AHC: U.S. liberals successfully defend the word liberal after '88 presidential election.

After Michael Dukakis's loss to George H. W. Bush in the 1988 presidential election, how might the word liberal be successfully defended?
 
That's a tough one, since I think it was the results of trends well established and moving. America was going rightward throughout the 80s, the older liberal guard struggled with this until Clinton's more moderate positions helped revitalize the Democrats and get them back into the Oval Office. To stop the 80s going rightward, you have to go back beyond the 80s, and you soon get to the point that your changes will result in a 1988 that doesn't really resemble ours as well.

In other words, it happened because America was going in that direction. Changing America's course is hard and takes time. It's the same way that barring a miracle, Mondale wasn't going to win in '84.
 
Framing the Sixties: The Use and Abuse of a Decade from Ronald Reagan to George W. Bush
By Bernard von Bothmer, University of Massachusetts Press, 2010.

https://books.google.com/books?id=I...ly twenty points during the campaign"&f=false

' . . . The percentage of voters who considered Dukakis a liberal rose nearly twenty points during the campaign. Historian William Berman called the 1988 campaign "a good example of using the sixties as a bludgeon." Dukakis became the unwilling but hapless target of the Right's enduring anger toward "the sixties." . . . '
This is one view. Plus, Dukakis seriously fumbled on the issue of crime.
 
Yes, I agree, it's a tough challenge. That's kind of what makes it interesting! :)

Oh sure. On the other hand, I've see a fair few threads about the 80s that boil down to left-wing wanks or wishful thinking. I'm leery of them after seeing one too many threads that jam something in without really understanding the era. I don't have a lot of faith in it being done right for a variety of reasons.
 
I want it to be realistic, too.

And nowadays in the twenty-teens, a lot of fellow citizens consider mass incarceration to have been a mistake, but I'm not sure they felt that way back then.
 
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I don't think it's particularly important whether Democrats keep on using the *word* liberal or substitute "progressive" for it. (Ironically, one reason "progressive" had given way to "liberal" is that "progressive" had been discredited by Henry Wallace and his Progressive Party. In the mid-1940's, Dwight Macdonald had complained that "A "liberal" used to be one who favored the spread of liberty: freedom of thought, more humane economic arrangements, the "popular" cause in general against kings or bankers or governments. Today it has become one who favors the extension of governmental authority for reasons of efficiency, especially in wartime. The modern liberal generally calls himself a "progressive," a semantically interesting shift from a term which implies *values* to a term which implies *process.*")

What this thread seems to be about is something rather different: not about Democrats abandoning the *word* liberalism, but some of the policies associated with it before the 1990's.
 
. . .
What this thread seems to be about is something rather different: not about Democrats abandoning the *word* liberalism, but some of the policies associated with it before the 1990's.
Yes, but also the word itself. In fact, conservatives accuse liberals of hiding behind the word progressive. I think they would have been better off if they (me!) had just kept using the word liberal.

The Democratic field in '92 was second string, because a lot of people thought Bush was so popular after victory in the Persian Gulf War that he basically was unbeatable.

Now, Clinton was a first-rate candidate and president, just to be clear about this, but we almost got this by accident.

Clinton ran and won in '92 based on economics, to which he added conservative or moderate stances on social issues, notably crime. I just wonder if he or someone else had still mainly run on economics, but had added primarily liberal stances on social issues.
 
Had Michael Dukakis not got in that damn tank...
dukakistank.jpg

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/po...k-ride-does/wVngluATanikakqmgImh2N/story.html

although Dukakis himself said he made bigger mistakes and earlier mistakes
 
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