Taki Magazine

Liberals and Illiberals

by Grant Havers on June 02, 2009

The recent contributions by Professors Gutzman and Kopff on the proper meaning of conservatism naturally raise another related question:  what is the proper meaning of liberalism?  I have always been critical of the attempts of Louis Hartz, Michael Zuckert, Thomas Pangle, and many other prominent American political theorists to describe the great social contract theorists and the Founders as “liberal.”  (For reasons that will hopefully become clear, I sympathize with Professor Kopff’s critique of Professor Gutzman’s overreliance on Hartz.)  What exactly does the “liberalism” of Spinoza, Locke, and Jefferson have to do with the 20th century version associated with the Roosevelts, John Dewey, or Barack Obama?  Since all these figures pay lip service to liberty and equality, is it fair to draw a straight line between Locke’s Letter Concerning Toleration and Obama’s The Audacity of Hope?  Is the older liberalism simply the right-wing version of this hallowed tradition, as Louis Hartz’s supporters have argued for over 50 years?

If “liberal” means the pluralistic tolerance of all beliefs in the marketplace of ideas, then the number of liberals in the social contract or founding traditions was exactly zero.  Hobbes, Spinoza, and Locke were prepared to be tolerant, yes, as long as the citizenry of their desired regimes (absolute monarchy for Hobbes, limited republicanism for Spinoza and Locke) remained overwhelmingly Protestant in creed.  Universal suffrage was firmly rejected even by the most democratically minded of this tradition; Spinoza, whom Lewis Feuer once dubbed the prophet of “liberalism,” did not believe that women by nature possess with men the equal right to rule.  As Willmoore Kendall argued long ago, Locke’s alleged philosophy of individualism was a mirage when one considers his support for majority Protestant rule in his native England.  The Founders were no more pluralistic in their beliefs, since they usually assumed that “We, the People” would remain broadly Christian in their attitudes to church-state separation, limited government, and the leavening force of biblical morality.  Moreover, Hamilton was decidedly opposed to unlimited freedom for the press, and even that great libertarian Jefferson had an inconsistent record with respect to the toleration of illiberal practices like loyalty oaths and unlawful search and seizure. 

None of the above is meant to be a critique of the great contractarians and Founders for their illiberal beliefs and policies, since they never claimed to be liberals anyway.  There has never been a perfectly “open regime” in history, nor is it likely that today’s “liberals” who favor hate speech laws are about to usher one into the present age.  The point to which I am leading is that what we now call “liberalism” is of recent historical vintage.  Since America’s rise to superpower dominance in the post-WW 2 era, it has become more and more fashionable to downplay the historically and religiously specific roots of American republicanism in order to market an abstract universalism that promotes the “eternal” ideals of liberty and equality.  It just wouldn’t do to teach the world that Abraham Lincoln was a Protestant leader of a Protestant people; instead, the Great Emancipator must be reinvented as the founding father of Americanism, the new global creed which owes nothing to a Christian tradition of faith.  Otherwise, why would Hindus, Moslems, or Sikhs embrace America’s ideals as their own?  The neoconservative Natan Sharansky has followed this ideological rationale by teaching that Lockean democracy is compatible with any traditional faith or identity.  (If anything represents the right-wing version of today’s liberalism, it is neoconservatism!)  Along these lines, Obama happily affirmed in Turkey earlier this year that America was no longer a uniquely Christian nation.  In other words, the republic is now a fully fledged cosmopolitan regime ready to move beyond its parochial past as it preaches republican values to all those millions of proto-Jeffersonians in Afghanistan and the Sudan clamoring for democracy. 

One of Canada’s former Prime Ministers, Jean Chrétien, once observed without irony that the great thing about being a liberal is that you can always change your mind.  He should have added that it is a great thing, at least for today’s liberals, to adulterate the very meaning of history and political philosophy. 

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