Classical Liberals Increasingly ‘Homeless’ in U.S. Politics

The name of this blog is Almost Classical because I find myself more pragmatic than ideologically pure. But, what is a classical liberal if the label is neither a social conservative nor a right-leaning libertarian purist? (I am somewhat more attuned to the libertarian left, which does not exist as an organized community in the United States.)

Politico asks why “classical liberal” is being used more often by people trying to describe themselves, especially former Republicans and Libertarians who have left their political parties. As I recently posted, the outright racism and bigotry of some self-described conservatives and libertarians increasingly makes it undesirable to associate with those labels.

In particular, many scholars and thinkers associated with the Intellectual Dark Web (IDW) have embraced the “classical liberal” label. The individuals associated with the IDW have good reason to be rhetorically cautious with labels, as I recently explained.

Why the ‘Classical Liberal’ is Making a Comeback
A perfect storm of political upheaval has led to the resurgence of a label with centuries-old roots.
By DEREK ROBERTSON June 16, 2018

“I really call myself a classical liberal more than a conservative.”

Protests like the above have become common as of late from certain quadrants of the self-proclaimed, free-thinking “Intellectual Dark Web,” a loose confederacy of free speech absolutists that includes figures like the atheist writer Sam Harris and Peter Thiel sidekick Eric Weinstein. The “classical liberal” label has until now mostly been the domain of libertarian types and conservatives on the never-Trump end of the spectrum, such as Bill Kristol and much of the National Review staff, who are eager to root themselves in a tradition that connects the Founding Fathers to conservative philosophical icon Edmund Burke. Its recent surge in popularity, however, has come from twin phenomena—those conservatives’ intensifying desire to distance themselves from a Trump-ified Republican Party, and the term’s discovery by that new clique of anti-PC voices placing themselves in opposition to the supposedly illiberal campus left.

The label has a sort of musty intellectual authority to the lay person—“classical” is right in the name—and in the partisan chop of the Trump era it’s an appealing rope ladder, thrown down from the helicopter by a team of powdered-wigged Whigs who offer an escape from the never-ending battle between Trump and the #Resistance. That escape was appealing for obvious reasons to the speaker of that quote, in February of last year—not a political historian or a YouTube warrior, but Speaker of the House Paul Ryan himself.

Paul Ryan is not a classical liberal. He has embraced Ayn Rand in the past, who was certainly no liberal (classical or otherwise) and not a libertarian of any coherent ideology. Ryan selectively chooses labels, as we all do, but he has less coherence than other self-described classical liberals. He didn’t even manage to adhere to the basic goal of restricting federal government’s growth and limiting federal meddling in the economy. Ryan followed Donald Trump away from classical liberalism. Do not try to convince me that Ryan is leading the anti-Trump brigades.

Those using the classical liberal label aren’t always classical liberals — they make too many exceptions, especially when it comes to civil liberties and federal spending. Maybe labels don’t mean much, since “socialist” hasn’t been used properly as of late, either. Still, I would like to have readers of this blog understand classical liberalism as it originated with John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith. Classical liberalism was not social Darwinism — it was tolerant and, for its time, progressive in the Enlightenment tradition.

As Robertson writes in Politico, there is a muddled history behind classical liberalism. I also believe Robertson exposes his (and much of the media’s) biases in his description of the history.

The tradition of the use of the term “classical liberal” within conservative circles dates back to (and is largely because of) the movement’s youth. The movement conservatism that still flickers at the heart of the Trump-era Republican Party was born just within the last 70 years, roughly, whereas the tradition of liberalism as understood by most of the world outside America, and as embraced by these conservatives—unfettered free markets, the rule of law, civil liberties (with qualifications, frequently)—is defined by the work of 17th and 18th century heavyweights such as Thomas Hobbes and Adam Smith.

Conservatives, in the modern sense, are not classical liberals — especially not social conservatives. But, who in their right mind would want to be associated with Donald Trump? And so, the conservatives are trying to embrace a label that should be associated with civil rights and tolerance, a libertarian and neoliberal term.

It’s only fitting that conservatives would reach for such a term in greater number given the existential crisis their movement currently faces. During the Bush years it was a clubby signifier of one’s true believer-dom, but with Trump’s (at least rhetorical) retreat from traditional conservatism it’s the password for a fully-fledged sleeper cell within the Republican Party. The combination of its Trump-inspired resurgence in conservative circles and its discovery by malcontent free speech absolutists has led to a spike in classical liberalism’s popularity, one that has seen it used to describe an increasingly disparate range of beliefs. But despite its seeming elasticity, the term is rooted in a real, sprawling, frequently contradictory intellectual history—one that allows it to bend to its bearer’s will just as easily as it resists the authoritative claim of any one party or cadre.

Authentic classical liberalism is best defined by Mill and Smith. The sovereign self, constrained only when that self interferes with the freedoms of others, is the basis for liberalism. This does not preclude cooperation and the establishment of shared commons (parks, roads, police, etc), but the starting point of classical liberalism is that every compromise of liberty must be carefully and cautiously considered. For example: We might need a road, and the local citizens should vote on that road, but understand that a road comes with external consequences, too (notably, pollution). Once the road is built, it must be maintained. Now, we have an ongoing local funding need. And so on. Everything we do collectively comes with a lasting consequence and therefore such collective projects should be limited.

Overall, the classical liberal places the individual above the collective when weighing the benefits of a project or policy. But, Adam Smith himself saw that we needed some social safety nets. Society doesn’t exist without shared values and enforcement of those values, either. We might not agree with “social justice,” but classical liberals defend justice in that we do not believe any person should interfere in another’s exercise of liberty. Liberalism is that notion of selfhood, that a person has merit and rights inherent to his or her existence.

Adam Smith published “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776, a portentous year in more ways than the obvious. The Scot’s book, which formed the basis of the free-market capitalist system as we understand it today, also featured the most prominent use to its date of the newly coined modifier “liberal.” “Liberal” policies, in Smith’s conception and that of his contemporaneous predecessors, stemmed from the Enlightenment concept of “liberty”—”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,” as he wrote in “The Wealth of Nations.”

The contemporary progressive “liberal” would punish thoughts and ideas, not merely actions that harm others. The progressive is, in effect, illiberal, because the progressive would regulate and demand compliance with so-called “positive rights” and “social justice” in action and in expression because they wish to force upon society the “correct” values. As a result, the progressive wishes to regulate speech and force people to adhere to majority (or at least elite majority) values. The classical liberal defends the right of a person to say something stupid and crude, while the modern liberal sees hurtful speech as a violent act that must be punished. This isn’t to say the classical liberal accepts crude speech, but that one can both reject speech and defend it.

“[These are people] who are culturally liberal in the sense that they come from that world, from that tradition, and yet… they’re pursuing intellectual honesty to places where they run into the guild of academic liberalism and political correctness, and they feel the pinch of illiberalism up close,” said the conservative writer Jonah Goldberg in an interview with POLITICO Magazine. “This country was founded with a classically liberal bourgeois revolution, and [the tradition] gives you a ready-made intellectual history that you can subscribe to, without having to subscribe to the politically or reputationally damaging parts of full-suite Republican-style conservatism.”

I reject “positive rights” because you cannot force people to provide services to others. We cannot make healthcare or education a true “right” because we cannot force people to become doctors or teachers. In fact, we collectively entice people into public service, but through market mechanisms. We reward civil servants for choosing, freely, to serve others. Those civil servants can also quit and locate private industry careers, if they so wish.

Classical liberal consider “negative rights” more essential than positive rights. We seek to first limit government to the minimum tasks necessary for our society. Most of us who are almost classically liberal prefer to have government services provided as locally as possible, so that we have the most say in how those services are provided. We are not anti-government, but we would remind people who local control matters until that local control violates the rights of individuals outside the majority.

Political debates in the United States and most developed nations center on individualism vs. state collectivism. The debates are on how to balance the individual freedoms against collective goals. Our definitions of being “free to” and “free from” start getting complicated and the debates get more passionate as we sort into tribalistic political ideologies.

In the annals of political history, this is referred to as the “social liberal” tradition, in contrast to that of classical liberalism. To be slightly reductive, in the former rights are “positive” (extended to others through action, like the right to medical coverage as extended by programs like Medicaid and Medicare), and in the latter rights are “negative” (based on the inaction of others, like the right to consume raw milk.) The dichotomy informs American politics across centuries and topics, from Jefferson’s belief in the moral superiority of a cloistered country life to Lyndon Johnson’s creation of entire federal departments to better organize the Great Society. It’s not difficult to see how the use of the same term to describe such disparate traditions has led to today’s identitarian pile-up—especially in the crater of today’s political landscape, with its Trump-sized blast mark. So where do the newcomers to the table fit into an intellectual tradition that predates the nation itself?

“I’m hopeful that… if people want to call themselves classical liberals, and actually subscribe to real classical liberal ideological views, I hope they win the fight the way the neocons did, and pull the Republican Party back toward its modern tradition of limited government, free market, free speech,” Goldberg said. “If I had to pick a team, I would pick that team.”

If you want to call yourself a classical liberal, then you should embrace negative rights (restrictions and limits on government’s coercive powers) and actively work to ameliorate the potential social frictions allowed by negative rights. If you are a progressive, admit that you want to control people because someone or some group “knows best” when setting values. Negative rights allow me to drink my sugary cola — and leave me responsible for the consequences. Positive rights might provide me with healthcare — but in return, I must give up some choices.

I chose Almost Classical because I believe in the sovereign self more than I trust collective morality and collective mandates. This doesn’t mean I reject social order. In fact, individual rights must be protected against mobs via, ironically, a majority-approved set of prohibitions. A majority (at least a majority of voters or legislators) must adopt protections for the minority. It is a paradox that the individual must be protected from the powerful state by… the powerful state.

In the end, Classical Liberals are homeless in the current political landscape of the United States. We fear the populism of the left and the right because populism leads to a tyranny of the majority. We know we’re not in the majority, too. We’re not social conservatives nor social justice warriors.

We embrace an old label because it reflects a heritage we respect. Unfortunately, we also have to defend usurpers of that label.