Liberal? How come? Part 9,231

I've been thinking about this for a long time. What made me a liberal? Or, better said, what made me a lunatic-fringe liberal? This is hard for me, to admit being a liberal, since I generally dispise liberals as being way too academic, among other things. So the academic pleasantly intones W.C. Williams' "No ideas but in things" during a lecture, while secretly adoring the butthead language poets or worse, accuse Gary Snyder of lacking craft. WTF is craft? Tin punching? Anyway, more on this liberal thing later.