Thursday, March 28, 2024 -
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I am a liberal

I used to be a liberal. I still am a liberal.

Let me explain it this way.

The old cars didn’t have bucket seats in the front seat. Actually, they called it “the front seat” because it was one big cushion wide enough to hold three people.

One day, Joe and Peggy, who used to have a wonderful marriage, were driving along. Peggy squeezed herself against the right front door as far from Joe as she could get.

Peggy sadly said, “Joe, what’s happened to us? We used to sit so close together. It’s not that way any more.”

Joe, sitting beyond the steering wheel, said, “Peggy, I haven’t moved.”

Neither have I.

I was a liberal back in 1964 when I went off to college at Berkeley, only to discover the Free Speech Movement. (They capitalized and alphabetized it, as in FSM.) It was exciting to watch a revolution unfold before your very eyes. And who couldn’t be part of it? If free speech was not as American as apple pie, what was?

The main issue was this: Could non-student political activists speak on campus and distribute literature? The administration said no. The students said yes. Neither side backed down.

The leaders of the FSM were primarily interested in seeing recruiters for the civil rights movement’s summer activities in the South allowed on campus. I vividly recall one such non-student activist, Bayard Rustin, the redoubtable civil rights leader, because he closed his speech by quoting Hillel the Elder.

Rustin said, “If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when?”

I was simultaneously stunned and proud. Here was a non-Jew who seriously looked into Judaism, and here was I, finding a validation of my own name and what it stands for, in a most unexpected way.

Now is not the space for a history of the “FSM,” but the point is clear: Liberalism meant the free range of ideas. It meant tolerance for ideas one did not agree with. The political ideas expressed at Berkeley were mostly leftist, but there was a small minority of rightist students who backed Barry Goldwater for president. Odd, yes, for Berkeley, but in a way, not odd at all. In fact, the mutual tolerance of student Democrats and student Republicans was exactly the point.

What is “liberalism” today? In many ways it is now illiberal. If right-ring bete noire Ann Coulter is invited to Berkeley to speak, well, the administration says no (later to recant, only after protests, and only on a date of its choosing).

Berkeley says it cannot guarantee Coulter’s safety. Which I take to mean that those who disagree with her have expressed the intent to engage in violence against her.

That is not liberal.

Nor is it far-fetched, given that at another recent anti-free speech incident, students at Middlebury College reportedly screamed, punched fire alarms and jumped on cars to shut down the speaker they didn’t like.

And what, exactly, is wrong with the ideas of Ann Coulter? It’s hard to ascertain. She is simply called “racist” and that becomes the end of the analysis. Or, her words are “hate speech” and there is no more need for discussion.

This is not liberal.

At Berkeley, I studied with Henry F. May, a distinguished professor of American history (and, by the way, a descendant of Louisa May Alcott, author of Little Women). He did not talk about the Free Speech Movement in class, but he was called upon by both sides of the movement to try to negotiate a path through the charges and countercharges. He was looked up to as a person who was rational and balanced, who could listen to both sides, and who could come up with a scrupulously argued solution.

That is liberal.

I haven’t moved from that.

In recent months, speakers at other colleges, besides Berkeley, such as Claremont College, McKenna College and UCLA, have been threatened. One of those speakers, Heather Mac Donald, calls this “soft totalitarianism.”

But I hear your retort against my liberalism:

“You, too, would threaten, or at least object to, a Holocaust denier if he were invited to speak at the college nearest you. You say you’re liberal only because the issues that these arch-conservative speakers address don’t touch your soul in the same way that Holocaust denial does. In fact, you aren’t as liberal as you say, maybe not liberal at all. If it were your ox that was gored, you wouldn’t write the way you do now. You would be very different.”

Actually, I wouldn’t be. I believe in what Justice Brandeis said: The answer to bad speech is more speech. If you don’t like what someone says, hear him out, then rebut him. That takes thought, preparation, research and, sometimes, courage. All of these are the elements of liberalism.

I always felt that a superior college instructor was one whose students could not determine from his or her lectures where he stood on the political spectrum, or on the academic issues in his chosen field. That is because the job of a college instructor is to compel students to develop and defend their own ideas, not to adopt those of their professors. Today, it often seems, the opposite is the case. Professors must profess their beliefs, and students must flock to those professors with whom they agree.

This is not liberalism.

This is a cross between childishness and intolerance.

It is, however, often what goes under the label of liberalism these days.

These “liberals” have moved.

Real liberals have not.

They just go by different names; in some cases, “conservatives.”

It’s the substance, not the label, that counts.

By the way, I am a liberal Jew, too, but that’s another discussion.

Hillel Goldberg may be reached at [email protected]

Copyright © 2017 by the Intermountain Jewish News



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IJN Executive Editor | [email protected]


6 thoughts on “I am a liberal

  1. Bob Schwartz

    I appreciate that you wrote this very thoughtful piece. I would love for this to be written in the Denver Post so others could read it. Thanks for a well written article.

    Reply
  2. Gregory Mullins

    Your point is excellent. I only am left to bring that annoying question that the internet compels: hypothetically, if Hitler were somehow alive today, having won ww2 and been invited to speak at Berkeley following the murder of much of the world’s Jews, would you accept or protest?

    This point is to name the belief that the far right are, essentially, Nazis, in their soft racism. By giving space to those we find violently repugnant, are we being fair to our own desire for self preservation? If their views are assumed by the majority, the minority will surely suffer the consequence.

    Free speech is a double edged blade. It can both spur creative empathy, and utterly destroy it. So to tolerate the intolerant, we ponder inviting the devil into our own home for tea, hoping our other friends are not persuaded by his lies. So to speak…

    Reply
  3. David Weisberg

    I am probably more conservative than liberal but I have always believed that there are at least two sides to every issue. Maybe it is just the love of debate but I have a serious problem with those who believe “it is my way or the highway.”

    Reply

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