Liberalism: What is it? Where did it go wrong?

Can a socially generous liberalism rebuild itself?

Liberalism is a very large family of ideas with a long history of promoting freedom. Recently, though, some liberals became society’s chief censors. How did that happen?

Originally, for thinkers like John Locke (in 1688) and John Stuart Mill (in 1859), the liberty of the rational individual was paramount, although limited by the duty not to harm the liberties of others. That is, being free doesn’t give you licence to do whatever you please; but a rational grown-up person’s liberty entails respect for the freedom of others.

This classical liberalism stood against an established Church telling us all how to worship, an oppressive Government, or the intrusion of other people’s moralistic (or just plain stupid) opinions. The individual should be free to differ conscientiously on matters of religious, scientific or moral importance. After all, today’s heresy might become tomorrow’s orthodoxy.

Locke insisted that you should do your own research. But there was much less information to absorb in his day.

Mill spoke up for women’s right to vote, which was controversial back then, but he didn’t think about same-sex marriage. Both can be defended as liberties today.

By the early twentieth century there was an awareness that it’s much harder to develop fully as a free person, with hope and opportunity, when suffering poverty, illness, disability, or lack of basic education. To liberate people on a larger scale required doing something about that, and the State served as the vehicle. Two world wars with mass conscription and high taxes helped to boost this. And real social progress was made in hospitals, sanitation, schools and welfare. Literacy rates, for instance, soared.

Of course, reformist socialism played a part in this too. But (don’t be shocked) even the UK Conservative Party campaigned on welfare policies!

UK Conservative Party Election Poster, 1929. Although those protective Tories won the popular vote that year, they got fewer seats than Labour.

Anyway, we acquired the idea that liberalism was not just about freedom from certain constraints, but also about the positive freedom to do or achieve good things in life, for the benefit of all. This meant that the individual would have valid claims on the community to enable that.

Liberalism, then, took on another sense of the word liberal: that is, generous or giving, especially towards those with fewer advantages in life. It progressively embraced a wider acceptance of different cultures and lifestyles, removal of discriminatory barriers and fundamental equality of all human beings, regardless of colour, creed, etc. This connotation of “liberal” took off in North America, so the Liberal Party of Canada is the centre-left party, akin to a labour or social-democratic party elsewhere.

This gets confusing, though, because liberalism also encompasses individualism, private enterprise and free markets. Today, this business-friendly economic liberalism gets branded as “conservative”, being more associated with right-wing parties, notably the UK Conservative Party since the Thatcher era of the 1980s. A more rigorous version of this kind of liberalism, which seeks to pare down the State to a minimum, is often called libertarianism.

So, we can distinguish left- and right-wing versions of liberalism.

Left liberalism is interested in the flourishing of the whole community, and hence is more willing to accept collective obligations for all people’s wellbeing, in one’s own country and even globally. Universal human rights, international assistance programmes and protection of refugees are favoured, as well as national-level taxation and redistribution.

Right liberalism is more focussed on the free individual and what he or she can choose to do – and be held responsible for. Margaret Thatcher’s famous (and misquoted) statement in 1987 that “there’s no such thing as society” harked back to classical British liberalism.

“…we have gone through a period when too many children and people have been given to understand ‘I have a problem, it is the Government’s job to cope with it!’ or ‘I have a problem, I will go and get a grant to cope with it!’ ‘I am homeless, the Government must house me!’ and so they are casting their problems on society and who is society? There is no such thing! There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first. It is our duty to look after ourselves and then also to help look after our neighbour and life is a reciprocal business and people have got the entitlements too much in mind without the obligations…” [Italics added.]

Empirically, society is not a tangible “thing”, while each person inhabits a physical body and has free will. Thatcher’s neoliberalism unwound many of the social rights and public services that came to be taken for granted with the expansion of the State after WW2. She and her Austrian chum Friedrich von Hayek believed that the State was becoming too large and was threatening the freedom of the individual, especially through high tax rates. This harked back to the classical liberalism of the 19th century, but wanted a strong rule of law to address a more complex business environment and to deal with crime and delinquency.

Are you now thoroughly confused about liberalism? If so, join the club.

Where you stand on that broad liberal spectrum from universal human rights to individualistic self-responsibility – or pro-welfare state somewhere in the middle – is up to you. Neither economics nor political science can settle the matter once and for all. It’s a conscientious choice each person makes.

Political debates in Western countries nowadays can often be boiled down to a contest between versions of liberalism, especially regarding the roles of the State versus a deregulated market. Added to that is an intense debate about how freely people should be allowed to cross borders.

Socialist and Marxist opinions are relatively quiet now, compared with the pre-WWI era. Intellectuals who call themselves Marxists today will generally come down in favour of the welfare state – an institution that Marx, who died in 1883, never witnessed. Marx and Engels saw the State as an agent of oppression, not emancipation. There’s a fair historical argument that the welfare state was created in part to stifle Marxism, not to express it – and indeed it seems to have achieved that aim.

The Americans generally call “liberal” those who speak up for the left-wing welfare-state version of liberalism. Those who believe in the liberty of individuals, free markets and slimmer governments get called “conservatives”.

Going with that American and Canadian use of the word, then, what’s to become of liberalism following the defeat of the Democrats and the collapse the Trudeau government? Michael Ignatieff, a former Harvard professor who led Canada’s Liberal Party to its worst-ever defeat in 2011, has come out as a voice of experience in the Washington Post. It’s paywalled, so let me take some key quotes.

“Diversity — of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion and class — was a virtue in comparison to the dire cantonment of peoples in silos of exclusion, but liberals turned diversity into an ideology. Once an ideology, it quickly became a coercive program of invigilation of speech and behavior in the name of dignity and respect.”

“A liberalism whose defining value should have been liberty invented a diversity and inclusion industry whose guiding principle may have been justice but whose means of enforcement included coercion, public disgrace and exclusion. Worst of all, we censored ourselves, willingly turning off our bullshit detectors and stilling the inner doubts that might have made us confront our mistakes.”

“Now, none of us is ever as generous as we’d like to be, and no liberal has a monopoly on generosity, but the largeness of spirit it calls us to does define our horizon of hope. Such values are embattled today, and they need defending because our societies so desperately need largeness of spirit, together with a revived liberal ideal of solidarity.” [Italics added.]

Generosity and liberty build solidarity, he suggests, in old-school style. Will the younger generation dismiss him as a Boomer?

In a weird twist of political history, some younger “liberals” became illiberal, censorious and intolerant towards people who didn’t fully agree with them, while supposedly liberal institutions used policies and procedures to control non-conformers. What started out as a valid effort to combat discrimination of all kinds became guilty of discrimination on grounds of political opinion.* In some cases, activists self-righteously used megaphones or even physical violence to silence people who begged to differ.

The consequent reputational damage done to the Left by the Left may have set back the cause of generous humanitarian liberalism.

In the meantime, voters around the world are saying they’ve had enough of the distorted liberalism that they cynically label “woke”. Elections are shifting power so far towards nationalism that a formerly far-right has become mainstream by winning pluralities in numerous democracies.

To find their way back into office, centre-left parties need to rediscover “largeness of spirit” and to reconsider how they express their commitment to social justice.

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The ways in which NZ Labour responds to the Treaty Principles Bill in 2025 will reveal how they’re reacting to these winds of change, if they’ve noticed them. Can they show generosity or “largeness of spirit” towards those who felt ignored or left out by the direction in which they tried to take the country when last in office? Or will they tell those people they’re ignorant and should learn some history?

The 2020 election was exceptional and had a high turnout. But 1,443,545 people gave their party vote to Labour that year. Their number plummeted to 767,540 in 2023. That’s a loss of 676,005 votes. Labour would be very lucky to get half that number back in 2026, but they need to regain about 250,000 to be within range of forming a coalition government.

Do you fancy their chances?

* Political opinion is one of the prohibited grounds of discrimination under NZ’s Human Rights Act.