Will The Last Remaining Liberal
Please Turn Out The Lights?

By Keith Boykin, in politics
Monday, August 18 2003, 12:10PM

Here's a question for you. How many liberals does it take to screw in a light bulb? My first answer is none because there aren't any left. My second answer is at the end of this article.

Forty years ago this month, organizer Bayard Rustin brought 250,000 people to Washington, D.C. to demand civil rights, jobs and justice. Martin Luther King Jr. electrified the audience with his now famous "I Have A Dream" speech.

Within two years, President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the two most significant civil rights laws in history. Johnson's "Great Society" ushered in Medicare and Medicaid and launched a brief but important flurry of liberal activity not seen since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal.

Roosevelt, of course, brought us the Works Progress Administration, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the granddaddy of all progressive legislation, Social Security.

It seems every 30 years the country shifts to the left to rectify social needs unresolved by decades of neglect. Roosevelt did this in the 1930s, Johnson did this in the 1960s, and Clinton, well, that's a different story.

As with the 30s and the 60s, the Democrats controlled the White House for most of the 90s. But unlike the two earlier decades, the Democrats did not move the country to the left in the 90s. Instead, from 1993 to 2001, Clinton governed as a centrist with a moderate agenda. His most ambitious social policy reform, universal health care, failed in 1994, and left him scrambling for another legacy.

Clinton turned to federal welfare reform, a policy which forced millions of poor Americans off of welfare even if there were no jobs available for them. That was hardly the legacy of FDR and LBJ, but Clinton won reelection in 1996. As the first Democratic president elected to two terms in 60 years, Bill Clinton could have been empowered with a left-wing mandate. Instead, he spent much of his second term wrestling with a hostile Republican Congress and fighting back conservative attacks.

By 2000, the Democrats' decade of opportunity had disappeared. Clinton left a legacy of new jobs and strong economic growth but no lasting political shift to the left. And unlike Reagan, who appointed right-wing ideologues to important government positions during his two terms, Clinton appointed highly qualified moderate Democrats to executive branch positions and to the federal judiciary.

Which brings us to the present. The country hasn't had a significant shift to the left in 40 years. In the meantime, the GOP has replaced the Democrats primacy in the South, Republicans have won 6 of the last 9 presidential elections, and they control the White House, the Congress and the Supreme Court.

Despite all the talk of progress made in the past 40 years, the American electorate has become much more conservative. Democrats fight for the political center and take the party's liberal base for granted, while Republicans cater to their conservative base while claiming to represent the center.

The liberals have all but disappeared. Except for the aging Ted Kennedy and a handful of other stalwarts, the liberals don't even call themselves liberals anymore.

Should the liberals just give up? Absolutely not.

While national Democrats are tripping over themselves to sound like Republicans, a conservative evangelical southern Republican in Alabama is sounding an awful lot like a liberal Democrat. Alabama's Republican Governor, Bob Riley, has introduced a proposal to raise state taxes by a record $1.2 billion.

Riley wants to use the money to close the state's $675 million budget deficit, fix the state's schools, and reverse the century-old regressive tax policy that penalizes the poor and rewards the rich.

The Alabama tax system imposes an effective rate of 3 percent on the wealthiest Alabamians and 12 percent on the poorest, according to the Washington Post. Riley, a born-again Baptist conservative, calls this system "immoral."

He's right, but it's a reflection of just how lost Democrats have become that a right-wing, conservative evangelical Christian Republican white male politician from Alabama sounds more progressive than a Jewish, northeastern Democratic presidential candidate.

It's also sad that Democrats have become so defensive about being labeled "liberal" that they bend over backwards to ignore their own party base. The mainstream Democrats predictably stay away from the base during most of the election cycle until the last few weeks when it's time to "get out the vote." Then the candidates expect liberals, labor unions, blacks, Hispanics and women to come running out to support them.

That's a losing strategy. While the middle-of-the-road Democratic Leadership Council urges Democrats to abandon the big government policies of the party's past, the Republicans are using the same big government to implement their policies that prop up corporate welfare and the military and prison industrial complexes.

They don't really oppose big government. They oppose big government doing what the don't want it to do. It's not a problem if the government is spending $300 billion on defense, giving out exclusive tax breaks or regulating women's bodies. But let the same government decide to help a poor person in need and everybody's up in arms about welfare.

Since Bush took office, the country has lost 2.5 million jobs, unemployment is up, stock values are down, the federal deficit has skyrocketed, and the economic optimism of the 90s has vanished. Despite all the talk of tax cuts for the average American, Bush has slashed taxes for the wealthiest Americans and forced cash-starved state and local governments to raise property taxes, sales taxes and income taxes that disproportionately affect the poor and middle-class.

There's plenty of lies and hypocrisy in the conservative agenda, but there's no one to challenge it. The politicians are afraid to speak up, the so-called liberal media are too busy pretending to be objective and the political commentators can't get the corporate-owned media conglomerates to put them on television.

One of the best solutions I've heard recently comes from Williams Cole, who argues for the dismissal of objectivity in news. "Given the corporate ownership of media, it’s unreasonable to expect that the mainstream news will ever be as ideologically left as what we’re currently seeing from the right," Cole writes.

Look around the media and see who gets a platform. You'll find plenty of right-wing pundits and commentators filling the airwaves but not many left-wing alternatives. Where is our Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity?

Conservatives point to Phil Donahue, George Stephanopoulos, Tim Russert, Paul Begala, James Carville, Al Franken and Alan Colmes, but they can't be serious.

Phil Donahue's show was cut from MSNBC shortly after it aired. Stephanopoulos and Russert each worked for prominent Democrats but now are confined by "objective" media jobs that often require them to be more critical of Democrats than Republicans. Begala and Carville share a half hour of time with conservatives Tucker Carlson and Robert Novak on CNN. Al Franken is a comedian. And has anybody really heard of Alan Colmes?

Conservatives quickly cite National Public Radio as a bastion of liberal politics, but even NPR is confined by the need to appear objective while talk radio is filled with right-wing zealots spewing out their anti-immigrant, anti-affirmative action, anti-abortion, anti-Democrat venom.

Even the liberals aren't that liberal. NPR's "liberal" commentator Juan Williams appeared on Fox News a few weeks ago and denounced the idea of gay marriage. Crossfire's Begala and Carville are mainstream Democrats who call themselves liberals. Meanwhile, Lou Dobbs infuses his political conservatism into virtually every episode of "Money Line."

"While the simplistic views from the right on issues like war, deregulation and taxes are winning in the mainstream news of this country, there is a significant percentage of the population that would welcome, even commercially, the equivalent in distribution and power on the left," Cole writes. "Until that happens, our best hope is that the Liberal Media Establishment will shelve the idea of objectivity and come out swinging."

Let's hope he's right. Forty years after LBJ, it's time for a new progressive revolution. It's time for Democrats to start acting like Democrats again. It's time for the left to stand up and be counted. It's time for a liberal pro-gay, pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-labor, pro-peace voice in the White House, in Congress, on the Supreme Court, and in the media. With so much damage caused by conservatives in the past few decades, it's time to be proud to be a liberal.

So here's that question again. How many liberals does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer: As many as it takes to get the job done.

Comments (7) reveal