Opinion/Brown: Liberalism in America is waning. Strategic change is needed to save it.

Last year, 37% of Americans described their political views as moderate, 36% as conservative and only 25% as liberal, according to a Gallop poll. So I want to talk to Liberals about where our weaknesses are and the urgency of fixing them in whatever time we have left.

I had my first school debate in the late 1950s — about gun control. Sixty years later, Americans own between 300 and 400 million guns and kill each other with them (or ourselves) at a rate of almost 50,000 a year. Clearly, this is an argument Liberals have lost.

Liberals have championed women's rights, including reproductive rights for well over half a century. Today, across the whole political spectrum, we see a powerful political movement intent on rolling back every vestige of political, social and economic progress liberalism has made in the last half-century.

The strategies being used to undo liberalism have not changed since Joseph Goebbels first explained them to the Nazis in the 1930s: Offer an idealized national identity in race, folkway and belief … identify a few minorities (Jews, gays and foreigners) as aliens and mortal threats to the nation … strip away any civil rights that might protect them and denounce liberals for sheltering enemies of the state.

“It works in every country,” said top Nazi Hermann Goering at the Nuremberg trials. And as we see across Europe — and here in the U.S.A. — it’s still working.

Democracy is best understood as a balancing act. When it works, we successfully maintain a dynamic tension between having sufficient liberty to keep ourselves free and having enough authority to get things done — between allowing diversity to thrive in an atmosphere of tolerance and having a national cohesion that reminds us of who we are and why that matters. Any attempts to dissolve this tension by removing the contradictions inherent in the American argument tips us toward intolerance and authoritarian rule.

Liberalism is about empowering individuals to flourish by realizing their full and free potential as human beings. This flourishing is only possible in a tolerant society that allows people to live and let live. However, this personal empowerment requires a balancing consideration of its own.

A society can only flourish if its fundamental institutions are supported by the majority of people living in it. Patriotism, faith and the family require a commitment from each person who stands in tension with the desire for unlimited personal freedom. Whenever liberals find something almost embarrassing about these collective institutions, they are participating in the same failing the conservative movement is making when — in the name of patriotism, faith and family — they are eager to crush the individual rights of anyone who does not conform to their expectations.

Our goal left and right, cannot be to resolve the tensions built into democratic life but to embrace these tensions and strive to keep our balance — like high-wire walkers do — while maintaining forward progress. When democracy loses its balance, it falls into anarchy or tyranny. Any party that offers the American people a chance at equilibrium has a chance of winning. At the moment, neither party does.

In the early 1900s, the progressive movement started defending ordinary working people against the entrenched economic and political power of our financial elites. Soon, the Democratic Party became the mighty defender of ordinary Americans and remained so through the Great Depression and World War II.

Then in the 1960s, liberalism shifted its focus to opposing the Vietnam War and defending the rights of racial minorities against social cruelty, economic exploitation and political disenfranchisement. These were good and necessary things to do, but in the process, liberals lost their affection for ordinary white Americans whom they increasingly found too bigoted and ignorant to love. Millions of white Americans felt the burn and shifted right. Talk radio put that rightward shift on steroids.

As liberals felt ordinary Americans slip away from them, we took increasing comfort — especially in academic settings — in distancing ourselves from even the slightest hints of racism or sexual intolerance. In today's America, many of the wealthiest counties are Democratic and many of the poorest are Republican. Populism has replaced liberalism as political America’s dominant life form.

The heart of liberal ideology is the idea that our compassion for others and our support for their welfare should be universal, excluding no one. Think of the hippie girl from the 1960s sliding a flower, stem first, into the muzzle of a National Guardsman's rifle. Hard as it is, liberals must return to our core value of universal love or we’ll have betrayed ourselves — and will lose.

Lawrence Brown is a columnist for the Cape Cod Times. Email him at columnresponse@gmail.com.

Stay connected with the Cape Cod news that matters. Sign up for our free newsletters.

This article originally appeared on Cape Cod Times: Opinion: The liberal movement is losing white voters. Here's why.