Bob Herbert has a fantastic column in the New York Times today in which he reminds us of the tremendous accomplishments of “liberal” America. Women’s rights? Check. Advocates for special needs children like Trig? Check. Safer food, cleaner air, better schools? Check, check and check.

Our country is far from perfect on these issues but the progress we’ve made is often due to liberals who were willing to sacrifice for ideals that are now being taken taken for granted (at best) and co-opted for political gain (at worst) by the Republican party.

Sometimes it is easy to think of liberals as living in la-la land and to forget all that liberals have given America.

Herbert’s column reminded me of one of my first classes in graduate school. I came to Harvard to study issues related to access and persistence in higher education for low-income students (how to help more poor kids enroll and succeed in college). When I got there, I felt like I was the last liberal standing.

People ask me why I chose college access and persistence as my life’s work, and I don’t have a simple answer except to say that education–especially postsecondary education–still represents our best shot at upward mobility. Also, I have always been drawn to work in social justice, probably because my grandparents are Holocaust survivors and my parents emphasized the importance of giving something back.

Annnyway, I enrolled in graduate school with an underlying assumption that this work was about social justice and that the collective goal of educators and education policy experts was to increase opportunity and quality of life for under-served citizens. At the time, I believed that educators = modern day civil rights workers.

Early on, I was sitting in a policy class and arguing a point (I can’t remember what exactly). The professor looks at me and says, “But Joie, you’re assuming that everyone deserves to go to college. Do others feel that way?”

No one else raised a hand.

I felt alienated, like my ideals were relics from the past that had been proven passe. Was it really so naive to think that everyone deserves the opportunity for an affordable–or gasp! free–college education?

Where are all the liberals? I wondered.

In the years that have since passed, I have found many like-minded liberals who are committed to increasing educational opportunity as a vehicle for social justice and civil rights. But that day in graduate school, I could have sworn that I was the only one. I started to wonder if my beliefs were silly.

We all have moments like this. And perhaps liberals as a group are now engaged in collective self-doubt. Instead of letting this doubt fester into something worse, let us BE PROUD of our ideals. Let us remember that liberal movements have indeed changed the world.

To quote Bob Herbert:

Self-hatred is a terrible thing. Just ask that arch-conservative Clarence Thomas.

Liberals need to get over it.