Liberalism in ascendancy
Gallup is reporting that liberalism is growing in the US, but that conservativism still has the edge. The realty, however, is that liberalism always wins, and the reason there are fewer liberals than conservatives is that liberals represent the risk of change and the belief in hope. Liberalism represents new ideas, while conservativism represents old ideas. Our country may not move forward as quickly as we'd like, but it rarely moves backwards.
The fact is, except for a small number of conservatives, if you took average conservatives today and sent them back in time 100 years, they would be quite progressive. Most conservatives today support policies and programs that their ancestors would have opposed. Today's conservatives support the right of women to hold any job, the right of minorities to be equal in the work place, 40 hour work weeks, laws against child labor, Medicare, Social Secuirty, electing Senators by popular vote, and so on. 100 years ago, mainstream conservatives would have opposed all that and more. And moderates are even more liberal because they tend to support broader women's rights, gay rights, environmental programs, programs for the poor, minimum wage, and so on. Liberalism constantly moves the goalpost, so today's moderate is yesterday's liberal; today's conservative yesterday's moderate.
When we look at a conservative victory, it's not a victory at all. The recent NRA "victories" against gun controls were victories in the sense that they stopped the implementation of more gun control. They didn't reduce what was already there. When you look at the "victories" against women's reproductive rights, their only victories are to make more difficult for women to have abortions; it is still legal. A conservative victory is basically like cutting losses, like losing a football game 21-17, instead of losing 21-0.
The fact that more people are identifying as liberal simply means that the future will come more quickly. We've certainly seen that with gay marriage, and now we're seeing it with immigration reform. Soon, we'll see it with the implementation of health care reform. What's next? With the momentum of today's liberalism, we might actually start to work on global warming and might in our lifetimes actually have a Congress and President who represent the poor and much as they represent the middle class. We're living in good times, and as liberals we're on the winning team and have always been on that team.
