I was a liberal before I knew what the word meant, before I had read a word of Locke, Mill, Berlin, and Rawls, before, in fact, I knew anything about the world at all. Liberalism was not a political idea; it was a family loyalty, born in the blood, and it became a way of life. We liberals commonly tell ourselves that, unlike the far right and the far left, we reach our beliefs through a rational inspection of the world as it is, but I didn’t get my ideas that way. I didn’t form my convictions through a critical evaluation of evidence about life as it actually was. I was born a liberal. My parents were liberals, their friends were liberals, and my father worked for thirty years for liberal governments in Canada. Some of my earliest memories are political: at the age of five, in 1952, watching the Republican convention with my parents on the first fuzzy black- and-white TV we ever owned. My parents were Canadian diplomats in Washington, and they were for Adlai, not Ike, and like their American friends they were horrified by McCarthy, the scowling Republican bully who presided over the Senate Army hearings. So before I knew anything at all, pretty much as soon as I could stand up and put on my own clothes, the label had been sown into the shirt on my back. While other kids had baseball or hockey stars for heroes, mine were Jack and Bobby Kennedy, Bayard Rustin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks. By the age of twelve, I was copying Jack Kennedy’s mannerisms. I couldn’t do the Boston brahmin accent, but I could put my hand in my blazer pocket, with my thumb down the front seam, the way he did. By the time I was twenty-one I knew by heart Bobby Kennedy’s improvised speech in Indianapolis on the night of King’s assassination, to comfort a shocked and grieving black crowd, quoting Aeschylus about the “awful grace of God”. In those terrible months of spring and early summer in 1968, when both King and Kennedy were murdered, I campaigned for Pierre Trudeau, bringing delegates over to our side in the tumultuous five ballot struggle at the convention that elected him leader of the Liberal Party and then traveling with him on the cross-country campaign that elected him Prime Minister in June 1968. I was twenty-one years old. Bliss it was in that dawn. It was the only political campaign I have ever been part of where we knew we were going to win, the only question was by how much. It was also the only political campaign where I saw what winning meant. Two nights after his victory I was invited out to Harrington Lake, the Prime Minister’s country residence, to dine with him and one of his then current girlfriends. Instead of exhilaration, there was exhaustion in Trudeau’s eyes, and I thought I saw fear too, in his dawning realization of what it meant to hold power. My heroes may have been Americans, but my liberalism was Canadian all the way down. Liberalism prides itself on its cosmopolitanism, but in truth all liberalisms are local, since, as the man said, all politics is local. Canadian liberalism had all the self-congratulatory earnestness particular to a small official elite, to whom my parents belonged. It was a managerial doctrine of moderation appropriate for a small country, with no imperial destiny like its neighbor next door, but instead trying to muddle through, holding together a continental nation-state the size of America but with a tenth of its population in a harsh but beautiful landscape where, as Margaret Atwood said a long time ago, the name of the game was survival. Yet, in its muddling way, Canada did more than survive. In the surge of postwar prosperity Canadian liberalism did some great things, a new national flag, a new constitution and charter of rights, a new immigration policy, a national pension and a national health care program. The canard that liberalism never dares to take on big enemies is false. To make all this happen, liberal governments had to take on provincial governments, resurgent Quebec nationalism, and vested interests coast to coast, chief among them the pharmaceutical companies and the doctor’s lobbies. So I grew up with a liberalism that knew how to fight. It was unafraid to tame capitalism and to “socialize” medicine and pensions in order to take the fear of catastrophic illness and poverty in old age out of people’s lives. Liberalism’s victories in the 1950s and 1960s laid the foundations of a welfare state not just in Canada, but also in Europe and America. Lyndon Johnson’s administration secured Medicare for elderly Americans and Head Start for poor children. We liberals of the 1960s thought we had laid the granite of basic security under everyone’s feet. Sixty years later, the granite is cracking, the liberal state is frayed, contested, underfunded, straining at the seams, and we are defending our achievement, and none too successfully, against populists and authoritarians who want to take it apart. They have mobilized resentment at the price of social solidarity, but they offer no solutions, or solutions so drastic, such as the forcible deportation of millions of migrants, that they would tear society to pieces. A politics that stokes anger without proposing solutions is not a politics. It is only manipulation, and we like to think that we are in the solution business. We are right about that, but we keep on defending achievements of long ago instead of raising our sights and finding a way to fund and reinvent social solidarity for the twenty-first century. For my heyday — 1945 to 1975, what the French call les trente glorieuses, the glorious thirty years of robust growth and relative equality — has gone forever. Beginning with the oil crisis of the 1970s, an abyss slowly opened up between a credentialed elite and an uncredentialed working class whose steady union jobs
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