It looks obvious

I often rant about the fact that the American left hijacked the term Liberalism. Associating the left with ideas of Liberty and Human Rights was smart in terms of PR but has very little to do with reality. The fact is that the left commitment for Human Rights and Liberty is limited, although pretty vocal, to those issues were it is aligning with its real agenda and easily suspended when it is not.

My weekend reading provided me with two clear examples.

Forget the criticism about Bush suspending Human Rights and constituently protected rights in face of terrorism threat. Here is a suggestion to ignore the public opinion, or any real debate and enforce clean air legislation in non-democratic fashion:

Real disadvantage: public deliberation

One doesn’t want to be sentimental, but there is something to the argument that shift of this significance should be discussed in public and shaped by the public’s elected representatives. It would be nice, in an ideal world, if reasoned debate and discussion and interest-balancing yielded the perfect program.

But in this world, we’re perilously late getting underway and Obama must weigh America’s procedural ideals against what a wise man once called the “fierce urgency of now.” Whatever it’s other merits, the Clean Air Act is now.

One might argue that the above suggestion is not typical and somewhat extreme. However I tend to agree with George Will’s analysis, discussing the “fairness doctrine” (Which is, by the way, another use of newspeak.), about the underline suppression of opposing ideas:

Reactionary liberalism, the ideology of many Democrats, holds that inconvenient rights, such as secret ballots in unionization elections, should be repealed; that existing failures, such as GM, should be preserved; and, with special perversity, that repealed mistakes, such as the “fairness doctrine,” should be repeated. That Orwellian name was designed to disguise the doctrine’s use as the government’s instrument for preventing fair competition in the broadcasting of political commentary.

Because liberals have been even less successful in competing with conservatives on talk radio than Detroit has been in competing with its rivals, liberals are seeking intellectual protectionism in the form of regulations that suppress ideological rivals. If liberals advertise their illiberalism by reimposing the fairness doctrine, the Supreme Court might revisit its 1969 ruling that the fairness doctrine is constitutional. The court probably would dismay reactionary liberals by reversing that decision on the ground that the world has changed vastly, pertinently and for the better.

[...]

If reactionary liberals, unsatisfied with dominating the mainstream media, academia and Hollywood, were competitive on talk radio, they would be uninterested in reviving the fairness doctrine. Having so sullied liberalism’s name that they have taken to calling themselves progressives, liberals are now ruining the reputation of reactionaries, which really is unfair.