What is a Liberal? Ideology Explained

[Music] hey guys welcome to hip Hugh history we're banging out some ideological videos and right now we're going to be hitting up liberalism more specifically social liberalism you guys know the word as liberal so what is a liberal let's giddy up and find out here we [Music] go la la la la la all right guys if you've watched the previous lecture we did on libertarianism I mean you can click that right there it'll take you to watch that I'll even pause for you but we did talk in that video a lot about the ideological Matrix that's drawn out from the political Compass quiz where you can take that if you go down in the description below and find where you come out on this ideological Matrix so we're going to talk about liberalism in a second here and then kind of bring ourselves up to a definition of what a liberal is in terms of the 20th and 21st century but definitely you want to get the major idea that this kind of uh horizontal line going across that's what a horizontal line is is an economic scale of ideology so the farther left that you are the more towards your kind of moving towards a commune idea all the way in the end would be communism if we're somewhere in the center we generally believe in some sort of mixed economy where there is some sort of government um presence government regulation government oversight to make sure that the system is safe and fair the farther to the right that you go you're moving towards kind of a free market pure capitalistic maybe a libertarianism idea about government's role in the economy which is there really shouldn't be any that it gets in the way it's bureaucratic it slows things down and then we have this uh hor vertical line that's the other one Hughes where we're talking about more of a kind of a government role when it comes to social order we have authoritarianism way up on top so we would find a Stalin character towards the left and to the top Hitler who believed more in kind of a a business model when it came to U the economy is going to be to the right a little bit and then the further down we go past the center we actually move towards a word called anarchism where we don't believe that there should be government limits at all in terms of um on order and social expression and speech and that sort of jazz most of us fall in the center right we believe in free speech and unless you're standing on the corner saying I like to blow up babies let's go blow up babies then you might want to you know take that guy in for questioning let's take a look now that we have our minds kind of wrapped around that ideological scale about the term liberalism and then it's going to get [Music] confusing all right so when people are yelling you're a liberal I think we're all liberals because the classical definition of liberalism is this kind of idea that came out of the Enlightenment and you know the ideas of Liberty equality Freedom that we're all born free all liberals believe this whether you're a classical liberal or a more new liberal everybody believes in the ideals that we're born free and we should be able to live our lives free Freedom equality civil rights All That Jazz the difference is Classical liberalism sees all government really as limits on that Liberty and really what we're talking about the difference between a classical liberal and a new liberal is the government's role when it comes to the economy a classical liberal is somebody who believes in a la Fair free market that government interference not only is going to get in the way of the economy growing and going to end up redistributing um wealth really a socialistic idea but it's also going to pick winners and losers and therefore you really don't have a free market system a free market system would Sol all of our problems and would eventually lead to Full Employment that's what a Libertarian would say really what we have is we kind of have this model coming in the 1700s and the early 1800s of classic libertarianism that we have a a role of democracy we have a republic everybody is free everybody can you know kind of Express themselves and live out the lives they want to live if they work hard enough you know the American dream concept right that you will have you know your Liberty blossom into all of this uh great um outcome and I think that what happens is in the mid- 1800s it really starts with writers like Charles uh Dickens and then at the turn of the century the muck rakers in the United States like like an up in Sinclair who begin really exposing um really what this Liberty looks like in a free market and what they come to the conclusion what a lot of people come to the conclusion is is that people really aren't free just because you say they're free and there's no government interference in their lives that doesn't mean they can live out that freedom because they're being mired by ignorance poverty disease all of these variables that the free market isn't solving therefore people are living a mundane miserable experience and whether they work you know 100 hours a week um it doesn't matter they're never going to get out of that poverty it's only one in a you know 100,00 that rises to the next level in society it's really a classist view of the world um in a sense so um beginning in the 1860s and the 1870s first in Europe and then the United States we begin to change our definition from a classic liberalism to a social liberalism that in order to have Liberty in order to have freedom in order to uh live out your dreams there needs to be a basic framework where that can exist a classical liberalist views coercion coming from the government a classic liberalist sees the government is the one that's in your way a social liberalist believes yes we need limited government we don't want totalitarianism we don't want a government that you know takes away all your private property or impedes your freedom of speech we believe in all of those things on that social order scale but we also believe that there is coercion and there is um a lack of opportunity that's that's being stopped from private sector private forces Market forces therefore we need a government role in order to create those conditions so the first the progressive error at the state level in the United States and then finally really um after the Great Depression through the New Deal we see that government role coming into the economy and then into social life through uh programs like Medicare down the road Social Security early on but having a certain framework where people can live out uh those those objectives in life now I think that both classic liberalists and social liberti believe in equality of opportunity it's whether or not that equality of opportunity exists just in a free market or if the government needs to come in and say look perhaps there's a state government or there's a terrorist group that's impeding on someone's rights we need to equal the playing field not only by um regulating elections to make sure that that minority group can can vote but also by making sure that um their civil rights are not being violated by the law so we need an active judicial system one of the quotes that I'm going to leave you with is we're we're kind of getting getting really deep into liberalism here is Madison's quote about tyranny of the majority he warns that in a republic it's the tyranny of the majority that you have to worry about and the classical kind of definition of that is the classical liberalist definition that really you're worrying about the majority being the lower classes controlling the mechanisms of government to in a sense rob Peter to pay Paul that's the tyranny of the majority there's a focus on private property and I think that really the and the new Liber liberals in the 20th century see that tyranny of the majority and the forces that are controlling the government which to them is the wealthy and the the upper class the white that is using the system especially in the you know first half of the 20th century to deny other people their freedom therefore we need an active role of the Federal Government in order to take care of that problem so people can live out their existence to the full capacity that their their skills offer we couldn't leave this discussion without talking a little bit about Kenzi and economics and without getting 15 layers under the Skins here we want to point out that the main idea is that a classic liberalist believes that the free market will solve its own problems that the free market will adjust through supply and demand and these natural Flows In order to create the smoothest ride in life and really it's the Great Depression after World War I around the world that creates these conditions where the free market isn't solving those problems where you're getting unemployment of 25 30% that you're getting um really you know terrible situations situations that are really ripe for revolution Kenzi and is is a British Economist who who wrote about his ideas um that really argue that the government has to step in when private business is not and by coming in and creating jobs programs and again this is violating kind of that private property idea because it's taking money from Peter to pay Paul for the job but that in a sense will pump money back into the economy to create the um artificial I guess you would say demand um where that will need a bigger supply so therefore the market will then come in to create that supply and then the government can start to to pull out know when FDR took over in 1932 I think unemployment was about 30% didn't go down probably below 20% before World War II but it dropped 10 points because of the new deal and all that pump spending into those jobs programs um but World War II I think government spending went up something like 56% between 1940 and 1941 and the unemployment you know rate was cut in half that's really I guess War liberalism now let's take a look at some of the criticisms of liberalism and uh some of the current [Music] viewpoints the main criticis is going to be that number one you're violating liberalism by being liberal because you're violating that tenant of private property especially with a progressive income tax something that's taking you know from Peter to pay for Paul now the liberal is going to explain that this is necessary in the type of economic system that we have in order to create equality of opportunity otherwise you're going to have you know a a Russian thing going on in 1917 where the masses are going to feel so powerless and and and so without choice that they will Revolt they will overthrow the system so in a sense the liberal is arguing for this mixed economic system in order to modulate capitalism to kind of shave the rougher edges of capitalism the other criticism is going to be is that when you have especially not just equality of of opportunity but really I think the argument would be equality of outcome so if you have something like food stamps or welfare that you're trying to say not only do we have to provide opportunity but we have to a certain level of outcome that everybody has enough food in their belly everybody has enough Health Care to make the system work everybody um yada yada Y is that what you're doing is you're creating dependence and that dependence is going to get in the way of that Natural State of Liberty and that natural state of people having to act in order to get so those are the two major criticisms but there is a major difference and we want to point this out between a liberal and a socialist a liberal still believes in a um capitalism and private property it's just modulated they're not arguing for State ownership of Walmart they're arguing for regulations to make products safer to make things more uh competitive and fair in the marketplace and to make sure that employees have a certain voice in their world that they're not going to be taken advantage of because they don't have power they don't have money and of course we would see that the classic liberal would say classic liberalist would say yeah but you're taking away the liberty of the owner of that store in order to satisfy that need for that Liberty of that employee man there's a lot to think about there all right guys giddy up I think that's all we got for you so you tell us down below what you think libertarian liberal somewhere in the middle what's going on in the 21st century with the role of government and the market who is best equipped to solve our problems or maybe neither of them are if you haven't subscribed to hip Hugh history you want you to press that big red button it's just so fun to press it'll take like 10 seconds and then you'll be subscribed and be all informed about the new lectures that'll be so exciting how about that and you know what I'm going to say when I'm done I always say the same thing we attention goes energy flows guys we'll see you next time that you press my [Music] but

Channel: Hip Hughes

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Keywords: stock footage, liberal, politics, conservative, libertarian, apgov, ap government, review, help, teacher, social studies, keith hughes, crash course, hip hughes, hiphughes, history, constitution, Liberalism (Political Ideology), Government (Quotation Subject), Press, Election, Political Ideology, Liberalism, what is a liberal?, social liberalism, political compass, democrat, republican, political, HipHughes History, socialism, libertarianism, lens, economy, Bernie Sanders Wife, News

Id: V7rHGydPFjY

Length: 14min 20sec (860 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 17 2014