For many, particularly in the post-World War II era, "liberalism" has become a dirty word, a caricature and a stereotype. For many on the right "liberals" are to them what the Jews were to the Spanish Inquisition. Those who caricature, stereotype, and demonise liberalism, however, really do not have, and not surprisingly I might add given their manichean religious inclinations, a sound grasp of the history of real empirical liberalism. Liberalism, of course, is the product of several intellectual streams. Historically speaking liberalism is the product of Florentine and Italian city-state ideas about representative government and practise of representative government. Liberalism is the product of the Scientific Revolution beginning of the sixteenth century. Liberalism is the product of the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century with its emphasis on anti-monarchicalism and anti-theocratism. Liberalism is the product of mass capitalism, which, while it has antecedents in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became prevalent in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in the modern world, and dominant in the twentieth century. Liberalism is the product of the American and French Revolutions both of which helped increase the power of the bourgeoisie or middle class. Liberalism is the product of political debates surrounding concepts like liberty, freedom, property, justice, equality, and fraternity since the sixteenth century.
Liberalism has been and continues to be, as a result of this history, multiple. Lockean political liberalism, which challenged absolutism, for instance, emphasised the inalienability of the "natural rights" of life, liberty, health, and estate or property, which Locke, like Marx after him, argued originated in the mixing of one’s labour with the land. The laissez-faire form of economic liberalism, which, ironically, most of those who detest liberalism these days actually believe in, that emerged from the Scottish Enlightenment emphasised the need for a free marketplace in the face of monarchical monopolies. That brand of liberalism relied on a deus ex machina in the form of the invisible hand to make it work making it, in the process, akin to a religion. The American propertied elite liberalism of America’s founding fathers borrowed heavily from Locke with its inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Constitutional liberalism, as opposed to nationalist liberalism, began with the American Revolution, was stimulated by the French Revolution, and was further stimulated by the triumph of mass capitalism and corporate capitalism in some places in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Social liberalism, which emphasised the need for a stronger government to deal with what was seen as the ravages of mass capitalism including poverty and inequality, emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Leftism or radicalism, by the way, emerged as a challenge to liberalism during the French Revolution and became a prominent modern subculture or counterculture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Many on the radical left saw the central symbols of liberalism, life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness, as inherently contradictory. Conservatism arose as a nostalgic, theocratic, and romantic or utopian reaction to liberalism.
Throughout constitutional liberalism’s history the concepts of life, liberty, health, estate, the pursuit of happiness, and others that followed, such as equality and fraternity, have had and continue to have, as symbols often do, multiple meanings. Many American liberals, for instance, found slavery inconsistent with their understanding of “liberty”. Many American liberals debated how big constitutional liberal states, which vouchsafed liberalism’s sacred symbols, should be. Some, anti-federalists, wanted a very weak central state and strong regional states. Some federalists, like Jefferson and Madison, wanted a stronger federal state than that allowed by America’s first constitution, the Articles of Confederation, but disagreed with others, like Hamilton and Washington, who wanted a stronger federal state than the weak federalists.
So given this historical context what is the best way to understand liberalism? First, liberalism is best seen as a continuum with a number of levels to it. Liberalism, for example, is a continuum with free market liberalism at one end of the continuum, and, a mythical total state control of the economy on the other end of the continuum. I say mythical because no liberals I know of advocate total state control of the economy. Social liberalism or progressivism, with its advocacy of things like food and drug regulations, lies somewhere in the middle of this continuum. The social liberals Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Lyndon Baines Johnson, for instance, enacted social liberal legislation that saved capitalism rather than destroyed it. Liberalism is a continuum with right libertarians and left libertarians, differentiated largely by their attitude to big economic institutions, on one end and a mythical group of no liberty or freedom types on the other end. No political liberals I know of want total abolition of free speech, for instance, though some do want limits, hence they lie somewhere along the continuum. Liberalism is a continuum in which some advocate for limits on civil rights--I know of no liberals who advocate for zero civil rights--while others advocate for the expansion of civil rights, American liberals pursing civil rights for Blacks, homosexuals, and trans people, for instance. Liberalism is a continuum in which some liberals, including liberals of left and right, are authoritarian while others are less authoritarian. I know of no liberals, by the way, who advocate for total anarchy and anarchism.
Why do those of the right wing religious persuasion like PU and others of their ilk ignore this real history of liberalism? The reason is simple. They ignore it because they have to. They need to believe in an enemy and proclaim "liberalism" as their enemy because fear, as history repeatedly shows, is a polemicists and a demagogues best friend. Fear allows them to raise money and pied piper the opiated masses. Fear, with its stereotyping, caricaturing, demonisations, and mythhistory, allows right wing cults to try to achieve power and influence with the help of the pied pipered masses they have opiated. Fear with its manichean "logic" gives them collective life. Marking off your group from an "inferior" and "polluted" "enemy" "other" is a tried and true method of creating an identity and a community with a mythic sense of their own superiority. Given this, manufacturing "enemy" "others" is not likely to end anytime soon.
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