of the left; a crisis which is the absence of an economics of the left.

The irony of all this is that it was an American who gave the world its only known -- if very little known -- sane, viable economics, which also happens to be an economics of the left. His name was Henry George. He was a socialist. But not in a manner anyone who doesn't know his work would imagine.

In America, "socialism" has been the subject of black propaganda by redefinition of words far longer than has "liberal."

George's economics doesn't include redistributing wealth, which is something one may be obliged to do only when wealth has been distributed wrongly in the first place.

What George's economics does is to forego an initial, unfair distribution of wealth. It does this by not allowing monopolies or monopolistic practices.

Incorrect, initial distribution of wealth does not occur naturally. There's nothing natural about it. It happens when laws are passed that allow monopolies and monopolistic practices.

If you're interested in learning more, don't bother with such as Wikipedia: the entries suck. Go to his first book, ~Progress and Poverty~ and read it. It's available free.

http://www.henrygeorge.org/pcontents.htm

All of this is nonsense. Indeed, the liberal label is shunned because of what it represents to the least informed and most reactionary. If one takes the elitist view that this is a dandy chunk of the citizenry, this is a useless discussion then, isn't it?

Conservative is a term that ought perhaps come under review, though. How many right wingers are interested in conserving the well being of the planet, energy resources, their neighbors, and so on?
Maybe the "conservatives" should be the "possessives."

Have tried to remain open about this for years, because some people seem so attached to an earlier meaning of the word "liberal," but I just can't get over the thought that's it's a foolish waste of time to fight to recover ownership a brand name that's been ruined by misinterpretation and straw man applications. Instead of reacting to "you're a liberal!" with a "no I am not" or "yes I proudly am" or whatever, it's more functional communication-wise to say "what do you mean by that?" This is why JohnW1141's approach with the relatives works, he let go of arguing the label until the end. I just don't understand why a writer like you even wants to use a term that has such differing meaning to different people and is so loaded with miscommunication.

To sum up, I think you have chosen a poor title for your book. What real value is in defending a word, especially if it distracts from more important things?

P.S. Ellen, too, has a great approach. Mess up the meaning of the conservative brand as well, and we might even have some hope to get back to halfways decent political communication in this country. With micro-labeling, I don't have the same problem, because they get sophisticated enough that they engender some fruitful conversation in the process. But these big broad labels are silly to fight for "ownership" over.

Politics in a democracy has to be comprehensible to non-political people or it cannot function. Ideological labels are necessary shorthand to this end. The labels always over-simplify, and even partisans bicker continually over their meaning. Witness the current fight among Republicans whether GWB is or is not a "true conservative".

It is always smart politics to turn the other side's label into an epithet. The Republicans realized this decades ago and their assault on the word liberal is remarkable for its discipline, ferocity, and success. Liberals now run from the term.

Eric seems to argue that the Democratic Party cannot afford not to defend their primary label, which is liberal. We have to embrace the word, make it represent Democratic successes rather than failures, fight for it in terms of today rather than mistakes made decades below. Others seem to feel the defense is too difficult, and that adopting another word (progressive is popular) is the better way to go.

An analogy is car brands, in this case I'll pick Chevy. Can GM afford to let its brand slide, or is fightig to keep Chevy from becoming an epithet intrinsic to survival as a carmaker?

Frankly, I think Eric is right. There is no fixed meaning to either conservative or liberal. Both are words whose meaning is continuously in flux, and each Party must defend their label to the death, because a completely destroyed ideological descriptor equals Party death. I also think that Democrats are wise to learn from the Republicans. Attack conservatism. Attack the word itself. Make it synonomous with incompetence, war-mongering, anti-intellectualism, avarice, and a reflexive tilt towards the interests of the rich.

"Liberalism: a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of the human race, and the autonomy of the individual, and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties." - Webster's Collegiate Dictionary 10th ed.

So, what do you have against liberalism, Mr/Ms America? Part of the problem is the word has come to be synonymous with positive liberalism, and while there there are reasons for that, I say the real meaning of the word (i.e. liberalism is the political philosophy that renders the individual supreme) needs to be returned to the public mind before the subtleties (which really deal with HOW liberalism can be achieved) only after. After all, folks don't seem to have a problem with living in a liberal democracy; they just don't appear to get the fact that the true antonym of liberalism is not "conservatism" at all, but authoritarianism, or Fukuyama's current bugaboo, illiberal majoritarianism. Once it's been established beyond doubt that liberalism is a good thing, we can get into debates over to what extent society should support people between jobs, etc., and it will be much easier to make the case without all the confusion. And people like Eric Alterman won't have to write confusing books called What Liberal Media when in fact a free and responsible press is an intrinsically liberal institution and complete anathema to illiberal regimes, representing as it does a check on the power of the rulers. Which, of course, explains Fox.

I am a liberal, and I think the charge of elitism is painfully accurate, even today. At its inception liberalism was focused on the protection of the rights and economic well-being of working-class whites. (FDR, I’m sorry to say, ignored racial injustice.) But, as liberalism grew in its idealistic pursuit of social justice, it fell out of touch with the very people it was originally designed to help. Just as Bush misunderstood the culture of Iraq, so have liberals misunderstood the culture of working-class whites. Though I agree with the intent, liberals have made clumsy and arrogant mistakes in areas of school busing, affirmative action, abortion rights, anti-gun legislation, removing religion from public life, militant feminism, gay marriage, and a disdain for patriotic symbols like the American flag. We have ridiculed and demonized the culture of whites who have never been to college. How can we expect them to vote for us?

I say if Obama is willing to talk to Ahmadinijad, then liberals should be willing to open a dialog with working-class whites. I say if a future liberal president is willing to engage in a sympathetic dialog with Islamic culture, liberals should also be willing to engage in a sympathetic dialog with American working-class whites who go to Main Street Baptist Church and put up a flag on Memorial Day. Let’s face it: Far too many liberals get off on feeling superior to small-town working folks; just as working-class white people tend get off on feeling superior to Blacks and Hispanics. Hillary Clinton seems to have discovered this late in her otherwise unseemly campaign.

Where is the common ground between a liberal, well-educated professional in Seattle and a carpenter or waitress in a small town in southern Ohio? If we don’t take the concerns of the last two into account as we pursue social justice, liberalism will die.

My response to someone way upthread;

I'm a socialist too. And, a capitalist. I'm for whichever economic arrangement works best at solving each specific problem. (The market doesn't work so well in security, education and healthcare, but delivers very well in other areas.)

I'm a Democrat and a liberal. These terms overlap but they're not identical. At the time of the revolution liberal meant a belief in the basic goodness of people, in the perfectability of people (and the institutions of free people), and that we are not born to a particular station and therefore limited to turning to our better born neighbors for governance in all the important aspects of life.

Through most of this country's history nearly every American shared those values and the term conservative evolved to become a cramped (in my view) form of liberal... until Reagan. The pre-Revolution conservative has made a huge comeback in the last 30 years and we find ourselves back at the original delineation. They believe we're born sinners. They believe only better born individuals should make the big decisions (see Scalia.) They think nothing will ever get better (at least by the hands of humans) so why bother.

They may still use the language of American revolutionaries, but it's rhetorical for them. They don't believe it, it's just the language of their grandfathers whose ideals they no longer understand.

Break down today's issues you'll find this basic delineation separating today's Democrats and Republicans. Liberal is not just a good thing to be, it's the foundation of our civilization.

Much erudite commentary above. It is a simpler dynamic. The gop is the party or corporatists, truebeliever wingnuts, fundamentalist christians, predators, warmongers, fearmongers, propagandists, disinformation warriors, pathological liars, fascists and wanton profiteers - Democrats sadly cannot defeat these monsterous facts and truths. It is a terrifying mystery. How is it even possible after the seven years of failure, bloody costly noendinsight wars, systemic financial malfeasance, treacheries, predations, shamings, treasons, and betrayals of the American people and the peoples rights, freedoms, and protection, the radical dismembering and reengineering of the Constitution, and mangling and dismissing of the rule of law, and the tyranny of reign of King George, and the fascists in the Bush government - that democrats are not leading by 99%.

Liberals are human beings. Conservatives...? - I'm suspect.

Liberals stand on a sterling and proud tradition of legal and political and human evolution. Liberals need to define liberals. The great fallacy and the Achiles heal of liberals, is that they allow conservatives to define what is a liberal. Consevatives motives and parables are retarded, savage, and patently wrong. Yet, liberals allow conservatives to both slime all things liberal and exalt all things conservative.

This dynamic must change. The terrible swift sword of truth is our weapon. Honoring our laws and the Constitution, and human decency our shield. Do any of you actually expect this American to believe any of the unholy conjurings, fictions, parables, and myths bruted and hoisted by the fascists in the Bush government?

Jihadists are only a threat to America if our government sits on our hands and willfully ignores dire warnings from our intelligence professionals (not private intelligence profiteers), conducts wargames exactly mirroring the actual attack, holds curious and potentially damning relations with the funding apparatus and minders that support and finance the attackers, - or if our government is complicit in the mayhem and massmurder.

The Bush government conjured an hegelian dynamic, and forced America to burden and hazard the terrible, bloody, noendinsight enormous costs of neverendingwar, and invented, bruted, blandished, proselytized, and prosecuted the neverendingwar the fascists in the Bush government conjured.

"Deliver us from evil!"

ERIC - Off topic, but I wanted to THANK YOU for the amazing book "Ain't No Sin to Be Glad You're Alive: The Promise of Bruce Springsteen." Read it, loved it, and bought it for friends.

FreeBubba- Henry George. Man, clarity at last. Possibly (I'm hedging my bets, I can't help it). After drowning in Marx/Bakunin/Marcuse/Debord and Guerin...(you get the point), George feels correct to me, for where I am right now. How is it possible I missed him? Reading the little that I have so far feels like that swift kick to the head Kafka prescribed. Thanks.

You guys all talk too much. I am a Liberal because I am a decent, open-minded and concerned human being. I was brought up to believe that the world is for all of us and we owe it to ourselves to become better human beings. We can become better human beings than we even think we can. I don't mean to get mystical, it's just that we, all of us, have potential beyond what we realize.
Now you take a Conservative and seek to find out how he got that way. He wants to be rich like the Rockefeller crowd and he listens to their hired lackeys to find out what he is supposed to think. The lackeys know that a Liberal is the biggest threat to who pays their salary so they vilify us. You don't defeat these guys by defending your own position. You defeat them by pointing out who they really work for and what their aims are. Our position is well nigh impregnable if you expose who they work for. And you do not expose it once. You expose it and you expose it and then you do it again because their employers have deep pockets.