This Isn't 1972 - This Is A Good Time To Be A Liberal! [View all]

[Butch McQueen]

I keep coming across references to how being a liberal will equal death on election day with reminders of the presidential election in 1972 thrown in.

I remember 1972... The middle class was near the peak of it's historic earning power. Unemployment was low. Unions were still strong. Banking and finance laws had yet to be gutted like a fish on a riverbank. Job security was taken for granted and most people took faith in the belief that their children's future would be better than their own. Young people could take their High School education and a solid work ethic out into the marketplace and find employment that actually provided a living wage for themselves and a family. And 1972 was the year that George McGovern failed to carry any state but Massachusetts. In hindsight that doesn't surprise me much - McGovern was a voice for change at a time when most people weren't all that interested in changing things.

Today has a lot more in common with 1932 than it does 1972. Be it unemployment statistics, the Gini coefficient, or a lack of adequate social service safety nets, 2013 looks a hell of a lot more like 1932 than it does 1972. And in 1932 Democrats took 59 out of 96 Senate seats, 313 out of 435 House seats, and elected FDR.

Now I may just be guilty of looking for hope where there isn't any, but it seems to me ideas such as raising the minimum wage, staying out of pointless wars, same sex marriage, banking reform, progressive tax policies, and so on, are starting to find real traction in the popular imagination. Even the basic concepts behind the ACA (when it isn't tagged with the red flag label "Obamacare&quot garner a majority of popular support in the polls. Now I'm not so naive as to think for a second that you could ever successfully market a candidate by advertising them as a liberal - that label has been successfully demonized by the right. However, I do believe that the country is reaching a point where it is ready for many of the IDEAS behind liberalism. We need candidates that support those ideas.

Now I live in teabagger country so it is kind hard for me to be optimistic based on the people I talk to every day, but my broader sense of things is that the future is starting to look brighter for liberalism. I'm I being rational here, or am I just delusional?