A Heartbreaking Post by a Sister Liberal Blogger Who Dares to Dissent

Georgetown University law professor Heidi Li Feldman’s post titled For a friend: What it is like to be a liberal law professor in Washington, DC in February 2009, is heartbreaking to read this Sunday morning. I can fully empathize with Heidi as I’ve had a similar experience in my own liberal professional associations and affiliated social circle where Obama supporters have dominated, dissent has not been allowed, and mentioning Hillary Clinton’s name is asking for ostracism.

Feeling ostracized is no fun and that’s one reason I’m currently in the process of forming a mindfulness meditation group with the objective of supporting one another in being peace in challenging times.

I send all best wishes to Heidi as I link to her post excerpted below:

Dear friend,

You asked whether I was finding it easier to be a liberal who was not enthusiastic about President Obama's candidacy and is not enthusiastic about his administration. The short answer: no. The problem is both due to external circumstances and internal ones. I've never been a left-leaner who takes pride in being left of the mainstream Democratic establishment. But this year, as the race narrowed down to Clinton and Obama, it was clear to me to that the more liberal candidate was Clinton: the candidate more interested in a politics favoring the middle-class, especially the lower middle class, and the poor; the candidate more interested in separation between church and state; the candidate more interested in gay rights and women's rights and economic justice. The candidate who understood that Kumbaya is not popular song in Washington, D.C. and for good reason: politics is not nonpartisan: it is fight, rooted in competing visions of social good and the means to achieve it.

I work at a place of higher education where it was unfashionable to support Clinton's candidacy, on the widely broadcast assumption that no liberal could prefer any other candidate to a viable black Democratic candidate. There were some underlying messages broadcast along with this: that it was "cool" to support a relatively young black man who liked sports while it was "shrill" to support a slightly older white woman who liked her daughter and her friends. Indeed as time went on, the misogyny of the academy, which is a topic for another time, became more and more apparent.

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