A few thoughts on liberal dogma

Liberalism, like a large rambunctious family, is characterized more by its long-running arguments than by its shared beliefs. It is not so much a creed as a list of things worth fighting about. And as time goes on and history teaches us fresh lessons, new options arise and old ones are discarded.

-K. Anthony Appiah
"Seven Habits Of Truly Liberal People,"
Slate, Feb. 16, 2009

That's a pretty neat way to put it, actually.

In the circles I frequent--living in the South in real life, cruising the internet in... the other real life--it's not unusual to find people talking about "what liberals believe" as if it's some kind of dogmatic set of beliefs. We believe in taking people's guns away, taxing everybody, censoring language, animals having more rights than people, trees having more rights than animals, terrorists having more rights than trees... I don't know, all kinds of silliness that when I hear it I usually have to process it for several seconds to figure out whether Coulter or Limbaugh or O'Reilly or whomever is talking about me. And frequently they're not, which seems a bit silly because I self-identify openly and consciously as a liberal, that foulest of animals, lowest of species, worst something of category. You know the drill.

Thing is, I can't always argue with them. Because this is one of the things about liberalism, is you can always point to a liberal who believes whatever and laugh at him or her or it, and we liberals do it to ourselves, frankly. I mean you'll find plenty of us liberals pointing at a subset of our fellow liberals and saying, "Ha! What a buncha asstards!" only to wonder what happened when a group of conservatives snuck into the legislature behind our backs and started wrecking up the place again.

If, as conservatives like to say, the Democrats are liberals, maybe they're right and this natural fractiousness of our sect is the truth behind the truth of Will Rogers' great line, "I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat." (He also said, "Democrats never agree on anything, that's why they're Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.") Maybe the Democrats are liberals (mostly) and that's why I don't think they're liberals....

Because, maybe as Appiah says, liberalism isn't a creed so much as it's a list of things worth fighting about.

One of my favorite things a liberal ever said about liberalism was the late Spalding Gray's statement in Swimming To Cambodia to the effect that the central tenet of liberalism was "Question ev-ry-thing." I think that's basically true; I suppose there are leftist dogmatists but I guess they're not really liberals even if they're associated with liberalism. Liberals tend to second-guess their presumptions, even their most dearly-held ones. This is maybe the main reason conservatives are able to attempt to paint us as amoral or vacuous: a conservative says "Thou shalt not blank" and then a liberal's instinct is to say, "Really? Says who? What if we blank on Tuesdays? What if people in China blank? I knew a guy who blanked on a dare one time, and he was mostly alright except he got kinda twitchy at loud noises...." And then the conservative says, "No, really, thou shalt not blank, it says so right here in this Font Of Wisdom we share" (it could be the Bible or it could be some hoary tome on economics or last week's episode of Rush), and then the liberal says, "Well who the hell is this Font Of Wisdom to tell people what blanking is? Huh?" And blank may really, well, and truly be an awful idea, but you know we liberals, we like (as Gray said) to question everything and telling us thou shalt not seems less like a commandment than it does for a starting point for a long and twisting march towards what we hope is Truth (not that we won't question that when we come to it).

I can see why conservatives get exasperated with us. I get exasperated with us. We're not merely trying to be contrarians, really, we're not. It's just that we don't like getting bossed around. By anyone. Or anything.

Of course, Ann Coulter would argue with that, she and Jonah Goldberg and some of the other talking pinheads like to say we're bullies and we get off on bossing others around, and we all have weird dogmas and whatnot. You'd think, then, that we'd be much more effective and coherent if that were the case. Three weeks in and some of us are already bitching about our oh-so-supposedly liberal President. (Okay, he's a liberal, or a moderate liberal, or center-left whatever that means. See? We can't even agree who our members are.) If we're so dogmatic, why do we fight amongst ourselves all the time?

Here's an example: Air America. Remember Air America? This was "our" response to right-wing talk radio. Purportedly. A bunch of liberals thought they'd get together and broadcast left-wing talking points aired by left-wing celebrities like Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo. Because, see, that's the problem we have with our message, is that we need this central switchboard or nexus or whatever.

Of course, Air America ended up declaring bankruptcy and who knows what's happening to it now. And why? Why did Air America do so poorly? Was it because it was too left for American tastes? I'm sure some idiot on the right has said something like that.

But no; no, the reason Air America went belly-up and bloating in the sun so quickly was that hardly anybody, not even liberals listened to it. I know one person, exactly one liberal, who ever listened to Air America. (If any lefty readers want to chime in, maybe I can bring that up to a number between five and ten.) Air America wasn't even on the air when a number of liberals began to say that it sounded like one of the most retarded ideas they'd ever heard of. "So... wait... why would I want to listen to this again?" "I don't know, I'll probably just keep listening to NPR." "Who thought of that?" "Sure, Janeane Garofalo is hot and I loved her on Ben Stiller, but when the hell did she become an expert on politics?"

Seriously, people on the right: anything you said about Air America was probably half as incredulous, a quarter as mean, and an eighth as funny as what we said about Air America. Also, we disagreed with whatever you said, partly on principle and mostly out of habit. Except when we didn't. (See?)

Here is the dogmas of liberalism: question all dogmas except this one--that some things are worth fighting about. "About" seems to be the best preposition--I thought of making that "for" or "over," but both of those are both true and false at the same time. No, some things are worth fighting about.

I don't want to make generalizations about conservatives. (I'd immediately have to question them, I'd start thinking of self-proclaimed conservatives I know who don't fit the bill, etc.--see? I'm doing it again.) But buried in the word itself is a reluctance to ask questions. Dictionary.com tells us conservative means:

...disposed to preserve existing conditions, institutions, etc., or to restore traditional ones, and to limit change.

Such a disposition, it seems to me, inevitably means being slow to challenge, slow to question, slow to fight over things. I mean, I suppose you can question everything and then decide it was all as it should have been to start with, but that seems much more like a liberal thing to do than a conservative thing, because inherent in the question is the possibility that change might be good (c.f. the definition of liberal, "favorable to progress or reform" or "open-minded or tolerant, esp. free of or not bound by traditional or conventional ideas, values, etc."). I imagine (second-guessing myself again) that there are conservatives who do question and challenge a great deal, but why do they bother if they're just going to end up where they started? Of course, I don't want to say it's bad to not challenge things all the time like liberals do....

In fact, where I was really going with that was: I can see why conservatives are quick to take the opinions of some of our louder sects and ascribe those beliefs to the whole, because a group of people who all call themselves "liberals" and then disagree about nearly everything must seem shockingly alien to them. We must be lying, or up to something. Surely the loudest among us must be the spokespeople for the whole movement. Why else would we tolerate them being so loud (and sometimes stupid) if we didn't agree with them? Seems logical enough, only it's completely wrong. We tolerate some members being loud (and sometimes stupid) because of a deep belief that people ought to be allowed to be as loud (and sometimes stupid) as they'd like, because (question everything!) maybe the loud (and sometimes stupid) are actually right.

Incidentally, this sometimes also leads to another one of our "problems": not only do we tolerate loud-and-stupid people, but sometimes we even stick up for them, and conservatives confuse this form of tolerance with endorsement. It goes back to the family metaphor in the Appiah quote: you might not get along with your brother or you might hate your Uncle Bob, and you might say all sorts of nasty things about those family members when you're talking to Aunt Sue or your sister, but somebody outside the family says an unkind word (however true) and it's on, motherfucker; it's permissible within the family to say just about anything, but outsiders don't have the same license. So we end up sticking up for our worst members every now and again because, dammit, they may be morons but they're our morons, and blood has to stick together. (I suppose conservatives must do the same thing, sometimes: hence the uneasy looks on the faces of fiscal conservatives when rubbing elbows with their fundamentalist "brethren" during Republican national conventions; now you know how some of us over here feel about PETA.)

We're a fractious group, it's in our nature. When we stop....

When we stop, we'll be conservatives.

That will be the day.