Perception Altered : L Word: How Liberalism Lost Its Lure

For one breathless moment last week the entire political world seemed transfixed by a single word: the dreaded “L word,” liberal. And what made it so mesmerizing was that it was uttered by Michael S. Dukakis.

After months of trying to avoid it, the Democratic presidential nominee was finally acknowledging the political faith that George Bush had endlessly accused him of adhering to. “Miracle of miracles,” Bush gibed, while Democrats gamely insisted that their nominee’s new-found pride in his heritage might help his faltering campaign.

Whether Dukakis’ last-ditch ploy helps or hurts, his long struggle to avoid the label points up the remarkable decline in public esteem of a word that once drove the national political agenda and, to a large extent, transformed the world in which most Americans live.

What Does the Change Imply?

How did liberalism become a term of such devastating political opprobrium, and what does the change imply about the difficulties that confront liberals, and the Democratic Party that is their home, as they try to redefine their once-potent and persuasive faith?

For older Democrats, at least, liberalism--with its insistence that government can help people shape a brighter future and a better society for themselves and their children--was the credo that broke the back of the Depression, smashed the Axis powers and forged a new world order abroad--all the while stimulating unprecedented affluence at home.

For millions of other voters, however, especially middle-class white workers and others who make up the all-important swing vote in presidential elections, the word liberal has come to have quite different meanings and associations.

Array of Attitudes

In simplest terms, political professionals and historians agree, the word liberal has come to be associated with an array of attitudes and positions that many Americans today consider inimical to their own interests and--especially in the realms of social policy and personal values--beyond the bounds of acceptance.

And this shift in what the L-word means to voters on gut issues, ranging from managing the economy and fighting crime to combatting drugs and dealing with the Kremlin, is what has made it such an effective weapon in the hands of Republican strategists.

“Liberalism has gone from a philosophy which aimed at improving individual opportunity and welfare to promoting the interests of interest groups,” says Al From, executive director of the Democratic Leadership Council, an organization of centrist Democrats, offering his diagnosis of one part of the problem.

He also decries what he sees as a liberal tendency toward “cultural relativism”--an inability to distinguish between such things as “fighting discrimination against gays on one hand and promoting adoption for gay parents on the other.”

Stuart E. Eizenstat, who was President Carter’s domestic policy director, sees much the same situation: Liberalism has drifted too far from its original concentration on fostering economic opportunity at home and combatting totalitarianism abroad. It has become immersed in “social experimentation” and “neo-isolationism,” Eizenstat complains.

Mark A. Siegel, former executive director of the Democratic National Committee and a longtime party activist, says liberals have become such a rarefied breed that they have lost touch with the ordinary people whose interests liberalism once championed.

Siegel bemoans, for example, what he calls “the Chauncy Street elitists,” in Dukakis’ Boston campaign headquarters, “who think they know better than the people what the people should be thinking.” Siegel cites Dukakis campaign commercials that focused on the allegedly devious tactics of Bush’s strategists, rather than issues that affected voters directly.

“Too much Harvard, not enough Boston College,” Siegel says.

Roots in Three Upheavals

The roots of these problems lie in three profound sociopolitical upheavals of the turbulent 1960s and ‘70s: the civil rights revolution, the “Great Society” initiatives of President Lyndon B. Johnson and the anti-Vietnam War movement.

These historic causes, setting in motion forces their leaders could not control, pitted the political constituencies that had supported liberalism against each other. They also dramatically associated liberalism with economic, social and foreign policy positions that millions of American voters reject.

Ironically, each of the causes involved things that many Democrats then--and now--count among their party’s proudest achievements:

--The civil rights revolution. The anti-discrimination laws pushed to enactment in the 1960s by Democratic supporters of the civil rights movement constituted a historic step away from the officially sanctioned racism that has stained the nation’s history. And the Democrats’ identification with the passage of these laws assured the overwhelming loyalty of black Americans to the party.

But it also cost the Democrats the backing of many whites in the South and in the cities of the North. In both places, liberals’ commitment to blacks not only made them targets of racial enmity, but also sometimes made them insensitive to the feelings of whites who believed that their own legitimate interests were threatened by such things as government-enforced integration of housing, schools and the workplace.

Federal action to halt klan violence or to open ballot boxes was one thing; federal action to take over a local school system or dictate who got hired and fired in a local factory seemed quite another to many once-loyal Democrats.

A related problem for liberalism was that the success of blacks in righting historic wrongs inspired other groups with legal grievances--Latinos, gays and women--to mount similar protest efforts. The result was increasing pressure on the Democratic Party and increasing strain on the liberal coalition.

--The Great Society. Medicare, Head Start and a handful of other programs survive as potent remainders of what government can do, but the Great Society promised more than it could deliver and left behind bitter public skepticism about government efforts to help the poor or engineer social progress in general.

Moreover, Johnson launched his far-reaching effort to emulate and expand on the social and economic reforms of the New Deal at a time when he enjoyed the blessings of his 1964 landslide victory and the country enjoyed relative affluence.

Some critics charged that Johnson tried to do too much, others that he did not try to do enough. Whatever the case, as economic conditions became less favorable and the Great Society brought neither an end to poverty nor social tranquility, public disenchantment set in.

And liberals, fearful that conservatives would try to roll back the clock, took uncompromising positions on such issues as welfare and busing that further alienated voters.

--The Vietnam War. By one theory, Johnson escalated the war to demonstrate his anti-communism and thus protect the Great Society from attack on the right. But the war not only destroyed the President who had given liberalism its greatest triumphs since Roosevelt, but also split the liberals themselves.

Traditional liberals, such as the late Hubert H. Humphrey, supported the war as a continuation of liberalism’s battle against totalitarianism. Liberals of the New Left protested the war as a wasteful, self-defeating enterprise that lacked the support of the people whose freedom was supposedly at stake.

And, the most vehement opponents declared, U.S. intervention sprang not from legitimate national security interests but from aggressive, imperialistic impulses in America itself--a picture of the country that struck many voters as not only inaccurate, but also anti-American.

The bitterness of the split, and the disastrous climax of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, created a deep-seated aversion among liberals to committing American strength abroad to combat communist insurgencies.

And the anti-war movement, adopting increasingly extreme tactics as its frustration and determination mounted in tandem, linked itself--and liberalism--to patterns of behavior and a broad range of social and life-style movements known as the counterculture, further estranging liberals from the middle-class Americans whose support they needed if they were to succeed in electoral politics.

The net result of all these interrelated elements was to weaken and fragment the liberal movement. More damaging still, a political environment was created that was hostile to liberalism and more receptive to conservatism.

The changes were reflected in part by Richard M. Nixon’s ability to recapture the White House for the Republicans in 1968, an election that marked the begining of liberalism’s descent. Only four years earlier, the 1964 GOP candidate, Barry Goldwater, had been shellacked at the polls because he was regarded as far too conservative.

‘Domestic Disturbances’

“Nixon’s speeches were more right-wing than Goldwater,” conservative leader David Keene argues. “The difference was that, when Goldwater was running, things looked good and there was no reason to buy what he was saying. But by 1968 there were domestic disturbances and the programs that had been sold as solutions to domestic problems were seen as making the problems worse.”

For 20 years thereafter, down to the present day, Republicans have used the word liberal as an epithet to brand Democratic office seekers. And Democrats who follow what Republicans like to call “the liberal persuasion” have fled from the label. Arizona Rep. Morris K. Udall, for example, when he ran for President in 1976, pointedly referred to himself as a “progressive,” a term deemed less odious than liberal.

Cataloguing the ghosts of its unpopular past, Bush recently denounced the upper echelons of liberalism as “remnants of the 1960s, the New Left, campus radicals grown old, the peace marchers and the nuclear freeze activists.”

Allegations Held Bolstered

Indeed, liberalism seems to have plumbed new depths in public regard during the 1988 campaign. Partly, this is because some facets of Dukakis’ stewardship of what conservatives like to call “The People’s Republic of Massachusetts” seemed to bolster conservative allegations that liberals are soft on crime and short on patriotism.

In particular, the identification of liberals with such things as protecting the constitutional rights of the accused, rehabilitating criminals and opposing military intervention abroad made the Democratic candidate vulnerable on such seemingly extraneous matters as the prison furlough granted to convicted murderer Willie Horton while Dukakis was governor and the place of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools.

Apart from Dukakis’ vulnerability on social issues, the huge federal budget deficit has put the next President in a straitjacket as far as new government spending is concerned. Even in the unlikely event that the election produces a renewed mandate for activist government, the fiscal legacy of the Reagan Administration makes significant new programs unfeasible.

‘We’re Here to Help’

This has emboldened Bush to sneer at the relatively modest ideas along these lines advanced by Dukakis. Ridiculing a Dukakis proposal to aid economically hard-hit areas in a speech early in the fall campaign, Bush declared:

“We can see it now when the government agent from the Fund to Rebuild America comes to your door with the most feared words in the land: ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help.’ ”

Why does it matter if liberalism is an object of scorn and derision? After all, most Americans think of themselves pragmatically, as moderates, and have never shown much interest in ideology either on the left or the right. Significantly, unlike Britain and other Western democracies, the United States has never had a national party that was officially willing to call itself “liberal” or “conservative.”

Nevertheless, even in this country’s workaday political world, says Republican consultant Keene, who is also chairman of the American Conservative Union: “Ideas do make a difference.”

And liberals can look back with justifiable pride on a heritage of ideas that gained political approval and made a difference in the lives of nearly every American. By promoting and fighting for such ideas as economic opportunity and equality before the law, liberals helped establish such now-sacrosanct institutions as Social Security, collective bargaining, the GI Bill and Medicare, along with a battery of statutes striking down discrimination because of color, creed or sex.

And if 1980s-style liberalism has a different meaning from the brand of liberalism common to the 1930s and 1940s, it is relevant to remember that the word has been redefined before. In the 18th Century, when the term liberalism was born, its main focus was on protecting the rights of individuals, usually against government--then seen as the greatest threat to individual liberty. This was the sort of liberalism that this country’s Founding Fathers inscribed in the Constitution in the Bill of Rights.

Liberalism’s concern with protecting the individual remained constant for 200 years. But by the 20th Century, amid the the hardships and inequities fostered by the Industrial Revolution and the development of self-aggrandizing corporate giants, liberals began to view government less as a potential threat and more as an ally and defender of vulnerable private citizens in the economic jungle.

It was this shift that Franklin D. Roosevelt dramatized and institutionalized in the midst of the Great Depression, when he prodded Congress into establishing a host of new agencies to serve the interests of the average citizen.

Meanwhile, Roosevelt saw another threat to the average citizen abroad: the rise of totalitarian states such as Nazi Germany. He prodded the United States into taking a more assertive part on the world stage. Thus, a forceful, interventionist role for government at home and abroad became part of the liberal tradition under Roosevelt, and this brand of liberalism was carried forward by Harry S. Truman and John F. Kennedy, the two other liberal Democratic presidents with whom Dukakis has identified himself.

But the difficulties that Dukakis and other contemporary liberals face in defining themselves were reflected in the contrasts between Dukakis and the three earlier Democratic liberals he sought to embrace.

By likening himself to F.D.R., “Dukakis sure surprised me and I’m sure he would have surprised Roosevelt,’ said Roosevelt biographer William Leuchtenburg of the University of North Carolina. “I don’t recognize this guy as a liberal at all because he has run away from Ronald Reagan’s charge that government is the problem.”

“Roosevelt had a very strong sense of the state,” Leuchtenburg says. Dukakis, by contrast, stresses that the federal government should play only a “partnership” role with business and state government.

On the other hand, Dukakis’ resistance to the idea of committing U.S. military force abroad seems to conflict with the pattern established by the three Democratic presidents he cites as his ideological models. All of them favored a prominent role for this country abroad--Roosevelt urging “a quarantine of the aggressors” long before Pearl Harbor, Truman sending U.S. troops into combat in Korea and Kennedy pledging in the memorable words of his inaugural “to pay any price, bear any burden to assure the survival and success of liberty.”

Hard Road to Redefinition

Though even the most ardent liberals recognize many of their current problems, the road to redefinition will be long and difficult. That is because there is still wide disagreement as to what the objectives of liberalism should be for the rest of this century.

Eizenstat argues that liberals should shy away from social issues and concentrate on dealing with economic problems, which is how liberalism became popular in the past. “Economic liberalism has never been rejected,” he argues. As proof he points out: “Bush felt the need to offer some economic proposals of his own during the campaign.”

Indeed, among the proposals offered by Bush to enhance the “economic empowerment of individual Americans” are the expansion of the Head Start program for poor children, a Great Society idea. Bush also backs federal job training programs and has proposed tax credits to help finance child care.

But some veterans of the New Left think liberalism should stake out broader horizons for the future. “Liberals are still stuck on issues of economic benefits,” complains Michael Lerner, editor of the provocative new liberal Jewish magazine Tikkun. “Liberalism should do more to meet people’s psychological and spiritual needs and help solve problems such as stress in family relationships.”

Whatever the future definition of liberalism turns out to be, the evidence of this campaign strongly suggests that the word as it is now understood remains a considerable political liability. Though Dukakis was applauded by many pundits for his belated candor, campaign sources say their nightly tracking polls indicate that it took the Massachusetts governor fully two days to recover from his confession of liberalism.

Staff writer Stanley Meisler contributed to this story.