Liberal Elites Hate the Left
Liberal elites hate the left.
In 2013, President Obama, speaking at a fundraiser in Medina, Washington — home to a small community of wealthy donors — expressed a sentiment that has become all too common among Democratic Party liberals.
"I'm not a particularly ideological person," the president said in
a reassuring nod to those made anxious by Republican hysteria
suggesting that Obama, despite his calm exterior, is in fact a raving
revolutionary.
While not particularly remarkable, given the current temperament of
the Democratic Party, Obama's casual, throwaway line is rather
instructive: It describes quite well the shifting foundations of
American liberalism.
Liberalism has become a political framework that, as Emmett Rensin has written,
"insists it has no ideology at all, only facts. No moral convictions,
only charts, the kind that keep them from 'imposing their morals' like
the bad guys do."
Since the presidency of Bill Clinton, Democrats have become
increasingly anti-ideological (in word), opting instead for an approach
cloaked in the garb of objectivity and pragmatism: No longer, for instance, would liberals favor, in principle, labor over business.
Simultaneously, however, despite liberals' professed disdain for political doctrines, a new ideology arose in the place of the New Deal tradition, an ideology that would ultimately come to infect both of America's major political parties: Neoliberalism.
