This may come as a shock to some but a liberal college professor was among the most influential people in this conservative’s life. In fact, I often wonder whatever happened to liberals like Dr. Jerry Polinard.
Polinard was my constitutional law professor at Oklahoma State University – I know, shocker, I didn’t go to an Ivy League school like the really smart people – and I loved his class more than any other, even though he and I passionately disagreed on just about everything.
He was an inspiring teacher who clearly loved the teachable moments made possible in the humorous and constructive repartee between teacher and student in the college classroom. More important, he always made a persuasive case for genuine American liberalism, while also taking seriously the conservative critique of that view.
His was the liberalism of counterpoised power on behalf of individual freedoms. He argued that concentrations of power often develop in certain sectors of capitalist economies with large corporations. And our decentralized, federal system sometimes lets local and state governments abuse individual rights or groups of people who are powerless to defend themselves, such as the Jim Crow era for Blacks in the rural South and urban North.
To protect the freedom and opportunity for all individuals equally, only the federal government has the requisite power to oppose such hurtful combinations, so it is justified in pursuing activist government initiatives like anti-trust litigation, consumer protection and civil rights legislation. First Amendment rights also must be protected first and foremost to insure the free flow of public debate.
You need not agree with that argument to appreciate that it is imminently reasonable, logical, and at least arguably based on historical fact. Add Polinard’s wise-cracking, insatiable gusto for debate and the result was usually a wonderfully constructive discussion.
Here’s another shocker. Among the American politicians I most admire is Hubert H. Humphrey, the “Happy Warrior” from Minnesota. His “I am ready to lead this nation” acceptance speech at the chaotic 1968 Democratic National Convention was a rhetorical masterpiece now lost to history, thanks to Mayor Daley and the Chicago 7.
Polinard viewed him as something of a relic, as I recall, but Humphrey always struck me as the classic voice of the logical, humane and patriotic American liberalism that once commanded the loyalty and votes of millions of people.
But now, four decades later, the liberalism of that former time has become the progressive movement. Today’s “liberals” have confiscated two-thirds of the Big Three, they are moving rapidly to take over one fifth of the U.S. economy by nationalizing health care, and they are on the verge of putting environmental bureaucrats in charge of the most minute details of daily American life, allegedly to save the rest of us from the apocalyptic horrors that are sure to come if a mythical global warming is not stopped.
And along the way, they’ve confiscated trillions of dollars of wealth generated by the sweat and creativity of millions of working Americans who pay taxes, and given it to millions of people who are dependent upon tax-funded paychecks and benefits, government contracts and federal spending programs. They call this “spreading the wealth around,” but they always make sure generous helpings go to their favorite special interests like Big Labor, ACORN, the NEA, civil service bureaucrats, and the trial lawyers.
Worst of all, they have all-but-destroyed academic freedom by imposing speech codes in public and private schools across the country, restricted political expression via campaign finance “reform,” suppressed full and open scientific inquiry on issues related to evolution and the origins of life, effectively repealed the due process and equal protection of the law clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment via Affirmative Action and other race-based policies, and fostered collectivist, group-think multi-culturalism on citizen political participation in elections and policy making.
How did liberalism degenerate from the honorable activism of HHH to the special interest-led Nanny State of Nancy Pelosi, from a devotion to protecting individual rights to relentlessly expanding government as an end in itself?
Liberals old and new forgot what the old Puritan divine John Cotton knew long ago: Government is like the tiger tied to a stake in the morning. By noon, it knows the full length of its tether. It might even be a friendly tiger, straining to be free so that it can turn back other predators. But it is still a tiger and soon enough it devours even those who unleashed it.
Mark Tapscott is editorial page editor of The Washington Examiner and proprietor of Tapscott’s Copy Desk blog on washingtonexaminer.com.
