[othervoice]

What do we offer people ? Everyday millions of Americans do their best on job, but they don't get a bonus or raise even when they are productive and companies profit. They srtive to pay the bills and hopefully not get wiped out by illness and healthcare costs. Meanwhile one their most important assets- home value declines making them less wealthy. For people in small towns where farming barely sustains life and factories that provided good paying jobs and good lives closed years ago, it makes sense for people to lease or sell land to large energy companies drilling for natural gas. Think about the new movie Promised Land. Small business owners try to live out their dreams and make money. They don't have experts and lawyers to help them understand or evade regulations. Moreover these people and their employees often make four figure salaries so taxes matter. We may not talk about it as much but many self employed people like workers lack health insurance. What do we offer people ? Some will argue for deregulation, eliminating social programs, and lower taxes for the wealthy and corporations claiming these things will allow individual initiative and market forces to create wealth and prosperity. The fact is unregulated capitalism and the absence of welfare only benefits big business and rich people. Conservative and libertarian ideas don't help. At the same time liberals need to think about what we offer working people, communities trying to grow their economies, and small business owners.

Do Democrats or liberal politicians in particular talk about wealth and income inequality? Are helping to save unions and collective bargaining rights a major part of the center left agenda ? Fair trade that protects and stimulates American jobs is not a consideration either. The fact is liberals are not doing enough for working people beyond criticizing and reacting to bad policies on the political right. Fighting for progressive taxation, protecting the right of labor to organize, and fair trade should be parts of an agenda for Congressional and Senate Democrats as much as opposition to proposed cuts in Social Security and Medicare. Liberals from Washington to the statehouse need to be pressed to fight for working people as hard as they do for gay marriage and abortion rights.

When it comes to environmental protection and energy policy we are not thinking about the implications for growth and jobs in depressed communities. I am not saying clean air, water, and renewable energy are not important. In fact some jobs will be lost, but its not so simple for people in certain communities. Some practices need to be controlled through sensible regulation not banned. This won't please environmentalists but their concerns are not the only ones that matter. Consider the practice of hydraulic fracking where water and chemicals are injected underground at high pressure to break up rock formations and release natural gas. The contaminated water and chemicals pose a pollution and health hazard. Alot of environmentalists are pressing hard for a ban on the practice but what about people who need the work ? Parts of Ohio and Pennsylvania are key centers in a natural gas boom. Its cleaner and cheaper than coal, and these burned out industrial communities need jobs and money. I am not so sure anymore that a ban on fracking is best. Call me a "sell out" but liberalism always strives to balance competing claims and interests in the name of individual freedom and equality.

I do not think any business owner large or small will ever see the value of regulations. The vast majority of them simply do not like the idea, however large corporations easily adapt. Its the smaller firms and their owners we have to focus on. We need to make regulations easier for them to comply with while removing unnecessary ones. A lagre multinational firm needs thousands of regulations but your local plumbing contractor or neighborhood bakery does not. People want safe products and a clean environment, but they don't think of small business when it comes to these things. Americans sympathize with outraged small business owners burdened by complex and costly rules. Democrats especially liberals need to reach out to small business groups like the National Federation of Independent Business. We will not agree on the Affordable Care Act but there are other things we need to do for small business together.

People who work hard should be able to improve their quality of life and stay in the middleclass. Small towns trying to revitalize their economies need as much consideration as environmental protection. Small Businesses who create most of the jobs and are the dream for so many individuals need consideration in regulatory policy. Its not enough to criticize the Republican right or libertarians liberals must offer these groups a better deal.

[Distracted]

I was going to change the question to What Do Liberals Offer People, but then, I thought better of it and decided the question to ask is What Does Liberalism Offer People, as liberalism doesn't call for a leader to lead people to the promised land but instead is about seizing the reigns themselves.

So...What Does Liberalism Offer People?
General Answer: Popular sovereignty. The political system of liberal democracy does not discriminate against different viewpoints. Generally speaking a person is free to vote for a wide range of options and according to a wide range of philosophies without running into the actual essential constitutional barriers. You can't vote to take away the vote from people you don't like, but you can vote for specific policies that are liberal, conservative, libertarian, socialist, ecological, whatever. Liberalism is, more than any other school of thought, the ideology of politics itself. It postulates that we as humans are political beings and that organizing politically rather than simply through traditional institutions offers people ways to exercise their individual part of the self-government of the nation's people more directly and with less restrictions than other political schools.

Rather than enshrining a single fixed set of ideas that must be endlessly served to the deteriment of self, be those safeguarded by the ancient institution of the church or by a group of libertarian or socialist philosophers, liberalism has long encouraged people to get out and form political parties, to not be ashamed of mixing politics and society. Whereas previous society was ruled by different undemocratic institutions, the introduction of politics to the sphere previously thought of separate from temporal governance allowed people unprecedented freedom to choose what kind of society they wanted to live in.

I refer to as the best example of this the formation of the first real organized political party in France, the Radicals (Republicans), who organized their political clubs and managed to make an impact not just in the government, but in their communities by removing the disproportionate influence of the church and nationalist cliques. They were able to champion human rights, including minority rights and freedom of religion, as well further social progress such instituting modern education. They did this by exercising the proportionate power they already possessed, by organizing in ways that broke through groups that had less members but greater influence.

That's what liberalism offers people, the chance to choose what kind of society they want to live in.


Specific Answer: This is a matter of specific platforms and would likely vary greatly from individual to individual, party to party, nation to nation.

[othervoice]

When we talk about what to offer people its important to remember liberal values like individual liberty and equal opportunity which make prosperous and liveable societies possible. American liberalism has become defensive and reactive. It has put ideology and interest groups over the kind of pragmatism and equal concern for all that liberal governance requires. I used the following examples to illustrate this point:

1. The American Working Class has been central to everything liberalism has done for the country. Yet somewhere along the way
we lost sight of them. Liberals have failed to limit the size and power of big corporations and economic inequality. I think
we became too concerned with stimulating growth. This one demensional focus has been our undoing since the end of World War II .

2. When it comes to struggling communities we have put conservation, anti pollution, and regulation ahead of the wellbeing of
workers and townspeople who have been displaced. We have not thought about balancing regulatory costs with job creation.
Some communities have diversified and growing economies where workers can find new jobs but in other places people need jobs
and money. They have few options if any.

3. We set out to control corporations but make it hard for small business owners. It makes people think liberals are against
freedom and capitalism and thats not true.