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The word Liberal as an insult.

If I call you a liberal, I mean it in a specific sense. Not to mean that you belong to a capital L political party, nor, as those the American right do, to mean that you are somewhere to the left of wherever the speaker stands, nor do I mean that you are generous in some way.

Rather, I use it to mean that your position ignores the structural issues in the problem being discussed. I use it to mean that you are seeing the problem in terms of individual behaviour rather than social construction. I use it to mean you are missing some important systemic formation, such as class. Usually class.

For example, if you are complaining of media bias but are seeing that bias in terms of the individual behaviour of individual journalists, then your approach is liberal. Here, Ed Herman explains why he and Chomsky believe a structural explanation is the one that’s needed.

The liberal limits ideas to individual behaviour. The liberal thinks that in order to free the media from bias, all that is needed is for individuals to behave better, more morally, more fairly. While these aims may in themselves be laudable, they will have limited effect, as the structures will not have been tackled. The liberal’s ideas therefore lack rigour. If I call you liberal, I am saying your analysis lacks rigour.

This limiting lack of rigour defines the liberal response to the ills of capitalism for a reason. Liberalism became a political expression of the capitalist class. It offers a lack of rigour because it doesn’t want to overturn the privilege of the elite. It limits the debate to a discussion of individual morality, because that way change itself is limited. Liberalism offers individual guilt that change has not come fast enough, but it does not offer real change.

If I call you a liberal, I don’t mean it as a compliment.
This is a fair criticism of classic liberalism, now reborn as neoliberalism, but liberalism also encompasses social liberalism, which arose specifically to address the structural flaws of capitalism, and which has led, along with social democracy, to the mixed-economic model that's been so successful in Germany and the Nordic countries.
 
This is a fair criticism of classic liberalism, now reborn as neoliberalism, but liberalism also encompasses social liberalism, which arose specifically to address the structural flaws of capitalism, and which has led, along with social democracy, to the mixed-economic model that's been so successful in Germany and the Nordic countries.
The Germany that's currently stripping Greece of its assets and impoverishing its people in order to line the pockets of the wealthy? Or some other Germany?
 
This is a fair criticism of classic liberalism, now reborn as neoliberalism, but liberalism also encompasses social liberalism, which arose specifically to address the structural flaws of capitalism, and which has led, along with social democracy, to the mixed-economic model that's been so successful in Germany and the Nordic countries.
The task I undertook was to explain what is meant when people use the term “liberal” as a criticism, and specifically what I mean when I use the term as a criticism. I was not asked to consider any and all possible portmanteau terms including the word “liberal”. Furthermore I have no interest in entering into semantics about where and when actually existing social liberalism occurs, and whether it ever exists in isolation from its parent, liberalism. However in considering that question, I would point you to those political parties claiming to be social liberals, or to contain a social liberal stream. How successfully do they divorce social liberalism from liberalism?

What is social liberalism anyway? I suggest that all we really have is the traditional liberal tenet that the state is necessary in order to mitigate against restrictions on liberty. LT Hobhouse wrote (in his magnum opus named “Liberalism”, not “social liberalism”): “The function of State coercion is to override individual coercion, and, of course, coercion exercised by any association within the State.” (Hobhouse, Liberalism, p. 146). He goes on: “It is by this means that it maintains liberty of expression, security of person and property, [and] genuine freedom of contract […]”. (p146).

I certainly prefer a welfare state to a non-welfare state, but Hobhouse is still talking about individual agency, and still ignoring class as a structural issue. His innovation is to be honest in saying that he sees the state as having an active role (rather than merely something to be rolled away as much as is possible) but he still thinks that it is possible to have free contract between employer and employee. The definition of liberty used by liberals - whether they call themselves social liberals or not - therefore lacks rigour.

He is, in the terms of my earlier post, still a liberal. As is his admirer, Tim Farron.
 
The task I undertook was to explain what is meant when people use the term “liberal” as a criticism, and specifically what I mean when I use the term as a criticism.
I just want to say you did this brilliantly, and made clear to me (for first time) how all the different meanings stem from the one central tenet / flaw of ignoring the systemic and focussing on the individual.
 
danny la rouge
What would you say is the opposite of Liberalism then .. (not at all what i thought before - things like intolerance or conservatism or fascism) but .. maybe Structuralism?
(i don't mean to be annoying / pretentious just trying to learn things)
 
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danny la rouge
What would you say is the opposite of Liberalism then .. (not at all what i thought before - things like intolerance or conservatism or fascism) but .. maybe Structuralism?
(i don't mean to be annoying / pretentious just trying to learn things)
Well, in a way that'd be the word to go for I suppose, except it already has a specific meaning connected to people like Levi Strauss and Lacan. (In linguistics it's a somewhat out of favour school of thought).

I suppose the opposite of liberal to some extent is "intellectual rigour". But that's not the whole story. I will sometimes flippantly say to people I think are being liberal "get some politics, ffs!" It's a bit rude of me if I'm honest. What I mean is: "look at the structures here", and usually "look at how class affects things here".

So when I'm being as rude as that, I'm generally wishing the person would be more class aware and more, broadly speaking, collectivist.
 
The Germany that's currently stripping Greece of its assets and impoverishing its people in order to line the pockets of the wealthy? Or some other Germany?
The German government's unjust treatment of Greece doesn't undermine the success of mixed economics. It's a separate issue.

Danny, Hobhouse also had this to say in Liberalism:-
... Liberalism has had to deal with those restraints on the individual which flow from the hierarchic organization of society ... There is the reservation of public appointments and ecclesiastical patronage for those who are "born," and there is a more subtly pervading spirit of class which produces a hostile attitude to those who could and would rise; and this spirit finds a more material ally in the educational difficulties that beset brains unendowed with wealth.
"New Liberalism," as it then was, was perfectly well aware of class as a structural issue. How could it not be? Classical liberalism was equally aware, it just dismissed inequality with near-religious appeals to the market.

Social liberalism arose specifically to counter the structural defects of laissez-faire capitalism, a purpose that underpinned the entire ideology. It can of course be argued that its solutions to those structural issues were insufficient, an argument I'd agree with, but not that they didn't exist.
 
Even accepting that (arguendo), Liberalism has a section, "Economic Liberalism," devoted to critiquing "mechanical Socialism" as economic reductionism, which goes on to lay out the prerequisites of a Liberal Socialism, including grassroots organization. Hobhouse also supports the view that the state must provide common access to the means of production, claims that Liberal legislation has already begun to do this, and sought to "guarantee to the individual a certain share in the common stock" lost during agricultural enclosure.

Social liberals knew the arguments, they just disagreed with the solutions.
 
It has a section misunderstanding and misrepresenting stuff as economic reductionism sure. Which is borne out in the understanding of it as caste.

What does "the state must provide common access to the means of production" mean?
 
For Hobhouse, apparently, Edwardian Liberal social policies like access to a living wage.

Can you elaborate on the distinction between "class" and "caste"? If they're distinct, they certainly aren't unconnected. Are you claiming that Hobhouse was unaware of the Marxist conception? (Difficult, considering his potted history of economic statification, ownership and nature of the means of production, and him incorporating Marxist criticism of competition into his concession that some monopolies are inevitable.)
 
For Hobhouse, apparently, Edwardian Liberal social policies like access to a living wage.

Can you elaborate on the distinction between "class" and "caste"? If they're distinct, they certainly aren't unconnected. Are you claiming that Hobhouse was unaware of the Marxist conception? (Difficult, considering his potted history of economic statification, ownership and nature of the means of production, and him incorporating Marxist criticism of competition into his concession that some monopolies are inevitable.)
They are entirely unconnected in marxian class analysis - that's why any rejection of it that confuses two ( as above) is worthless.
 
Azrael, if the claim is that social liberalism represents the (relative) left wing of neoliberalism, then I don't disagree.

But if your claim is that either it as a whole or Hobhouse in particular has an adequate structural conception of capitalism then I disagree profoundly. I'm not just saying that I think their proposed ameliorations inadequate, but that I think he and his admirers are fundamentally misunderstanding the structures, especially class. In the end he thinks the role of the active state is one that provides the conditions for individuals to make the correct choices. I'm saying not only has it not done that under their ministrations, but that this is the wrong way entirely to look at the problems.
 
Class is an (almost) social universal: caste has no meaning outside of India, and a handful of its cultural offshoots.

E2A:

Ah, I see this spat arose from the Hobhouse quote cited by Azrael above. As butchersapron what Hobhouse is describing is caste, not class: in describing the British class structure of this time, Hobhouse is engaging, I would say, in a nakedly ideological manouevre, one that seeks to legitimise and naturalise that class structure by implying that it is essentially the same as that of the caste system of India.
 
Danny, having just returned from watching Suffragette (now there's a class whitewash), I've no desire to go to bat Edwardian liberalism. Hobhouse's analysis in Liberalism is as glib and patrician as you'd expect from a person of his time and background.

What I do disagree with is that liberalism is focused on the individual to the exclusion of structural analysis, especially when there's a through-line from Edwardian new liberalism to the Keynesianism that, in a curiousness liberal civil war, is now the only viable challenger to neoliberalism.

As for Hobhouse's views on class, for all his blinkers, he's explicitly challenging, not justifying, existing class structure. While plenty social classes (or castes, if people prefer) aren't rooted in economics, the division's addressed by Hobhouse are. This can be allowed without demanding that he adopt the minutiae of Marxist theory on capital and labour. In any case, even accepting the criticism arguendo, he's one a guy, in any age now, thankfully, long past.
 
Danny, having just returned from watching Suffragette (now there's a class whitewash), I've no desire to go to bat Edwardian liberalism. Hobhouse's analysis in Liberalism is as glib and patrician as you'd expect from a person of his time and background.

What I do disagree with is that liberalism is focused on the individual to the exclusion of structural analysis, especially when there's a through-line from Edwardian new liberalism to the Keynesianism that, in a curiousness liberal civil war, is now the only viable challenger to neoliberalism.

As for Hobhouse's views on class, for all his blinkers, he's explicitly challenging, not justifying, existing class structure. While plenty social classes (or castes, if people prefer) aren't rooted in economics, the division's addressed by Hobhouse are. This can be allowed without demanding that he adopt the minutiae of Marxist theory on capital and labour. In any case, even accepting the criticism arguendo, he's one a guy, in any age now, thankfully, long past.
I don't think he is challenging that class structure. If he was doing that, he wouldn't throw out the ball of smoke that is his misleading conflation of class with caste. His real goal is the "career open to talents", which in reality is always closed to those whose faces don't fit.

As for liberalism adopting a structural analysis, that only happened because it faced pressure exerted from outside by confident working-class movements, built by people who direct experience of what "the structural" really meant.
 
Surely when using the term "liberal" as an insult it should really be applied the now near extinct UK liberal-democrats as thanx to them propping up cameron and co and enabling the blue conservatives [along with the ineffectual opposition from the Red conservatives] thanx to the policies enacted by cameron and co to insult the dignity of everyone young, old, fit, disabled, unemployed, homeless etc
 
Idris, I agree that new liberalism arose, in large part, to counter pressure from socialist parties: just as social democracy arose in part to offer an alternative to communism.

Origins do nothing to undermine social liberalism addressing structural problems, however inadequately (since he was talking about reform of land ownership and guaranteed wages, even that old patrician Hobhouse was going beyond meritocracy). We have numerous examples of people from working class backgrounds accessing parliament and the professions, places occupied by people, many of whom reject class prejudice.

If we confine structuralism to economics, as the Keynes-Hayek debates show, liberalism has a long history of addressing the structural defects of the laissez-faire capitalism Marx and Engles rightly condemned as cruel and alienating. If we expand it beyond economics, liberalism crystallized and expanded the rule of law appealed to by everyone treated unjustly by the state. Limited government, religious freedom, multiparty democracy, equality under the law, all children of liberalism. You can't get more structural than that.
 
Surely when using the term "liberal" as an insult it should really be applied the now near extinct UK liberal-democrats as thanx to them propping up cameron and co and enabling the blue conservatives [along with the ineffectual opposition from the Red conservatives] thanx to the policies enacted by cameron and co to insult the dignity of everyone young, old, fit, disabled, unemployed, homeless etc
Yeah, that's what happens when Orange Book market-worshippers take over. Hopefully their rout at the polls will finish that wing for a good long while, if not the entire party.

The problem with neoliberalism is the problem universal to dogma, whether political or religious: its followers ignore the human cost of their beliefs, putting ideological purity over people; and they fit evidence to their beliefs, instead of fitting their beliefs to the evidence.
 
The problem with neoliberalism is the problem universal to dogma, whether political or religious: its followers ignore the human cost of their beliefs, putting ideological purity over people; and they fit evidence to their beliefs, instead of fitting their beliefs to the evidence.

I think you've hit the nail on the head here. All the baggage about left wing or right wing dogma, to me is an impediment. What one needs to do, is acting in accordance with the circumstances in front of one. I think it's often the case that liberal attitudes are not based on kindness or compassion but rather doing what you think your enemy on the right wing won't like. One gets so many political veterans that have been engaged in trench warfare are so many years that they have lost all perspective and all they care about is getting revenge for the last member of their platoon that was killed. The complete absence of mindful clarity.

To me liberal is an annoying word because I feel it's been hijacked by manipulators and bullies. How can the word liberal which should be synonymous with freedom, come to a situation where liberalism is often a suffocating ideology policed by knuckle scraping on the ground thugs that acts as a sort of thought police ready to pounce if anyone is considered not liberal enough, a sort of modern day it McCarthyism. In order to blot out this reality one gets the nice Liberals who paint on a happy smile and go along with things blocking out their own nagging fears. The people like this one always hears, total certainty an expression of total belief that they are correct, no room for any doubt, for me this is how you know something is wrong, if people don't express doubt.

So what about this condemnation, witch hunting, McCarthyism, humiliating denouncement of people not seeming liberal enough. I have definitely experienced this myself. In my teen years CND was a huge part of my life, I had many friends of the family that used to camp at Greenham Common antinuclear protest. I been on many antifascist marches although I'm not a protester type. I have socialist leanings, I want there to be a far fairer distribution of wealth and very concerned about the ecology of the planet. Now for me one of the most humiliating accusations to experience, is to be called a troll and a racist and a Daily Mail reader, be accused of being some mindless hate filled a-hole. So I have experienced being denounced and if you're curious you can read about in the thread of 1000 dustbins.

Being accused of being a racist is not an insult to a racist but as I have said it had one of the most humiliating and painful insults to someone who respects all peoples, races and religions. So this is the method used by the thugs to keep people in line. And on the other hand you have the mindless certain idiots that pepper our Facebook feeds with do gooding slogans about the world situation, and all this "keep calm and carry on" garbage, which is like some hideous totalitarian state controlled mantra.

The answer to this is truth, what is truth? It's not an ideology or found in political writings, it is the truth about each one of us really thinks, feels and believes. This is obvious is not easy particularly on the Internet where for some, the Internet provides a sort of anonymity in which people can indulge their moronic, brutal feral aspects of themselves freely in much the same way as a flasher is impelled by some madness to expose himself to schoolgirls in the local park. But like with bullying is much better to be bullied than to be a bully, because that would rot one's inner soul.

Everything that I've ever written on this forum, I would be happy for any member of my family or friends or work colleagues to see. So in that previous thread that I mentioned that got put in dustbins, ask yourself how many good upstanding Liberals who contributed to that thread would be happy to do the same.
 
Idris, I agree that new liberalism arose, in large part, to counter pressure from socialist parties: just as social democracy arose in part to offer an alternative to communism.

Origins do nothing to undermine social liberalism addressing structural problems, however inadequately (since he was talking about reform of land ownership and guaranteed wages, even that old patrician Hobhouse was going beyond meritocracy). We have numerous examples of people from working class backgrounds accessing parliament and the professions, places occupied by people, many of whom reject class prejudice.

If we confine structuralism to economics, as the Keynes-Hayek debates show, liberalism has a long history of addressing the structural defects of the laissez-faire capitalism Marx and Engles rightly condemned as cruel and alienating. If we expand it beyond economics, liberalism crystallized and expanded the rule of law appealed to by everyone treated unjustly by the state. Limited government, religious freedom, multiparty democracy, equality under the law, all children of liberalism. You can't get more structural than that.
At least on the guns/school shootings thread you put up some sort of a struggle.

This is like trying to have a fight with a big pile of jelly.
 
The claim's that liberalism fails to address the structural flaws of capitalism; I cited a debate between two liberal economists concerned with exactly that.

Unless you're claiming that Keynesianism isn't addressing the structural flaws of capitalism, you're right, there's no struggle, 'cause we don't even disagree. If you are making that claim about Keynesianism, what's its basis?
 
Greebozz, problem is that the word "liberal" casts a wide net, dragging in everything from Thatcherism to marriage equality. Split between social liberalism and economic liberalism's particularly stark. Dogmatic neoliberalism's a heartless creed, that sacrifices people on the altar of the market; equal marriage, the precise opposite, an effort to protect each individual's worth and rights.

Then, of course, in America, there's the use of "liberal" as a synonym for "progressive," progressivism having more in common with social democracy than Victorian laissez-faire.

But hey, in a world where Peter Hitchens calls himself a social democrat, and gets praised by Urban for his opposition to bombing Syria, it's all topsy-turvy! (Cue Clopin.)
 
But hey, in a world where Peter Hitchens calls himself a social democrat, and gets praised by Urban for his opposition to bombing Syria, it's all topsy-turvy! (Cue Clopin.)
tbh I think Hitchens is just an example of how disgusting others are - specifically, those with a neoliberal agenda, who will happily see people die in the name of their politics. He is a (rather unhinged) high tory. But he isn't inhuman in his beliefs. He is not dogmatic. So, given that he's not inhuman and he's not dogmatic, it would be worrying if he didn't agree with at least some of what you think.

When Charles Kennedy died, the best I could say about him sincerely was that, in a sane world, the likes of him would be the political opposition to those on the left - political opposition rather than entrenched enemy. Perhaps that's the kind of difference. Doesn't mean the likes of Kennedy or Hitchens deserve praise, though. They're just passing a rather low bar of human decency in the end. In said mythical sane world, everyone would be expected to pass that test.
 
I love this place. Since I posted the question up top I went through a period of thinking I'd learnt something, got my answer, and now I'm confuseder than at the beginning. Thank you people of U75. :)
 
There are a few angry types who seem to spend most of their life posting on here and a good portion of that time seems to be spent taking swipes at other posters... 'liberal' is generally interchangeable with 'cunt' in their language. You don't have to have posted anything 'liberal' per say, just an opinion that isn't completely in line with theirs.
 
LBJ, excellent point about the diff. between enemies & opponents.

I too struggle to think of market-worshippers as anything but callous SOBs, but I've found my experience with evangelical Christians to be instructive.

Evangelicals honestly believe that God wants them to oppose everything from gay relationships to gender equality. All bigots looking for an excuse? No. Even LGBT evangelicals buy into it, and make their own lives miserable. They go along 'cause they've an overwhelming emotional need to believe it.

Now, don't know why people get that way about the markets. Sure plenty are just exploitative scum, but not all, and without evidence to the contrary, I force myself to think of them as opponents who're not evil bastards, but horrifically wrong.
 
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