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To be a liberal, in this account, is in some sense to be a fake. Its to shroud an ambiguous, even reactionary agenda under a superficial commitment to social justice and moderate, incremental change. American liberalism was once associated with something far more robust, with immoderate presidents and spectacular waves of legislation like Franklin Roosevelts New Deal and Lyndon Johnsons Great Society. Todays liberals stand accused of forsaking the clarity and ambition of even that flawed legacy. To call someone a liberal now, in other words, is often to denounce him or her as having abandoned liberalism.

Liberal-bashing on social media has reached a kind of apogee, but its targets have not yet produced much real defense of the ideology. This means the word liberal is, for the moment, almost entirely one of abuse. It is hard to think of an American politician who has embraced it, even going back two or three generations. If liberalism is dead, then, its a strange sort of demise: Here is an ideology that has many accused sympathizers, but no champions, no defenders.

Americas version of liberalism has always been a curious one. In Europe, the word has traditionally meant a preference for things like limited government, separate private and public spheres, freedom of the press and association, free trade and open markets whats often described as classical liberalism. But the United States had many of those inclinations from the beginning. By the 20th century, American liberalism had come to mean something distinct. The focus on individual liberties was still there, but the vision of government had become stronger, more interventionist ready to regulate markets, bust monopolies and spend its way out of economic downturns. After the end of World War II, this version of liberalism seemed so triumphant in the United States that the critic Lionel Trilling called it the countrys sole intellectual tradition. Its legislation legalized unions and, with Social Security, created a pension system; a health plan for older Americans, Medicare, was on the way.

But as these same liberals initiated anti-Communist interventions in Korea and Vietnam, or counseled patience and moderation to civil rights activists, they quickly found themselves in the same position we see today: under heavy abuse from the left. In a landmark speech at an antiwar rally in April 1965, Paul Potter, the president of Students for a Democratic Society, asked: What kind of system is it that justifies the United States or any country seizing the destinies of the Vietnamese people and using them callously for its own purpose? What kind of system is it that disenfranchises people in the South? The first step, as he saw it, was clear: We must name that system. In a speech later that year, his successor as S.D.S. president, Carl Oglesby, did precisely that, calling it corporate liberalism an unholy alliance of business and the state that was enriching to elites but destructive to working-class Americans and the worlds poor.

It was the 1980 victory of Ronald Reagan and his brand of conservatism that set in motion the villainizing of American liberalism from the right this time not for warmongering but for supposedly being soft on crime and communism, bloating the government with ineffective social programs and turning American universities into hothouses of fetid radicalism. Many demoralized liberals responded by abandoning the label completely. The nasty 1988 presidential campaign may have been a watershed. In one debate, Bush demanded that his opponent, Gov. Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, explain some of these very liberal positions. Dukakiss reply, a weak Lets stop labeling each other, only confirmed the word as an insult. A few weeks before the election, dozens of distinguished figures from novelists to editors to former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara bought a full-page ad in The Times to print a letter titled A Reaffirmation of Principles, expressing their alarm at the use of liberal as a term of opprobrium. But their own definition of it was oddly vague: They called it the institutional defense of decency. All those attacks on liberalism seemed to be weakening peoples sense of what liberalism even meant.

As the insult gathered steam in the 90s, Bill Clinton was studiously aiming for the political center, ending welfare as we know it and pushing through a tough-on-crime bill. In 2011, Barack Obama made a deal with Republicans to adopt a program of fiscal austerity, prompting the left-wing critic William Greider to declare, in The Nation, the last groaning spasms of New Deal liberalism. Conservatives will fight one another to the death over whos the truer conservative, but the people most accused of being liberal have often seemed as if theyre the ones most ambivalent about actual liberalism.

If liberalism really is Americas core, hegemonic intellectual tradition, its easy to see how it has become the word we use to deride the status quo. For the left, thats a politics in which government cravenly submits to corporate power and cultural debates distract from material needs. For the right, its one in which government continually overreaches and cultural debates are built to punish anyone who isnt politically correct. But in both cases, liberal points to the consensus, the gutless compromise position, the arrogant pseudopolitics, the mealy-mouthed half-truth.

Each side has drawn tremendous energy from opposing this idea of liberalism. At the same time, the space occupied by liberalism itself has shrunk to the point where its difficult to locate. Different strands of it now live on under different names. Conservatives have styled themselves as the new defenders of free speech. Democrats have sidestepped liberal and embraced progressive, a word with its own confusing history, to evoke the good-government, welfare-state inclinations of the New Deal. Some of the strongest defenses of liberalisms achievements come from people who identify as socialists. And free-trade advocates, with no more positive term to shelter under, are now tagged, often derisively, as neoliberal. The various ideas to which liberal has referred persist, in one form or another, among different constituencies. Liberalism may continue. But it may well end up doing so without any actual liberals behind it.

Nikil Saval is an editor at n+1. He last wrote for the magazine about the trend of turning abandoned railways lines into urban parks.

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A version of this article appears in print on July 9, 2017, on Page MM11 of the Sunday Magazine with the headline: Off Center.

Originally posted here:
Hated by the Right. Mocked by the Left. Who Wants to Be 'Liberal' Anymore? - New York Times

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Support for single-payer health care is on its way to becoming the consensus position in the Democratic Party.

This is particularly true after the debacle of the Republican health-care effort. Not only has the debate demonstrated that Americans are perfectly fine with the idea of government-provided health coverage, it has convinced Democrats that there's no point in trimming their political sails in the hope of getting buy-in from Republicans for whatever they advocate, so they might as well go all the way. When 500 or so Democrats run for president in 2020, we'll probably see many if not most of them drop the equivocation and come right out and say they favor single payer.

But before we get there, Democrats need to take a breath and do some thinking. Do they understand exactly what it is they want to advocate for?

Consider what has been going on in California. A bill to establish a single-payer plan in the state passed the state Senate there, but it was recently pulled in the Assembly by Speaker Anthony Rendon. Democrats have a super-majority in the legislature, so why didn't they go ahead? As Rendon argued, the bill would have created massive budget problems given other California laws; for instance, the state is required to spend 40 percent of its budget on education, so it would have had to come up with hundreds of billions of new dollars even beyond what it would spend on health care. It also would have required waivers from the Trump administration to divert money currently being spent by federal programs like Medicaid, waivers which of course would not have been forthcoming (David Dayen explains all the convoluted problems the bill would have created).

Nevertheless, some on the left treated Rendon's decision like the most perfidious treason against progressive principles. RoseAnn DeMoro, head of National Nurses United and a prominent Bernie Sanders supporter, tweeted out a picture of the California flag with a knife labeled "Rendon" sticking out of the bear's back, and characterized anyone who objected to the bill as in the pocket of insurance companies. When liberal blogger Kevin Drum criticized the bill as unrealistic, NNU's communication director sent him an email saying "the name of your magazine [should] be changed from Mother Jones who actually fought for working people to Milton Friedman, which would better reflect your class sympathies."

The truth is that establishing single payer in a single state is a nearly impossible challenge when the country as a whole continues to exist within our largely private system. It's why Vermont tried to do it and then abandoned the effort, why Colorado voters rejected it at the polls last year, and why it isn't going to work in California. Nevertheless, more and more in the future, single payer is going to be treated as a litmus test by which "true" progressives can be distinguished from establishment sellouts.

In the abstract, that's not such a terrible thing health care is a vitally important issue that affects all our lives in profound ways, and it's one of the major dividing lines between the two parties. There's no reason why Democratic voters shouldn't use health-care policy as a means to judge prospective candidates, for president or anything else.

But everyone who cares about it needs a very specific and clear answer to this question: When you say "single payer," what exactly do you mean?

I suspect that many people don't actually mean single payer when they say "single payer." Liberals like myself have long lamented the fact that alone among the world's advanced industrialized democracies, the United States doesn't have a system that provides universal health coverage. We look around with jealousy at other systems that manage to cover everyone and produce health results that are equal to or better than what we get, all at dramatically lower cost. But those systems vary widely in design, and none of them are truly single payer.

In a true single-payer system, there is only one insurer, the government. It pays for all health care, and is able to use its regulatory and market power to hold prices down and take advantage of bureaucratic efficiencies. The country that comes closest to single payer is Great Britain, with its National Health Service. You might recall that Britons are so proud of the NHS that the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Olympics included a tribute to it.

But even the British system has some private elements to it. And moving to a completely public system from our current mishmash of public and private insurance (and mostly private health providers) would require an extraordinarily costly, complex, and lengthy transition. But maybe that's fine with you you can argue that in the long run, that maximizes the benefits.

Or perhaps you would prefer a hybrid system like the one they have in France, where there's a universal government insurance program that covers everyone's basic needs, and then most people buy private but highly regulated supplemental insurance on top of it (Canada has something similar, but with much more control at the provincial level). That happens to be my preference, particularly since we can foresee a path to it from where we are now, by expanding Medicaid (which already covers almost 75 million Americans) and changing what private insurers provide but not eliminating them entirely. I think you'd have a hard time arguing that a hybrid system would be some kind of betrayal of progressive principles.

Or you might prefer a system like Germany's, where tax money goes to fund non-profit insurers ("sickness funds") that people can choose from. The point is, those are just a few of the options. Each country that has addressed this problem has come up with a slightly different solution (if you want to compare them, this is a terrific source), but what they have in common is that they all achieve universal coverage at a cost much lower than what we pay.

If we're going to remake the American health-care system and we should we're going to have to decide which of those models would work the best for us. But they're not "single payer."

I'll admit that like many people, in the past I've used the term "single payer" too loosely. And there's a rhetorical problem: We don't have a name that would refer to all the different kinds of universal health systems we might consider moving toward. It's hard to communicate what you're for in a simple and understandable way without such a name; it's much easier to say "I'm for single payer." But you probably aren't or at the very least, you're open to any number of styles of health system, so long as they cover everyone in a way that's equitable.

We're now finally approaching a point where something we call single payer can be considered politically feasible. So we'd better make sure we know what we're talking about.

More:
Liberals, get your story straight on single payer - The Week Magazine

The West Hartford man who police said wrote profane and threatening anti-Trump graffiti at Morley Elementary School on June 15 has been ordered to stay off the property.

Hartford Community Court judge Tammy Geathers said Wednesday that Steven Marks, 32, is to stay off the Bretton Road school property and continued his case to Aug. 2.

Prosecutor Tom O'Brien said Marks has a clean record but asked the judge to continue the case so he could reach out to the Town of West Hartford and discuss restitution for the graffiti. He said Marks has arranged to meet with a social worker in West Hartford as well.

West Hartford Police on June 19 released a 28-second surveillance video clip showing a bald, white man wearing a dark blue Boston Red Sox t-shirt with khaki shorts riding a bicycle onto the Morley playground accompanied by a white and brown dog, identifying the man as the suspect. In the video clip, the suspect appears to write something on a sign located on the playground. The video was time stamped at about 10:30 p.m. on June 15.

Marks told police on June 19 he vandalized the property "out of 'anger towards liberals and they are breaking major laws everyday and being disrespectful towards our government,'" according to the warrant for his arrest. He told police it was his hope that the vandalism would appear to have been done by the "Left."

In the arrest warrant, West Hartford Police Officer Dante Ursini said Morley Elementary School Principal Ryan Cleary on June 16 said "students informed him that there were 'swear' words written on the playground equipment."

Some of the writings said "Kill Trump," "Left is the best," "Bernie Sanders 2020" and "Death to Trump" and were written on the playground welcome sign, a tan piece of of playground equipment, a yellow concrete barrier pole, a playground bench and on a "Little Free Library" located on the playground.

Marks saw his photo in the news, called the police and later turned himself in on a warrant that charged him with third-degree criminal mischief and breach of peace, police said. He posted $500 bail. Police said when they went to his home to take his statement, he was compliant and respectful.

Marks told police he was at the school to play catch with his dog and that he found a green Sharpie marker on the school grounds. He told police when he found the marker, he "'had the dumb idea to vandalize the school with what would seem to be liberal hate speech.'"

Marks told police he would "never harm the president or any member of government and understood it was 'stupid' and 'illegal.'"

Courtesy of West Hartford police

He said after vandalizing the property he threw the marker in a bush at the corner of Fern Street and North Quaker Lane and on his way home thought it was a "'very stupid idea' and thought he should have gone back to clean it up, which he never did." Police later found the marker in a bush on the southwest side of Fern Street and Auburn Road and said his statement was off by one block.

Police reviewed two of Marks' Facebook accounts, his home, garage, vehicle and cell phone and found nothing of concern.

In an interview with The Courant last week, he said he was sorry, that his actions were "stupid," and that he supports President Donald Trump and refused to explain why he would write anti-Trump graffiti.

"It was just a stupid thing I did at the time," Marks told The Courant last week. "It was stupid, stupid, stupid."

He declined to comment after his community court appearance on Wednesday.

Read the original post:
West Hartford Man Told Police Anti-Trump Graffiti At School Was Out Of 'Anger Toward Liberals' - Hartford Courant

The head of the Royal Canadian Air Force has refuted suggestions, including from more than a dozen of his predecessors, that the Trudeau government is needlessly dragging its feet on new fighter jets.

Lt.-Gen. Mike Hood instead said the Liberals are taking "a prudent amount of time," as choosing Canada's next fighter is a big decision especially since it will likely be in use for decades.

"Fighter operations, there is a lot to chew on," Hood said in an interview with The Canadian Press.

"The timelines the government and the minister have articulated will let them be absolutely sure that they're making the right choice for a final fighter that will probably be flying when I'm going to the grave."

The Liberals' new defence policy includes a promise to replace Canada's 76 aging CF-18s with 88 new warplanes, which is an increase from the 65 previously promised by the Harper Conservatives.

The policy estimates the new fighters will cost between $15 billion and $19 billion, up from the $9 billion previously budgeted by the Tories.

The Liberals say the extra fighter jets are required to meet a new policy, adopted in September, that increased the number of warplanes that must always be ready for operations.

But fighter-jet companies such as Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which make the F-35 and Super Hornet, respectively, won't be asked to submit formal bids until next year at the earliest.

That is despite many defence experts, including 13 retired Air Force commanders in February, saying a competition to replace the CF-18 fleet can and should be launched immediately.

They say doing so would negate the need for 18 "interim" Super Hornets, which would save taxpayer dollars and keep from diverting personnel and resources away from other areas of the Air Force.

But Hood played down those concerns, saying that he'll have no trouble operating an interim fighter fleet if "I'm given the resources and the priority that I need."

That doesn't mean there won't be challenges in growing the size of Canada's fighter fleet, he admitted, notably in terms of having enough pilots and technicians to fly and fix the new jets.

The problem has been exacerbated by the fact that while airlines are currently on a hiring binge, Hood said, the Air Force can't ramp up the number of pilots it puts through flight school each year.

"We brought in a pilot-training system in the early 2000s that had a maximum capacity to deliver about 115 pilots a year. With attrition going up, I'd probably want to produce 140 this year, but I can't."

However, Hood is hoping planned changes to the training regime and new initiatives such as recruiting potential technicians directly out of community college will help grow his ranks.

At the same time, the military is looking at ways to improve working conditions across the board to keep experienced personnel in uniform and not lose them.

The plan to grow the number of fighter jets is only one area in which the Air Force is slated to grow in the coming years, with new armed drones, search-and-rescue aircraft and other equipment having also been promised.

Hood said that represents a significant and welcome turn of events after the service was dramatically weakened by years of cuts.

"When General (Rick) Hillier talked about the 'Decade of Darkness,"' Hood said, "the lion's share of that was done on the back of the Air Force in the '90s."

More:
Liberals taking 'prudent amount of time' with jet competition: RCAF commander - CBC.ca

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Danny Westneat is a columnist for the Seattle Times.

Bad news for liberals.

That was how one national news outlet summed up the finding last week that Seattles bold experiment in a $15 minimum wage isnt working out quite as planned. University of Washington researchers found that forcing wages higher and faster could be hurting the very people it was most supposed to help: the lowest-wage, least-skilled workers.

But the bad news doesnt have to be either final or fatal. Not if liberals can get out of their defensive crouches and actually be liberal that is, open to new information that may not square with the program.

We have a culture in Seattle that if youre not on board with the cause 100 percent, then youre vilified. Thats got to loosen up, or were really heading for trouble.

Thats Dave Meinert, owner of six bars and restaurants in town. He was one of only three on a 24-member advisory task force who dissented as the $15 wage plan was adopted in a progressive cheering parade three years ago.

Basically what he said then was the city was pushing the base wage too high, too fast, without enough flexibility for different types of businesses. Unlike some of the more strident naysayers, who predicted (wrongly) that businesses would fail, Meinert suggested it was the workers themselves who would get hurt.

Which is what appears to be happening to the lowest-wage workers, the UW study found.

As with anything involving the dismal science, the report is complex and caveat-filled. But the main finding is very inconvenient that near the bottom of the pay scale, wages went up but hours were cut more, resulting in an overall loss of $125 in pay per job per month.

Meinert said he wasnt surprised, because he has started slightly shaving hours at his bars. Example: One of his places that used to open at 11 a.m. now opens at noon, leading to a reduction of one hour per day, times three workers, equaling 21 fewer paid hours per week.

Nobody has lost jobs, but some of the newer hires have seen reduced hours, Meinert said.

The study found that while this was going on, Seattle restaurants also hired more highly paid employees. The LA Times said it suggests restaurants here are splitting into two models: limited service, like where you bus your own tables, or lavish, full-service joints, where a salad can cost, say, $25.

A $25 salad? In 2014 I quoted one pub owner predicting Seattle would become the city of the $18 hamburger. He wasnt far off.

The red flag is that restaurants have been shielded from the biggest wage boosts so far. They have a $2-an-hour tip adjustment (meaning they can pay $2 less than the base wage, which this year is $13 for small businesses.) But in time that tip adjustment will be phased out.

If I were a Seattle lawmaker, I would be thinking hard about the $15-an-hour phase-in, David Autor, an MIT economist, told The Washington Post.

Are they? I see more rationalizing and propagandizing. That Mayor Ed Murray went out and recruited a labor-friendly Berkeley researcher to bash the UW economics study before it was even released doesnt exactly suggest an open mind.

Maybe this study is wrong, and more research obviously is needed. But whats puzzling about City Hall attacking it is that even this bad-news finding suggests only tweaking might be in order.

Theyre putting their heads in the sand, when they could just be adjusting the experiment to make sure it works better, Meinert said.

Ideological rigidity like this is exactly whats plaguing national politics. Example: There was an insane story in Politico that U.S. Senate Republican leaders were going around with an urgent warning for colleagues: If Obamacare repeal fails the GOP might be forced to compromise with Democrats.

Compromise? Oh the humanity!

Seattle liberals, dont be like them. Instead, be real liberals.

Danny Westneat is a columnist for the Seattle Times.

Go here to see the original:
Westneat: Liberals need open minds in minimum-wage debate - The Columbian