David Brooks Wonders Where The Liberals Are - I Say "Here I Am!"

David Brooks doesn't talk to enough people, it seems. Liberals are everywhere!

Still, Brooks does have a point that liberals don't have much faith in government as a solution these days. I think the British writer Godfrey Hodgson pointed out two reasons in his book from the 70's, "America In Our Time: From World War II To Nixon."

As I recall Hodgson's argument, part of the doubt is watching just how deep into the thicket of regulations you have to get to single out the factors that cause the troubles people have to deal with. The thicket of air pollution regulations (using an example that I'm somewhat familiar with) is frighteningly complex, all in order to deal with smoke in an measured way. And that's just smoke. You don't have to be a conservative to wonder if the complexity of the effort is worth the cost.

Second, some of the most vexing problems people have to deal with seem inherent in human beings, and seem to defy governmental solutions. An excellent example is drug abuse. How to stop it? What programs work? The most-effective solutions so far seem to rely on religious or spiritual engagement, but that fails far too often too.

Still, government can do some things (like Social Security) quite well, and that's where the support of us liberals is very important. And we liberals are here, if Brooks would just ask around. Some of the people who describe themselves as conservatives are actually liberals:

Why aren’t there more liberals in America?

It’s not because liberalism lacks cultural power. Many polls suggest that a majority of college professors and national journalists vote Democratic. The movie, TV, music and publishing industries are dominated by liberals.

It’s not because recent events have disproved the liberal worldview. On the contrary, we’re still recovering from a financial crisis caused, in large measure, by Wall Street excess. Corporate profits are zooming while worker salaries are flat.

It’s not because liberalism’s opponents are going from strength to strength. The Republican Party is unpopular and sometimes embarrassing.

Given the circumstances, this should be a golden age of liberalism. Yet the percentage of Americans who call themselves liberals is either flat or in decline. There are now two conservatives in this country for every liberal. Over the past 40 years, liberalism has been astonishingly incapable at expanding its market share.

The most important explanation is what you might call the Instrument Problem. Americans may agree with liberal diagnoses, but they don’t trust the instrument the Democrats use to solve problems. They don’t trust the federal government.