Contrary to the popular American usage, ‘liberal’ is qualitatively different from ‘left.’ It is a centrist position meant to preserve the status quo.
Senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren: Liberals pushing the envelope? Photos by Larry Downing and Joshua Roberts / Reuters.
Ever since George Bush the Elder made his dismissive quip about “the L-word,” liberals have sought to rehabilitate the term and restore it to the connotation it enjoyed throughout its postwar heyday, when “western liberal democracies” were the embodiment of mankind’s progress up from the jungle, and to be liberal was to be evolved, humane, rational, grownup, and on the side of the future.
For a couple of decades, the political spectrum was essentially unipolar. Gradually, though, the “Conservative Revolution” picked up steam, and while it may not be the juggernaut now that it was in 1988 when Bush dropped his L-bomb, it definitely made the rightward end of the spectrum respectable in the public mind, or at least not as unspeakable as it was up until, say, the Carter administration.
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