American Liberalism Quotes

True American Liberalism utterly denies the whole creed of socialism.

Harvey Weinstein does not personify American liberalism any more than Bill O'Reilly personifies American conservatism.

The fact that populism is flourishing internationally, far from the Electoral College and Fox News, suggests that Trump's specific faults might actually be propping up American liberalism.

The ancient liberal faith ... that our course be governed not by the dead hand of yesterday's facts and prejudices but by the living realities of today and our aspiration for tomorrow. It is this genius for making change serve the eternal unchanging values we cherish that is the very essence of American liberalism.

The principal feature of American liberalism is sanctimoniousness. By loudly denouncing all bad things — war and hunger and date rape — liberals testify to their own terrific goodness. More important, they promote themselves to membership in a self-selecting elite of those who care deeply about such things.... It's a kind of natural aristocracy, and the wonderful thing about this aristocracy is that you don't have to be brave, smart, strong or even lucky to join it, you just have to be liberal.

The search for a moral equivalent of war continues to define American liberalism to this day.

The death of American liberalism as a significant moral force can be traced to the point in when President Bill Clinton signed legislation that effectively ended the main federal anti-poverty program and turned the fate of welfare recipients, 70 percent of whom were children, over to the tender mercies of the states. With a stroke of the pen, Clinton eliminated what remained of New Deal-era compassion for the poor and codified into law the "tough love" callousness that his Republican allies in the Congress, led by Newt Gingrich, had long embraced.

When American liberals go to the UK they see the Tories as the Washington Generals, and they see the Labor Party as the Harlem Globetrotters, and they love that. Total power. Whether anything works or not is irrelevant. We work.

All this marked them as vaguely liberal, although their ideas would never congeal into anything like a firm ideology; in this, too, they were American.