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

by Ian Dunt

In the last few years, nationalism has become the driving force behind the Republican party in the United States, the Conservative party in Great Britain, the Bharatiya Janata party in India, Likud in Israel, the Alliance for Brazil in Brazil and PDP–Laban in the Philippines. It conquered Hungary under Fidesz and Poland under Law and Justice. It dominated political debate in Italy through the Lega, Austria through the Freedom Party, Bulgaria through Attack and Estonia through the EKRE.

It was ‘as good almost kill a man as kill a good book,’ he wrote. ‘Who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.’

Overton went one step further. He outlined where those rights ended: at the exact point at which someone else’s rights were infringed. You were free to do whatever you wanted, as long as you did not take away the freedom of others.

Not all of the decisions taken in the constitution worked. The use of non-proportional representation in the Senate gave excessive power to states with relatively few inhabitants. The inclusion of a presidential nomination to the Supreme Court would eventually create a hopelessly politicised body.

The American Revolution had unleashed a powerful thought into the world: that you could start afresh. Anything was possible. Old authorities could be smashed to pieces, not as some kind of utopian dream, but as a practical plan for societal change.

The Girondins followed her. No documents were produced, no lawyers for the defence were permitted, and they had no right to speak except in response to the prosecutors’ questions. They were executed the day after their verdict. It took 36 minutes to cut off 22 heads. In the first nine months of the Terror, 16,000 people died under the guillotine’s blades.

‘Lyon will lose its name,’ the Convention decreed. ‘It will be destroyed.’ At first they tried killing people by firing squad. When this proved too time-consuming, they switched to a guillotine. But even that was too slow, so they started firing cannon filled with shot directly into crowds of people. By the time they were done, nearly 2,000 were dead.

In the port of Nantes, the Convention’s envoy, Jean-Baptiste Carrier, also found the guillotine was too inefficient for the rate of death he required. So he tried a different method, in which 90 priests were hogtied in a holed boat in the Loire and sunk. This technique, called a ‘vertical deportation,’ became one of his primary methods. Around 1,800 people were killed in this way.

Hébert, who had mocked his enemies for their fear when they faced ‘the national razor,’ fainted several times on the way to the guillotine and screamed when he was put under the blade. His executioners entertained the crowd by stopping the blade just over his neck three times before they finally beheaded him.

‘You seem to have convinced the king,’ a friend informed him. ‘That does not surprise me,’ Constant replied. ‘I almost convinced myself.’

Any political movement that proclaimed the will of the people would eventually be taken up and misused by one leader – whether it was Cromwell or Robespierre or whoever came next. They’d claim to represent this mythical entity, summon up tremendous power, and use it in their own interests. It was true that the people were sovereign, as the Levellers and the American revolutionaries had claimed. But as soon as that power was recognised, it had to be limited.

Utilitarianism – the belief that the purpose of life is to secure the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people.

Bentham and James Mill set about trying to turn his child into the Utilitarian ideal: a man constructed entirely of reason and able to operate at the highest possible levels of rational thought. The kind of man who would save the scientist. It was, as the 20th-Century liberal philosopher Isaiah Berlin put it, ‘an appalling success.’

His saving grace was poetry. Bentham had breezily written off this entire form of literature by insisting it was all ‘misrepresentation,’ but Mill found that it gave him a will to live.

The most important works of the philosopher known as John Stuart Mill were in fact jointly produced by him and Harriet Taylor. Liberalism had a mother. And she was erased.

‘He who does anything because it is the customs, makes no choice,’ they said. ‘He who lets the world choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.’

Unlike the great political philosophies of communism, conservatism and liberalism, fascism had no intellectual heft. There was no Karl Marx, or Edmund Burke, or John Stuart Mill, no learned Victorian debate to fall back on. Fascism did not communicate through the mind. It was pumped into the heart and pursued with the fist.

Anyone who wasn’t starving was under suspicion. Not long after that, anyone left alive was treated as a potential kulak. If they had food, they should have given it up. If they did not, they were kulaks.

In Britain, the wartime coalition established full employment and a full welfare state as national goals. A National Health Service was established after the war, which would help anyone, for free, at any time, to treat any condition. It was one of the most daring, radical inventions in British political history and became the UK’s most cherished institution.

It was a remarkable U-turn. After three decades of singing from Hayek’s hymnsheet of non-interference, politicians and bankers changed their views overnight. An industry which had constantly broadcast the need for the state to keep out of its way was pleading for government assistance. And governments which had spent decades insisting on the inefficiency of state intervention in the markets now recognised that it was the only way to protect the broader economy.

There were two areas of spending he could not touch: pensions, which were relied on by the Conservative party’s elderly support base, and the National Health Service, which was politically sacrosanct. So the main cuts were reserved for local councils, who were forced into jettisoning community services. Budgets were slashed for libraries, school services, public parks, buses and countless other services.

As Alexei put it: ". Austerity is the idea that the 2008 financial crash was caused by Wolverhampton having too many libraries."

But there was one crucial distinction between the content aimed at conservative Americans and other groups. Conservative Americans were encouraged to vote, in order to boost America’s nationalist movement. Other groups were encouraged not to vote.

The nationalism that took hold around the world in the wake of Fidesz’s victory was not as extreme as that in Hungary. It did not exert the same degree of manipulation and control, and in many cases, the leaders who pursued it distanced themselves from Orbán. But his approach provided the broad storyline that would be told around the West: the people versus the elite, the fixation on immigration as a threat to the country, the denigration of the global rules-based order and the subversion of domestic institutions in a bid to undermine the separation of power.

The Brexit deal, which would define the UK’s economic and political status for a generation, now existed in two realities simultaneously: that of the black-and-white legal text and that of the public-facing communications strategy. Government rhetoric had abandoned reality.

By the summer of 2020, Trump had made over 18,000 false or misleading claims. During 2018, he averaged 15 erroneous claims a day.

Ministers presented it as an error in the system, but it wasn’t. It was the system.