Left, Right, Left, Right

Democracy marches on

By Jerry Fraser

While I was at the Boston Globe, the newspaper’s editor, Matthew Storin, mounted a crusade to get reporters to stop using terms like “liberal” and — especially — “conservative” to describe people.

I say especially in the latter instance because reporters are more likely to describe you in terms of ideology if you’re perceived as conservative.

(Just as residents of an all-white community are unlikely to describe a neighbor as “the Caucasian guy down the street,” reporters are unlikely to characterize people who share their outlook. What would be the point?)

In his approach to the question, I suspect, Storin was thinking of his newspaper’s reputation for fairness. In truth, however, it’s not always clear who’s liberal and who’s a conservative — only that each takes a turn being a dirty word.

According to my electronic version of the American Heritage Dictionary, people with a liberal outlook are “not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas” and are “free from bigotry.” If you’re a liberal, you’re open to reform, new ideas for progress, and are “tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others . . . ” and exhibit other laudable attributes.

Conservatives, on the other hand, are described, among other things, as “favoring traditional views and values; tending to oppose change . . . moderate; cautious.”

Small wonder conservatives are always on the defensive: if the dictionary is to be believed, liberals are progressive in outlook, generous, and unprejudiced; conservatives are narrow-minded, intractable, and cheap.

(Small wonder somebody coined the term “white-hat” to describe a noble Republican, as opposed to the regular ones.)

Recent history, however, suggests that both outlooks fall in and out of favor with the times. In the 1950s and ’60s, for instance, opponents of civil rights used states’ rights and other conservative rationales in an effort to deny blacks equality in the eyes of the law. States’ rights are crucial to our federal system of government, but 35 years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act there are few politicians who would appear before the NAACP to revel in the sovereignty of the individual states.

By the same token, Ronald Reagan, a one-time New Deal Democrat, in the 1980s convinced a majority of Americans that we had squandered the principles of the Founding Fathers on entitlements so fulsome as to undermine the very principles of freedom and opportunity. “Liberalism” became “the L-word,” and there were damn few politicians — or anyone else for that matter — who would own up to what was now seen as a rather indulgent world view. So effective was Reagan that Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas and other ambitious Democrats formed a centrist “leadership council” to try to get the party back on track. It should have been called a “followship” council, because Reagan had showed them the way.

The recent, much lamented presidential election indicates America’s ideology may be in balance — a fifty-fifty split suggesting to me that we didn’t want either guy. That alignment could change, however, if congressional lightning rods like House Whip Tom DeLay, a former exterminator from Texas, and Mad Maxine Waters, the representative from South Central Los Angeles, aren’t sent into hibernation for the next two years.

But that isn’t all it says about American political ideology. The morning after the election, as it became clear to Vice President Al Gore that he was a heartbeat and several hundred votes away from the presidency, and as George W. Bush was forced to contemplate becoming governor-for-life of Texas, ideological order became as expendable as baby kisses.

Democrats who ordinarily wouldn’t trust a state court to adjudicate a speeding ticket became champions of Florida’s Supreme Court and states’ rights. How dare those Republicans suggest there are federal implications in Florida’s election laws? Equal protection? What we need is protection from Katherine Harris!

The Republicans were just as slippery. The party of big-government bashers and Washington outsiders was filing suit in federal court faster than you can say “Ronald Reagan.” States’ rights are all well and good, but these judges are right out of the Okefenokee Swamp! And look at them! They’re all Democrats!

But the real fun started when the US Supreme Court got in on the act. Seven of its nine justices were appointed by Republicans who professed disdain for judicial activism, i.e., rulings based on principle rather than law.

(It goes without saying that this country derives from principles. One, however, is the notion of a separation of powers, which means the judiciary’s role is to apply law. The people, through their elected representatives, make it.)

In recent decades, one needed to look no further than the abortion issue to realize that we are all sometime-champions of judicial activism: one side found a right to privacy, the other side is finding ways to roll it back.

The Florida election has driven home the point. The high court’s most liberal justices decried the intervention in state and county affairs; its conservative wing fell over itself inserting federal law into the case.

If it’s all confusing, we should be amused, not alarmed. We tend to think of political ideology as a spectrum, with communism at the far left and fascism at the far right. In truth it’s much more like a circle. This explains how Jesse Jackson can look at free trade in his way, Pat Buchanan in his, and both can still wind up at the same place.

Sometimes we Americans scamper to the left, sometimes to the right. Move too quickly, or too often, we get a little dizzy; a circle will do that to you. At its center is the heart of Democracy, and none of us is further from it than another.

Jerry Fraser can be reached at cfraser@maine.rr.com.