Post Column: Defining Liberals

This is a column from the St. Louis Post, which someone else had directed me to (since I seldom read the paper other than when in Journalism class).

When it comes to defining liberals, count me as one
By Bill McClellan
Of the Post-Dispatch
11/08/2004

A couple of blue men from a red state were having dinner a couple of nights after the election, and one of the blue men, a fellow who worked for Kit Bond many years ago, said something like this: "Back in Kit's early days, he never described himself as a conservative. In those days, nobody did. After the Goldwater debacle in '64, conservative was a dirty word, kind of like liberal is now. It wasn't until Ronald Reagan came along and defined conservatism in a new and positive way that people began using the word again. That's what the liberals need to do now. Right now, we let other people define us."

And just how would we define ourselves? Let me try.

I'm a liberal, and that means I believe in responsibility, both personal and collective. Collective responsibility? You betcha. I believe that society - that's us - has a responsibility to take care of the less fortunate and those who can no longer provide for themselves. Social Security, for instance, is a liberal idea. Both for retirees and the disabled. If a working person becomes disabled, he or she will get a monthly check. It's not going to put a person on Easy Street, but that person is not going to have to sit on the sidewalk begging like you see in some countries. Back when the whole Social Security program was being founded, many of our conservative friends were against it.

Our friends, I say, and I mean that. I believe that the people on the other side are our opponents, but not our enemies. They are mostly decent and patriotic. I believe in civility, and I am dismayed when people on my side of the Great Debate lose sight of that. It especially annoys me when people on my side assume a condescending attitude toward other working people.

You see, I'm a liberal and that means I support working people. In the struggle between labor and capital, I lean toward labor. Our conservative friends call organized labor a special interest, but this particular special interest is the reason we have a 40-hour workweek, paid vacations, health care benefits and decent wages.

I believe in responsibility so, yes, I'd raise taxes if I had my way. I believe that it is wrong to put current expenses on a credit card that will be passed down to our children. That may be good politics, sure, and our current president, a conservative, has cut taxes while presiding over the greatest increase in nonmilitary spending since the days of the Great Society. Under the watch of a conservative president and a Congress controlled by his party, we've gone from a surplus to a deficit. I'm a liberal, and I find this irresponsible.

I excluded military spending from that last argument, but I'd like to deal with it now. Because I believe in collective responsibility, I would never wage a war while cutting taxes. Shared responsibility means shared sacrifice. If we're going to ask the working-class kids of an all-volunteer military to put their lives on the line, we can at least make a small financial sacrifice ourselves. Maybe we'd pay a special fuel tax to fund the war. However we did it, we would do it together and we would do it now. We would not pass the debt down to our children.

What we would pass down to our children is a healthy planet. I'm a liberal, and I believe in the environment. The Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act were both liberal ideas. Many of our friends on the other side support industry and call our environmental laws onerous. They want those laws relaxed. I'm a liberal and I support the Sierra Club.

The ACLU, too. I support the rights of the accused. In so doing, I stand on the shoulders of the Founders of this country who were distrustful of governmental authority. I believe that a person who has been fairly convicted should be punished - I have served as a state's witness at an execution - but I believe that a white-collar criminal who loots a company should be punished as severely as a kid who robs a convenience store. I believe that if drug addiction is a disease for the rich, it should not be a crime for the poor. I believe in fairness. I'm a liberal.
>> Source [STL Post website]