Scratch a Liberal
by Brian Morton
A flyer appeared not long ago on the campus where I teach, protesting a visit by the journalist and podcaster Ezra Klein. “Scratch a liberal,” it read, “and a fascist bleeds.” Earlier in the academic year, students had held a teach-in under the title “Combating Liberalism.” Student activist opinion seems to be coalescing around the idea that liberalism is one of their enemies. It seems unlikely that they’ve thought this through.
“Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.” Anyone who’s read about the history of fascism would be surprised by this idea. In the 1920s and 1930s, as soon as they came to power, the fascist regimes of Mussolini, Dollfuss, Hitler, and Franco set out to strangle liberal institutions—labor unions, newspapers, universities, the judiciary, and opposition parties of all kinds. The same has been true for every fascist government since then, all over the world. Fascism isn’t liberalism’s alter ego; it’s liberalism’s executioner.
Students who plan on combating liberalism might first take a moment to think about how many of the achievements of liberalism they depend on. It was liberalism—a political tradition over three hundred years old, the cornerstone of which is the idea of equal rights under the law—that brought us most of the freedoms and protections we value in political life today, including freedom of expression and assembly, trial by jury, due process, and the right to vote. If you’ve ever stopped to think that it’s fortunate that the political world is no longer organized around the divine right of kings, you might remind yourself that we have liberalism to thank for it.
Liberal thinkers and legislators, as we know, have often failed to put principle into practice. Thomas Jefferson denounced slavery and owned slaves; John Stuart Mill wrote eloquently about representative government but believed that the people of India weren’t ready for it. The rights and protections associated with liberalism have always been granted to some and not to others.
The great liberation movements in U.S. history—abolitionism, women’s suffrage, the labor movement, the civil rights movement—arose precisely from these failures to put principle into practice. But these movements weren’t fighting to destroy liberalism; they were fighting to extend liberal rights to people who were unjustly denied them. Frederick Douglass was drawing on the ideas of 1776 and 1789 when he wrote that the slaveholder, the “violator of the just and inalienable rights of man…never lisped a word in commendation of the fathers of the republic without inviting the sword, and asserting the right of rebellion for his own slaves.”
Even when some of these movements did press to go beyond liberalism, their hope was to extend liberalism’s egalitarian political practices into economic life. When Martin Luther King, Jr., who grew more and more outspoken about his democratic socialist beliefs during the course of his life, argued in 1967 and 1968 that the country needed an “economic bill of rights,” he was paying tribute to liberalism’s legacy. The most humane traditions of socialist thought have always sought to build on liberalism’s achievements.
Writing in a global context, Frantz Fanon expressed this idea memorably when he said that the democratic revolution he envisioned—a “real social and economic democracy”—would draw on “the essential values of modern humanism concerning the individual taken as a person: freedom of the individual, equality of rights and duties of citizens, freedom of conscience, of assembly, etc. all that permits the individual to blossom.”
Any honest defense of classical liberalism has to acknowledge that although it attacked political hierarchies, it left economic hierarchies unchallenged. This is why Mill, near the end of his life, referred to socialists as liberalism’s “far-sighted successors.” My argument isn’t that liberalism is all we need; it’s that if we want to go beyond liberalism, we need to understand and defend its positive contributions.
I’m guessing, though, that students who think of liberalism as the enemy aren’t thinking of Mill or John Dewey. They’re thinking of people like Joe Biden (”Bibi, I don’t agree with a damn thing you say, but I love you”) and Kamala Harris (”I am a top cop”).
It’s easy to understand why students who identify liberalism with Biden and Harris and Chuck Schumer might want to tear it all down. But the political legacy of American liberalism isn’t a simple one, and any serious attempt to understand contemporary liberalism has to take account of the fact that liberals have been responsible for most of the legislative developments that have brought a measure of decency to life in the U.S. Social Security and unemployment insurance; the right to join a union and the right to strike; federal minimum wage laws and child labor laws; the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act (which together put an end to Jim Crow); Medicare and Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act; the Family and Medical Leave Act—all of these were brought into being by liberals and opposed by the right. If you said these reforms didn’t go far enough, I’d agree with you, but without them, where would we be?
Today, the Trump administration is showing us exactly where we’d be. It’s attacking most of liberalism’s accomplishments—deporting or locking up thousands without due process; dismantling civil rights laws; assaulting Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act and other social insurance programs; bullying universities and the press; ignoring court decisions that don’t go its way; giving masked goons the freedom to break into homes without warrants, detain people based on nothing more than the color of their skin, and kill innocent people without consequences. In such a moment, activists who believe that liberalism is their enemy are failing to see what’s in front of their eyes. And they’re making it easier for the actual fascists to do their work.
“Scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds.” It’s understandable that many college activists are attracted to the most militant-sounding slogans. It would be weird if they weren’t. The world is in need of radical repair, and when you’re getting involved in politics, furious simplicities are not a bad place to start. But one of the tasks of the activist is to keep thinking.
Brian Morton’s books include the novels Starting Out in the Evening and Florence Gordon, the memoir Tasha, and the literary guidebook Writing as a Way of Life. He teaches writing at Sarah Lawrence College.
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Why, when reading this, do I feel like I am being a patronized by a liberal? And why do I believe I am listening to a middle age person, whose understanding of history is at the service of his assumptions, about not only the necessity and durability of classical liberalism, but also a prevalent misunderstanding or falsification of the history of resistance to fascism?
Of course these are rhetorical questions. One of the reasons that MAGA bigotry has such traction among otherwise decent people, is because those people hear sociopaths like Trump speaking a different language from the manicure of liberal bullshit and patronization they know all too well.
I am 78 had them spending some significant part of my remaining years with activists who are mostly in their twenties and thirties, and risking personal comfort and safety in a way that the putative addresees of Morton's lecture also do.
They sometimes use a too- convenient meme like the one our author has his poemic on. I sometimes give them a hard time about oversimplification and lack of context. But in this context, and as an activist, the last thing I'm going to say is that it is easier to deal with relative immaturity of committed young people, than with smug liberal ossification.
Thanks. A great essay! Many of the liberal ideals of the French Enlightenment were written into the American Declaration of Independence, United States Constitution, and Bill of Rights, but are still waiting to be fully realized. Since the signing of the Constitution on September 17, 1787, the United States has usually been a forward looking work in progress but with some dark periods at times. The Enlightenment ideals have spread through much of the world and Americans have made progress toward fulfilling them, but it’s too early to declare victory and say let’s go back to the past. We are still learning how to accomplish them. Many beliefs we take for granted today did not exist back in the late 1700s because the ideals were just being penned and they didn't know how to implement them or had staunch resistance to them by those profiting from the old ways. We’ve done some good things, and we’ve done some bad. The future is uncertain but it cannot be a good one under the leadership of aristocratic billionaires, book bannings, and suppression of history.
Let’s finish the job. It’s time for Good Trouble.