What Liberals Believe About Community and Putting People First

The sixth and concluding part in a series about the liberal perspective on human rights.

A sense of community is a core liberal value.  It is based on the idea that, as President Barack Obama is fond of saying, “We are not a red America and a blue America; we are one United States of America.” Bill Clinton likes to say, “We believe that ‘we’re all in this together’ is a better philosophy than ‘you’re on your own.’”  Or, as Martin Luther King put it, “We may have all come on different ships but we’re in the same boat now.”  

The impulse to put people and their needs first is a liberal imperative.  Dr. King said, “Whatever affects one directly affects all indirectly.  I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you ought to be.  This is the interrelated structure of reality.”  The liberal heart cannot stand idly by in the face of human suffering, want and need.  Franklin Roosevelt electrified the nation in the depths of the Great Depression by promising to do something about poverty and unemployment.  In his Inaugural Address he avowed, “This nation asks for action, and action now!”  He promised to give it to them, making the people’s government their partner in recovery in a New Deal that would directly create the jobs they needed.  He inspired confidence with his ringing exclamation against his predecessor and those minds shackled by ideology and inertia, those too timid to act, when he assured the American people, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.”  Afterward, these bold words were backed up by programs that put millions of Americans to work and ended the Great Depression.

Liberals do not believe the responsibilities of the people’s government end with defending the frontiers, arresting lawbreakers and enforcing contracts.  To ignore solvable problems and preventable human suffering is intolerable to liberals, because to them human needs come first.  An ideology based on what size government ought to be is nonsense to a liberal.  It ought to be whatever size it needs to be to fix those problems the people need fixed and cannot fix so well in their individual capacities. When the flood waters rise, the fire spreads or the epidemic grows people need help, not ideologies.  Liberals want to make sure that help is there.      

Where do these impulses come from?  Liberals are attracted to the insight of the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who wrote, “The greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation.”  In the spiritual realm, Jesus of Nazareth commanded, “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you.”  Muhammad echoed this in Islam.  The Qu’ran states, "No one of you believes until he loves for his brother what he loves for himself."  The wellspring of all these statements is empathy, the ability to place one’s self in another’s shoes and want what is best for that person.  All politicians pay lip service to this quality.  How else could they get people to vote for them?  But to real liberals it is not something that has to be affected; it is part of their core.

The Affordable Care Act is a fine example of values reinforcing practicality.  Liberals believe it is immoral to deny human beings a basic necessity like health care.  Obamacare saves not only lives but also money compared to the previous system.  Liberals supported even more effective measures, such as giving the government stronger authority to use its massive purchasing power to negotiate lower drug costs from manufacturers, and by having a “public option” insurance plan as an alternative to those provided by for-profit companies to put some real competition into the mix.  Unfortunately, Representatives beholden to the insurance industry managed to defeat those provisions, but the Act even still is a major step forward for the American people, some 32 million of whom will be added to the rolls of the insured through its provisions. 

These principles underlie the many other liberal positions on human rights.  For community and “people first” reasons, liberals look at education as a human right, not a privilege.  They believe small rural communities deserve clean water supplies as much as large urban ones do.  It’s why they support the Violence Against Women Act, fight so hard against human trafficking and predatory clergy, make a big deal out of bullying, and call out demeaning and derogatory speech.  Some conservatives decry this as unwarranted “political correctness,” as though insulting people is a positive good that needs to be protected.  Liberals remember that the basis of political correctness is empathy for the feelings of other human beings.  You don’t use racial slurs and epithets.  You don’t go to the synagogue and tell jokes about the Holocaust.  It’s a form of bullying and fails the test of treating others the way one would like to be treated. 

The same goes for voting as a human right.  It is the foundational right upon which democracy itself stands or falls.  Liberals are consistently for making it as easy as possible, such as by encouraging voting by mail and making early voting widely available.  Conservatives, on the other hand, continue to raise obstacles and make it more difficult, following their age-old practice of trying to restrict voting to “the better sort of (wealthier) people.”  It is nothing but a sham designed to exclude liberal voters from the polls.  The first priority should be to facilitate people exercising their right to vote.  A secondary concern is to guard against fraud, which the actual facts show to be extremely rare.  If they are truly worried about this, I have often thought the way to go about it is to require the state to provide people with an ID card, at its trouble and expense, not the citizen’s.  Most people just use their state-issued driver’s license, but those without a driver’s license tend to be older folks who no longer drive (and who can be counted on to vote in support of Social Security and Medicare) and poorer people who have no car.  These are precisely the people for whom going through a lot of expense and trouble like taking time off from work, finding a bus or hiring a cab is a real impediment to exercising their right to cast a vote. 
       
Liberal opposition to the awful 2010 Supreme Court ruling Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission is also about human rights and putting people first.  The idea of declaring an entity like a corporation a “person” and allowing it to electioneer with unlimited and anonymous funding is a perilous step indeed.  This ruling on a razor-thin 5-4 vote by the Court’s conservative majority overturned forty years of sensible limitations imposed and agreed upon by both parties in the wake of the outrageous Watergate corruption scandals of the 1970s.  Liberals oppose this egregious miscarriage of justice and support overturning this decision.  The people of Montana, Colorado, and the councils of dozens of cities across the country have voted against it.  

To sum up, whatever the issue, you can always count on liberals to support communities and put the needs of people first.  Liberals value human rights, including equality, fairness, personal autonomy, security and community for their own sake.  The underlying principles behind this stance are a firm belief in those rights, compassionate empathy, a practical approach and the courage to pursue justice in the face of selfish and self-interested power.  As Martin Luther King taught us, “We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing"-oriented society to a "person"-oriented society.  When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism and militarism are incapable (of) being conquered.”