Fake Liberals

One of my favorite bloggers, MaxedOutMama, disputes a recent post where I characterized those opposing spreading democracy in the mid-East as liberals. According to M_O_M, such views are anything but liberal:

No true liberal ever stood for this. I could slap a red hat on my head, pick up a shepherd's crook and go to Rome, calling myself a cardinal, but the real cardinals would know my lie.

Real liberals support the essence of liberalism - that all human beings share the same essence and the same potential. Real liberals don't say these things, even quietly and among themselves. Real liberals gave birth to representational forms of government, real liberals expanded those promises to include those originally thought not capable of participation in it and real liberals have fought a slow and painful battle to eradicate barriers to freedom.

Having recovered sufficiently from my flu-induced stupor to reply, I agree that "real liberals" would do no such thing for the reasons she states. But perhaps there's a shortage of "real liberals," because plenty who claim to be "liberal" are far less charitable:

• Initially, many claim that President Bush never claimed spreading freedom to justify the invasion of Iraq. Wrong, as I've previously quoted--but many of the folks I'm describing refuse to acknowledge the point.



• My post was in partial response to this article, which castigated Bush and the neo-cons for "remaking the Middle East in their own image, controlling the oil lands (the so-called "arc of instability") of the world, and, oh yes, of "democracy" of a sort."



• Plenty self-described liberals have concluded democracy and Islam are incompatible, most famously, Adam Garfinkle in The National Interest. And, though I won't claim they're representative, regulars in the anti-Bush Yahoo chat rooms spew this all the time.

Singapore's founder Lee Kuan Yew still defends the authoritarianism he built into that nation's law and culture, claiming a:

fundamental difference between Western concepts of society and government and East Asian concepts . . . [and leaving] little doubt that a society with communitarian values, where the interests of society take precedence over that of the individual, suits them better [than democracy].

Lee's no liberal. But it's remarkable how much he sounds like many anti-war leftists.

Could it be that today's liberals aren't "real liberals?" I think so--but, M_O_M, I'd rather you told 'em.