Across the political divide, ‘liberal’ seems to have become a dirty word. In part this is just due to the multiple meanings that have grown around the term. Nevertheless if we look at the various reasons people give for despising ‘liberals’ some interesting common threads can be found.
Obviously ‘liberal’ in the UK is currently suffering from the Liberals with a big L forming a pact with the Conservatives. To the left this proves an old hunch – Liberals were just closet Tories, all along.
Then there is the US reading of liberal, which is really just a counter to ‘conservative’. A liberal in this sense can mean any form of leftist, socialist or even communist, so plenty to hate there. Confusingly however, since Thatcher and Reagan there have also been neo-liberals to hate. This is liberal in the sense of free-market liberalism – loathing of tax and state intervention, so firmly on the political right.
Then there are the more colloquial usages. There is the woolly do-gooder ‘liberal’, the stereotypical Guardian reader/writer, corduroy-clad social worker or social studies teacher. Close behind is the Fabian socialist, the top-down social reformer who sees the problems of the lower orders as something that can be solved by a benevolent intelligentsia. Many on the left and the right find common reasons to despise these sorts of liberals. Both groups see a self-serving bureaucratic class, patronising, paternalist and naïve, one which fails to address structural problems and instead does rather nicely out of the awful state of things. Rather than urge people to fight their own battles and solve their own problems, these sort of liberals prefer to appoint themselves as saviours, infantilising the downtrodden and robbing them of their autonomy.
And of course there are the ‘liberal interventionists’ the sort who brought liberty to Iraq and Afghanistan – a liberal fig-leaf to hide the diminutive organs of the naked imperialist. Although these liberals might seem a million miles from the woolly do-gooder kind (and many woolly do-gooder liberals would the first to condemn them) it is interesting to note the paternalistic similarities. In both cases an elite of well-educated and well-to-do white folk judge themselves to be in a better position to evaluate and plan the lives of lesser beings. If it so happens that you need to kill most of them along the way then so be it. One can also see a link here to the ‘free-market’ liberals. Anyone who does not wish to participate in the ‘free-market’ may find themselves coaxed towards liberty at the point of a gun.
Such widespread distaste for liberalism might seem odd in a democracy. After all, isn't democracy all about liberty? But of course while most people might claim to cherish liberty there is no agreement on what it is, or how it might be attained. Some see it as something that needs to be carefully engineered by the state. Others see it as the wholesale abolition of the state. In Economics alone, many self-proclaimed liberals are poles apart. Liberal individualists argue that liberty is born of zero tax and unrestricted corporate freedom. Liberal collectivists argue that liberty requires progressive taxation and spending, to create a level economic playing field.
Naively, we might assume that liberty is simply the removal of restrictions, but of course that would leave murderers free to murder and rapists free to rape – hardly a liberating situation for the rest of us. Clearly liberty has more to do with carefully chosen limits on some human desires than it has to do with boosting ‘freedom’ in the abstract. Thankfully, most of us agree on rape and murder, but there is far less agreement elsewhere. For some, liberty would include the right to wear a veil, or take drugs, or slap your children. For others these are infringements of liberty, freedoms that need to be prohibited in the name of higher liberty. And what of the liberty to push your own vision of liberty on others? What about the liberty to make someone else wear a veil, or buy your opium, or host your airbase?
If your notion of liberty boils down to nothing more than ‘free to comply with my notion of freedom’ then you might as well call it fascism and be done with it. But even the most sincere and judiciously chosen freedoms will always seem like gross infringements of liberty to some people. And you can be sure they will hate you for it.
