The Liberal Story
In our last entry, we briefly reviewed the conservative metanarrative, the archetypal tale that explains the current woes of America. In capsule, this story asserts that various liberal camps have rejected the core values of America, squandering our post-WW2 advantages and corroding our nation from within. Many conservatives see themselves as the last bastions of virtue and tradition, besieged from all sides by a world gone haywire.
We turn our focus this time to the liberal story. Once again, we are not concerned here with exhaustive and comprehensive social history. We're trying to get at the core narrative in the background of people's minds, the framework on which they hang a lot of their other concepts and perceptions. And like the conservative story, the main liberal motif has to address that same core question: "What the hell happened to our country?" And so also like the conservative story, the liberal tale must explain the time period from post-WW2 to the present. What has caused our decline? This, I believe, is the liberal answer.
After World War II, the United States was poised for greatness. As much of the rest of the world lay in ruins, America was in a perfect position to consolidate its advantages and enter a golden age. For liberals, this was an opportunity to expand on the moral advances made in the Progressive Era and the New Deal. Throughout our young country's short history, much progress had been made in areas of gender equality, racial justice, workers' rights and economic opportunity, thanks in large part to enlightened reformers and aggressive government action. These liberal movements for social and moral advance had built on the lofty Jeffersonian ideas of liberty and inherent equality, naturally unfolding America's unique meaning.
Liberal reform really got traction in the 60s and 70s, as the women's, Civil Rights, and gay rights movements challenged entrenched inequalities and unenlightened, backward values. All across the country, people were waking up to the realities of racism, sexism, war-mongerism and jingoism, challenging old regimes of power and thought. Many battles were fought to open the doors of success to the marginalized, with the heyday being the mid-to-late 70s, the high water mark of economic equality in America.
But then, the Fall. In 1980, defenders of the old ways struck back, resulting in the Reagan Revolution and the conservative rise to power. The economic equality fought so hard for by liberals was swept aside in a decade of greed and government bashing. Conservative moral police attacked liberal values and culture as unAmerican, decadent, debauched and anti-religious. Government was seen as the problem, not the solution. Regulatory structures and programs to aid the marginalized were dismantled, allowing the powerful to once again again ride roughshod over the weak.
This battle continues on today. Despite Bill Clinton's heroic efforts to return America to greatness in the 90s, the liberal cause was hampered by Republican majorities in Congress and the relentless pursuit of the Clintons by the conservative establishment. So nothing of progressive importance has been able to emerge. Corporations continue to dominate the globe, enhancing their power at the expense of regular people and the environment. The religious right continues to erode the separation of church and state, while backward-thinking zealots assault science in our schools. Anti-government rhetoric still prevails in many circles, with any effort to resurrect aid programs dismissed as socialism or social engineering.
In this situation, liberals march on as the weary defenders of all that America was supposed to be. Besieged on all sides by greed, selfishness, religious superstition, and pseudo-patriotism, progressives still fight on to recapture the magic of mid-70s equality or the interrupted potential of 90s economic dynamism. While the forces of fear and reaction are forever looking backwards, liberals cast their hopes forward, working to restart the engine of social and moral improvement that has been derailed.
Again, this is of course a simplification, quickly put together. But like the conservative story, I think this does capture the general story that is in the background of many liberals' sense of recent history and our current predicaments.
The first thing that jumps out from the conservative and liberal narratives is that each side sees itself as besieged. Conservatives are besieged by the liberal media, the elite coastal intelligentsia, the anti-religious (militant atheist) movement, and the traitorous-socialist entertainment industry. Liberals, on the other hand, are on the defensive against the conservative mainstream media, callous transnational corporations, moneyed Washington lobbyists, and religious reactionaries. It is not surprising that each side sees itself as on-the-run, dogged by nefarious forces. Again, the main fact that both conservatives and liberals have to explain is the pervasive sense that the current state of America is dire. People are looking for an explanation of why things are so bad. So politicians and thinkers from the two main camps have to craft an explanation for these evils, an American Theodicy. And at bottom, theodicies are dramatic interpretations of reality, which may or may not have much to do with what is actually going on. As we'll see in the next post, I don't think either of these stories captures the actual picture of where we are. Our wheels keep spinning as conditions get worse precisely because the metanarratives of liberalism and conservatism are inadequate. They do not have the conceptual tools within them to actually make sense of what's going on.
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