Conservatives and progressives make the same big mistake
It is time to revive and revere the word “liberal” — if it’s not too late already. Summer Lee’s victory Tuesday in the 12th congressional district race underscores how far the Democratic Party has shifted from the reasonable liberalism of its recent past. That past is something everyone except Rep. Lee’s progressive bloc should be longing for — especially at this fraught moment in history.
Just as Donald Trump’s domination of the Republican Party defies its historic conservatism and bodes ill for “the American experiment,” so too does the progressive wing’s power over the Left.
Right now, the Free World and the would-be-free world face existential threats — in Russia’s vicious siege of Ukraine and in the Middle East’s widening war. As American political leaders argue about whether, how and when to assist in these two conflicts, the stances taken by extremists in each party have shocked the rest of the nation.
The extremists at the extremes
The sizable extremist wing of the Republicans, party of the - friendly candidate like Donald Trump, includes opponents of aid to Ukraine and even fans of Vladimir Putin. For months they delayed aid Ukraine desperately needed, and even delayed aid to Israel, which they support, to keep it away from Ukraine. Now the extreme wing in Congress threatens to bring the House of Representatives to a stop because they lost that vote.
Within hours of Hamas’s barbaric Oct. 7 attack on Israel, some American progressives — Ivy League student associations, university professors, spokespeople for Black Lives Matter, chapters of Democratic Socialists of America — openly celebrated the Palestinian terrorists who raped, mutilated and murdered innocent civilians.
It is incomprehensible that a political movement whose prominent members celebrate the murder of innocents could continue to exist, much less prosper. People who still have a moral compass should have left the movement and disavowed it immediately.
Some did. Many Jews, in particular, have written movingly about the way Oct. 7 changed their worldview. Feeling betrayed by the hard left, they discovered that they are indeed liberals.
Florida Rep. Lois Frankel left Congressional Progressive Caucus in November over its stance on Israel. Rep. Ritchie Torres, a gay Afro-Latino who represents the South Bronx, left the caucus in February, with this posted explanation: “The international community remains obsessed with pressuring Israel and only Israel. How about pressuring Hamas to release the hostages, surrender unconditionally, and end a war it started?”
Summer Lee stayed in the caucus and has just won by a margin of 20% in the Democratic primary. Or, assessed from another vantage point, 40% of Democrats in her district voted against her, rejecting an incumbent and her hairsplitting denial of the far left’s anti-Semitism.
Together in the center
Conservatives who agree on that point could begin the healing by owning a common mistake of the past: turning “liberal” into a dirty word.
Live long enough, and mistakes like that become clear, as shifting political realities make our similarities more important than our differences. True liberals and conservatives are clustered at the center of the country’s political spectrum while radical forces on both sides spin some members toward destructive extremes.
Liberals and conservatives are nearer to each other at the center of American politics than they are to the extremists on their respective sides of the aisle. This is as much a matter of tone as it is of policy. Liberals’ strongest political inclination is to extend the blessings of liberty to those who haven’t yet secured them, while conservatives’ strongest inclination is to preserve liberty from those who would destroy it.
Our shared imperative is
actually to do both, simultaneously, together.
No matter which side of the political aisle reasonable Americans may have chosen, they have to grapple with the fact that some on their side bewilder or offend them. How they handle this reality will vary, but here’s a good starting point: We should stop splitting hairs when they belong to a corpse.
Perhaps the extremists’ responses to current wars will push the rest of us toward each other. War abroad has fostered unity in the past. Post-World War bipartisanship was still healthy well into the 1980s.
But after the West’s triumph in the Cold War, bipartisanship waned. The rise of talk radio, cable TV news and countless Internet communities contributed mightily to our fracturing.
True liberals, true conservatives
European friends interested in American politics used to insist to me, back in the mid-80s, that our country did not have a true Left nor a far Right. We certainly do now, and a majority of us find little at the extremes to admire.
But if reasonable people are going to make common cause to save our tattered Union, they’re going to have to stop using scornful epithets to refer to compatriots on the other side of the aisle.
Things have changed — as they tend to do — so our labels and language need to adapt. These days being a true liberal or true conservative is a good and necessary commitment — indeed, it includes the same commitment to democracy. The center won’t hold unless we try a little harder to find it.