For the 'L' of it:

...Which is very odd, when you think about it, since the entire history of the United States is little other than the history of the growth and development of American liberalism...

...The parallel is not exact, I admit...

...and, of course, it was a large part of the point (the other part being the Texas votes in the electoral college) behind nominating Lloyd Bentsen, a person whose nonliber-al credentials are universally believed to be in impeccable order, for vice-president...

...As a result, the word "liberal" is in terribly bad odor among conservative Protestants, carrying as it does anti-Christian connotations...

...So it's dirty, all right, really dirty...

...for conservative Protestants, numerous though they are, are yet nowhere close to being a majority of the American population...

...And no small part of the Dukakis campaign is to run away from this poisonous label...

...but I suspect we have reason to be nervous about the long-term future of liberalism in a society in which the word "liberal" has become "the L word...

...But the trouble goes much deeper and much broader than that...

...In the eyes of the conservative American Protestant, liberal Christianity has long been a suspicious character...

...Suppose that the great majority of Catholics, while not repudiating Catholicism or its traditions, indeed while proclaiming their loyalty to the church and its values, all of a sudden took it into their heads never to use the word ' 'Catholic" except as a term of abuse, a stick with which to beat certain of their co-religionists...

...If "liberal" is now a dirty word, does this mean Americans are turning against these liberal values and institutions...

...So how come, if this is such a 100 percent liberal society, "liberalism" has got weighted down with immense dyslogistic connotations...

...Maybe they are just being a bit sloppy in their use of words...

...But as Catholicism modernized itself at Vatican II and as Catholics in the United States became fully Americanized, the old animosities faded...

...It is a word with a vast amount of historical content, a word whose meaning has been supplied and defined by the last couple of centuries of social, political, and economic experience...

...it is not so much a version, as it is a betrayal, of Christianity...

...come "the L word...

...Americans who dislike the word "liberal" may not be about to repudiate the content of the liberal tradition...

...In fact, those who call themselves conservative intend to conserve, not so much the preliberal values that classic conservatives like Edmund Burke meant to conserve, but the values of liberalism itself...

...So long as the old Catholic-Protestant division remained socially significant, the two wings of American Protestantism tended to keep a lid on their dislike for one another...

...Wouldn't we have good reason for worrying about the long-term future of Catholicism in such a case...

...You don't have to be a conservative Protestant to dislike political liberals...

...One of the most aston-ishing terminological developments in the politics of our time is that "liberal" has become a dirty word-"the L word," as President Reagan calls it...

...In America we are all liberals, both those of us who, like Michael Dukakis, used to call ourselves liberals before we became embarrassed by the word, and those of us who call ourselves conservatives...

...Let me suggest a hypothetical parallel...

...But if political liberals had to write off only conservative Protestants, they could still get elected president while waving the liberal banner...

...Of course not...

...Part of the answer has to do with American religion, in particular American Protestantism...

...For to repudiate all this would be to repudiate the United States itself...

...How dirty is it?'' you may ask...

...As the conservative sees it, liberal Christianity-with its accommodation to the moral values and the literary criticism of the modern age-is not truly Christian at all...

...That was the point behind the snub given to the Democratic party's most conspicuous liberal, Jesse Jackson, when Dukakis failed to make the courtesy phone call to him while naming a vice-presidential candidate...

...thus to be an American conservative is to belong to a species of liberal...

...Among such folks, a politician is dead if he or she gets identified as a liberal, and no amount of refined distinctions between church and state, between liberalism in politics and liberalism in religion, will save such an unfortunate campaigner...

...Liberalism involves such taken-for-granted elements of American life as democratic elections, a largely private enterprise economy, a strong but limited state, equal protection of the law, freedom of speech and press, separation of church and state, a high value placed on the individual and the rights of the individual...

...Liberalism" is not a word which means, a la Humpty Dumpty, anything you want it to mean...

...Well, the heart and soul of the Bush-for-president campaign is the effort to pin the "liberal" label on Michael Dukakis...

...Nowadays the great religious divide is found within Protestantism itself-between the liberal (or mainline) denominations and the conservative (evangelical and pentecostal) denominations...

...Nonetheless, there is something very disquieting about a situation in which a liberal society develops a distaste for the word that best describes that society...

...The great divide in religion in this country used to be that between Catholics and Protestants...

...while these latter squirmed this way and that to avoid describing themselves as Catholic...

...In fact it has been viewed as a downright contradiction in terms...

...But once Catholics and Protestants entered the era of mutual good feelings, liberal and conservative Protestants were free to commence an era of mutual bad feelings, which they did...