Opinion: Once Upon a Time, There Were Liberals in America

By John F. Di Leo, Opinion Contributor

How old do you have to be to remember liberalism?

When I was growing up, Gentle Reader (at this writing, your friendly scrivener is 61), the Democratic Party was the home of liberalism in America, and had been for half a century.

Democrats were proud liberals. They weren’t leftists, and they certainly weren’t conservative, but they proudly stood for a well-defined family of political and philosophical beliefs that the Democratic Party quietly abandoned about a generation ago, somewhere around the end of the Cold War.

Does anyone out there remember what liberalism was? Consider:

Liberals believed in “the working man.” This wasn’t some vague notion or empty platitude: liberals believed in funding vocational training in high schools and community colleges so that willing workers could be prepared for a wide range of jobs. They believed in empowering OSHA and the EEOC to protect the working man at the factory or jobsite. They required businesses to offer time and a half for overtime, and guaranteed paid holidays, and the ability to join a union. The dream was for workers to eventually own two or three or four apartment buildings, to have an income supporting a well-deserved retirement.

They frequently went too far, driving overtaxed employers out of business or out of the country, which didn’t help anybody, but at least their intentions were good. The liberals of the 20th century wanted people to be able to rise in prosperity and class, through hard work and ambition.

Liberals believed in Good Government. We conservatives sometimes derided this “rose colored glasses” outlook, but at least the good intentions were clear. Good Government meant efforts to limit the power of campaign contributions in politics, and always hosting lots of debates and forums, and encouraging high turnout for election day. Liberals demanded open records of meetings by officeholders, and the availability of most government documentation through the Freedom of Information Act.

Again, conservatives may have argued that campaign finance limits would be enforced unevenly, and if those debates and forums are biased in their format and questions, they’d be an addition more negative than positive, but at least the liberals certainly meant well.

Liberals spent much of the twentieth century agitating for a social safety net. They insisted they did not want to build a welfare state, but just a government-managed package of offerings – housing, food, schooling – so that those born into a pit of poverty could survive long enough to climb out of it into the middle class.

Liberals wanted safe streets. They campaigned for an end to police brutality and forced confessions; they worked hard to provide taxpayer-funded legal counsel for defendants who couldn’t afford lawyers. Liberals worked for better conditions in our jails and prisons so that those convicted to spend years or decades behind bars would at least be incarcerated in clean and safe cells. Liberals may have been more compassionate toward America’s robbers, rapists, muggers and killers than conservatives were, but at least both sides were agreed on the need to lock up those criminals once rightly convicted.

Liberals believed in the Bill of Rights. They stood proudly, and marched defiantly on occasion, for the right of people to join the church or temple they preferred, and the right of writers and publishers to print the articles, magazines, and books they wanted. Liberals went all the way to the Supreme Court, again and again, to fight for various groups’ equal protection under the law.

On all these issues, and on so many more, the modern Democratic Party hasn’t just abandoned its former liberal views; the Democratic Party now calls for the absolute opposite.

Now firmly in the control of the hard Left, today’s Democrat politicians, from federal to local, have turned against the working man in every way. Today they support the illegal aliens who undercut American laborers by working cheaper and by disregarding workplace regs. Today, Democrats support onerous regulations that drive companies, even whole industries, out of the country. We haven’t built a petroleum refinery or nuclear power plant in generations; we’re banning affordable furnaces and water heaters from new construction in state after state. The nation that invented mass production of cars and computers now imports them from Asia.

We now see whole neighborhoods full of families in which nobody has held down a real job in generations, and the Democrats are happy about it, because welfare recipients are sure to vote Democrat, whereas people with jobs, who see what happens on payday between the lefthand and righthand columns on their paychecks, are rightly fleeing the Democratic Party in droves.

The party that once demanded fair trial procedures, to ensure that we lock up the right person, now demands an end to cash bail requirements and the outright closing of prisons, because they no longer want to lock up any criminals at all. Democrats hold voter registration drives “to attract the felon vote;” it’s just another demographic for them now.

And what of the average standard of living, an American promise at least since the New Deal guarantee of “a chicken in every pot?” Democrat policies have caused a stagnation in working Americans’ real average income and a clear drop in average standard of living, for the past 45 years.

The rampant “Bidenflation” of the Biden-Harris regime has placed an incredible additional burden on the shoulders of every head of household. We can’t afford gas for our cars, food for our table, or new clothes in our dressers. People without jobs are shopping at malls, while people with jobs are shopping at thrift stores.

In many states, home ownership is now priced out of reach for all but the upper middle class; automobile prices have almost doubled in just three years. The energy we need to heat and cool our homes is less and less dependable, because Democrat mandates and executive orders are crushing or outright closing countless efficient coal and gas plants, while wasting a mint on heavily subsidized Chinese solar panels and windmills that will never produce as much energy as their cost to build and install. All this, because of Democrat policies.

The differences are stark. Liberals cared about criminals; the Left cares more about criminals than they care about the innocent victims. Liberals cared about the working family; the Left cares about the foreign family that illegally snuck over the border to become a public ward.

Liberals cared about American manufacturing; the Left shuts it down or drives it off, because they don’t feel they have to care about slave labor as long as it’s occurring on another continent.

Liberals cared about empowering people to enjoy an early retirement on the 401K and IRA savings they’d earned over the course of a well-spent career; the Left wants to tax or even confiscate those retirement funds, and have the government directly fund everyone’s meager retirement through welfare.

The issues are almost endless. There is a reason why politics seem so much more bitter, more divisive, today. The common ground is gone.

The liberals and conservatives of generations past wanted the same results, but differed on the prescriptions. By contrast, today’s Left wants opposite results from the rest of the country. The Left stands for the Chinese factory over the American one, the Venezuelan illegal alien over the legal Mexican-American immigrant. The Left sides with the mugger rather than the old lady in the alley. The Left supports the Chinese manufacturer of the wind turbine scam, and doesn’t care about the millions of Americans who suffer energy shortages for days at a time as a result.

Perhaps most shocking of all, the Left now supports the terrorism of Hamas and its American allies. Today’s Left is shutting Jewish students out of college classrooms, causing riots and traffic jams in their virtual call for the dismantlement of Israel. American students, in lock-step with radical arabs, joining in the chant “from the river to the sea…,” and professors and administrators siding with such venomous politics, from state schools to the ivy league, coast to coast.

There’s nothing “liberal” about any of this.

Where have the liberals gone?

There are competing theories. Maybe they’re simply gone for good; they died out, and were replaced by the Left.

But maybe not. Maybe the majority of Democrat voters are still liberals; they just didn’t see what had happened to their party over the years.

Perhaps 2024 is the year their eyes are opened.

Will 2024 be the year when American liberals finally realize they have infinitely more in common with the Right than they have with the Left? Will this be the year they cross the aisle and vote Republican, recognizing that America’s only hope for survival is if we purge the Left and their malevolent philosophies from all levels of American government?

November isn’t that far away. If America can be saved, we’ll know soon enough.

Copyright 2024 John F. Di Leo