Liberalism can encompass best of past and present
By Felicia Nimue Ackerman
An article in the New York Times Dining Section last month covered the gastronomic side of the Occupy Wall Street protests. It reported that protesters were enjoying donations of organic carrots and a homemade vegan casserole. It quoted a woman who said she had come to the park partly "to push the sustainable-food side of things."
However, "'someone gave us Spam,' said Elliot Hartmann-Russell, 18, a volunteer who held up a can of the meat and stared at it while sorting through the donations. 'I'm not going to eat it, but …'" This made me nostalgic for my childhood.
My particular Brooklyn subculture took the liberalism of its members for granted. For example, when my ninth-grade social-studies teacher wanted to stage a debate between Nixon and Kennedy supporters in the 1960 presidential election, he knew better than to ask if any student actually favored Nixon. Instead, he offered extra credit for anyone who would pretend to do so. Finding no takers, he drafted me. This set off a little commotion at home when I relayed the news to my parents.
But what this subculture lacked in political diversity, it made up for in other kinds of diversity. Liberalism did not dictate your lifestyle. Liberalism was about civil rights, civil liberties and poverty, not about what you ate, whether you smoked, how much refuse you produced or how you disposed of it. And liberalism definitely did not encourage you to monitor your neighbors along those lines.
Mid-century liberalism was not perfect, of course. Affirmative action existed, but virtually all its beneficiaries were white. It was not called affirmative action. One common form was called geographic distribution, and it made admission to selective private colleges much easier for Southerners and Westerners than for applicants from New York City. Unlike the later affirmative action favoring racial minorities, geographic favoritism aroused little controversy.
Many kinds of discrimination received little or no criticism. We were spared the ugly neologisms "ageism," "sexism," "ableism" and "homophobia," but we barely recognized the ugliness of the phenomena that these words now refer to. No matter how good you were at your job, you took it for granted that your employer could boot you out when you reached 65. Women expected huge barriers in the workplace. Unequal treatment of the disabled also lacked status as a political issue. Gay marriage was not even on the radar.
My childhood community was not feminine-mystique territory, though. Over half my friends had mothers who worked outside the home. I remember one mother who chose to retain her maiden name and got less criticism than women in today's liberal circles who make the opposite choice. And when, after encountering 1960s feminism, I gave my own mother the surprising information that many husbands objected to doing housework, she replied that their wives should not have married such selfish men in the first place. She didn't think the personal was political.
Nowadays, of course, we say that people were socialized to believe that housework was women's work. But my mother's point holds: You should not marry a selfish jerk.
Why not combine the virtues of past and present liberalism? Recognize forms of discrimination other than racism. Recognize that political inequalities may affect personal choices, but don't expect people to see all their choices in political terms. Recognize environmental concerns, but don't become a buttinsky who monitors other people for environmental purity. Recognize the dangers of smoking and unhealthful eating, but respect adults' right to make their own choices about health versus pleasure.
Some people seem open to this. The New York Times article reported that "nobody was turning down any donations," even of food that was "not precisely what the troops might have desired."
I have been donating packages of delicious commercial non-organic cookies and candy to the Occupy Providence movement. I have gotten no complaints that I should donate organic carrots instead.
Felicia Nimue Ackerman is a professor of philosophy at Brown University. He is also a columnist for the Providence Journal.