Liberals old and new

— Acontinuing source of frustration for anyone who visits America from a foreign country is the unique way in which the words "liberal" and "conservative" are used here.

The people we call liberals generally would be considered socialists or social democrats in other democracies. The people we call conservatives would be called liberals. In other words, our liberals really aren't traditional liberals, and our conservatives really aren't traditional conservatives.

Confusion is piled on when realizing that the American experiment in selfgovernment has been, from the outset, an overwhelmingly liberal rather than socialist or conservative enterprise, that America was the first "liberal nation."

Much of the incoherence dates back to roughly the beginning of the 20th century, when the Progressive Movement began to alter the meaning of American liberalism by embracing the previously illiberal idea of centralized political authority as an agent of reform. What the Progressives began was essentially completed by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, when ideas drawn from antithetical European belief systems like Fabian socialism andsocial democracy were presented as simply another permutation of American liberalism.

It is probably too late to restore the original meaning of liberalism or to instill any coherence in the American ideological system. Liberalism for most people is what it has been since the 1930s; conservatism is, for the most part, what liberalism was before then.

Still, it wouldn't hurt to make some distinctions in the service of greater clarity, to note some of the ways in which the old liberalism differs from the new.

First, classical liberals and contemporary liberals have fundamentally opposing views on the importance of liberty and its relationship to government. The classical liberals who crafted the U.S. Constitution viewed government as a necessary evil. If allowed to grow too large, it would almost certainly threaten those basic freedoms they called inalienable rights. Individual freedom was the central goal of classical liberalism, and preservation of that freedom was only thought to be compatible with limited government.

Contemporary liberals care less about individual freedom and much more about equality of condition and tend to see a powerful centralized government as the necessary means of bringing it about. Whereas traditional liberals focused upon what are called negative rights-that is, those things that government couldn't infringe upon or take away-new liberals emphasize positive rights, defined as things government should give us, including employment, housing, and health care. Freedom for a traditional liberal means freedom from restraint, freedom for new liberals means freedom from want and insecurity.

The differences between old and new liberals on issues like liberty, equality and inequality have led to further and broader differences over economics, in particular dramatically differing views on what Karl Marx pejoratively labeled capitalism.

Old liberals like Adam Smith believed in market economics because they saw thepursuit of profits and private property as not just economically beneficial to society but also as an extension of the idea of personal freedom. New liberals tend to see capitalism as a major source of injustice and oppression. In a manner that blurs the distinctions between the once distinct and opposing philosophies of socialism and liberalism, new liberals wish to use governmental power to constrain capitalism and redistribute its bounty from those who have it to those who have less of it. The goal, again, is to use governmental power to reduce inequality and provide economic security, if need be at the expense of economic freedom.

It would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that, whereas classical liberals see freedom and its economic expression in the form of capitalism as the solution, contemporary liberals see them as the problem.

Even if its too late to rescue the good name of liberalism from its socialist imposters, Americans might at least keep in mind that the defining feature of true liberalism is limited government, and that many of the ideas of contemporary liberals are more easily traceable to Marx and Engels than to Jefferson and Lincoln.

More to the point, there is nothing "liberal," in the proper sense of the term, about national health care.

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Free-lance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial, Pages 77 on 08/23/2009

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