The Liberal Brand

I've seen a few articles on the Internet the past week or so about the "liberal brand," with one person arguing that we liberals do a much worse job of branding ourselves than conservatives, partly because we don't know what our real core message/value is, and another person arguing that electorally, it doesn't matter. I'd just like to say that I'm a liberal and I know perfectly well what my core value/message is, or at least the one I refer to by "liberalism." As a liberal, the kind of society I want to see is one where everyone is free to live their life as they see fit. This freedom "to" takes the form of three freedoms "from:" first, freedom from active interference in individuals' pursuit of happiness, as in religiously-inspired anti-gay laws; second, freedom from acute material want, which (given the fact of scarcity) implies no freedom to live a life of such opulence that it forces others into acute material want; and third, ideally, freedom from a restrictive, oppressive culture that might accomplish de facto what the first of my freedoms-from outlaws de jure. The ordering is one of importance and of logical priority, I'd say, although it's a very close case between #1 and #2.

That's my liberalism. If other people who call themselves liberals don't basically agree with me on that, then we're using what amounts to two different words that happen to look and sound alike. But as far as I can tell, liberals in this country actually have a more cohesive vision of what we want this society to look like than conservatives do. If there's a popular perception to the contrary, it's probably mainly because unlike liberals, conservatives have this giant propaganda machine from which 40% of the country gets their "news."