WHO IS THE LIBERAL? SYDNEY WILLIAMS
The word liberal reminds one of Humpty Dumpty’s proclamation. It means different things to different people. The word is polysemous. To the Left it means big government, which actively supports social change. To the Right it refers to less government interference, the endorsement of individual rights, civil liberties, and free markets. The word stems from the Latin, liber, meaning free or unimpeded. In Lewis Carroll’s story, the word that caused the skirmish was glory, when used as a verb. “They’ve a temper – some of them, particularly verbs,” Humpty Dumpty says to a puzzled Alice. The word liberal is not temperamental (at least as far as I know), but it can self-camouflage, to ambush the unsuspecting.
Over the years, the Left has usurped the word. so that for most the word refers to those who prefer a large role for government in their lives, while conservatives have become deplorables, birthers, conspirators, or just plain racists or right-wing nuts. We on the right should seize the word back. In his 1953 book The Conservative Mind, Russell Kirk wrote of Edmund Burke (1729-1797), of how he defended the liberties of Englishmen against their king and of Americans against king and parliament. He defended those liberties not because they were innovations, “…but because they were ancient prerogatives, guaranteed by immemorial usage. Burke was liberal because he was conservative.” (Highlights mine.)
It is amusing to consider how the definition of liberal has morphed over time, so that today’s social liberals consider themselves the sole owners of the word, “even as,” Daniel Henninger wrote in last Thursday’s Wall Street Journal, “they surrender to the state an array of long assumed freedoms – of opinion, speech, and privacy.” Classical liberals believe that such rights, along with “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,” are natural; they are God-given. The purpose of government is to secure and ensure those rights, not to dictate social behavior.
While classical (conservative) liberals emphasize the freedom of the individual to achieve his or her goals, they recognize the necessity of government in maintaining order, in protecting us from enemies, in providing a quality high school education, in ensuring a sound currency, in adjudicating differences, and in making sure that the sick and the elderly – those who cannot care for themselves – live comfortable lives. At the same time, they emphasize the dignity of work, personal independence, self-determination, personal responsibility and accountability, and the importance of thinking for oneself.
On the Left there are social liberals who see the state’s role as being ubiquitous, that equality should include outcomes as well as opportunities, that ease of voting should trump security of the polls (they are equally important), and that healthcare should be free for all. Their efforts have encouraged the growth of the administrative state, creating agencies with expansive legislative, regulatory, and judicial powers. Have they pushed liberalism too far? In Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler wrote: “Liberals, implied in the name, say they are for freedom, but are they? The progressive wing is full of authoritarians telling others what to do or how to think: America is a racist country. Wear a mask. Limit charter schools. Bees are fish (in California.)” Regulatory bodies, created by Congress and managed by unelected bureaucrats, are not accountable to the people. Their powers, however, can be unleashed – or restrained – by whomever is President. Recently courts have begun to push back, questioning, for example, the doctrine of “deference to regulators.” It is the Left that comprises the bulk of college professors and administrators, and they decide what speech and which speakers are acceptable. Social liberals control the teachers’ unions and most of mainstream and social media. In Up from Liberalism (1959), Williams Buckley (1925-2008) wrote: “Though liberals do a great deal of talking about hearing other points of view, it sometimes shocks them that there are other points of view.” Are liberals open to contrary opinions? Am I? I hope so.
Is it liberal to call those who question the efficacy of a vaccine anti-vaxxers? Is it liberal to denounce as deniers those who question the contention that man is the primary (or sole) reason for climate change? Is it liberal for a university liberal arts professor to deny a speaker who does not hew to a preferred political ideology? Can a liberal believe in tradition and custom? I am not sure about a social liberal, but a classical liberal would answer yes, when the question refers to long-established modes of behavior: accepted manners, respect for others, humility, and charity. But he or she would not if it meant providing advantages to preferred groups – racial, national, or ethnic – whether it is America in the 1950s or in the 2020s. Is it liberal to replace merit and achievement with identity essentialism? I think not.
Who is a liberal? It depends, as Lewis Carroll wrote, on who is using the word. But well-intentioned authoritarianism, whether from the Right or the Left, is not liberalism. A school friend, now living in Denver and with whom I reconnected fourteen years ago at our fiftieth reunion, writes a clever, satirical piece, The Apocryphal Press. He puts to rest the old belief among conservatives that the Left is devoid of humor. Today, we are good friends, yet we stand at opposite ends of the political spectrum. We both describe ourselves as liberals. And yet, while I believe my friend when he professes to be liberal, I see nothing liberal about policies his side backs: universities that deny conservatives the right to be heard, schools that teach gender identification to pre-teens, biased media organizations, corporations that require adherence to woke dogma, social policies that disrupt or discourage family formations, and an administration that demands social media companies comply with demands regarding vaccinations and that still fails to enforce immigration laws at the border. And I see nothing liberal about politicians – on both sides of the aisle – who lie about their backgrounds.
So, who is a liberal? Perhaps they have become endangered, at least in Washington.
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