Edmund Wilson told John Dos Passos that he never regarded himself as a liberal, "because the word does not mean anything definite." Wilson was right (as usual) and his remark exposes a very real problem with contemporary Liberalism.
Liberals have sentimental attachments to a set of broad concepts including "freedom" and "equality" which, though laudable, can mean many different and even contradictory things depending on context.
Self-styled liberals ought to be able to set aside their sentimental attachments to certain words and examine those words critically and in historical context. Were they to do that they would see, e.g., that the liberal Barack Obama's drone war in the Yemen and record-setting sales of weapons to Saudi Arabia were proximate causes of one of the worst humanitarian disasters in living memory.
A politics grounded in principle and informed by historical research (or just paying attention to the news) recognizes how meaningless the definition of "liberal" has become and besides, as Howard Zinn put it, "there's no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people." Sentimental attachments get in the way of clear thinking and moral reasoning. Though liberals believe themselves to be on the side of the angels, they are, as the Black Agenda Report has noted, "traitors to the millions of people who want to see progressive change in this country."
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