One of the more misleading claims of some right-wing thinkers, particularly libertarians, is that left liberals are totalitarians with a love for authority.
Certainly it’s true that the liberal left usually supports interventionist government, but this is not due to a natural love of authority, but an emotional dislike of traditional forms of authority like the church and family.
Contemporary left-liberal thinking arguably began in the late 18th Century with enlightenment thinkers like Rousseau and Godwin who believed that man is good but is everywhere enslaved by unnecessary authority and traditional morality. The subsequent history of left-liberal thinking is the history of emancipatory rhetoric – emancipation from traditional gender roles, freedom from long hours of hard work, freedom from social and parental authority, freedom from the church, freedom from military service, freedom from bourgeois morality.
Although Karl Marx’s Das Kapital advocates the implementation of communist totalitarianism, his work is full of emancipatory language, and the ultimate aim of his ideology is an anarchist utopia free from traditional or bourgeois authority. The radical ideas of thinkers like Marx are therefore an example of radical liberalism (individual freedom achieved through extreme means) rather than authoritarian collectivism for its own sake. American left wing intelletual Noam Chomsky provides a good example of an anti-authoritarian left liberal. Chomsky attacks any and every manifestation of American power on the international scene and advocates a vague form of anarchism, which he, like Marx before him, conveniently fails to outline in detail.
While the liberal right also believes strongly in individual freedom, and predates left liberalism in this regard, it places a greater number of checks and balances on what the individual can and can’t do. For example, the individual is expected to respect the legal system, accept the authority of the police and the military, and respect the rights of private property owners. It also tends to take a neutral line on other forms of social organisation like organised religion, accepting whatever social relations people have worked out through free association. Without such checks and balances, freedom negates itself since one individual is free to take away the freedom of another. Today classical liberalism is most strongly supported in the Unitest States, where religion and federalism help to act as conservative counter-weights to classical liberalism’s more radical off-shoots like left libertarianism.
Thus left-wing liberalism and right-wing liberalism both share a desire for greater individual autonomy, but differ over methods, with the right liberals believing the means shouldn’t justify the ends, and the more politically savvy left liberals believing that autonomy can only be achieved by overthrowing the traditional order through collective action, and by sharing economic resources so that each man or woman is free to pursue their ‘higher’ desires as a rational being. As Marx temptingly put it, in a socialist utopia the individual should be free to “do one thing to-day and another to-morrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner”.
To the extend that the modern liberal state has become increasingly authoritian, it is because either the majority hold traditional views which clash with left-liberal thinking, and so need to be checked by more and more “progressive” legislation, or because the practical application of left-liberal policies leads to social instability or violence. The breakdown of the traditional nuclear family for example, has led to an unintended increase in domestic violence, which has necessitated greater state involvement in family affairs.
Some on the traditional right claim that the left is fully aware that the implementation of its policies will increase violence and instability, and uses the disruption caused by liberal reforms as a means of pushing through further left-liberal legislation. However, since most left-liberals genuinely appear to believe in egalitarian ideology, it seems unlikely they are using this as a deliberate tactic – after all, such cynical tactics would bring into question the left-liberal belief that people are inherently good.
Furthermore, not everyone on the left even supports strong central government. A significant number of left-wing anarchists have an irrational hatred of all forms of authority, and, as in the early years of the 20th century, are again becoming a serious threat to law and order in a number of inner city areas in Europe.
The incorrect labelling of left liberals as authoritarians, also misrepresents the political significance of fascists and populists. Many on the libertarian left try to argue the case that Fascism is part of the same school of thinking as radical left liberalism, but this glosses over the historical fact that few liberal progressives have ever identified with fascist political movements, and that most nationalists thinkers have a general dislike of enlightenment thought.
Although Mussolini was a former communist, both the Italian and Spanish Fascists in the 1920s and 1930s violently crushed all progressive left-wing economic movements (socialist and anarchist) and were generally supportive of the Catholic church and bourgeois society. Similarly, most left-wing progressives and trade unionists in English-speaking countries supported the communists in the Spanish Civil War, while centre-right politicians like Winston Churchill frequently sympathised with the Fascists in Italy.
It was only the particularly extreme and idiosyncratic Nazi’s that described their brand of Fascism as a type of socialism. If communism can be described as radical left liberalism, then Nazism can be described as a particularly extreme form of radical conservatism that aimed to revive semi-mythical pagan values from before the age of Christianity.
In contrast to Marxism, populism actually is what it says on the tin – a political ideology that, for better or worse, promotes the interests of the working and lower middle classes. While left liberals identify with the weak, and right wingers with the strong, populists strive to defend to interests of the battler in the middle. Populists may clash with conservatives and right wing liberals over economic matters, but this is more about specific issues of economic justice or social stability than a general desire for radical change or expanded government.
Posted by mikecourtman 