What It Means To Be A Former Liberal
Emerging out of World War II, there was nothing much remaining to the term Liberal. It had been completely co-opted by its enemies…
Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times
I’ve never liked the word liberal applied in the way it is today.
The word itself has a noble heritage.
It meant being for freedom generally and opposed to despotism and dictatorship by church or state.
Our Founding Fathers were considered liberals in a classical sense.
They wanted free speech, free elections, free enterprise, free formation of community, and so on, and wanted government restricted in its power.
That meaning of the word—which has translations in every language—lasted mostly until the Great War.
Many of the most liberal intellectuals and venues threw themselves into that conflagration with great enthusiasm. Matters got worse during the New Deal when even more “liberals” threw their weight behind industrial planning and corporatism.
Emerging out of World War II, there was nothing much remaining to the term. It had been completely co-opted by its enemies.
That presented genuine liberals with a problem. They needed a new term. Russell Kirk suggested conservative, which was odd because that term recalls monarchies of old, Tory traditionalists, and blood-and-soil revanchism.
Not everyone liked that term. The former and thoroughly reformed communist Max Eastman suggested “liberal conservative” or “conservative liberal,” all of which was too confusing. Then he finally proposed “new liberalism,” which didn’t quite catch on.
The writer Dean Russell in 1956 suggested reviving the word libertarian, which rather stuck for some people.
My mentor Murray Rothbard liked it but turned against it later in life. It became too barren of granular content to provide moorings in a political storm.
Indeed, these days, reading the libertarians is like attending a concert of a promised piano concerto, only to hear the pianist play scales and some arpeggios on stage. There’s just not a lot of depth or understanding there.
Meanwhile, I’m surrounded by people who call themselves “former liberals.”
From what I gather from that designation, it refers to a legacy bias on one side versus the other.
They weren’t fans of the Cold War and really didn’t like the War on Terror.
They still champion civil liberties but gagged at woke ideology and especially the transgender agenda.
“Liberalism” became way too ill-liberal for them to stomach.
It was the COVID experience that really shattered them.
All their friends in media, academia, and the corporate world went nuts. They were demanding that everyone lock themselves indoors, make the working class deliver food, cover the faces of children, close schools, censor speech, and then let medical workers inject the entire population with an untested substance of uncertain origin.
There was nothing liberal about any of that. So my liberal friends felt a great sense of alienation. It was not just that their communities abandoned their values. They began to wonder if their whole ideological outlook was wrong.
Maybe government won’t save us from corporatism after all. Maybe the media is not really a check on power. Maybe all these people are working together to create a machinery of oppression that is targeting not just the middle class but the working class too. If that is so, it is surely not new. Maybe this has been going on for a long time and no one knew it.
It did not help that the heroes of liberalism seemed to cave completely. Even Noam Chomsky called for the arrest and jailing of people who refused the wrongly named vaccine, even those with natural immunity. There was never a more principled liberal than Chomsky. Something is very wrong here.
As a result, many of these people feel homeless both intellectually and politically. They are warmer to Trump than they ever thought they would be but not uncritical. They still browse their old media venues with interest but often it turns to disgust. They dread faculty parties and social occasions because the prattle about the pathology of various -isms they once accepted as doctrine now sounds barren and performative.
They have become, in popular parlance, red-pilled. It’s a funny phrase drawn from the movie “The Matrix.” A guy is offered a blue pill to proceed in ignorance, or a red pill to see the world anew, replete with fakes and fiat.
I was speaking with a person the other day who referred to a friend of mine as having been red-pilled on some subject. It made me laugh because, so far as I know, the person in question pretty much held far-left views all his life. He even travelled with Sandinistas in the late 1980s—hardly a conservative in any sense. Today, he is hoping the Trump administration will save the nation from his former tribe.
My point is this. We live in very unusual times when the terms left and right have become enormously scrambled. I depart from the views of many when I say that we don’t really need a new term. Terms are always subject to mischaracterization and capture, as we see with the word liberal (and the word conservative actually).
What we need instead is open minds, the courage to look at facts and reality, and the willingness to say in public what we believe to be true. We can do all that without carrying the baggage of legacy ideologies. There is nothing wrong with reading grand treatises attempting to parse all this out and create taxonomies of belief. Burrowing in and becoming a preacher of them is another matter.
These times offer all of us tremendous opportunities. We know who the dissidents are from woke ideology, from Covidianism, from NPRism, from the matrix of mainstream media. Their legacy commitments are all over the map. We can encounter and learn from each other. This is what I find most intellectually stimulating. I’m thrilled to figure out the contours of the public mind today and in the past and excited to explore all these realms with my newfound friends.
Still, my heart also breaks for those people who thought that they had found their tribe until it turned out that their tribe is dominated by crazy people. It’s a bit like losing a beloved pet or even a spouse. The comforts of familiarity have been taken away and we are left to fend for ourselves.
Now no thoughtful person is in a position to outsource his worldview to any leader or institution. Perhaps that is a good thing.
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