Liberal Contrarianism Explained

Recently in Democracy, Michael Bérubé, a literature professor at Penn State wrote a pretty hilarious piece about the (almost) death of what he calls "liberal contrarianism." I don't have a whole lot to say about the specifics of piece, I mean how do you agree or disagree with a fictional dialog of two different characters arguing inside one man's head? But it is quite funny.

It's also a great look back into the past, at least in terms of what people were writing in "high brow politics" magazines once upon a time and how similar and totally different that is from our own era. I especially loved the deep cut about how Reason magazine ginned up a controversy about how Dade County, Florida spent too much money installing a ADA compliant ramp to access a nude (well actually clothing optional) beach. People were outraged (or were they?), then again maybe it was just a conservative writer looking for a punch line at other people's expense. As the HIC character puts it, "Cripes. I can’t even begin to imagine anyone ridiculing access ramps today."

The conversation then goes on to address what the character ILLE calls, "liberal contrarianism", like from the old joke that a liberal is someone who won't take their own side in a fight, that sort of thing:

You know where I’m going with this. As the age of the liberal contrarian reaches maturity in mid-decade, Andrew Sullivan is hawking The Bell Curve at The New Republic, by then known as “even the liberal New Republic.” A few years later, Michael Kelly, having spent his time at TNR fulminating against the liberal hegemony of Heather Has Two Mommies, takes over The Atlantic. Camille Paglia is ubiquitous. Slate emerges as the West Coast, online TNR, and within a few years, the #Slatepitch becomes shorthand for the liberal contrarian hot take. By 1997, it’s like, they may seem innocuous, but maybe Secretary of Labor Alexis Herman and Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy are the most corrupt public officials in the history of the republic! Democracy and public decency demand an investigation! That was an actual, real Slate essay by Jacob Weisberg about Herman in February 1997.

Read the whole thing, as the kids say. But I would like to push back against this a bit. It's really common, at least to me, to see this sort of framing around a lot of the inter-"Left" brawls when it comes to high brow political magazines from the 90's. That is, once upon a time liberals foolishly fought each other, but now that The New Republic has been destroyed and William Safire is no more liberals have finally gotten their act together and can focus on the important stuff!

But I think this gets liberalism and especially the Democratic Party (which is often where theses sorts of conversations lead to) wrong. In politics everything is contested, so these sorts of fights aren't really about liberal writers being "contrarian" for the hell of it, but rather they often show real disagreement  about questions like what "liberal" and "liberalism" means. Just look how that once hallowed term "Conservative" has become "I'm with Trump" in the last few years!

In other words the "contrarians" may or may not have been writing that stuff to be, well contrarian. But those views, whatever you think of them, were once a mainstream part of liberalism and the Democratic Party. As political scientist Jonathan Ladd put it back in 2016 when surveying the downfall of The New Republic:

One way to think about this is as part of an intra–Democratic Party argument that took place in the 1980s and early '90s about what the party needed to do to win presidential elections more often. From 1968 through 1988, the Democrats lost five out of six presidential elections. Many liberal pundits and Democratic politicians debated what the party needed to do to win presidential elections again. The truth was that this streak was a product of essentially random variation in short-term economic conditions close to election time. But pundits and politicians wanted an ideological explanation.

One natural inference was that because the party started losing presidential elections around the time it heartily embraced the civil right movement and turned against the Vietnam War, these changes were a major culprit. To win the presidency again, the Democrats needed to reconstruct their geographic and ideological constituency from the 1940s, '50s, and '60s.

In the 1980s, many thought that if only the Democratic Party distanced itself from threatening African-American leaders like Jessie Jackson, and demonstrated that it was tough on crime and tough overseas, it would win the presidency by winning back the white Southern voters who were the backbone of Democratic electoral strength before 1964.

I think that's spot on. Ladd goes on to put it this way:

But as the presidency of Barak Obama draws to a close, this fight over the future of liberalism and the Democratic Party is essentially over. The party has an increasingly racially diverse voting base. Racial, gender, and sexual pluralism is a key part of the party's culture and ideology...

In the two major ways the Peretz-era New Republic distinguished itself, it lost the battle for the soul of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Where once its views on race and foreign policy represented a faction within liberalism, now they don't seem liberal at all.

In other words the famous/infamous "Day Of Reckoning" cover of TNR that liberal writers love to cite these days, did in fact represent a branch of liberalism and the Democratic Party, most notably in the form of then President Bill Clinton, very much a liberal (well that's what we called him at the time), who negotiated that welfare reform bill with then newly Republican congress (he vetoed two earlier ones).

Likewise just a few years before the "contrarians" Bérubé cites the Speaker of the House was a man named Jim Wright (The Speaker from Texas as they used to say), who among other things lead Congress to override quite a few of Reagan's vetoes and chaired the 1988 Democratic National Convention. He also supported the Vietnam War and voted against the Civil Rights Act.

This all seems weird, but not really once you start thinking in terms of changes in parties and political coalitions instead of the word-smithing done by people who write about it for a living. And it's a very old story indeed, whether it's one time icon of liberalism Adlai Stevenson ducking the whole question of civil rights, or noted liberal Howard Dean making many Democratic Party old hands queasy when he endorsed the then radical idea of "civil unions" as an alternative to the impossible dream of marriage equality.

Which means the "contrarians" aren't gone, they've just changed shape. For example they are people like Kevin Drum (and me I suppose) who were deeply skeptical of the whole Bernie thing, and look back not with awe and respect, like most liberal writers these days, but with a touch of bitterness. Or you can find them with a growing chorus of liberals (Noah Smith comes to mind) who increasingly point out that liberals in major cities and their NIMBY obsessions are causing real harm to people.

To make a long story short people won't be giving these contrarians New York Times columns anytime soon, but, it doesn't mean they (we?) aren't out there. Or that new battles over the future of liberalism and Democratic politics don't loom on the horizon.