Liberal Values Then and Now
– By Howard Sierer –
ST. GEORGE – Ah, the good old days when liberals were actually, well, liberal. Liberal in its true sense, that is. Today’s “progressive” née liberal movement has morphed into something in many ways antithetical to liberalism.
Start with a definition of liberalism: “A political and moral philosophy based on liberty, consent of the governed and equality before the law. Liberals espouse a wide array of views depending on their understanding of these principles, but they generally support individual rights (including civil rights and human rights), democracy, secularism, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion and a market economy.”
These values appealed to many in liberalism’s golden years in the 1960s and that swept Democrats into office across the country. For many, John and Robert Kennedy represented these liberal values.
Compare liberalism then with those who call themselves “progressives” today.
Free speech is one of our Constitution’s bedrock liberal principles. Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s name is synonymous with squelching free speech. In the 1950s, he used his office and by extension Congress to force government officials, professors and media screenwriters from their jobs for expressing what he and others called far-left views.
Using McCarthy-like tactics, progressive students today have forced the dismissal or resignation of professors and university staff deemed insufficiently sensitive to progressive causes. In many cases, they have protested and even rioted to keep invited speakers with whom they disagree off campus.
This direct assault on free speech has been aided and even applauded by self-described progressive faculty and the reliably-leftist mainstream media, those who should be at the forefront of liberalism’s freedom of speech.
For example, this year’s Princeton freshmen indoctrination included a video by progressive Professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta that characterizes free speech as a “privilege” rather than a right and in which he disparages the speech of those with whom he disagrees as “masculine-ized bravado.”
There are few self-described progressives today in academia, government or the media who would agree with George Washington, George Orwell, Oscar Wilde and others, all of whom uttered words similar to a quote often attributed to Voltaire, “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Civil rights were a core liberal value that animated the 1960s and drew vast numbers of Americans to the cause. They embraced Martin Luther King’s dream that every person should be judged by the quality of his character rather than the color of his skin.
Over the passing decades, the liberal ideal of equal opportunity gave way to progressive’s push for equality of results. These results were to be achieved by overt preferences in education and employment based solely on race, so-called “affirmative action” embodied in extreme form today by Critical Race Theory. So much for King’s liberal ideal of judging people by the quality of their character.
Today’s progressives have abandoned another bedrock of liberalism, due process. The Constitution’s Fifth Amendment couldn’t be clearer: “No person shall … be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”
Harper Lee’s novel “To Kill a Mockingbird” shined a long-needed spotlight on Jim Crow justice; Sen. McCarthy’s egregious excess was eventually repudiated. Abandoning liberalism, today’s progressives have reverted to shocking violations of due process, justified in their minds because they furthered the progressive view of social justice.
In 2011 the Obama Education Department sent a “dear colleague” letter to universities threatening to cut off their federal funding unless they made it easier to discipline students accused of sexual assault. In a previous column, I described how these “kangaroo courts” eliminated a defendant’s right to counsel, discovery of evidence and cross-examination, all fundamental to due process.
The #MeToo movement, also discussed in a previous column, morphed from “women deserve to be heard” into “women must be believed.” Sen. Diane Feinstein, in an attempt to prevent Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation as a Supreme Court Justice, introduced a woman’s sexual assault accusations against him. Those accusations were flimsy to begin with and were later completely discredited. Nonetheless, progressives in government and the media readily presumed Kavanaugh’s guilt, ignoring any semblance of due process that presumes innocence.
Freedom of the press is likewise in jeopardy as progressives scour the media looking for what they perceive as racial and gender affronts. Facebook and Google attempt to delete what they call “hate speech” and racial bias from their content and comments sections. But like beauty, hate speech is in the eye of the beholder.
For example and despite its massive effort, Google has been accused of “racial bias” in its policing of hate speech. Ditto for Microsoft’s LinkedIn. These large companies have been whipsawed by a handful of progressives looking for the slightest excuse to take offense while they ignore conservatives with far more obvious reasons to complain.
I am no supporter of former Pres. Trump and have never followed his tweets or Facebook posts. But I am stunned that Twitter, Facebook and Google have all banned Trump from their websites, cheered on by progressives. Love him or hate him, no major public figure should be prevented from presenting ideas and opinions to the public.
The final liberal value on the list above is a market economy. For progressives, support for free markets disappeared when they began to insist on Marxian equality of outcomes rather than the equality of opportunity that free markets provide.
I support true liberal values and have supported them for my adult lifetime. Sadly, they are hard to find on the progressive left these days.
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