I think a major reason that I'm proud to proclaim myself a Liberal is the thoroughly offensive way that the Right has had some success turning the label into an epithet. I can understand other people's militancy about other causes--if I were gay I'd probably be in everybody's facing proclaiming myself "queer". Sometimes you just have to push back against the forces of social and intellectual oppression.

I would say that my Liberalness is more about core values than about particular policy planks. Policy gets passed through a political process on its way to implementation, and sometimes the results aren't pretty (though, unlike a Conservative, I view that consequence of human nature as a spur to try harder to get it right, rather than a reason to declare all attempts to make things better either hopeless or the spawn of Commie devils).

I've been having these on-again off-again conversations with Tom about intangible aspects of human reality that he (as archetypical Conservative stand-in) rejects as either nonexistent or aberrations that should be treated as mental defects, and certainly never considered in organizing human affairs. Yet, to me, the core values of Liberalism embody not only concrete reality but also those very intangibles. You can't hold "human dignity" in your hand or assign it a dollar value (well, except on reality TV shows or in corporate boardrooms), but that doesn't mean it can be ignored in calculations about human affairs. Aspirations aren't only for CEOs, and human aspirations other than maximizing profit have a legitimate place at the table. I don't think materialism is all it's cracked up to be, and I don't think that the greatest thing about America is its ability to churn out huge piles of cheap consumer trinkets.

Liberalism usually takes the side of the underdog. I like that. All of history's great moral teachers would agree. Human civilization is not a metaphorical jungle, it's an escape from the jungle. It's wrong for some humans to treat other humans as prey...even if in hot pursuit of profit.

Anti-intellectualism is the province of the Right, as when they think they're smearing Liberals by calling us an "intellectual elite". I'll take the side of intellectualism any day; that's a no brainer, so to speak.

That's why I'm a Liberal. And proud of it.