The end of liberal thinking as we know it
By Robert M. Rees
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Liberalism, according to many who reside on the left of the political spectrum in Hawai'i, is an idea whose time has gone.
The centrist: Hillary Clinton referred to negative liberal reactions to her husband's centrist policies as "naive surprise." Above, the former president at a rally for unsuccessful gubernatorial candidate Mazie Hirono last October.
When asked about liberalism, a 23-year-old self-described "progressive leftist" and member of the activist Refuse & Resist group, Travis Thompson, responds, "I always want to laugh when I hear that term. Liberalism is kind of played out."
Another member of Refuse & Resist, Carolyn Hadfield, adds, "Liberals are people who say things but don't follow through. We're not just whining in our wine."
Professor Ruth Hsu at the University of Hawai'i, leader of the Professors Opposed to War/University Peace Initiative movement and one of the local left's most thoughtful social activists, proposes, "We chuck liberalism as we know it because the principles of liberalism have failed us."
Even those on the left who consider themselves liberals have trouble getting enthused about the future of liberalism. Liberal icon Ah Quon McElrath, an activist from the days when it really was the ILWU pitted against colonialism, observes, "Liberalism has been supplanted by elected officials with a need to be reelected. The young people love power and the wealth it brings. They lack guts."
Asked to name leading liberals in Hawai'i, McElrath responds, "You're kidding?"
Self-described liberal Ira Rohter, professor of political science at UH and a leader of the Green Party in Hawai'i, also is hard-pressed when asked about liberal leadership in Hawai'i. He finally names McElrath, Sen. Daniel Inouye and only a few others.
What all this indicates is that liberalism is a shadow of its former self, an idea at the end of its tether. The political left — a term that derives from the location of the seats occupied by liberals in European legislatures — no longer considers itself represented by traditional liberalism.
What is traditional liberalism? McElrath, in searching for a definition, describes it as a combination of individualism and collectivism: "Ensuring individual choice is the prime function of liberalism, but the responsibility of government is paramount because of the human condition. Government must ensure material needs and some measure of quality of life for all."
Rohter, when asked for his definition, cites as a model the Democratic Party of Hawai'i, when it first came to power.
Former Gov. Ben Cayetano defines liberalism partly by what it has done. "Most of the younger generation do not have a clue. Every social program which has uplifted the lives of the average American is the product of Democratic liberals. Civil rights, equal rights, Peace Corps, Head Start, Medicare ... and progressive social programs."
A group of hard-core and long-time liberals in Hawai'i now attempting to reinvigorate the Americans for Democratic Action offers a variety of definitions. Nancy Bey Little, who emphasizes that next year the ADA is going to evaluate Hawai'i's legislators on their liberalism, maintains, "Liberalism is about caring."
ADA member Jim Olson adds, "Liberalism is an attitude of doing a decent thing. It's about fairness."
The vagueness of some of these responses — what conservatives love to cite as "fuzzy-minded thinking" — indicates that traditional liberalism has become a slippery concept even among its constantly diminishing circle of friends.
The way of all flesh
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Three factors account for the replacement of liberalism by a new standard bearer for the left. The first is natural attrition and compromise, sometimes on a cyclical or generational basis, that characterizes all social movements in America.
.The uninvited: The Hawai'i chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union at first refused to invite Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas to a debate because of his conservative political views. The ACLU later changed its mind, but Thomas declined the invitation anyway.
An interesting prototype of this is U.S. Rep. Neil Abercrombie. Once a firm believer in the redistribution of wealth who on occasion attacked Republicans simply because they had money, Abercrombie voted on June 18 — at the urging of the Hawaii Automobile Dealers Association — to make permanent the repeal of the inheritance or estate tax.
Local activist Doug Luna attempted to change Abercrombie's mind with e-mail that argued, "Permanent repeal of the estate tax ... simply cannot be reconciled with the values of the Democratic Party ... "
U.S. House Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi of California described the vote as an attempt to undermine the fundamental social compact by starving government programs of money.
Other former or near-liberals in Hawai'i also have moved to the right in search of the more comfortable center, a strategy that gained acceptance when Clinton and advisor Dick Morris used triangulation to develop crowd-pleasing centrist positions. (In fact, we learn in Sydney Blumenthal's new book, "The Clinton Wars," that President and Mrs. Clinton disdained those White House operatives who felt their liberalism had been compromised by Clinton's centrist choices, a reaction labeled as "na•ve surprise" by Hillary.)
In keeping up with the times, one group of former or near-liberals that has triangulated is the leadership of the Democratic Party of Hawai'i. Observes Cayetano, "Look at what they did in the past session: They passed bills which gave undeserved and generous tax credits to special interests at the expense of social programs."
Current state Democratic Party chairman Alex Santiago, in a recent op-ed piece explaining why the Democratic Party has a great future, did not once refer to liberalism or even use the word.
ABERCROMBIE
State Rep. Brian Schatz, the Democratic majority whip in the House, says, "The word (liberal) has become something politicians stay away from. I do consider myself a liberal on social issues. It's mainstream to be liberal on social issues in Hawai'i. You can still be private-sector-oriented and believe in social freedoms. I think that's where the mainstream of Hawai'i is."
House Vice-Speaker Sylvia Luke, in deciding to vote to override Cayetano's veto of an age-of-consent bill, informed the governor's chief of staff that she agreed with the governor on principle but feared a voter backlash.
In 2002, former Democratic Party chairman Richard Port worked with the incumbent party chairwoman, Lorraine Akiba, to defeat a bill that called for the elevation of personal choice over government control when it comes to suicide for the terminally ill. Conflicted by his own Catholicism, Port's ostensible concern conveyed to legislators by Akiba was that there would be a voter backlash aimed at the Democrats.
The ADA's George Simpson isn't wrong when he says that "Identifying liberals has been difficult to do in the past 10 years because many who started as liberals ... are no longer liberal."
Outcome democracy
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It's not just the way of all flesh that has accounted for the decline. A second factor in traditional liberalism's loss of standing as standard-bearer for the left has been the emergence of something called outcome democracy.
The new liberal archetype: The filmmaker and author Michael Moore represents what writer Harold Bloom calls the "School of Resentment." In his new book, "Stupid White Men," Moore says, "You name the problem, the disease, the human suffering ... and I'll bet I can put a white face on it ... "
Outcome democracy is the proposition that due process of law and constitutional guarantees are of value only if they produce the desired results. If they don't, then they should be rejected in favor of the imposition of the most desirable outcome. Outcome democracy is decidedly anti-liberal in some of its approaches, yet it has come to dominate the left, and even some former liberals have adopted its approach.
When feminist legal scholar Catherine MacKinnon spoke at a philosopher's conference at the East-West Center a decade ago, she provided Honolulu with a taste of outcome democracy. MacKinnon argued that we should simply circumvent the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment on the grounds that it has been used to perpetuate inequality.
More recently, a Harvard professor of sociology, Orlando Patterson, has written about what he sees as "the obsession with the principle of color-blindness" among those opposed to affirmative action.
Writes Patterson, "It is hard to resist the conclusion that principles are invoked in public life to rationalize the control of the vulnerable."
The Hawai'i Civil Rights Commission has only recently offered a near-perfect example of outcome democracy. For two years, until at the urging of attorney Jeffrey Portnoy the state Supreme Court ruled otherwise in June of this year, the Civil Rights Commission opposed the idea that employers as well as employees should have a right to trial following the commission's administrative processes. One of the commission's rationales was that employees are the ones who need help, and that a thumb on the scale can ensure fairness.
The hard-core liberals now trying to revitalize the ADA profess disagreement with outcome democracy — the abandonment of principles for pragmatism — yet in some ways endorse it. For example, four of five present for a discussion strenuously objected to Gov. Linda Lingle's veto of a bill that would have required all hospitals to administer advice to rape victims about emergency contraception.
With the exception of the Rev. Fritz Fritschel, the members of the ADA saw no reason for society to tolerate the free exercise of religion by St. Francis Hospital.
Political correctness
Outcome democracy, really a restatement of the communist belief that the end justifies the means, gained momentum because it came wrapped in something called political correctness, the third factor in the decline of traditional liberalism.
Political correctness or PCism in America was described from afar by the London Times in 1991: "One of the ironies of our age is that, just as the Soviet Union is shedding this repressive thinking, some of it has landed in America. The phenomenon, which can be defined as a new spirit of intolerance, is ... a cluster of broadly left-wing attitudes designed to foster tolerance towards race, gender and class but which seem, in Orwellian fashion, to do the opposite."
SCHATZ
The replacement of John Locke's emphasis on tolerance with a system of thought that disdains dissent and imposes orthodoxy occurred during a long historical decline that began with Jean Jacques Rousseau's "The Social Contract" of 1762.
"The Social Contract" famously begins with a simple observation: "Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains." From there, however, Rousseau somehow conjured up the Theory of the General Will. This is the notion that there exists a political absolute — a dictate representative of what the people truly want even if the people don't know it — in whose name those in the know can rule absolutely.
Robespierre and the terrorists of the French Revolution, and later Karl Marx with dialectical materialism, seized upon the idea of a General Will.
It has surfaced in our time more benignly but just as ominously as PCism.
A classic example of PCism occurred in Hawai'i three years ago when the board of the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawai'i, supported by members of the state Civil Rights Commission, voted 12-3 to violate the ACLU's own principle that the best remedy for speech we don't like is more of it.
The board voted not to invite Supreme Court Associate Justice Clarence Thomas, a conservative black who opposes affirmative action, to debate the national president of the ACLU. The rationale was that Thomas is an "Uncle Tom" whose views are not acceptable to blacks.
The ACLU of Hawai'i, under pressure from national media and its national organization, later changed its mind, but Thomas declined the tainted invitation. Who knows? A vehement debate with the president of the national ACLU might have altered Thomas' view most recently expressed in the University of Michigan affirmative action cases.
Political correctness was very much in evidence at a recent UH law school forum concerning admissions to Kamehameha Schools. Professor Jon Van Dyke and former Bishop Estate trustee Oswald Stender, unopposed, presented their case for a Hawaiians-only policy.
There was hardly a murmur and nary a dissent from the crowd of fledgling attorneys when Stender proposed new signs for Kamehameha: "Non-Hawaiians Need Not Apply." The young lawyers dutifully tittered when Van Dyke threw a photo on the screen of rancher Freddy Rice, the plaintiff in Rice v. Cayetano, and ridiculed him by saying, "Here's a picture of Mr. Rice dressed in a cowboy costume."
Political correctness in one of its worse forms attempts to vilify all those who disagree with the desired outcome. Opponents of same-sex marriage are labeled as homophobes. Opponents of Hawaiian sovereignty are called racists. Defenses of the U.S. Constitution are cited as attempts to exploit the vulnerable.
The new left
Three factors — natural attrition, the acceptance of outcome democracy even by some liberals and the permeation of the left by political correctness — have combined to produce a new archetype of the left. That archetype is not the liberalism of Ah Quon McElrath, Patsy Mink, Tom Gill or the Democratic Party of the 1960s. The new archetype is not even liberal.
The new archetype of the left is Michael Moore. Moore is the talented provocateur from what Harold Bloom in "The Western Canon" calls the School of Resentment, those "who wish to overthrow the Canon in order to advance their supposed (and nonexistent) programs for social change."
McELRATH
Moore, in his best-selling book "Stupid White Men," offers two ideas that sum up the new left. The first is, "You name the problem, the disease, the human suffering ... and I'll bet I can put a white face on it ..."
The second is Moore's mantra that "Jeb Bush gave his brother George Jr. an early Christmas present — the state of Florida," and that President Bush is only an "idiot-in-chief."
Such is the state of mind of the new left today.
Robert M. Rees is the moderator of 'Olelo Television's "Counterpoint" and Hawai'i Public Radio's "Talk of the Islands."
