In Defense of Liberalism

(Originally published in Talk Business Quarterly)

Liberal is derived from the Latin word “liberalis,” meaning freedom, as in not to be owned by another. Conservative is derived from “conservare,” meaning to conserve the existing order. The terms define a long-standing political conflict, which emerged from the Enlightenment.

The Enlightenment itself arose from the most fundamental of all human revelations: that the workings of the universe are not whimsically manipulated by god(s), but rather defined by fixed laws amendable to human reasoning. Previously, with few notable exceptions, most developed societies were hierarchal in nature. The peasant masses belonged to the land and the land belonged to the state ruled by a king, who, if not a god, was ordained by god(s) to rule.

The church and state thus fused — the law was a mix of arbitrary church dogma and sovereign whim. Most people subsisted; all excess wealth was drained to support the hierarchal state-military-church complex; nations swung to the ephemeral ambitions of a few; and one’s station in life was determined by one’s class at birth.

Supplanting mythology with reason freed the mind to ask some suddenly obvious questions. If nature was governed by fixed laws amenable to reason, why might men not also govern themselves by laws, founded in reason? On what basis does the church claim to issue worldly law or ordain a king to rule in god’s name? The conceptual separation of church from state inherent in such questions made possible a complete redefinition of human society — one in which power issued from the people up, rather than from pretentious authority down — and with that, class ceased to make any sense. The rule-of-law, legal due process, separation of powers, civil liberties, economic freedom, capitalism, social mobility — all these things are the product of the liberal political revolution.

Liberal democracy and its twin Enlightenment concept, the scientific method, have become the defining elements of western civilization and increasingly the world as a whole. Once thought a questionable experiment, today it is undeniable that individual human development, and hence collective wellbeing are advanced in proportion to which liberal concepts define a society. Indeed, the truth is so plain that the presence or absence of liberal principles is deemed definitional in evaluating the political progress of nations.

But what does this have to do with liberalism/conservatism in America today? The answer is, unfortunately, everything.

On the eve of the American Revolution, liberalism was an intellectual revolution slogging against deeply-established hierarchal social orders in its European birthplace. In America, the circumstance permitted a wholesale application of the doctrine to a new nation with little engrained hierarchy. The leaders of the American Revolution, and most particularly those who articulated its cause and purpose, were Enlightenment intellectuals and hence students of and advocates for liberal democracy.

The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution are the final masterpieces of a conscious intellectual analysis of the potential for and proper form of self-government by free peoples, a subject as enthralling to the 18th century as the quest for flight in the early twentieth.

History and the world see the American Revolution as the watershed event in the assent of liberalism, which is to say the modern social order.  It is popular to assume that every revolutionary patriot was committed to the liberal concepts that a relatively few intellectuals stamped upon it, but it is not so. Then, as now, many Americans did not understand or accept the liberalism that its founding documents boldly claimed for it. Indeed, American history has largely been a story about the struggle to realize its own proclaimed founding values. Neither the Declaration of Independence nor the Constitution define a nation that was; after all the words “all men are created equal” was written by a slaveholder. Rather these documents were a conscious effort to define what the Nation should and could become.

For the most part, the American story has been one of success for liberalism, and to that extent the nation has prospered. But that success has never been complete. The reason? For many, liberty is understood only in subjective terms. Even the most repressive prince has valued that kind of liberty, but “liberty” by definition only really exists when its application is universal. This is the part that the conservative mind has trouble grasping but is essential to the full promise and potential of liberty.

Today, those most inclined to wrap themselves in the flag and accuse others of being un-American, America’s “cultural conservatives,” are in fact the intellectual and cultural heirs of an oft-beaten, but as yet not eradicated minority that the Nation has repeatedly had to rise above to fulfill its founding values and achieve its potential. This conservative mindset, largely rooted in the ignorance demographic of the South and Inner-Mountain regions of the country, has objectively been a retardant to the Nation’s progress in that respect.

The reasons for this reservoir of conservatism in “the land of liberty” are beyond the scope of this piece, but the South — particularly the Old South — was defined by an inherently conservative hierarchal social structure. Unlike the relatively urban, middle class-dominated Northeast which led the rebellion, the South came slowly and reluctantly to the Revolution. It endorsed human slavery and brought the nation to civil war over it.

Apologists long excused its retarded economic development and outsized portion of poverty to the war. The reality is much was due to its own conservative structure and values. At least until after WWII, this included a willful under-education of the population to assure cheap labor for its agrarian economy and the landowning class; discouragement of the lower classes, black and white, from the political process; rejection of free-thinking intellectual institutions that threaten established dogmas; and a favoritism for the rights of capital and land over human interests. All of these are classic manifestations of a conservative social structure and had a classic outcome — a surplus of ignorance and poverty ordered in a hierarchal class-conscious society.

But for the invention of the mechanical cotton picker in the late 1950s, the civil rights movement would not have been politically possible in the 60s. Even as it was, the country was brought to the edge of open violence before de facto slavery was finally put to rest, and a semblance of education was offered to the entirety of the population. It took the occupation of federal troops, or the threat of it, and the courage of a “liberal activist judiciary” making an honest application of the Nation’s founding documents to finally achieve that result. Schools, polls and even bathrooms required federal legislation to be open to all. Hypocrisy has no power to define the divergence between the American promise of liberty and the reality of Southern conservative culture, not just for blacks either.  

Even now, a cultural disdain for intellectual achievement, distrust of academic thought and predilection to primitive, deeply-mythological religious views, often used to justify overtly irrational or unjust cultural values and conditions, xenophobia and various other culturally endorsed prejudices, continue to characterize this core conservative element of American society that define the “Red States” on the political map.

The blunt reality is that the South and Inner-Mountain regions prospered and progressed at all is largely due to their forced inclusion in the larger nation and the presence of a sufficient “liberal” minority to allow these areas to draft in the general success of the greater American Liberal experiment. It is not an accident that the American middle class, its intellectual centers, its engineering and manufacturing prowess developed first and fastest outside its regressive conservative regions.

Nonetheless, these insurmountable regional cultural realities aside, both political parties at the national level have historically in the main been intellectually committed to the Nation’s traditional liberal values. In part, this condition prevailed because the constituent parts of conservatism were for historical reasons divided, with concentrated economic power (the natural beneficiary of conservatism) mostly in the Republican Party, but the culturally conservative demographic (the manipulatable conservative base) mostly in the Democratic Party.

The undeniable success of the nation under liberal principles undoubtedly served to smother conservatism for a time. Particularly after WWII, many natively born into conservative culture sought to free themselves and their progeny from its poverty, ignorance and corrosive prejudices.  A “New South” began to progress.  Unfortunately, there was not enough indigenous liberal energy to overcome deeply-ingrained cultural conservatism and its self-promoted and promoting reservoir of ignorance.

Today, for the first time since the civil war, all the conservative elements of American society have coalesced into a single political movement. How the once largely-progressive Republican Party has come to be high-jacked by so alien an element is yet another story, but the new core of the Republican Party is plainly intent upon re-writing American history.  This core believes, against object historical reality, that it represents the true America even as it often displays the Stars and Bars. It is hostile to a liberal education for its children. It is disdainful of anything intellectual. It seeks to undermine equality for many, both in the law and in opportunity. And it seeks to impose religious values, if not religion itself, upon public policy, and to perpetuate the power and privilege of concentrated wealth.

It is an objective reality, which nearly the entire world now endorses, that all are better off when everyone has a fair shot at life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The political principles of liberalism and the Enlightenment are the universal yellow brick road to human progress.  America did not go to the moon in a Southern Baptist church bus; its economy was not built on the primitive economic superstitions of the Tea Party nor the economic exploitation of the many by the few; it did not become the university to the world by treating scripture as a crystal ball that foretells the future and trumps reason; it did not build the greatest middle class society since Athens by cowering before the interests of concentrated wealth.

Yet these are the defining characteristics of modern American conservatism — all of which stands in clear opposition to the Nation’s fundamental founding liberal Enlightenment values. These conservative doctrines are, as they always have been, a threat to American middle class prosperity, and to the human adventure revealed in the Enlightenment that America has largely led since its inception.

If this latest assault upon America’s native classless liberalism is successful, it will be because of the greed of a few who feed it, the ignorance that was manipulated by that greed and the indolence of the rest of us too self-absorbed to resist it.

We will all be guilty in it.

Note: My ventings have been moved jamesbrucemcmath.blogspot.com