Whatever happened to Liberalism?

By ROGER MARTIN

Special to The Capital-Journal

Question 1: Whatever happened to liberalism in America? Question 2: What forces eroded our sense of good and evil in the 20th century? I like it that two University of Kansas professors are addressing those grand questions.

This spring, they and some other academics are talking to audiences at Unity Temple in Kansas City, Missouri, as part of a "Whatever Happened to . . . " lecture series organized by KU's Hall Center for the Humanities. In late March, Bill Tuttle, a professor of American Studies, told a crowd that American liberalism was doing fine up till the 1960s.

The New Deal Coalition of Franklin Roosevelt was a powerful engine for liberalism from the 1930s to the 1960s. It even found support from Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, Tuttle said. For example, Ike extended Social Security to some groups, such as farmers, originally excluded from the program.

Then Liberalism peaked in the mid '60s with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society. Racism and George Wallace smote liberalism from the right, Tuttle says. Blue-collar workers flocked out of the Democratic Party, and the Solid South dissolved. On the other hand, Johnson and the 1968 Democratic candidate for president, Hubert Humphrey, drove liberal intellectuals out of the party with their anti-communist, pro- Vietnam war stance.

The low point for liberalism, Tuttle says, was George Bush's politically successful accusation in 1988 that rival Michael Dukakis was a card-carrying member of the ACLU. Bill Clinton continued the exorcism of liberalism from the Democratic Party by going along with the abolition of welfare and farm subsidies.

On May 3, a KU associate professor of philosophy will challenge audience members at Unity Temple to think about good and evil. Russ Shafer-Landau will dispute those who believe that they are merely personal and subjective. But he'll also contest against those who believe good and evil are as objective as fenceposts --- and easy to discover simply by reading this or that holy book. Like Tuttle, Shafer-Landau sees the 1960s as a watershed decade. It was then that faith in our ability to make moral judgments began to disintegrate, he says.

As Americans learned more about other cultures and ethical practices, Shafer-Landau says, their morally superior attitude --- the kind that the British demonstrated in colonizing Africa, for example --- was tempered.

Also undercutting our moral certainty has been the growth of a nearly religious faith in the findings and methods of science. "You can't touch or measure a value," Shafer-Landau says, "so values have come to seem like witches, sprites or trolls." Even so, he believes that a moral reality exists. Here's a way to think about that. You can't touch the number 2, he says, but there are many instances of the idea of "2" around. Likewise, you can't touch the virtue called "integrity," but, just as with the number 2, there are many instances of it.

Now why do I think it's a big deal that these guys are out lecturing about stuff like this?

Because the issues are huge and important. History has led many academics to address ever narrower questions. This lecture series departs from that. I hope there are more like it to come.

Roger Martin is communications coordinator for the KU Center for Research and editor of Explore:, a KU webzine at www.research.ukans.edu/explore/.

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