I, Liberal

David Greenberg on being a liberal, as opposed to being a conservative:

I think there's another reason for this budding re-embrace of liberal: the fight against Islamist jihadism. Whatever our views of Bush's policies, liberals and conservatives agree that what divides the West from the terrorists is our commitment to liberal values--liberal in the broad sense of the term that denotes the Enlightenment traditions of freedom, equality, and human rights. Search for the term liberal on sites like that of the Progressive Policy Institute and you'll rarely find it used in distinction to Bush-style conservatism--but often invoked in distinction to al-Qaeda-style fundamentalism. Even the Bushies use "liberal values," if only rhetorically, to describe their project of democratizing the Middle East.

In this context of international conflict, liberal suddenly drops its associations with Volvos and lattes and starts to evoke more noble images of education, voting, free speech, and freedom of religion. It's starting to sound like a label we don't have to run from at all.

count me as a proud Liberal, too. In fact I would go further and say that those who eschew "liberal" for the term "progressive" - those who might rule out Harold Ford or Jim Webb as being insufficiently pure - are just as much my political opponents as the (regrettably) mainstream of the modern Republican party. If the Progressives want the color blue, and the Republicans want the color red, they can have them. Liberals and Conservatives, however: go Purple!

(via Blake)