"There is a first class political mystery here at first sight - in fact, two. In the first place, liberalism is (or at least has been) overwhelmingly the dominant political ideology in the country. If we had Independent Socialists to the number of one half of one percent of those who espouse what they call liberalism, we would have a movement of the Left that could move American politics. Yet organized movements representing American liberalism have usually been little more than letterhead concoctions (like Americans for Democratic Action), the only partial exceptions being regional and temporary. Liberalism simply does not seem capable of existing in organized form. There must be a reason.
The second mystery is that hardly any liberal even claims to be able to define what liberalism is. The exceptions try to do so by dint or vacuous generalities, like "Liberalism means Caring For People..." Now when a political tendency cannot explain itself to itself, there must be a reason.
In theory, liberalism and liberals are for All Good Things: more democracy and civil liberties, human rights rather than property rights, popular welfare rather than private greed, and other stands on the side of the angels. In practice, however, there are always overweening, equally liberal, reasons why they can lead no fight for these goals.
The mysteries are partly explained by the disparate sources of American liberalism: like bellflowers there are many different things that answer to the same name. Historically (and still often in European terminology) liberalism means freed from state interference and controls. The few consistent civil-libertarians left among liberals are among the last remnants of this strain. (Today, this cry of freedom from state interference is, ironically, mostly the property of the ultra-right in this country.)
This meaning of historical liberalism is mainly obsolete. Around the turn of the century, in the same period that saw the burgeoning of the socialist movement here and in Europe, American liberalism was transmogrified into an ideology of advocating just the opposite: the expanded use of the state power on behalf of the people's welfare, but within the framework of capitalism. It thus became the left tip of bourgeois society, opposed both to the conservative status-quo ideology of the right, and to the alternative offered by socialism.
At the same time it is the heir of those aspects of Populism and Progressivism which tried to represent the aspirations of the intermediate social strata - small farmers, artisans, new-fledged workers - that were being squeezed by the development of big business and finance-capitalism, but which fought against the descent into proletarian status. Anti-trust rhetoric and suspicion of big capital were the legacy, but a fruitless one, since it could have no program to turn the clock back to the good old days of little business, prosperous family farmers, and such. Liberalism still has no definite program, but some of the rhetoric hangs on.
With the eventual dominance of big capital in the U.S., it was precisely the liberal rhetoric which came into its own. There is no social demagogy which can hold a candle to the sincere kind - such as wells up instinctively in the lips of the middle-class liberal who wants to Do Good For The People, but who cannot even begin to buck the economic and social imperatives imposed by a system basically run in the interests of big capital. He cannot buck them without going over to conscious opposition to the whole system, as he gets to understand the implications of opposition - that is, going over to socialism. Now this conversion happened often enough in other countries, where a strong socialist movement based on a radical working class could exercise a magnetic attraction to pull over alienated bourgeois and petty-bourgeois idealists. In this country, where such a strong socialist movement never developed, such cases tend to peter out, give up, or settle for a maverick status on the periphery of practical politics.
But the typical liberal, who cannot break with the system, has to settle for something else: protesting the best of intentions (sincerely) while being dragged along by the system he supports, or busying himself with filing off the sharp corners or rough edges on the towing chain which drags him; meanwhile congratulating himself on doing an indispensable smoothing job which the callous powers-that-be are too heartless to attend to."
From the pages of Independent Socialism: A Perspective For The Left.
A small pamphlet by Hal Draper published in 1964 by the Independent Socialist Committee (Berkeley, CA)
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