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It seems like liberals are taking a lot of rhetorical beatings lately and are doing a bit of self-flagellation themselves. Some criticisms are undoubtedly deserved, others have the potential to make the left side of the political spectrum stronger. But a couple of items up at Slate should give reflection on our tendency to blame liberals for just about everything.

First, William Saletan weighs in on the current battle between Intelligent Design and the scientific community (and allies) waging in the Kansas Board of Education. To read Saletan, you’d think the liberals just don’t get it:

Liberals, editorialists, and biologists wonder aloud how people can refuse to see evolution when it’s staring them in the face. Maybe they should ask themselves. It’s the creationists in Kansas who are evolving. And it’s the evolutionists who can’t see it.

To understand the fight in Kansas, you have to study what evolutionists accuse creationists of neglecting: the historical record. In the Scopes trial, creationists defended a ban on the teaching of evolution. That was the early, authoritarian stage of creationism—the equivalent of Australopithecus, the earliest hominid. Gradually, evolution gained the upper hand. In 1987, the Supreme Court ruled that states couldn’t even require equal treatment of evolution and creationism. By 1999, creationists were asking the Kansas board not to rule out their beliefs entirely. This was creationism’s more advanced Homo erectus phase: pluralism.

Six years later, evolutionists in Kansas are under attack again. They think the old creationism is back. They’re mistaken. Homo erectus—the defense, on pluralist grounds, of the literal account of Genesis—is beginning to die out. The new challenger, ID, differs fundamentally from fundamentalism. Like its creationist forebears, ID is theistic. But unlike them, it abandons Biblical literalism, embraces open-minded inquiry, and accepts falsification, not authority, as the ultimate test. These concessions, sincere or not, define a new species of creationism—Homo sapiens—that fatally undermines its ancestors.

He’s right on the merits: Intelligent Design proponents are not unreconstructed creationists. The trouble is that biologists - even many liberals and editorialists - know this and have responded to Intelligent Design as a separate entity. The blogging life scientists at Panda’s Thumb have done an excellent point-by-point refutation of many ID claims, without falling into the trap, that Saletan fears, of “think[ing] good science consists of believing the right things.” The problem is that the sincerity of ID’s concessions to scientific method do matter. Culture warriors in Kansas in elsewhere don’t want ID taught simply out of openness, they want “openness” taught to imply that scientific heterodoxy is equivalent to the orthodoxy it attacks. To my mind, liberal bloggers like Kevin Drum, Brian Lieter and Chris Mooney have written intelligently about this for quite some time. And Ellen Goodman gets it right in her editorial today, which urges us to “‘Teach the Controversy.’ I’m all for it. But this controversy doesn’t belong in biological science. It belongs in political science.”

Meanwhile, an interesting article on deportation law under consideration makes the useful point that news coverage has focused on changes to driver’s license procedures to the detriment of free speech considerations. Fair enough. But then the author, David Cole, goes on to say,

But all the blame cannot rest on Sensenbrenner and the Republican conferees. Liberal advocacy groups like the ACLU and the National Immigration Forum didn’t make much noise about the changes to who can be deported and excluded. They chose instead to focus on the new standards for driver’s licenses and asylum. That choice may have made strategic sense. The licensing scheme, with its intimation of a national ID card, potentially affects all of us. And while asylum affects only immigrants, applicants for asylum are more sympathetic than those who are labeled as terrorists. From the perspective of safeguarding civil liberties, however, the expansion of the grounds for deportation is by far more egregious.

Sorry, no. The blame rests squarely on those authoring the bill. Say the ACLU did take up the cause of deportees, what would the effect have been in the bill’s chances? Next to no difference, really. The ACLU is so beleaguered that it’s hard to blame them for failing to stop a xenophobic tide (or, to put it more charitably, a fortress mentality). And given that these multipart bills are complex, any policy advocacy group has to distill a simple message from it. Like Cole, I’d wish for more consideration of issues that play beyond domestic concerns, but strategic sense on liberals’ part is not ultimately the cause of what’s going on.