Welcome to OSLBlog

Hi, I'm oldstyleliberal. My real name is Eric Stewart. This is my political blog.

I call myself an "old-style liberal" because the liberalism I espouse went out of style after the Kennedy and King assassinations in the 1960s.

"From the founding of the country on, the central instinct and pride of the American liberal has been to keep opportunity for individuals open," Theodore H. White wrote in The Making of the President—1972.

White continued, "For two centuries the wars of American liberals — against King George, against the banks, against the slaveholders, against the railways, against the trusts, against the bosses — have reflected a doctrine which is more than politics, a doctrine which is of the essence of the culture of the nation: No man must be locked into or be hammered into a category from which he has no opportunity to escape. He must not be locked in by the color of his skin or his racial genes; he must not be locked in by lack of educational opportunity; he must not be locked in by birth, or parentage, or age or poverty." (Bantam ppbk., p. 40)

By 1972 the Democratic Party was, however, beginning its long and disabling romance with the politics of category. It started, as White documents, with Democrats' lurch to require quotas — not just open representation, but hard quotas — for blacks, women, and youth in state delegations to their national convention of that year.

"The quota idea was a wrench from this [original liberal] tradition," wrote White. "It set up stark categories within the political process; and the voters must, whether they will or not, confirm those categories in selecting representatives."

The liberals inside and outside the Democratic party went on from there to turn the politics of category into the politics of edict — bypassing wherever possible the time-honored politcal processes. Thus, the question of legal abortion was soon to be settled along liberal lines in the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe v. Wade decision, in effect a fiat by unelected officials that took abortion out of the hurly-burly of the legislative arena.

oldstyleliberal thinks the politics of category and of edict have been the downfall of American liberalism. It's time for liberals to reclaim their "central instinct and pride": to fight the oppressors of individual liberty and opportunity without themselves becoming oppressors.

That (re)definition of liberalism as the politics of liberty and opportunity will be the ongoing thrust of this blog!