Comments on: “Liberal” as a term of abuse

By: Benny Lava

Benny Lava — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 22:26:22 +0000

“All I can figure out is that conservatives have managed to create an imaginary “liberal” ”

This is exactly correct. If you read Rush Limbaugh’s books he states this expressly, and mentions this on his show often. He picked a small group of left winger folks in California and propped them up as a strawman of all “liberalism”, and proceeds to knock it down on a daily basis. Ann Coulter and the new group of conservative pundits have followed his lead and basically do the exact same thing.

To a conservative all “liberals” are the sort of folk you might see in Southern California with a big pink Hummer in the driveway with a sign saying “this Hummer is being driven for breast cancer awareness”. Basically they paint all liberals as Hilary Banks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_The_Fresh_Prince_of_Bel-Air_characters#Hilary_Banks

By: Joe S.

Joe S. — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 20:48:13 +0000

DCuser:
Depends what you mean by “reflexively anti-cop”. I’d say that many or most liberals are reflexively anti-cop worship, which is a pretty common disease out in Wingnuttia. That’s not anti-cop, just as being anti-militarism is not anti-military. The anti-cop liberals became pretty rare after the Clinton administration.

By: Henry

Henry — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 18:06:29 +0000

When I referred to “50 years for three petty thefts,” I should have said “50 years for a third petty theft.” This was under California’s three-strikes law; the defendant had already been punished for his first two crimes. The Supreme Court upheld the law, with the so-called “conservative,” “strict constructionist,” “non-activist” justices essentially reading the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition on cruel and unusual punishments out of the Constitution. (When a corporation injures thousands with a dangerous product, these same justices strike down “excessive” punitive damages awards against them under “substantive due process,” which they don’t even believe in.)

By: Henry

Henry — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 16:03:49 +0000

“[R]eflexively anti-cop and anti-punishment” is an absurd charge. Nobody is anti-cop or anti-punishment. Some of us, however, are more concerned than others about abuses by cops (such as tasering people for talking back to them), and by wrongful punishments (such as 50 years for three petty thefts or the execution of someone who is innocent. Some of us are also more concerned than others that a substantial percentage of the people arrested and punished have committed acts that should not be crimes, such as drug possession. If you disagree about liberals’ concerns with these matters, then debate them on the merits rather than engaging in ridiculous name-calling such as “anti-cop and anti-punishment.”

By: dcuser

dcuser — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:26:23 +0000

The problem is that a fair number of liberals *are* reflexively anti-cop and anti-punishment. Ask any liberal prosecutor about the kind of blank stares they get introducing themselves at an American Constitution Society event…

By: Bill Webb

Bill Webb — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 02:17:15 +0000

Interesting take on this general subject here:
http://www.utne.com/Politics/Liberals-Arent-Un-American-Conservatives-Arent-Ignorant.aspx?utm_content=10.1.09+Politics&utm_campaign=Politics&utm_source=iPost&utm_medium=email

By: Joe S.

Joe S. — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 20:21:41 +0000

I remember the days when the Democratic Party harbored a fair number of Rosseauvian fools, to whom every criminal was a noble savage, and every cop a squadristi. Remember Leonard Bernstein and the Black Panthers? Or the Village Voice, when it still pretended to charge money?

There are a few fools who still fit this description–the Ward Churchills of the world. But the Democratic Party (and by extension, the liberal movement) threw them out in the 1980′s and 1990′s. I’d like to know how old Mark’s interlocutors were. If they were in their 50s or older, maybe they are just working off stereotypes that had a grain of truth when they were young and first learned them.

By: Larry Glickman

Larry Glickman — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 18:39:00 +0000

Mark,
I provide some historical perspective on the development of liberalism as a term of abuse here:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lawrence-b-glickman/consumer-protection-redux_b_278958.html

By: Dennis

Dennis — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 15:22:08 +0000

Brett,

Conservatives don’t know what they are, at least according to John Dean (in Conservatives Without Conscience.) If they don’t know what they believe in (other than saying, “No”) why should I expected to know what they are?

By: Barry

Barry — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:46:59 +0000

Seconding BZ – the right has spent decades working on this perception.

By: paul

paul — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:40:58 +0000

Can we chalk it up to the fact that there seems to be a strain in so-called conservatism that is, if not exactly anti-intellectual, largely free of intellectual curiosity? It sounds as if your interlocutors hadn’t been exposed to liberalism past the 70s or so, and even then only in a fairly cartoonish way. I think there may be a useful parallel here with the current “saltwater/freshwater” spat in economics, where many of the freshwater school (see Brad Delong for quotes) seem to have decided that the arguments of their opponents were so thoroughly discredited that keeping track of new developments would just pollute their minds.

(Of course, there’s a certain amount of sense in that: if you truly are convinced that government intervention in the economy is meaningless, then learning about the addition of new epicycles is not going to interest you.)

By: Brett Bellmore

Brett Bellmore — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 11:13:05 +0000

I don’t know, I think conservatives probably have about as clear a notion of what a “liberal” is, as liberals do of “conservatives”, which is to say, not very clear, and hardly a definition the opposition would willingly agree to, but scarcely content free.

By: bz

bz — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 06:46:36 +0000

Can’t speak to your particular case, necessarily, but to conservatives in general “liberal” is just an epithet – like “socialist/fascist/communist/pinko/traitor/baby-killer/etc/ad infinitum.” They don’t know what they mean by use of the word, because they don’t know the historic or dictionary definitions of any of the oft contradictory meanings of those epithets which they use so interchangeably. Again, can’t speak with certainty to your particular encounter, but it’s not hard to imagine a similar scenario wherein the statement is “I’m glad they decided not to have some asshole talk about crime.” (Or fucktard or shithead or snotty-nosed pile of parrot droppings or other disparagement.)

Conservatives love to brag about how great the United States is based on the laws and policies established by liberals over the decades, who had to combat vigorously against conservatives at the time in order to accomplish them. Conservatives love Medicare now, for example, although they fought it tooth and nail when it was introduced; they point to civil rights or women’s right to vote or genuine freedom of speech (void of sedition laws) as hallmarks of American Greatness, despite having viciously fought against those very things before liberals succeeded in establishing them as bedrock principle. (Of course, a lot of the respect and admiration they voice for those principles is mere lip service, as they routinely seek to undermine them, but the sad/pathetic/scary fact is they actually don’t recognize the difference between their beliefs and their behavior any more than they know the meaning of the word “liberal.”

By: Quiddity

Quiddity — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:58:16 +0000

I think it goes back to a widely held notion (from the 1970′s) that liberals didn’t believe in punishment for crime. To oversimplify: All crime was the fault of society*. All criminals were good souls that could be rehabilitated. And cracking down on crime was, in some instances, unfair to minorities.

And then there are those “Hollywood liberals” who generally align with what we’d consider liberal values (abortion rights, redistribution, civil rights, pacifism), but in the case of Polanski there is a huge disconnect.

* – There was even a Monty Python >a href=”http://www.ibras.dk/montypython/episode29.htm”>sketch that made that explicit (Man:”It’s a fair cop, but society is to blame” Policeman: “Agreed”)

By: yoyo

yoyo — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:56:33 +0000

Liberal=libertine

By: Julie

Julie — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 01:52:57 +0000

Professor Kleiman, I worked for you briefly back in 2003 attempting to do research for you and then going off to intern at the now defunct CA senate committee on corrections. I have since been following your blog and, having dabbled in the criminal justice arena in NYC, am back here looking for work. I attended your lecture on Wednesday and chatted with a few folks after. Having attended so many conferences, talks, lectures etc on a wide array of criminal justice topics, I found this audience to be unique in that maybe they weren’t representative of criminal justice reform advocates in LA. As soon as your talk was over, people were quick to ask questions about drug legalization and the death penalty and I felt as though they were missing the point of your book, since you said twice that you did not cover the topics in your current book. But I think this speaks to how the general public, the kind that likes to be informed, sees the issue of crime: through the lens of the popular issues of the day. I feel that the vast majority of problems are a result of overcrowding in the system, and so many problems could be alleviated by de-bloating our prisons/jails. Anyways, I feel as though your speech was warmly received because it made sense and that you articulated your points well, leaving out of the discussion the oft repeated complaint of racism, education and poverty being the source of all our criminal justice woes. This issues will be resolved the 12th of never, right Unfortunately racism education and poverty are frequently cited as part of any conversation on reform and many conservatives don’t want to hear that, and for the most part, neither do I, because it gets us nowhere. I came away completely invigorated and hopeful about Project HOPE and the possibility of nurse visits for poor unwed mothers. The latter has an unbelievable success rate in VT I believe. I think that the fact that you were warmly received by a choir you were not preaching to is a good sign and I look forward to reading your book once it becomes available at the public library, because I am broke!