George McGovern: "The Case For Liberalism, A Defense Of The Future Against The Past"
Excerpt: My friend Bob Dole is fond of Robert Frost's observation that a liberal is someone who won't "take his own side in a quarrel." I will. I believe that the most practical and hopeful compass by which to guide the American ship of state is the philosophy of liberalism. Virtually every step forward in our history has been a liberal initiative taken over conservative opposition: civil rights, Social Security, Medicare, rural electrification, the establishment of a minimum wage, collective bargaining, the Pure Food and Drug Act, and federal aid to education, including the land-grant colleges, to name just a few.* Many of these innovations were eventually embraced by conservatives only after it became clear that they had overwhelming public approval for the simple reason that almost every American benefited from them. Every one of these liberal efforts strengthened our democracy and our quality of life. I challenge my conservative friends to name a single federal initiative now generally approved by both of our major parties that was not first put forward by liberals over the opposition of conservatives.
We need conservatives, of course, to challenge liberal ideas and proposals and to impel us to examine their soundness, but we cannot depend on conservatives to offer constructive new ideas of the sort that might bring about a more just and equitable society or a more peaceful and cooperative world. If we assume that Lincoln, the first Republican president, was a liberal (which he surely was), nothing inspiring has come out of the conservative mind since the age of John Adams. As my friend and sometime debating partner William F. Buckley puts it in his book Up from Liberalism, Conservatism is the tacit acknowledgment that all that is finally important in human experience is behind us; that the crucial explorations have been undertaken, and that it is given to man to know what are the great truths that emerged from them. Whatever is to come cannot outweigh the importance to man of what has gone before.
The business of conservatives is, in other words, to cling tightly to the past, and although such a stance can be admirable, a stale and musty doctrine is of little use at a time when the nation needs not to fear the future but to seek out ways to improve it.
Instead of spreading fear across the land, our leaders should be asking themselves, and asking us, thoughtful questions about the world in which we live.
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