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While some books are very thin on facts and heavy on opinion this book is just the opposite- for every point he makes, the author backs it up with numerous and highly memorable statistics, studies, relevant examples from recent and past history before finally giving the reader an overall perspective on each issue. For instance, when he debunks the notion of a liberal media, he does so by not through ranting but through citing studies which tallied the number of liberal talking heads that have appeared on the Sunday shows over the past years, how many hours of total time anyone resembling a liberal gets on cable and network T.V.. When he talks about how little conservatives are willing to deal in shades of gray on issues, he gives numerous very cogent examples of exactly this then goes on to cite studies that show things like people who self-identify themselves as conservatives have less activity in their prefrontal cortexes when they attempt to resolve ambiguous visual stimuli in laboratory conditions, i.e. is that letter an “M” or a “N”?

If you’re looking for facts you can use in conversation or debate, you’d better be ready to take notes. Can you remember every hypocritical Congressman or Senator or political figure of the right who attacked Clinton or gays or drug addicts or the left while engaging in exactly the behavior they were self-righteously condemning? Can you remember their names and positions and what they said and exactly what they did? I lived through all the examples he cites and was disgusted by each, but I have to confess I forgot the names and details. To see them all paraded here was edifying and astonishing- I had no idea there were so many of them and that they were so shamelessly hypocritical; I’m now a lot more fun at Thanksgiving dinner. For instance, Newt Gingrich is gearing up to Being Somebody another go. He lead the charge to impeach Clinton. He’s also the guy who dumped his first wife, who put him through college, with the words “she’s not young enough or pretty enough to be a First Lady” and served her divorce papers at her hospital bed where she was being treated for cancer, then went on to marry a younger woman, then dumped HER later when she came down with MS and finally married another woman 23 years his junior. Still he thought himself in a position to lecture the country, and the Clintons, about the importance of family values and the sanctity of marriage and all that.

Another example: I didn’t know that there was a measure of health care which specifically isolates “cure rate of diseases which are amenable to treatment”. This is important because it shows very starkly just how mediocre American health care really is compared to other countries. This is not something you’ll learn about on Fox.

This is a high quality work. Conservatives will hate it and quite frankly it’s hard to imagine them reading it through, so the audience is probably the converted, but it’s well worth the time it requires to read it. You’ll come away with a ton of facts which, even if you’re politically savvy, you probably haven’t heard before and which taken together devastate a long list of conservative articles of faith such as, “America was founded as a Christian country” or “Europe is in economic decline” or “the U.S. has the best health care in the world” or “there’s a liberal bias in the media” or “the majority of people are conservative” or “the economic golden age of 1945-60 in this country was a result of low taxes and limited government”.

A solid work, a moral work, packed with memorable and effective facts. All stuff, no fluff. Enjoy.

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What’s wrong with Berube’s characterization? First, the race differences Rushton writes about are a matter of scientific observation, not “belief”. Second, he writes number of separate physical and behavioral traits, not of overall superiority or inferiority of any one race. Third, according to Rushton’s analysis, whites are uniformly intermediate between blacks and Orientals! [See Table 1, on page 19 of the Abridged edition, searchable on this website.] It would take a great deal of special pleading and tortuous logic to extract a “genetic superiority of the white race” out of this data. Needless to say, Rushton does not attempt this task.

Liberals like Berube may find repellant the empirical fact that significant race differences exist in such matters as intelligence and brain size, but it is not kosher to shoot the messengers who report such news.

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Briefly, this is not an easy read. I had hoped to find out why liberals are liberals. I still don’t know. As another reviewer commented, the title is strange, and I would add misleading. Read from cover to cover and you will find it difficult to define ‘Why we’re liberal’. Given the title, I expected that the author would set out a definiton of Liberalism and then go on to demonstrate why liberalism makes sense to most americans, and as the sub-title indicated, provide “A political handbook for post-Bush America”. It doesn’t.

The author on page 56, says ‘liberalism is notoriously difficult to define’. I read this several times and wondered, is he trying to tell me that I won’t understand his explanation of liberalism, or is he telling me that he doesn’t know how to define it in relatively direct language? He then goes on to describe liberalisms origins in the Enlightenment, and then later explains the overall goals of contemporary American liberalism by pointing to current social policies in Western Europe. Frankly, it would have been more helpful to me, and I posit to his definitions, had he used our Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights to start, rather than European experiences; the former being more relevant to average americans and the political philosophies which formed this country than the latter.

As several reviewers mentioned, Dr. Alterman makes ‘liberal’ use of Pew polls to argue that Americans are really quite liberal. Here are a few of the examples he uses to butress his arguments: (1) ‘roughly 70 percent of all respondents believe that the government has a responsibility “to take care of people who can’t take care of themselves”; (2) 69 percent of the people believe that the government should guarantee every citizen a place to eat and sleep; (3) 65 percent say corporate profits are too high and about the same number say that labor unions are necessary to protect the working person; (4) 69 percent agree that we should put more emphasis on fuel conservation that on developing new oil supplies; and (5) 60 percent would be willing to pay higher prices in order to protect the environment. I found the wording of these, along with the percentages of respondents interesting, and compared these to another set of poll results I had recently seen, these the results of six nationwide polls across both democrat and republican party members as well as independents, taken mid 2007(see http://www.americansolutions.com). Here are the top ten results: (1)96% believe that it is important for the President and Congress to address the issue of social security in the next few years; (2) 95% believe we have an obligation to be good stewards of God’s creation for future generations; (3) 94% believe that children should be allowed a moment of silence to pray to themselves in public school if they desire; (4) 93% believe that Al Qaeda poses a very serious threat for the United States; (5) 93% believe that, in the worker visa program, each worker should take an oath to obey United States law, and to be deported if the worker commits a crime while in the United States; (6) 93% believe that it is important to acknowledge today that the reference to God in the Declaration of Independence-that we are endowed by our Creator with rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; (7) 92% believe that our focus should clearly be to provide long term solutions instead of short-term fixes; 91% believe we should dramatically increase our investment in math and science education; (8) 91% believe we should hold local governments to the same standards for cleaning waste water as are applied to private industry; (9) 90% approve of a Christmas tree or a Menorah being placed on public property during the holiday season, and (10) 90% believe we should give tax credits to home owners and builders who incorporate alternative energy sources in their homes, like solar, wind, and geothermal energy. While taking all polls with a grain of salt, in comparing the two sets of results, I note that the percentages in the second set are all significantly greater than those used by the author, not just a majority, or even say two thirds, but 9 out of ten respondents across the political spectrum. I leave it to the reader to decide to what extent the polling results support his contention that the country is moving in a liberal direction.

In Chapter 3, Dr. Alterman describes at length the challenges that liberals must overcome, including, the word liberal itself, the racial and ethnic conflicts originating in the 1964 Civil Rights Act (cost the Democrats the solid south), class conflict abortion and gender politics, secular vs religious conflict, victimization politics, indiscipline and political disorganization, and short-termism, to list just a few. I see these as realistic criticisms / challenges for liberals / democrats. For example one only has to look at the continuing challenges in the primary process on the Democratic side, including the question of what to with the Michigan and Florida delegations, to give a nod to the question of political disorganization. The chapter is reasonably well done. Unfortunately the remainder of the book does little to provide workable answers to these.

Much of the following chapters is less an explanation supporting the book title, than it is a pillorying of Conservatives; from the supposed dominance of Conservative media, to the personal pecadilloes of individual Conservatives, and red states compared to blue states. All make good talking points if your objective is to argue that liberals are ‘good’ people and conservatives are not, however, do little to explain why any one is a liberal. Also, arguing that Keith Olbermann or Chris Matthews represent a center or even center right while Rush Limbaugh is far far right, and that Media Matters is something other than a liberal media channel, only obfuscate not clarify. Rush is on the right. Media Matters is on the left, not in the middle.

In a particularly strange chapter on activist judges, the author quotes two legal scholars who have created a measure of judicial activism based on decisions to strike down legislation as unconstitutional. Until I read this section, I had assumed, as I believe most do, that activism on the part of the judiciary did not require actual action, ie striking down of legislation. That is judges could be activists by either quietly sitting by and allowing legislation to continue, or by striking down legislation. The common meaning of ‘judicial activism’, I believe requires examining the grounds on which judicial decisions are made. Judicial restraint is based on the interpretation of laws according to the meaning the words had when the laws were written, while ‘judicial activism’ allows for any interpretation of the words, from a wide range of sources. Regardless of the role I believe that the Supreme Court should take, changing the definition mid-stream, seems to a sort of ‘authorial activisim’ to obtain a logically faulty result! I ask, was it really necessary for the author to defend ‘activist’ Supreme Court decisions by changing the definition of activisim itself? If so, then this ought to be listed in Chapter 4, along with the other historical problems facing liberals!

The final chapter is a reasonably solid effort, and should have come after Chapter 2, obviously written to follow the flow of the argument. Then eliminate the attacks on Conservatives, and go on to exmplain ‘liberalism’ in positive language. Finally, I do agree with the author, that efforts to replace the term ‘liberal’ with alternatives such as ‘progressive’ waste energy, and provide more fodder for those who are not liberals. Accept the term and get on with the political challenges facing the country. Libertarians are happy to be named such, and conservatives don’t have a problem with their appelation. The problem isn’t the name it is the failed policies and inconsistent, short-term behavior that needs to be addressed.

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Packer’s father, by contrast, was a pointy-headed academic. He grew up as a shy Jewish boy and moved into the ivory-tower life after some time spent in World War II; Packer paints the war years as rather uneventful for the senior Packer — indeed little more than a pause from his books. I felt a lot of empathy with the dad; I was the same way when I was a kid, and I’m sure that if I went off to fight a war I’d be mailing home to ask for books and magazines just as much as Packer Sr. was.

I also drew a lot from Packer’s portrait of his father, because in that portrait Packer seems to have discovered why liberals keep losing elections. Packer Sr. was an Adlai Stevenson man — Stevenson, the charismatic, brilliant loser. In a better world, Stevenson would have been our president, but in this world he lost the race twice. The term egghead became popular because one of the Alsops tagged Stevenson with it.

And ever since Stevenson, says Packer, liberalism has been dominated by rather bloodless intellectuals who can’t argue persuasively against the bread-and-butter issues that let Republicans win. The common thread among these intellectuals, says Packer, is a love of abstract debate, and the belief that human problems can be solved by the judicious application of reason — that we can all get along and solve our issues without yelling or fighting. That’s fine and good, and as far as it goes it’s no more modern than Jefferson. The Jeffersonian strain is one of the key strands that Packer identifies in liberal thought.

Where it starts losing elections, he says, is when the intellectuals start to take it over. Discussions shift from individual people — this man lost his land, this man’s family is starving because of government policies — to larger universal themes like freedom, equality, justice, and the rule of law.

This adherence to principles loses us elections. It lost Stevenson the election against Eisenhower when he stood up for fairness and impartiality in the anti-Communist witchhunts; he himself was a strong anti-Communist, but he framed his beliefs in terms that Nixon could tear apart.

This doesn’t play with the public. The public is more concerned with outcomes than with processes. If the public doesn’t feel safe, it will not vote for abstract principles that seem to help their enemies. We could argue for civil liberties all we want, but Republicans will always come back with the argument that they’re helping protect us from terrorists. When it comes to a battle between safety and our Constitutional freedoms, safety will always win.

This, at least, is the message that Packer seems to be sending so far. His diagnosis does seem spot on. And his delivery is just right: he cuts back and forth between an impersonal political tale — how liberals have ended up in the mess we’re in — and a personal story about discovering his father’s and grandfather’s role in it all. It is at once autobiography and political cautionary tale. I’m amazed that he could pull it off.

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The author (and his co-conspiritors)unwillingly debunked his book when details of journolist surfaced. Bummer, huh?