INTRODUCTION

In my view, being a liberal is something to be proud of. Yet for more than twenty years, liberals have been on the defensive, and conservatives ascendant. I have watched and chronicled the nation’s rightward drift, sometimes fretting and fulminating about it, twice participating in Democratic administrations that have tried to slow or co-opt it, every four years or so advising political candidates what they might do about it, often debating right-wingers on television and radio about whether it’s good or harmful (it is, indubitably, harmful, as I will make clear), once running for office myself in a vain attempt to halt it in my home state, and rarely but occasionally—dare I admit it?—telling myself I should stop worrying about it and get a life (obviously, I haven’t).

I write now with greater urgency. In recent years, the conservative agenda has become far more radicalized. Its latest incarnation is more threatening and potentially more destabilizing to America and the world than its previous forms. Barry Goldwater’s “extremism in defense of liberty” was merely quirky and quixotic. Ronald Reagan’s buoyant divisiveness was at least tempered by moderate Republicans, congressional Democrats, and two generations of Americans who had experienced the we’re-in-this-together solidarity of the Great Depression and World War II.

Now, however, radical conservatives—Radcons, I call them—are taking over the public agenda, and they are meeting with woefully little resistance. Public debate has become grossly imbalanced. The Democratic Party has turned timid. The marketplace of ideas has retreated to a back-alley stall.

The administration of George W. Bush was more the result than the cause of this radical conservative ascendance, and its end will not mark the end of radical conservatism in America. Casting Bush as the villain of a dark conspiratorial drama may be emotionally satisfying to many liberals, but it doesn’t illuminate the larger clash of ideas and principles. We need to look beyond any specific election in order to understand what is occurring and why, and consider the alternative choices facing America in the years ahead.

The Radcon agenda, undiluted and unopposed, is dramatically out of sync with the needs of America and the world. As such, it endangers our future.

Consider:

• When the integrity of our economic and political system is threatened by unbridled greed and abuses of power—fraud in corporate suites and on Wall Street, exorbitant payments to top executives, and unprecedented sums of money flowing to politicians in exchange for political favors—the nation needs tough laws backed by sturdy enforcement and uncompromising public indignation. But instead of a reinvigorated public morality, Radcons are focusing on private sexual morality, on personal sin and sex. They would rather police bedrooms than board rooms.

• When the differences in income and wealth separating rich Americans from everyone else have become wider than at any time since the Roaring Twenties (by some measures, wider than at any time since the Gilded Age), Radcons are cutting social services and school budgets, and showering the rich with tax breaks. When jobs and wages have grown especially precarious for the vast majority of Americans, Radcons are shredding social safety nets and privatizing social insurance.

• When international cooperation is most needed to guard against global terrorism, Radcons are turning their backs on the rest of the world, often treating it with contempt. They believe America has enough wealth and power to go it alone, so they launch preemptive wars and occupy nations they deem hostile. When we need to be especially vigilant to protect American freedoms at home, Radcons would prefer to stifle dissent and restrict civil liberties.

In all these respects, there is a clear alternative to radical conservatism. It is a bold new liberalism, properly defined. Such liberalism is more urgently needed than ever—to stop abuses of power and unconstrained greed at the highest reaches of America; to prevent this nation from becoming a two-tiered society comprising a few who are very rich and a majority who are barely making it; and to unite the world effectively against terrorism and hate.

We live in an era when “liberalism,” a great and essential tradition, is mocked and its meaning grossly distorted. Radical conservatives have made a point of doing so, akin to demonizing an enemy during a war. They have depicted liberalism as a caricature of the sixties left. It is the equivalent, in their lexicon, to moral laxity and sexual permissiveness. It means taxes on the middle class in order to spend money on the undeserving poor. It is caricatured as the creed of “blame America first” pacifists who hate this country and don’t want to use force against our murderous terrorist enemies. They call liberals effete and elite, traitors and scoundrels, and blame their naive, softhearted generosity and permissiveness for everything that’s gone wrong with America. So the Radcons say—over and over again.

In fact, liberalism is not at all the cartoon version of the sixties left that the Radcons accuse it of being. The liberal tradition is directly relevant to the challenges America faces today. The classical liberal ideas that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and took root in American soil sought—for the first time in human history—to improve the well-being of all people, not just the rich and the privileged. Liberalism has stood for an economic system that betters the lives of average working people, and for a democracy that gives voice to the little guy. That liberal tradition animated American abolitionists of the nineteenth century who fought against slavery. It inspired suffragettes who demanded that women have the right to vote. And it motivated civil rights workers who put their lives on the line for equal rights.

American liberalism has also functioned like a balance wheel, saving capitalism from its worst excesses. It moved reformers at the turn of the last century to stand firm against monopolies and political corruption. It inspired progressives to battle for safety, health, and food and drug regulations. In the wake of the Great Crash of 1929, it led New Dealers to regulate banking and clean up Wall Street. As the Depression deepened, it prompted them to create Social Security, unemployment insurance, and a minimum wage, rather than resort to European-style socialism. The same liberal spirit aroused labor leaders to fight for better pay and working conditions for average working people. And it animated public-works spending to put millions of Americans back to work.

Those who see in liberalism a flaccid pacifism either don’t know history or seek to distort it. Liberals have always stood in sharp opposition to fanaticism and violence, and against religious bigotry, totalitarianism, and nationalist zealotry. Liberal ideals inspired Americans to confront Hitler’s fascism and Soviet totalitarianism, not only with our military might but also with our moral clarity about the sanctity of human life. In contrast to the “us” versus “them” swagger of Radcons, liberals understand our interdependence. They’ve held to the goal of an international community. After World War II they created the United Nations and international economic institutions. They relied on “collective security” against Soviet aggression. They pioneered a system of international law and human rights.

And it is liberals who again and again have championed decency and tolerance in civic life, in sharp opposition to demagogues who have demonized opponents and blamed the weak for what ails the nation.

These ideals—this profound insistence that Americans are all in it together, this search for practical reforms to make democracy and the economy work better for average people, this bulwark against bigotry and fanaticism, this smart internationalism, this demand for decency and tolerance—this is the true, robust liberalism, not the Radcons’ paranoid delusion of the sixties left. And this is the liberalism that must be resurrected and adapted more effectively to our times because our times demand it.

I believe most Americans still share these mainstream liberal values. At the level of specific policies, polls show*¹ a majority of Americans in favor of abortion rights, privacy to do whatever they want in their own bedrooms, civil liberties, and religion apart from the public schools. They want to ensure that top corporate and Wall Street executives act in the interests of small investors who have entrusted to them their savings for college and retirement. They want money out of politics. They support a progressive system of taxation, good public schools, and social insurance for those who slip and fall in a new economy that’s inherently unstable. And they want a foreign policy that effectively guards against terrorism by engaging and involving all our major and long-standing allies. They want an America that leads the world because of its moral authority, not one that aspires to control the world through military might.

But radical conservatism is setting the public agenda, and all of these items are “in play.” Courts or legislatures are deliberating some of them; the executive branch has turned its back on others; or Radcons have created the false impression they are supporting them when in fact they are systematically undermining them. Right-wing views that were on the fringe of the Republican Party in the sixties and seventies—propounded then by a ragtag collection of Bible-thumpers, nativists, racists, anti–New Dealers, free-market fundamentalists, and rabid anti-communists—are now center stage.

Although Al Gore won the popular vote in 2000, for at least the past two decades radical conservatives have gained power steadily at all levels of government. They have risen to control Congress and the White House, most governorships, and the majority of state legislatures. Their views are represented in a steadily increasing proportion of the nation’s school boards and a growing number of the nation’s courtrooms.

I’m writing this book because I want to reach people, perhaps like you, who share liberal values even if you don’t call yourself a “liberal"; people who are alarmed by the Radcon ascendance and the one-sidedness and shrillness of public debate in America, even if you’re not a political partisan. I want you to understand the Radcon agenda for what it really is. And I want to give you the courage of your liberal convictions by helping explain them, and why they’re so crucially important today.

Radcons have intense convictions; this is a part of their strength. They believe passionately in the righteousness of their cause. They are quite certain they represent the forces of good in a war against evil. And in making their case, they have cleverly and eagerly usurped the basic American values of morality, prosperity, and patriotism. In recent years liberals have had too little to say about these values. They have ceded the terrain to Radcons by default. In the following pages, I will try to correct this.

There is no “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Radcons have risen by means of a highly efficient, self-reinforcing system designed to shape public opinion and politics. The system consists of a steady stream of money from corporate executives, wealthy ideologues, conservative family foundations, and Radcon media tycoons. It relies on a tight political alliance with the evangelical Christian right, and depends on a cadre of political operatives and southern and mountain-state legislators committed to winning at any cost. And it presents itself through a shock troop of radio and TV talk-show hosts and pundits spinning Radcon views into columns, books, web logs, and broadcast appearances.

All this would create a formidable political advantage for Radcons even if they faced a coherent opposition. But there is none. Liberals are in disarray and on the defensive, if not in hiding. The Democratic Party has ceased to provide viable alternatives apart from individual Democratic candidates or politicians who pop into public consciousness before elections and often vanish just as quickly. As a party, Democrats are undisciplined, intimidated, or just plain silent. The religious left is unorganized and disconnected from political struggle. There are almost no liberal radio or television personalities, few if any liberal pundits, an absence of expressed liberal ideas and ideals in the public arena. Many people who disagree with Radcons have grown disillusioned and demoralized with politics, and figure there’s no point fighting back.

Hence, my final purpose in writing this book. If you’re not already involved, I want to inspire you to get involved—not just in this or that election, but for the long term. The stakes are enormous, both here and abroad. As the last remaining superpower, America has an extraordinary capacity for good or ill in the world. That means that as citizens of the United States, each of us has enormous leverage. America can exemplify moral leadership or crass narrow-mindedness. We can grow the economy by widening the circle of prosperity, at home and elsewhere around the globe, or further widen the perilous gap between the rich and everyone else. We can unite much of the world against terrorism and hate or merely assert our bullying self-interest.

What we do as a nation depends to a large extent on what you and others like you decide to do in the months and years ahead. Politics is the applied form of democracy. If we fail to act, we not only cede democracy to the radical conservatives, but in doing so we give them control over the wealthiest and most powerful nation in the history of the world.

The radical conservative assault on America is well under way. Radcons must be met head-on by a bold and intelligent liberalism founded upon a love of America and grounded in public morality and common sense. We can—and will—win the battle for America because we better represent true American ideals. What’s more, we have reason on our side, which is more than the Radcons can honestly claim. But idealism and reason bring us only halfway there. Winning back America will depend also on our organization, our passion, and our courage.