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Liberalism vs. Liberalism
John Stuart Mill influenced my political views greatly
Reader and frequent commenter Nicrivera left a great comment, in my opinion at least, in the comment section of Jason Steck’s post Why Defend Conservatives. In fact, it is so good and important, that it deserves to be published in full right here. My comments follow below.
Read my entire take on this at Michael P.F. van der Galiën.
14 Responses to “Liberalism vs. Liberalism”
Michael,
I’m pleasantly surprised that “John Stuart Mill influenced my political views greatly”. He is one of my political mentors, too.
I believe his comment on conservative intellect has yet to be matched.
Another option for clarifying the meaning of labels is to try to avoid them as much as possible. Economic and social issues are often too many and too nuanced to easily fit into a short list of umbrella types. Sometimes we can easily fit into conventional labels such as libertarian but after we get past the top several positions many of us start to diverge.
I would prefer that folks try to avoid the labels and rather than take the easy path of oversimplifying themselves they take the time to list their position on a half dozen defining issues: e.g. I am a moderate Independent who supports an efficiently run social safety net, low barriers to quality education, efficient free markets, active engagement with all players on the world stage, aggressive pursuit of any kind of chronic predators, minimal intrusion into personal choices, reduced criminalization for victimless behavior…
Whether you agree with me or not you do have a better idea of where I am coming from.
Paul, yes it is indeed quite difficult to talk about people in certain labels. However, i’d say that it is relevant whether one generally shares a particular ideology or not. It gives a person more understanding.
Steve; John Stuart Mill is absolutely one of the greatest thinkers in the history of mankind.
IMO that is.
It is a bit confusing and I guess in the US, liberal has become associated with the left and with the Democratic party while conservative is associated (mostly) with right wing and with the GOP. Thinking back to that survey that was discussed here a while back, to plot one’s political ideology on a grid, that seems to show where the problem lies with a two dimensional spectrum: most ideologies vary on their judgment of market solutions vs. governmental interventions for economic issues and then also vary on degree of intervention on social issues. So, the three dimensional grid is a bit better but with our two party system, we really don’t have a way to illustrate our alliances in that way: instead it’s all labelled either right or left in US politics.
“So, the three dimensional grid is a bit better but with our two party system, we really don’t have a way to illustrate our alliances in that way: instead it’s all labelled either right or left in US politics.”
Good observation, CS. Only one minor correction: it’s a two dimensional grid, of course. Left/right is only one dimension.
Yes, I stand corrected Gray- typed too quickly without thinking about it correctly.
What’s even more confusing is that Liberal in the US arose out of progressive aims, but now many progressives are free-market and small government oriented because they believe it works better. I’m extremely progressive but not very Liberal, inasmuch as I’m very concerned with closing the income gap and getting everyone basic safety nets but think that doing it in the government realm instead of private sector won’t work.
In my view, Liberal/Libertarian/Conservative refer to government implementation but don’t accurately describe goals.
NOTE TO MICHAEL:
Great post, Michael!
But do you know what the truly hilarious thing is?
Eight months ago–I kid you not–I wrote a two-page letter making are argument for using the terms “liberal” and “progressive” to thirty of the most influential liberal (i.e. progressive) bloggers. Yep, I sent a mass email, and in some cases, individual emails to:
Brad Delong
Matthew Iglesias
Huffington Post
Talking Points Memo
Oliver Willis
Washington Monthly
Mother Jones
Ezra Klein
Think Progress
Media Matters
Crooks and Liars
Talk Left
Fire Dog Lake
Glenn Greenwald
Crooked Timber
The Emerging Democratic Majority
Burnt Orange Report
Gun Toting Liberal
World ‘o Crap
(and about a dozen other liberal/progressive bloggers)
Of those 30, do you know what the grand total of responses was (and by response, I mean a human-generated response as opposed to an automatic bounceback of a pre-written Thank you for writing to usresponse)?
Two.
Yep, after sending a two-page letter to each of them, only two bloggers had the courtesy of responding to my letter.
And they very recpetive to my argument. One liberal blogger even accused me of writing “screed” and “using the terminology of tom delay and newt gingrich.”
LOL! Apparently trying to reduce confusion over the meaning of “liberal” and “progressive” puts me on par with Delay and Gingrich!
Both my letter to liberal/progressive bloggers and my post entitled Progressive Liberalism vs. Libertarian Liberalism can be found over at my personal blog.
Nic: thanks for your response and for the links. I have read both articles at your own blog.
You write, in the letter that the left will have a “liberal wing”. That’s not possible. Even, for instance, development liberals (or progressive liberals) are not as far to the left as progressives are. In essence, “progressive liberals” or “development liberals” are slightly left of center for Americans. Then we have the more classical liberals and conservative liberals who are right of center.
In a schedule, it’d be like this:
Leftwing P.L. Center C.L.’s Rightwing
In the PL vs. L.L. you write:
Are we talking about those in America who are called liberals, or are we talking about the essence of liberalism? True liberalism, in its pure sense, is highly in favor of the free market. A true clasically liberal society is a “Nachtwakersstaat” – the government has the responsibility to protect its citizens, law and order and… that’s it (as opposed to the Verzorgingsstaat – Welfare state).
Then you write:
True, progressive liberals allow more government interference in the economy, but, always within quite clear boundaries. Left of center, yes? Far to the left? No. Why? Because liberalism itself means limited, very limited, government influence in every possible way. Progressive in the context of progressive liberals simply means that they’ll allow more government influence than clasical liberalism does.
But… that still isn’t thát much compared to real progressives.
Michael,
I think the confusion between the two of us as to what constitutes the true definition of liberalism goes back to my original point–that the term liberalism has become an increasingly vague term. Here in the United States, I have heard the term liberal be used to refer to everything from socialist to libertarian (which mean virutally the exact opposite of each other), and yet Americans INSIST on using the term liberal while assuming everyone knows what they’re talking about.
Between the two of us, confusion might be eliminated by simply using the European (AKA, pre-1930′s America) definition for the terms liberal and conservative. The problem that would arise, however, would be:
1) Most people here are not going to have any clue what we’re talking about. The idea of any liberal being considered right-of-center is a completely foreign concept to most Americans. When Americans look at the political parties of Australia or Germany or Taiwan, we (unfortunately) have to be told that the political party with the word liberal in its name is actually the more fiscally conservative (in the American sense) of the two (or three or four) political parties.
2) I, myself, am not familiar with all the political subdivisions that Europeans have. I’ve heard Europeans used the terms market liberal, social liberal, social Democrat, and Democratic Socialist, but unfortunely, most Americans just aren’t taught those things. We’re talking about a country in which most people can’t even be troubled to learn the difference between Muslims and Arabs (and consequently believe the two to be the same), much less learn about subdivisions of political thought.
It’s an unfortunate result of our polarized political system in which the government is exclusively controlled by two political parties who have co-opted the terms liberal and conservative and defined them as they have seen fit–distorting the definitions of these terms to reflect their own shifting positions on the issues.
Everything is Left versus Right in the United States. Unlike in Europe, we don’t have any viable third parties with which to form interparty coalitions or offer alternative points of view. The Democrats and Replicans control the state legislatures in ALL FIFTY STATES, and they’ve taken it upon themselves to write the ballot access laws in manner that makes it extremely difficult for third parties to get on the ballot.
What I’m arguing is that based upon the Nolan Chart, (in which American liberals tend to favor more personal freedom while American conservatives tend to favor more economic freedom and American libertarians favor both personal freedom AND economic freedom), we ought to split the liberal and conservative quadrants in half in order to differentiate between those liberals and conservatives with libertarian-leanings and those with more populist (or communitarian) leanings.
Therefore, this is what I propose for American liberals:
Liberal = term used to describe liberals with libertarian leanings.
Progressive – term used to describe liberals with populist/communitarian leanings.
This isn’t some political system that I arbitrarily devise. It actually has a good deal of history to support it. In the late nineteen century/early twentieth century, Americans with libertarian leanings were indeed called liberals while those with populist/communitarian leanings were called progressives.
In my opinion, this would not only eliminate much of the confusion caused by the ambiguity of the terms liberal and conservative, but it would bring the term liberal back to its classical liberal roots, thereby making it more consistent with both the 18th, 19th, and early 20th century American definition of the term as well as the contemporary European definition.
I’m following some but not all of this (just don’t have time or inclination to delve too deeply.)
I think I have a pretty good handle on the social/economic leanings, but I’m wondering how you also plot foriegn policy. Militarism vs. diplomacy, isolationism vs. intervention, etc. Do we need more axes to define positions on these, and is there a traditional conservative or liberal philosophy on them?
I don’t think foreign policy neatly falls into a liberal vs. conservative paradigm or even a two-dimensional model like the Nolan Chart. It certainly doesn’t fit into a Democrat versus Republican paradigm. Afterall there have been both hawkish Democrats and hawkish Republicans as well as Democrats and Republicans whose views have bordered on isolationism (i.e. Seantor Robert Taft, Gore Vidal).
An extra axis is needed, I feel. In fact, you almost need two extra axes, one meant to measure foreign interventionism based on humanitarian/idealistic reasons (i.e. foreign aid, preventing genocide) and one meant to measure foreign interventionism based on the projection of American power.
A conservative by the name of Walter Russel Mead wrote an interesting article called The Jacksonian Tradition and American Foreign Policy, in which he divides Americans into four camps:
Jeffersonians: support a foreign policy based upon noninterventionism
Hamiltonians: support a foreign policy based upon “commercial realism”
Wilsonians: support a foreign policy based upon “crusading moralism” in the context of working with the “world community”
Jacksonians: support an interventionist foreign policy but are suspicious of both the Wilsonians and the Hamiltonians and their “world order initiatives.”
Extremely nationalistic, extremely populist, and “fiercely patriotic.”
I don’t completely agree with Mead (who doesn’t hide his bias in favor of the Jacksonian tradition, and hence my inclusion of Daniel McCarthy’s article as a counter-argument), but it’s an interesting read, nonetheless.
Supposedly the four groups can be plotted on a 2 x 2 graph, but it’s been a while since I’ve read these articles and have forgotten exactly who goes where.
While there isn’t a direct correlation between domestic policy and foreign policy, if one were to attempt to match certain domestic ideologies to these four traditions, it would probably look like this:
Jeffersonians ~ libertarians
Hamiltonians ~ conservatives
Wilsonians ~ liberals
Jacksonians ~ neoconservatives
Not a perfect fit by any stretch of the imagination, but it would explain pre- and post-1970 political alliances.
Pre-1970:
Jeffersonians + Hamiltonians ~ Republicans
Wilsonanians + Jacksonians ~ Democrats
Post-1970:
Jeffersonians ~ Libertarians
Hamiltonians + Jacksonians ~ Republicans
Wilsonians ~ Democrats
Post-2006:
Anyone’s guess
Thanks for the response, nic. I didn’t catch it until just now when looking back through threads for something else. Very interesting analysis and I’ll check the linked articles when I get a chance.