I M P R E S S I O N S

Liberalism And The Prevent Defense


by Steven C. Day

8.12.02 |  If liberalism were a football team, the head coach would have been fired years ago. 

According to an annual Harris poll, only about 19 percent of Americans consider themselves liberals — a number that has held remarkably firm for more than 30 years. In the battle for the public heart and mind, liberals are getting nowhere.

The news is worse at the ballot box. Liberal elected officials have become less common than satisfied WorldCom shareholders. Out of 535 members of Congress, only 59 belong to the Progressive Caucus, a whopping 11 percent. You have to be almost old enough to collect Social Security to remember the last time a dye-in-the-wool liberal was elected president. And if things keep going the way they are, our grandchildren will be receiving Social Security (or more likely wishing there still was Social Security) by the time the next one is elected.

One might reasonably conclude from all this that the American electorate is made up of Margaret Thatcher and Archie Bunker clones. But it isn’t. In fact, according to public opinion surveys, a substantial majority of the public favors the liberal position on a wide variety of issues, from gay rights to protection of the environment.

So why, if the public agrees with liberals on so many specific issues, do they elect so few of them to public office? And while we’re at it, why do so many people who hold strongly progressive views on the issues steadfastly refuse to describe themselves as liberals?

In an earlier column I suggested that part of the reason may be that by abandoning the word “liberal” and treating the concept of liberalism as a topic to be avoided at all costs, left-of-center politicians have undercut the left’s credibility. As a result, liberal beliefs have been relegated to a status akin to a guilty pleasure (like sappy love songs — you may like them, but you’d never admit it publicly).

I want to follow up on that point by looking at the extraordinary timidness that has characterized recent liberal political tactics. The best analogy I can come up with is football’s “prevent defense.” Instead of working to promote a broad progressive agenda, liberals have been spending most of their energy, what there is of it, trying to prevent conservatives from scoring “big plays.” 

But as so often happens with this strategy in football, conservatives have been scoring touchdowns by moving the ball down the field a few yards at a time. At the same time, the moribund condition of liberal advocacy helped pave the way for the hostile take-over of the Democratic party by the ever-so-moderate and corporate friendly Democratic Leadership Council. This, in turn, has further weakened the liberal cause.

The end result is that even on those rare occasions when liberals have actually “won” political battles, their gains have been offset by conservative victories. For instance, while the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been saved from oil and gas drilling, at least for this year, it hasn’t prevented the Bush administration from adopting developer friendly policies that threaten scores of other parks and wilderness areas.

Similarly, stopping Bush’s partial privatization scheme for Social Security this year didn’t save the Social Security “lockbox,” which is hemorrhaging greenbacks at the speed of light (the good news is Social Security may still be around when you retire; the bad news is there may not be any money to pay your benefits). And while Judge Charles Pickering’s nomination to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals was successfully blocked by Senate Democrats, other extreme right-wing judges are now being confirmed at an alarming rate.

Roe v. Wade is still standing (barely), but a generation of anti-abortion legislation, at both state and federal levels, has come close to making freedom of choice an abstraction. Already it’s almost impossible for poor women to obtain abortion services in many parts of the country. And new restrictions on a woman’s right to choose are being adopted somewhere almost every week.

Clearly, this “prevent defense” isn’t working. The right-wing is fighting virtually every issue virtually all of the time. Meanwhile, liberals are engaged in a constant process of triage, picking and choosing only the most important fights, and waiving the rest. What this means is that even if we were to win all of these “big play” issues, which, of course, we won’t, we would still lose ground. But then, losing ground is something liberals have down pat.

Consider that in more than one-third of all secondary public schools, sex education is now limited to so-called “abstinence only” programs. The prison population in the United States, per capita, is one of the largest in the world, made up mostly of petty drug offenders. The barrier between church and state is collapsing. Rising rates of childhood hunger are ignored. Desperately needed dollars for family planning worldwide are withheld. And don’t even ask about what’s happening to civil liberties (if you do, they may lock you up as an enemy combatant). Meanwhile, an unelected president is getting ready to fight an undeclared war.

Could there be a more important time for the left to get its act together? Step one has to be giving the “prevent defense” style of politics the boot. It isn’t just a losing strategy; it’s a dreary and uninspiring one. There couldn’t be a less effective way to build a political movement. Sure, we need to defend what remains of the New Deal/Great Society legacy, but it will take a lot more for liberalism to ignite the public. To accomplish that, we will need that old bugaboo, ‘the vision thing.”

The good news is that people are ready to listen to a new vision of America — one built on something more than greed. This is a gift to liberals, served on a silver platter with the name Enron embossed on it. Consider it a small consolation for watching your 401K evaporate into the dissipating ozone.

But this hope will never become a reality unless liberals are prepared to fight for it, starting by reclaiming a fair chunk of the Democratic Party from the Democratic Leadership Council and spreading a progressive vision of what’s possible across America. The time for the “prevent defense” is over. It’s time for the offense to take the field.

P o p  F o r u m
Discuss a new liberal vision

Steven C. Day is an attorney practicing in Wichita, Kansas. His previous columns can be found here.

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"What Democratic leaders have forgotten is this: Partisanship is good in and of itself," Michael Tomasky writes in The American Prospect.