The Left hijacked the label “Liberal.” Yet they favor an empowered government and diminished rights for individuals. Is it liberal to hamper free speech on the nation’s campuses, for fear that alternative speech may offer preferred venues, or lest conservative speech may offend sensitive ears? Are liberals progressive, when they put the wishes of union bosses ahead of workers who would rather not pay dues that fund policies and politicians with which and with whom they disagree? Is it liberal to protect entrenched, unionized businesses against “disruptive” technologies such as Uber, in London and New York City?
Labels can be misleading. Democrats are better than Republicans in framing arguments with grandiloquent words and phrases. They create slogans and acronyms that can be contrary to the policies they represent. Those on the Right are less nuanced – less imaginative. The word “conservative,” for example, conjures images of old white men in club chairs, drinking brandy and soda. Yet, most Republicans live in “Red” states, less affluent than states that house Democrats. They do not look backward to privilege, wealth and biases against race, gender, creed and sexual orientation. Their wants are simple. They cherish the dignity of a good-paying job. They want the opportunity a good education provides. They want to conserve a culture that encourage faithfulness, thrift, hard work, respectfulness, responsibility and accountability. They believe in JFKs assertion: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what can you do for your country.”
Today, liberals want to protect people against speech they deem harmful. When I was a child and teased at school, I would come home in tears. My mother would repeat an adage whose roots go back to an 1862 publication of the African Methodist Episcopal Church: “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me.” Such stoicism is no longer deemed appropriate. Words can be hurtful, Leftists claim, so “safe places” must be available. Limits on speech are, thus, permitted.
Consider “net neutrality.” How could any free-market pundit be against a label that suggests openness and unfettered access? But net neutrality is a directive issued by the Obama Administration that turns the internet into a regulated utility. It was marketed as a defense against big internet service providers (ISPs), cable and telecom companies. Proponents of Net Neutrality claim they have too much power – to speed up or slow down internet access. Liberals want them regulated, like public utilities. What proponents do not say is that ISPs, like Comcast and AT&T, owe their bigness to regulation. Better service and lower prices do not come from the beneficence of government, but from competition. As well, net neutrality says nothing about far bigger internet players, like Amazon, Facebook and Google, who monopolize content. With billions of subscribers, our values today are more influenced by Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg than all the churches, synagogues and mosques in the country.
Think of “sanctuary cities.” They were once havens to shelter the innocent, but have become asylums to protect criminal aliens. Sanctuary cities claim to be humanitarian, yet they destabilize civil society by ignoring the rule of law; for example, federal detention orders from ICE (Immigration and Custom Enforcement). We saw this in 2015 when Mexican-illegal Juan Francisco Lopez-Sanchez, who had been deported five times for seven felony convictions and who found in San Francisco a sanctuary, shot and killed Kate Steinle. Last fall, in Twin Falls, Idaho a city that declared itself as “welcoming”, three young Muslim migrants raped and then urinated in the mouth of a five-year-old girl. Wendy Olson, an Obama-appointed U.S, Attorney, threatened to prosecute any who spoke out about the crime in ways she considered “false” or “inflammatory.” Yet, words could not have exceeded the brutality of what those thugs did. Prosecutors are supposed to enforce laws, not create them. There was nothing “humanitarian” or “welcoming” about either incident. Civil society depends on obeisance to laws. In a democracy, no one, no town, no city, stands above the law.
