Why Liberals Lose
Liberalism was born as a demand for freedom. Freedom from serfdom, from monarchy and aristocracy, from clergy. Freedom to unshackle reason and learning from the chains of religion and the dead hand of tradition. And while the history of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries is filled with glowing hymns to the Rights of Man and the evils of tyranny, hymns do not feed the hungry, nor clothe the naked. The real power of Liberalism was that it worked. The idea was unstoppable, because it delivered, here on this earth, concrete progress elevating life through rational thought and productive work. Humanity discovered that earthly life did not have to be a cross to bear, a trial of toil and suffering on the way to some imagined after-life above the clouds. It could be an adventure. It could have its own rewards.
That was the meaning of Liberalism.
Conservatism was born in reaction. Liberation meant change. It meant a loss of authority, loss of hereditary privilege, and it promised an end to systems of patronage. A vast assortment of very important people – kings, bishops, slaveholders, lords and great landowners, mandarins and functionaries – did not like this, and they advanced many Conservative theories as to why Liberalism had to be resisted. Some had a grain of truth. But in the end, on most fronts, Liberals prevailed, because freedom worked.
The American Civil Rights Movement was successful because it attacked the objective oppression of black American citizens – segregation, sanctioned murder, rigged elections, voting rights denied – as a denial of the freedom and rights owed to all American citizens by all levels of government – a principle established in the Reconstruction amendments adopted after the crushing defeat of vainglorious Southern aristocracy. As a story of freedom denied, it was a story that everyone could understand, and the gradual upswell of popular support led to federal action to end segregation, secure voting rights, and provide due representation.
Liberals had prevailed once more.
Since that time, though, the exponents of Liberalism have drifted mainly in a leftward direction. They have found new causes, constructing academic ideas of ‘justice’.
What Liberals once fought was what everyone could see. You might argue, as some nineteenth-century personages did, that the African slave was actually happy with his lot, but you could not argue that he wasn’t a slave. And it was not that hard to establish that in fact he was not at all happy, whether by listening to the words out of his mouth, or by witnessing the dozens or hundreds of miles he trekked to escape and take his chances with passing Union troops.
Again, objectivity.
And it was objectively true that the faculty of reason combined with practical work accomplished what religion and tradition never could, which was to create new methods of production and new machines that made human life not just endurable, but actually worth living.
In the context of Law, there is a concept of justice that can be objectively estimated. Either an injury was done or it wasn’t. Either property was stolen, or it wasn’t. And there is justice in the principle that the perpetrator should pay a price for his misdeed, as restitution and satisfaction, as an example to deter others.
This is an objective kind of justice. And it can be defended to the extent that it objectively works. Peace and order are maintained. Crime is suppressed. Society functions.
The same can’t always be said of theories of economic or social ‘justice’.
There are theories that are not truly theories at all, because they can’t be tested. There is no standard to test by, that is not assumed by the theory itself. They are instead properly understood as mental constructs, abstract (or emotional) systems of belief anchored in a subjective preference. What is economic justice? One might feel that it is unfair, and hence unjust, that some people should be fabulously rich while others are chronically poor, but the moral weight of this feeling is a preference by no means shared by all reasonable people. And there is no reason evident why it should be.
You might find a hundred dollar bill in the street and decide to give it to the Salvation Army, and when questioned might respond, “Because it’s the right thing to do!” But language is slippery, and the implication that it is the right thing, that no other action would do, doesn’t hold up. I might use that same lucky find to surprise my wife with a nice dinner out, because it gives me pleasure to do so, and because finding joy in this life is undisputably good, and therefore also the right thing to do.
And if a group of people insisted on having a law declaring that all found money must be given to the Salvation Army, there would be at least as many people fighting that law, and for their own equally good reasons.
To make the Law a handmaiden of subjective belief is objectively unjust. If one group has no demonstrable foundation for forcing its way on another, and yet does so, why then would it not be reasonable for other groups to forcibly resist? Quite apart from the impracticality of resisting the state, bad law sows contempt for the Law. Contempt for the Law breeds lawlessness and hatred of the state. And without the state, civilization itself collapses.
The unexpected genius in the origins of Liberalism was to make the state work, not for the aristocracy or clergy, but for society – which was incidentally to make it work to advance civilization. And so long as it strove for what was objectively and progressively useful, it had power.
Today there is not much evidence that those who claim the title of Liberal – or who are damned for it – have much interest in anything objectively useful. And so it is not surprising that they should be rejected by a good portion of productive society, a portion that is apparently growing.
But it is tragic.
Humanity needs Liberalism, but we need it to evolve. Concepts of the state and of democracy need to evolve – not as intellectual exercises debated in scholarly papers, but as working theories that can be tested in action, refined, and tested again. Democracy may be the form of government most preferred by most of the world, yet it is by no means evident that it is still the most effective in the world; on the contrary.
But we are at this point because the principles of democracy have long been neglected, placed on Corinthian pedestals, never to be touched or questioned. And this borders on the criminal.
So it matters that Liberals lose. But what matters more is that they’re losing for the right reason. They’ve forgotten where they came from.
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