Liberalism is not in good odor today, which is unfortunate because it offers to us our only available route for enduring, generative, effective social change. (Of course, if you're against social change, then liberalism is in the right place.) Liberalism is often lampooned by Reaganites, neoconservatives, and even neoliberals as the political Pandora's Box that brought us high deficits (despite Reagan's gutting of the national treasury), illegitimate AFDC families (despite a history of insufficient welfare funding in the 20th century), and a general unraveling of moral fibers through permissiveness, secular humanism, and military flabbiness.
But this caricature only shows the insufficient clarity characterizing American political debate and political labels, not liberalism itself. Welfare relief, supposedly a "liberal" invention, exposes this lack of clarity very neatly. The conventional fable about liberalism goes that welfare was instituted by "bleeding heart liberals" whose compassion got the better of their fiscal common sense, and that it has been conservatives, most notably Reagan, who have kept the fort of sanity intact with their tough-minded belief in the work ethic. Yet as Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have shown in their books Regulating The Poor and The New Class War, welfare relief has most often been used to nullify revolutionary potential during economic distress; once stability has been achieved, the relief was cut back to insure a fluid labor supply for low-wage, low-level jobs, most often filled by the minority poor. This was done regardless if a Republican or a Democrat was in the White House. Thus, conventional liberalism has often been as niggardly as conservatism, with FDR's "generosity" the most notable offender against the truly needy. What has passed for liberalism has really only been Pyramus to conservatism's Thisbe, what Gore Vidal called one of the two wings of the Bank Party, which really runs the country.
How, then, does this liberalism I think essential to our country's preservation differ from the "liberalism" served up as a staple of political menus in the 20th century? My liberalism has three interlaced elements.
Ortega y Gasset defines the first element: compassion. He said, "Liberalism...is the supreme form of generosity; it is the right which the majority concedes to the minorities and hence it is the greatest cry that has ever resounded in this planet." The generosity Ortega y Gasset proclaims can vary from individual acts of kindness to a voluntary sharing of power and goods, but its source of essential energy is the irreducible demand that each individual human being be accorded the right and the means to a decent life. This generosity aims far beyond the pallid Lenny Skutnik variety of charity so cherished by Ronald Reagan, beyond noblesse oblige, beyond the Darwinian smugness that inequality is an inevitable, and desirable, conclusion to human history. Its target is to create those sharing activities which keep life open rather than closed, free rather than fated.
The second element, skepticism, has to be seen in the light of this compassion. It is not self-indulgent or coolly academic. It distrusts pronouncements about "the way things are" from those centers of the world that control the goods. It constantly battles against those who would wish to cement the world into "principles," who piously announce that there are "natural" limits to social mobility and expectations. Perhaps the best articulation of this skepticism is Saul Alinsky's Rules For Radicals. Alinsky sells no radical ideology but instead proposes rules and strategies by which people can fight to break open the vaults of goods and influence jealously guarded by those who have. Skepticism, like compassion, tries to maintain a constant turmoil so that lines of status and avenues of mobility do not have a chance to ossify. But skepticism also extends compassion by giving it a pair of boxing gloves and common sense so that it may fight effectively and doggedly and not give in to martyrdom or nihilism.
Yet compassion and skepticism could just as easily adorn the philanthropist who gives money but not himself as it could be one of Alinksy's organizers. Liberalism's third element extends compassion and skepticism and denies them to those interested only in credentials, in static pedigree. True liberalism's quintessence is a desire to empower those who have no power. It demands action in the world, not residence in one's own goodness. And while the motive for action may vary, from religious conviction to simple outrage and anger, the goal is to keep the democratic ports of self-government and equal opportunity open, dredged, deep, and productive for all people.
Liberalism is not a political label, and as I've described it here, only dimly characterizes the Democratic party. Instead, it's a way of thinking about how the world is and the way it might be, without being so lost in idealism or cynicism as to forget the daily political battles necessary to keep dignity afloat and food on the table. Most important in liberalism is its capacity to renew us. It asks each of us to fulfill America's democratic possibilities in our own lives by moving outside our own self- and class-interest and helping those who do not have power over their lives to gain it, exercise it, and prosper by it. If there is a "pure" constant in American society, it is liberalism's call to freedom and action, not the stinginess and false rationality of conservatism. We should renew that call in our political dialogue so that it may then renew us.