Kevin Schultz on the Hateability of White Liberals

What’s the deal with liberals? Kevin Schultz’s September 26 lecture attempted to answer a question on (most) everyone’s minds in the war-torn hellscape of Portland, Oregon, which was succinctly summed up in its title, “Why Everyone Hates White Liberals.” Given the current targeting of Portland for military deployment, the long-standing conservative campaign against the city’s (perceived) “liberal” culture took on a new light from the historical context of Schultz’s lecture.

Schultz is the chair of the history department at the University of Illinois in Chicago, but has his own connection to Reed as the father of student Celve Schultz ‘26. Nonetheless, he was welcomed to the campus by Paddy Riley in the history department, who introduced Schultz’s background and explained that the material of this lecture comes from his new book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals): A History (University of Chicago Press, 2025).

Schultz began the lecture by referencing The West Wing, setting the scene for depictions of liberalism in the past few decades. He described the show as an “alternate universe for liberals in hiding,” which constructed a fictional defense of liberalism when it was under attack. In contrast to the liberal fantasies of The West Wing, Schultz countered the show’s positive description of liberalism with Hillary Clinton’s contemporary presidential campaign. Clinton described her politics as “progressive” against her opponents’ claims that she was liberal, reflecting a political climate of hostility toward liberalism. 

The negative perception of liberalism is deeply familiar in today’s political climate, as Schultz acknowledged, with President Trump calling his 2024 presidential opponent Kamala Harris a “dangerous liberal” and the omnipresent conservative dogwhistles against perceived liberals everywhere online. For Schultz, these issues posed a major question: how did liberalism come to be perceived as such a political sin for left and right alike?

Schultz compared the current denigration of liberals to mid-twentieth century descriptions of liberalism as an American value. He cited an article from 1949 calling a liberal “a pretty good thing to be” and reporting that most people at the time believed that liberals were good people. Similarly, liberals can be seen as being responsible for many, if not all, of the major social changes of the mid- to late-twentieth century, most critically the civil rights movement under Lyndon B. Johnson. 

In political discourse, the term “liberal” dates back to Shakespearean times and beyond, when it originally meant generous and open-minded. During the eighteenth century, the word took on an added connotation of religious tolerance with the Enlightenment, and later became associated with republican and individualist sentiments in the wake of the French Revolution. The nineteenth century saw the development of the more familiar sense of “classical liberalism” involving capitalism and free trade in addition to the aforementioned values. However, these largely European discourses of liberalism did not directly translate over to the American political sphere. 

In America specifically, “liberal” did not come into use in its modern sense until 1932. Schultz traced the lineage of the term back to a speech given by Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the speech, FDR was defending the New Deal against conservative opposition, to “prevent him from being tarred as socialist.” As FDR made clear in his liberal defense of the New Deal, this political vision was based on using the state to provide support for citizens to ultimately better participate in the existing capitalist economy. As Schultz put it, “FDR was the first white liberal.”

Following FDR’s lead, the modern American definition of liberalism is loosely defined for Schultz by “using the power of the government to check oligarchic power and provide a social welfare floor for individual achievement.” 

As Schultz argued, American liberalism has been dogged since at least the 1950s by three main points of attack: from the right, from the left, and from activists more generally. The first argument against liberalism that Schultz presented is a classic one for anyone who’s had the misfortune of seeing at least five minutes of Fox News: the conservative position that liberalism is “ushering in communism.” This argument was born during the Red Scare and has stuck around with depressing longevity, now forming the basis of much of modern right-wing ideology. 

Around the same time as the conservative attack on liberalism, if not earlier, Schultz asserted that liberalism was attacked from the left as an extension of global capitalism. Lastly, Schultz distinguished the criticism of liberalism from civil rights activists such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Gwendolyn Brooks as a powerless ideology that was not truly radical enough. These arguments, too, will no doubt sound familiar to anyone who’s been at Reed longer than a day. 

Against these schools of criticism, Schultz argued that liberalism has come to be defined by its enemies, without its own coherent identity. He described modern liberalism in the eyes of its opponents from both sides as “bureaucratic, ineffectual, and unmoored in any philosophic tradition.” Schultz further stated, “There is no agreement about what a liberal is.”

At the heart of his lecture, Schultz claimed, “How you define a white liberal says as much, and probably more, about you than it does about them.” Schultz argued that liberals have let themselves be defined primarily by their conservative opponents, making it time for them to organize around new labels and ideologies rather than try to reclaim the fraught history of the word “liberal.” Without trying to outline a new plan of political action, Schultz spoke with tentative optimism about the future of social democracy as a rising leftist political movement, as evident from the popularity of politicians like Bernie Sanders and, more recently, New York state assembly member Zohran Mamdani.

Rather than answering the question it set out to resolve, Schultz’s lecture posed more questions for the future of liberalism and the greater political landscape in America. Under the current conditions of Republican power, Schultz’s call for left-leaning moderates to find new ways to frame their political ideologies may not be so radical after all—just like the liberalism they eschew.