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.” 

What Liberals Believe About Security

Fifth in a series about the liberal perspective on human rights.

Liberals have an expanded idea of human rights that includes a reasonable level of security from the adversities of life.  We feel it is part of the community’s responsibility to its own members, a basic function of our democratic government, to afford protection and safety to people in time of need.  To an extent, conservatives agree with us on some of the basic human rights such as freedom of speech and trial by jury.  They are big on the freedoms “to” do this or that.  They agree that government should protect people, but apparently only from military or criminal attack.    Where we often part company is in our desire also to achieve some insurance and  freedom “from” the negatives life can send our way, negatives like disaster, disease and unemployment.   

Liberals have used government to provide security for people in many ways.  Franklin Roosevelt got congress to pass the Social Security retirement program for senior citizens in 1935.  Seniors went from the most to the least impoverished age group as a result.  It provides a majority of their retirement income to 70% of American seniors, who earned it by paying into it their entire working lives.  Social Security also provides survivor aid to orphans, disability assistance to those with handicaps and unemployment assistance.  Medicaid, for the poor, and Medicare, which people also pay into while they work so it will be there when they reach 65, were passed in 1965 under Lyndon Johnson so that medical care to the needy and the elderly (over age 65) would be assured.  Liberals tend to think of medical care as a human right.  Everyone needs it at some time or other, but the working poor were not getting it with their employment.  Among the elderly, only a very few could afford to pay the mounting medical bills of old age out of their own pockets or the inflated rates private insurers needed to charge the oldest and sickest members of society in order to make a profit.   
 Rather than leave the poor and elderly to sicken and die without hope, a liberal president and congress acted.  Conservatives were mortified.  Conservative icon and future President Ronald Reagan wailed, “It will be the end of freedom in America!” Instead, Social Security and Medicare, which people also pay into while they work so it will be there when they reach 65, remain the most popular and among the most effective federal programs ever instituted, saving, prolonging and improving the quality of millions of lives at a cost far below that provided by private insurers.  Along with Medicaid, they strongly fit Abraham Lincoln’s prescription, “The legitimate object of government, is to do for a community of people, whatever they need to have done, but cannot do, at all, or cannot, so well do, for themselves in their separate, and individual capacities.”  People’s retirement and health security are every bit as important to them as security against fire, flood, crime or military attack.  They are essential for life, and are necessities people cannot so well secure on their own.  So, just as firefighters, flood control, police and armed forces are part of securing human rights, so are making sure society’s health needs are met.  That’s how liberals see it.

We collectively take action as a society to insure ourselves in innumerable ways against harm.  Think of air and water quality controls, meat inspection, weather satellites, the air traffic control system, workplace health and safety regulations, car, plane, bus and ship safety requirements, inoculations against illnesses, engineering requirements and inspections for roads and bridges, residential and commercial building standards, and the testing of drugs, medicines, toys and consumer goods of all sorts.  Would you like to see any of these protections curtailed?  Liberals support these efforts to provide security for public health and safety.

What Liberals Believe About Fairness

Third in a series on the liberal perspective on human rights.

Liberals also support human rights because of an innate sense of fairness.  Liberals understand that legal equality does not mean equality of condition or results.  Some people will always be wealthier or smarter, some are good artists or athletes and others are not.  Not every student who applies will get accepted for enrollment into the college of their choice.  But what liberals really want to foster is a society where everyone has an equal opportunity to try, and a fair chance to acquire the tools for success. 

That’s why liberals always fight so hard to get better funding for poorer school districts, or poorer areas within a school district.  That’s why they are in favor of keeping college tuition as low as possible, with plenty of scholarship help available.  The statistics strongly show that kids from poorer families and families in which English is not the primary language do worse in school, have lower graduation rates, lower college attendance and graduation rates and lower lifetime incomes.  They also have higher incidences of unwed pregnancies, incarceration, chronic health problems and shorter life expectancies. 

Part of the reason liberals are concerned and want to do something about these problems comes from empathy and compassion.  It doesn’t feel right to send kids into the struggle of life with two strikes against them due to the financial conditions of their parents.  The other reason is pragmatic.  If equalizing school funding will help reduce crime, the dropout rate, the prison population, health care costs and result in more qualified students going to college and becoming successful members of the middle class, liberals wonder why would anyone not want to do it?The fairness issue goes beyond this to many facets of life and policy.  It’s why liberals favor a graduated income tax rather than the “flat tax” idea wealthy conservatives push.  In the early twentieth century Liberals and Progressives, including Republican and Democrats, passed the Sixteenth Amendment authorizing a federal income tax.  The principle was to make wealthier folks pay a higher rate of tax, based on the idea that first, they could afford it better, and second, they benefit more from what the taxes buy. 

How so?  Why not collect everything from, say, a sales tax, where everyone would pay the same percentage?  Well, the poor have to spend just about everything they earn just to get by.  Rent, groceries and the essentials of life take up almost the entire income.  So the poor would pay taxes on everything they earn.  The wealthy have a bigger cushion.  They don’t spend all their income, so they would not have to pay taxes on the part they invest or put away for things like college and retirement, things the poor person can scarcely do.  The rich also benefit more from the services government provides.  Police and fire protection guard the tycoon’s mansion, worth millions, from harm, conferring a much greater benefit than the same service provided to the average person’s humble house or apartment. 

Consider also that the same city street is worth different amounts to different interests.  Suppose a bank teller needs the street to get to work, and makes $30,000 a year.  Without the street this worker couldn’t get to the job, costing him or her $30,000 in earnings.  But the same street is worth a lot more to the bank.  Suppose the bank has 1,000 customers and $50,000,000 on deposit.  If the city doesn’t keep the street up and customers can’t get to the bank, they will likely take their deposits somewhere else.  The street, maintained at taxpayer expense, is worth $30,000 to the teller but $50,000,000 to the bank owner.  Is it fair to assess them the same amount for its upkeep?  Based on their relative abilities to pay and the relative value they get back, the liberal would say, “Definitely not!  That’s not fair.” 

What Liberals Believe about Equality

Second in a series on the liberal perspective on human rights.
 

Liberals believe in equality before the law, and they believe it for real rather than just paying lip service to the concept.  The Declaration of Independence famously states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”  Liberals like Abraham Lincoln believed that meant slavery was inconsistent with the principles of freedom.  “No man is good enough to govern another man, without that man’s consent,” he said.  Conservatives looked for reasons to create exceptions.  Surely, they felt, equality, though a good concept for white, Christian, property-owning men, could not apply to blacks, people of other non-Caucasian races, slaves, Jews, Hindus, women and the landless.  All couldn’t really mean “all,” could it? 

The Fourteenth Amendment avows, “No State shall…deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”  Liberals like Elizabeth Cady Stanton believed that meant women, as well as men, deserved the right to vote.  It took 72 years and a constitutional amendment, the Nineteenth, to accomplish that.  Some, such as conservative Supreme Court Associate Justice Antonin Scalia, still don’t think the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment requires equal rights for women.  Here is what he said about it:  “In 1868, when the 39th Congress was debating and ultimately proposing the 14th Amendment, I don't think anybody would have thought that equal protection applied to sex discrimination, or certainly not to sexual orientation. So does that mean that we've gone off in error by applying the 14th Amendment to both?  Yes, yes. Sorry, to tell you that.”  So, we still have people, even prominent ones, looking for reasons to deny equal rights. 

Liberals, on the other hand, take the wording at face value.  No one can be denied equal rights, period.  In proposing legislation to end the racial discrimination against African-Americans in his day, President John F. Kennedy observed, “We are confronted primarily with a moral issue.”  Kennedy based his views on strong sources.   Where should we search for the right answer to this issue?  He said, "It is as old as the Scriptures and is as clear as the American Constitution.  The heart of the question is whether all Americans are to be afforded equal rights and equal opportunities, whether we are going to treat our fellow Americans as we want to be treated.”  His answer, based on both, was an emphatic “Yes!”  Modern liberals are proud to emphatically agree.      

The uncompromising liberal view of equality has therefore been applied in a wider and wider circle over the centuries.  The principle was clearly enunciated in the beginning of the country, but was not realized in many people’s daily lives.  The pursuit of the dream to bring Jefferson’s words to fruition continues in our own time, concentrating now most urgently on the LGBT community.  This unfinished work shows liberalism at its best.  Carved over the entrance to the Supreme Court building are the words “EQUAL JUSTICE UNDER LAW.”  The views of certain retrograde Associate Justices not withstanding, that is what liberals continue to strive for, confident in the ultimate realization of America's egalitarian founding ethos.  As Martin Luther King declared, "the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice."       

What do Liberals Believe?

Today I'll begin a series on liberal issue positions dealing with human rights. Today's short entry can stand as an introduction.

“Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” Frederick Douglass

Does it bother you when you hear someone say gay people shouldn’t be allowed to get married or adopt children?  That somebody who was brought to America from a foreign country by their parents as an infant and can remember no other home should be deported to that foreign country?  That it’s OK to deny people medical care if they are too poor to afford it?  That demonstrators can only exercise free speech in fenced, restricted areas designated and kept under surveillance by the police?  That companies can be allowed to hide things in fine print that let them share your personal information and commit you to things you are not aware you are agreeing to?  That kids from wealthy neighborhoods in your area go to modern, well-equipped schools while kids from poorer areas go to ramshackle, poorly-equipped schools?  That it’s all right to torture a suspect if someone thinks they might be a terrorist?  That women, on average, still earn only 77% of what men earn doing the same job with the same number of years of experience and similar performance evaluations? 

If your consistent answer to these questions is yes, you are likely a liberal.  Liberals have always been in the forefront of extending and expanding human rights because liberals are imbued with a set of principles that promote freedom.  These principles include equality, fairness, personal autonomy, security, community, and a priority system that places human needs first because it is infused with empathy. 

Where Do Our Rights Come From?

In America there is a good deal of preoccupation with rights. The American Revolution was primarily fought over a conception of rights. The Declaration of Independence mentions "inalienable rights, among them life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." The Constitution's first ten Amendments were passed as a package and seek to spell out what the nation's fundamental rights are. They are usually called the "Bill of Rights." Both our major and nearly all our minor political parties compete in part by promising to adhere to what they consider to be the correct interpretation of the original meanings of these rights.

The most popular belief about the origin of these rights among the American people is that they come "from God." We hear mention of our "God-given rights." The Declaration says that the "inalienable rights" apply to "all men" and have been "endowed by their Creator." There is no question that Judeo-Christian thought is an important underpinning in the idea of individual rights. The belief that people stand equal before God and have value to Him long predates the United States, and has much to do with the ideals of individual rights appearing primarily in the Western World.

Yet these ideals did not translate into legal and political rights for a long time. Feudalism defined a rigid class system in Western society for centuries even though that society was strongly Christian. After that, the idea of monarchs ruling by "divine right" was the pre-eminent political understanding in Western Christian society after feudalism began to decline. It was only when Enlightenment rationalism was applied to moral and political discourse that a connection between Christian morality and political freedoms was established in most people's minds. Up to that time ideas like rights and liberties were mainly restricted to the realm of theology and relations between kings, nobles and the Church. It was only after philosophers like John Locke demonstrated the logic of applying these concepts to civil society that they caught on in the popular mind. He is, after all, the writer who came up with the "natural rights" formulation that included "life, liberty and property," and which formed the basis of Jefferson's similar formulation in the Declaration.

The important thing to keep in mind is that historically, nobody has ever been "granted" any of these rights. Freedom of speech and religion, equality under the law, trial by jury, freedom from unreasonable search and seizure without probable cause, habeas corpus, the right to vote, in short, every limit on royal or representative governmental power over individuals has only come after persistent and often bloody resistance to that power. And once achieved, such limits have had to be maintained and supported by consensus or they have been lost. A citizen asked Benjamin Franklin what kind of government had been set up by the Constitutional Convention. "A republic, if you can keep it," was the great man's reply. The record shows that rights are won and maintained only if they are staked out and tenaciously defended.

For example, the 14th Amendment's mandate of "equal protection of the laws" was of little avail to African Americans for nearly a hundred years after its passage due to the hostility of much of the majority to the measure, or to Japanese Americans during the war hysteria after Pearl Harbor. The Bush administration's disregard for habeas corpus and constitutional requirements for jurisprudence and the prevention of torture show just how easily "inalienable rights" can be abridged by a government that whips up fear in order to increase its power and latitude for action.

No, rights are not granted by God. Peoples' idea of what is godly may underlie the rights they demand, but rights have to be fought for by humans here on earth to be won and often fought for again to be sustained. As John F. Kennedy said in his Inaugural Address, "Here on earth God's work must truly be our own."

Tortured Logic

On Saturday President Bush vetoed legislation that would have prohibited the CIA from using waterboarding and other coercive interrogation methods beyond the 19 techniques approved in the Army Field Manual. On Tuesday the House of Representatives voted 225-188 to override the veto, a 37-vote majority but 51 votes short of the 2/3 necessary to overcome the president's veto.

Because of the bill's failure, the intelligence authorization contained in it will not go into effect. Television ads quickly appeared blaming House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) for leaving America unprotected against terrorists. The ads called on citizens to contact their congressional representatives to urge passage of an intelligence bill without the restrictions.

In his Saturday radio address Bush explained, "I cannot sign into law a bill that would prevent me, and future presidents, from authorizing the CIA to conduct a separate, lawful intelligence program, and from taking all lawful actions necessary to protect Americans from attack."

Bush's logic is specious on two counts here. First, it was not congressional Democrats who scuttled the Intelligence Authorization bill. It was Bush's veto that did that. They passed a bill that continued U.S. intelligence efforts except for the banned practices. He decided he would rather have no bill than agree to one that does not let him torture.

Second, U.S. law already specifically bans waterboarding. It is not lawful. His use of the term "lawful" twice in one sentence does not change that fact. Congress passes the laws. Bush's opinion that something ought to be lawful does not make it so.

In terms of the presidential race, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supported the ban. John McCain, who was tortured himself as a prisoner of war and who used to oppose torture, sided with Bush. When told earlier in the Iraq War that Americans should torture captives because insurgents there sometimes did so, McCain famously said, "It's not about who they are. It's about who we are." Who we are has apparently changed, in his view.

As columnist Eugene Robinson points out, if Osama Bin Laden were to perform such dangerous and sadistic practices on Americans it would be regarded as evil. Bush asks us to believe, however, that if we do it it is moral. His tortured logic is as unpersuasive as it is hypocritical.