I am familiar with the classic liberal from my own family.
The classic New England liberal, Vermont, 19th to mid 20th century, opposed slavery and accepted other faiths, at that time, other faiths meaning other Protestant sects. You do not talk about religion, so you would not get into arguments.
This is left over from Elizabethan England, in which it was decided to create the United Church of England with a very low threshold of theology and high on ritual, promoting a culture that avoids delving deeply into religion lest it lead to fights and burning at the stake.
My forebears - family names were Bridge, Philips, Keeler, Bowman, and one Keegan from Ireland, married right after trade school or college, that is, they were chaste until marriage, of course. They did not discuss sex. You did not know why your great-grandmothers only had two and three children, I mean, did they abstain? Did they have birth control back then? You would never ask that question.
A generation later, 1940's, Hudson Ohio, my grandparents had a black cleaning lady. One day she did not show up. They wondered what happened, and discovered she had gotten involved with a bad man. My grandfather drove to the black area of Cleveland to look for her. I imagine him, bright blue eyes and ruddy part Irish complexion sporting yellow chinos and a plaid alligator shirt driving around that area. They cared about all people and were all for the civil rights movement.
They had a relative through marriage who was gay, but never mentioned it, and they graciously hosted her whenever she was in town. No problem, since it was not discussed.
When I visited them in their stately home, my blouse had to be properly buttoned and tucked in neatly, I had to be fully dressed and wear shoes to breakfast, sit up at the table, put my napkin in my lap, place my drink back on the coaster, have my fork knife and spoon placed properly on each side of the china plate, not complain about the food and finish everything on my plate.
No brushing your hair in the kitchen or dining room. No matter how you feel you must be civil, restrain your emotional expression, and be courteous and make small talk.
They used the word "converationalist". A good "conversationalist" was someone who could make good polite small talk.When my uncle Johnny passed away, the church pamphlet praised him as an "outgoing conversationalist."
They were formal, but liberal in many respects, but in one area they were conservative: in the area of sex. You waited til marriage, and did not talk about this subject. You also do not talk about religion, as that could upset the serenity of the company present.
So, you do not talk about religion or sex, but you have basic values that are part of your set of assumptions: tolerate other faiths, stay quiet about faith, wait til marriage, and be private and restrained.
When in 1964 Ann brought home a Jewish man and said she was going to marry him, her grandmothers approved as he was a good citizen, in fact, an Episcopalian newsletter had written about his civic accomplishments! So it was like this Jewish fellow was just another Protestant. Her father admittedly was not enthusiastic, but he took a liking to dad, in time.
When a great aunt converted to Catholicism, at her farm in Vergennes, Vermont, grandma tired of visiting her, saying, "she does not stop talking about Jesus". It was fine to believe, but not talk about it too much.
The question arises - how did they react to the sexual revolution in the 1960's?
Well, they said nothing.
I think it was so unfamiliar to them, that they could not respond, and just would hope that everything would work out okay. Abortion was unthinkable, when it became legal, well, let's just hope it never happens.
How did they react to the lessening of moral and religious values? Well they didn't, having grown up in a stable society, stable for generations, they were used to tolerance and not used to confronting real challenges.
This New England family deteriorated without noticing it or asking why. The next generation, 1980's had to grapple with the effects of the sexual revolution and the lessening of religious values, or be lucky and dodge these very real challenges.
The problem was that thinking and speaking about these topics was foreign to them.
1980's: I saw the emotional toll that sexual activity outside marriage had, both on young students and on struggling single parents. The sexual revolution betrayed the sensitive, and most people are in fact sensitive when it comes to sharing their bodies intimately with another. I witnessed the promiscuous try to destroy these feelings with more promiscuous behavior, kill those feelings that were really a sign that they had gone to far, but they could only interpret these feelings as sexual repression and therefore "backward".
Then came the opening for being co-opted by the Left. There was just no more space for that Classic Liberal.
And this is how that co-opting happened: well okay abortion is legal, but surely it won't happen too much, wait a minute, a friend's daughter was advised to get an abortion because of severe nausea? Or another, mom bumped into an old friend, whose son had married his girlfriend as she had become pregnant and could not go through another abortion, because she already had five abortions. She was just 22 years old! The classic liberal never intended that.
Well okay be affectionate before marriage, all will be well. Wait a minute, people are in relationships for years and then break up? But how with the woman ever have kids if she lives with a man for seven years, is now 35 years old, they break up, and he goes off to marry a younger woman? They never intended that.
Well okay affirmative action/quotas, allowing more people of color into colleges by lowering standards, is fair, wait a minute, in 1986, a black student at Harvard hit, swore at, and locked her white roommate out of their room (our family friend), and the administration did nothing because the perpetrator claimed racism? The victim had been president of her high school class at Boston Latin, a totally mixed and tolerant culture, and not likely a racist one bit. They never intended that.
I would hear this hushed horror at what liberal policies had become, and the left-over classic liberals I knew did nothing to stem these tides, like keep abortion legal only for certain circumstances, stem the tide of promiscuity, stand up to ridiculous charges of racism.
In the formal Protestant New England family, nothing was in anyone's face, nothing was imposed except for table manners. Privacy is actually a better path to tolerance that in-your-face modern culture in which we better know your personal jumbled pronouns and who is straight or gay or now - "trans".
Privacy and restraint actually would go a lot farther in promoting tolerance than in-your-face provocations which can only provoke a religious and right-wing backlash.
Or maybe the provocateurs want a backlash, they are emotional children looking for the limits they lacked.
Another problem in the classic New England Protestant family - we lacked cohesion. By the 1980's the slightest personality different between the cousins meant alienation. I had second cousins who lived a four hour drive away from us in Brookline Mass, they were in Portland Maine, who I never met. There was little sense of family cohesion, those we did get together with, well we were always sort of "on approval" in each others' eyes. WASP's can be cold, this was also a problem.
My orthodox Jewish cousins did not look for personality differences, if there were any, they were brushed aside, it was a feeling like they all had to pull together. One friend quipped, "they are probably closer to the immigrant generation, with the feeling like they have to survive." A good observation, but in addition, in the traditional Jewish world, "family", and "visiting cousins" is part of status. Not so for my New England Protestant side.
If I wanted to live like my classic liberal Protestant grandparents, just wait for marriage and value privacy, when I was coming of age in the mid 1980's, I would have had to become a religious fundamentalist.
I was more comfortable around the Jewish members of my family, so that became my path, but the loss of family cohesion in the noble, formal, New England Protestant family, who a generation before took morality and good citizenship for granted, still makes me sad for them, and for the United States of America.
They had been the bedrock, and they vanished without noticing it.
Statue of Puritan leader John Bridge. Cambridge Common, Cambridge Mass, my ancestor, I am probably one of the last who is even aware of it.
