Tangle - What is a liberal PAID?

I’m Ari Weitzman, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day.

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What is a liberal?

In early November, the Tangle team had all descended on Philadelphia to cover the results of the upcoming national election. We’d spent weeks organizing an itinerary of events, planning what editions we’d release in print and audio and visual media, arranging a list of interesting people for Isaac to talk to on the night of the election, and then executing a live event while also trying to host an election watch party for local members of the Tangle community. 

We’ve hosted live events before, and they always have a buzz about them — anything can happen at a live event, no matter how much you’ve read in advance about what to expect from the night’s proceedings or learned about the people your team will be talking to. At the same time, anything that could happen is filtered through a rigorously planned schedule. 

On election night, I had the privilege of a sideline-level perspective to incredible conversations between Isaac and people like Bill O’Reilly and Brian Williams, people whose thoughts shape the way we talk about the events we all experience. One of those people Isaac interviewed was Sharon McMahon. During a conversation about the future of the Republican Party, she made a comment that immediately piqued my interest: “Trump in many ways is not conservative. A conservative by nature is someone who wants to conserve what is, who does not want to enact sweeping radical reforms. And in many ways, Donald Trump is proposing very very significant, radical reforms.” 

I’d heard some form of these questions posed before about Trump: How will his base of support affect the Republican Party? How will his impact change moving forward? And then to Sharon McMahon’s question, what will it mean to be a Republican after Trump — what will it even mean to be a conservative? Then, the opposite question hit me: What will it mean to be a liberal?

Actually, what is a liberal now?

In the immediate aftermath of Republicans’ big electoral victory, I posed this question to the members of our team — and then again after we all returned to our respective homes. I brought it up in comment threads during newsletter editing and on team calls. It even became something of a trope on our Slack:

Eventually, through something between fascination with the idea and sheer annoyance, I was able to convince Isaac to let me write a Friday edition exploring this idea. So today, after forcing countless discussions and digesting numerous articles about what liberalism in the United States is, has been, and should be, I want to answer the question: 

What is a liberal?