This question was asked by Roger L. Simon 10-10-13, on Facebook, perhaps flummoxed by the conduct of Congressional Democrats and POTUS. I will try to answer that question, but in no particular order.
First though we must distinguish between anticommunist social democrats and those hard Leftists who have joined the progressive movement and who may formulate many of its political and cultural positions. This separation is not easy to determine, as even the communist historian Eric Hobsbawm wrote like a social democrat in his last books. These are Popular Front tactics, and “liberals” today are more likely to be the “moderate conservatives” of yesterday, or, as I call them, “corporatist liberals.” (See https://clarespark.com/2009/08/09/what-is-a-corporatist-liberal-and-why-should-they-frighten-us/. This is the only link to prior blogs that I will include in my overview of today’s pseudo-liberals.)
The POTUS appointment of Janet Yellin suggests Keynesian economics will rule the Fed. Even Maynard Keynes would not have approved of the promiscuous use of his demand-stimulus measures today; it was intended for the Great Depression, and many countries indulged in the bureaucratic collectivism that he sponsored during the 1930s. But Lord Keynes was a conservative economist, a point lost on today’s journalists, especially Paul Krugman.
To answer Roger L. Simon most directly, liberals advocate “social justice” through the welfare state. Since American history is a horror story as “liberals” tell it through their command of the textbook industry and school curricula, reparations are in order. Hence the preferential treatment for Green corporations, affirmative action, and separatist cultural studies departments, including “whiteness studies.”
The term cultural studies requires unpacking: Liberals abhor “the melting pot” that ostensibly turned out lookalike robots fashioned by Fordism, but advocate the furtively racialist notion of multiculturalism and the hyphenated American. The intent is to defame classical liberalism as racist, while promoting their racialist discourse as emancipating. Cultural relativism (distorted beyond recognition from its Enlightenment intent) has dissolved empiricism and science along with universally comprehended facts and cultural syncretism.
In practice Liberals have lengthened the Popular Front against Republicans. The Communist Party of the 1930s first abhorred the “social fascists” of the New Deal, but then adopted the Comintern–generated Popular Front against fascism, circa 1934-35. As late as the end of the red decade, CP writers (especially Stalinists) were blaming big business for Nazism, thus appealing to the strong (often anti-Semitic) populism and isolationism that characterized the US after the Great War. Oddly, movement conservatives sympathetic to small business are often equally anti-elitist, giving much needed ammunition to the failed Democratic Party that swears allegiance to the New Deal and the welfare state. Bereft of sound economic arguments (the New Deal failed), many liberals pursue social/cultural issues with as much zeal as movement conservatives. For instance, Democratic pols nail the Right’s supposed “war on women,” and put great energy into abortion rights, gay marriage, and “secularism.” It is my own suspicion that aggressive atheists are either agents provocateurs or convinced leftists seeing all religion as the opiate of the masses.
Many liberals don’t mind Jonah Goldberg’s best-seller Liberal Fascism. But his tirade against “the nanny state” conflates paternalism with maternalism, and in effect makes American Progressives the inspiration for European fascism. This was a mistake on Goldberg’s part, as a few academics noted, but who pays attention to these characters nowadays? The final effect is to make real American proto-fascism invisible.
Fascists opposed the labor movement and the Soviet experiment, and the forms fascism took in Europe were distinctive and historically specific. They were all movements of the Right, even though Hitler and Mussolini shared a populist past above all opposed to “laissez-faire capitalism,” and those aspects of modernity that emancipated the imagination and gave voting rights and free public education to the dreaded lower orders.
What corporatist liberals do NOT want, besides communism: Since the liberal base is composed of incoherent constituencies with widely differing demands, they cannot form a rational set of ameliorative changes. They are trapped in time, beholden to discredited ideas such as Wilsonian internationalism and the organicist rhetoric of the political family/nation.
The ideologies I have described are tackled in depth throughout this website and understood by many authors on the right, and I can only wonder why PJM’s ex- CEO Roger Simon is ever at a loss to explain “what liberals want.” Women may not know what they want in all cases, but as a writer himself, Simon must know that his opponents want to obliterate the very notion of the individual and to substitute collectivist categories for how we think of our unique, irreplaceable selves and the world. The “liberal” “will to power” (often discussed on the internet) is not power for its own sake, but “power” for well-meant, but finally utopian, objectives, as ”…experience hath shewn, that even under the best forms of government those entrusted with power have, in time, and by slow operations, perverted it into tyranny…..” (Thomas Jefferson, http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch18s11.html) .
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