My name is Steve, and I'm a Liberal

If you listen to Fox News, it seems that "liberal" is a dirty word these days, something that should have a 12-step program to help you recover from it. So it's nice to see a book that places the word in a more constructive light. The book is Liberalism: The Life of an Idea by Edmund Fawcett, a long-time writer for The Economist. I confess to not having read it, or even bought it. I've only read the reviews. Still, the author's ideas, as described at some length in reviews in the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times, seem to strike a chord.

Fawcett traces the history of the use of the term "liberalism" in the U.S., U.K., Germany and France from 1830 to the present, and finds four ideas common to those who describe themselves as liberals. I would phrase them in the following terms:

• Tolerance: Acceptance of divergent viewpoints
• Freedom: Limits on power
• Progressivism: Faith in human progress and intellectualism
• Civility: Respect for others

It follows that those who are not liberals tend to believe in:

• Rightness: What is right is clear and unmistakable and everyone should agree on it
• Order: Everyone should be forced to do only what is right
• Tradition: Modern thinking is leading us dangerously away from traditional ways
• Class: "We" (those of our race, nationality, religion, etc.) are worthy but "They" (the others) are not

Representative non-liberals might include: Nazis, communists, most religions, most corporations, and especially Fox News.

But what about the Tea Party? They seem to violate this traditional alignment on the basis that they are strongly anti-establishment, yet decidedly non-liberal with respect to the other three categories. The discrepancy can be explained, though. In the Nineteenth Century and well into the Twentieth, liberals distrusted "order" because those in power tended strongly to believe in "rightness", "tradition" and "class" rather than "tolerance", "progressivism" and "civility". But in the last half of the Twentieth Century, most of those in power (in the western countries at least) switched to the liberal point of view, so it was the right who found themselves in the role of anti-establishment outsiders.

This tells me that "distrust of power" was historically a liberal idea only because the liberals were mostly out of power. Once liberals came to power, they came to believe in "order", and it was those on the right who came to distrust it. So I think it's really only the other three "liberal" ideas that truly represent the liberal point of view. Whether you trust power and believe in "order" depends only on whether those sharing your point of view happen to be in power at the time.

It's worth noting that liberals are slip-sliding on the "tolerance" ideal. On college campuses, which are mostly in the grip of liberal students and educators, an extreme level of intolerance exists for those who do not share the liberal point of view. France is another example, having outlawed the wearing of veils by Muslim women on the grounds that it offends feminist principles. This is a bad trend in my view. Agreeing to disagree is an important pillar of liberalism and should not be allowed to degenerate into intolerance.

The exegesis of liberalism spawned by Fawcett's book is a good thing. It challenges us to self-examine of what we believe and it gives me reason to wear the label proudly.