Michael Walzer: What It Means to Be Liberal
Like all adjectives,
“liberal” modifies and complicates the noun it precedes. It determines not who
we are but how we are who we are—how we enact our ideological commitments.
Is liberalism an “ism”
like all the other “isms”? I think it once was. In the nineteenth century and
for some years in the twentieth, liberalism was an encompassing ideology: free
markets, free trade, free speech, open borders, a minimal state, radical
individualism, civil liberty, religious toleration, minority rights. But this
ideology is now called libertarianism, and most of the people who identify
themselves as liberals don’t accept it—at least, not all of it. Liberalism in
Europe today is represented by political parties like the German Free
Democratic Party that are libertarian and right-wing, but also by parties like
the Liberal Democrats in the UK that stand uneasily between conservatives and
socialists, taking policies from each side without a strong creed of their own.
Liberalism in the United States is our very modest version of social democracy,
as in “New Deal liberalism.” This isn’t a strong creed either, as we saw when
many liberals of this kind became neoliberals.
“Liberals” are still
an identifiable group, and I assume that readers of Dissent are
members of the group. We are best described in moral rather than political
terms: we are open-minded, generous, tolerant, able to live with ambiguity,
ready for arguments that we don’t feel we have to win. Whatever our ideology,
whatever our religion, we are not dogmatic; we are not fanatics. Democratic
socialists like me can and should be liberals of this kind. I believe that it
comes with the territory, though, of course, we all know socialists who are
neither open-minded, generous, nor tolerant.
But our actual
connection, our political connection, with liberalism has another form. Think
of it as an adjectival form: we are, or we should be, liberal democrats and
liberal socialists. I am also a liberal nationalist, a liberal communitarian,
and a liberal Jew. The adjective works in the same way in all these cases, and
my aim here is to describe its force in each of them. Like all adjectives,
“liberal” modifies and complicates the noun it precedes; it has an effect that
is sometimes constraining, sometimes enlivening, sometimes transforming. It
determines not who we are but how we are who we are - how we enact our
ideological commitments.... read more:
https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/what-it-means-to-be-liberalsee also
