I received a question in Quora about the use of a certain word. I explained as best I could, and am reproducing the result below.
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To some extent “liberalism” is simply like the word “bark” It can be used in many different ways. One has to decide from context whether the bark in question is the outside of a tree or the sound a dog makes. It would be just goofy to argue about this: “no, the REAL meaning of bark is the outside of a tree! You are trying to subvert and distort the language by transposing the word to the canine context.” Many of the arguments about the word “liberal” that one encounters are confused in much the same way.
In the United States, the term is often used for what one might alternatively call a social democrat: for someone who believes that (a) there is a role for profit-seeking activity in the production of wealth, but (b) the DISTRIBUTION of that wealth is a matter in which the state has to play the central role, by for example guaranteeing healthcare for all, and so (c) profit seeking activities (and private property rights) have to be kept on a short lease, to keep the first of those points consistent with the second. Those who use “liberal” with disdain are condemning that combination of views, and those who use it with pride generally hold something like that combination of views.
Note that a social democrat is not the same thing as a democratic socialist. As I understand it, the fellow pictured above, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I) is NOT a social democrat, or a liberal, in this sense. He would let proposition (a) on the above list go to the blazes. A liberal is someone who is somewhat to the right of Sanders, although perfectly willing to ally with Sandersians when he perceives the threat as coming from those to the right of both of them. As he usually has, at least since the cold war ended. (The history of Cold War liberalism largely confirms this observation.) A social-democrat-aka-liberal is someone very much like Joe Biden.
In other parts of the world, though, the word “liberal” still has an older meaning. It can refer to anyone who holds the general view that I should stay out of your bidness and you should stay out of mine. In Britain, for example, the Labour Party is pretty plainly a socialist party. Liberalism is a current of opinion that plays itself out largely within the Conservative Party — the Thatcherite current within the Tory sea. Somewhere in between the Conservatives and the Labour Party there is a LIberal Democrat Party and a Social Democrat Party. The views of the social democrat party you may divine from the above explanation. The Liberal Democrats seem somewhere to the right of the social democrats, with or without capitalization, and to the left of the Conservatives but generally adhering to a liberalism akin to that of SOME of the Conservatives.
There is no use trying to make sense of this with the American sense of the word “liberal.” It would be like asking why trees never make the canine noise mentioned above.
This probably doesn’t help. But I tried.
And a yeoman effort, at that. Liberal and conservative are labels and really nothing more to those who describe/define political extremes, a simplistic convenient means of separating one's self from the enemy. And the animus is palpable. When a well-known conservative used the term, 'the L word' years ago, there was no mistaking his disdain; one of the thousand points of light he shed upon an expanding gulf of political thought. A meme, if you wish, in the rudimentary sense. All, sadly humorous commentary in the world as we know it.
ReplyDelete"I should stay out of your bidness, and you should stay out of mine," has a cultural (societal?) facet as much as it has an economic one. 'Let them free' (laissez faire) is mostly used in the context of free-market economies versus dirigiste economies. But the freedom to sell/buy as one wishes is certainly not the only freedom worth preserving. Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association -- the freedom to pursue happiness in myriad ways -- are all important to (self-described) liberals. For example, Friedrich von Hayek made it clear that he was a liberal, not a conservative -- his fear was that economic restrictions were the first step on the 'road to serfdom.'
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