Politically speaking, America may be the most confused country in the world. Millions of people in this country are conservatives and even reactionaries who think they are liberals; we have millions more liberals and radicals who call themselves conservative.
It is an unholy mess and it needs to be cleared up. It’s time for a language intervention.
...But today the words have been hijacked. They’ve been turned into their opposites: a liberal today is somebody who wants to defend and restore the Blue Social Model from the last century; a progressive is now somebody who thinks history has gone horribly wrong and that we must turn the clock back to make things better.
Does this really make sense?
...
America’s Word
But the l-word in particular isn’t just any old word. The l-word is America’s word, the word that sums up in a nutshell what this country is all about. A liberal is someone who seeks ordered liberty in politics: who seeks to reconcile humanity’s need for governance with its drive for freedom in such a way as to give us all the order we need (but no more) with as much liberty as possible...
...
One Snake, Four Skins
In modern history, liberalism has gone through four distinct incarnations; the old snake keeps shedding its skin. Liberalism 1.0 was the political expression of the original enlightenment philosophy that developed in Britain and shaped the Glorious Revolution of 1688. That Revolution remains the seminal political event in the history of the English speaking world; the American founding fathers set out consciously to imitate the spirit of 1688: both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights flow from the ideas of a revolution that once and for all made Parliament supreme over the Crown in British history. Even today the principles of that glorious (and largely peaceful) revolution remain the central pillars of American political thought and the best definition of a liberal remains someone who wants to build on the accomplishments of that epochal event.
... The 1.0 Revolution of 1688 had replaced an intolerant established Church with a more tolerant one. The 2.0 Revolution of 1776 separated the church from the state to the benefit of both.
Liberalism 2.0 as developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries was rooted in the thought of 1.0 liberals like John Locke, but thinkers and politicians like Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington developed and put into practice a set of ideas about how individual liberty could be reconciled with economic development and good governance. Note how the names changed. In 1688, if you supported the Glorious Revolution you were a Whig and a liberal. In 1776 if you supported those same principles against the Declaration of Independence, you were a Tory conservative. The labels changed with the times...
... While (much more than the 1.0 liberals) 2.0 liberals understood that slavery was an evil, they believed that it could be tolerated until it died a natural death.
The 19th century saw the development of liberalism 3.0; sometimes called Manchester Liberalism, this was, compared to the earlier systems, a philosophy of radical individualism and equality. 3.0 liberals had much more confidence in the common sense reasoning power of ordinary people than earlier generations; their programs included once unthinkable ideas like universal suffrage, the abolition of slavery, an end to state-enforced monopoly corporations, limited government, free markets at home and free trade abroad. 3.0 liberals tended to support strong, personal and emotional religious belief; they were much more likely to be evangelical than either 1.0 or 2.0 liberals. Like earlier liberals, 3.0 liberals believed that capitalism, individual rights and a culture of virtue supported by a tolerant, non-fanatical Protestant Christianity could provide ordered liberty to countries like the US and the UK. ...
Stage Four Liberals
In the 20th century, liberals continued to seek new ways of advancing the core liberal synthesis of individual freedom with social order in the post-Civil War world. Ultimately they produced liberalism 4.0, the model that most Americans today understand when they hear the word liberal. Today 4.0 is increasingly outdated and backward-looking, but in its time it was a genuinely positive attempt to realize old values in new circumstances, and many of its achievements still demand our respect.
The driving force shaping the agenda of 4.0 liberals were a series of powerful and profound historical developments that changed the world under their feet. The first three versions of liberal politics were built in societies that, while beginning to urbanize and industrialize, were still predominantly agricultural. Both Jeffersonian and Jacksonian liberals saw independent small farmers as the basis of American freedom and democracy.
(read the article at the link for bacground)
...Although socialists and social democrats sometimes made common cause with 4.0 liberals, it’s important to realize that, at bottom, 4.0 liberalism was built as an alternative to socialism rather than as an introduction to it. That is, many American liberals came to believe that providing benefits like Social Security and unemployment insurance would inoculate American workers against more virulent forms of socialist ideology, and attract the new immigrants and their children toward the American liberal tradition.
It worked. The strong socialist political movements, mostly based among recent immigrants from countries with strong socialist and social-democratic traditions, gradually faded away. The descendants of the European immigrant waves between 1880 and 1920 turned their backs on socialism; and the overwhelming bulk of the American labor movement was strongly anti-communist all through the Cold War.
...
...conversions are not, historically speaking, as rare as one might think. Benjamin Franklin was one of the most prominent American 1.0 liberals during much of his life. During his long residence in London he hoped that a transatlantic British Empire under the royal House of Hanover would be a beacon of enlightenment to all the world. But as times changed, so did Franklin, becoming one of the most courageous and effective leaders of the American Revolution. I suspect that some of the most important and creative people who will lead the movement towards a 5.o America will have grown up steeped in the values of 4.0 thought.
During the next couple of weeks I will post some more about what 5.o liberalism will look like and how it both breaks with the policies and world view of 4.0 liberals while seeking core liberal values in a changing world. But whether we still call it liberalism or whether we find some new word to stand for our deepest national hopes and dreams, American society must move beyond the increasingly dysfunctional and outdated ideas of 4.0 liberalism. Whatever was the case in the past, it just doesn’t work now. If we don’t recognize that and move on, economic decline and social stagnation will undercut our prosperity, endanger our liberty and undermine our international power and domestic security. That is a future no true liberal could love.
Saturday, January 1, 2011
One Snake, Four Skins: The L-word
also see the synopsis at:
How the L-Word Became a 4-Letter Word | FrontPage Magazine
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment