Chris
06-08-2012, 06:06 PM
This is how liberalism, once popular, became unpopular.
Whatever Happened to Liberalism? (http://spectator.org/archives/2012/06/08/whatever-happened-to-liberal)
Today: "Liberalism in America is thought at the moment to be unpopular. Its actual situation is much worse, for to judge from what is being written and said, by the leading liberals in the United States today, a once great system of political thought has degenerated into a sorry mess of contradictory opinion, prejudice, fantasy, passion, and trivia."
At one time: "[in 1979, David Spitz, a distinguished American political philosopher who specialized in the theory of liberalism wrote] that liberalism, in its essentials, is a doctrine about liberty, a doctrine which assigns priority to the freedom of the individual, and notably to freedom from the constraints, of the state. This was the liberalism of John Locke and -- in some at least of his writings—of John Stuart Mill. David Spitz believed that this was still the only genuine form of liberalism, and the credo he devised for liberals in the twentieth century began with the maxim: "Esteem liberty above all other values, even over equality and justice.""
But ""The decisive issue for our time," Spitz wrote, "is not Mill versus Burke, but Mill versus Marx; hence liberals and conservatives stand together, at least in the here and now, in defense of democracy against dictatorship.""
But today "Liberals and conservatives ought logically to stand together against Marxism and Marxist dictatorship, and in some parts of the world they do. In America, on the other hand, this is manifestly no longer the case. American liberalism continues to define itself only in opposition to conservatism, and far from rejecting Marx, seems only to add more and more pieces of Marxism to the flimsy structure of its own ideology."
How? "The process can, I think, be traced back to the introduction into liberalism of the "social question" -- the idea of using government as a means to resolve problems in the economy and improve the living conditions of the poor and disadvantaged. Translated into practical politics, this idea necessarily entails the enlargement of the state, of that very entity which traditional liberals had located as the central adversary of freedom. The whole idea, to put it plainly, is a socialist idea; and whether desirable or undesirable, it cannot be reconciled with the original liberal principle of keeping the state's powers to a minimum."
Whatever Happened to Liberalism? (http://spectator.org/archives/2012/06/08/whatever-happened-to-liberal)
Today: "Liberalism in America is thought at the moment to be unpopular. Its actual situation is much worse, for to judge from what is being written and said, by the leading liberals in the United States today, a once great system of political thought has degenerated into a sorry mess of contradictory opinion, prejudice, fantasy, passion, and trivia."
At one time: "[in 1979, David Spitz, a distinguished American political philosopher who specialized in the theory of liberalism wrote] that liberalism, in its essentials, is a doctrine about liberty, a doctrine which assigns priority to the freedom of the individual, and notably to freedom from the constraints, of the state. This was the liberalism of John Locke and -- in some at least of his writings—of John Stuart Mill. David Spitz believed that this was still the only genuine form of liberalism, and the credo he devised for liberals in the twentieth century began with the maxim: "Esteem liberty above all other values, even over equality and justice.""
But ""The decisive issue for our time," Spitz wrote, "is not Mill versus Burke, but Mill versus Marx; hence liberals and conservatives stand together, at least in the here and now, in defense of democracy against dictatorship.""
But today "Liberals and conservatives ought logically to stand together against Marxism and Marxist dictatorship, and in some parts of the world they do. In America, on the other hand, this is manifestly no longer the case. American liberalism continues to define itself only in opposition to conservatism, and far from rejecting Marx, seems only to add more and more pieces of Marxism to the flimsy structure of its own ideology."
How? "The process can, I think, be traced back to the introduction into liberalism of the "social question" -- the idea of using government as a means to resolve problems in the economy and improve the living conditions of the poor and disadvantaged. Translated into practical politics, this idea necessarily entails the enlargement of the state, of that very entity which traditional liberals had located as the central adversary of freedom. The whole idea, to put it plainly, is a socialist idea; and whether desirable or undesirable, it cannot be reconciled with the original liberal principle of keeping the state's powers to a minimum."