Rebirth of a Realist

Rebirth of a Realist
Americans are only what the media makes them. We love Saddam..we Hate Saddam. We love the Taliban..we hate the taliban..We hate Arafat..we love Arafat.During the Bush-Dukakis presidential campaign of 1988, the scare word was "liberal", the more that it was used (and it was used often) the more degrading the connotation. This may have left older Americans with a new compilation of farragoes to deal with, but for the baby boomers, it was just another case of the media jerking the reins. Middle aged Americans, however, were still reacting to the cold war rhetoric that President Truman began. It escalated months before the war in the Pacific ended when he canceled the "Lend lease Program " to The Soviet Union. That same rhetoric grew into the dementia that America still has not fully recovered from called "The McCarthy Era". The seeds of cynicism were planted at that time and have been growing inside me ever since.

In 1988 meek voices rose to defend liberalism, but they found no support in the camp of the once liberal Democratic Party where most of the candidates and the so-called leaders were all fighting among themselves to prove which one was the least liberal of all. It seems that today they are still doing it. The Democratic candidate for President in 1988 separated himself from the old guard leaders of the democratic House and Senate. Contrast that to 1948 when all the major candidates for the presidency were jousting for the title of "World Champion Liberal."

The following quotations may strike some as astounding in view of the present political climate, but they are as relevant today as they were then. The New York Times, obviously trying to keep the hate mongers from bringing the American psyche to a political imbalance that would lead the country into a blind faith, blank mind, political morass, posed this question to all of the major candidates seeking the presidency in 1948. The Times asked, in it’s magazine section of the Sunday April 18, 1948 issue, " What is liberalism?" Governor Dukakis should have read all of the answers from the podium at the 1988 Democratic nominating convention in the Omni. It might have created the momentum for victory instead of the, tail between the legs, defeatist, campaign that was run.

We shall start with excerpts from the sitting president of the United States at that time, Harry Truman. He did not answer the question directly (He was, after all, a machine politician) but addressed it obliquely as one who had already won the contest and was the Chief liberal of the land. He said, "Our first goal is to secure the human rights of our citizens. Some of our citizens are still denied the equal opportunity for education, for jobs and economic advancement and for the free expression of their views at the polls. . . . We believe in freedom and we are doing all that we can to support free men and free governments throughout the world."

Well there certainly isn’t anything there to be ashamed of although I am sure if that statement were given today the president certainly would have added "free women," especially in an election year. Now let us try the answers of the late senator Robert M. Taft, but first we have to resurrect this man who flirted with greatness, but never brought it to bed. Three times, he challenged for the Republican Party nomination for president and three times, he failed. He did come very close to denying Eisenhower the nomination. In 1953, he served as the Senate majority leader in the Eisenhower administration. Yes, this is the same ultra- conservative who was the chief architect of the Taft-Hartley bill and was once quoted as saying that he agreed with Herbert Hoover that, "the best answer (to high cost of food) was that people should cut down on their extravagance and eat less." One has to inject here that in 1948 liberals still had the bit in their teeth. The great depression and the labor wars of the thirties and the global war against fascism, with a Communist country as one of our major allies, freed many Americans from the mental straitjacket placed upon them by the media during the Bolshevik scares of the early nineteen hundreds. So it was politically prudent for a man, whose father was William Howard Taft the very conservative one term president, who served in the White house from 1908 until defeated by Woodrow Wilson in 1912, to try and suspend his established image and convince the media that he could be the president for all the people. He said, "Today everyone goes around calling himself a liberal. Unfortunately, there is a tendency to attach the term to anyone who supports any change proposed even if such change would lead to serious limitations on freedom of thought and freedom of the individual. Such a man is a radical, a sentimentalist, not a true liberal. In the United States liberalism means the resumption of progress under those historic American principles of liberty which have kept our people free and our economy free, principles that have made the United States the greatest and most productive country in the world today."

Damn, as a liberal I was busting with pride, but wait, the best is yet to come. Other conservatives have not been heard from yet. The man who was to deprive Taft of the nomination in 1948 was New York Governor Thomas E. Dewey who came as close to being president without moving his underwear into the White House as one can come. Truman (who failed to get a real majority of total popular votes) received 24,105,812 popular votes while Dewey received 21,970,065. It was so close that the Chicago Tribune, which went to press before the final tally was in, happily declared, "Dewey defeats Truman." Dewey was not the winner, but he did not fail because he lost the contest in the New York Times. His answer to "What is a Liberal" borders on holy script. "Liberalism," he said, "derives from the same word root that gave us "Liberty." It seems perfectly clear to me that no man has a right to call himself a liberal unless he believes explicitly, spiritually and concretely in economic, social and most of all human liberty. True liberalism springs from our deepest spiritual aspirations. It is as old as the Ten Commandments and the Sermon On The Mount. It practices brotherhood of all men and places first the dignity of the individual and his opportunity and personal liberty. It fights tyranny and regimentation of any kind and insists that the Government exists to preserve the freedom of human beings."

I am sorry about the long quotation, but as an old battered liberal, I could not find any of it that I wanted to deprive you of. It does make you wonder what the Dukakis people were so defensive about doesn’t it? It should also make you wonder how the media turned "liberalism" into a dirty word and how the political momentum was created to move America so far to the conservative right. (I must add here that, at this writing, right wing. off the wall, talk show hosts around the country on radio and TV are still trying to make LIBERAL a dirty word and smearing Howard Dean with it the way they did to Poor Henry Wallace.)

Well now, if that is what the conservative candidates and the President, who was rapidly losing whatever liberal credentials he had, said about "Liberalism," what was left for the real liberals, or at least those who wore the liberal mantle long before the campaign began? Governor Earl Warren of California who was to be appointed Chief Justice of the Supreme Court by Eisenhower in 1953 had this answer to the question.

"Liberalism, as I understand it, is the political belief and movement arising out of the belief that the individual should be the all important, precious object of consideration in every phase of social relationships. This belief and movement born of faith in mankind and in the dignity of the human soul has found its finest expression so far in western civilization. Civil rights, representative governments and equality of opportunity are all part and parcel of the liberal tradition. Unfortunately, this great term has been abused and distorted in recent years. If I had a choice of classification, I would place people politically in three groups, reactionary, radical, and progressive. I particularly like the term progressive not necessarily as a party label, but as a concept. I believe that the great body of American people regardless of what party they are in are progressive and liberal. In this sense the finest thing that could happen to our political system would be to have such liberal thought and action dominate both political parties."

Then there was Henry A. Wallace the "Progressive Party" candidate. Vice president of the United States, Henry Wallace was the man who was deprived of the presidency by the southern racist block of the Democratic Party. He was always thought to be the heir of the Roosevelt White House by most liberal democrats. Wallace gave the most direct answer to the question. He said, "Liberalism is the credo of those who have no fear of change. Its core, as I see it, is a willingness to place human rights first and property rights second or as Lincoln put it, ‘I am for both the man and the dollar, but in the case of conflict I am for the man.’ Liberalism demands that there be no price for honest, forthright expression. Free speech is not free if it is limited by the fear of losing a job, by fear of business reprisals or by the fear that frankness endangers naturalized citizenship. Liberalism demands action against the vile practice of segregation and discrimination . . . Today’s liberalism requires that we engage in sufficient government planning to assure the maintenance of independent enterprises and full employment and to guard against excesses in business cycles."

The media giveth and the media taketh away.

From the book REBIRTH OF A REALIST by David Truskoff