Radio Commentaries

COMMENTARY #69 The "L" Word and How It Got That Way

The "L" word of course refers to the word liberal and it is hard to feel a lot of sympathy for liberals when they are labeled dangerous subversives because they only have themselves to blame for the trend.

During the heyday of Senator Joe McCarthy liberals of all stripes ran for the hills when threaten by the unscrupulous Senator from Wisconsin. McCarthy had learned that he could amass vast power simply by brandishing a piece of paper and saying something like, I HAVE HERE IN MY HAND A LIST OF A HUNDRED COMMUNISTS IN THE STATE DEPARTMENT. That was the refrain.

Some liberals, who may have been labor leaders, intellectuals, entertainers, government workers, and progressives of all stripes, trembled with terror that they personally would be fingered or listed as un-American. "ARE YOU NOW OR HAVE YOU EVER BEEN A MEMBER OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY?

Historians have found that the real leftist, known as "radicals," were the ones who fought back against the witch-hunt. Carl Braden and his wife Anne were southern white radicals who worked as Directors of the Southern Conference Educational Fund. SCEF was organized at the behest of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in Birmingham, Alabama in 1938.

Anne Braden, who is now celebrated as a comrade and role model for Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, was a mentor of my organization, SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She taught us students not to participate in the red baiting that was tearing the liberal and the progressive forces apart during the 1960s. She said that spending all your time trying to figure out who the communists are – looking under every bed for the boogeyman, keeps us from doing the hard work of ending segregation and racism. Luckily my organization, SNCC, worked in the most dangerous parts of the South. If anybody wanted to join us on the front lines, they were more than welcomed.

Some weak-kneed liberals, however, who lacked the intestinal fortitude to stand up to McCarthy, capitulated to the red scare. In a vain effort to "prove" their patriotism and make amends for their political sins, they named names and turned their friends over to the inquisition.

Henry David Thoreau liked to describe radicals. For every thousand reformers hacking at the branches of evil, there is one radical chopping at its roots. Radical means going to the root of the problem and not being content to treat its symptoms. Another simplistic way of stating the case is that radicals tend to address the root causes of hunger – war, economic exploitation, greed and imperialism, while liberals hand out sandwiches. Thank God for the sandwiches, but don't forget to ask why they are necessary in the richest country on earth.

When liberals ran away from the "L" word and failed to defend its honorable meaning, made clear by its root, liberty, they allowed themselves to be unfairly marginalized in American politics. Republicans, on the other hand, meaning anti-monarchist, also an honorable root, thrived by demonizing both the individual liberal and his political beliefs.

I am Bob Zellner and I hope President-Elect Obama's new style of politics-- nonviolent politics, catches on. Obama's campaign has taught us to preserve the individual worth of one's opponent while disagreeing with his or her policies.

This is my opinion and I am Bob Zellner

Commentary #68 Post Obama Political Realignment

The election of Obama offers an opportunity few are talking about today and that is the chance to reorder American thinking vis-a-vis the political spectrum here, and how it differs from almost everywhere else in the world. It is a well know fact of US political life that the acceptable political positions here in the United States run from the far right to just a smidgeon left of center. The entire left side of the political spectrum has been chopped off. This is due to our peculiar American history of slavery, segregation, imperialism, and the long cold war against the "alien" political systems and philosophies found in the old Soviet Union.

Politically knowledgeable citizens of other counties are often amazed that large numbers of Americans think of President Elect Obama as a socialist, a leftist or, a possibly dangerous radical terrorist, or at the very least a radical liberal. The answer to why political discourse in this country is skewed so far to the right can be found in that word "liberal." The father of our current president helped to demonize the word by forming an "L" with his thumb and forefinger. It was a word like the "N" word - too horrible to utter.

Liberals, by and large, ran away from the word as Poppa Bush had wished they would and "liberal" became a bad word. Liberals, then, in the age of the nasty Karl Rove, became bad people. What would have happened, I wonder, if liberals had shown more spine and said to the right-wingers, "You bettcha I'm a liberal, the root of the word is liberty and the political philosophy with the name liberalism has as its core individual freedom." But when even liberals avoided the word, they in effect handed over a potent weapon to their enemies.

Political Neanderthals like Rush Limbaugh, Sarah Palin, and Joe "the Senator" Lieberman rushed to call Senator Obama a socialist, a possible Marxist or communist palling around with terrorists.

Political observers of the more informed type have been intrigued as well by the notion, concocted by professional right wing nuts, that even Senator Clinton is a dangerous leftist. This is pretty laughable because she is even more conservative than the political centrist Barack Obama. Furthermore, her husband won the Presidency even though he came from a small state by bringing the Democratic Party back to the center.

Young people especially have a hard time understanding why progressive people run from labels. They don't remember the other Senator Joe, Joe "the Red Hunter" McCarthy, who made liberals, labor unionist, intellectuals and progressives of all stripes trembled in fear that they would be fingered by McCarthy as "disloyal", or a "subversive."

My study of the cold war and the red baiting used to keep American citizens "in line" has convinced me that the real radicals of the 1940s and '50s survived the witch hunt best when they defied the James Eastlands and the McCarthys and the House UnAmerican Activities Committee. When people fight back against being demonized, they keep their self respect and live to fight again another day. People who prostrate themselves before the committees in a vain attempt to "prove" themselves to be patriotic Americans found that they could be given a clean bill of health only with they informed on their fellows. Those are the ones who sold their souls - most of them never recovered their dignity and self respect.

More on this next week. I am Bob Zellner and this is my opinion.