Inexact Possibilities: Politics at the Cutting Edge
Is There a Liberal Movement?
I rarely make it past Politico’s headlines—the site’s zero-sum view of politics and relentless hyping of partisan gamesmanship is often laughable—but the other day a subhead in my RSS reader caught my eye: “He also calls Obama a ‘movement liberal.’”
Now, I don’t really care about achingly dull Minnesota Governor Tim Pawlenty, who was being interviewed by Newsmax (yet another cauldron of empty rhetoric in the conservative echo chamber). What does interest me is his formulation: Obama as a “movement liberal.”
What on Earth is a “movement liberal?”
You often hear about the conservative movement: Buckley to Goldwater to Reagan to Gingrich to Rove’s “permanent majority”—the wilderness of today. Throw in National Review, CPAC and the Heritage Foundation for good measure. But “movement liberal” is a strange phrase. It’s long been an irony of American politics that conservatism, philosophically inclined toward self-reliance, individualism and the preeminence of the free market, has been organized into a cohesive movement while liberalism, based strongly on a belief in collective action, has catered to a varied and often contradictory collection of interests. To read “movement liberal” is therefore startling—the incoherence of what falls under the banner of liberalism in America ought to make such a thing impossible.
So is the phrase empty—is Pawlenty merely going for the rhetorical point? Or does such a thing as a “liberal movement” exist today?
The latest Gallup poll on ideological leanings suggests not. Conservatives continue to outnumber liberals 2:1, as they have, historically, as long as such polls have been conducted. What’s important here is that this poll represents how Americans describe their own political views. Only 20% identify as liberals; can a fifth of the populace a movement make?
I find myself in the unprecedented position of agreeing with Jonah Goldberg, who writes
The Democratic party’s leaders are a lot more liberal than their voters (the dynamic is even more true when it comes to committee chairs who are to the left of the average Democratic congressmen). The Democrats came into power in 2008 thinking they had a huge mandate for liberalism, when they really had a huge mandate for competence (for want of a better word).
The idea that a liberal movement, especially the shadow liberal movement that Pawlenty seems to be hinting at, exists in America in any real form seems ludicrous to me. But it begs a more interesting question.
Should there be a liberal movement?