Seen as weak, liberalism is actually a victim of its own success
"The congeries of stuff that is liberalism," wrote Ted Honderich dismissively in this space two weeks ago. It's true that the word "liberal" is used so often and variously as to have lost much precision of definition. Liberal parties can lean to the right, like the German Free Democrats, or to the left, in the British tradition of Lloyd George and Maynard Keynes. To the American right, it is a catch-all term for anyone vaguely left-wing, while to some on the US left, such as the actor and activist Danny Glover, a liberal is an apologist - "a guy who talks about how bad segregated trains are. Yet he rides in the whites-only section," as he told me once, quoting the poet Langston Hughes. But liberalism is still a word worth fighting for.
At its heart is a belief in individualism, perfectly expressed by John Stuart Mill in his in troduction to On Liberty: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his own will, is to prevent harm to others . . . Over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign."
The second of Mill's sentences is one of the most stirring statements to be found in political philosophy. The first is where all the problems arise. For the second provides tinder for the lib ertarian fire, while the first is the bucket of water ready to douse it.
This compromise makes liberalism vulnerable to the more obvious certainties of conservatism and socialism (or its more amenable sibling, social democracy). It appears to lack conviction, even though believing in both freedoms to (behave as you wish) and freedoms from (ignorance, poverty, etc) is a consistent position.
Come back to the second of Mill's sentences; that is the key to why true liberals are bloody-minded about being told what to do; to why, above all tolerant, they are determinedly intolerant of intolerance, which makes them the enemy of closed minds, whether in terms of racial, sexual or religious bigotry or selfishly class-based politics. It is the key to why liberalism always allows for the question, "Why must this be so?"
Think of how the term is used in everyday conversation, too. A "liberal measure" is a generous one, which is appropriate for a philosophy that takes an optimistic view of human nature, one that assumes the betterment of character always to be possible; which, again, is why the liberal is for reform, not revolution.
Perhaps the seeds of liberalism's downfall as a specific political movement were sown by its very success. After all, it is not democracy itself (a process that can lead to the election of the most illiberal extremists) that we revere today, but liberal democracy. It is liberalism's misfortune that framing, as it does, the constitutional parameters, it struggles to find a distinctive voice against the more boisterous and simplistic creeds that spar within those borders.
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