Liberal Expansionism

A valuable missive re: the recent Goldwater debate just arrived in my inbox from Richard Pearlstein:

I've finally figured out a way to elegantly get at what is missing from the discussion of my Goldwater book, speaking now as a historian--without getting bogged down in the complexities of the story I'll be telling in the sequel, which I hope to finish this fall, for publication in 2006. It comes down to this: In the period I was writing about, "liberalism" was synonymous with the expansion of liberalism's vision and influence, the creation of new programs that no one had even thought of yet. The word had nothing much to do with "preserving" New Deal programs, or even improving and/or strengthening them. If it wasn't about expanding its frontiers to new social realms, it wasn't called "liberalism." And if you weren't into expanding the New Deal's domain, you weren't called a "liberal." Expansion was central to the concept. Now, right here and now, you may or may not yourself belief that the kind of things the New Deal did should be expanded to new frontiers. But the crucial point to grasp--the historical shift--is that if you don't believe that the New Deal project should be expanded, you aren't a "liberal" in the sense the word meant before the forces Goldwater represented began flexing their muscles in the mid 1960s. Though you may still call yourself a liberal. Which may mean that the word itself, "liberal," has changed meaning, and the thing it refers to is not as far to the left as the thing it used to refer to. This is a bedrock shift in the geological narrative I'm laying out, slowly, slowly--but this point is one of its foundations, and one's understand of this point (if not one's opinion about the lessons for Democrats today, which the book leaves intentionally vague) should definitely come out in the text.

That seems right. What I'd like to add is that the march of liberalism in this sense -- which I'll call "Expansionist Liberalism" -- didn't end with the 1964 election. What happened in this country in Lyndon Johnson's second term largely was the fulfillment of Expansionist Liberalism's goals. This is what's known as "the Great Society" and it was kind of a big deal. We got the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. We got Medicare and Medicaid. For the first time, the federal government got involved in providing extra money for public schools in poor districts (through Title I of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act). We got a large expansion of federal anti-poverty spending. Later, during the Nixon administration, we got federal regulation in the fields of environmental and consumer protection. Some of this was partially rolled back during the Reagan administration. It was then re-rolled during the Clinton administration. Some areas (anti-poverty spending, most notably) haven't been returned to their pre-Reagan highs. Other areas (federal education spending, environmental protection) are now higher than they were before Reagan.

Now let's call "Super-Expansionist Liberalism" the view that we need to further expand upon what's already been done. I would consider myself a Super-Expansionist Liberal. I believe, among other things, that we ought to complete the march toward universal health care, that the federal government ought to play a much larger role in equalizing education funding, and that we ought to restore our commitment to fighting poverty to the sort of scale we saw in the 1970s (though not through the same methods). Super-Expansionist Liberalism isn't in such hot shape at the moment. The Democratic Party, our vehicle of choice, is kind of on the ropes. Even within the Democratic Party, most of its elected officials either aren't Super-Expansionist Liberals or (more likely) won't admit to being Super-Expansionist Liberals for fear of losing office. This is a problem, and it's directly related to our lack of institutional infrastructure compared to the right.

Nevertheless, while Super-Expansionist Liberalism is certainly in the spirit of Expansionist Liberalism (Pearlstein's "liberalism") it isn't the same thing. The Expansionist Liberals were the people who won in 1964 and went on to create the Great Society. The post-Goldwater defense of the Great Society -- which is to say of the Expansionist Liberal program -- has been largely successful. It's been chipped away at the margins in some places and expanded upon in a few other places. But it hasn't been gutted and looks unlikely to be gutted, even though the country is run by people who, in their heart-of-hearts, would unquestionably like to gut it.

So that's what I think about that.