What is liberalism?

[Originally published on a weblog called “What Is Liberalism?”]

Some good points by Chris Cobb, who was writing in response to Mark Schmitt:

First of all, liberalism predates liberals. That seems obvious, but it leads me to my second point. Mark’s quick list of liberalism’s highlights are really liberals’ greatest hits. But liberalism is more fundamental–it is the foundation of modern democracy. What Mark and most establishment Dems refer to when they say liberalism seems to actually mean the landmark policies implemented by liberals beginning in the FDR era. But what if getting question #1 right means that liberals retrace their steps back even farther? Back, say, to the founding of this nation? In that definition of liberalism, can’t liberals claim the Founding Fathers as the first American liberals? I think they can. And that leads to question #2, where we are today. Mark is right when he says that the right has discredited much of the old liberal agenda. But they also have an underlying weakness built into that attack; namely that they have come to where they are now, where the ongoing demonization of liberals has taken a stark turn and become an attack on liberalism itself. Because, to reiterate, liberalism isn’t just for liberals. Liberalism is the organizing principle of western democracy. As such liberalism is even the underlying premise of modern day conservatism, or at least it’s libertarian aspects. But as faithful readers have heard me say before, that has changed with the merging of the Republican Party with Christian fundamentalism. The Christian fundamentalists of the Republican Party want the same thing that Islamic fundamentalists want– for everyone else to abide by thier belief system, whether everyone else wants to or not. In effect this is the attempted overthrow of the Enlightenment, the dismantling of modernity, and with it the eradication of individual freedom that is the foundation of liberalism. All of the other things that flow from individual liberty–equality, rights, fairness, the free association of communities, control of your own body and property–are under threat as well. I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but with the fundamental principles of our democracy under attack by religious fundamentalists, I think this is a very dangerous time.