Cultural Liberalism Is Not Enough - Eric Alterman/NYT

Cultural Liberalism Is Not Enough
By ERIC ALTERMAN - NYT
April 7, 2012, 4:33 PM

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As White House aides and Congressional leaders flood the media with dueling leaks about just how far President Obama was willing to go last summer to meet the budget-cutting demands of House Speaker John A. Boehner, many liberals have reacted with shock and horror at how much of their historic achievement the president appears to have been ready to bargain away. If a Democratic president could consider cutting America’s shredded safety net further when unemployment remained stiffly high and the country was undergoing an explosion of inequality, was the “liberal moment” of American politics finally over?

Yet Maryland recently became the eighth state to join the same-sex marriage club (which includes the District of Columbia). Rush Limbaugh was force-fed a triple helping of crow for his failed attempt at “slut shaming,” after opening up the gender gap again. Women, young people, college graduates and mixed-race Americans, surveys indicate, are spurning conservative arguments about contraception, same-sex marriage and sexual freedom.

In other words, economic liberalism is on life-support, while cultural liberalism thrives. The obvious question is why. The simple answer is that cultural liberalism comes cheap. Supporting same-sex marriage or a woman’s right to choose does not cost the wealthy anything or restrict their ability to become wealthier. But there is more to it than that.

The United States has undoubtedly become a fairer, more open and less oppressive society thanks largely to the political and cultural struggles waged by liberals during the past half century. The progress in securing basic human and civil rights for women, African-Americans, gay men and lesbians, immigrants and their children, Americans with disabilities and so many others is a testament to liberal courage in the face of adversity and oppression. This was the work of “those who marched and those who sang, those who sat in and those who stood firm, those who organized and those who mobilized,” as Barack Obama recalled on the occasion of the unveiling of the memorial statue of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the National Mall in October.

Liberal optimism regarding race and progress had been buoyed by the belief that, with the right experts running the government, an expanding economic pie could be guaranteed indefinitely, which would in turn purchase peace between feuding factions. But liberals had no ready response when the global economy chose not to cooperate, first with the rise in oil prices following the 1973 Arab-Israeli war and then with the exodus of exactly the kinds of manufacturing jobs that had provided the engine driving the expansion of the middle class in the first place.

The failure of liberals to plan for the failure of their plans — what Saul Bellow once called the “Good Intentions Paving Company” — resulted in a bitter, resentful scramble for the remaining scraps...

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Much More: http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/04/07/cultural-liberalism-is-not-enough/?ref=opinion