So You Think You’re A Liberal
Much like the word “socialist,” “liberal” has become a derogative in US politics. Unlike Socialism, there is a valid reason behind that.
Slave Trader's Business in Atlanta, Georgia, 1864. Photo: George N. Barnard, Public domain
Do you know what the term Liberal means? For many, it brings to mind things like socially progressive, humanist and reason-guided. In the United States, the Liberal and the Left are interchangeable, amalgamated into a singular identity which manages to span the entirety of the political spectrum from right-wing war-hawks like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to Leftist revolutionaries such as Fred Hampton, Martin Luther King Jr., Eugene Debs, and John Brown. When you look at it from this perspective, that anything that isn’t exclusively fascist must be Leftist, you fall into a trap which has been set with the explicit goal of derailing your own politicization.
Many of you will have a knee-jerk reactionaryism which is likely already making you feel targeted, triggered, as we begin this conversation. Nobody likes to be looked down upon, to be told that what you think you believe isn’t what you think it is; nobody likes to see that they have been manipulated and lied to. To understand where I am coming from, you have to know that “Liberalism” - the catch-all for progressive attitudes in the US - is actually a clever misnomer here, a manipulation designed to mix values of humanism with the explicit dehumanization of imperial expansion and corporate domination across the globe.
Liberalism, as defined by the early writers such as John Locke and other humanists of the early-Industrial period, is a belief in the unassailable equality of "man” (read: humans) independent of any government or material condition. It is an ideological cornerstone which asserts that governments are to be of the People, by the People, and for the People; a string of thought which lifts the common person above any system which does not primarily seek to empower the commoner. This is “social liberalism.”
However, Liberalism took on another meaning around 100-years later with the writings of Adam Smith and his An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) which set the foundations for the field of both economics as well as the normalization of the coming Capitalist ideology. In this vein, Liberalism is a pro-business belief, an ideology which stresses that the only way to build an economy and to ensure the welfare of your population is to limit regulation of business, that the individual is protected and property provided ascendancy as the primary assessment of a population’s well-being and continued development. This is called “economic liberalism.”
Herein lies the problem with the contemporary “liberal:” one cannot believe and support the former if they are invested in and executing the beliefs of the latter. The two types of liberalism are at odds, counterpoints and opposites and direct contradictions. It is impossible to support your fellow worker, neighbor, and peer while simultaneously supporting the deregulation which is today ensuring you are consistently too poor for housing, medicine, education, or food.
John Locke, the guy who pretty much spurred forward the idea of social liberalism, was also a stakeholder in a slaving company; was the Secretary of the Lords Proprietors of the Carolinas; and earnestly argued about the inhumanity of slavery while provided exceptions the whole while for his English Colonial projects. For example: South Carolina was constitutionally obliged to respect slavery from the beginning and provided land grants specifically tied to the amount of slaves a prospective landowner could bring with them, entrenching it in that society some 200 years before the Emancipation Proclamation would do exactly the same, condemn slavery as inhumane and a violation of rights while directly placing the same carve-outs which enabled Locke to sleep at night himself.
For the Left, a sharp understanding of economics in the real-world is key. Not only the discussion of nonsense abstractions such as “widgets” which underline the economic liberalism of our ideological frameworks, but also the deeper points of how material reality directly effect the spurious and purposeful intangibles of liberal economics. It is essential to see that economic liberalism is a profoundly inhumane idea which ultimately leads back to where this all began in the first place: slavery.
For the economic liberal, their is nothing so fine as slavery. A completely submissive and self-contained group of labor inputs which you alone can determine the value and use of in your business. They are humans turned from autonomous laborers into simple economic inputs, the collective costs we have socially determined to be acceptable as payment for labor being completely unnecessary and ultimately damaging to the business owner whose primary concern is profits.
This, the entire premise of deregulating industry so that it may better prey upon both you and workers across the world, is the foundation of the Neoliberalism which has taken over the world since the 70s and 80s and why “Liberal” has become derogatory for many who wouldn’t see so otherwise. The Clintons, Bushes, Obamas, Trumps, Bidens, Reagans, etc., all economic liberals, none of them social liberals.
Social liberalism is a Leftist belief and if you think that the worker deserves to be protected over the company trying to enslave them, you are a Leftist. If you support companies using their wealth and influence to conglomerate, to steal your voice and political efficacy through sheer corruption and cronyism, you are an economic liberal, and likely a right-wing reactionary.
Thanks for reading and please subscribe! All I do here is 100% reader-supported, so if you can spare a few dollars, it really helps me keep working on the stuff I love!
