Why "liberal" is a dirty word

David Horowitz is a red-diaper baby, a former left-wing, Marxist radical. He lived in Berkeley, edited the radical magazine "Ramparts", protested the war in Vietnam, supported the Black Panthers and advocated revolution in America. After seeing the communists kill more than 2 million innocents after the US left Vietnam, he wondered why none of his friends on the left seemed to care about it. This started a long political migration toward support of freedom, democracy and free markets.

In this diary post, he discusses an interview the NY Times did with three lefties. The first question posed asked why "liberal" had become a dirty word? David answers:

Here's the reason liberal has become a dirty word. Because Communists, fellow-travelers, pro-terrorists, terrorist sympathizers have hijacked the word liberal and because organs like the New York Times have abetted them, using "liberal" to describe anti-American radicals and even totalitarian radicals like Noam Chomsky, Ward Churchill, Michael Moore, the organizers of the anti-Iraq and pro-Saddam "peace" movement, and Katrina vanden Heuvel and the Nation.

The nation's last truly liberal leader, a pro-Vietnam war Democrat named Hubert Humphrey, had his presidential chances destroyed by the pro-Communist Tom Hayden and the Yippes nearly forty years ago. Hayden, who even today is working to defeat America in Iraq is invariably referred to by institutions like the Times as a liberal. Wrong. I am a liberal -- a believer in free markets and free individuals, a supporter of intellectual diversity on college campuses against the opposition of the ACLU, the AAUP, the Nation, and the progressive left generally (with one exception known to me).

When the cultural arbiters like the Times stop referring to totalitarians and anti-American radicals as liberals, the good name of liberalism will start the long road back to being a good name. Peter Beinart has made a stab at beginning this process. But if he continues to be cowed by the likes of Katrina vanden Heuvel, he's not going to get very far.