Are liberals moderates?

Like many a writer for The Nation, historian David A. Bell is impatient with self-described liberals who seem to hesitate at some of the radical measures proposed by self-described progressives within the Democratic party. Reviewing a new book by Adam Gopnik in the July 1/8, Bell presents him as a representative specimen who exemplifies the problem with liberalism. Historically, but perhaps more than ever now, liberalism as described by Gopnik and Bell is more a temperament than an ideology. That temperament is cautious and increasingly centrist in an increasingly polarized political environment. Liberals, according to Bell, have a bad habit of staking out a middle ground between perceived extremes, with the implication that opposite extremes are equally bad in some important ways. To Bell this is "false equivalence," resulting in misguided attempts at "balance." This is the crucial liberal failure in the reviewer's opinion; by substituting the superficial category of "extreme" for rigorous analysis of conditions, liberals mistake "extremism" for the real crisis for which, Bell insists, "both sides" are not equally to blame.

For Bell, the real crisis is that the American political order has been broken by an oligarchic drive for power that relies on right-wing media, unlimited campaign spending, and lumpen prejudices to thwart genuine democracy in America. Progressives argue that the crisis requires radical remedies, possibly to the point of breaking the current system, to prevent their populist-oligarchic nightmare from becoming a reality.  While insinuating this, Bell tries to remind Gopnik that the remedies proposed by today's leading progressives, from "Medicare For All" to the "Green New Deal," actually are relatively moderate compared to the measures taken, for example, by the British Labor party when they first took power in 1945. Why, then, should they disturb liberals like Gopnik? According to Bell, it's because Gopnik, at least, still believes the system can achieve egalitarian goals, while progressives strike the author as absolutist, historically uninformed and, worst of all from a liberal perspective, uncompromising. Liberals, to the extent that they promote moderation, promote compromise. To that extent they're typically American, but progressives worry that liberals make a fetish of compromise when conditions should not require equal concessions from either "extreme." It can be argued that they fall easily into a peculiar trap that leaves them demanding more compromise from progressives the more the oligarchs refuse to compromise. If anything infuriates progressives about liberals, it's the assumption that the burden of compromise falls on progressives more than on the oligarchs. This is mainly because liberals and progressives are engaged in a debate over the future of the Democratic party, in which liberals, acting as moderates, insist that progressives compromise to make Democratic candidates more electable among presumably centrist swing voters. But it's also because liberalism really is a matter of temperament. American liberalism is concerned more with means than ends -- liberals are the ones most likely to say that ends don't justify means -- and tends to see compromise as a means that is an end unto itself. As noted here often, liberalism also abhors the very idea of crisis because it drives people to put emergency ends ahead of conventional means, raising the specter of unconstrained power. Their reluctance to acknowledge crises or emergencies makes liberals appear increasingly detached from reality from the vantage point of left-wing progressives and right-wing populists alike. The right condemns liberals for failing to perceive and respond appropriately to a different set of crises. If they offend both camps, liberals will of course be tempted to assume they must be doing something right. Whether you identify as progressive, rightist, populist or other, Bell's review article should give you an intellectual basis for challenging that perhaps-characteristic liberal complacency.