Why everyone hates white liberals, with Kevin Schultz

Dec 16, 2025

Kevin G. Schultz, a history professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago and author, delves into the decline of liberalism's reputation. He explores how enemies like William F. Buckley Jr. redefined liberalism, associating it with secularism and socialism. Schultz discusses the ambivalence of civil rights leaders toward white liberals and critiques from the left accusing liberals of upholding capitalism. The podcast debates whether liberals can reclaim their identity in light of their historical failings and the evolving political landscape.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Liberalism Is Historically Elastic

Liberalism historically shifted meanings to oppose whichever power held sway, from church to monarchs to oligarchs and then to big business.
Kevin Schultz argues FDR repurposed "liberalism" in America to mean a centrist reforming philosophy that preserved regulated capitalism.

INSIGHT

Shift From Economic Floor To Quality Of Life

Midcentury liberalism shifted from quantitative (economic floor) to qualitative (improving life quality) goals.
That shift opened liberals to critiques of elitism and bureaucratic overreach, especially on cultural preferences.

INSIGHT

Liberalism Was 'Assassinated' By Labels

Political opponents defeated liberalism by attaching hostile, inauthentic meanings to the term rather than by refuting its policies.
Mocking "white liberals" made the label carry so much baggage that it became undefendable, Schultz contends.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

From the 1930s through the early 1960s, roughly half of Americans described themselves as liberals. But in the decades that followed, liberalism has suffered near-continuous reputational decline. The critics, rivals, and enemies of liberalism sought to redefine its public image downward, and nearly all succeeded.

Among these opponents were the conservatives around William F. Buckley Jr., who attempted to portray liberalism as a combination of militant secularism and socialism or even communism; while a majority of Americans didn’t buy this definition, Buckley and his confreres succeeded in equating liberalism with leftism, to the point that more than half of Americans tell pollsters that the Democratic Party has become “too liberal.” But actual left-wing critics felt that, on the contrary, postwar liberals had betrayed the radical potential of the New Deal and smothered American society in corporate capitalism and conformist consensus. Black civil rights activists, for their part, came to feel that white liberals were treacherous allies, unwilling to push for true equality if it would threaten their own power and position.

Kevin G. Schultz, a professor of History, Catholic Studies, and Religious Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago, has researched the descent of liberalism’s reputation across the latter half of the twentieth century and up to the present. Why, he wonders, “have so many people come to hate white liberals, including, perhaps, even white liberals themselves?” He describes this history in his new book, Why Everyone Hates White Liberals (Including White Liberals). In this podcast discussion, he concedes that liberalism set itself up for criticism in many ways, but nonetheless concludes that liberalism did not fall of its own weight – it was “assassinated,” as he put it, by its political opponents, who “recognized they could defeat liberalism in America… not by attacking its politics or policies, which generally remained popular,” but instead by “giving it meanings no self-respecting liberal would accept but from which they couldn't successfully escape.” And by mocking the people who upheld that philosophy, the white liberals, the critics gave the word “liberal” so much baggage that the concept of liberalism could no longer be defended — to the point that Schultz now feels the very term should be abandoned.