As a conservative, I mourn the loss of liberalism
by Ed West, UnHerd:
This year we’ve all learned about a number of terms we might otherwise have quite happily never known: “R number”, “underlying conditions” or “herd immunity”, to name just three. Another we might hear more about is “successor ideology”, a coinage of Wesley Yang to describe the political belief now dominant in the United States; the successor ideology is, in Yang’s words, “authoritarian Utopianism that masquerades as liberal humanism while usurping it from within”.
I’m a realist when it comes to accepting when linguistic battles are lost, but the misappropriation of ‘liberal’ — often by conservatives — has been to our disadvantage.
‘Liberal’ has positive etymological connotations, meaning ‘generous’ and ‘free’; the liberal arts are so-called because they were subjects worthy of a free man, while ‘the liberal’ as a medieval epithet meant a generous monarch. There is even a town called Liberal in Kansas, so called because of the famous kindness of its founder.
Liberalism is true to this etymology, believing centrally in human freedom but also a generosity of political spirit — pluralism, the willingness to share the political and cultural sphere with people you profoundly disagree with.
Related Posts
Tags
Share This
