Guide for perplexed liberals: Second installment

Abstract

Imagine that you are a liberal not necessarily one in the popular, media sense in which, supposedly, Ted Kennedy and Harry Blackmun are liberals but Jesse Helms and Robert Bork are not; instead, you are a liberal in the rather vague, habitual, and reflex sense in which many Americans, perhaps even Senator Helms and Judge Bork, qualify. That is, you would think that promoting and protecting some favored list of individual freedoms is an important task of government the preeminent one. You would, all things considered, be well disposed to some form of constitutional democracy. You might endorse, in some version or other, a concept such as that of "intrinsic human worth," human autonomy, self-determination, or "individual effort and accomplishment"; if so, you would likely believe that some such value should be accorded appropriate public respect and support. You probably would favor, in principle, some idea of public equality at least in the form of universal suffrage, legal impartiality, or the importance of a general public policy of the government's attempting to avoid favoritism in its dealing with its citizens. You might well also think that the idea of fairness enshrined in the slogan of "equal opportunity" is sufficiently important that some public attempt to promote and protect it is in order. Most Americans, I conjecture, never experience the impulse to probe or to question their "liberalism" in this sense. When it comes to the hurly-burly or real-world politics voting, developing views about particular pubic issues, adopting causes, joining associations, making contributions, and so on the rather nebulous commitments that I have described combine, for most of