Liberalism’s Natural Disadvantage—and How to Overcome It - Michael Tomasky

We are vastly outnumbered, but our record of accomplishment is formidable. Today, though, the task before us is as grave as ever.
I sometimes marvel that liberalism manages to hold its own in this, or really any, country. Its insistence upon openness to change and new ways of thinking is, let’s admit it, a pretty large boulder to be carrying right out of the chute. Your average person is suspicious of change and perfectly content with the old ways of thinking. As much as liberals might wish otherwise, the desire to conserve runs far deeper in the human soul than the desire to reform.

The natural liberal disadvantage is, alas, quantifiable. Going back to 1992, Gallup has done a yearly survey asking Americans if they considered themselves moderate, conservative, or liberal. The 2024 numbers: moderate, 36 percent; conservative, 36; and liberal, just 25. But don’t despair! Twenty-five is good! Back in 1992, the distribution was moderate, 43; conservative. 36; and liberal, 17. (As for left of liberal, Gallup doesn’t even bother, although a 2021 Pew survey that tried to drill down more specifically found “progressive left” clocking in at just 6 percent.)

A stroll through American history makes readily apparent the reality that our default position as a society has been resistance to change, which carries on for ages—or more often, is enforced, and usually brutally—followed by paroxysms of progressive reform, which are in turn followed by backlash against said reform. The periods of liberal regnancy in this country’s 248-year history can easily be counted on one hand.

And yet, given all that, liberal change has proved remarkably durable. People may spend years allowing themselves to be convinced by powerful interests that they’re indifferent to this or that liberal reform; but once it happens, they usually like it. And so conservatives in Washington have not found it easy work to walk back public education, dismantle Social Security, reduce or revoke the federal minimum wage, reintroduce child labor, and so much more. Liberalism constructed the modern welfare state, for mostly better and occasionally worse; every Republican president since Reagan has taken office vowing to smash it, and every one of them has left office being calumniated by fiscally obsessed rightists as just another feckless big spender, unable to reverse liberalism’s grimly inevitable tide. For a creed that is reputed to lack conviction, that’s not a bad track record.

Today, though, is different. Today, it really does feel like the barbarians are at the gate. As Thomas Paine put it, “tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered.” And as the rapper Fat Joe put it, “The shit is real.” We must fight as we never have, or we genuinely and literally stand to lose everything. The assault on the ban on child labor—the ban on child labor!—is the least of it.