The word “liberal” is a pretty complicated one. Living in this country it gets associated with the Liberal Democrats, and I hope it should be obvious why I’m not a Lib Dem. In a US context it means anyone to the left of the Republican Party mainstream.
More generally, if you’ll forgive being told how to suck eggs, it’s associated with freedom, the philosophy of John Stuart Mill (left), and the like. And in modern political analysis, it tends to be divided into two sections: social liberalism and economic liberalism. The combination of these two, in a slightly caveated way, is loosely the position of the Orange Book Lib Dems.
The latter is pretty straightforward: should companies and individuals be free to act economically largely without constraint, except where a direct harm can be demonstrated? This part has never had much appeal to me. It seemed clear to me that such an idealised system would essentially see those with money acquire more of it, and those without continue to be squeezed.
The Tory/Lib Dem/Labour consensus position on markets isn’t pure economic liberalism, but even the version I’ve lived under all my life clearly has those undesirable feedback characteristics.
The advantages under capitalism of starting with assets are so strong that a safe Piketty-ish bet is that inequalities will not just be protected but will grow. No thanks. I’m in favour of innovation, I’m in favour of a role for business – but within a clear framework that puts society’s needs first.
The former I find a bit more complicated, though. I have in the past described myself as economically socialist and socially liberal.
My use of “socially liberal” as a description of myself was a result of seeing social liberalism regularly in the same space as me on policy issues like equal marriage, drug legalisation, the New Zealand model for sex work laws, ID cards, etc. It seems like a tempting team to back, especially when you see it as a binary with intolerant “social conservatism”. And who on the left wants to be called illiberal?
However, it became increasingly clear to me that social liberalism has more in common with economic liberalism than I’d realised: that they have similar flaws, just as they have a similar theoretical underpinning.
Most obviously, neither social nor economic liberalism take account of power dynamics. In both cases, classically liberal positions risk favouring those with existing money or or social power. It leads to intellectual clusterfucks like today’s Tim Lott piece in the Guardian, a defence of privilege from someone who’s so liberal that he can’t even say whether or not the EDL is racist or right-wing.
To take another topical example, just look at the way “freedom of speech” is used and misused by social liberals. It’s a stopping point for too many people: an end to discussions. Social liberals seem determined not to analyse who has the power and who has the platform. It’s also off limits to consider what they’re saying or what impact it might have. It’s hard to persuade social liberals to look at whose voices are being systematically excluded, mocked, or ignored, especially when they have some technical freedoms of speech (i.e. where we don’t live under Stalinism or similar). Decisions not to invite discriminatory speakers becomes censorship (as argued against in this letter to the Observer, to which I was a signatory), neglecting the radical and worthwhile idea in human rights discourse, which is to protect individuals against oppressive restrictions at the hands of the state, not to restrict the organising of those individuals.
Some of this is simply naive on the part of liberals, but it’s hard not to read some of it as defiant protectionism for those who already get heard a lot, a close ideological parallel with the cartels or oligopolies which economic liberalism has consistently facilitated. Money accrues to those who have it: liberal platforms accrue to those who have them. The poor stay poor: the marginalised continue not to be heard. Liberal assessments do nothing to identify power inequalities, and liberal policy framings do nothing to redress them.
Now, clearly I still support policy positions where I happen to share them with social liberals, but for me they are part of an anti-authoritarian value set, closer to anarchism than to liberalism. I’m done with liberalism: all of it.
#1 by Gryff on March 11, 2015 - 4:41 pm
As a liberal I would like to offer a defence of liberalism as a radical, and often anti-establishment philosophy that, I wouldn’t expect you necessarily to share, but hopefully you would agree you could make common cause with.
I will have to admit at the outset that my liberalism is not what is often called liberalism, and I don’t think it is something that any political party strongly aligns with, but I think it is a fair development of a fair reading of Mill.
As a privileged liberal I think it is my duty to recognise that not everyone has the same privilege I do. Privilege is freedom, freedom to be heard in the media, freedom to move in public without being afraid of harassment (from the police, from bigots of any flavour, from leering men), the freedom that comes from a stable job and a secure home, the freedom to marry the person I love in a religious setting, the freedom that comes from knowing that I will not be discriminated against in my career or in my interactions with the state. I have to recognise that not everyone shares that freedom, that sometimes these freedoms are constrained by the state, and other times they are constrained by power dynamics and social factors. I especially have to recognise that my liberty is a benefit frequently derived from a system that constrains the liberty of others.
As a liberal I have a responsibility to work, both as an individual and as a member of a society, to fight structures that constrain those less privileged than me, even if it means that I have to voluntarily sacrifice my own liberty. I believe one of the foremost duties of the state is to protect the liberty of everyone, but most especially of those whose liberty is infringed by the liberty of the privileged, the state should be prepared to constrain the liberty of the strong to protect the liberty of the ‘weak’.
To address your example, no true liberal should think that freedom of speech should extend to its exercise when it drowns out those with a weaker voice, than my freedom to move my fists extends into your face. Calling freedom of speech should not be the end of an argument, but an invitation to consider who cannot exercise their freedom to speak, or who might be harmed, or whose liberty constrained, by its exercise.
#2 by Allan Campbell on March 12, 2015 - 3:34 pm
I’m afraid I wholeheartedly disagree with your conclusions about social liberalism here. While it’s true that there are numerous individuals who claim to be acting as social liberals who will act as you’ve described (using accusations about free speech or censorship to close down uncomfortable arguments or failing to highlight and criticise prejudice where it exists) that is not what social liberalism is about.
John Stuart Mill, who as you mentioned is something of a father to the liberal movement, articulated the “harm principal” as to how we should approach the rights of individuals (though he didn’t quite invent the principal itself). He said that people should be free to do whatever they want provided it doesn’t harm other people, which on the face of it sounds pretty reasonable. There are obvious flaws with this idea – particularly how you measure harm. Drug abuse, for example, can cause huge emotional damage to those close to the abuser while also funding organised crime (where the drugs are illegal) and perhaps even causing the abuser more likely to harm others – despite this most social liberals would argue in favour of either decriminalising or legalising many, if not all, drugs. The other major flaw with this for people who are against economic liberalism is that the harm principle appears to forbid intervention in the business sphere. As such, Mill’s harm principle is not an absolute rule that we should aim to enforce (and no, I don’t even know how you enforce a rule that tries to do away with other rules)! What the harm principle does give is a good guide to where one individuals rights start and another’s end. For me this actually fits well with a left-wing view of economics as it condemns the harm caused by financial exploitation.
Your issues seem to be with those trying to create their view of a socially liberal society, which you point out can be just as harmful to the voices of the downtrodden as a socially illiberal one, and on this I have a great deal of sympathy with your view. However, in denouncing the whole social liberal movement you denounce not just the idea of a socially liberal society (which seems to be where you issue lies) but the idea of a socially liberal government and socially liberal governance. A socially liberal government is one which, for social issues, largely abides by the harm principle and does not impinge upon its citizens’ personal freedoms. A society that is not socially liberal could exist under a socially liberal government (it would not be very socially liberal to legislate against people having the right to deny bigots a platform, for example).
This is an important distinction because, for the majority of people to call one’s self a “liberal” is a political label much more than an indication of the kind of society they are trying to build. Your problems with social liberalism are not, in my view, problems of socially liberal governance and as long as “liberal” is a primarily political label I believe that encouraging people to support the politics of social liberalism is the best way to ensure a fairer and more equitable society whether it’s a society you would recognise as socially liberal or not.
N.B. Apologies for the long and rambling post, I feel I was struggling to articulate myself so I hope it still makes sense!
#3 by Douglas on March 12, 2015 - 6:39 pm
I cant help feeling that instead of being done with liberalism I just wonder if you are done with the traditional framework of labels?
As people have become more educationed (or even just more informed) and people communicate more and more ideas and thoughts spread it is clear that traditional labels like liberal, conservative, socialist, authoritarian etc are increasingly irrelevant. These traditional labels then fed into the traditional political parties and their policy-making processes.
Instead we all take individual positions on such a wide range of policies that even the umbrella labels like ‘liberal’ don’t mean much any more.
A few years ago I was an Orange Booker. Equality of opportunity was, for me, better than equality of outcome. This is because, for me, enforcing the same result on everyone removed individual choices and desires. I now believe that both positions have some problems and some merits. Not everyone has the same chances to take all of the opportunities that are available to them. Take education and health. I have no problem with people paying what they want if they want to go private. To deny people the opportunities to access services they want merely because they cost something is step towards living in a very bad place. Of course, we as a society need to decide what services we want people to have without cost and raise taxes and spend money accordingly. Public and Private health provision are not mutually exclusive.
If we want better health and education outcomes then looking beyond labels is perhaps the first step. We need to look at evidence of what works and what doesn’t and make the changes. It is often labels that get in the way of those changes.
I, like you, have multiple labels. The one that has the most profound affect on my worldview and changed a number of policy positions is “husband”. Being married to a black female asylum seeker has given me the opportunity to see the world though another persons eyes. And our world is not pretty and labels that are claimed in the “first world” mean nothing in the “third world” where two of the primary labels people have are “hungry” & “thirsty”. If privileged is to be checked then lets start with who has access to clean water in their house.
I am a member of the Scottish Green Party (so am a Green) and also a humanist. Mostly these two labels are not in conflict but I go with a different approach to scientific evidence in policy making so am in favour of GM crop trials, investment in alternative nuclear fuel technologies etc. which are not SGP. However, I don’t mind this difference.
The basic point I am probably not very successful at explaining here is that we all have labels but that the collection of labels we have are never going to fit into historically simple frameworks of identities. We are all human and should all have the agency to act for ourselves and together. As we are seeing with the decline of traditional parties around Europe, people are beginning to see themelves in different ways and your rejection of liberalism is a part of that.