Liberals Love America

I know I said we'd be taking Thanksgiving off, but I was sent an article by email that I wanted to share with you to save you a bit of grief at the dinner table -- and, perhaps, remind us of what we have to be thankful for as Americans.

We all have those conservative-against-their-own-interests relatives that we often have to uncomfortably ignore as they drop some thinly-veiled insult to liberals between bites of turkey. A post at OurFuture.org promises ways to debunk the top ten conservative slanders and myths about liberals in a way even those conservatives would understand.

It makes for a great read, particularly for those of us who are sick of being wrongly framed as God-hating anti-troop amoral elitist wusses -- which at some point is probably every one of us. But whether or not you decided to click through and read it (you really should!), I'd like to share with you part of the answer to the first myth, "Liberals Hate America." It made me stand a little taller today, proud of what we've achieved and encouraged to fight to continue to achieve it.

1. Liberals hate America.

For the record: Liberals love America. In fact, what makes us liberals is that we actually read and believed all those pretty words in the Declaration of Independence about "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," and in the Bill of Rights about freedom of speech, religion, assembly, privacy, and all the rest of it.

We're idealists that way. We want to live in the country the Founders described. We believe that the nation's founding documents expressed a uniquely powerful moral contract between the people and their government, and an audaciously positive vision of people's ability and competence to shape their own future. When we get annoying and whiny, it's usually because we believe so much in America's astonishing promise—and our own responsibility for realizing it—that we're sorely disappointed when the country falls short of that standard. We really want to believe we can do better.

Conservatism, by contrast, tends to take a dim view of human nature, prefers hierarchy to liberty, and isn't completely convinced people can or should be trying to contravene the will of God or their betters by trying to arrange their own futures. This tends to lead to a selective reading of the Constitution (as well as the Bible), and—as we've seen in the Bush years—a far more flexible attitude toward its interpretation.

The proof, however, is in the history—and it's pretty irrefutable. America's greatest moments of progress, generosity, and moral strength occurred when the country stuck most closely to its progressive ideals. We loved America so much that we freed the slaves, passed child labor laws, built schools and colleges, gave the vote to women, enacted civil rights laws, rebuilt Europe after a war we helped win, and put a man on the moon. All of these were progressive projects—and all were fought tooth and nail by conservatives in their time, simply because they feared change and saw power as a zero-sum game. Yeah, we sometimes overshoot and miss—but you can't argue with the daring scope of our dreams.