The origin of this blog is, if we’re being perfectly honest, to put to ‘paper’ my stream of thoughts and analysis (the quality of which is up to you, dear reader, to judge) about the past, present, and future, from an unapologetically liberal lens, and faster than any responsible editor would publish them.
The reason for such a lens might strike people as unclear - after all, aren’t we living in a liberal media environment? Isn’t everything we see through a liberal lens?
This is, I believe, a misconception. Even those who describe themselves as ‘liberal’ tend to in fact be going along mostly with a progressive zeitgeist, and really for most people small-c conservatism is the order of the day (though this might mean taking a progressive position, if that road is well enough worn). Rarely are actual liberal principles advanced as reasons for policies or cultural positions - gay marriage should be legal because gay people are ‘born that way’, cannabis should be legal because it is ‘less dangerous than alcohol’. These are both decent reasons, of course, but they rest on the assumption that government has the right to make these kind of calls in people’s lives until proven otherwise - as opposed to a truly liberal view that people’s lives are in fact their own and the burden is on the government to prove interference is necessary.
Moreover, because liberalism is assumed to be the dominant tide of the times, little attention is paid to the actual intellectual tradition of liberalism. On the left there is extensive citation of Marx’s theories, even 150 years later - far outpacing conscious citations of Mill or Locke. And even liberal theorists like Adam Smith who are perhaps more present in the collective conscious are so woefully misunderstood it’d almost be worse if they were not. And I would argue that none of these three men deliver the most incisive liberal critiques. Instead, others - Thomas Paine, Mary Wollstonecraft, Frederick Douglass, and Henry George, to name a few - show the depth and richness of a liberal tradition and continue to provide sound foundations for today.
This task gains much urgency, to my mind, on account of the growing prominence of openly and self-consciously illiberal forces, domestically and globally. The divide between right wing and left wing illiberalism is becoming more blurred as the political descendants of both Mussolini and Mao realize their biggest stumbling block is that the baseline appeal of individualism will thwart their totalizing visions of society. Together, the right and left strands of illiberalism present a challenge to moving into a liberal future.
To meet this challenge, liberalism must also look beyond, to an extent, ‘left’ and ‘right’ categorizations and act in defense of its own goal -liberty, broadly defined. Doing so will require revitalizing liberalism as a theory put into action. Hopefully my writing here will contribute something to that.