What Liberalism Is

I thought Obama's speech was bloody brilliant, obviously, and in particular I thought he did a great job of getting political without getting political, if you will. But there was line where I thought he just got brass-knuckledly partisan:

We should be civil because we want to live up to the example of public servants like John Roll and Gabby Giffords, who knew first and foremost that we are all Americans, and that we can question each other's ideas without questioning each other's love of country and that our task, working together, is to constantly widen the circle of our concern so that we bequeath the American Dream to future generations.

What's partisan here? Well, the phrase "widen the circle of our concern." Because, you see, that little phrase is the entire heart of What Liberalism Is.

When I want to say what underlying moral value serves as the foundation of my political ideology, I almost always say, "kindness." But that's not really accurate, because I don't think there are very many people who think that kindness per se is a bad thing. Kindness, mind you, is defined here as wanting to make the lives of people in general better, by reducing suffering and increasing happiness. I don't really think that very many Tea Party types would tell you that kindness is a bad thing (although I might expect that most people who disapprove of kindness are conservatives). What I do think is that I and they disagree about how broadly to view the sphere of kindness.

Americans are a highly privileged people, in the aggregate, being among the richest societies in history and certainly the most powerful. And the people who tend to hold power in our country tend to be the sort of person who has traditionally held power in America and its Western European forebearers. They tend to be male. They tend to be Caucasian. They tend to be wealthy. They tend to be Christian, and in particular Protestant. They tend to be heterosexual, or at least to say they are heterosexual. They also tend, of course, to be the sort of person who the political system puts in power. Also, they tend to be members of the group Homo sapiens. And I think there is a tremendous tendency among those people in power to extend the scope of their kindness only to people in more or less these same groups. In some cases and along some dimensions, this happens with more malice than others where it's more unthinking, but it tends to happen along all of these dimensions.

Liberalism, to my mind, is largely the desire to widen the circle of our concern, to include women, and Africans, and Asians, and native Americans, and Arabs, and the poor--hell, the middle class, even!--and Catholics, and Jews, and Muslims, and Buddhists, and Hindus, and pagans, and atheists, and gays, lesbians, bisexuals, transsexuals, queers of all sorts, the politically dispossessed of all sorts, and, most radically, the non-human. This is a framework that carries very well from place to place, because there are almost always some people who tend not to get the benefit of kindness in any society. Liberalism is the desire to extend it to them. (I should point out that in my view kindness extends to everyone and everything in this universe or any others that exist, but that most objects in this universe are non-sentient and therefore have no actual interests to help them fulfill.)

That, I think, is why conservatives get so upset about empathy: broad-based empathy is the fundamental basis of liberalism. Of course, they don't like to put it that way, because it sounds bad to say you're opposed to broad-based empathy or kindness. So kudos to Obama, for slipping in a line of utmost partisanship in a way that nobody can actually criticize, and that doesn't actually sound particularly partisan.