I suspend my caustic take on liberalism when it comes to the momentous achievements of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. They may have been the most liberal pieces of legislation ever passed in the United States. For the first time in American history, the United States legally declared itself to be a democracy and did so by parliamentary (not military) means. That makes the United States a very young republic indeed. Yet those great historical breakthroughs, “the liberal hour,” now seem fleeting, tactical, and so propulsive of anti-liberal reaction that they generated what can only parallel the post-Reconstruction era of white “redemption” from the grip of federal power (known in the 1960s and beyond by the more populist term “backlash”).
This delivers us to the missing piece of the liberal story. As the historian James Kloppenberg noted in a 2001 retrospective essay on Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition, we need to stop debating liberalism and “turn our attention toward democracy.” In this time of political crisis, the path forward should be focusing on the single definable dimension of liberalism, democracy, and promoting a robust expansion of the franchise, through very active federal intervention, ideally a constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote for all citizens—full stop—and some system of equal representation of that vote (say, getting rid of the Electoral College, gerrymandering, and other tricks of the trade).
Our current political system is based on who gets to vote and which states’ votes matter, not what the policies or ideas could or should be. That is a failure. The clarion call of “Democracy Now!” is a lot more attractive than “Vague Culturally Relative and Historically Defined Liberalism at Some Point if It’s Convenient and Procedurally Correct!”
Authoritarian conservatives now own nearly every political value—liberal (as a pejorative), freedom (a scary version), patriotism (the white nationalist variety). But confront them with the one concept that remains up for grabs, democracy, and they buckle. It’s the key dividing line. The real American history is a contest over whether this will be a democracy—culturally, institutionally, and participatorily—or will be something else: authoritarian, oligarchical, white nationalist, fascist, segregationist, elitist, or some other.
