One of the greatest losses to clear thinking in America has been the demonization of the term “liberal.” All that is best in America is entirely the outcome of or compatible with liberal values and liberal political principles. The Declaration of Independence is liberal to its core. So is the Constitution. The federalist papers written mostly by James Madison and Alexander Hamilton are a powerful statement of liberal political philosophy as well as the most fundamental examination of our constitutional system of governance.

At root, liberalism is the principle that the individual is the fundamental moral and ethical unit of society, and therefore no collectivity, be it state, class, race, gender, religion, nationality, or any other group, has justification beyond what it contributes to the well-being of individuals. When Americans are taught that liberalism is “anti-American” our ability to understand our own country is undermined.

Mark Kleiman over at The Reality Based Community has a great post on “Restoring the Liberal Brand.” I agree with him completely. Any one who loves their country should take a look at it.

The problem of liberalism in America has its roots in the first decades of this century, when American liberals split over how to address problems arising from the successful implementation of liberal principles.

A Victim of Success

Freedom of contract and secure property rights generated world wide markets and the rise of industrial capitalism with its thousands of wage laborers and concentrations of economic wealth, concentrations that often secured political privileges denied to mere citizens. This was a far cry from the Jeffersonian ideal of a country of small farmers and business people whose prosperity and security of title rendered them truly independent of others’ wealth and power.

Explosive growth in our population and size, along with the establishment of corrupt political machines dominating many cities and states, meant that the liberal ideal of free and equal citizens voting for people who in some clear sense represented them was fast eroding. New England town democracy, America’s political pride and joy, and so beautifully described in Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, was rapidly becoming utterly irrelevant.

The rise of science, an enterprise that is also liberal to its core, not only increased our ability to understand and manipulate the natural world, it did so at the cost of relegating that understanding to increasingly specialized parts of society. Scientists became elites within their chosen fields of knowledge, and if those fields promised to be useful in improving society, the implications were bothersome. Some believed that America’s future pointed towards governance by a scientific elite, administering the rest of us for our own good.

A Disastrous Split

Liberals split over how to address these challenges. The “classical liberals” argued nothing of real substance had changed despite all these new developments, and the market should be trusted over any other force in society. Technocratic administrative and democratic egalitarian liberals disagreed, and argued instead for different and often mutually contradictory reforms (bureaucratic regulation and political primaries for example). With the New deal liberalism fell apart as a unified perspective, as each faction focused more on where they disagreed than on where they agreed.

Classical liberals claimed, falsely, that they were the “true liberals” whereas the others had betrayed the real spirit of the liberal vision. They lumped the others into a common bag and labeled it “collectivist” while largely shutting their eyes to the enormous power of giant corporations and their ability to rig the rules of the law in their favor. The meaning of the term “public” largely disappeared from their vocabulary.

Technocratic liberals sought to strengthen administrative bureaucracies, often in alliance with the largest corporations. They looked at classical liberals as naive worshippers of a market now largely gone except among abstract theorists. Democratic liberals were considered equally naive, for citizens were usually ignorant, easily manipulated, and showing no sign of developing into Jefferson’s model of self-governing individuals. Better to administer them humanely.
Democratic liberals worried about the power of bureaucracies and big business alike. They rejected the inequalities that came with any genuine empowerment on smaller scales, but the more perceptive of them also worried about the inequalities in power that arose when more powerful governmental institutions overrode local ones. Substantive equality and independence stood in a greater tension than egalitarian values were often prepared to admit. In a word, once liberalism lost its center, none of its partial expressions could offer a convincing path to their fellows.

With liberalism’s weakening as a coherent political and social doctrine, anti-liberal forces from left and right alike sought to ally on those issues, despite their fundamental rejection of liberal values. This occurred first with the Marxist left, but the illiberal left was never all that strong in the US. A more radical challenge occurred, and is continuing, when classical liberals made common cause with the authoritarian right in both its imperial and theocratic guises.

The November elections gave us a breathing space. But the fundamental self-inflicted wound on America’s guiding philosophy remains, and we will be in serious peril both as a society and as a vision for others until it is dealt with. Mark Kleiman has some good initial ideas in this regard. Read him.