A Guide to American Liberalism

[Music] hey what's up everyone i have an opinion and i think it's an opinion that a lot of people have and what that opinion is is the opinion that american political terminology is just too loose there's too many words being thrown around without a sharply defined meaning behind them and there must be a lot of strong contenders for loose terms in america but one of the top contenders must be the term liberal when people say liberal in america right now they mostly use it as a synonym for democrat or progressive or leftist and that's a problem for two reasons one is that it's redundant even to the point of being confusing and the other problem is that using it that way actively obscures the political tradition that liberal came from which is liberalism and i think as a result people are losing touch with liberalism they're not entirely sure what it is or how it fits in with things and people that do want to call themselves liberals in the way that relates back to liberalism are trying to find these roundabout ways of doing it saying classical liberal or a john stewart mill type liberal and the whole thing's a mess so i think we need to sharpen things up we can't let terms endlessly degenerate into meaninglessness and incoherency so i thought that i would try to help by going through the evolution of the concept of liberalism in america and going through the different ways that the term liberal was used in the major time periods and then when we get to the present i'll make my own argument as to how we could better use the term liberal going forward we do have people these days that call themselves classical liberals i think kind of begrudgingly but we're going to forget about them and we're going to go all the way back to the 1800s which gave us our first group of official liberals in america the classical liberals who basically workshopped liberalism into a coherent philosophy they were inspired by a lot of earlier thinkers but those people are more considered pre-liberals because the word liberal wasn't around yet so what is liberalism and who are liberals what they come up with some people answering that question list a set of values that liberals try to embody like being broad-minded or having mutual respect backed by law or being wary of tyrannical forms of power and i don't think that's wrong but i think there's one value for liberals that sits up front and center so for all liberals this is their most important value and all these other concerns and values kind of cascade down and stem from that the one thing that all liberals have in common at the core of their beliefs is the belief in the necessity of freedom that's not freedom for a community to do what they want it's not freedom for a country to do what they want it's freedom specifically understood at the level of the individual and then you might say how much freedom and liberals would respond as much freedom as possible liberals do believe that we need to constrain freedom in some ways but it's mostly for the purpose of maximizing freedom they believe that if we constrain certain malicious uses of freedom for the rest of society more freedom is gained and therefore overall it's something that we should do so for example we need to make it illegal to physically hurt other people and we need to make it illegal to take freedom from someone else liberals don't believe that we should protect people from mental harm because mental harm is too abstract of a concept and too open to abuse and also just inevitable in a society where people can think for themselves so liberals at the core of their beliefs believe in the necessity of the freedom of the individual and they try to figure out the necessary compromises needed to secure it and make the most of it and those freedoms include the right to think for yourself speak for yourself and generally pursue your own interests in your own life as you see fit so here's jon stewart mill giving his definition of it who in turn is paraphrasing adam smith liberals basically imagine the ideal society being like a sandbox that has rules and regulations that everyone needs to follow um like to not hurt anyone and those are like the borders of the sandbox that need to be very carefully considered and constructed but once those are set up and people respect them then people can live within that society doing pretty much whatever they want so that may sound controlling based on the way that i described that but they were arguing for a radical amount of freedom at the time especially compared to their competitors who may have wanted to interfere more in the thoughts and behavior of others and in a lot of ways i think it's still a radical idea now classical liberals were in favor of capitalism they saw it as a humane way for people to provide for themselves and pursue their goals and fulfill natural drives for conflict and competition in a non-violent way so they saw conflict as inevitable and they saw capitalism as a safe and even productive way to channel it they wanted the state to not intervene in the economy or individuals capitalistic pursuits because they thought that the more the state intervened the more the state would grow in power and inevitably the state would become tyrannical and overly coercive in the affairs of individual people so they had a hands-off position with the state which in their terminology is laissez-faire as is the case with so many things in liberalism it's controversial how much classical liberals actually practiced being laissez-faire but many of them did advocate for it and that distinguishes them from other types of liberals because going forward in history it would be rare for a liberal to go back and even advocate for it if we were going to add another word to liberalism it should be the word equality and things get a little weird here especially for the classical liberals because they weren't totally consistent with it but at least in theory liberals believe that any freedom we're going to back by law needs to be equally distributed to everyone in society so it's not good if say rich people have one set of rights and poor people have another set any freedom that we're going to guarantee needs to be equally distributed to everybody an important thing to understand is that you can't infinitely support the principle of freedom while also infinitely supporting the principle of equality because they often come into conflict with each other and then you have to figure out some sort of compromise between the two so for example if you take the principle of equality to mean that there should be equal outcomes everywhere meaning all people working the same type of job should make the same amount of money or maybe you think all types of people should be equally represented in every type of job liberals would say that the amount of interference it would take in people's lives to make those equal outcomes happen is tyrannical so it would cost too much freedom and it's just not viable but if you take the principle of equality to mean a quality of opportunity liberals are generally for that but then even there there's usually a cut-off point so for example let's consider the problem of parents wanting to provide for their kids it's natural for parents to want to give their kids a leg up in life whether it's hooking them up with a good job maybe sending them to a good school maybe giving them a bunch of money whatever in a perfectly free society parents should be able to do as much of that as they want because it's their freedom to provide for their kids however they see fit but then if their parents are propping their kids up to positions of power or giving their kids you know millions of dollars while other kids don't have that then that's also compromising equality so then a liberal would probably look at that and say we need to find a healthy compromise here we don't want to not allow this parent to provide for their kid because that's taking too much freedom from the parent so let's find some sort of targeted policy here maybe when the parent wants to give an inheritance to the kid we'll tax that inheritance then we'll take that money and we'll put towards free education therefore raising a quality of opportunity in the rest of society so that's just a way of saying you can't have a society that has full amounts of both you can't have a perfectly free society and also a perfectly equal society and liberals tried to find this sort of healthy balance between the two so those were principles that were established at the time that were true of classical liberals and are still generally true of liberals now in other ways classical liberals were more distinct so for example they were pretty elitist they didn't trust regular uneducated people and wanted to keep voting to being a privilege so they thought in order to earn the right to vote you needed to get an education and also own property so they did advocate that we should expand education to more people but they thought until more people received an education voting should be a privilege while we're talking about stuff that doesn't age well classical liberals saw liberalism as a civilizing force in the world so they thought that um societies that had liberalism were civilized and societies that didn't have liberalism were uncivilized which they called barbarous and they thought they had sort of an obligation to spread liberalism around the world so that sounds pretty bad but to be fair you have to realize that they're talking about giving civil rights and education to people around the world that don't have it and would presumably want it at least a lot of them would but they thought that they had to do it imperialistically which meant that they would basically have to take the place over and educate and civilize the people in that country and then once those people are deemed able to handle running their own country they would theoretically give them their country back if you're wondering where this is coming from these are generalizations and classical liberalism basically evolved across the 1800s into that generalization so different thinkers would contribute different pieces to it but they themselves typically wouldn't capture the whole so tocqueville for example talked about the dangers of concentrated power both in government and in groups of people and he also talked about the virtues of a society where people looked at each other and roughly saw each other as equal but if you only read tocqueville then you probably won't get a strong sense of what liberalism is or classical liberalism because his writing just provides pieces of it so if you're looking for a definitive take on classical liberalism in america people usually point to jon stewart mill who spent his career trying to tie all these liberal ideas together with on liberty being his landmark book so when people talk about classical liberalism including me they tend to average together the different ideas that these classical liberals had while throwing out the ones that didn't stick and if anything point to john stewart mill as the biggest authority on the subject by the late 1800s liberal values in a loose interpretation had spread across the broad american public and liberals themselves loosened up their own position that voting should be an earned privilege and liberals started to endorse extending voting in a classless way so as voting rights spread and as liberal values spread that introduced a new term which brings me to the next section which is called so a liberal democracy as you might guess is a society that's both liberal and democratic so it has either widespread voting rights or universal voting rights and it's capitalistic even if it's some sort of moderated version of capitalism and also has civil rights backed by law for everyone in that society basically everything about liberal democracy is controversial not everyone agrees even when liberal democracy started in america some people say it always was but most people put it somewhere around the beginning of the 20th century but it depends what voting rights bill you're looking at that should mark the beginning of it and some people say that other values come along with it but all that's controversial so some people say that a loose understanding of liberal values is now the default value system of america like individualism this idea that we should look around and see the country as made up of atomized individuals and not in terms of collectives and competing collective interests other people argue that we now broadly aspire to be tolerant and mutually respectful because those are qualities that are ideal to have in a society based on the freedom of the individual but again that's all controversial either way the creation of the concept of liberal democracy introduced a new meaning for the word liberal which in this context means someone that supports liberal democracy meaning that you're for capitalism and meaning that you're for a multi-party democracy because it can't be a single party democracy because that's not much of one and your four state backed rights for all citizens so in this context most americans are probably liberal and certainly all american presidents so you could also use it to compare different government systems around the world so you could say after world war ii germany was split into two parts you had the liberal west and the communist east this also introduced a new type of liberal thinker that especially concerned themselves with the health and relative standing of liberal democracy around the world so that would be like carl popper or more recently francis fukuyama and for this video beyond pointing out those new terms that's it for liberal democracy short section [Music] once liberal democracy was more or less established and once america started industrializing as a country modern liberals were the next group of liberals who tried to make liberalism work in those conditions one problem is that people liked to proclaim america as the land of the free and equal but it was just too obviously in too many ways not free and equal and it was being pointed out both in america and abroad as a point of hypocrisy so one type of modern liberal was a rights-based liberal that basically worked to fix that and worked to extend equal rights to everyone in the country so that included extending voting rights to everybody and extending civil rights to minorities another type of modern liberal focused more on the economy and on quality of life concerns like unemployment or quality of opportunity and i think at times it can be hard to understand why they're still considered liberals so i think to wrap your head around where they were coming from it helps to consider a scenario like this if you imagine someone that doesn't have somewhere to live so they're say on a street corner somewhere and they don't have much of an education and they don't really have a way to afford more and say they're also discriminated against say in the job market and say it's because of their skin color their options in their life are going to be windowed down so much that if you go up to that person and say that they have rights guaranteeing their freedom it kind of makes a mockery out of the concept so you could give that person food and shelter but they're still not very free and then on top of that if the economy crashes and unemployment skyrockets that person's going to have even fewer options so these types of concerns were already in the mix for classical liberals especially towards the end of the classic liberal period but it was much more of a thing for modern liberals and they generally looked to the government and saw the government as a solution to these problems there was another problem too as america industrialized corporations became bigger and more powerful and liberals started to argue that we needed a bigger more powerful government to regulate these corporations and maybe even break them up some liberals did argue back that the problem mostly takes care of itself they said that as corporations become bigger they sort of become like ocean liners that are unwieldy and sluggish to accommodate change and just naturally smaller corporations that are sort of sleeker will just overtake them over time but that was a minority opinion and especially in the beginning of the 20th century the prevailing wisdom among liberals was that we needed a bigger government to deal with the challenges of the modern world so the relationship between liberals and the government was changing and basically no one was laissez faire anymore but opinions on what exactly that relationship should look like were split into a spectrum of opinion between left and right liberals on the left tended to argue that the government should intervene more it could mean that they took a more active role stabilizing the economy or it could mean that they took more of an active role trying to make quality of life improvements for the worst off meaning that they overall took a more welfarist position then you also had the liberal right their general position is that a rising tide lifts all boats they thought that less intervention meant more freedom which meant more economic activity which meant more prosperity which overall in the long run they said would help everyone the most including the least well-off the liberal right were generally more particular about what types of social programs they would support so they would often for example criticize welfare saying that it was counterproductive and certain forms of it trapped people in dependency but they were generally more for some types of intervention like if they had to do with the quality of opportunity if you could find ways that people were being discriminated against or if you could find ways that market competition was unfair they at least in principle said that those were things that we should fix as long as it doesn't cost too much freedom from other people in case this helps make any of this more clear here's some famous names on both sides friedman and keynes were more exclusively economists and hayek was also primarily an economist but he and john rawls were also influential philosophically for their sides not everyone considers people like john rawls a liberal especially if you're someone that's more over on the laissez-faire end of the spectrum but you have to look closely at what they're saying because john rawls says that we should only act on interventionist principles if they don't compromise personal liberty which includes freedom of thought freedom of conscience freedom of the person and civil liberties even though john rawls brings in ideas like justice and fairness into his argument he still centers it around personal liberty which balances freedom and equality so most people still consider john rawls a liberal he's just saying that once we have personal liberties secured we should look to help those that don't have very much freedom in their lives so that if we help them we'll then have more freedom overall in society this part isn't discussed as often but i think that there's another important access that this liberal conversation happened on in the 20th century and that access was culture when it comes to culture laissez-faire means let people think speak and be themselves and intervention means some sort of coercion with the power of a group behind it like censorship i think it happened in other ways that were less explicitly political and more banal like academics establishing orthodoxy in their fields and then pressuring others to conform to it looking at this superficially you might expect that this struggle going on in culture would also be between the liberal left and liberal right but i don't think it's that simple the difference is when it comes to economics both sides were making arguments based in freedom and equality so they had different ideas about how to compromise those principles but fundamentally on both sides they were liberals when it comes to culture there was only one side of the argument that was grounded in liberal principles the other side may have been acting off of just human instincts or in philosophical principles that are not grounded in freedom and equality they may be grounded in trying to free people from mental oppression but liberals don't recognize mental oppression as grounds to restrict the freedom of someone else it's just too abstract and open to abuse you can argue that anything is mentally oppressive and it becomes too easily a means to control other people so i think that this struggle was between liberals and people who were not liberals they could have been conservatives they could have been progressives or something else but not liberals i'm spending a while talking about the major dynamics in economics and culture because as you may have guessed i think that these are still the major dynamics in play and we just don't use the right terms when we talk about it so i think it's about time that we moved up to present day if liberalism was controversial up until now in the 21st century it's especially true with wildly different competing narratives being thrown around about it some people think that we have a new kind of liberalism which had been developing for maybe a few decades before that but i don't think that's right i think we're still in a period of modern liberalism where say 100 years from now if people look back on this time period it'll still essentially be an extension of modern liberalism where the basic liberal ideas haven't changed other people are saying that liberalism in america is basically conservatism now and i think that's oversimplification to the point of just being wrong some people are saying that liberalism is dead and that's not a new claim and i don't think that's right either liberalism isn't dead it's just being obscured by poor terminology so who are the liberals in america and who aren't if you're someone that believes in the principles of freedom individuality and equality and in respecting the civil rights of others including people you don't agree with and including their right to free speech then you're a liberal there's a spectrum of liberal opinion in america but those are the basic principles that everyone agrees on but if that doesn't describe you and especially if you have negative ideas about liberalism in your head then i shouldn't have to say this but you're probably not a liberal you're probably either a conservative or a progressive but that being said they don't have to be mutually exclusive you can be inspired by both progressive values and liberal values or by conservative values and liberal values and not betray either value system in which case you could accurately identify either way but you can also be a progressive and illiberal or a conservative and illiberal in which case it would be wrong to identify as liberal so i think this is where we're at we have a liberal left and a liberal right in this country the liberal right that are the most laissez-faire are probably libertarians we also have liberals that are more moderate and might not want to identify either way all of them are against censorship and most of their disagreement comes down to the size of the government and its role in the economy and welfare we also have conservatives that value tradition and progressives that want to create progress through social reform we also have people who take influence from multiple value systems without betraying either one and can identify either way if we try to simplify our political value set into a simple left and right where liberal and progressive become synonyms and the liberal right gets rolled into conservatism it's just wrong i understand that we would want to simplify things but this actively creates confusion and actively obscures liberalism liberalism conservatism and progressivism are not interchangeable they're their own political traditions with their own core philosophies that each contribute a distinct voice to american politics we've been blending them together in the 21st century but i would argue that it's at liberalism's expense and if liberals want to continue to be a voice going forward in american politics i would think that they would need to reclaim their term and insist that we use it in a way that relates back to liberalism

Channel: Ryan Chapman

Views: 326,403

Keywords: liberalism, what is liberalism, liberalism explained, american liberalism, liberalism overview, classical liberal, classical liberals explained, john stuart mill, liberalism usa, modern liberals, modern liberalism, classical vs modern liberalism, term liberal meaning, liberal vs liberalism, liberal definition, liberalism crash course

Id: mCPeNXzf7Dw

Length: 23min 17sec (1397 seconds)

Published: Tue May 11 2021