Why "Liberal" is a term of abuse.

Mark Kleiman Mark Kleiman has a post recounting comments he recieved after a recent lecture he gave. In his words

Then Tuesday night I gave my crime-control pitch at the California Endowment. It was fairly warmly received. But two of the people who came up afterwards to tell me how much they’d liked the talk said something like, “I’m glad they decided not to have some liberal talk about crime.” When I told them that I was an unreconstructed liberal and card-carrying Obamaniac, they were deeply puzzled.

He wonders at this encounter, but I am not nearly so surprised. It is a growing contention of mine that while conservative policies are indeed quite dreadful, horrid really, close on their heels for being dreadful is liberal rhetoric and argument. Liberal policies are, on the whole, quite good, but the arguments we wield, at least those that permeate the public conscientiousness are quite bad. Actually, to be more exact, the leading liberal arguments are often quite mediocre or poor, while much better, liberal arguments are left unstated.

Take crime control and the criminal justice system, for example. I hear often, from liberals, that there is a need to protect the basic rights of the accused, but this is almost invariably presented as a protection for the accused and only for the accused. This is therefore presented as a gift to someone who is accused, that will benefit my neighbors and colleagues only if they are ever accused of a crime, an event that they don't believe will happen. These rights for the accused then come across as a moral obligation my we liberals believe is a moral obligation imposed on my neighbor for the sake of people accused of crimes, the vast majority of whom have, in fact, committed crimes. My neighbor may, therefore be a bit puzzled as to why we have to grant this privilege to these people.

The most persuasive reasons why we need to do this are, oddly, rarely stated, at least in our public arguments. For one thing, the power of the state to prosecute citizens is enormous, and history shows that if that power is not checked then it gets abused. If we grant our magistrates unlimited and unchecked power to prosecute they could then do a much more effective job going after criminals. But they could also, with far less effort to themselves, do a just barely adequate job of going after criminals and use their powers to go after people pointing out their corruption. This later choice is much easier and much more profitable and therefore the one invariable taken. If instead we require that they meet standards of evidence, that they be required to present overwhelming evidence of guilt of an accused defender, they can only accuse someone on the basis of "probable cause" and the other rights of the accused are respected, then our magistrates will need to just go after actual criminals. That is why we want to have these rights respected. If we require the state to respect these rights, then those who do get accused will generally be those who are actually guilty and we will be more secure in the process.

We are also made more secure ourselves, if the state respects the rights of the accused, because it fosters greater faith and confidence in the state and greater willingness to cooperate with police in investigations. By going through the whole process of trial, including the rights of the accused, we make it publicly clear that the state is going after those who are guilty. The rest of us are more likely to be cooperative with such investigations if we have confidence that the state is pursuing people guilty of recognized crimes and not some personal vendetta.

So, in short, the reasons for respecting the rights of the accused include powerful arguments that doing so protects the security of those who do not commit crimes. Indeed, those arguments are sufficient, in themselves, to persuade most everyone that respecting these rights is the correct thing to do. The moral concerns of the fate of the accused, who may indeed be guilty of a monstrous crime, can, and should be, a secondary concern. However, in recent times "liberal" arguments have raised this secondary concern to first place, and left the more significant arguments behind. This, more than anything else, I believe, is the source of "liberal" as a term of abuse.

As I indicated in the first paragraph, I also am coming to believe, that this general tendency for liberals to put weak arguments first and to abandon our strongest arguments is far more wide spread than just the issue of the rights of the accused. More on that in future posts.

Liberalism

Paul Waldman over at the American Prospect has a great article up on the status of Liberalism in America today. I think it is a very important piece, it captures several very important truths.

For example

But when Republicans began to go after liberalism, Democrats cowered in fear, not only trying to distance themselves from the term but embracing the idea that a "conservative" is a great thing to be. Few Republicans would claim to be "social liberals" -- even if they are -- but Democrats are always claiming to be "fiscal conservatives," saying they have "conservative values" or chiding Republicans for not holding to the principles of conservatism on issues like the deficit. The message this sends to Americans who don't know much about politics is that, regardless of the details of policy, it's good to be conservative and bad to be liberal.

This is very true of the liberal response to conservative attacks and is very damaging to our position. Democrats are regularly seen as less attractive on national security, it was, by many accounts the deciding factor in the last election. Indeed Kerry, the war hero, got trounced on this measure by Bush, who at the very best avoided hazard to himself. Kerry was damaged for opposing weapons systems which Cheney also called for cutting, yet Cheney kept his status of being strong on national defense. But if what Paul Waldman is saying is true, and I believe that it is, then this is hardly surprising. If liberals will at the first sign of attack on the political playing field abandon their positions and concede ground to conservatives, is it any surprise that conservatives are seen as stronger on security? Liberals need to stand on their positions in the national debate and not give ground. As I've written elsewhere conceding points like we do is fine in an academic debate, but a political debate is more like a trial, where we are convinced that our client, liberalism, is in the right. Any criticism of a liberal position needs to come only from conservatives, and liberals need to be determined only to disagree with that criticism. Such a position, I'm convinced, will go a long way to improving our stature on issues of national defense.

The next few paragraphs also deserve some comment:

Which brings us to what may be the most important feature of ideological competition in America today: Unlike liberals, conservatives don't simply criticize specific candidates or pieces of legislation, they attack their opponents' entire ideological world view. Tune into Rush Limbaugh or any of his imitators, and what you'll hear is little more than an extended discourse on the evils of liberalism, in which specific events are merely evidence that the real problem is liberal ideology. Liberals may write best-selling books about why George W. Bush is a terrible president, but conservatives write best-selling books about why liberalism is a pox on our nation (talk radio hate-monger Michael Savage, for instance, titled his latest book Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder).

Indeed, large portions of the conservative movement can be understood as an effort to crush liberalism in all its manifestations. Conservatives understand that their main enemy is not a law, government program, or social condition they don't like. Their main enemy is a competing ideology, and that is what they spend their time fighting.

In contrast, liberals spend very little time talking about conservatism. They talk about their opposition to President Bush or the policies proposed by the Republican Congress, but they don't offer a critique of conservatism itself. When was the last time you saw a book-length polemic against conservatism? Liberals have failed to understand that a sustained critique of the other side's ideology not only defines your opponents, it helps to define you by what you are against.

Following this advice does not mean, however, that we need to become like the Republican attack machine of Karl Rove and abandon civility and fair play. Rather it is a matter of first using reason and critical review to develop a set of policies that we as liberals believe in. Then we need to present those ideas with complete conviction and an unwillingness to compromise except as a kind of last and extreme resort. Part of the nature of liberalism is the scientists recognition of the tentativeness of all conclusions. However, when we present our policies to the electorate we need to forget that tentativeness and present them with complete confidence. This is not a form of deceit. The electorate is aware of the tentativeness of conclusions, they just don't want to hear it from the advocates of those conclusions. Again, the analogy is to a trial lawyer. Don't indicate to the jury any doubts about your clients case, that is the job of opposing council.

Kevin Drum has some further comment on this same article along the same lines. Check him out.