Defining Liberalism: An Overview

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

An overview in this case consists of general statements and analogies, with demonstration and support, in most cases, to be developed later. (Bacon's remark, in the Novum Organum, that "Since we agree neither upon principles nor upon demonstrations there is no place for argument," may be apropos here.)

As asserted in The Liberal Founding, "In this blog the term ‘liberalism’ means Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is substantially different from the outlook of the left, and from Marxism, progressivism, libertarianism, and conservatism (as Historian Fritz Stern writes, “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.”)" Liberalism and the outlook of the various flavors of the left are so fundamentally different that, in practical terms, there are no points of agreement between them, even though media discourse assumes that there are.

Public-spiritedness vs. class warfare:
For example, the most famous statement of the early left is the conclusion of the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Contrast this with the way the Constitution, as a representative liberal document, begins: “We the People.” One addresses a class; the other, the whole. In political democracy, which necessarily is about the public, not a subset of it, class-think is social, not political. Liberalism is public and civil (following the example of the Roman Republic before it); the left, in all its flavors, is instead social. For liberalism, rights are human rights (in 18th century terms, the Rights of Man); the left speaks of group rights (that is, class rights).

The Manifesto addresses a class (workers), implies an enemy class (the "bourgeoisie"), and issues a call to war. Likewise the modern left thinks in terms of "my community," rather than "the public." In the terms used by Rowley, above, it is particularist rather than universalist. It applies social standards (community values) rather than universal ethical principles. Contrast the Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

This addresses an Everyman, a citizen, as Hayek said (PDF), who has “political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions.” This is the language of a universalism which is about civility, cooperation and altruism, far different from the left's implied class warfare.

Win-win vs. zero sum: 
Everyone wins in the democratic order envisioned by Hayek immediately above. Instead of a culture war over differing "moral values," there is the deeper moral value represented by a tolerant civil order which protects the single person from social tyranny. (John Stuart Mill's term. Mill spoke of “the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways.”)

An example is the liberal principle of freedom of speech, a civil right and thus an aspect of universal justice (Martin Luther King: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."). There is an enlightened self-interest aspect whenever anyone's rights are protected, even the rights of someone I may not like very much: When my neighbor's freedom of speech is upheld I am more confident that I, too, cannot be censored.

But I have heard people on the left say that whenever one person gets something, someone else loses something (classic zero-sum reasoning); and give as example the case of a minority group member who hears a remark thought to be critical of the group to which he or she belongs. As John A. Flower wrote, "The elimination of hostile environments by limiting the freedom of speech of oppressor groups is determined to be necessary to remedy the wrongs visited upon historically oppressed groups."

Notice what this reveals? The left, at least in this situation, is not in favor of civil rights. An iconic civil right, freedom of speech, is subordinated to a vested interest, the feelings of a protected class. Political freedom is deemed less important than "group rights." In this sense the left is literally unprincipled. Instead of an ethical principle, instead there is something low and base: a mere social standard.

Defining Liberalism: Published Arguments for Liberalism

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

Former President Clinton at the Democratic National Convention:

It turns out that advancing equal opportunity and economic empowerment is both morally right and good economics. Why? Because poverty, discrimination and ignorance restrict growth. When you stifle human potential, when you don’t invest in new ideas, it doesn’t just cut off the people who are affected; it hurts us all.

The former president echoes what Fritz Stern, a historian driven from Germany by the rising antisemitism of the Third Reich, wrote:

In the past and at its best, liberalism has sought the institutional defense of decency. Everywhere it has fought for the freedom of individuals to attain their fullest development.

Contrast this with the implied social Darwinism of conservatives' so-called "tragic" view of reality:

5. [Conservatives] feel affection for the proliferating intricacy of long-established social institutions and modes of life, as distinguished from the narrowing uniformity and deadening egalitarianism of radical systems. For the preservation of a healthy diversity in any civilization, there must survive orders and classes, differences in material condition, and many sorts of inequality. The only true forms of equality are equality at the Last Judgment and equality before a just court of law; all other attempts at leveling must lead, at best, to social stagnation. - Russell Kirk,  “Ten Conservative Principles” [Emphasis added]

 
Clinton also said:

You see, we believe that "we're all in this together" is a far better philosophy than "you're on your own."

Or as an anonymous post in a newsgroup said, "Liberalism wagers that civility, cooperation and altruism have greater survival value than aggression and the will to power." "What works in the real world," Clinton said, "is cooperation."

The epigraph to this post lists four principles of liberalism: Universalism; the importance of the single person; egalitarianism; and the passionate desire for optimum outcomes. It omits the cognitive emphasis of liberalism, the devotion to what the Roman Cicero called "right reason."* As Martin Luther King put it:

"How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, ... An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. ... Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality ..." - Martin Luther King Jr.

To sum up, liberalism's characteristic "politics of kindness" is not just morally right and pleasing to the conscience, it makes human lives better. It is also the best public policy, because it maximizes human resources. Liberalism is not only the politics of political freedom, it is the politics of prosperity.
 
(*)Cicero wrote:

"True law is right reason in agreement with nature; it summons to duty by its commands, and averts from wrongdoing by its prohibitions. And it does not lay its commands or prohibitions upon good men in vain, though neither have any effect on the wicked. It is a sin to try to alter this law, nor is it allowable to attempt to repeal any part of it, and it is impossible to abolish it entirely. We cannot be freed from its obligations by senate or people, and we need not look outside ourselves for an expounder or interpreter of it. ... Whoever is disobedient is fleeing from himself and denying his human nature, and by reason of this very fact he will suffer the worst penalties, even if he escapes what is commonly called punishment . . ."

Defining Liberalism: Hayek, Habakkuk and More

As noted in The Liberal Founding, liberalism may be described as the outlook of the Enlightenment, and should not be confused with the quite different outlooks of the various flavors of the left (or, of course, with that of the right).

When then-senator Obama visited Seattle, he said that we need a politics of evidence and reason rather than ideology (according to the media, the crowd cheered). The following material is offered in support of one of the aspects of liberalism: its cognitive emphasis; and its resistance to ideology.

 In "Why I Am Not a Conservative" (PDF), F. A. Hayek speaks of "liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas."* Those representative Enlightenment documents, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution, are rife with ideas: Human equality, the right to liberty, to freedom of speech and (with the Fourteenth Amendment) to equal protection under the laws.

As Lincoln wrote, the manner of expression of the ideas should reflect their importance:

The Constitution used the very clearest, shortest, and most direct language.

Compare this passage from ancient scripture:

Write down the vision clearly upon the tablets,
so that one can read it readily.
For the vision still has its time,
presses on to fulfillment, and will not disappoint;
if it delays, wait for it,
it will surely come, it will not be late. (Hab. 1:2-3; 2:2-4)

Thomas Paine (he who inspired the Founders) wrote:

The Republic of Letters is more ancient than monarchy, and of far higher character in the world than the vassal court of Britain; he that rebels against reason is a real rebel, but he that in defence of reason rebels against tyranny has a better title to "Defender of the Faith," than George the Third.

President Kennedy attested to the importance of carefully chosen language in a free society:

 In the dark days and darker nights when England stood alone and most men save Englishmen despaired of England's life, [Churchill] mobilized the English language and sent it into battle. ...
In 1938, Winston Churchill said dictators were afraid of the power of words, quote, "a state of society where men may not speak their minds cannot long endure."

Ideology may be described as language in service of social opinion rather than reality (Robert Pirsig wrote "Truth stands independently of social opinion."). A good example of ideology is flat-earthism. It elevates a notion—the earth looks flat—above the "consilience of inductions" which tells the informed thinker that the earth is spherical: Time zones, satellite radio, airlines' great circle routes, circumnavigation, the longer summer days of northern regions, and many others.

As Timothy Ferris writes:

When ideologies were put into action, the results were disastrous. During the twentieth century alone, ideologically inspired regimes — mainly Communism and its reactionary brother, Fascism — murdered more than thirty million of their own citizens, mostly through purges and in the state-sponsored famines that resulted when governments adopted reforms based on dogma rather than fact. That this is not more widely known and appreciated, but instead is so often brushed aside as somehow irrelevant to the argument at hand, demonstrates the extent to which the dead hand of ideology still grips many a mind.

The Declaration proclaims, "Let facts be submitted to a candid world." Liberalism is founded on a commitment to the well-being of all humankind. But its methodology is to leverage evidence and reason—and what the Greeks called "winged words"—in the service of the public good. Paine's declaration is an example of both of liberalism's tools, ideas and language, in the service of the whole world: "I have been tender in raising the cry against these men, and used numberless arguments to show them their danger, but it will not do to sacrifice a world either to their folly or their baseness."

(*) A more complete version of the passage:

But, from its point of view rightly, conservatism fears new ideas because it has no distinctive principles of its own to oppose them; and, by its distrust of theory and its lack of imagination concerning anything except that which experience has already proved, it deprives itself of the weapons needed in the struggle of ideas. Unlike liberalism, with its fundamental belief in the long-range power of ideas, conservatism is bound by the stock of ideas inherited at a given time. And since it does not really believe in the power of argument, its last resort is generally a claim to superior wisdom, based on some self-arrogated superior quality.

What Children Once Read, And A Veteran On Vietnam

The Young Folks Library set of children's books includes Famous Myths and Legends, in which may be found Charles Kingsley's retelling of a Greek myth about Jason and The Golden Fleece, "The Argonauts":

[The young Jason is tutored by a magical being, Cheiron the centaur, whose "eyes were wise and mild." When the day was come, Cheiron said, "Will you promise me two things before you go?" Jason promised, and Cheiron said, "Speak harshly to no soul whom you may meet, and stand by the word which you shall speak."]

As Jason traveled it came to pass that:

On the bank of [the raging flood] Anauros sat a woman, all wrinkled, gray, and old . . . "Who will carry me across the flood?"

And Jason was going to answer her scornfully, when Cheiron's words came to his mind.

[Jason carries the old woman across, she whining and berating him all the while:] He lay panting awhile on the bank . . . but he cast one look at the old woman . . .

And as he looked, she grew fairer than all women, and taller than all men on earth; and her garments shone like the summer sea, and her jewels like the stars of heaven; and over her forehead was a veil, woven of the golden clouds of sunset; and through the veil she looked down on him . . . with great eyes, mild and awful, which filled all the glen with light. . . .

And she spoke–"I am the Queen of Olympus, Hera the wife of Zeus. As thou hast done to me, so will I do to thee. Call on me in the hour of need, and try if the Immortals can forget." [Emphasis added]

I think the grandeur of mythic vision, and the simple but solid ethical principles in, for example, Cheiron's advice to the young Jason, make it worth putting on the lifetime list.

***

The best selling novelist Nelson DeMille, who had served in Vietnam, spent some time in the communist regime there before publishing Up Country in 2002:

I avoided looking at Susan and said, “I wiped the blood off my knife on his pants, … and started walking away. I looked up and saw two guys from my company, who’d come to find me, and they’d seen some of this. One guy took my rifle out of my hand and fired three signal shots into the air. He said to me, ‘The rifle works, Brenner.’ These guys looked at me . . . I mean, we were all a little nuts by then, but . . . this was above and beyond nuts, and they knew it.” … “He looked at me and says, ‘How the f--- did you get into hand-to-hand with this guy?’” p. 410

I imagined Captain Tram and his comrades sitting in their bunkers or slit trenches at night, … hoping for a quiet evening. Meanwhile, six miles overhead, too high to be seen or heard, a flight of huge, eight-engine B-52 bombers all released their thousand-pound bombs. … Arc Light Strikes, they were called, and they transformed the earth below into a here-and-now hell, … 

We’d found hundreds of North Vietnamese here, lying down, staring up at the sky, blood running from their ears, nose, mouth, or wandering around like zombies. They weren’t worth taking as prisoners, they were beyond medical help, and we didn’t know if we should shoot them or not waste the time. p. 439

Truly great writing by a Viet War vet. He went back to modern Vietnam and describes the situation of those who fought on the American side–under the current shabby Communist North regime–with the same compassionate honesty; for example, the South Vietnamese fighter pilot reduced to peddling a rickshaw.

And Susan Weber is one of the great descriptions of a modern upscale expatriate woman in popular fiction. The conversations between the POV char. and her are smart and accurate.

Followup: Courts and the Civil Rights of the Disabled

There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities.

Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity - Erving Goffman

The previous article,  In Retrospect: The Supreme Court and The Disabled, was about judicially interpreting away the protections of the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990. It should be noted that the ADA is not a civil rights act. It refers only to barriers to the employability of people who can be productive members of society if reasonable accommodations are made in the workplace. The ADA does not even address such workplace civil rights matters as defamation of character or harassment. It says nothing about co-workers who attempt to degrade and intimidate employees who have, or are thought to have, a disability.

In this context, note a recent news item:

An Ohio man faces one month of jail time for teasing and taunting a 10-year-old girl with cerebral palsy after a video of the incident went viral.

On Nov. 27, Judge John A. Poulos of the Canton Municipal Court sentenced 43-year-old William Bailey to 29 days in jail. ...

William Bailey "was dragging his leg and patting his arm across his chest to pick his son Joseph up," said [Tricia] Knight. "I asked him to please stop doing this. 'My daughter can see you.' He then told his son to walk like the R-word." ...

The next day Knight posted the video on her Facebook page while [Knight's mother-in-law, Marie] Prince uploaded the video they called "Bus Stop Ignorance" to YouTube. Within days, the video went viral. ...

"I think when we look at cases, there's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But when there's nothing out there regarding disabilities, it took me a little bit longer to come to a decision." ...

As for whether this case presents a new precedent in Ohio is another debate.

"I don't know if it sets a precedent so much maybe as it begins a conversation between people," said [Jennifer] Fitzsimmons [the chief assistant city prosecutor for this case]. "I think conversation starts progress, and I think if it can bring something else to light, it would be good."

Disabled people are a targeted minority. We call them retards, harelips, and spastics; and we abuse little people, those with Downs Syndrome, the developmentally disabled, bipolar people, and many others.

We have had a civil rights revolution, embodied in the Omnibus Civil Rights Act of 1964. But note what Prosecutor Fitzsimmons said about the treatment of a little girl with cerebral palsy just a day or two ago: There's case law out there regarding people commenting and gesturing against race and religion. But ... there's nothing out there regarding disabilities. The Civil Rights Act has made such "commenting and gesturing" unacceptable when it applies to those we call minorities, that is, those of a different race or ethnicity.

However, we have a double standard concerning discrimination against the disabled. We treat them as having stigma. For example, note the following passage:

A drawn-out impeachment process is our worst option: another six months of Monica, have mercy; I don't care if it harelips the Governor.

This is from an article by the supposedly liberal columnist Molly Ivins, which appeared in the print edition of Time and has been on www.time.com for over a decade. It is obviously defamatory, and it seems to be clear evidence of a double standard. After all, would Time have printed it if the late Ms. Ivins had used the n-word rather than the h-word?

Above, we saw that William Bailey publicly humiliated a defenseless little girl, because she has cerebral palsy. He felt safe in doing so, with reason: This sort of thing happens all the time. After all, the nation's premiere news magazine defamed another group of disabled people, in print, and the nation has tacitly accepted this. It is as if, for the disabled, the civil rights revolution never happened.

How can this be? After all, justice–in this case, the freedom from marginalization and disenfranchisement–is, by definition, universal. As Martin Luther King said, "injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Perhaps the reason is that our civil rights revolution apparently was not implemented, as King thought it would be, as justice–which is universal–but as protected class, which is obviously not universal. (King did not dream that his children would be in a protected class. He said I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.) We–even the infamous William Bailey–know that there are certain kinds of things you don't say about those we call "minorities." That sense–can we call it a sense of right and wrong?–obviously did not kick in where a little girl with cerebral palsy was concerned, and it did not kick in in the case of Molly Ivins' supposed earthy humor regarding a birth defect.

Protected Class and the Courts:
Would the court system of a liberal society, sidestepping universal justice, treat "protected class" as a term at law? One has only to read the news:

Publication: The Spokesman Review - Publish date: March 2, 1996
A state judge supports an earlier court ruling giving Spokane restaurants the right to refuse service to Hells Angels wearing their club insignia.
Spokane County Superior Court Judge Neal Rielly, in a written ruling released Friday, says members of the biker gang aren't a "protected class" under state or federal discrimination laws.

And more recently in Illinois:

Plaintiffs Gary Kohlman and Allen Roberts are members of the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club.*fn1 They contend that the Mayor of Midlothian (defendant Thomas Murawski), Midlothian's Police Chief (defendant Vince Schavone), and a Midlothian police officer (defendant Hal Kaufman) ordered restaurants and bars in Midlothian to refuse to serve the plaintiffs because of their membership in the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club and/or their wearing of Hells Angels insignia and logos. ...
Because no suspect class is at issue, the plaintiffs must allege that:
(1) they are members of a protected class; (2) who are otherwise similarly situated to members of an unprotected class; (3) who were treated differently from members of the unprotected class; (4) based on the defendants' discriminatory intent. 

In Plessy v. Ferguson, the first Justice Harlan wrote:

Our Constitution is color-blind and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens.  In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law. The humblest is the peer of the most powerful. The law regards man as man and takes no account of his surroundings or of his color when his civil rights as guaranteed by the supreme law of the land are involved.

Yet we have among us people we see every day, who are members of a targeted minority, but are not, as Prosecutor Fitzsimmons' comment reveals, in a protected class (there do not seem to be civil rights cases regarding them). That should not make a difference in how we treat the disabled. But it does: The most horrifying aspect of Molly Ivins' offhand remark is that everybody understands it. If it was possible to "harelip" the governor, it is understood that person would be outside the protections and considerations we afford those of "normal" identity.

In Retrospect: The Supreme Court and The Disabled

In 2008, the year of Obama's first presidential election, the American Congress took action to remind the Supreme Court of the intent of existing disability employment law. Under the headline, Congress Passes Bill With Protections for Disabled, the New York Times wrote:

The bill expands the definition of disability and makes it easier for workers to prove discrimination. It explicitly rejects the strict standards used by the Supreme Court to determine who is disabled.

The bill declares that the court went wrong by “eliminating protection for many individuals whom Congress intended to protect” under the 1990 law.

“The Supreme Court misconstrued our intent,” said Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the House Democratic leader. “Our intent was to be inclusive.”

In an effort to clarify the intent of Congress, the bill says, “The definition of disability in this act shall be construed in favor of broad coverage.”

Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, the principal Republican sponsor in the House, said, “Courts have focused too heavily on whether individuals are covered by the law, rather than on whether discrimination occurred.” ...

“This is one of the most important pieces of civil rights legislation of our time,” said Representative Jim Langevin, Democrat of Rhode Island, who uses a wheelchair.
Lawrence Z. Lorber, a labor law specialist who represents employers, said the bill would change the outcome of “a slew of cases that were thrown out of court in the past.” Now, he said, “employees who have cancer or diabetes or learning disabilities will get their day in court and are more likely to get accommodations from employers.”

Lawmakers said that people with epilepsy, diabetes, cancer, multiple sclerosis and other ailments had been improperly denied protection because their conditions could be controlled by medications or other measures. In a Texas case, for example, a federal judge said a worker with epilepsy was not disabled because he was taking medications that reduced his seizures.
In deciding whether a person is disabled, the bill says, courts should not consider the effects of “mitigating measures” like prescription drugs, hearing aids and artificial limbs. Moreover, it says, “an impairment that is episodic or in remission is a disability if it would substantially limit a major life activity when active.”

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, the chief sponsor of the bill, said: “The Supreme Court decisions have led to a supreme absurdity, a Catch-22 situation. The more successful a person is at coping with a disability, the more likely it is the court will find that they are no longer disabled and therefore no longer covered under the A.D.A.”

Senator Orrin G. Hatch, Republican of Utah, said the bill, by establishing more generous coverage and protection, “will make a real difference in the lives of real people.”

The Washington Post wrote:

Rights for the Disabled: IT WENT largely unnoticed in a week of economic upheaval, but Congress approved one of the more momentous pieces of civil rights legislation in recent years. The bill, passed overwhelmingly in the House and by unanimous consent in the Senate, will significantly broaden protections for the disabled. It instructs the Supreme Court to act "in favor of broad coverage," a distinction that should make it easier for disabled workers to claim discrimination. By explicitly arguing for a less constrictive interpretation, lawmakers sought to restore the intent of the original Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990; the Supreme Court has imposed a consistently narrow interpretation of the ADA. President Bush has said that he will sign the bill into law despite previous concerns that the legislation would spur excess litigation.

The legislation is the result of two years of remarkable cooperation between business groups and disability rights organizations. The compromise strikes a balance as it guarantees rights for workers with "actual or perceived impairments." For example, airlines can no longer discriminate against prospective pilots if the applicants employ "mitigating measures," such as corrective eyewear. ... [The bill protects intermittently disabled workers who can] prove they have a disability that "would substantially limit a major life activity when active." The bill will also provide protection, for the first time, to workers with serious ailments such as diabetes, epilepsy and cancer.

Business and disability groups are pleased with the final version of the bill and said that collaborating on the legislation should reduce the number of lawsuits over its implementation. The direct language of the bill, and the laudable cooperation that forged it, should also improve employment levels for the disabled. Two out of three people with significant disabilities are unemployed, a disturbing statistic that disability organizations say is unchanged from when the original ADA became law. This time, Congress's intent is clear, and we hope the courts follow it.

These two articles described case after case where the august Court cruelly denied protection to disabled individuals even though the intent of the Americans With Disabilities Act should have been clear. As the Times noted, The court went wrong by “eliminating protection for many individuals whom Congress intended to protect” under the 1990 law. As Senator Tom Harkin said: “The Supreme Court decisions have led to a supreme absurdity.” The question these articles brings to mind is, Why the needless cruelty of these excessively narrow interpretations? One would almost conclude that the only thing supreme about this Court is its supreme indifference to what matters in the lives of real people.

How Fares The Republic: Movement Conservatism Cruelty

This embrace of cruelty is arguably the dominant feature of the present conservative movement. - Ta-Nehisi Coates

Romney gives his own explanation for his loss:

"You can imagine for somebody making $25,000 or $30,000 or $35,000 a year, being told you’re now going to get free health care, particularly if you don’t have it, getting free health care worth, what, $10,000 per family, in perpetuity — I mean, this is huge," Mr. Romney said. "Likewise with Hispanic voters, free health care was a big plus. But in addition with regards to Hispanic voters, the amnesty for children of illegals, the so-called Dream Act kids, was a huge plus for that voting group."

The only reason for moving the United States toward the universal health care offered by most other prosperous nations is to bribe voters? Let's look at that premise.

Back in 2010 2009 Andrew Sullivan described a good idea:

a healthcare plan that expands access, removes obvious cruelties and inefficiencies, allows more people into the system and can be plausibly described as universal coverage.

In the same year 2010 he wrote:

We now have more public clarity on the critical issue. The Democrats want to provide basic private insurance to the 40m or so working poor who don't have it. The Republicans don't  want to. Both parties want to stop the cruelty of denying people access to health insurance because they have a pre-existing condition, but if you do only that, then the insurance companies will take a big hit and hike premiums even more, rendering even more people without insurance. So you have to have a way to get the companies to agree to this by giving them 40m more customers to outweigh the costs. Only the Obama plan does that. The Republicans have nothing.

Except Romney didn't want to stop the cruelty, because doing a good thing for the people would reflect favorably on the Democratic party. Romney said he had his own plan, but here he is tacitly admitting that he didn't, because if he had, the American people would have given him credit for it and erased the Demo advantage. 

Here is Sullivan (blogging a Republican primary debate) on conservatives' cruelty:

I was surprised by the ineptness of Perry's attack on Romneycare. But I am more surprised at the cheering of someone dying because he couldn't afford intensive care. Yes, the GOP is now not only cheering executions; they are cheering people dying because they cannot afford any health insurance. Cheering death by poverty. "Yeah!" came the cry at the thought of a twentysomething dying because he didn't have insurance. I didn't think I could be more shocked by the instincts of those in the Republican base, but I just was.

Ta-Nehisi Coates recounts an email sent by a federal judge:

"A little boy said to his mother; 'Mommy, how come I'm black and you're white?'" the email joke reads.

"His mother replied, 'Don't even go there Barack! From what I can remember about that party, you're lucky you don't bark!'"

Coates writes:

What stuns you about this "joke" is the sheer embrace of cruelty. Here is a woman who lost her life to cancer. And [the judge's take on this] is imagining her son as the product of bestiality.

Though less crudely stated, this embrace of cruelty is arguably the dominant feature of the present conservative movement.

Andrew Sullivan's comment on the Romney excuse for his loss which begins this post:

Romney gives his own explanation for his loss to the only people he really cared about: his donor base. As usual with Republicans these days, there is no real personal responsibility. They do nothing wrong ever. They confess to no mistakes themselves. And we now kinda know that Romney's "47 percent" remarks were actually what he deeply believes.

A number of newspapers endorsed Romney, just before the election, arguing that the kinder gentler Romney who miraculously appeared just at the end of the campaign was the real Romney, the one we'd see in the Oval Office.

But it wasn't. Romney lied when he said his "47 percent" remarks didn't reflect his actual beliefs. He had no plans to "stop the cruelty of denying people access to health insurance" because they were poor, because he sees such things solely from the self-aggrandizing politics of political advantage. The enormous contribution to the public good of a health plan which will prevent millions of Americans' needlessly dying from preventable illnesses meant nothing.

This is the mindset that without shame practices the politics of obstruction. This is the cruel worldview which is willing to sabotage the nation's wellbeing for partisan advantage.

If the shoe were on the other foot, if it were the Democrats who were wreaking havoc with our politics, the party that was just repudiated at the polls by the American people would call it treason.

It is not partisan to object to the Republican party as it now stands, because at the present day  it does not represent a viable political alternative. It is not partisan to object to cruelty and heartlessness and destruction. One instead notes that one is dealing with cruelty and heartlessness and destruction, and passes regretfully on.

Defining Liberalism: Randall Kennedy's 'My Race Problem—And Ours'

In The Liberal Founding this weblog cited Professor Rowley's list of characteristics of liberalism: “universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing).” In essaying a definition of liberalism perhaps the first task is to observe that by and large the left disagrees, both in fundamental outlook, and on nearly every point of liberal thought.

I was first directed to this point by Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, which, though not liberal itself, clearly assumed that to discuss 'liberal' as synonymous with 'left' would be conceptually incoherent. The issue is confused because media discourse generally treats 'liberal' and 'left' as synonymous.

An illustrative example of this fundamental dichotomy is Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy's My Race Problem—And Ours, published in Atlantic, May 1997. Jim Sleeper analyzed some of Kennedy's arguments in his ironically titled Liberal Racism:

First, Sleeper critiqued the left's rejection of liberal universalism in favor of class—particularly racial class. Sleeper said that [effective crusading against racism originates from] "people who yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular group," and quoted Glenn Loury's apt phrase, "... the moral requirements of a humanism which transcends race."

Sleeper cites Kennedy:

... Analogizing race to family is a potent rhetorical move used
  to challenge those, like me, who are animated by a liberal,
  individualistic, and universal ethos which is skeptical of, if
  not hostile to, the particularisms—national, ethnic, religious,
  and racial—which seem to have grown so strong recently.

That is, family, and in particular “brotherhood,” in the political realm is incompatible with the liberal universalism and individualism cited by Rowley above. [Note that while the Founders wholeheartedly embraced the 'liberty' and 'equality' of the Continent's rallying cry, liberté, égalité, fraternité, “brotherhood” is absent from their discourse. In contrast with the left, liberalism is public and civil.]

The reason is that the obligations of family—or racial brotherhood—tend to be “antecedent to choice,” in the artful phrase Kennedy borrows from Michael Sandel. Brotherhood, or in more general terms, 'community,' tends to be coercive in ways that liberalism's equivalent term, The People, is not. [A phrase I grew up with was “put three Americans together and they form a committee.” De Tocqueville noted the tendency of the citizens of the infant American nation to form “voluntary associations.”]

This brings us to a crucial fact. In a world of kings and emperors, sultans and rajahs and warlords, the Founders created a nation with no rulers. To this day no one in our politics—mayor, county executive, governor, president—is legitimately called a ruler. This is because a ruler is someone who can subject others to their will, and in a free country no one can do that. We carelessly speak of an election as expressing the will of the voters, perhaps because we are influenced by one of Rousseau's terrible errors, the notion that “the general will is always right” (which laid the foundation for the Terror). [As Orwell warned, “the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.”]

'Community' as used by the left means that the group is everything and the individual is nothing (and thus the rejection of the liberal principle that the locus of freedom is the individual and not the group or class). It is because communitarianism rejects justice in favor of class, subjects civil rights to the notionally less selfish claim of “group rights,” that Kennedy objects to racial kinship. "I reject the notion of racial kinship," he wrote. "I do so in order to avoid its burdens and to be free to claim what the distinguished political theorist Michael Sandel labels 'the unencumbered self'."

The harmful effect of treating a person as a representative of a (racial) class, at the expense of justice (the equal civil rights of the single person) can be seen in the treatment of Justice Clarence Thomas. The liberal position is "I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it," but Justice Thomas regularly confronts audiences who take the position that a black man does not have the right to be conservative. This is a double standard as well as a denial of equality, rightly opposed by "people who yearn for justice, not merely for the advancement of a particular group" (as noted above).

To Summarize:
First, 'liberal' and 'left' are not synonymous.
Second, the left's orientation toward class in the form of racial community cannot be reconciled with the universal justice favored by liberalism.
Third, rulership and its attendant coerciveness is illegitimate in our liberal society. The coercion of a 'general will' (saying "the people rule" instead of saying "the people govern") is implicit in left communitarianism.
 
This is just a beginning. I hope to post further on this topic.