The term "liberal" has become all but meaningless. Unlike the useless slur of "fascist", there are still some people who identify with the concept of "liberal", even as it has become more common for younger leftists to decry this concept along with its more nebulous offspring "neoliberalism". Often, the modern liberal is someone who believes in multiculturalism and a large (if not entirely robust) government able to tackle the various social ailments that afflict countries. There are outliers (such as Australia's center-right party being the Liberals), but generally a liberal supports widened welfare programs, public-private partnerships with an emphasis on the public, and higher taxes to support these measures. There's an emphasis on the sentimental and the compassionate within government, to right public evils through public means.
Obviously, to anyone with even a dim view of political history, this description sounds nothing like traditional liberalism. The concept "libertarian" was invented (by Hayak, if I recall rightly) to reclaim the term's original meaning. The classical liberal was concerned about arbitrary and tyrannical government. They believed in limiting government, perhaps even closing off some sections or spheres of society from government intervention. Like a night-watchman, the government kept away foreign invasions and settled internal disputes over property. That was all. In fact, the only purpose of government was to defend the rights of property. Economic management was deplored as an interference in natural market relations, which an "invisible hand" governed according to rational laws of nature.
How can these two seemingly contradictory terms interrelate? Most analysis is short-sighted and generally ignorant. Sometimes there's some sort of genealogy derived (often beginning with Scotus or Ockham) about the origin of liberalism as the origin of individualism. But given modern liberalism's fairly obsessive concern with regulating group dynamics and righting phantom "systemic" oppressions, it is obscene and nearly braindead that this originates from some kind of obsession about the individual. While it's true that identity politics seems concerned to allow every person to confect particularities about themselves, this form of branding depends on belonging to a wider community. Like the popularity of Enneagram voodoo, the idea is not to be a-typical, but to have a set of preset characteristics modeled through an ur-paradigm. The appeal of Harry Potter style sorting-hat (having some arbiter tell you who you really are) do not really smack of individual. Nominalism rejected the notion of universal categorization for varying forms of resemblance. It's hard to say this epistemology explains the almost Platonic concept of gender identity that defies even biology. Perhaps, as David Nicholls had argued, that the individualism of the 80s in Reagan and Thatcher (a phenomenon mediated through corporate advertisement) was the flip-side of totalizing collectivization. However, this means individualism has little to do with an individual.
One option is that simply there is no real connection. Turn-of-the-century reformers took upon themselves the mantle of Liberalism, even as they proceeded to gut it of all its earlier distinctions. Modern liberals turned classical liberalism into a skin-suit to advance their own objectives of socialism-lite under the mantle of a revered tradition. Such was in contrast to the Marxist idea that Liberalism was a necessary revolutionary precursor, wiping out the Ancien Regime of throne and altar. Before liberalism's attack on all traditional boundaries (as threats to property ownership), it would create the conditions of class-ware, before the working masses overcame the victorious burghers who had claimed government for themselves. Nevertheless, this neither fits modern Third-World Socialists (who often decry liberalism) or the modern liberals themselves, who believe they are in continuity with this tradition (warning that without changing liberalism that socialism would inevitably win). Was this just a cynical and polemical use of a concept, a subtle operation of the Fabian-like mind? Or was this mutation a sincere effort to continue or save the liberal tradition?
I will argue the latter. While I do not deny the importance of polemic in transforming the use of a term, the classical liberal tradition was already in decline by the time liberalism began to rapidly transform. A key conceptual point in discussing the history of ideas is to note that it is better to conceptualize an idea more as a constellation than a solid-set Platonic form. An idea is made up of various sub-point that hold together with logical coherence, but they may be forced apart in response to outside influences and needs. Thus Second Temple Judaism may be spoken coherently as an idea, it was a constellation torn apart by the advent of Jesus and the Roman destruction of the Temple. Christianity emerged as one radical reformulation of some ideas, while Rabbinic Judaism emerged as an equally radical reformulation of this concept as it passed away. And just as we will see with liberalism, only one of these factions claimed the nomenclature of the past ('Judaism' was first coined in 2 Maccabees), giving the illusion that it alone possessed continuity (a lie that has existed in scholarship for centuries until fairly recently).
What was this constellation of Liberalism? Perhaps one of the best places to see the internal tension, visible retrospectively, is the canonical work of Adam Smith. Often considered the theoretical father of "Capitalism" (a title that often ignores Medieval theorists on market relations, the Salamanca school, and French physiocrats), Smith is well known for his argument about an "invisible hand" regulating market relations. Thus the government (in his case, the imperial Parliament of Britain) did not need to maintain royal corporate monopolies on trade and sales. This mercantilist thought (a heuristic, but one visible in the Navigation Acts) was a hindrance to the full productive efficacy of the people. If left to their own, the butcher, the baker and candlestick maker would pursue an enlightened self-interest that would benefit all. Additionally, Smith excoriated high taxes and subsidies, which were efforts to manipulate trade, often to the disadvantage of economic progress. Free trade is essential to breakdown artifice and allow natural success to flourish:
"Were all nations to follow the liberal system of free exportation and free importation, the different states into which a great continent was divided, would so far resemble the different provinces of a great empire. As among the different provinces of a great empire, the freedom of the inland trade appears, both from reason and experience, not only the best palliative of a dearth, but the most effectual preventive of a famine; so would the freedom of the exportation and importation trade be among the different states into which a great continent was divided." (Wealth of Nations, IV.5)
Thus, a trade free from interference and hindrance will only profit all nations which participate. Government has limited duties, but these contain some seeds of contention:
"All systems, either of preference or of restraint, therefore, being thus completely taken away, the obvious and simple system of natural liberty establishes itself of its own accord. Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way, and to bring both his industry and capital into competition with those of any other man, or order of men. The sovereign is completely discharged from a duty, in the attempting to perform which he must always be exposed to innumerable delusions, and for the proper performance of which, no human wisdom or knowledge could ever be sufficient; the duty of superintending the industry of private people, and of directing it towards the employments most suitable to the interests of the society. According to the system of natural liberty, the sovereign has only three duties to attend to; three duties of great importance, indeed, but plain and intelligible to common understandings: first, the duty of protecting the society from the violence and invasion of other independent societies; secondly, the duty of protecting, as far as possible, every member of the society from the injustice or oppression of every other member of it, or the duty of establishing an exact administration of justice; and, thirdly, the duty of erecting and maintaining certain public works, and certain public institutions, which it can never be for the interest of any individual, or small number of individuals to erect and maintain; because the profit could never repay the expense to any individual, or small number of individuals, though it may frequently do much more than repay it to a great society." (IV.9)
In other words, the government's sole objective is 1) defend from invasion; 2) prevent internal oppressions (theft, murder, etc); 3) public works that would best facilitate the entire public in their pursuit of their own ends (e.g. roads, harbors, etc.). Obviously, therefore, is the defense of property and the natural inequalities that form within a society (defined according to changes in the 17th/18th c. as distinct from the state or the crown):
"Wherever there is a great property, there is great inequality. For one very rich man, there must be at least five hundred poor, and the affluence of the few supposes the indigence of the many. The affluence of the rich excites the indignation of the poor, who are often both driven by want, and prompted by envy to invade his possessions. It is only under the shelter of the civil magistrate, that the owner of that valuable property, which is acquired by the labour of many years, or perhaps of many successive generations, can sleep a single night in security. He is at all times surrounded by unknown enemies, whom, though he never provoked, he can never appease, and from whose injustice he can be protected only by the powerful arm of the civil magistrate, continually held up to chastise it. The acquisition of valuable and extensive property, therefore, necessarily requires the establishment of civil government. Where there is no property, or at least none that exceeds the value of two or three days labour, civil government is not so necessary." (V.2)
So far, so good. This all sounds like classical liberalism, especially the necessity of government strictly for the means of defending property. Additionally, Smith advocates for a standing-army (not militias) to provide a sufficient protection against enemy encroachments. It should be noted that this point in Smith runs contrary to the Whiggish republican tradition (in both Britain and America) that feared standing-armies. The reasoning is not unlike that of Benjamin Constant, who disaggregates ancient and modern liberty: old republicans aspired to a much more comprehensive state of which all men must participate, whereas modern liberals want the freedom to pursue their own ends apart from a state. A standing-army was, perhaps perplexing to modern libertarians, necessary to prevent the totalizing effect (besides inefficiency) of compulsory military service for all citizens.
Now to tie in another place of ambiguity that Chomsky likes to repeat ad nauseam, Smith was not an advocate for an agnostic government when it came to its citizenry. The effects of this capital economy, freed to pursue technical and commercial perfection, could lead to severe degradation. I'll quote the passage in full:
"In the progress of the division of labour, the employment of the far greater part of those who live by labour, that is, of the great body of the people, comes to be confined to a few very simple operations; frequently to one or two. But the understandings of the greater part of men are necessarily formed by their ordinary employments. The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects, too, are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert his understanding, or to exercise his invention, in finding out expedients for removing difficulties which never occur. He naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such exertion, and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become. The torpor of his mind renders him not only incapable of relishing or bearing a part in any rational conversation, but of conceiving any generous, noble, or tender sentiment, and consequently of forming any just judgment concerning many even of the ordinary duties of private life. Of the great and extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very particular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his mind, and makes him regard, with abhorrence, the irregular, uncertain, and adventurous life of a soldier. It corrupts even the activity of his body, and renders him incapable of exerting his strength with vigour and perseverance in any other employment, than that to which he has been bred. His dexterity at his own particular trade seems, in this manner, to be acquired at the expense of his intellectual, social, and martial virtues. But in every improved and civilized society, this is the state into which the labouring poor, that is, the great body of the people, must necessarily fall, unless government takes some pains to prevent it."
As Chomsky likes to note, Smith is working in the tradition of political economy which reached its completion in Karl Marx. Eventually Smith and political economists will be opposed by historic economists (notably Frederich List, who influenced Henry Clay's American System). Without weighing into the merit of these criticisms, or whether Marx/Marxism was the telos of political economy, it is clear that Smith was not in favor of a strictly night-watchman state or a government only interested in defense of property. And of course, there's no reason to expect Smith (just as later liberals like Constant) believed in the good or necessity of democracy. As de Toqueville noted as a good liberal, [representative] democracy creates expensive, corrupt, and very flight government, which is especially damning in foreign affairs. Nevertheless, the idea in a liberal government was to promote free-economy, sound weights&measures, limited government, and the unleashing of commercial-manufacturing to produce better quality products at cheaper prices.
It is the great multiplication of the productions of all the different arts, in consequence of the division of labour, which occasions, in a well-governed society, that universal opulence which extends itself to the lowest ranks of the people. (I.1)
In 19th c. Europe, liberals were generally triumphant as a steady progress of erosion. Whiggery in Britain came to divide into what would be more aristocratic and agricultural-commercial as Conservatives, as defenders of burghers and their manufacturing-commerce formed the liberals, with a wavering peasant/prol movement forming around the Radicals-Chartists (who demanded the full fruits of liberalism for themselves). In the United States, lacking any Ancien Regime, liberalism reigned in both parties in somewhat different ways (Whig emphases on internal improvements matched Democratic emphasis on anti-tariff free-trade). The brief period of restoration in France gave way to the July Monarchy, which boasted a liberal aristocracy. Liberal movements spread across Europe, threatening monarchical and ecclesiastical privileges. 1848 was the great explosive moment of liberal revolution, a coalescence of burgher and proletariat hostility to legal inequalities. Its broad failure began a period of reactionary repression, which often betrayed weakness than confidence. There are other, and better, accounts of how Napoleon III, Bismarck, and Cavour brought about a form of liberal revolution steadily under different means. However, it was also quite clear that the late eighteenth/early nineteenth century liberalism was not sustainable.
The beginning of the crisis is most clear in that fount of liberalism, Great Britain. During the 1870s, the great source of liberal pride (free-trade, gold-standard, limited government, manufacturing excellence) began to decline. The industrial wage class had increasingly drifted from any interest in inclusive liberalism. Radicals had temporarily banded with the new National Conservatism of Disraeli, which began a process of paternalized liberalism that was richly caked-over with the aesthetics of nobility, empire, and church. Nevertheless, these working masses were also attracted to a Liberal party that was increasingly responsive to their plight, as well as forming a Labour Party out of their efforts to organize and unionize. Manufacturing began to decline and belief in the Empire had also become shaken. What was the point of another African adventure when white Britons continued to suffer against cheap production in other parts of the Empire. This mobilized the campaign of Joseph Chamberlain as a radical Tory, which saw northern industrialists turn towards Conservatives when London commercial-finance began to detach from native industry. Instead of turning to a highly protective Dominion (CANZUK), mirroring the successes of the United States under the Republican Party and Bismarck's reorganization of imperial Prussia-Germany, Britain tried to stay the course. Free-trade and a gold-standard was essential to the financial wealth of the City, whereas manufacturing was but one element. The free flow of capital must remain, thus influencing and guiding potential allied industrial economies. However, what if the necessities of free-trade and technological innovation (viz division of labor) conflict with the rights of property? What if old machinery, old methods of organization, and old prejudices about the movement of capital prevented the free-expansion of the economy? As Adam Smith noted, it was only the attachment to hearth and home that prevented the English investor from pulling his stakes out of his native land and moving elsewhere.
In the United States, liberalism had a similar shake-up. The Democrat's concern for free-trade (often in support of raw production of corn and cotton) eventually turned the party towards an assault on sound-money, willing to flood the economy with silver to inflate the currency in favor of farmers. Republicans defended the gold-standard (though with efforts to prevent currency flow abroad to London), but in conjunction with high taxes on foreign goods. Increasingly both parties had members who, in the name of Liberalism, began to question certain key aspects of it. The Progressives were concerned that a more active and robust government was necessary to secure the benefits of free-trade, corporate development, and equality before the law. The division between a Theodore Roosevelt and a Woodrow Wilson was on which of these solutions was preferable. While Britain began to produce "New Liberals", the United States embraced (temporarily) the Democrats' New Freedom. While the 1920s saw a rejection of this paradigm for the far more subdued old Republican policies of Harding and Coolidge, there were still many who were concerned that liberalism must change in order to be preserved. This was the basic idea of theorist-journalist Walter Lippmann, who had begun his political career as a Socialist. Lippmann (sometimes exaggerated in his influence) believed that there was no other way to deal with an increasingly complex and interconnected world than more active government to uplift the impoverished wage class. Free-trade was not so free, and it perhaps required supra-national organization to secure it. If Communism was to be prevented, melting down all things in a revolt from below, then the government must regulate excesses. Wall Street generally agreed, offering support to the Wilsonian vision.
This new liberalism triumphed with the election of Franklin Roosevelt (with Hoover's more limited paternal adjustments as a precursor). Thus began the New Deal, and the radical transformation of the Federal government. Liberals continued to divide in Britain, ultimately with a rump pouring into the Conservative party, whereas Liberals were absorbed and eclipsed by the rapidly growing Labour Party. Across Europe, most liberal equally divided between rejoining what was left of the Ancien Regime, or allying to some Socialist party (usually the more parliamentary parties, like Social Democrats). The transformation was complete: the old liberalism had died.
But what exactly divided? How did a good classical liberal like H.L. Mencken, as he noted, all of a sudden wake up on the right? What brought men like him beside Al Smith and the (DuPont-sponsored) Liberty League to restrain, if not defeat, the radical innovations of Franklin Roosevelt? How did the party of Jefferson and Jackson become the party of Roosevelt?
My contention, as can be seen above in the quotations from Smith, was a stark split between the liberal concern for limited government, sound-money, and the inviolable rights of property away from division of labor, free-trade, and public services. I will give my brief assessment on each of these pairs, though there is more to say. Take this discussion as a heuristic for understanding divisions, though there were obviously people who tried to formulate different combinations. Obviously, Libertarians have and will defend free-trade, though they will contest modern definitions. The father of Libertarians, von Mises, was willing to offer support for Dollfuss as a stop-gap against the growing communist hordes. Therefore, read carefully and take what is most useful in grasping the crack up:
-For most Libertarians today, sound-money (gold standard) goes hand-in-hand with free-trade. Yet the Washington Consensus (since Roosevelt) has always claimed the mantle of free-trade. Are they dishonest? Not exactly. When Ron Paul defends free-trade, it's within a context that he denounced NAFTA and the WTO. At the turn-of-the-century, it had become increasingly clear that the only way to establish free-trade was to create international agencies that would bind all global powers. What had allowed free-trade in the past was the uncontested, and fairly restrained, British naval power that prevented piracy. American advocates of free-trade (often in Jefferson's camp) were at least economically Anglophile. While the largest plantation owners considered the fate of an American national economy, the small-planter joined the party of Jackson to prevent special benefits. Theoretical awareness that trade with Britain required a strong Britain did not determine a fully-fleshed out policy. With the rise of comparable navies, offering different (or opposed) trade agreements, the idea of an open sea became difficult to sustain. Thus, to keep up the British model of free-trade required a global organization of enforceable agreements. While NAFTA may rob the United States of its strict determinations in trade, it places open borders beyond the political. Instead, it is a given (the "state-of-nature") which must be guarded and adjusted according to professional economists. Free trade requires a wider state-intervention, and one capable of restraining governments from interference in these bodies (or, more truthfully, an active government able to enforce these bodies' rulings).
At the same time, this trade must continue according to standardized and balanced currency exchanges. The gold-standard, as a form of sound-money, seemed normative and regular when its purveyors controlled its supplies. Often this could only operate according to a paper-money system that did not allow gold to disappear from the market through hoarding. The vast majority of gold could sit in London, or New York, and yet the exchange of paper notes continue. The strength of the British Pound helped maintain normative exchange rates. While some core Jacksonians were staunch advocates for hard money, the vast majority of Democratic politicians who destroyed the Bank of the United States did so in favor of their smaller state banks. This facilitated free-trade, as London currency markets were most capable of stabilizing (and not threatened by a rival institution). However as Britain buckled, and the claws of London were visible on maintaining this system, Democrats began to veer away towards inflationary silver. Anglophile Democrats lost control of this process, often depending on certain Republicans, but eventually gold became less important than the monetary system itself. If gold threatened to destabilize what the UK and US built in the aftermath of World War 2, than it too must be dispensed with. Artificially pegging the US Dollar allowed the dollar to backstop the currencies of Europe (the way the Pound often did). However, by the 1970s, when the US underwent similar manufacturing shocks, the interest of finance meant uncoupling the Dollar from gold (and preventing any rapid de-dollarization by cashing out the foreign currency for gold, which DeGaulle had intended to do). Sound money was thus ejected for stable money for the purposes of free-trade. The monetary system which used gold now abandoned gold. The new Liberals from the 70s onward made their peace with this change of affairs (despite a mirage of action in Reagan's rainbow dollar program).
-Limited government and public works could easily go hand-in-hand in the heydays of liberalism. In the US, the fight between Whigs/Republicans and Democrats was whether the federal government (and not the states) should engage in public works (when these would seem to only benefit one region of the country). It was understood by both Democrats and Republicans that public school should be provided to have an effective and acculturated workforce, with divisions primarily over how overtly confessional or Christian these schools should be. Port security, roads, railroads, harbor improvements, these were all debated about, but usually in terms of which level of government should repair them. The concern was whether the federal government was usurping too much power to itself, creating artificial inequalities and expanding beyond the Constitution, or not. However, even the advocates of the American System never believed in an unlimited mandate to solve many or all social ills. The most vocal reformers in the Whig-Republican Party advocated for voluntary societies, churches, and others organizations capable of meeting the challenges of contemporary life.
However, as greater challenges to more complex forms of social organization (especially in light of the rapid explosion of urban centers and, at least in the United States, massive immigration), new efforts were made to deal with these problems. In Britain, Germany and the United States, the question was debated whether the government should restrict working hours, grant some form of insurance, regulate urban construction, and expand broader measures towards public health. All of these were not out of arbitrary desire for a greater state, but ad hoc in response to principle concern to defend the public of civil society. If it was necessary to tax to build large roads to facilitate trade, then it may be necessary to fund limited work-hours to keep a healthy/efficient work-force (as well as forestall proletariat radicalism). Concerns to limit government must increasingly be put away as the public need must continue to increase. And as the old republican concern of an active citizen had already passed as outdated whiggery, so too must the responsibility for these issues fall to the elected representatives. It was not a private citizen's concern or burden to deal with questions that involved hundreds of thousands of people, variegated properties, and the complex processes of mass industrial production. Thus it's no surprise that Wilson and Lloyd-George were quite similar on questions of domestic intervention, with the Liberals vanishing into Labour and Roosevelt's conquest of the Democratic Party a decade or so later. Recall that Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom was predicated on an active government intervention and regulation to prevent corporate consolidation. It was in the name of the public right to start and maintain a business that the federal government could dissolve corporations and strangle any business that seemed to influence the market. It thus became the norm that the federal government must take an expanding role, with Republicans and Democrats debating about how much and where. The old liberals found themselves allied inextricably to the Republican Party, which offered the only means to limit further expansion (even if it often did no such thing). Similarly, old liberals throughout Europe found themselves allied to conservatives, even as their power had evaporated in parliament and were reduced to a rump. The Night-Watchman state was now reserved to the "kooks" that tried to elect Barry Goldwater, and their future descendants.
-The division between property rights and division of labor reflect the growing demands of the economy. It's often misunderstood that Locke's inviolable defense of property was as a Whiggish republican, not a Liberal (pace Macpherson). Locke's philosophy on epistemology and language was eccentric, but his political views were not out of line with Sidney, Trenchard, Gordon, Hoadly, et al., who remained the Whig vanguards of the Glorious Revolution (inspiring American Patriots like John Adams and Patrick Henry). Property became an essential aspect to liberalism because, as the Smith quote above demonstrates, economic freedom was eviscerated if the property-owner feared that he would be robbed. The need to defend your land and possessions would hinder easy and free trade, and thus Smith advocated for a strong professional army and navy. Nature must take its course against its perverts. And, being part of the Scottish Enlightenment, it would be no surprise that this legal emphasis derived from general psychological comfort. Thomas Reid's Common Sense Realism was less a metaphysic than an epistemic reverse-engineering of the average man knows, learns, and experiences. Thus the defense of property was not for itself, but part of a free economy and a free country. Early liberals in both the United States and United Kingdom were vocal supporters of a professional police force. The Peelers, by their visible presence of authority, would help restrain and prevent crime (not, as today, in solving it).
This defense of property and the freedom of movement would allow the rapid development of technology capable of creating better and cheaper products. The division of labor was necessary to improve industrial production. And so it was. With the advent of capital investment in novel inventions, Britain's textile industries exploded. Every revolution has its losers, and while some former handicraftsmen turned towards economic terrorism with the Luddites, many saw that they must adjust to this new economy. It did not take ten years to produce an expert craftsman who could make only a few hundred textiles a year, but now a machine that effectively any could operate immediately that would produce a hundred-fold what the mere artisan could produce. Most people, barring the snobs and ideologues, are quite happy receiving high quality and cheap products. However, the question is whether ownership, in itself, could ever hinder this process? Obvious exceptions, like Eminent Domain, exist in legal constitutions to deal with this question, but necessity does not necessarily imply economic efficiency. Over most of the nineteenth century, these two concepts could exist simultaneously. However, with the rise of capital flight to new areas of the world to produce, what was to stop the misuse of lands? To turn back to Locke, improvement was a sure guarantor of ownership when previous occupants allowed fertile lands to waste away. If this was expanded to a broader question of technological development, than what good were property rights? As organized labor became more vocal in its confrontation with management, liberal governments began to turn away from indifference to mediation. Factory owners did not have a right to simply fire their workers or drag out a strike indefinitely. Roosevelt made mediation national policy, forcing management and labor to get along. Truman and Kennedy both threatened nationalization to get industry back on course. Today, an internal CIA presentation reflects contemporary fears that the Chinese will surpass the US if it cannot dump its "legacy systems" (eg paper-money, individual home-ownership, individual car ownership), which are impediments towards development. Increasingly rootless labor, connected to free movement and trade, thus services increasing division of labor, property rights notwithstanding.
What about neo-liberalism? Don't we live in the doldrums of a capitalist conspiracy running the world? What about rightwing criticisms? Were the Birchers completely insane to believe that we live in a socialist captivity? I think a proper parsing of terms, even as limited and broad as this essay has been, would show that both can be said to be correct. It is true that we do live in a capitalist world-order, but the term capitalist has nothing to do with what was meant two centuries ago. Do we live in socialism? Certainly if we understand how new liberals ruptured their constellation of values to better defend and protect the core of what they believed was the liberal vision. The progressive parliamentary management of affairs that Democratic Socialists advocated a century ago seem to have taken place, but not in any specifically class-oriented way. Leftists are correct that "class analysis" is often lacking in public discussions, but that's because old Marxist terminology has basically become meaningless to describe the economy of the latter half of the twentieth century (a realization made both in the old USSR and PRC). There is not much in the way of a proletariat in the Western world. The new liberals were successful in guiding their way towards their goals, picking up Socialist policies and tactics along the way. Hence many academic leftists are indistinguishable from old-fashioned liberals in politics: their goals are basically the same. Yet the World Economic Forum does not discuss Socialism, but share-holders Capitalism and ethical Capitalism. These are concepts related to marketing terms like Compassionate Conservatism, The Big Society, and Build Back Better.
And this new liberalism will continue to adjust, traceable genealogically. Just as the Anglocentric liberals of the late nineteenth century began to branch out to reconceptualize a form of global liberalism without the British Empire, post-1970s liberals have began to reorganize their thoughts. With the decline of the US manufacturing economy, financialization has become the norm. With war in Ukraine, it seems the US has bought some temporary legitimacy as the champion of this Global order. But how long that lasts is another question. Will US fortunes and standing decline where it too is sloughed off for better grounds? Will liberalism once against alter policies to eject another core set of its principles? Will equality before the law give way to the grievance politics of majority-of-minorities? The future is yet to be written for this term. On the other hand, the old liberals who left for the right have additional difficult questions. Will a stronger state be necessary to promote/defend sound-money (which may have a future as Russia, China, and possibly Brazil hammer out a new gold-standard)? Will private property, and the inequalities it naturally generates, require legal defense of inequality? Hopefully this essay will provide some elementary context for future analysis.
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