Defining Liberalism: An Overview

Charles K. Rowley: In 1993, in his book, Post-Liberalism, [John] Gray poked around among the rubble of classical liberal philosophy to determine what, if anything was left. He concluded that none of the four constitutive elements of doctrinal liberalism — universalism, individualism, egalitarianism and meliorism (or human flourishing) — could survive the ordeal by value pluralism and that liberalism, as a political philosophy, therefore was dead. www.independent.org/pdf/tir/tir_01_1_rowley.pdf

An overview in this case consists of general statements and analogies, with demonstration and support, in most cases, to be developed later. (Bacon's remark, in the Novum Organum, that "Since we agree neither upon principles nor upon demonstrations there is no place for argument," may be apropos here.)

As asserted in The Liberal Founding, "In this blog the term ‘liberalism’ means Enlightenment liberalism. Liberalism is substantially different from the outlook of the left, and from Marxism, progressivism, libertarianism, and conservatism (as Historian Fritz Stern writes, “Extremists of the right and the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy.”)" Liberalism and the outlook of the various flavors of the left are so fundamentally different that, in practical terms, there are no points of agreement between them, even though media discourse assumes that there are.

Public-spiritedness vs. class warfare:
For example, the most famous statement of the early left is the conclusion of the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the World, Unite. You have nothing to lose but your chains!” Contrast this with the way the Constitution, as a representative liberal document, begins: “We the People.” One addresses a class; the other, the whole. In political democracy, which necessarily is about the public, not a subset of it, class-think is social, not political. Liberalism is public and civil (following the example of the Roman Republic before it); the left, in all its flavors, is instead social. For liberalism, rights are human rights (in 18th century terms, the Rights of Man); the left speaks of group rights (that is, class rights).

The Manifesto addresses a class (workers), implies an enemy class (the "bourgeoisie"), and issues a call to war. Likewise the modern left thinks in terms of "my community," rather than "the public." In the terms used by Rowley, above, it is particularist rather than universalist. It applies social standards (community values) rather than universal ethical principles. Contrast the Preamble to the Constitution:

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

This addresses an Everyman, a citizen, as Hayek said (PDF), who has “political principles which enable him to work with people whose moral values differ from his own for a political order in which both can obey their convictions.” This is the language of a universalism which is about civility, cooperation and altruism, far different from the left's implied class warfare.

Win-win vs. zero sum: 
Everyone wins in the democratic order envisioned by Hayek immediately above. Instead of a culture war over differing "moral values," there is the deeper moral value represented by a tolerant civil order which protects the single person from social tyranny. (John Stuart Mill's term. Mill spoke of “the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development, and, if possible, prevent the formation, of any individuality not in harmony with its ways.”)

An example is the liberal principle of freedom of speech, a civil right and thus an aspect of universal justice (Martin Luther King: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."). There is an enlightened self-interest aspect whenever anyone's rights are protected, even the rights of someone I may not like very much: When my neighbor's freedom of speech is upheld I am more confident that I, too, cannot be censored.

But I have heard people on the left say that whenever one person gets something, someone else loses something (classic zero-sum reasoning); and give as example the case of a minority group member who hears a remark thought to be critical of the group to which he or she belongs. As John A. Flower wrote, "The elimination of hostile environments by limiting the freedom of speech of oppressor groups is determined to be necessary to remedy the wrongs visited upon historically oppressed groups."

Notice what this reveals? The left, at least in this situation, is not in favor of civil rights. An iconic civil right, freedom of speech, is subordinated to a vested interest, the feelings of a protected class. Political freedom is deemed less important than "group rights." In this sense the left is literally unprincipled. Instead of an ethical principle, instead there is something low and base: a mere social standard.