“The Democrats have nothing. No leader, no banner to march under, no signs and no symbols.”

 

 Why don't Democrats want to be called liberals?
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Naomi Schalit

 
When I was growing up, the political divide in the U.S. took the form of “liberals vs. conservatives.” Historian Kevin M. Schultz, at the University of Illinois Chicago, says that ideological shorthand for Democrats and Republicans has been around ever since FDR in the early 1930s described the two parties that way.

But things have changed for both parties.

“Republicans right now have strong tribal belonging that begins and ends with a single question: Do you support President Trump? They have a banner to march under: MAGA. And a song: ‘God Bless the U.S.A.’ They live, laugh and love to own the libs. Their signs and symbols are simple and amusing. And they are effective,” he writes.

So conservativism turned into Trumpism. But what do Democrats have?

As my mother would say: “Bupkis.” Or as Schultz puts it: “The Democrats have nothing. No leader, no banner to march under, no signs and no symbols.”

Whatever happened to liberals and their liberalism? Schultz provides an entertaining intellectual history of why “no one, it seems, wants to be a liberal anymore,” wending his way from FDR to LBJ, through several historians, civil rights advocates, and the writers James Baldwin, William F. Buckley and Norman Mailer, the latter of whom said, “I don’t care if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist or even a left conservative, but please don’t ever call me a liberal.”

Schultz points out that while lots of people – including, apparently, a number of New York Times columnists – are trying to devise new banners and ideologies for the Democrats, right now “without finding a new emblem to rally behind, Democrats may be doing little more than battling that other neologism: MAGA.”