I’m not sure when exactly the word “liberal” became an epithet in American discourse. The Goldwater era? The Reagan years? Oddly, the same venom has not attached itself to the word “conservative” and I don’t wish it to. It is important to remember, however, that the United States is a liberal country and not a conservative one.
You would be hard pressed to identify any of those who rebelled against a distant monarchy as conservative. They were participating in a radical, liberal act. There were no conservatives attending the Constitutional Convention. There were no conservatives writing or signing the Constitution. The conservatives fled to Canada or returned to England to remain subjects of the British monarchy.
Certainly there were differences in how best to frame the new democracy. There were differences of opinion on how to balance competing interests. But no conservatives in the Constitutional Convention called for a document that would establish a monarchy in America. The people we call the Founding Fathers were liberal to their core. More than that, they were liberal rebels, leading a frontal assault on monarchy, a form of government established around the world and with very deep historical roots.
To be identified as a liberal is to be quintessentially American. A significant part of conservatism in contemporary America is simply a very cautious liberalism. That conservatism poses no threat to the United States or to democracy. There is, however, another school of thought that styles itself as “conservative.” They have dispossessed traditional conservatives and replaced them with an ideology that is radically authoritarian, corporatist, and fascist. They propose an entrenched plutocratic oligarchy in opposition to a liberal democracy. This ideology poses an imminent threat to the United States and to democracy. As citizens of a liberal country we are called, as we always have been, to struggle for our essential liberties and principles. It is a liberalism that is in our blood and in our history. It is who and what we are.
Welcome to liberal America.
Submitted by Mike Pfeifer