It's interesting what he is saying. It's not exactly what my last two posts have been about, but very similar.
Liberalism in Europe, today, is something like
“libertarianism”—it is a right-wing ideology. There used to be a left
libertarianism, which is probably better called anarchism, and that
persists in various sectarian versions, but it isn’t much in the public
eye. And then in the United States, liberalism generally means “New Deal
liberalism.” It’s our very modest version of social democracy, and it
isn’t a very strong doctrine, since many of its practitioners became
neoliberals much too easily. So, the -ism is not a strong or coherent
doctrine. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t liberals. But liberals are
people who are best defined morally or psychologically; they’re what
Lauren Bacall, my favorite actress, called “people who don’t have small
minds.” A liberal is someone who’s tolerant of ambiguity, who can join
arguments that he doesn’t have to win, who can live with people who
disagree, who have different religions or different ideologies. That’s a
liberal. But those liberal qualities don’t imply any social or economic
doctrine. So, there are liberals in the world, and I can recognize
them, but liberalism does not describe their actual political
commitment. The word is better used to qualify the kinds of commitments
that I write about: democracy, socialism, nationalism, et cetera.
He's making a good point since "liberal arts" is a field of study "based on rational thinking, and it includes the
areas of humanities, social and physical sciences, and mathematics. A
liberal arts education emphasizes the development of critical thinking
and analytical skills, the ability to solve complex problems, and an
understanding of ethics and morality, as well as a desire to continue to
learn." That means the division is between closed mindedness and open mindedness: not whether one is on the left or the right.
The problem with US politics is that it is based upon fallacious thinking. "The Democrats are progressives/socialists/liberals/etcetera" and "The Republican Trump supporters, etc." Is the divide that clear cut? Fox news calls the democratic party "socialist", yet that party has a long track record of destroying the moderate "socialist" policies of the new deal. What Sanders was proposing wasn't too far out from where FDR was going, and what is pretty much expected in the rest of the world as far as social policy goes.
As I said, not exactly what I have been saying in the past few posts, but definitely something I agree with:
Liberal Commitments
An interview with Michael Walzer on The Struggle for a Decent Politics. in Dissent Magazine