Reclaiming “liberty” for liberals

As I teach my students on a regular basis, modern liberalism and classical liberalism are two different ideologies. Classical liberalism, rooted in John Locke’s natural rights theory – all men are created with the right to life, liberty and property – is more akin to modern libertarianism than it is to modern liberalism.

So, how did modern liberalism evolve? Does it have ANY connection to classical liberalism?

The answer is, very importantly, yes – modern liberalism comes directly out of classical liberalism. But without understanding the implications of classical liberalism in action one cannot grasp modern liberalism’s origins.

More importantly, by tracing the evolution of American concern over individual liberty liberals can reclaim the language of liberty.

In fact, the earliest political divide in the history of the American Republic – Jeffersonianism v. Hamiltonianism – revealed two competing strains of liberalism from the beginning. Both of these Founding Fathers believed that liberty lay at the heart of the American experiment. But what did that liberty mean in practice? What did it mean for governance? What did it mean for the economy? Hamilton believed that the future liberties of the nation would protected only if the nation learned to harness its natural and human resources and develop a functioning industrial capitalism like that of Great Britain. Like Adam Smith, Hamilton believed that the quasi-feudal system of plantation slavery would prove to be a hindrance to the growth of American liberty. The optimal goal of American policymakers should be the encouragement of manufactures based on a labor force freely able to leave employment at will. Wealth generated by wage laborers could be accumulated and invested in new industrial enterprises, or in the purchase of land in the West. A Federally-sponsored bank would help finance this great American rock of liberty.

Thomas Jefferson, on the other hand, believed that liberty was best preserved by maintaining the yeoman farmer republic. When the greatest number of Americans could possess at least some plot of land then liberty would be greatest. Ever the Lockean, Jefferson vested liberty in land ownership. Hundreds of thousands of former indentured servants in Virginia sought freedom in small land ownership. By pushing west through Cumberland Gap into Kentucky and beyond these yeoman farmers embraced Jefferson’s conception of liberty in land ownership. The greatest threat to liberty for these small farmers was the development of large scale industrial capitalism. The engines of that British-style industrial system – the banks – would only drive small farmers into debt and thus threaten small propertyholders’ precarious hold on liberty. Jeffersonians embraced strict constructionist readings of the Constitution not because of an abstract fear of the Federal government but because Hamiltonians and their Whiggish successors sought Federal government investment in large-scale, wage-labor capitalism.

Small farmers were not proto-socialists by any standard. But they did look skeptically upon the great industrial dreams of Eastern bankers like Hamilton. It was the corporate welfare that they saw as unconstitutional – and dangerous to their own autonomy.

A generation later the Jacksonian Democrats furthered the small farmer ideals of the Jeffersonians. They opposed the Second Bank of the United States because it threatened their relative economic autonomy – their liberty as they saw it. But the newly formed Whig Party did not cede the defense of liberty to the Jacksonians. On the contrary, the Whigs believed that Federal investment in harbors and roads would encourage American self-sufficiency, promote prosperity for Americans, and provide good wages to farmers already dislocated by the inevitable market revolution.

Whigs added a moral dimension too, drawing energy from the evangelical Second Great Awakening taking hold in New England and Upstate New York. Northern Whigs – calling themselves “Conscience Whigs” – formulated a vision of America based on moral improvement. But these Whigs did not just support personal morality issues like temperance. They viewed the American public as a social compact in which the elites had an obligation to improve the lot of the dowtrodden. In this vein they targeted slavery as a great scourge on the national soul and, yes, on American liberty. Slavery and liberty were utterly irreconcilable, despite Jacksonian protests that slavery actually lightened the load of poorer whites. That Whigs rarely embraced racial equality put them in an uncomfortable bind. If they shared the sense of white supremacy with their Jacksonian rivals, why should the Whigs speak of liberty for slaves while ignoring the growing plight of white workers (many of them immigrants) in Whig-owned industries? It seemed hypocrisy to Democrats. And it would not be the last time that the vexatious question of race would threaten American liberalism.

These conflicts boiled over in civil war, after which Americans reconsidered the very essence of liberty. Radical Reconstruction invited the first attempt by victorious Northerners to nationalize a vision of free labor ideology that had long buttressed the Northern economy. Unfortunately for the Radicals, ex-slaves had no intention of becoming wage laborers. They wanted to be Jeffersonian yeoman farmers with the “40 acres and a mule” that General Sherman promised. Nobody understood the connection between land ownership – however small – and liberty better than newly freed slaves. Surely they had worked the land long enough to take ownership over it. Surely they had a better claim to the land than their traitorous ex-masters. But their dream was not to be as ex-slaves descended into sharecropping and debt peonage.

It turned out that many white Southerners also fell into virtual debt peonage by the late 19th century as well as the New South promise of railroad wealth never materialized and cotton prices deteriorated. By the 1890s most of the South lay in some state of unfreedom. And so the forces of liberty sought new targets – the railroads, Eastern banks and hard money capitalists. These Populists, like their Jacksonian forebears, saw the commercialization of agriculture as the virtual enslavement of ordinary people – white and black. A generation or two later they would form a critical component in FDR’s coalition by seeking relief for the agricultural crisis from the Federal government.

While the Radical Republicans faded away in the 1870s, the moral and social reform impulse re-emerged with full force after 1900 in the form of the Progressive movement. Like the Populists, Progressives viewed unfettered capitalism as destructive to American liberty. Unlike the laissez-faire advocates of the late 19th century, the Progressives believed that unregulated business would actually trample upon the rights of the people. They looked skeptically at corporate claims to personhood – and absolute Lockean property rights. Increasingly, Progressives saw “Robber Barron-led” corporations as a reincarnation of the worst of the old aristocracy. Unrestricted immigration and anti-union vigilantism kept wages low, thus preventing workers from realizing the American dream that seemed more plausible a generation earlier.

And so by the time the Progressive era rolled around the two strains of liberalism had transformed from support for small government to advocacy of a more robust and benign governmental intervention in the economy.

However, the two strains would not entirely merge until FDR. At last modern liberalism emerged in full force, combining the demands of farmers and workers for unionization, price supports, labor laws and government pensions (Social Security) with the elite-driven support for a more improved public sector in terms of energy production (TVA), banking regulation, support for the arts, and infrastructure modernization.

But one thing was still missing: African Americans. It would not be until Harry Truman’s Administration that liberalism would fully extend its promise to the black population. And it was at that point that other elements of the liberal coalition started to weaken. The black-white liberal coalition would have one last hurrah with the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations before collapsing upon itself amidst riots, the Vietnam War and eventually stagflation. And Nixon. And Reagan, who skillfully adopted the language of liberty for conservatism, blaming well-intentioned big government for encroaching on individual liberties. It was time, Reagan argued, to unfetter capitalism again.

Liberalism would attempt to pick up the pieces after the 1960s with episodic success. After 40 years of conservative ascendancy the younger generation seems poised for a long-term commitment to liberalism again. Certainly the energy behind Barack Obama reflects that. The most ardent supporters of Obama even today are young adults who prefer the welfare state liberalism sought for over 100 years.

So, what is the biggest difference between classical liberalism – or libertarianism -and modern liberalism? It’s the state. Libertarians take an orthodox approach to Lockeanism. Any form of property privately held is, by definition, a citadel of liberty. Government, by its very coercive nature, is a natural enemy of liberty – including especially economic liberty.

But modern liberals – like Progressives, Populists, Radical Republicans, Jacksonians and Whigs before them – view absolute property rights as detrimental to human liberty. With the exception of some of the Whigs, most of these folks believed that large-scale capitalism would actually restrict individual liberties. But rather than replacing capitalism with state socialism, liberals seek a safety net and robust regulations to ensure that capitalism actually increases the economic liberty of the people.

It is absolutely critical for liberals to reclaim the classical origins of its worldview. Liberals cannot cede the language of “liberty” and “freedom” to conservatives, who often hide their plutocratic sensibilities under the cover of libertarianism. Until liberals reconnect with this long and storied quest for American liberty, they will lack a key rhetorical weapon in the struggle for America’s political soul.