Modern liberalism in the United States

Modern liberalism in the United States is a form of liberalism that began in the United States in the last years of the 19th century and the early years of the 20th century. Princeton Sociologist Paul Starr described it by saying, "Liberalism wagers that a state... can be strong but constrained – strong because constrained... Rights to education and other requirements for human development and security aim to advance equal opportunity and personal dignity and to promote a creative and productive society. To guarantee those rights, liberals have supported a wider social and economic role for the state, counterbalanced by more robust guarantees of civil liberties and a wider social system of checks and balances anchored in an independent press and pluralistic society." Modern American liberalism is largely a combination of Social liberalism and progressivism.

American versus European use of the term "liberalism"

Today the word "liberalism" is used differently in different countries. (See Liberalism worldwide) One of the greatest contrasts is between the usage in the United States and usage in Continental Europe. According to Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. (writing in 1962), "Liberalism in the American usage has little in common with the word as used in the politics of any European country, save possibly Britain."

According to Girvetz and Minogue writing in Encyclopædia Britannica, "contemporary liberalism has come to represent different things to Americans and Europeans: In the United States it is associated with the welfare-state policies of the New Deal program of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt, whereas in Europe liberals are more commonly conservative in their political and economic outlook."

In late 20th century and early 21st century political discourse, "liberalism" has come to mean support for freedom of speech and freedom of religion, reproductive rights for women, a progressive income tax, the right to privacy, equal rights for homosexuals, equal rights for the disabled, affirmative action, the reduction of poverty by government intervention, affordable quality health care for all as provided by government intervention, and the protection of the environment and of endangered species. In many European countries, some of these are non-issues, and European liberals share many positions in common with Christian Democrats and Social Democrats.

Demographics of Liberals

While it is difficult to gather demographic information on ideological groups, some studies have been conducted. Liberalism remains most popular among those in academia and liberals commonly tend to be highly educated and relatively affluent. According to recent surveys, between a 19% and 26% of the American electorate identify as liberal, versus moderate or conservative. A 2004 study by the Pew Research Center identified 19% of Americans as liberal. According to the study, liberals were the most affluent and educated ideological demographic. Of those who identified as liberal, 49% were college graduates and 41% had household incomes exceeding $75,000, compared to 27% and 28% as the national average, respectively. Liberalism also remains the dominant political ideology in academia, with 72% of full-time faculty identifying as liberal in a 2004 study. The social sciences and humanities were most liberal, whereas, business and engineering departments were the most conservative. The high educational attainment and prominence of liberal thought on American campuses can largely be attributed to a correlation between education and ideology. Generally, the more educated a person is, the more likely he or she is to hold liberal beliefs. In the 2000, 2004 and 2006 elections, the vast majority of liberals voted in favor of the Democrats, though liberals may also show support for the Greens.

History of modern liberalism in the United States

Scholar of liberalism Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., writing in 1956, said that liberalism in the United States includes both a "laissez-faire" form and a "government intervention" form. He holds that liberalism in the United States is aimed toward achieving "equality of opportunity for all" but it is the means of achieving this that changes depending on the circumstances. He says that the "process of redefining liberalism in terms of the social needs of the 20th century was conducted by Theodore Roosevelt and his New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson and his New Freedom, and Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal. Out of these three reform periods there emerged the conception of a social welfare state, in which the national government had the express obligation to maintain high levels of employment in the economy, to supervise standards of life and labor, to regulate the methods of business competition, and to establish comprehensive patterns of social security."

Some make the distinction between "American classical liberalism" and the "new liberalism."

Early modern liberalism

Herbert Croly (1869 – 1930), philosopher and political theorist, was the first to effectively combine classical liberal theory with progressive philosophy to form what would come to be known as modern liberalism in the United States. Croly presented the case for a planned economy, increased spending on education, and the creation of a society based on the "brotherhood of mankind," ideas that are now an integral part of American government. Croly founded the periodical, The New Republic, still in circulation, which continues to present liberal ideas. His ideas influenced the political views of both Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. In 1909, Croly published The Promise of American Life, in which he proposed raising the general standard of living by means of economic planning and in which he opposed aggressive unionization. In The Techniques of Democracy (1915) he argued against both dogmatic individualism and dogmatic socialism.

The New Deal

President Franklin D. Roosevelt came to office in 1933 amid the economic calamity of the Great Depression, offering the nation a New Deal intended to alleviate economic want and joblessness, provide greater opportunities, and restore prosperity. His presidency from 1933 to 1945, the longest in U.S. history, was marked by an increased role for the Federal government in addressing the nation's economic and other problems. Work relief programs provided jobs, ambitious projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority were created to promote economic development, and a Social Security system was established. The Great Depression dragged on through the 1930s, however, despite the New Deal programs, which met with mixed success in solving the nation's economic problems. Economic progress for minorities was hindered by discrimination, an issue often avoided by Roosevelt's administration.

The New Deal consisted of three types of programs designed to produce "Relief, Recovery and Reform":

Relief was the immediate effort to help the one-third of the population that was hardest hit by the depression. Roosevelt expanded Hoover's FERA work relief program, and added the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Public Works Administration (PWA), and starting in 1935 the Works Progress Administration (WPA). In 1935 the Social Security Act (SSA) and unemployment insurance programs were added. Separate programs were set up for relief in rural America, such as the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration.

Recovery was the goal of restoring the economy to pre-depression levels. It involved "pump priming" (deficit spending), dropping the gold standard, efforts to re-inflate farm prices that were too low, and efforts to increase foreign trade. New Deal efforts to help corporate America were chiefly channelled through a Hoover program, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC).

Reform was based on the assumption that the depression was caused by the inherent instability of the market and that government intervention was necessary to rationalize and stabilize the economy, and to balance the interests of farmers, business and labor. Reform measures included the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), regulation of Wall Street by the Securities Exchange Act (SEA), the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) for farm programs, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance for bank deposits enacted through the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) (also known as the Wagner Act) dealing with labor-management relations. Despite urgings by some New Dealers, there was no major anti-trust program. Roosevelt opposed socialism (in the sense of state ownership of the means of production), and only one major program, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), involved government ownership of the means of production.

In international affairs, Roosevelt's presidency was dominated by the outbreak of World War II and American entry into the war in 1941. Anticipating the post-war period, Roosevelt strongly supported proposals to create a United Nations organization as a means of encouraging mutual cooperation to solve problems on the international stage. His commitment to internationalist ideals was in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson, architect of the failed League of Nations. [1].

Liberalism during the Cold War

U.S. liberalism of the Cold War era was the immediate heir to Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal and the slightly more distant heir to the Progressives of the early 20th century.

The essential tenets of Cold War liberalism can be found in Roosevelt's Four Freedoms (1941): of these, freedom of speech and of religion were classic liberal freedoms, as was "freedom from fear" (freedom from tyrannical government), but "freedom from want" was another matter. Roosevelt proposed a notion of freedom that went beyond government non-interference in private lives. "Freedom from want" could justify positive government action to meet economic needs, a concept more associated with the concepts of Lincoln's Republican party, Clay's Whig Party, and Hamilton's economic principles of government intervention and subsidy than the more radical socialism and social democracy of European thinkers or with prior versions of classical liberalism as represented by Jefferson's Republican and Jackson's Democratic party.

Defining itself against both Communism and conservatism, Cold War liberalism resembled earlier "liberalisms" in its views on many social issues and personal liberty, but its economic views were not those of free-market Jeffersonian liberalism; instead, they constituted ideas of American progressive thought rooted in Clay, Lincoln, and Theodore Roosevelt which resembled a mild form of European styled social democracy.

Most prominent and constant among the positions of Cold War liberalism were:

• Support for a domestic economy built on a balance of power between labor (in the form of organized unions) and management (with a tendency to be more interested in large corporations than in small business).
• A foreign policy focused on containing the Soviet Union and its allies.
• The continuation and expansion of New Deal social welfare programs (in the broad sense of welfare, including programs such as Social Security).
• An embrace of Keynesian economics. By way of compromise with political groupings to their right, this often became, in practice, military Keynesianism.

In some ways this resembled what in other countries was referred to as social democracy. However, unlike European social democrats, U.S. liberals never widely endorsed nationalization of industry but regulation for public benefit.

In the 1950s and '60s, both major U.S. political parties included liberal and conservative factions. The Democratic Party had two wings: on the one hand, Northern and Western liberals, on the other generally conservative Southern whites. Difficult to classify were the northern urban Democratic "political machines". The urban machines had supported New Deal economic policies, but would slowly come apart over racial issues. Some historians have divided the Republican Party into liberal Wall Street and conservative Main Street factions; others have noted that the GOP's conservatives came from landlocked states (Robert Taft of Ohio and Barry Goldwater of Arizona) and the liberals tended to come from California (Earl Warren and Paul N. "Pete" McCloskey), New York (see Nelson Rockefeller), and other coastal states.

In the late 1940s, liberals generally did not see Harry S. Truman as one of their own, viewing him as a Democratic Party hack. However, liberal politicians and liberal organizations such as the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) sided with Truman in opposing Communism both at home and abroad, sometimes at the sacrifice of civil liberties. For example, ADA co-founder and archetypal Cold War liberal Hubert Humphrey unsuccessfully sponsored (in 1950) a Senate bill to establish detention centers where those declared subversive by the President could be held without trial.

Nonetheless, liberals opposed McCarthyism and were central to McCarthy's downfall.

The liberal consensus

By 1950, the liberal ideology was so intellectually dominant that the literary critic Lionel Trilling could write that "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition... there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in circulation, [merely] irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas." [Lapham 2004]

For almost two decades, Cold War liberalism remained the dominant paradigm in U.S. politics, peaking with the landslide victory of Lyndon B. Johnson over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election. Lyndon Johnson had been a New Deal Democrat in the 1930s and by the 1950s had decided that the Democratic Party had to break from its segregationist past and endorse racial liberalism as well as economic liberalism. In the face of the disastrous defeat of Goldwater, the Republicans accepted more than a few of Johnson's ideas as their own, so to a very real extent, the policies of President Johnson became the policies of the Republican administrations of Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford.

Liberals and civil rights

Cold War liberalism emerged at a time when most African Americans, especially in the South, were politically and economically disenfranchised. Beginning with To Secure These Rights, an official report issued by the Truman White House in 1947, self-proclaimed liberals increasingly embraced the civil rights movement. In 1948, President Truman desegregated the armed forces and the Democrats inserted a strong civil rights "plank" (provision) in the party platform. Legislatively, the civil rights movement would culminate in the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

During the 1960s, relations between white liberals and the civil rights movement became increasingly strained; civil rights leaders accused liberal politicians of temporizing and procrastinating. Although President Kennedy sent federal troops to compel the University of Mississippi to admit African American James Meredith in 1962, and civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. toned down the March on Washington (1963) at Kennedy's behest, the failure to seat the delegates of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the 1964 Democratic National Convention indicated a growing rift. President Johnson could not understand why the rather impressive civil rights laws passed under his leadership had failed to immunize Northern and Western cities from rioting. At the same time, the civil rights movement itself was becoming fractured. By 1966, a Black Power movement had emerged; Black Power advocates accused white liberals of trying to control the civil rights agenda. Proponents of Black Power wanted African-Americans to follow an "ethnic model" for obtaining power, not unlike that of Democratic political machines in large cities. This put them on a collision course with urban machine politicians. And, on its most extreme edges, the Black Power movement contained racial separatists who wanted to give up on integration altogether — a program that could not be endorsed by American liberals of any race. The mere existence of such individuals (who always got more media attention than their actual numbers might have warranted) contributed to "white backlash" against liberals and civil rights activists.

Paleoliberalism and neoconservatives

According to Michael Lind, in the late 1960s and early 1970s many "anti-Soviet liberals and social democrats in the tradition of Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Humphrey and Henry ("Scoop") Jackson… preferred to call themselves 'paleoliberals'".

According to Lind, this group of people influenced or later became neoconservatives.^Lind

Liberals and Vietnam

While the civil rights movement isolated liberals from their erstwhile allies, the Vietnam War threw a wedge into the liberal ranks, dividing pro-war "hawks" such as Senator Henry M. Jackson from "doves" such as senator (and 1972 presidential candidate) George McGovern. As the war became the leading political issue of the day, agreement on domestic matters was not enough to hold the liberal consensus together.

Vietnam could be called a "liberal war", part of the strategy of containment of Soviet Communism. In the 1960 presidential campaign, the liberal Kennedy was more hawkish on Southeast Asia than the more conservative Nixon. Although it can be argued that the war expanded only under the less liberal Johnson, there was enormous continuity of their cabinets.

As opposition to the war grew, a large portion of that opposition came from within liberal ranks. In 1968, the Dump Johnson movement forced Democratic President Johnson out of the race for his own party's nomination for the presidency. Assassination removed Robert Kennedy from contention and Vice President Hubert Humphrey emerged from the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention with the presidential nomination of a deeply divided party. The party's right wing had seceded to run Alabama governor George Wallace, and some on the left chose to sit out the election rather than vote for a man so closely associated with the Johnson administration (and with Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley). The result was a narrow victory for Republican Richard Nixon, a man who, although a California native, was largely regarded as from the old Northeast Republican Establishment, and quite liberal in many areas himself. Nixon enacted many liberal policies, including the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, establishing the Drug Enforcement Agency, normalizing relations with Communist China, and starting the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to reduce ballistic missile availability.

Nixon and the liberal consensus

While the differences between Nixon and the liberals are obvious – the liberal wing of his own party favored politicians like Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton, and Nixon overtly placed an emphasis on "law and order" over civil liberties, and Nixon's Enemies List was composed largely of liberals – in some ways the continuity of many of Nixon's policies with those of the Kennedy-Johnson years is more remarkable than the differences. Pointing at this continuity, Noam Chomsky has called Nixon, "in many respects the last liberal president." [2]

Although liberals turned increasingly against the Vietnam War, to the point of running the very dovish George McGovern for President in 1972, the war had, as noted above, been of largely liberal origin. Similarly, while many liberals condemned actions such as the Nixon administrations support for the 1973 Chilean coup, it was not entirely dissimilar to the Bay of Pigs Invasion in 1961 or the marine landing in the Dominican Republic in 1965.

The political dominance of the liberal consensus even into the Nixon years can best be seen in policies such as the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency or his (failed) proposal to replace the welfare system with a guaranteed annual income by way of a negative income tax. Affirmative action in its most quota-oriented form was a Nixon administration policy. Even the Nixon "War on Drugs" allocated two-thirds of its funds for treatment, a far higher ratio than was to be the case under any subsequent President, Republican or Democrat. Additionally, Nixon's normalization of diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China and his policy of detente with the Soviet Union were probably more popular with liberals than with his conservative base.

An opposing view, offered by Cass R. Sunstein, in The Second Bill of Rights (Basic Books, 2004, ISBN 0-465-08332-3) argues that Nixon, through his Supreme Court appointments, effectively ended a decades-long expansion under U.S. law of economic rights along the lines of those put forward in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly.

End of the liberal consensus

During the Nixon years (and through the 1970s), the liberal consensus began to come apart. The alliance with white Southern Democrats had been lost in the Civil Rights era. While the steady enfranchisement of African Americans expanded the electorate to include many new voters sympathetic to liberal views, it was not quite enough to make up for the loss of some Southern Democrats. A tide of conservatism rose in response to perceived failures of liberal policies. Organized labor, long a bulwark of the liberal consensus, was past the peak of its power in the U.S. and many unions had remained in favor of the Vietnam War even as liberal politicians increasingly turned against it. Within the Democratic party leadership, there was a turn to the right after the defeat of arch-liberal George McGovern in 1972.

Meanwhile, in the Republican ranks, a new wing of the party was emerging. The Goldwater Republicans laid the groundwork for, and partially fed in to the Reagan Republicans. In 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan captured his party's nomination for the presidency. By the end of the 20th century, the liberal consensus had ended in the US, and centrist groups such as the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) would contend on an equal footing with liberals for control of the Democratic Party.

Philosophy of modern liberalism

Modern liberals tend to see themselves in the context of their fellow man and woman and assume their rights and privileges are no greater than anyone else's, regardless of wealth or position. Key liberal values are empathy, compassion, trust, and cooperation. Liberalism is an empirical philosophy that attempts to make changes that will improve life even if those changes run contrary to previously accepted positions. Most tenets are not held with unquestioning conviction. [3]

American liberalism differs from competing political philosophies not only through different values or preferences but through different epistemologies. [4] Liberalism is open to change and receptive to empiricism [5].

Liberals generally seek a balanced and flexible "mixed economy" occupying that middle ground between capitalism and socialism whose viability is generally denied by both capitalists and socialists [6]. In general liberalism is anti-socialist, when socialism means state ownership of the basic means of production and distribution, because American liberals doubt that bases for political opposition and freedom can survive when all power is vested in the state. Some American liberals also doubt the feasibility of administering a socialist system. In line with the general pragmatic, empirical basis of liberalism, American liberal philosophy embraces the idea that if substantial abundance and equality of opportunity can be achieved through a system of mixed enterprise, then there is no need for a rigid and oppressive bureaucracy. [7]

Many of these ideas were initially promulgated by liberal thinkers John Dewey, Reinhold Niebuhr, and John Maynard Keynes and form the basis for the American liberal philosophy. The political godfather of American liberalism, Franklin Delano Roosevelt never publicly embraced Keynes's theories but there were many similarities between the works of the two men. [8] The ideas of American liberal philosophers and American liberal politicians, such as Roosevelt, laid the foundation for American liberalism that remains a viable political philosophy embraced by a significant percentage of Americans.

According to George Lakoff, liberal philosophy is based on five basic categories of morality. The first, the promotion of fairness, is generally described as an emphasis on empathy as a desirable trait. With this social contract based on the Golden Rule comes the rationale for many liberal positions. The second category is assistance to those who cannot assist themselves. A nurturing spirit is one that is considered good in liberal philosophy. This leads to the third category, the desire to protect those who cannot defend themselves. This trait is difficult to define, as both conservative and liberal morality consider it a virtue. The fourth category is the importance of fulfilling one's life; allowing a person to experience all that they can. This goal of ultimate self-development is one that is considered important in liberal philosophy. The fifth, and final, category is the importance of caring for oneself as to allow one to act on the other categories. This means preventing oneself from "becoming a burden on others", and allowing others to do the same.

Some positions associated with modern liberalism

In the early 21st century, the term "liberalism" in the United States has been applied to a broad spectrum of viewpoints. As the Democratic Party, generally seen as the standard-bearer of liberalism, adopted the more centrist outlook of the DLC, the term "liberal" (applied to the party as a whole) became associated even with more centrist candidates who, for example, may support the death penalty or take pro-business positions. For this reason, and because many on the right have so heavily used "liberal" as a pejorative, some Americans on the left of the political spectrum prefer to call the movement progressivism.

On the other hand, those associated with the DLC have used the term neoliberalism to describe what they regard as a more pragmatic and results-oriented form of American liberalism. This usage creates some confusion, since the same term is used to describe the international revival of classical liberalism and the associated radical free-market policies associated with politicians such as Margaret Thatcher and, in the United States, Ronald Reagan.

The following are some of the views that many contemporary American liberals or progressives support, starting with several points where there would be a strong consensus among American liberals.

• A social "safety net" including support for Medicare, unemployment benefits, health insurance, and preservation of existing Social Security and welfare programs
• Adherence to the principle of separation of church and state
• A reasonable progressive tax system
• Civil rights, including laws against discrimination based on gender, race, age, religion, sexual orientation, or disability
• Laws intended to protect the environment from pollution and encourage conservation of resources
• Government role in funding or subsidizing public education and public transportation
• Regulation of business practices through OSHA, child labor laws, anti-trust laws, and minimum wage laws.
• Labor unions and labor regulation
• The belief in a woman's right to abortion by Roe v. Wade standards
• Government role in alternative energy development
• Government responsibility to supervise ports and infrastructure in the public interest
• A spirit of international cooperation and strong alliances
• The elimination of the death penalty
• Advocacy of federal funding for embryonic stem cell research and support of scientific study
• Affirmative action continuance and transitional multi-lingual educational programs for children whose first language is not English
• Gun control and regulation for safety
• Opposition to censorship of the media
• Marijuana or hemp legalization for medicinal, industrial, or recreational purposes
• The right of the terminally ill to end their life
• Animal welfare
• Support for same sex-marriage

On globalization, American liberals stand largely divided. Liberal members of the intelligentsia and the professional class tend to favor globalization, due to their cosmopolitan ideals. Members of organized labor, on the other hand, tend to be opposed to increased globalization.

"[Globalization] invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the inequalities between nations need to be mitigated... The second is to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens... the first response suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them. The first response comes naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second comes naturally to members of trade unions, and to marginally employed people who can most easily be recruited into right-wing populist movements." - Richard Rorty Achieving Our Country" Leftist Thought In Twenthieth Century America, 1997.

Negative use of the term "liberal"

The negative use of the word "liberal" in American politics dates at least from the time of self-proclaimed American liberal President John F. Kennedy. In his speech accepting the Presidential nomination by the New York Liberal Party on September 14, 1960, Kennedy contested the claims of his "opponents" that "liberal" meant "someone who is soft in his policies abroad, who is against local government, and who is unconcerned with the taxpayer's dollar." [9].

John Lukacs, in "The Triumph and Collapse of Liberalism," observed a change in the political usage of the term "liberal" from the 1950s onward. Noting that in 1951, Senator Joseph McCarthy used "liberal" positively when condemning "a conspiracy of infamy so bleak that, when it is finally exposed, its principles shall be forever deserving of the maledictions of all liberal men," and that conservative leader Senator Robert A. Taft stated "he was not a conservative but "an old-fashioned liberal." [10], Lukacs also asserted that the word "liberal" "has become a Bad Word for millions of Americans."

The use of pejorative terms such as "bleeding-heart liberal", "knee-jerk liberal", "tax-and-spend liberal," "Massachusetts liberal," and "limousine liberal," are a common political tactic in modern American politics. As an example, Republican political consultant Arthur J. Finkelstein was known to repeat the word "liberal" in negative television commercials as frequently as possible, e.g.: "That's liberal. That's Jack Reed. That's wrong. Call liberal Jack Reed and tell him his record on welfare is just too liberal for you." [11]. Many liberal contemporary politicians have tended to shy away from the "liberal" label, preferring terms such as "progressive" or "moderate." [12], [13]

Conservative columnist Ann Coulter made the case for using "liberal" as a slur in her book How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must) in which she likened liberalism to treason. The Conservative Book Service [14] sells a talking doll of Ann Coulter that says, "Liberals hate America". Conservative talk radio hosts Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity often use anti-liberal slogans; the latter titled a book Deliver Us from Evil: Defeating Terrorism, Despotism, and Liberalism. The full title of linguist Geoffrey Nunberg's 2006 book on the use of slogans by conservatives to reshape the image of liberalism, Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte-Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show is an extended list of liberal slurs.

Conservatives frequently make accusations of liberal elitism, implying that affluent, educated liberals are not in a position to decide what is best for Middle America. For example, during the 1988 presidential election, then-Vice President George Bush accused Democrat Michael Dukakis of being a "Harvard boutique liberal"; during the 2004 presidential election, a television advertisement accused Democratic nominee John Kerry of being "another rich liberal elitist from Massachusetts who claims he's a man of the people." [15]

Major influences on modern liberalism in the United States

• John Dewey (1859 – 1952)
• Herbert Croly (1869 – 1930)
• Henry A. Wallace (1888 – 1965)
• Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882 – 1945)
• Adlai Stevenson (1900 – 1965)
• Lyndon B. Johnson (1908 – 1973)
• John Kenneth Galbraith (1908 – 2006)
• John Rawls (1921 – 2002)
• Robert F. Kennedy (1925 – 1968)
• Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. (1929 – 1968)
• Arthur Schlesinger Jr. (1917 – 2007 )
• Ronald Dworkin (1931 – )
• Richard Rorty (1931 – 2007 )
• Robert Reich (1946 – )

See also

• Economic interventionism
• Progressive Christianity
• Progressivism in the United States

References

• Hart, Gary. Restoration of the Republic: The Jeffersonian Ideal in 21St-Century America (2002)
• Lewis H. Lapham, "Tentacles of Rage" in Harper's, September 2004, p. 31-41.
• Kramnick, Isaac and Theodore Lowi. American Political Thought (2006)