Why Liberals Hate Being Called Liberals

From Adbusters, an article by a liberal about liberalism and how liberals hate to be called liberals (Warning: contains profanity).

This is by Rolling Stone editor Matt Taibbi and it's called "The American Left's Silly Victim Complex."

I've often chided liberals for being so ashamed of being called what they are (not too many conservatives are ashamed of being called conservatives); they always prefer that forward-sounding, hopeful, optimistic "progressive" that few people understand, to the "liberal" that all too many people understand.

Apparently Taibbi also finds this "shame of the name" interesting:

When the people who are the public voice of a political class are afraid to even wear the party colors in public, that’s a bad sign, and it’s worth asking what the reasons are.

Of course, Taibbi attributes many of the wrong reasons for this, beginning by blaming the handful of conservative media outlets for giving liberalism a bad name, even though the vast bulk of the "mainstream" media (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, PBS, NPR, New York Times, et al) have been hard at work for decades to slap an attractive label on this dead-end political philosophy which is paved with broken dreams.

At times, though Taibbi's analysis is dead-on:

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans’ rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the “All Things Considered” interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook.

And another insight where he hits it dead-on:

This is another dirty little secret of the left – the fact that, at least when it comes to per-capita income, those interminable right-wing criticisms about liberals being “elitists” are actually true. According to a 2004 Pew report, Americans who self-identify as liberals have an average annual income of $71,000 – the highest-grossing political category in America. They’re also the best-educated class, with over one in four being post-graduates.

Would that he'd go one step further and explain that much of the reason these "educated" people are so liberal is that they're indoctrinated with liberalism from Day One showing up at college by snobbish liberal academia that cannot harbor the slightest whisper of something not in harmony with Das Kapital or the Communist Manifesto. (Of course they're not opposed to some good ole' capitalism when it fattens their wallets).

Perhaps one of Taibbi's most astute observations of why the Left is so wacky and has fallen out of favor with the average American:

We all know where this stuff comes from. Anyone who’s ever been to a lefty political meeting knows the deal – the problem is the “spirit of inclusiveness” stretched to the limits of absurdity. The post-sixties dogma that everyone’s viewpoint is legitimate, everyone‘s choice about anything (lifestyle, gender, ethnicity, even class) is valid, that’s now so totally ingrained that at every single meeting, every time some yutz gets up and starts rambling about anything, no matter how ridiculous, no one ever tells him to shut the [REDACTED] up. Next thing you know, you’ve got guys on stilts wearing mime makeup and Cat-in-the-Hat striped top-hats leading a half-million people at an anti-war rally. Why is that guy there? Because no one told him that war is a matter of life and death and that he should leave his [REDACTED] stilts at home.

I recall one liberal conference in particular that I attended a few years ago which perfectly illustrated this. There were some of the most whacked people on the planet getting up and speaking at this event (some talking about crystals, and how we're all just composed of energy waves and not really matter, and drivel such as this), but all the other liberals in the room simply nodded in a sage and broad-gauged manner and rendered the obligatory "tolerant" applause when these nut-jobs sat down.

No, I'm just not buying into the whole "progressive" thing. I think it's a waste of everyone's time forcing the average American to spend months or years to learn that "progressives" are just liberals with a new name. Let's just save everyone time and trouble, and use a term that everyone knows what it means.

You can call liberalism "progressive" or "onomatopoeia" or any other thing all you want, but a pig in lipstick is still a pig.

HT to World Magazine blog.