"A Dirty Word Gets Clean" Digby's got a good point. [View all]

[madfloridian]

Good for her. I openly and proudly identity myself a liberal, even in this fundamentalist right wing area in which I live....with a Southern Baptist Church on nearly every corner. I especially emphasize it to former Southern Baptists I see. When I was recently in the hospital some of these groups would walk the halls and go in rooms to see if they could pray with patients. I told them they should have gotten my permission via a nurse before they walked in.

When word gets out you are a liberal everyone around here wants to pray for you.

Anyway, back to Digby. She's right. More and more are wearing the liberal label after it's been abused for years.

A Dirty Word Gets Clean

Hmm:

The shift toward greater liberal self-identification has been led by Democrats. Currently, 43% of Democrats say they are liberal, a nearly 50% increase from 29% in 2000. Over the same period, the percentage of Democrats identifying as moderate is down to 36% from 44%, and conservative identification is down to 19% from 25%.

U.S. Political Ideology — Recent Trend Among Democrats



Now, we don’t know exactly what they are defining as “liberal.” I would guess more than a few define it as President Obama’s philosophy which I think is more accurately defined as “moderate.” (He said himself that he would be considered a moderate Republican back in the 80s.) It is curious that this increase in self-defined liberals seems to have jumped just in the last couple of years, so it’s hard to say it’s all Obama driven.

In any case, there are two factors here that are of interest. The first is that the demonization of the word itself seems to have faded a bit. If 43% of Democrats are now willing to call themselves liberal it is obviously no longer a shameful label. I don’t know why that’s happened, but perhaps it’s just as simple as the fact that the conservatives have been making such asses of themselves in recent years that normal people are no longer as influence by their opinions.

When I came to DU in 2002 I was terribly afraid of the word "liberal". Where I live it was taking a chance to mention it, still is sometimes....and still is in our neighborhood.

I am not fearful of it any longer, and I am proud to give myself that label.