Although it`s unlikely that most people would recognize their names or faces, both Randall Forsberg and Sally Lilienthal are prominent in the orbit in which they move, and both represent a species that, if not endangered, is certainly embattled: the American liberal.
While they do not seem to be viewed by society with as much repugnance as sexual deviates, drug dealers or 30-year-old investment bankers who have phones in their BMWs, liberals are nevertheless experiencing hard times.
Liberal-bashing has been a central strategy of the Republican presidential campaign. Vice President George Bush repeatedly has attempted to discredit Gov. Michael Dukakis simply by describing him as one of them , with a capital L.
The attacks on liberalism in this campaign have been noted and commented on by press and television pundits, but using liberals as political whipping persons is nothing new.
Indeed, followers of this political tradition, who generally can be found in the Democratic Party, have been so disparaged during the eight years of the Reagan administration that many dare not speak its name.
Some have taken to calling themselves moderates or progressives; the less cautious paste ”neo” in front of what`s come to be referred to as the
”L” word.
A recent New Yorker cartoon shows a maitre d` telling a waiter: ”Should anyone inquire, Harrington, our portions are generous, not liberal.”
Private citizens Forsberg and Lilienthal, who deal in different ways with arms control and nuclear disarmament, are liberals who have lived through several years of heavy bombardment from conservative Republicans.
Forsberg, 45, is executive director of the Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies in Brookline, Mass., which performs research permitting
”long-term projections of military forces and long-term alternative military policy planning.”
Lilienthal, 69, is president and founder of the Ploughshares Fund, a public foundation that gives money to groups and individuals ”dedicated to preventing nuclear war through arms control leading to disarmament.”
Each has learned to dodge certain words that can trigger stereotypes that divide people and prevent them from listening to one another.
”Peace,” for example, is a loaded word. ”We almost never use `peace`
because of the negative connotation it has for so many people,” Lilienthal said. ”We have a wonderful board member who said he would join Ploughshares only if we didn`t use the word. I think he was right.”
For many people, she said, the word projects an image of a kind of emotional, self-righteous opposition that ignores the harsh realities of the world. ”Yesterday on the plane to Chicago, I met this gentleman who asked what I did. I told him I worked for the prevention of nuclear war, and he said, `Oh, I guess you`re for unilatedisarmament.`
”I said no, I was not. And he said, `Well, if you`re working for an organization to try to prevent nuclear war, then of course you`re for peace through strength.` Those are code words for people who support big military budgets and the arms race. If I`d said I wasn`t for peace through strength, he`d have called me a commie pig.”
Forsberg regards ”liberal” the same way Lilienthal views ”peace.”
”Like other people who are liberal nowadays, I avoid the word,” Forsberg said. ”First, because the term has been so badly distorted and caricatured and, second, because the traditional concept of a left-right spectrum doesn`t seem appropriate to so many contemporary problems. These problems call for a pragmatic rather than an ideological approach.”
Forsberg, 45, founded her nonprofit Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies, which now has an annual budget of $300,000, in 1979. In 1983 she received a five-year MacArthur Foundation ”genius” grant ”in recognition of her accomplishments in defense studies and arms control.”
She is considered the founder of the nuclear-freeze movement that swept the country in 1981-82, having originated the idea and written the proposal that called for the United States and the Soviet Union to jointly agree to halt the production, testing and deployment of nuclear arms.
She became involved in the subject of arms control after she married and moved to Sweden in 1968, joining the the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. (The mother of a daughter, she is now divorced.)
Lilienthal, 69, a widow and mother of five, comes from a wealthy, conservative GOP background and lives in San Francisco; she`s at home in the city`s most exclusive social circles, donates money and time to the local arts community (having been a sculptor herself for 15 years) and is involved in the alumni activities of her alma mater, Sarah Lawrence College.
When she had turned 21 and was preparing to vote for the first time, in 1940, her father told her she could not live in the family home if she cast her ballot for Franklin Roosevelt. ”I found out the voting booth was private,” she said.
Lilienthal would become affiliated with groups that her father, were he alive, would probably find just as objectionable as Roosevelt. She has been national vice chair and chair of Amnesty International/USA and on the Northern California boards of the American Civil Liberties Union and the NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund. ”I`ve always been proud of being a liberal,” she said.
So what exactly is a liberal?
Conservatives portray them as soft on crime, weak on defense, strong on spending, dedicated to high taxes and responsible for every failing the country has had in the last generation.
The New Republic magazine, a longtime bastion of liberal thought, recently had a go at it: Liberalism is ”the belief that government has a legitimate, assertive role to play in economic life, especially in fine-tuning the trade-off between efficiency and equality.”
For Webster`s dictionary, liberalism is ”a political philosophy based on belief in progress, the essential goodness of man and the autonomy of the individual and standing for the protection of political and civil liberties.” For Lilienthal, a liberal is ”someone who is trying to think how to change society so that it benefits all its members.”
And for Forsberg: ”My view of being a liberal is an espousal of those basic individual human rights that this country was founded on.”
Columnist Tom Wicker of the New York Times defines liberals by their deeds. Before the last debate, Wicker advised Dukakis to ”quit dodging the word `liberal` and tell the voters forcefully that liberal government and liberal politicians brought this nation Social Security, Medicare, stock market regulation, federal deposit insurance. . . rural electrification, the G.I. Bill of Rights that educated untold numbers of American men, federally supported mortgages on the houses most of us live in-and on and on.”
Lilienthal, who was ”liberalized” by World War II, designed Ploughshares as a clearinghouse for those who wanted to donate to groups working for peace but were confused by the proliferation and changing makeup of such groups. In the fund`s first year, Lilienthal, acting alone, raised $100,000. Since then, Ploughshares has disbursed more than $3.5 million; last year it gave $1 million to 121 recipients.
”We don`t send out mailings, because we don`t want to compete with the organizations we support,” she said. ”We solicit contributors with personal letters. We think what we`re doing is important because only about 1 percent of foundation grants goes to preventing nuclear war, slowing the arms race and educating the public about these subjects. Philanthropy is very trendy, and this isn`t a hot area.”
An anonymous donor, presumed to be Lilienthal, provides $250,000 a year to cover the fund`s administrative costs, allowing all gifts to go directly to beneficiaries. In 1987 she was honored by the Council on Foundations ”for outstanding creativity by an individual grantmaker.”
Forsberg was here to address the North Suburban Peace Initiative (founded in 1979 as ”an interfaith peace education effort” supported by Christian and Jewish congregations).
In an interview, Forsberg said her speech was to emphasize the need for the superpowers to work toward a reduction of conventional forces, and an end to ”large-scale unilateral military intervention in the Third World.”
She said her attention to conventional forces was not a departure from her concerns about nuclear weapons that sprang from the freeze movement, which faded fast and left no measurable results.
”My conception of the freeze movement was that it was a way of beginning to address the problem of the arms race without getting into the complexities of military balance, military strategy, how much is enough for defense.
”I`ve increasingly felt the main purpose of our nuclear forces was not to deter the enemy`s nuclear forces but to deter conventional war, so it doesn`t make sense to aim for nuclear disarmament and do nothing about the conventional side of the problem.”
When the debate about arms control arises, it`s not unusual for liberals to serve as all-purpose political whipping persons. ”The caricature of the liberal view of the arms race is that we just want to get rid of weapons and trust everyone,” Forsberg said. ”But the policy the U.S. and NATO have followed for the last 35 years has been a bipartisan policy, supported by Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives.
”I`m attempting to change our policy. I`m trying to look honestly at what creates risks of war. Under what conditions can we trust and can we not trust people? How do you build trust? What is the linkage between nuclear weapons and conventional war?
”We recognize that trying to move toward a new international system of arms control is difficult and has no precedent. The values that are reflected in the approach I`m describing are not partisan values and should not be simplistically typecast as a knee-jerk liberal solution. On the contrary, I think the larger issues, both in the past and in my approach, have to be dealt with in a bipartisan manner.”
