Democrat First, Liberal a (Distant) Second

Just a few thoughts on institutions and ideologies.  You can't quite apply the same moral reasoning to institutions that you can to individuals.  The constraints are different, the decision-making process is different, the moral status is of course different.  But you can still think about an institution's role in history, and you can apply some basic judgments.

The reason I bring this up is that some liberals sometimes say that they can never vote Democratic again, because of the party's various sins.  And that's fine, obviously it's important to have some standards when you vote, and if a party doesn't live up to your standards (and another party does), then by all means do what you think is right.

But I just want to observe that as between the Democratic party and the liberal/leftwing movement in American politics, the Democratic party is far more trustworthy on most of the important issues.  I can easily imagine affluent liberals throwing Social Security under the bus, for instance, but I can never imagine the Democratic party doing it.  Affluent liberals are eager to embrace wealth maximization as the logically correct policy criterion, but I doubt the Democrats ever will.

And in particular, I think that while plenty of affluent white liberals are happy to embrace the emerging scientific consensus that blacks are racially inferior to whites, it is absolutely unimaginable that the Democratic party ever will.  Over the period from 1948 to 1968 (that is, from the adoption of the 1948 civil rights plank, through the integration of the military, and then through the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act), the Democratic party bound its destiny so tightly with the rights of black Americans that the two essentially merged into each other.  The Democrats decided that black rights were worth fighting and (politically) dying for, and the result was that whenever the Democrats had power, they used it to roll back the southern reign of terror, to integrate blacks into the key institutions of American society, and eventually to build a society in which overt racism is socially and politically unacceptable in both major parties.  Now, this has worked  out decently well for the Democrats, electorally, but the party is uncompetitive anywhere race is highly salient, and increasingly white people simply won't pull the lever for a Democrat no matter what.

And so now we return to racial science.  Liberals, for a variety of reasons, have put science and the work of scientists on a pedestal and love nothing more than to tar their opponents as "unscientific."  Now, traditionally eugenics was regarded as bad science, that is, not just immoral but factually wrong.  But because liberal rhetoric is aghast at the idea that morals might ever intrude into the world of science, white liberals were only ever a few twin-studies away from eagerly embracing the conclusion that they are simply better (that is, genetically prone to be smarter and less criminally inclined) than black people.  (Black liberals, I suspect, won't be so eager to cast aside the "myth" of racial equality.)

So again, as between the Democrats and affluent white liberals, the Democrats are far more trustworthy, that is, unalterably bound up with doing what is right in the world.  Again, you can't take a complicated institution like a political party and label it "good" or "bad" as a moral matter, especially because so much of the Democratic party's stance is structural (at this point, it needs those black votes).  But the point is that Democrats are implacably on the right side of history, and liberals are squishy.  I know that I will vote Democratic until I die, but I am not nearly so sure that bien-pensant liberalism will be at all attractive to me in 10 years.  I don't even know if it will be recognizably liberal, in the sense of being concerned with the well-being of people who are oppressed or poor.  Its commitments (to technocracy, "science," the market, Muslim-bashing, and the professional classes) are likely to drive it even further into unsavory territory.