Look Out for the Liberal Label

 This started as a comment on Crystal’s post aimed not at changing the subject but at getting back to it.  But then it wandered out of control, and it seems more like a separate post.

  My point was to be that this country has never had ideological parties, and when we talk as if we do – as, for example, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have been lately – we are playing right into the hands of people who know what they are doing and who are neither left nor right, just greedy.

  European party ideologues will see a wall and march right into it if their ideology tells them the wall isn’t there, or shouldn’t be. We never had parties like that -- before now. They aren’t a good idea for a country with our kind of sprawl.

FDR (who is as far back as I can go) experimented himself into what his opponents labeled liberalism.  But every step of the way he was relying on votes of the Southern Democrats, many of whom differed only in dress from the Ku Klux Klan, usually thought of as conservative. Eisenhower delivered the liberal-sounding Farewell Address warning (presciently) against the military-industrial complex. In death, JFK was a liberal, but in office he was the most cautious centrist since Herbert Hoover, usually thought of as a conservative.

It goes on. Nixon started the Environmental Protection Agency.  Reagan talked to Gorbachev about beating A-bombs into plowshares, frightening his advisers and baffling Gorby. Reagan was the closest thing we’ve had to a conservative president, but when he saw a wall where his beliefs were taking him he could back off. LBJ was a liberal (except when it came to offshore oil drilling), but he couldn’t have been elected on his own in 1960, and when he became president he was bogged down in the law that developed from his predecessor’s equivocations. When he ran for president in 1964 he had the good fortune to be the liberal everyone knew running against the avowed conservative who scared so many people.

Both parties have had their fringes, but both were big tents until Republicans convinced themselves that Ronald Reagan was the Second Coming and allowed well-funded think tankers known as “fellows” to tell them what he really did; it wasn’t then what they say it was today. (Reagan’s signature achievement was giving Republican baptism to a tax reform bill that had sprung from Democrats Bill Bradley and Dick Gephardt. You can look it up. He himself had to begin undoing the conservative budgets they talk about now.)

Forty years of promoting greed in the name of Milton Friedman and a couple of Austrians but for the benefit of extraction companies (remember LBJ and offshore oil) and the military-industrial complex have created a Republican Party with a reactionary ideology. The president isn’t anything in particular, but he has stuffed the Cabinet with ideologues in tinfoil hats, and many of Paul Ryan’s acolytes actually believe the market can bring down the cost of health care, even though the countries with lower costs (and better results) all regulate the living daylights out of it. They see a wall but they know it can’t be there.

If Republicans want to call that conservative, the Democrats ought to call them on it. If they simply try to run as an equal and opposite reaction, they will be running through the mud of  40 years of propaganda.  When Nissan workers vote as if they expect have Trump to protect them but not a union, you are looking at the need for years of rebranding before you can win on a horse named Left Wing. And, despite what they say about George Soros at Fox, the Ds don’t have a bunch of Koches and Scaifes and Bradleys to glitter up the liberal image.

That doesn't mean the D's shouldn't do liberal-like things like putting the teeth back into laws protecting unions, or fighting climate change (survival, I guess, is liberal by default). But if they play name games on a field where the sidelines were drawn by reactionaries they will always be called for being out of bounds.