In 1963, Playboy magazine published the transcript from a debate between conservative writer and commentator William F. Buckley and left-wing journalist Norman Mailer. The title of the piece—“The Conservative versus the Liberal”—sent Mailer into a rage, which he expressed in his subsequent letter to the editor, Hugh Hefner himself.
“I don’t care if people call me a radical, a rebel, a red, a revolutionary, an outsider, an outlaw, a Bolshevik, an anarchist, a nihilist, or even a left conservative,” Mailer wrote. “But please don’t ever call me a liberal.”
If the sentiment sounds oddly resonant, even sixty years later, well, that’s no surprise. The roots of anti-liberalism run deep, according to Kevin Schultz, Ph.D. ’05, professor and chair of the Department of History at the University of Illinois, Chicago. In his latest book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals), Schultz takes a close look at the origins and evolution of the term “liberal” into a sort of political boogeyman.
California spoke with Schultz about the “specter of the white liberal,” and how liberalism would ultimately be demonized by the conservative right wing and progressive left wing, alike.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Who is a white liberal these days, and why do we hate them so much?
My working definition of a white liberal is a Rorschach test. If you tell me what you think a white liberal is, it tells me more about you than it does about liberals. So, if you think a liberal is someone who is a socialist who’s trying to usher in communism and get your kids enticed into a whole bunch of predatory sex schemes and trying to usher in the DEI-centered, woke snowflake rebellion, then I would say that you’re a conservative who probably watches Fox News and respects Tucker Carlson and is interested in QAnon. On the other hand, if you tell me a liberal is someone who is just a beard of the capitalist order who’s not willing to take down corporations to bring about true equality, who focuses on social change but only in a NIMBY kind of way, well, then I would say that you’re probably on the left of the political spectrum, and you might look up to people like AOC or Bernie Sanders. And then on the other hand, if you tell me that a white liberal is a halfway friend who talks a lot about microaggressions but doesn’t do anything about them and whose extent of support for civil rights might be putting a lawn sign in your front yard saying “in this house we believe” but won’t really want to take any decisive action or give up any of your benefits to promote change for equality, then you’re probably a civil rights activist who looks up to Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin and, in today’s terms, Ibram X. Kendi.
They say there’s been a death knell of democracy, and liberals have struck it.
Part of the reason I wrote this book is because I was super interested, as a citizen and someone who lives in the United States, in the rise of political polarization that we’ve seen. We’ve had it around for a while, but it’s definitely been more intense in the last 20 years.
This is when my observations as a citizen collided with my work as a historian. In our era today, there is no center. There’s no middle. And I began to see, in our current politics, everybody making fun of liberals. And the politics that we saw was about “owning the libs” or “triggering the libs.” I started to think that nobody in our politics wants to be a liberal. So my book began to tell the story of how the word liberal went from being a really good thing to being a really bad thing.
It sounds like “liberal” has become a derogatory term that everyone uses to point at someone else. Is anyone assigning it to themselves?
You can still occasionally find people who will begrudgingly admit that they are liberals. But most of the time, when people, especially politicians, get asked by journalists, “Are you a liberal?” they push back. And that goes way back. I have quotations in my book from 2007, when Hillary Clinton was running for the Democratic nomination for president. They asked her, “Are you a liberal?” and she said, “That word used to stand for freedom, but now it means you’re for bureaucracy. So I’m not a liberal by those definitions, but I consider myself a progressive.”
That’s a great quote that gets at the root of the contradiction: The word liberal relates to freedom—something that I think most Americans would say they pretty strongly believe in—but has been so twisted over time that it’s become derogatory. What happened?
It was an assassination. Starting in the 1950s, there were three lines of criticism that came to the forefront. Each of them was trying to make room for their seemingly marginal political movements by attacking the mainstream politics of liberalism. The first movement started in the 1950s and 1960s with William F. Buckley—a right-wing movement to castigate the liberals as quasi-socialists who wanted to bring about the communist revolution. Buckley searched for a term to define his enemies. He thought maybe they should be called “collectivists” or “socialists,” and only in the late 1950s does he land on a word that actually works for him: liberals. This picked up steam throughout the 1950s and 1960s, and you could really see it in the Barry Goldwater campaign.
At the same time, and extending into the 1960s and 1970s, you get this left-wing critique, which comes from intellectuals like Saul Alinsky and Irving Howe, but then extends all the way into the famous musicians of the 1960s, like the Grateful Dead. They reject this sort of suburban picket fence, corporate-based lifestyle that the American mainstream seems to be promoting and begin to attack liberals for foreclosing the political possibilities on the left. A big moment for them, at least in the beginning, was the outlawing of the American Communist Party in 1954. They say there’s been a death knell of democracy, and liberals have struck it.
The third line of critique came from civil rights advocates like James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and Martin Luther King Jr. Black Americans have always had a complicated relationship with white liberals, who have let them down so many times. But after World War II and its ideals, after the Brown v. Board and Shelly v. Kraemer decisions, there was substantial hope in the 1950s and early 1960s that white liberals would actually help Black Americans bring about equality. But starting in 1963, Black Americans began to turn against white liberals as only halfway friends, as NIMBYs who push for equality in places like the South but not in their own hometown.
When and why did the qualifier “white” become attached to “liberal”?
Despite the successful March on Washington and the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the civil rights movement really turns against white liberals and calls them out for being halfway friends. Black civil rights advocates start worrying that white liberals are not actually going to be their friends and their partners in bringing the United States to the promised land of racial equality. Of course, they only wanted to castigate white liberals and not Black liberals. Martin Luther King Jr., for instance, was so entrenched and educated in the liberal tradition that he did not want to exclude himself, but he definitely wanted to critique the white people who were partners or who he thought were partners in the civil rights struggle.
But it’s really the second half of the 1960s when liberalism gets painted in such a light that there’s no coming back for liberals. You get things like the Vietnam War and protests against the Vietnam War, which really polarized the American people. The Republican Party, spearheaded by Richard Nixon, pointed out that these hippy-dippy people who were protesting in the streets were actually elitists who didn’t have to send their kids to Vietnam because they were able to get college deferrals. And then the Democrats themselves sort of turn against the liberal center, and you get phrases like the “limousine liberal.” Mario Procaccino calls John Lindsay a limousine liberal because he’s not a real liberal—or he is a liberal who drives around in a limousine but doesn’t really know who working-class people are.
You can actually pinpoint the origin of that term?
Oh yeah. Procaccino was this sort of Tammany Hall politician from the Democratic Party, and he was trying to make a lane to win the mayoralty of New York City in 1969. He was running against Lindsay, a super-rich guy, good-looking, 6’5, had a quarterback smile. So part of the political trick that this Italian child of immigrants did was to say that Lindsay was a phony person who didn’t represent the true people of New York City. And the phrase that he came up with was “limousine liberal.”
And it stuck.
Absolutely. And it’s part of this turn that happens in the late 1960s when the attacks on the term, on the people who are called liberals, are no longer solely about their policies or their politics, but instead it is about them personally, as being out-of-touch elitists or not real Americans.
In 1968, there were four men running for the Democratic nomination for president after President Johnson decided that he wasn’t going to run. All of those people had called themselves liberals and written books saying “a liberal answer to the problem of conservatism” or “how would a liberal respond” as late as 1965. But in the 1968 election, so far as I could tell, not a single one of them referred to themselves as upholding the liberal tradition in American life. They were all running from the phrase—it’s kind of remarkable.
It makes me wonder if the meaning of the word “liberal” changed or the people who it applies to changed?
Well, I think it’s a tricky question to answer because the answer is both. One of the big findings of the book that really surprised me was that the word liberal is relatively new in American life. People used it here and there, but they didn’t use it to describe any kind of politics before 1932.
I thought it went back to John Locke or to the American founding or something like that. I thought we had this long liberal tradition, and people were proclaiming to be liberals for a long time, but that’s just not true at all.
It was just a social term until the 1930s?
People did not use the word in the United States until—and this was really exciting for me to find—the summer of 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt was running for president in the depths of the Great Depression. He knew a lot of his social programs would be dismissed as being socialism or communism. This was in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917, so he was giving speeches trying to find language that he could use that would defang those critiques. He said that his vision was the liberal vision, which represented the new kind of liberalism devoted to freeing us from the yoke of the economic royalists, from the capitalists who had brought about the economic destruction that was the Great Depression. The term stuck. It was very effective [in showing] that he wasn’t promising to bring about communism on the left or authoritarianism on the right—he was bringing liberalism of the center.
I’m curious if you think white liberals have earned the criticism that they’re spineless, wishy-washy, and have no core beliefs?
My answer is they carry some of the blame, but they haven’t earned this much criticism. For instance, if you take the critique that liberals have only brought about a huge federal government mired in bureaucracy, well, there’s absolutely some truth to that. The Great Society programs of Lyndon Johnson in the 1960s did grow the bureaucracy in Washington DC and did create new regulations that prevented businesses from doing as much as they might want to do. Now, some of those regulations were things like seatbelts, which went on to save lives and save taxpayer dollars. And some of the regulations might be less justified in some ways.
Also this huge bureaucracy has a mind of its own and is less responsive to the will of the electorate. So it makes some sense that these people—which the right has called the “deep state” but really is just a bunch of federal workers—have sort of an agenda, that they want to keep their jobs, and they believe in what it is that they do, even if that does mean that they’re not always doing the will of the people. That lends itself somewhat justifiably to the notion that they’re elitists because they know more about farm regulations than most farmers, and they might know the master plan of what is behind the government policy. So there is some truth to that: that growth of the bureaucracy is a part of liberalism, and bureaucracy functions slowly most of the time.
The liberal as an embodied human being has run its course.
Another example is this notion that they are wishy-washy and halfway friends. Barack Obama is sometimes called a liberal. In 2008 or 2009, when he first became president, and they were in the middle of the 2008 financial recession, what he did was try to uphold capitalism and rebuild the foundations of American capitalist order. He did this by bailing out the banks and by giving billions of dollars to the financial industry, rather than helping out people who were losing their homes or were underwater on their mortgages, or out of work. So there’s a sense that he might have been able to do more for the individual citizen as opposed to helping out the structures.
But I will also say that liberalism has always been meant to be a word that has a changing definition. It’s meant to embody a spirit rather than a set of policies. Its great strength, which also is its great weakness, is its ability to change, its adaptability. As a weakness, it makes [liberalism] seem rootless—it doesn’t have any common solid foundation that everybody can rally behind in the way religious faith or blind nationalism might. That’s why it’s been castigated and [subject] to critiques that it is wishy-washy and that it has no foundation.
Who falls into the canon of today’s liberal or white liberal leaders, and what do you make of them?
My book concludes with the idea that we should not have liberals. Liberals should stop trying to revive that word because it is too much of a specter for the opposition. But what I do think needs to be revived is the spirit of liberalism, which of course derives from the Latin word “free.” It is constantly navigating that core tension in the American experiment between my individual freedom and how much I owe to the community and society around me.
I think that spirit of liberalism is searching right now for a political party or a political identity. The end of my book goes through a few phrases that might be possible ways forward. My greatest hope I put on the phrase “social democracy.” So if we can bring back social democracy or democratic socialism, that might be the way to reimagine what liberalism looks like in the 21st century. If you look at the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, the guy who won, Zohran Mamdani, calls himself a democratic socialist.
You described the right-wing movement and the Conservative Party as, in many ways, being a reaction to liberalism, even defining itself as anti-liberalism. So if liberalism as we think of it were to die, what would that mean?
The liberal as an embodied human being has run its course. But I think liberalism, as defined by the spirit of process and a foundational idea and not a foundational politics, will continue to resonate and live on.
But what this attack on liberals and now liberalism has meant in a serious way is the decline of the center of American politics. A lot of Americans feel that the polar extremes of the right and the polar extremes of the left now have the loudest bullhorns, and there is no sort of common sense party, nobody’s standing up for the center of the bell curve. So I do think this long-term attack on liberals and now liberalism has taken a toll on American political life. I also think that what we’re seeing, especially in Trump 2.0., is a significant attack on some of the major tenets of liberalism itself. When Roosevelt coined that phrase in 1932, he meant it to signify using the federal government to balance out the outweighed and outsized power of corporate America in order to allow individuals to have greater freedom and a social security safety net. And I think one of the things we’re seeing now in Trump 2.0 is not just lip service attacking liberals in order to gain political success, but an actual attack on liberalism as defined by Roosevelt.
It’s really fascinating how much weight a word can carry—that you can trace the etymology of a single term like liberal and use that as a lens to understand decades of political and social history.
I agree completely. That’s why I wrote the book—it blew me away by how much I was uncovering just by studying the uses and abuses of one word.
