Dear Commons Community,
Timothy Egan has an op-ed essay in today’s New York Times that urges liberals to seize this moment in history. He starts his piece as:
“I told a friend the other day while trying to fathom the election results, that pot is legal in my state, gays are free to marry, and a black man who vowed to raise taxes on the rich won a majority of the popular vote for president, back to back — the first time anyone has done that since Franklin Roosevelt’s second election in 1936.
And yet only one in four voters identified themselves as “liberal” in national exit polls. Conservatives were 35 percent, and moderates the plurality, at 41 percent.”
He then refers to other important liberal moments in history (Abraham Lincoln -13th Amendment, women’s suffrage, passage of the Social Security and Civil Rights Acts:
“Which brings us to the fascinating self-portrait of the United States at the start of the second half of the Obama era. A tenuous center-left majority wants to restore some equality to the outsize imbalance between the very rich and the rest of us. If a tenuous president can lead that coalition, without overreaching, he might be remembered among the greats.”
I agree but President Obama must show that leadership.
In addition, liberals need to stand up and be proud of what they believe in and not be cowered by “the shills” of Fox News and Rupert Murdoch.
Egan adds
“For at least a generation’s time, liberals in this country have been afraid to call themselves liberal. Was it the excesses of their creed, from race-based preferential programs that went on far too long to crude speech censorship by the politically correct and humorless (one and the same) that soiled the brand? In blindly embracing, say, the teachers’ union in the face of overwhelming evidence that public education needs a jolt or in never questioning the efficacy of government programs, the left earned its years in exile.
Or was it the relentless campaign by the broadcasting and publishing empires of the far right, associating liberals with tyranny, spiritual vacuity and baby killing, that drove people from the label that could not speak its name? “Godless,” “Treason” and “Demonic” are actual Ann Coulter book titles, and a representative sample of the profitable cartooning of liberals.”
He concludes:
“Liberalism, in the broadest sense, is about expanding human rights and opportunity, while embracing science and reason… All political moments are ephemeral. This one could vanish in the blink of a donkey’s eye. But here it is: a chance to shore up a battered middle class, make the promise of health care expansion work and do something about a planet in peril. Huge tasks, of course, and fraught with risk. For now, the majority of Americans have Obama’s back. But should he fail, the same majority could become something much worse — a confederacy of cynics.”
Be Liberal – Be Proud!
Tony
