What does "liberal" mean to you?

In the 1980s when I was a teenager, the GOP began orchestrating a campaign against the word "liberal." "He's too liberal," they would say about one candidate or the other. They would rail against liberals' attachment to civil liberties. If you believed the due process rights in our constitution were sacrosanct, conservatives would say that you were a "soft-on-crime-iberal." It would be just as well to respond by saying "I am strong for the constitution."

If the ACLU defended some miscreant's right of free speech, they were condemned for being "anything-goes-liberals." The same would be said of liberals who fougt against sodomy laws. Except they were usually condemned as "godless liberals." To conservatives liberals were against order, decency, respect. To conservatives liberals were unpatriotic, or worse treasonist because liberals believed even communists and other dissidents had free speech rights - a big no-no during an era of Cold War paranoia.

Conservatives invented a category of liberals called "tax-and-spend-liberals." This was purportedly worse than the borrow-and-spend policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations. The truth, as we know, is that conservatives aren't really opposed to big spending so long as that big spending comes in the form of corporate giveaways, our bloated military budget, or funding for prisons and law enforcement. As with everything, "tax-and-spend-liberal" was just code language for opposition to social welfare programs that aided the poor, elderly, and disabled.


By the 1990s, liberal had become a dirty word. Fewer and fewer Americans began identifying themselves as liberals in various surveys. A strange occurence given that America was founded by men who proudly declared themselves liberals. Throughout the 80s and 90s conservatives managed to portray themselves as the proud puveyors of American values. They may have stood firmly against the core values enshrined in our founding documents: personal liberty, free speech, religious freedom,  and due process of law, but the mainstream media bought into this propaganda. So it came to be that conservatism became the very expression of Americanism despite its misgivings about our founding principles, while liberals were seen as "un-pragmatic absolutists." By the end of the 1990s, liberals began referring to themselves as progressives.

The term "progressive" does have leftist roots dating back to the late 19th century when reformers began fighting against child labor, poor working conditions, and poverty. This website uses the term in our name: Vocal Progressives. Today the terms "liberal" and "progressive" are used interchangeably by almost everyone. If you are a progressive, you are a liberal, and vice versa. Despite proudly associating with progressivism, I do have some misgivings about the usage of the term in lieu of liberal. Two recent events bring this question to mind: "have some of us on the left forgotten what it means to be a liberal?"

The first incident was the matter of the comedy movie "The Interview." To recap: hackers from North Korea hacked Sony's computers and stole tons of private documents and emails from Sony. It lead to embarrassing disclosures of private emails sent and received by executives at Sony. There's no need to go over the details of those emails here because it is entirely irrelevant to the crime that was perpetrated. The hackers then threatened 9-11 styled terrorists attacks against movie theaters if those theaters showed the film. Frightened theater chains decided to decline to show the movie. Sony eventually pulled the movie altogether in response.

These decisions put the American public in an uproar over censorship coming from abroad. Sony was attacked in the media for being gutless (the theater chains that set things in motion barely heard a peep of criticism, however). After a public outcry, Sony and the theaters shifted course and the movie was released. Nonetheless, some liberals such as MSNBC's Touré balked at the film's content. Disliking a movie is hardly a big deal. There are movie critics in all of us, and James Franco and Seth Rogen's brand of comedy isn't for everyone.

But the problem occurs not at Touré's movie criticism, but at the conclusion he drew that since the movie wasn't to his liking that North Korea's attempt to censor an American movie wasn't such a big deal; that all the sound and fury over this episode was really about America "thinking we can do whatever we want." Similarly, John Harwood of CNBC and the New York Times tweeted "good riddance" after reading a review of the film. In these liberal commentators' minds censorship is okay if what is being censored, in their view, is in poor taste.

The second episode is the matter of Charlie Hebdo mass murder terrorist attacks. Charlie Hebdo, as we all know now, is a comic newspaper publication that publishes controversial cartoons. In a recent publication Charlie Hebdo published a cartoon of Mohammed, the Islamic Prophet. The cartoon shows a terrorist beheading Mohammed for being an "infidel." The point of the cartoon is to show the warped take on the Islamic religion by Islamic extremists who use Islam as an excuse to commit terrorism. It is not, as some reported, an insult to Mohammed. It is an insult to the extremists who use Islam as an excuse for their acts of murder.

Whatever one's opinion of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons, we would assume that after this brutal mass murder, the last thing anyone would do is decide to engage in social criticism of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons, but some liberals at the Guardian and Dailykos did exactly that. While the victims are mourning. It is most certainly their right. But that is so besides the point. This was a violent attempt to silence people for exercising their free expression, and in this moment, whining about how offended you are over the cartoons comes off as equivocation on the matter of free speech and the value of the lives lost.

"Liberal" should not countenance the idea of censorship, and most certainly not when it comes at the point of a gun. What does "liberal" mean to you? I wrote previously about the "Interview" and advocated a boycott of Sony and the the theater chains until they released the movie. When I did so, I emphasized that at the heart of "liberal" was the word "liberty."

While it is legitimate to criticize speech one disagrees with (this is, after all, part of free speech), or even boycott a business whose CEO holds views you find repugnant (this is part of free speech too), liberals should, with great zeal, make clear that whatever their views are of cartoons such as Charlie Hebdo's or movies such as "The Interview" that free expression must NEVER be represed by governments, or threatened out of existence by third world tyrants, or responded to with violence and murder. If not, we cease being liberals, and become the reactionaries.