Liberalism Has Changed

February 17, 2002

by Charles E. Perry

Once upon a time I was a liberal. That was way back, many years ago, of course. My first foray in politics, in fact, was as a young lad going door to door to hand out campaign literature for John F. Kennedy. Kennedy was a Democrat, and I was born a Democrat. Kennedy was a liberal, and I was a liberal. So it seemed a good way to get started in doing my political duty as an American. It might shock some of you that I was a liberal way back when, but liberal then isn’t the same as liberal now.

Liberals back then stood foursquare behind traditional American values. I doubt seriously if you could have found one who supported the "right" to kill children in the womb, for instance, and protecting the family, the traditional family, was something they took seriously. Today even liberals who are Catholic spout off about how we must let women kill their unborn children to ensure equality, and liberals seem hell bent to make fathers unnecessary and to call any group of strangers who inhabit the same building a "family."

Liberals back then recognized that a father and mother, married and living together, was the best setup for raising kids. Not today. Today liberals push the "two mommies" concept, along with the "three daddies and a really odd uncle in the basement" concept as if it were actually good for the kids. Good? Heck, they act like mom and dad are the worst possible way to raise kids, and that any other oddball group just has to be better - up to and including a yak and a camel living in sin.

Liberals hated communism and socialism back then too. Not many know it today, but Robert F. Kennedy worked for Senator Joe McCarthy when the senator was going after communists in the State Department. Today it seems like liberals just can’t wait to embrace socialism, and every program they propose seems designed to take us further down that failed path.

Liberals changed in how they view the Constitution as well. Once they supported it completely, because it gave them the right to air their views and convince the people that what they wanted to do was best for the country. Today, though, liberals are more inclined to just toss the Constitution aside as an inconvenience. You’ll hear how it was written so long ago, and it isn’t really relevant, or you’ll hear how it means whatever we want it to mean no matter what it really says. I was shocked to hear Robert Reich, when he was in the Clinton administration, bemoan the fact that we had a Bill of Rights, because it kept us from instituting "stakeholder capitalism." For those who don’t know, "stakeholder capitalism" is socialism with a fancy new name.

What happened was that the center moved. The radical left took over the Democratic Party by forming a coalition of people that nobody really wanted, and they ran with it. They infiltrated the colleges and the media, and today the center is a lot further left than it ever was before in our history. Old time liberals are now viewed as conservatives, and old time conservatives are now seen as radical extremists. The real radical extremists are all holed up in Montana, and don’t get out much anymore.

What do we do about it? Beats me. I try to educate people on what the Constitution really says, even if I have to do it one person at a time. And maybe that’s how we conquer it: one person at a time. The people of this country used to carry copies of the Constitution with them, and discuss what it said when they had a chance. Maybe we should start doing that again. Maybe Thomas Jefferson was right when he said that an educated and informed electorate was the best guarantee of our liberty. One thing’s for sure, it isn’t modern liberals.

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Charles E. Perry is a freelance writer living in Michigan. He has done a variety of things in his life, including Ward Supervisor at the State of Michigan's Maximum Security Mental Facility. His degree is in accounting, but he discovered writing and now spends his time hunched over a keyboard, hollow-eyed, looking for just the right word. Perry is the author of "How Government Should Work: A Look at the Federalist Papers and the Constitution of the United States," currently pending publication.

Send the author an E mail at Perry@ConservativeTruth.org.

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