A criticism that I have frequently made of mainstream conservatives is that they no longer stand for anything with which Modern liberals would not wholeheartedly agree and which in many if not most cases was originally a liberal idea. I most recently made this criticism in my annual essay for New Year’s Day explaining my own views, which I prefer to call Tory, because they stress affirmation of institutions such as royal monarchy and the Church as well as beliefs such as the orthodox Christianity of the Apostles’ Creed and ideas which go back to ancient times and predate Modern liberalism. I have never meant by this criticism that the things for which conservatives still stand are bad in themselves, merely that there are other, older things, which are more important and ought to be recognized as such by those who wish to distinguish themselves from liberals. This distinction is a very important one because without it, criticism of contemporary conservatism for making its focus primarily or entirely the defence of ideas that have their origins in liberalism could be construed as suggesting that every idea that liberals have ever had is wrong or bad. Liberalism, I would say, has been wrong a lot more often than it has been willing to admit, has been very wrong in generally regarding itself as immune to the sort of analytic criticism it levels against its rivals, and most wrong in its assumption that there was little to no worth in anything that was around prior to itself. To say that it was always wrong about everything, however, is to commit the equal and opposite error to that greatest of liberalism’s errors, and the events that have unfolded south of the border since Epiphany illustrate just how erroneous it is. That which is called “the Left” sprang historically from the same sources as liberalism – the Puritan revolt against the orthodox Church of England and the Stuart monarchy, Modern philosophical rationalism, Kantianism, to name but three – and through much of their history the Left and liberalism have walked similar paths, so much so that in many periods, including that of my youth, their names have been used interchangeably as if they were completely identical. Last week, however, the Left revealed just how much it has parted ways from historical liberalism. It would appear that there is now not the slightest vestige of liberalism lingering within it, merely the totalitarianism that had previously reared its head in the Cromwellian Protectorate, the French Reign of Terror, and in every state unfortunate enough to be taken over by the Bolsheviks. Utterly illiberal, it tolerates no divergence from its thought and mercilessly persecutes all who dissent.
The word liberal is derived from the Latin adjective liberalis. My pocket Collins Latin Dictionary defines
this word as meaning “of freedom, of free citizens, gentlemanly, honourable,
generous, liberal; handsome”. Turning
to Charlton Lewis and Charles Short for a more extensive definition I find that
they begin by relating the word to the shorter root adjective liber (long i,
with a short i it becomes the noun meaning book) and thus gives as its first
meaning “of or belonging to freedom, relating to the freeborn condition of a
man”. The second definition is “befitting
a freeman, gentlemanly, noble, noble-minded, honourable, ingenuous, gracious,
kind.” I will not cite all the sub
definitions given for the second, just B. 1., which is “Bountiful, generous,
munificent, liberal”.
The short version of all of that is that for the ancient Romans,
the adjective liberalis first designated the condition of being free rather
than a slave, and in its secondary connotations denoted the kind of character
and behaviour that the Romans saw as being appropriate to someone with free
status, e.g., graciousness, kindness and generosity. Before it came to be used as a political
label the English word liberal was pretty much an approximation of its Latin
ancestor. This gives us something of an
idea of what those who originally applied this term to themselves as a
political designation must have thought of themselves. Frankly, I am of the opinion that they
thought far too highly of themselves and this term is singularly inappropriate
for the heirs of the religious fanatics who murdered King Charles I, outlawed
Christmas, stripped the Churches of artwork and music, shut down the theatres,
and imposed Sabbatarian restrictions so severe that they would have made the Pharisees
of old blush and of the Manchester plutocrats who enclosed the commons,
legalized usury, and drove the peasants from the countryside into the cities to
subsist on servile labour in ugly, smelly, factories. To be fair, a similar analysis of the Latin
root of conservative would suggest that in its political usage it refers to
everything those so designated have failed to accomplish.
That having been said, there is much to appreciate in the
ideas put forward in the book which more-or-less defined liberalism when it was
at its best in the nineteenth to early twentieth centuries. No, I am not referring to John Locke’s Two Treatises, which in its response to
Sir Robert Filmer provides us with what is perhaps the earliest example of mere
contradiction being taken for refutation or debunking, the phenomenon that has
become the working principle of news and social media “fact checkers”. Locke’s book contains only one worthy idea and
no, it is not his bastardization of Thomas Hobbes’ concepts of the “state of
nature” and “social contract” but his idea of the basic rights of life,
liberty, and property. This, however, as
Sir William Blackstone later demonstrated, was present in Common Law long
before Locke. The book that I am
talking about is John Stuart Mill’s On
Liberty (1859). It is an argument
for the need for restrictions and limitations on government to protect the
freedom of the governed. While it contains
much historical nonsense and Mill makes the repugnant false ethic of
utilitarianism the entire foundation of his argument, a great deal of what he
says about freedom and limited government has merit. Freedom of thought or opinion, Mill argued,
was the most fundamental freedom of all, and attempts to suppress opinions,
even ones that are entirely false, by limiting freedom of speech, are always
bad.
Clearly, the present day Left is light years removed from
Mill on this matter.
That this is the case has been evident for quite some
time. For decades the Left has favoured
legislation prohibiting what it calls “hate speech”. “Hate speech”, as the Left uses it, has
never meant speech that actually expresses hatred, such as, most obviously, “I
hate you”. Indeed, there has never been
a “hate speech” law passed to the best of my knowledge under which someone
could be charged for saying “I hate you”.
What the Left means by “hate speech” is speech that they consider to be
“racist” or “anti-Semitic” or “anti-immigrant” or “xenophobic” or “sexist” or
“homophobic” or “transphobic” or characterized by any other such weaponized
word that they have coined to refer to ideas and opinions with which they
disagree. The Left considers “hate
speech” to be a form of violence and supports this contention by comparing it
to incitement. There is no substance to
this argument, however, because “hate speech” laws do not merely commit the
redundancy of prohibiting people from explicitly suggesting, encouraging, or calling
for violent action towards the groups they wish to protect which sort of thing was
already covered by existing incitement laws that were are far superior to “hate
speech” laws because they protect everybody and not just select groups. Rather, they prohibit the communication of
information and opinions, whether true or false, that reflect negatively on
protected groups in a way that might, possibly, inspire someone to commit a
criminal act against them. For all
their denials – “hate speech is not free speech” – their support for this kind
of legislation is clearly a rejection of Mill’s case against the suppression of
thought and opinion and an embrace of a form of thought control, one which has
only gotten more totalitarianism since the Left first proposed it.
Although this is directly related to another way in which
the Left has left liberalism behind, that is, in its abandonment of the
arguments against racism, especially of the de jure discrimination type, which
became prevalent about sixty years ago and which were grounded in liberalism in
favour of an aggressive “anti-racism” that is actually itself racism against
white people, I wish to devote an entire essay to this point and shall defer
further discussion of it until that time.
What I would like to point out now is how the Left has expanded the
flawed reasoning by which it equates speech it considers to be “racist”, “sexist”,
etc. with violence into all-purpose argument for suppressing any information
and opinions which contradict its own narratives.
In the aftermath of what transpired in Washington DC on
Epiphany, the Democrat-dominated House of Representatives in the United States
has for a second time voted for Articles of Impeachment against the current
president of the American republic, a man whom the Left hates like it has hated
no other political leader before him. Last
time, they accused him of colluding with the Russians to steal the 2016
election. This time, they are accusing
him of inciting an insurrection by claiming that the 2020 election was stolen
from him. Tempting
as it is to focus on the glaring hypocrisy, especially since insurrection more
accurately describes the BLM riots that the Democrats and the Left in general
have turned a blind eye to or endorsed out of their refusal to accept Trump’s
election of four years prior, the point is to be found in the fact that in
nothing Donald the Orange said, either on social media or in the address he
gave to the throngs who showed up to the massive rally before the Washington
Monument to show their support, was there anything that could legitimately be
considered incitement. Not when
incitement is understood, as it traditionally has been, to take the form of “I
want you to do X” with X being some form of violent or criminal behaviour. The Left here is applying the same kind of
bad reasoning that underlies its support for prohibiting “hate speech” – “saying
Y about Z could make someone angry against Z and if someone is angry against Z
he might turn violent against Z, therefore saying Y about Z should be
considered the equivalent of indictment and banned” to justify suppression of a
completely different kind of opinion.
The Big Tech companies that control the largest social media
platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook, marching in step with the Democrats –
or rather it was more like the other way around – threw the President of the
United States of America off their platforms, using the same faulty
justification, and then proceeded to purge their platforms of thousands of his
supporters as well. Then, having
basically told thousands of people “if you don’t like our rules, go to our
competitors”, they immediately proceeded to attempt to drive those competitors,
such as Twitter competitor Parler, out of business. When the internet first went online, many had
seen it as a way of escaping the near monopoly on the sharing of information
that the Left, which already dominated the major news and entertainment media
corporations, possessed. Now, however,
with Big Tech controlling most of the platforms that people have come to regard
as a kind of public forum, aligning itself with the Left, purging its platforms
of those who dissent from the Left and ruthlessly eliminating competitors that
allow for more freedom of thought, the Left is seeking to make its control on
the sharing of information and opinion absolute and total.
Clearly, the Left has completely abandoned the liberalism of
men like J. S. Mill in substance and spirit, and if it continues to maintain any
sort of outward pretense of liberalism, it will be out of either sheer
hypocrisy or an utter lack of self-awareness.
As many problems as there are with a conservatism that offers
nothing but (classical) liberalism, it is to be preferred a billion times over
a Left in which nothing of liberalism, neither its freedom nor the generosity
and munificence to which it seems to have aspired in naming itself liberal,
remains.
