THE WAYWARD LIBERAL

Whether Nancy Pelosi becomes the savior of House Democrats or their well-dressed downfall, the new minority leader is, all sides agree, a liberal at a time when “liberal” is an epithet flung to injure. “You’re a liberal,” are fighting words and maybe even dangerous ones – the Supreme Court might be talked into filing them in the same box as yelling “Fire!” at the movies.

This current condition marginalizes liberalism to a harmful degree. If politics really does benefit from a diversity of ideas – this was the conservative view back when liberals were on the inside when the bounty of government was being ladled out and conservatives stood outside – then it is lamentable. Lamentable but not, judging from an essay recently called to our attention, permanent.

Liberalism also apparently died in 1948, and Maine’s finest observer of the daily toil, E.B. White, noted the report of its passing. The news was presented in the New York Herald Tribune, which concluded then, “There is no liberal view, no really self-consistent and logical body of principle and policy” – sounding very much like the recent post-election Democratic obituaries. According to Mr. White, “The Tribune’s feelings about the independent liberal seem to be that he comes from a good family but has taken to hanging around pool halls. His instability, his shallow charm, his unpredictable movements, his dissolute companions, all have been the subject of speculation recently in the Tribune’s pages, and the word that was finally trotted out to describe his fate was the word ‘bankrupt.'”

The fairest thing to do now is simply quote his entire critique on that thought, but certainly space and probably copyright laws prohibit this, and, in any event, Mr. White emphasizes the independence of the liberal so the comparison with the uncertain state of the Democrats is not exact. But it nevertheless may offer guidance: “The independent liberal, whether walking by his lone or running with a pack, is an essential ingredient in the two-party system in America – as strange and as vital as the trace elements in our soil. He gives the system its fluidity, its benign inconsistency, and (in cahoots with the major political organizations) its indisputable grace.”

The absence of this vital element may help explain that as the country has so evenly divided itself these days, the halves have turned their backs on each other: not enough fluidity. There are so few in power of whom it would be said, in Mr. White’s words, “He leaves a crazy trail, but he ranges far beyond the genteel old party he walks with. …” Does either major party have such a person anymore; will it be found among the Greens or other third parties? Or will the liberal walking in the wilderness return with stories of what he has seen?