Marginal Mike - Michael Dukakis and liberalism

National Review, Nov 25, 1988

WHICH OF THESE did Michael Dukakis say? 1) "I don't think these labels mean a thing." 2) "I'm not a liberal." 3) "I am a liberal in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman and John Kennedy."

All three, of course. And, of course, all three are false. But in finally adopting the label he had been squirming away from for most of the year, Dukakis went out of his way to define a liberal as "someone who cares about average people." By that standard, the editors of this journal are liberals.

Roosevelt, Truman, and Kennedy, in the popular imagination, are associated with winning wars, spending public money, and standing up to the Soviet Union. None of them lived to see abortion on demand and gay rights become political issues, let alone tenets of Democratic platforms. Dukakis actually belongs to a later liberal tradition, along with Ted Kennedy, George McGovern, and such special tastes as Ron Dellums and Barney Frank.

There's a grain of truth in Dukakis's belated selflabeling. Since Roosevelt, liberalism has meant a tropism toward socialism, collectivizing wealth in the piecemeal style of "programs." The tens of millions of Americans who now depend on Washington for at least part of their income make up the Democrats' base. But the party has also become more "liberal" in the sense of gravitating steadily toward the marginal, even the morally marginal-obsessed with the homeless and the homosexual, you might say. The Happy Warrior has given way to the gay militant.

The label is damaging because most voters sense what it does stand for: the undermining of all the forces of Western cohesion-social, moral, economic, political, military, and spiritual. The normal energies that sustain society are being overtaxed in more than one sense. People understand this, and it has a lot to do with the pattern of Republican landslides in presidential elections. The Democrats' coalition of ideologues and special-interest dependents is formidable in local races, but increasingly feeble in national showdowns.