How To Be A Liberal: The Story of Freedom and the Fight for its Survival

by Ian Dunt

From the late 1970s, the laissez-faire wing took control. It did a few welcome things. In some areas, the market was a better provider of services than the state, in others a certain degree of deregulation was welcome. But it did not limit itself to those areas and in fact did not show any real interest in assessing the matter in individual cases. It was akin to a religious mission, a deep-seated belief that the market was always best. It was the reverse face of communism: a zealous commitment to the market in all things, as the solution to all problems. This proposition was simplistic and the consequences were catastrophic.

Laissez-faire failed. And it failed for a reason. It did not speak to people’s lives. It did not offer them protections. It did not provide real freedom, because the restrictions they faced – discrimination, insecure work, educational disadvantage, lack of social respect, absence of representation – were not addressed or even recognised. It was cold, distant and ineffective. It was a form of liberalism with nothing to say. Its approach to economics left struggling communities behind. Its approach to society trapped marginalised groups in a state of oppression. Many of the people discarded by this form of liberalism then abandoned liberalism in turn – not just laissez-faire, but as a whole. And in its place, other voices emerged, with an age old story to tell, in which people could find meaning through an authentic collective consciousness – by placing the group identity over that of the individual.

This idea began with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose argument for the general will served to diminish and eradicate individuals. It continued with Karl Marx and was then given full practical form by the horrors of communism and fascism. Today it is put forward by nationalism on the right and identity politics on the left. Sometimes it is expressed by people who are well meaning. Sometimes it is expressed by people who are not. The end result is nevertheless the same. Authority is handed to the group instead of the individual. Its members are homogenised and robbed of their individuality. The misfortunes of the group are blamed on an outside force – either as a form of pollution, or an enemy conspiracy. Leaders emerge who claim to speak on behalf of the group, by virtue of a mythical association.

The identity war provides no answers. It is the politics of division and resentment over mutual advancement and debate. It helps noone, except for its self-proclaimed leaders and the commentators who make careers off the back of it. It solves no problems, except those it invents. It has no agenda for how to improve the world, except the continued degeneration of human life into warring tribes. It is a betrayal of those it claims to represent. And it is false as a description of human life or political society.

there is another form of liberalism, one which has agitated for justice and equality throughout liberal history. It is egalitarian liberalism: the philosophy of shake-things-up. It was this form of liberalism which rejected the false choice between communism and laissez-faire. It was this form which delivered the material plenty of capitalism with the protections of the state and made some of the great advances in social progress, from Britain’s National Health Service to America’s tight regulation of finance. It worked to uncover discrimination and domination. It led the fight against the subjugation of women. It provided the tools in the great battles against racism and homophobia. It did the hard work of recognising people’s sense of group identity while protecting the individuals within it. It did not settle for accepting how life is now, but asked itself instead how life could be if the logic of individual freedom was followed to its proper conclusion. That is the liberalism of the future. If there was ever a time for liberalism to let things be, it has passed. Liberalism is no longer in charge. Its task is not to maintain the world, but to change it. It must show the people who are targeted by nationalism and identity politics that there is a better way. We are not homogeneous with those like us, nor at war with those who are not.