22/10/2024
Liberalism for shape shifters
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We are constantly surprised by the betrayals of liberalism. How easily liberals ally themselves with austerity and war and tax regimes that favour the rich and support the status quo and reinforce severe social inequality. How, de facto, liberals support foreign wars carried out to ensure the dominance of western corporations! How flexible liberals are when they are pushed to compromise on implementing progressive policies of social justice, and even to reliquishing the environmentalism they tout.
Liberal electioneering sets us all up for a fall. Why is this? We can look at Ed Davey, confident in the knowledge that he is capable of spinning like a weather vane in any political weather, like Nick Clegg before him. Nick Clegg who got into bed, like a good little piggy, with David Cameron. Nick Clegg who became a Facebook enforcer, helping dampen down opposition to US foreign policy globally, in protesting as Facebook harvests dissenting voices for US intelligence.
If liberalism is such a flexible philosophy, if it lends itself to imperialist foreign policy so easily, and if it so quickly gives up the ghost to 'the necessity' of market fundamentalism, how can we define it?
And when someone says the 'N' word - Neoliberal - what do they mean? The Guardian newspaper touts itself as the voice of liberalism. It did so as part of a strategy to strengthen its presence in the US. But isn't it tricking the US public?
Let's look at a definition in the Cambridge dictionary and then draw our conclusions.
Cambridge Dictionary
'an attitude of respecting and allowing many different types of beliefs or behaviour'
And . . .
'the political belief that there should be free trade, that people should be allowed more personal freedom, and that changes in society should be made gradually'
The dictionary extracts collocations of the word to illustrate:
'liberalism cannot be properly understood without an appreciation of its local government dimension.'
'political liberalism is justified because it satisfies the criterion of reflective equilibrium.'
'justification for political liberalism depend on second-order theories with which reasonable people can disagree'
'the ideas of stability and reflective equilibrium can be combined to form two different second-order justifications for political liberalism.'
'While pro-aristocratic attitudes became identified with the royalist party, their liberal opponents became ever more criticial of aristocratic liberalism.'
(So it can be 'aristocratic')
'Nationalism had surely played a positive role in modern liberalism in the nineteenth century'
'substantive exploration of the mechanisms or dynamics of social and political change in general, and of liberalism in particular.'
(So it is procedural)
Let's look at a few more definitions. From Britannica:
'Liberalism is a political and economic doctrine that emphasizes individual autonomy, equality of opportunity, and the protection of individual rights (primarily to life, liberty, and property), originally against the state and later against both the state and private economic actors, including businesses.'
And . . .
'The intellectual founders of liberalism were the English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704), who developed a theory of political authority based on natural individual rights and the consent of the governed, and the Scottish economist and philosopher Adam Smith (1723–90), who argued that societies prosper when individuals are free to pursue their self-interest within an economic system based on private ownership of the means of production and competitive markets, controlled neither by the state nor by private monopolies.'
Then Britannica continues, blurring distinctions between different kinds of liberals and making a mulch of it.
From the Oxford reference:
'A political ideology centred upon the individual (see individualism), thought of as possessing rights against the government, including rights of due process under the law, equality of respect, freedom of expression and action, and freedom from religious and ideological constraint.'
From Wikipedia:
'Historically, the term referred to the broad liberal political alliance of the nineteenth century, formed by Whigs, Peelites, and radicals. This alliance, which developed into the Liberal Party, dominated politics for much of the Victorian era and during the years before the First World War.'
And it mentions:
'the social liberalism of the Liberal Democrats'
And:
'the nineteenth-century Liberal tradition of gradually removing the religious, economic, and political barriers that prevented men of varied creeds and classes from exercising their individual talents in order to improve themselves and their society. As the third quarter of the century drew to a close, the essential bastions of Victorianism still held firm: respectability; a government of aristocrats and gentlemen now influenced not only by middle-class merchants and manufacturers but also by industrious working people; a prosperity that seemed to rest largely on the tenets of laissez-faire economics; and a Britannia that ruled the waves and many a dominion beyond.[5]
'Lord Acton wrote in 1880 that he considered Gladstone one "of the three greatest Liberals" (along with Edmund Burke and Lord Macaulay).[6]
'In 1909 the Liberal Chancellor David Lloyd George introduced his "People's Budget", the first budget which aimed to redistribute wealth. The Liberal statesman Lord Rosebery ridiculed it by asserting Gladstone would reject it, "Because in his eyes, and in my eyes, too, as his humble disciple, Liberalism and Liberty were cognate terms; they were twin-sisters."
And:
'During the Liberal Governments of 1905–1916, the welfare state was introduced to provide provision for lower incomes. In 1908 a pension system was created with old-age pensions for people older than age 70; an income tax was introduced and in 1911 the National Insurance Act was approved.[18][19] To fund extensive welfare reforms Lloyd George proposed taxes on land ownership and high incomes in the "People's Budget" (1909), which the Conservative-dominated House of Lords rejected. The resulting constitutional crisis was only resolved after two elections in 1910 and the passage of the Parliament Act 1911. His budget was enacted in 1910, and with the National Insurance Act 1911 and other measures helped to establish the modern welfare state.'
Wikipedia has many US posters and, just as they call football soccer they must qualify the term liberalism to distinguish it from their own understanding of the term. So they call modern British liberalism 'social liberalism':
'Social liberalism[a] is a political philosophy and variety of liberalism that endorses social justice, social services, a mixed economy, and the expansion of civil and political rights.'
There is a fight over the term. It seems to have been refashioned by the right into something deeply unpleasant.
The Mephistophelean Economist calls itself 'liberal'. The haunted, demonic figure of Anne McElvoy presents a BBC series going over 300 years of British liberalism.
Keep a bowl of holy water near as you listen.
Listen to the latest episodes of British Liberalism: The Grand Tour on BBC Sounds.
