Working in Iowa

 

 

There is this great line in The Princess Bride where Inigo Montoya says to Vizinni, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”   

 

There has been an odd propositional calculus of late:  Democrats are liberals and liberals are socialists.  All democrats are therefore socialists.  Steel-trap logic at its best.

 

We learned this week of a North Iowa Tea Party billboard in Mason City sporting a picture of Adolf Hitler and the heading “National Socialism” on one side, Vladimir Lenin with the title “Marxist Socialism” on the other side, and smack dab in the middle there was a picture of Barack Obama dubbed a “Democrat Socialist”(sic). 

 

The caption underneath said “radical leaders prey on the fearful and the naïve.”  

 

Who is fearful and naïve is patently obvious.  I’m reasonably certain the committee posting the sign does not contain historians or comparative political system scholars, let alone deep thinkers.  I take it as a given that the sign does not mean what they think it means.

 

Goodness, that’s awful company to keep for Mr. Obama even if speech, net of the cost of the billboard, is free.  While the implied correlation is a heck of a stretch to anyone with a decent grasp of history and the evolution of political thought, so be it if some out there see dangerous parallels between a man who fostered the extermination of more than 10 million Jews, Jehovah’s Witnesses, gypsies, homosexuals, and the mentally or physically disabled and another who upon taking power quickly fashioned iron-fisted one party totalitarian control over his own people lasting three quarters of a century and our current, democratically-elected, term-limited, and Constitution-bound president.  

 

It was even a stretch for the Iowa Tea Party, which immediately distanced itself from its obviously more reactionary northern sect by noting inflammatory rhetoric of this sort simply does not advance their cause.  The billboard has now been taken down.

 

Words have changing meanings over time.  The rise of liberal thought and action was strongly grounded in the ideas of Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes.  Those radical liberal thinkers (albeit not preying on the fearful or the naïve to my knowledge) laid down the foundations for the ownership and protection of private property along with the declaration of and safeguarding of individual rights and privileges in a civil society.  A fully-functioning private market was a liberal, indeed a radical, notion at the time.   Their writings lent concrete justification to our modern systems of governing.  We owe much of the origins of this country and the vast majority of democratic founding principles to those great liberal thinkers.

 

Much later the term “liberal” was used to described the thinking and activities of the economically, politically, and socially emerging merchants and reform-minded urbanites who constituted the business, professional and otherwise educated classes in the earlier decades of the 20th century.  Liberals championed child welfare laws, health initiatives, public education, public works, parks and community facilities, and city sanitation improvements to improve the lives of millions living in tenements, slums, and outright squalor. 

 

Liberals battled corrupt party bosses on one side of the urban power structure and indifferent and selfish corporate scions on the other side in the name of community improvement, good government, and, dare I say it, social justice.  They condemned Jim Crow laws in the South, segregation in the cities, and sexism and exploitation in all of their forms.  As an adjective it was applied to those who were literate, appreciated the arts, socially tolerant, and pragmatically indifferent to some of the rigidities of church or other parochial boundaries.  To be a liberal was not a slur, nor was it frowned upon to be engaged in liberal actions.

 

That is the heritage of liberal thinking and liberal action.  But the term now is an epithet spit at anyone who would argue that the rights and needs of groups sometimes trump the prerogatives of the market, those enjoying the most advantaged lives in this country, or those who would urge only private solutions to private sector failures, like pollution, the vast pool of the uninsured, or child poverty.

 

It is certainly the case that there has been a dearth of serious thinking behind the ever intensifying screeds of those that would manipulate public opinion.   There is precious little evidence that along the way books are read, essays scrutinized, or scholars consulted.  After all, most scholars are liberals and books are written, in the main, by scholars.  QED.

 

Better to just rhetorically wing-it and fling-it.  Kind of like a monkeys in a zoo.

 

Barry Goldwater, that abortion-supporting and gay accepting hero to so many on the right, once observed that extremism in defense of liberty was no vice.  

 

I think Mr. Goldwater would agree, however, that extremism for the sake of extremism is a dangerous vice.