Liberalism once meant a belief in individual liberty through limited government and the rule of law. It led the great struggle for freedom of speech and expression (as indispensable elements of liberty).
That liberalism obviously no longer exists. Liberals these days favor government rationing of political speech (under the guise of “campaign finance reform”), the imposition of “speech codes” on college campuses to suppress ideas they disagree with, the firing of Silicon Valley CEOs and reality TV actors for opposing gay marriage, and even the jailing of global-warming skeptics.
Terms like “liberal gulag” and “liberal McCarthyism” are being tossed about, and even a few prominent liberals, including Andrew Sullivan, Nat Hentoff and Alan Dershowitz, have begun to express reservations about the seepage of totalitarian tendencies into the liberal mainstream. Jonah Goldberg’s insightful book Liberal Fascism is now getting a more respectful hearing, with many noting that the “fascism” part seems to be prevailing over the “liberal” part.
So if liberals no longer support free speech or the marketplace of ideas (or free enterprise or individual freedom more broadly, for that matter) what, then, is left of liberalism? What does it now stand for?
Reduced to its essence, we can identify four complementary pillars.
First and most obvious is some form of neo-socialist wealth redistribution. Modern (post-New Deal) liberalism begins with the assumption that the rich oppress the poor and that there is a pressing need to transfer wealth from the former to the latter through a constantly expanding welfare state.
This obsessive egalitarianism doesn’t require Marx’s “dictatorship of the proletariat” or even the complete nationalization of the means of production but still seeks to bring economic life and resources under the purview of a state administered by enlightened liberals. The ultimate goal is to replace the “natural inequalities” permitted under capitalism (and sanctioned by the old liberalism) with the bedrock socialist principle of equality of outcome.
Second is a radical environmentalism that further justifies state regulation on the grounds that all forms of human behavior in industrial societies have detrimental environmental consequences.
“Climate change” is the ultimate cudgel in liberal hands because it prophesies an apocalyptic outcome at some unspecified future date unless an embrace of the environmentalist agenda occurs before then.
When you’re saving Earth itself, all means justify the end and there can be no limits to the power wielded. That it all comes wrapped in the guise of “settled science” (however oxymoronic such a term and dubious the actual science) enhances the intimidation effect.
Third is, of course, the emphasis upon and use of a form of “identity politics” that places everyone in groups distinguished by pigmentation, gender, and sexual preference, in the process discarding the classical liberal values of individualism, equality before the law and merit in favor of state allocation of resources based on the primitive medieval notion of ascription.
Within this context, what we call “political correctness” (as former Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich recently discovered) is merely the storm-trooper enforcement of identity politics precepts, a tactic of social coercion designed to shut down debates that liberals are losing. Conformity of thought is the prerequisite for conformity of deed and “thought crime” (defined as thinking for oneself) must therefore be punished. The goal isn’t to prove other ideas wrong, but simply to suppress their expression by making unfortunate examples of those who dare to express them. A chilling effect isn’t the unintended consequence but the intention.
Fourth, and finally, is a militant atheism increasingly grounded in anti-Christian sentiment. Whereas “freedom of religion” was a key component of classical liberalism, it has now been effectively replaced by the kind of venomous anti-clericalism that first emerged from the French Revolution and Marxism (in which religion becomes only the “opium of the masses”).
The reason for growing liberal opposition to religiosity (or at least Christian religiosity! Islam gets a predictable “multicultural” pass) is the assumption that it is a persisting source of racism, sexism and “homophobia,” and that appeals to the principle of religious freedom thus represent little more than tactical cover for bigotry. Put differently, you will be forced to bake that cake for a gay wedding and provide birth control to your employers even if doing so violates your most sacred religious beliefs.
Taken in its entirety, then, contemporary liberalism isn’t liberalism at all, but an ersatz mix of socialism, pagan Earth worship, and crude tribalism which has come to more accurately resemble a secular religion with its own icons, myths, dogma, and definition of and means of punishing heresy.
It has become a smelly orthodoxy based entirely on faith, immune to facts and logic, which acts to suppress ideas rather than engage them and to delegitimize dissent rather than encourage it in traditional liberal fashion.
Liberalism today is profoundly illiberal in content, intolerant in disposition, and increasingly dependent upon coercion and intimidation for survival. So why is it still called liberalism?
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 11 on 04/14/2014