The Liberalism of Martin Luther King

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

It seems to me that the character of Imperial Germany after 1878 can best be caught in the term "illiberal." [[I am using the term as the dictionary defines it: "Not befitting a free man . . . not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others; narrow-minded." The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1967)]] - Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism, p. xvii

A politics phrased in the language of a war by the oppressed against oppressors clearly has abandoned the democratic perspective for something darker. - My "Liberalism" Problem—And Ours

The principles of liberalism are universalism, individualism, egalitarianism, and meliorism (human flourishing), according to Professor Rowley, above.

Egalitarianism. As cited in The Liberal Founding, Fritz Stern wrote, "At our country's founding, the spirit of liberalism suffused the Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. " When Martin Luther King asked the mainstream society to live up to its own stated principles, proclaiming, "I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: 'We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,'" he was citing the passage in the Declaration which outlines the liberal principles on which the nation is based.

Universalism. Martin Luther King 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." To me this seems to mean that King held that people should not be judged by the group they belong to, but by the type of people they themselves are. King also said, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. ... Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly." Here, King seems to be saying that injustice, prejudice, denial of civil rights to any individual, whoever it might be, threatens the liberty of everyone of every race. "God," King added, "is not merely interested in the freedom of brown men, yellow men, red men and black men. He is interested in the freedom of the whole human race."

This is in contrast to the particularism of the left. An earlier post, Liberal, Left notes:

The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.

The brilliance of King's "not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character" standard is that it avoids stereotyping individual people by the assumed characteristics of the group they supposedly belong to. As Liberal, Left noted, "The process of identifying certain people as members of oppressor groups is profiling. The process of targeting the person profiled is discrimination." Martin Luther King, even while battling against the discriminatory treatment of African Americans, avoided the temptation to demonize the people he was appealing to. Political democracy, after all, is a government of all the people.

Meliorism. Martin Luther King, in Letter from Birmingham Jail:

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. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. ... Segregation is not only politically, economically and sociologically unsound, it is morally wrong and sinful. ... Thus it is that I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court, for it is morally right; and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances, for they are morally wrong.

Washington concluded his Farewell Address by saying:

I anticipate with pleasing expectation that retreat in which I promise myself to realize, without alloy, the sweet enjoyment of partaking, in the midst of my fellow-citizens, the benign influence of good laws under a free government, the ever-favorite object of my heart, and the happy reward, as I trust, of our mutual cares, labors, and dangers.

Both these figures from the nation's history recognize that the purpose of a liberal society is to better the human condition as it affects each citizen. As John Adams wrote to Jefferson,

We may say that the Eighteenth Century, notwithstanding all its Errors and Vices has been, of all that are past, the most honourable to human Nature. Knowledge and Virtues were increased and diffused, Arts, Sciences useful to Men, ameliorating their condition, were improved, more than in any former equal Period.

Individualism. The locus of freedom is the individual, not the group or class. Thus Dr. King, above, upheld "any law that uplifts human personality." And also as noted above, he observed, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. ... Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly."

The preceding section on Universalism discussed the problems inherent in thinking of people in terms of the group they are thought to be identified with: profiling, stereotyping, targeting. It should be added that the notion of group rights is not an aspect of justice. Groups may be unjust to their own members, as John Stuart Mill's passages on "social tyranny"* suggest. In contrast, justice for the single person expands to justice for any groups containing people needing the freedom afforded.


-*---

(*)Mill argued, in On Liberty, "Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against 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, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own."

Aristotle's Practical Advice on the Cultivation of Constructive Habits

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

It seems to me that the character of Imperial Germany after 1878 can best be caught in the term "illiberal." [[I am using the term as the dictionary defines it: "Not befitting a free man . . . not generous in respect to the opinions, rights, or liberties of others; narrow-minded." The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary (1967)]] - Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism, p. xvii

Humanity in the form of fraternity invariably appears historically among persecuted peop les and enslaved groups; and in eighteenth-century Europe it must have been quite natural to detect it among the Jews, who then were newcomers in literary circles. This kind of hu manity is the great privilege of pariah peoples;... The privilege is dearly bought; it is often accompanied by so radical a loss of the world ... that in extreme cases, in which pa ri ahdom has persisted for centuries, we can speak of real worldlessness. And world less ness, alas, is always a form of barbarism.
In this as it were organically evolved humanity it is as if under the pressure of per se cu tion the persecuted have moved so closely together that the interspace which we have cal led world...has simply disappeared. -Hannah, Arendt, "On Humanity in Dark Times"

Of philosophical idealism Aristotle said:
This form, which exists in the carpenter’s mind, is the formal cause of the table—but it can have no existence except in the carpenter’s mind and at length in his work. To speak otherwise—to say that there is an absolute Tableness floating somewhere that gives form to all particular tables—is “to speak abstractly and idly.” - Thomas Cahill, Sailing the Wine-Dark Sea: Why the Greeks Matter - from Theoretical Mathematis vs Empirical Mathematics

Aristotle is quite clear that it is the rational life which is worth living, but to achieve something by means of one’s abilities is more important than just to have those abilities. - Philosophy and Literature by Ole Martin Skilleas, p. 29

In the following passage from Philosophy and Literature by Ole Martin Skilleas, the author states that becoming a virtuous person (who ‘does the right thing’) comes from developing the habit of doing the right thing. Knowing that one has done right and acted virtuously becomes emotionally rewarding. The habit of acting rightly also becomes the habit of experiencing an emotional reward from good action. There is the harmony and personal wholeness of learning to feel joy in well-doing:

In the Republic every matter of its organization is ultimately derived from the cosmic order, the real world beyond [that] of which we can have sense impressions. ... It is by imitating the order of the realm of the forms that we can achieve the good life. Not so for Aristotle. ... There is no time to sit down and think deeply about what is at hand, you need to act there and then. This is one reason why Aristotle puts such a great emphasis on developing habits. Learning to act correctly, and preferably with the right emotions to match, is very important. In developing habits, the actions we actually do perform are the building blocks. We become what we do, in a way.

Aristotle holds that the passions and emotions are educable, and ‘doing the right thing’ teaches you to match actions and emotions. … In being generous and therefore acting virtuously, and avoiding the extremes of being stingy or extravagant, you also have to feel generous … learning to act and feel in unison. Eudaimonia, and acting virtuously through the use of your phronesis [‘practical wisdom’ or ‘practical knowledge’], involves your whole personality.

In the 2001 Time Magazine article "The EQ Factor", Nancy Gibbs wrote:

In [Daniel] Goleman's analysis, self-awareness is perhaps the most crucial ability because it allows us to exercise some self-control. The idea is not to repress feeling (the reaction that has made psychoanalysts rich) but rather to do what Aristotle considered the hard work of the will. "Anyone can become angry--that is easy," he wrote in the Nicomachean Ethics. "But to be angry with the right person, to the right degree, at the right time, for the right purpose, and in the right way--this is not easy."

Even in the case of anger, to possess the characteristic of knowing the right occasion for wrath is an achievement of right habit.

In Giants and Dwarfs Allan Bloom adds:

Anger ... as Aristotle teaches, is the only one of the passions that requires speech and reason--to provide arguments which justify it and without which it is frustrated and withers.

The Yglesias Award

You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all the people all the time. ~ Abraham Lincoln

This race is not about winning, because winning isn't enough nowadays. Winning without dignity, winning it without honor, winning without authenticity and truth is not winning at all, and we're not in it for that. - Michelle Obama, referring to Hillary's "I'm in it to win it."

We will not be serving our students well if we insist on teaching them what is factually incorrect, even if we imagine that it would be better for them if we did so. - Mary Lefkowitz, Not Out Of Africa

According to an influential blog, The Daily Dish, "the Matthew Yglesias Award is for writers, politicians, columnists or pundits who actually criticise their own side, make enemies among political allies, and generally risk something for the sake of saying what they believe."

Here's why. In Conservatives' Phantom Marriage Agenda Yglesias wrote:

One answer that Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam sort of walked up to in their book Grand New Party from several years back is that we ought to return to cruelly shunning single mothers and their children. Treat them really, really, really poorly like we would have 50 years ago. Call them "illegitimate" and rather than try to ameliorate the problems of being raised in a one-adult household, go out of our way to exacerbate them. Make life as awful as possible for single parents and their kids, and in the future you probably will see fewer single parents. The big problem with this idea, however, is that it involves deliberate cruelty to innocent people, which is morally wrong. So wrong that you never see conservatives explicitly avow it. Because it's really obviously wrong to be deliberately cruel to innocent people.

Did you ever wonder what simple transparent honesty (doing good with simplicity) would look like? These words are an example.


In "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed, this blog previously cited Yglesias:

At no point in the films is there any suggestion that one ought to put an abstract ideological or ethical commitment above a specific obligation to family.
Sociologically speaking, this is a classic moral outlook of a low-trust society . . .  - Matthew Yglesias

Postscript: In Not Out Of Africa: How "Afrocentrism" Became An Excuse To Teach Myth As History, Professor Mary Lefkowitz wrote extensively about honesty as contrasted with committed academic practice:

Discussions about evidence is what scholarship used to be about, and I would argue that we must return to debates about the evidence. p. 160

There are of course many possible interpretations of the truth, but some things simply are not true. It is not true that there was no Holocaust. There was a Holocaust, although we may disagree about the numbers of people killed. [...]

Not all bias amounts to distortion or is equivalent to indoctrination. If I am aware that I am likely to be biased for any number of reasons, and try to compensate for my bias, the result should be very different in quality and character from what I would say if I were consciously setting about to achieve a particular political goal. [...]

Drawing a clear distinction between motivations and evidence has a direct bearing on the question of academic freedom. p. 161

When it comes to deciding what one can or cannot say in class, the question of ethnicity or of motivations, whether personal or cultural, is or ought to be irrelevant. What matters is whether what one says is supported by facts and evidence, texts or formulae. [...]

Are there, can there be, multiple, diverse "truths?" If there are, which "truth" should win? The one that is most loudly argued, or most persuasively phrased? Diverse "truths" are possible only if "truth" is understood to mean something like "point of view." But even then not every point of view, no matter how persuasively it is put across, or with what intensity it is argued, can be equally valid. I may sincerely believe that Plato studied with Moses [...] but that will not mean that what I say corresponds to any known facts. Moses lived (if indeed he lived at all) centuries before Plato [...] In order to be true, my assertion about Plato would need to be supported by warranted evidence. And it cannot be. The notion of diversity does not extend to truth. p. 162

It is not possible for the same thing to be at once false and true. p. 163

Courses that are designed to conceal a considerable body of evidence, or that are intended to instill resentment and distrust in place of open discussion, have no place in the curriculum. p. 164

I was trying to draw attention to the differences between freedom of speech and academic freedom. Freedom of speech gives me the right to say that Aristotle stole his philosophy from Egypt, provided that it is clear that what I am expressing is my opinion, and that I do not pretend or assert that it is factually accurate and true in every respect. One can say many outrageous, untrue, and cruel things in this country, and on the whole it is better to have such license than to restrict free expression.

Whether freedom of speech extends to the classroom is another question. Academic freedom and tenure are not intended to protect the expression of uninformed or frivolous opinions. p. 165

There are many valid ways to read a literary text, although here again one expects instructors to have professional credentials, to be able to provide an argument for their way of reading the works of literature that they profess, and to show that they know its basic content (Hamlet is not the hero of Macbeth, for example).

But in certain subject areas motivation and identity have been taken as the equivalent of professional credentials. For example, does being a woman automatically guarantee knowledge of Women's Studies? p. 166

We will not be serving our students well if we insist on teaching them what is factually incorrect, even if we imagine that it would be better for them if we did so. If some students were comforted by being taught that the world was flat, would that justify the inclusion of Flat Earth Theory in the curriculum. Shouldn't we object if a geographer repeatedly taught that the world was flat, and did not mention that most other geographers happened to disagree with her, or describe fairly the reasons why they did so? p. 167

Academic freedom is the right to profess a discipline according to its recognized content and procedures, free from constraints and considerations extraneous to that discipline. p. 170

A Socialist Politician in the Land of The Pursuit of Happiness

Re socialist member of Seattle City Council Kshama Sawant: "Not drowning other voices (although she'd probably like to do so)" [Emphasis added] - Vide infra

To sell one's birthright for a mess of pottage. - Esau, as described in Genesis 25:29-34

Those who sacrifice liberty for [economic] security deserve neither. - Attributed to Benjamin Franklin

The purpose is always the same, to leave the economic realm in command over all others, to explain all human impulse, as it is expressed in the political process, in terms of nothing more than the "acquisitive instinct." ... They are in bondage to an economic view of human aspiration against which they have no defense once the supremacy of [human rights in] the political realm has been surrendered. - Henry Fairlie, Bite the Hand That Feeds You, p. 274

The Rights of Man, in liberal thought, are meaningful only if applied to immunities, such as freedom of speech. To speak of entitlements as rights, as the UN Declaration of Human Rights does, is to make a fundamental category mistake.  - Vide infra

Up in Seattle a self-identified 'socialist,' Kshama Sawant, has been elected to the city council. On November 22, an acquaintance, who in turn identifies as a baby boomer, wrote to one of us:

Did you happen to catch Essex Porter's interview with K. Sawant last night?  Essex did a double-take when Kshama proclaimed, "Boeing is an economic terrorist." [The reason, as Yglesias described: "The company tried to use the lure of building those planes in Washington State to get the machinists union to agree to some concessions in other areas of negotiation. The machinists said no. So on the face of it, 777X production is going to end up somewhere else."] In Seattle, one is supposed to genuflect when the sacred name of Boeing is invoked!  Not Kshama.  She went on to elaborate:  "They hold their workers hostage.  They hold the city hostage.  They hold the state hostage.  Boeing is an economic terrorist."

This acquaintance continued:

. . . For far too long, that particular aspect has not been voiced (or not loudly and clearly enough).  With luck, Kshama can continue to be that loud clear voice―not drowning other voices (although she'd probably like to do so), but at least holding her own.

A response:

One thought to be kept in mind in what follows is that such humanitarian safety net elements as 'Social Security' are part of the core business of liberal democracy (Keillor's "Politics of kindness" PDF), not a needed modification in the direction of  'socialism.'

The late Soviet Union seems to have proclaimed that their system represented "real existing socialism." (Wikipedia: "Real socialism (also real-socialism and even actually existing socialism) is a political term popularized during the Brezhnev era in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.") "Socialism" in that sense is explicitly identified with totalitarian command societies. Thus, for example, if a European 'democratic socialist' country does not allow *anything* to trump the civil liberties of the citizen, it is not properly socialist; on the other hand, if it allows 'economic rights' to supersede civil liberties (as Franklin, above, suggests), it is not democratic.

This is one of many areas in which liberal political concept is truly profound. The Rights of Man, in liberal thought, are meaningful only if applied to immunities, such as freedom of speech. To speak of entitlements as rights, as the UN Declaration of Human Rights does, is to make a fundamental category mistake.

One, the habit of terming desirable things 'rights' in order to put the weight of the justice system behind them would place coercion everywhere in what had been a free society.

By far the most important consideration, however, is the second one. When entitlements (which belong in the democratically accepted laws and not, as the Bill of Rights is, in the Constitution which constrains those laws (i.e., Judicial Review)), are *mandated*, a tax, unreachable by the voters, is imposed. And, violating the We the People principle, the public is divided into two groups, the group which receives the entitlements, and the group which pays for them, creating powerful vested interests with lessened concern for the public good. Democracy is sundered.

The kind of safety net we have―Social Security has been modified by vote several times―we citizens are basically comfortable with that not despite, but because, of our constant arguing and grousing about it. It is the healthy "clamor of democracy":

What Walter Bagehot wrote in 1874 ... "Parliamentary Government is not a thing which always succeeds in the world; on the contrary ... First, Parliamentary Government requires that a nation should have nerve to endure incessant discussion and frequent change of rulers." - Fritz Stern, The Failure of Illiberalism

What is liberalism's answer to the way the one percent has hijacked our economics and our politics? We may not know yet. Thomas Paine said ,"On the part of the public, my intention is, to show them their true and sold [sic] interest; to encourage them to their own good . . ." (An American Crisis). A free society has to wait―painful as it may seem―for the democracy to rouse itself. That a Kshama Sawant is needed to *coerce* them into it is unworthy of a free people (her suggestion that the workers confiscate Boeing property to 'do the right thing' would come at the enormous cost of abandoning the rule of law):

From "A Man for All Seasons":

William Roper: So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!
Sir Thomas More: Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?
William Roper: Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!
Sir Thomas More: ...And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned around on you―where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country's planted thick with laws from coast to coast―man's laws, not God's―and if you cut them down...d'you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake.
― Robert Bolt, A Man for All Seasons

Thus we read with great interest a November 20 post by Matthew Yglesias, "Socialism off to a Poor Start in Seattle":

Seattle City Council member-elect Kshama Sawant recently displaced a longtime business-friendly incumbent from the City Council, and is noteworthy for her status as an avowed socialist. ... I hope her political career blossoms so as to provide sensible liberals with someone noteworthy to triangulate against. Sen. Bernie Sanders is in some technical sense a socialist, but his views don't seem distinct from those of a dozen or two other Democratic Party senators.

By contrast, this from Sawant is some real socialism. Boeing is getting a bunch of orders for its new 777X planes. [... Without state concessions, Boeing will likely locate 777X production elsewhere.] Sawant thinks the union should counter by seizing the means of production:

“The only response we can have if Boeing executives do not agree to keep the plant here is for the machinists to say the machines are here, the workers are here, we will do the job, we don't need the executives. The executives don’t do the work, the machinists do,” she said.

Sawant says after workers “take-over” the Everett Boeing plant; they could build things everyone can use.

“We can re-tool the machines to produce mass transit like buses, instead of destructive, you know, war machines,” she told KIRO 7.

Can Boeing's front-line workers actually retool an airplane factory and turn it to bus production and win contracts to sell buses that raise enough revenue to keep everyone employed? Only time will tell for sure, but in the real world the answer is "no." This is exactly what you need executives for. Retooling plants, establishing relationships with suppliers and customers, understanding the size of the market for buses, and all that other stuff is a nontrivial task.

If Sawant were a smarter politician she would better disguise the rigid ideology under which she labors. "The executives don't do the work, the machinists do" is Marx's senseless Labor Theory of Value, which does not understand the essential role of management, distribution and marketing in successful production enterprises. Our correspondent sees Sawant as a needed "alternative" voice countering the flaws of capitalism.

But nonsense is not an alternative, it is only nonsense. (One voter responded to Sawant's proposal, "Knee-jerk party-line Marxist dogma, totally out of touch with reality and the wishes of her voters. She's an animated cliché machine.")

Liberal, Left, Ctd

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

Continuing Liberal, Left, further notes, not necessarily in any particular order:

The left sees the world in terms of a zero sum game. What benefits one person is necessarily taken away from some other person. Liberalism thinks in terms of win-win situations. De Tocqueville wrote that American public-spiritedness arose out of a concept of altruism as enlightened self-interest:

Among us, men still constantly feign great abnegation which they no longer feel. The Americans, on the other hand, are fond of explaining almost all the actions of their lives by the principle of self-interest rightly understood; they show with complacency how an enlightened regard for themselves constantly prompts them to assist one another and inclines them willingly to sacrifice a portion of their time and property to the welfare of the state.

From the earlier Liberal, Left:

• The most famous three words in liberalism: “We the People.”
• The left's most famous phrase: “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!”
• The left characterizes virtue as a property of a group (the oppressed). It takes a personalistic approach to evil, in the form of an implied out-group which chains the oppressed worker. The battle against evil, it is implied, will take the form of a war against a group of people who are, as a foregone conclusion, evil.
• This is in contrast to liberalism, which tends to see evil—at least the evil which a political system may seek to remedy—as error resulting from ignorance. To personalize evil, and in the process demonize certain types of people and create conflict, is seen as a category mistake. It can lead to what Frederick C. Crews called a “reckless dispensation of guilt.”
• “We the People,” by contrast, suggests harmony, cooperation, and altruism.
• In all of this, the left is thinking in terms of groups, oppressed groups versus oppressor groups, not in terms of the rights-bearing individual. This is a mind-set which does not place much emphasis on civil liberties. A person believed to be a member of a "reactionary" group tends to be treated as guilty of the sins ascribed to that group.

Such an us-vs-them outlook fits perfectly with the zero sum game perception, even as liberal enlightened self-interest is harmonious with universal justice. It may be noted in passing that the sources of liberalism in the classical world are the Roman concept of justice, on the one hand, and Jesus of Nazareth's philosophy of cooperation, kindness, and altruism, on the other.* (The modern antecedent, as noted in The Liberal Founding, was the scientific revolution which preceded the invention of the liberal modern state.)

An example of liberal/left differences is the contrast between Women's Liberation, the feminism of the pre-counterculture era, and "feminism," which has replaced it. In Who Stole Feminism? Christina Hoff Sommers contrasted "equity feminism" with "gender feminism." The equity feminists of Women's Liberation cited "all men are created equal" as their philosophical claim to political and social equality--to equal justice. In the more radical feminism which followed, "womyn" are the virtuous gender and "all men are created equal" is a biased pronouncement of the patriarchy--us-vs-them.

Wikipedia contains an example of such modern ideologized feminism:

Elaine Showalter describes ... "gender theory", in which the "ideological inscription and the literary effects of the sex/gender system are explored".

As The Liberal Founding suggests, it is in the United States' DNA, so to speak, to be liberal. And so it is, but more so before the left effects of the counterculture. The late Roger Ebert's discussion of "American Graffiti" illustrates the change:

On the surface, Lucas has made a film that seems almost artless; his teenagers cruise Main Street and stop at Mel’s Drive-In and listen to Wolfman Jack on the radio and neck and lay rubber and almost convince themselves their moment will last forever. But the film’s buried structure shows an innocence in the process of being lost, and as its symbol Lucas provides the elusive blonde in the white Thunderbird -- the vision of beauty always glimpsed at the next intersection, the end of the next street.

What characterizes a liberal society is yearning, because yearning is the entryway to ideals and aspirations; and because the dream is for all (see meliorism, above) it is pure and untainted. “The music was as innocent as the time,” Ebert wrote:

Songs like “Sixteen Candles” and “Gonna Find Her” and “The Book of Love” sound touchingly naive today; nothing prepared us for the decadence and the aggression of rock only a handful of years later.

The founding liberals thought in terms of a transformation of the whole world (see universalism, above). Thomas Paine proclaimed, “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.” The music of yearning had been replaced by a music of decadence and aggression, folly and baseness. For example, by the Rolling Stones:

You can't come back and think you are still mine / You're out of touch, my baby / My poor discarded baby / I said, baby, baby, baby, you're out of time.

“My solemn belief of your cause,” Paine added, “is, that it is hellish and damnable, and, under that conviction, every thinking man's heart must fail him.”

(*) John 10:10, "I am come that they might have life, and that they might have it more abundantly," could serve as a concise expression of the purpose of liberalism.

How the United States Has Changed, Ctd

At no point in the films is there any suggestion that one ought to put an abstract ideological or ethical commitment above a specific obligation to family.
Sociologically speaking, this is a classic moral outlook of a low-trust society . . .  - Matthew Yglesias

The Loyal Opposition: "a minority party esp. in a legislative body whose opposition to the party in power is constructive, responsible, and bounded by loyalty to fundamental interests" - Merriam-Webster Online

"The country I stayed in was a different America, a long time ago" - Daniel Ellsberg

"A fear society of arbitrary, disproportionate punishment" - "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed

[They're] capable of anything. - Very Hard Choices, Spider Robinson

We might die to preserve our nation's principles but most of us won't kill our country to win an argument. - James C. Moore

A country once guided by exalted principles is now tainted by cruel ones. - Dahlia Lithwick

Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done. - David Frum

From Spider Robinson's SF novel Very Hard Choices:

[Spider, born in the US, who now lives in Canada]: I live in a civilized country instead of America. p. 8

The United States of America has the most magnificent of ideals any nation ever failed to live to live up to. p. 125

In this, one of his later novels, Spider Robinson uncharacteristically inserts a discussion of recent developments in American life, viewed from the standpoint of ethics and decency:

"If this account is ... accurate ... then all three of you are unusually ethical people," p. 180 spoken by a character who until then had seemed to be a master criminal. "Ethics of that order [are rare.]" p. 182 “Who's the most ethical human being in the firm? . . . I think they are . . . one hundred percent honest and utterly fearless.” p. 183 “The Constitution and Bill of Rights are among the most enlightened political documents the human race has produced so far, and its people are, so help me, some of the kindest who have yet walked the earth. . . . So far nobody's ever been as ashamed of their own racism as we are.” p. 187 “. . . people of good will and good sense seem helpless to do anything about it.” p. 188 A few pages later he says the U.S. "didn't dismantle its own Constitution and Bill of Rights and the Geneva Convention and its own image of itself without help. ... All my life, if there was anything everyone in America knew for sure, without even thinking about it, it was that John Wayne would never beat up a little guy. ... The America he knew is gone." p. 189

The kind of people I'm talking about [...are] just very rich. ... They're not impressed by political power, popularity, or viciousness. They use people like those as chess-pieces--pawns. They've got handles on them all. They themselves are off the radar. They don't think of themselves as Americans. They don't even think in terms of nations or ideologies or the improvement of mankind; they are fundamentally indifferent to all suffering and death except insofar as it affects their game. ... The tools they have now are finally good enough to completely subvert democracy. ... Vandals ... absolutely selfish, utterly contemptuous of all morality and ethics. pp. 189-190

[They're] capable of anything. p. 191

All they were doing was treating each other with courtesy and common sense. ... What made me mad was, people used to treat each other that way in America when I was a boy. p. 197

. . . the hijacking and corruption of the United States. p. 200

Knowledge and reason and kindness and personal liberty really are worth all the dreadful effort they cost. p. 205

In "You Have a Monstrous Ideology": How the United States Has Changed, we recounted Daniel Ellsberg's reflection on his part in the Pentagon Papers exposure of concealed information. The justice system of that time took a lenient, freedom-of-speech approach to what he had done. A public-spirited citizen described today's changed situation:

John Cusack at The Guardian isn't sure Eric Holder will protect journalists. Cusack (yes, the actor from Say Anything) argues that David Miranda's recent detainment in the U.K. "was an assault on press freedom that should make every reporter shudder no matter their opinion on the NSA." He asks, will the U.S. act similarly when NSA journalists try to enter the States? He wonders if Americans should now "conclude that the U.S. is willing to create a generation of exiled watchdogs, who are trying to hold their government accountable from afar." Glenn Greenwald recommended the piece, as did Jason Leopold, an Al Jazeera reporter who covers civil liberties.

James C. Moore described an underlying degradation of decency in those who govern:

We had a process. Congress proposed, and the president disposed with his signature. A law then went on the books. Courts might be asked to test its constitutionality, but by surviving legal challenges, a measure became the settled law of the land, which was the case with Obamacare. The American legislative system was, in spite of the disturbing influence of big money, actually quite elegant. But now it is broken.

We have entered into an era of gunpoint government.

Americans have discovered that a tiny, radical minority can immobilize their entire country and hold it as still as a robbery victim staring at the barrel of a pointed gun. And regardless of how this might anger the majority, they must live with the fact that it can happen again. ...

Political accommodation for the common good is not even a consideration. Shutting the country down is the only objective, with no purpose beyond political destruction and personal ambition. ...

[Cruz's] ideological strain thrives on the notion that government should do little more than protect the borders, pave the roads and then get the hell out of our way. ...

We might die to preserve our nation's principles but most of us won't kill our country to win an argument. ...

He was willing to jeopardize the lives and incomes of millions of Americans, along with global economies. ...

Our deliberative government was not designed to be hijacked by a few dissidents. But fanatics have found a way to pry open the cockpit door and demand course corrections that put everyone on board at risk.

Aphorisms and observations which may apply:

Those who violate the bounds of propriety counting on the reluctance of more decent people to stoop to their level to protect them.

A willingness to fight in territory where conscience forbids most others.

David Frum - Theoretically, the party that holds the Senate could refuse to confirm any Cabinet nominees of a president of the other party. Yet until recently, this just “wasn’t done.” In fact, quite a lot of things that theoretically could be done just “weren’t done.” Now old inhibitions have given way. Things that weren’t done suddenly are done.

James Fallows: Liberal democracies like ours depend on rules but also on norms -- on the assumption that you'll go so far, but no further, to advance your political ends. The norms imply some loyalty to the system as a whole that outweighs your immediate partisan interest.