Column: What it means to be liberal

Candidates Kelly Ayotte, left, and Joyce Craig held their first New Hampshire gubernatorial debate along with Stephen Villee at the Event Center by Marriot in Nashua on Wednesday morning, September 25, 2024. (Concord Monitor - Geoff Forester)

Candidates Kelly Ayotte, left, and Joyce Craig held their first New Hampshire gubernatorial debate along with Stephen Villee at the Event Center by Marriot in Nashua on Wednesday morning, September 25, 2024. (Concord Monitor - Geoff Forester) Concord Monitor — GEOFF FORESTER

Contributor Wayne Gersen in West Lebanon, N.H., on April 12, 2019. (Valley News - Geoff Hansen) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com.

Contributor Wayne Gersen in West Lebanon, N.H., on April 12, 2019. (Valley News - Geoff Hansen) Copyright Valley News. May not be reprinted or used online without permission. Send requests to permission@vnews.com. Geoff Hansen

By WAYNE GERSEN

For the Valley News

Published: 10-11-2024 4:23 PM

New Hampshire’s Governorship is one of the few competitive elections in the nation. The campaigns of former GOP senator and state attorney general Kelly Ayotte and Democrat Joyce Craig, former mayor of Manchester, are flooding the airwaves and our mailboxes with advertisements.

One glossy flyer delivered to my mailbox a few days ago from New Hampshire Republican Committee Chair Chris Ager, got my attention, and not in a good way. It featured a particularly unflattering picture of Craig standing in front of a dirty, graffiti-covered brick wall. The most prominent word on the wall is “liberal,” which appears in large, yellow block letters on the upper left-hand corner.

As we have come to understand over the past few decades, “liberal” is meant to mean “bad.” Yet, according to the dictionary a “liberal” is someone who is: “willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own; open to new ideas.” Wikipedia defines “liberalism” as “…a political and moral philosophy based on the rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, right to private property and equality before the law.”

As one who strives to be open-minded and unapologetically endorses liberalism’s political and moral philosophy, it is sad to see that the Republican party has persuaded the public that the term “liberal” is an epithet. It is even more distressing that Republican voters do not fully comprehend that those who oppose liberalism are, by definition, “illiberal.” That is, they seek to restrict freedom of thought or behavior.

It is especially distressing that the GOP State Committee’s approach to the campaign thus far has been to denigrate Joyce Craig and demonize Massachusetts, a decidedly liberal state with a strong safety net, a strong economy, progressive taxes, and a demographically diverse population.

Today’s toxic political environment, where campaigns for public office are based on ad hominem attacks and innuendo instead of policy, is the result of the Trumpification of the Republican Party. Once the Party of Lincoln, which strove to keep the nation unified, the Trumpified GOP now seeks to divide us by demonizing and vilifying those who are not “true Americans” and seeking to expel them from our country or incarcerate them. The GOP, a party that once purged itself of McCarthyism, today effectively ex-communicates any “impure” party member who is “willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from one’s own,” classifying and then taunting them as RINOs: Republicans in Name Only. The GOP, once the party of fiscal responsibility, now calls anyone who refuses to cut taxes without any regard for the impact of those cuts on the deficit as a “socialist.” The GOP, which two decades ago ran on a platform of Compassionate Conservativism, now seeks to cut back on funding for education, women’s health and social services.

Before Donald Trump assumed the leadership of the Republican Party in 2016, the two Republican candidates who preceded him touted the bi-partisanship needed in a democracy. John McCain took pride in his ability and willingness to reach across the aisle to seek middle ground on key pieces of legislation. Mitt Romney, as governor of Massachusetts, the state now vilified by Kelly Ayotte, introduced a health care plan that Massachusetts’ Democratic legislature overwhelmingly passed, a health care plan that served as the blueprint for Obamacare.

Both former candidates are now reviled by the Trumpified party faithful. After the GOP House voted to repeal Obamacare, in 2017 John McCain cast the deciding vote in the Senate to sustain it. Three years later, Romney made history when he became the first senator in American history to vote to remove a president of his own party from office. Neither former candidate has any influence within the party today, joining former President George W. Bush and former Vice President Dick Cheney on the RINO list.

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In retrospect, the emergence someone like Donald Trump could have been predicted. At a 2008 Town Hall campaign event, John McCain gently but firmly corrected a woman who called Barak Obama “an Arab” and a man who said he was scared that Obama might win. His responses, that “Senator Obama is a decent family man” and “a person you don’t have to be scared of,” were greeted with boos and heckling. Eight years later, those who booed McCain’s civility cheered as GOP candidate Donald Trump belittled his opponents in the party primaries, signaled his support for the racist and xenophobic factions in his party, promised to jail his opponent should he win, demeaned the “lamestream media” and mocked a handicapped New York Times reporter, famously proclaimed that he could shoot someone in broad daylight in New York City and not lose any votes, and bragged about his ability to attract women.

Now, 16 years after audience members booed John McCain’s defense of Barak Obama, the Trumpification of the Republican party is complete. Bipartisan RINOs like Romney and McCain are purged and illiberal politicians who support the ideas set forth in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 are in control. As a result, every election from the president to the local school board is a referendum on democracy itself. In November I hope we elect open-minded leaders who will work collaboratively to find common ground on even the most contentious issues.

Wayne Gersen is a retired public school administrator. He lives in Etna.