Liberalism opposes absolutism

[Cross-posted from Heidi Li’s Potpourri]

In current American discourse, liberal is all too often equated with Democrat and conservative with Republican. But there are relatively illiberal Democrats and relatively liberal Republicans. Liberalism is a brand of thought that long predates the existence of the United States of America and both of its current political parties, each of which has had episodes of illiberalism and contains strands of illiberalism today.

Although liberalism is usually seen as the dominant ideology of the Western democracies, with its roots in Enlightenment thought, there are many variations and hybrids of its doctrines. Nevertheless it is clear what liberalism is opposed to: namely, political absolutism in all its forms, be they monarchist, feudal, military, clerical, or communitarian. In this opposition it attempts to ensure that individuals and groups can resist any authoritarian demands. In practice, this has most commonly meant a split between (on the one hand) a public world and a private world where rights are defined, the most common of which are to private property, and (on the other) the free exercise of religion, speech, and association. [source]

Liberals traditionally resisted absolutism in social and civic life as well as politics directly, believing, along with John Stuart Mill, one of the founders of modern liberalism, in the value of experiments in living.

In opposing absolutism, liberalism places an emphasis on the autonomy of the individual. Autonomy here means the individual’s ability for and right to self-direction constrained only by the need to permit similar autonomy for others. Liberalism is a concept with a history in political theory and philosophy dating back at least to the Enlightenment. In the current political environment in the United States of America many people have lost track of the defining features of liberalism, and the particular strand of it that is American liberalism. The founders of this country were strongly influenced by European Enlightenment thought, and our Constitution bears that stamp.

It is entirely unsurprising that as liberals many liberals rejected Barack Obama as a Presidential candidate or find his performance as President-elect wanting. From the perspective of a strong liberal, Mr. Obama does not share, or does not share fully enough, liberalism’s commitment to the realization of individual autonomy particularly in the face of powerful forces that tend to work against it. Some indications of Mr. Obama’s illiberalism:

• His twenty year membership in a church whose pastor endorsed anti-Semites like Louis Farrakhan and preached doctrines favoring the use of terrorist violence against individual civilians.
• His willingness to disenfranchise the individuals who voted in Michigan’s and Florida’s primaries.
• His vote to provide immunity to companies that aided and abetted government eavesdropping and spying upon individual U.S. citizens.
• His refusal to object to mobocratic measures taken on his behalf that enabled him to claim the Democratic Party nomination (e.g. his silence on the Democratic Party’s disregard for its own rules and procedures for selecting a nominee).
• His bent toward creating mechanisms that conflate the political with the civic and the social, particularly when the conflation advances his personal political identity (e.g. house parties to carry his personal movement forward under the banner of mybarackobama; the use of invented seals to collapse preexisting government institutions – e.g., the office of the president – with his own political machinery – e.g., “the office of the president-elect”).
• His elevation to the spotlight of a woman-bashing, gay-hating cleric.

Liberalism does not mistake toleration (e.g. social and political freedom for woman-bashing gay hating clerics to practice their religion) for endorsement, tacit or otherwise. Liberalism does not short-circuit procedures meant to protect individual interests and rights in the name of a specific preferred outcome (e.g. finagling pre-established publicly promulgated procedures that, however inconveniently, failed to produce a nominee for the Democratic Party at the end of June).

Liberalism does not applaud the herd mentality.

“The majority, being satisfied with the ways of mankind as they now are (for it is they who make them what they are), cannot comprehend why those ways should not be good enough for everybody; and what is more, spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of moral and social reformers, but is rather looked on with jealousy, as a troublesome and perhaps rebellious obstruction to the general acceptance of what these reformers, in their own judgment, think would be best for mankind.” On Liberty, John Stuart Mill (1859), Chapter III, On Individuality as One of the Elements of Wellbeing