What’s wrong with being a liberal?

A liberal system elevates the individual over the collective, process over outcome, the rules over the rulers

Daniel Hannan is Director-General of the Institute of Economic Affairs

Their whole shtick is based on sloppy language. The post-liberals, the NatCons, the alt-rightists, the integralists, the Groypers — they base their case on a linguistic trick. Philosophers call it “equivocation”. It means using the same word to mean different things as suits your argument. They do it with two words in particular: “liberal” and “globalist”. It is worth considering them in turn.

The word liberal has an ancient and rather majestic etymology. The Latin “liber” meant a free citizen: someone who was not enslaved. At the same time, from a different derivation, “liber” also meant book.

Those two meanings were blended in the English word “liberal”. To be a liberal was to favour liberty: freedom of speech, worship, association, and contract. It thus meant, by implication, wanting constrained government, low taxes, and strong property rights. Yet it did not mean anarchy. It also meant — this is where the “book” part comes in — a virtuous application of wisdom, a humane tolerance, a generosity of spirit.

The great seventeenth-century poet and philosopher John Milton drew a distinction between “licence” and “liberty”. Licence meant being able to do whatever you liked, and was nothing special. A beast in the wilderness had licence. Liberty, on the other hand, meant making moral choices in the informed knowledge of what might follow.

When the word “liberal” entered our political lexicon from the Hispanic world in the early nineteenth century, it had that high-minded meaning. Liberals were for free trade, property rights, and equality before the law; conservatives were for tradition, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical authority.

In most of Europe, as in Latin America, the word liberal still has this meaning. Javier Milei uses it accurately, unselfconsciously and proudly. But in the United States, starting in the 1890s and accelerating during the 1930s, the word began to mean “left-wing.” Sometimes, the elision was deliberate. FDR, in particular, applied the word “liberal” to various interventionist policies in the hope that its positive connotations would rub off on them. In fact, no semantic trick could make the New Deal successful. Instead of the word gilding progressive policies, the progressive policies tarnished the word. By 1988, forlorn Michael Dukakis voters were waving placards asking, “What’s wrong with being a liberal?”

That shift had “classical liberals” (a retronym that the first-generation liberals had never applied to themselves) scrabbling about for a new moniker. In the 1940s, some began to call themselves “libertarians”, until then a word associated with French radicals and anarchists. In a 1960 postscript to The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich Hayek bemoaned the ugliness of that “manufactured term”.

Postliberals deliberately blur the two meanings, as Roosevelt did, but from the opposite perspective. Liberalism is their all-purpose boo-word, covering both the traditional sense of “individualist” and the modern sense of “left-wing.” The idea that limited government is compatible with conservative values, that less authority for clerks, licensors and regulators means more authority for school principals, religious leaders and heads of families, is not considered.

An equivalent semantic shift is now happening over “globalisation”. Until an eyeblink ago, that word meant removing barriers so that people were not penalised for, or prevented from, buying goods or services from outside their country. But, over the past decade or so, it has taken on a new meaning. A “globalist” is now someone who wants the world to be ruled from Davos or Brussels. He wants human rights courts to strike down national governments. He wants to send entitled “gimmegrants” across every border. He wants to destroy the West.

Photo by Chris Leipelt on Unsplash

Again, the idea that the free flow of goods, services and ideas is itself part of the Western patrimony is not considered. Two completely contradictory notions — one to do with restricting the state’s power over the individual, the other to do with increasing it — are deliberately conflated.

For a lot of people under the age of 25, the older meanings of these words don’t register at all. Argue that tariffs are making us poorer, and they will ask why you want to flood the country with illegal immigrants.

Yet Hayek was right when, in that same postscript, he argued that what was called “conservative” in the Anglo-American world was what Europeans meant by “liberal.” Why? Because the English Whig tradition, and particularly the US Constitution, its sublime culmination, is the epitome of a liberal order.

When people in the great English-speaking democracies call themselves conservatives, the system they want to conserve is a liberal one – a system that elevates the individual over the collective, process over outcome, the rules over the rulers. The characteristics that make our way of life distinct and agreeable are all, in essence, liberal. The Western order in general, and the Anglosphere order in particular, are liberal. They make us who we are as a people. Let’s not be afraid to use the word.