Liberalism

"It's all [the] liberals' fault"

This is from chapter one, page one of Ann Coulter's new book Slander: Liberal Lies About the American Right, and she means it, boy does she mean it. For more than 200 pages she tears into the evil liberals. They are guilty of everything from elitism (Hollywood actors) to being under-educated boors (Michael Moore), and every crime in between. They hate conservatives, they hate Americans, they seem to hate everything. "Liberals hate society and want to bring it down to reinforce their sense of invincibility." (p. 27) Hate society? Whoa! Who knew?

Coulter's extremist stereotyping of liberals can be found on every page. She uses up most of the dictionaries nasty words in describing liberals, but what Coulter never does is tell us what exactly this thing called a liberal is. With wide-ranging targets--from Rob Lowe to Christine Whitman--it becomes clear that a liberal is anyone who Coulter doesn't agree with. And anyone she doesn't agree with is evil. This makes her book extremely annoying and hard to argue with. After all, if everyone who is bad is a liberal, then all the liberals are bad. Hard to argue with. Also hard to respect. This kind of circular logic has a certain aesthetic appeal but it is not conducive to rational discourse.

So who is a liberal in Coulter's universe? Although she does not give a clear definition (at least, none that I've found) she does provide a long list of who she defines as liberal. All Democrats are clearly liberals: she uses the words "Democrat" and "liberal" interchangeably in her books and in her columns. Some Republicans, however, seem to be liberals too (Senator James Jeffords). The Media is completely controlled by limousine liberals (barring radio and the Internet, where good conservatives triumph), Dan Rather being an especially loathsome example of this Media elite. The rich are liberals (elitists again). But so are the very poor. (Which suggests that Gore got a plurality of the vote because more than half the country is either very rich or very poor. What ever happened to the American middle class?) In short, anyone who Coulter doesn't like or doesn't agree with, is a liberal. And they're all pretty bad people.

Here's an example of liberal as defined by Coulter:

"We read letters to the editor of the New York Times from pathetic little parakeet males and grim, quivering, angry women on the Upper West Side of Manhattan hoping to be chosen as that day's purveyor of hate. These letters are about one step above Tiger Beat magazine in intellectual engagement. They are never responsive, they never include clever ripostes or attacks; they merely restate the position of the Times with greater venom." (p. 2)

Never mind the more obvious excesses in this paragraph (New York Times' letters are never responsive, never clever), there is an ugliness in this attack on liberals that is disturbingly typical of Coulter. In this paragraph, a liberal is a Manhattanite, or to be more precise, an Upper West Side Manhattanite with odd habits of either grimly "quivering" or acting like a parakeet. What does she mean by these adjectives? I can't help but sniff some homophobia here. I know Coulter would deny it, calling me a knee-jerk, politically correct liberal (or "girly-boy", another favorite Coulterism). But then, why "grim", why "parakeet". Why these images of tough, masculine women and small, twittering men? This is a typical Coulter strategy wherein she implies something about her ideological opponents (liberals are a bunch of queer New Yorkers) but maintains plausible deniability by avoiding actually saying what she means.

Of course, the worst part about the above quote is its complete lack of logic. If liberals are Upper West Side Manhattanites, how did they win half the Senate? Almost half the House? In the 2000 election, Democrats won almost half of the Electoral College and more popular votes than did the Republicans. Does Coulter seriously think that half the people in this country are evil? Or are those poor voters simply deluded pawns of the real liberals, the ones in Washington, Hollywood, and the Upper West Side who control everything? If so, this seems like the same sort elitist attitudes that she accuses her liberal opponents of harboring. The poor people are too dumb to see through those wily liberals. They need pundits like Coulter to show them the truth.

Coulter's image of liberalism is both ugly and divisive. What else but divisive can you call a world-view that labels half the country evil? On the major issues of today, American attitudes, unlike Coulters, remain divided and complex. Only one third think homosexuality should be illegal, but two thirds oppose the idea of gay marriage. Most Americans think abortion should be legal, but most also think that there should be limitations placed on when and why abortions occur. If these attitudes are somewhat contradictory, they are also quite real, and reflect the inherent moral murkiness of these issues. Alan Wolfe got it right in his 1998 book, One Nation, After All: most Americans understand that political issues are complex and nuanced and they prefer to put themselves in the moderate center of political debates, not out on the fringes with the likes of Coulter.

Coulter's characterization of liberals also shows she has no understanding of the history of American liberalism.

The modern liberal tradition begins with English philosopher John Locke. Locke argued that all men have certain rights, "life, liberty, and estates" (property), and that any government that takes away those rights is illegitimate. Locke's essays were an attack on the conservatives of his day who were defending the divine rights of kings. Our founding fathers based our Constitution on Locke's ideas (Thomas Jefferson practically plagiarized Locke in the Declaration of Independence with his "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness".) The followers of this way of thinking proudly called themselves liberals. They believed in freedom and individual rights. And they were so successful that the old conservatives, the ones who believed in the power of kings, died out.

In the 20th century, the victorious liberals split into two camps. There were those who had a relatively narrow view of individual rights, essentially believing that the government should just leave people alone as much as possible (these became the new conservatives); and there were those who argued that government should intervene to some degree to provide economic security, without which, they believed, individual rights were useless. These latter were the liberals of Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society. But these liberals still maintained their belief in individual rights and so vehemently opposed the Soviet Union from its formation until its collapse.

This is the history of real liberalism, one which Coulter either does not understand or deliberately distorts, as this selection from her conclusion demonstrates:

"Liberals have been wrong about everything in the past half-century. They were wrong about Stalin (praised in the New York Times and known as 'Uncle Joe' to Franklin Roosevelt). They were wrong about Reagan (won the Cold War and now polling as the greatest president of the twentieth century). They were wrong about the Soviet Union (defeated by the twentieth century's greatest president)." (p. 197)

Again, typical Coulter. Liberals were not wrong about Stalin, they loathed him. But during World War II they decided it was better to work with Stalin than Hitler. (There were radical leftists in the United States who liked Stalin, but there were also extreme right-wingers who liked Hitler, so that's a fair trade-off of lunatic fringes.) It was Democratic President Harry Truman who pumped up the Cold War, built up our nuclear arsenal, put troops into Germany, started NATO, and fought the Korean War. It was Democratic President John F. Kennedy who faced down the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis and sent the first combat troops to Vietnam to fight against Communism. Anti-Communism was an area where reasonable liberals and conservatives generally agreed and cooperated, despite Coulter's historical revisionism. To give Ronald Reagan sole credit for bringing down the Soviet Union is foolishness.

Coulter's use of the word liberal is inaccurate, monotonous, and dangerous. Dangerous because her kind of thinking makes healthy political debates almost impossible. Once we start using labels as an excuse for thinking we've lost our ability to engage in reasonable political discourse. Or to quote Coulter:

"Progress cannot be made on serious issues because one side is making arguments and the other side is throwing eggs--both figuratively and literally. Prevarication and denigration are the hallmarks of liberal argument. Logic is not their metier. Blind religious faith is." (p. 2)

Precisely, Ann. Stop calling everyone you don't like a liberal. It's mindless name calling and you don't even know what the word means. Your opponents aren't all liberals--some of us are far to the left of liberal, and some of us are even Republicans--and the ones who are don't all think alike. Start being a bit nuanced in your arguments and I might be forced to take this web site down.

Sure, there are leftists who play the same sort of name-calling game (think Noam Chomsky) but they don't represent liberals. Most leftists and liberals, like myself, can disagree with conservatives without calling them evil. William Safire, William Bennet, Barry Goldwater, John McCain, Rudy Giuliani, Christine Whitman, Bob Dole are all Republicans and yet I can respect them and take their opinions seriously.

I don't have to like their ideas (almost every Safire column annoys me) but I can respect their seriousness and their integrity. We simply disagree on issues. This is what reasonable people do. This is what Coulter should learn to do. But as long as Coulter keeps arguing that all liberals are evil we cannot take her seriously. We can merely work to expose her inanities and insanities.

If Coulter would only stop throwing those eggs, we'd all get along a lot better.

©2002 Carl Skutsch. All rights reserved.
All opinions expressed herein are those of the author unless otherwise noted
(and it goes without saying that they make more sense than Coulter's opinions.)

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