Matt Taibbi on the American Left

The word [liberal] has a chilling effect even on the people who basically agree with most of what it stands for. I myself cringe, involuntarily as it were, every time someone calls me a liberal in public. And I'm not the only one. When I called around for this article about the problems of American liberalism to various colleagues who inhabit the same world that I do - iconoclastic columnists and journalists who've had bylines in places like The Nation - they almost universally recoiled in horror from the topic, not wanting to be explicitly linked in public with the idea of the American left.

A lot of it, surely, has to do with the relentless abuse liberalism takes in the right-wing media, on Fox and afternoon radio, and amid the Townhall.com network of newspaper invective-hurlers. The same dynamic that makes the junior high school kid fear the word "fag" surely has many of us frightened of the word "liberal." Mike Savage says liberalism is a mental disorder, Sean Hannity equates liberals with terrorists, Ann Coulter says that "liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole." These people have a broad, monolithic audience whose impassioned opinions are increasingly entrenched. In the pseudo-Orwellian political landscape that is modern America, to self-identify as a liberal is almost tantamount to thoughtcrime, a dangerous admission that carries with it the very real risk of instantly and permanently alienating a good half of the population, in particular most of middle America. That reason alone makes it, in a way, wrong and cowardly to abandon liberalism and liberals. If Ann Coulter wants to call all of us fags, well, then, fine, I'm a fag. For the sake of that fight, I'll stay a liberal till the end of time. But between you and me, between all of us on that side of things, liberalism needs to be fixed.

At a time when someone should be organizing forcefully against the war in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming issue of big-business occupation of the Washington power process, the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.

It shies away from hardcore economic issues but howls endlessly about anything that sounds like a free-speech controversy, shrieking about the notorious bugbears of the post-9/11 "police state" (the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, etc.) in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI. It sells scads of Che t-shirts ($20 at the International ANSWER online store) and has a perfected a high-handed tone of moralistic finger-wagging, but its organizational capacity is almost nil. It says a lot, but does very little.

Here's the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein's monster of incongruous parts - a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone. In 1965, manufacturing jobs still made up 53 percent of the US economy; that number was down to nine percent in 2004, and no one has stepped up to talk to the 30 million working poor who struggle to get by on low-wage, part-time jobs.

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans' rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them - like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the "All Things Considered" interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They haven't yet come up with something to replace the synergy of patrician and middle-class interests that the New Deal represented.

"It's also a cultural thing," Sanders says. "A lot of these folks really don't have a lot of contact with working-class people. They're not comfortable with working-class people. They're more comfortable with environmentalists, with well-educated people. And it's their issues that matter to them."

This is another dirty little secret of the left - the fact that, at least when it comes to per-capita income, those interminable right-wing criticisms about liberals being "elitists" are actually true. According to a 2004 Pew report, Americans who self-identify as liberals have an average annual income of $71,000 - the highest-grossing political category in America. They're also the best-educated class, with over one in four being post-graduates.

That, in sum, is why I don't call myself a liberal. To me the word "liberalism" describes an era whose time is past, a time when a liberal was defined more by who he was fighting against - the Man - than what he was fighting for. A liberal wielding power is always going to seem a bit strange because a liberal always imagines himself in an intrepid fight against power, not holding it. I therefore prefer the word "progressive," which describes in a neutral way a set of political values without having these class or aesthetic connotations. To me a progressive is not fighting Mom and Dad, Nixon, Bush or really any people at all, but things - political corruption, commercialism, pollution, etc. It doesn't have that same Marxian us-versus-them connotation that liberalism still has, sometimes ridiculously. It's about goals, not people.