# Is classic American liberalism dead? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 27, 2005, 7:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174 "2005-02-27T19:52:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 10:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/21 "2005-02-28T10:16:39Z")
> [@Captain Amazing](#): > > Mises called himself a classical liberal, but he was really more of a libertarian. Although the assertion is not without some controversy, the terms “classical liberal” and “libertarian” are synonyms. Here is a brief contextual history of the terms: [http://www.libertarianism.org/ex-3.html](http://www.libertarianism.org/ex-3.html) ---
**Author:** ![Sevastopol](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/cdc98d/32.png) [@Sevastopol](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Sevastopol)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 10:32am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/22 "2005-02-28T10:32:18Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > I was hoping this would be an interesting discussion of political philosophy in an American historical perspective. But it looks like it’s headed toward being yet another pissing contest between the two American monopoly parties. That’d be duopoly. I do wish people would take more care with their language in these discussions. Careless words, careless thinking I always say. You know I think the time is right for a proper consideration of these important issues. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 10:34am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/23 "2005-02-28T10:34:13Z")
> [@Sevastopol](#): > > That’d be duopoly. > > I do wish people would take more care with their language in these discussions. Careless words, careless thinking I always say. > > You know I think the time is right for a proper consideration of these important issues. It would be a duopoly if there were any substantive difference between Demublicans and Republicrats. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 2:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/24 "2005-02-28T14:42:01Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > Although the assertion is not without some controversy, the terms “classical liberal” and “libertarian” are synonyms. Here is a brief contextual history of the terms: > > [http://www.libertarianism.org/ex-3.html](http://www.libertarianism.org/ex-3.html) I’m pretty sure that classical liberalism took a more positive view of government action than libertarianism. In other words, libertarianism tends to view the government as not having much of a role other than preventing exploitation of one person by another, while classical liberalism holds that it’s ok for the government to act for the common good, even if rights have to be restricted to do it. (So, Locke, for example, was willing to deny the franchise to Catholics, the early US government was willing to enforce taxes on whiskey and use the military to put down riots, the French revolutionaries were willing to execute nobles and/or seize their property, etc). ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 2:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/25 "2005-02-28T14:55:17Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > Democrats? I thought this was about liberals. Bill Clinton wasn’t a liberal, but Barry Goldwater was. :rolleyes: That crap again? **Liberal,** from now on, when you participate in GD threads involving the word “liberal” or the concept of “liberalism,” it will be better for you assume, until you encounter evidence to the contrary, that the word is being used in its contemporary American sense, and **not** as a synonym for libertarianism. And for Rand’s sake, change your username. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 3:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/26 "2005-02-28T15:07:45Z")
> [@Evil One](#): > > There are a couple of cultural earthquakes on the horizon in this country. One is the culture war which continues in the background…and the other is resolving the desire of the public to have ever increasing services and lower taxes. Care to expand on the “culture war” side of that? It seems to me this is the one area where time is **always** on the side of the left. Cultural conservatives can drag their feet and slow down change – but they can never, ever get enough traction to pull the country backward. If states adopt anti-gay-marriage amendments, those are no more than holding actions; they will keep things as they are, for the moment, but they will never recriminalize sodomy. Nor will abortion ever be recriminalized. Nor will the Promise Keepers’ vision of proper gender roles ever again become the norm. Nor will the level of traditional religious belief in America (i.e., belief in Christianity as the one and only true religion) ever revive above its present level; at most, its steady decline will be arrested. (The emergence of the religious right in American politics since the 1970s is not a symptom of any religious revival; rather, religious conservatives moved from quietism to political engagement without altering their spiritual beliefs, nor increasing their overall numbers.) Do you see any good reason to believe otherwise? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/27 "2005-02-28T15:15:59Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > If the DEMOCRATS wish to get back into power then they need to marginalize their left wing and definitely dump the ‘classical American liberalism’ from their main agenda…like the Republicans marginalized their right. I know that most on this board don’t see it that way, but thats how I see it…the Republicans pay lip service to their far right, and sometimes not even that, and they cater to the center…not just during the national election phase either, but even during their primary. In many cases (like abortion IMO) they just let the far right assume that the Republicans still support them. The support is personal, not institutional, i.e. Bush MIGHT agree that abortion is a bad thing (I’m actually unsure as I’ve never seen a definitive statement by the man saying anything substantial or laying out any kind of solid position…which kind of makes the point)…but he’s hasn’t done anything and he’s not GOING to do anything about it and neither are the other Republicans in power. > > And the key is, most people don’t THINK he or the Republicans are actually going to do anything on it or myriad OTHER supposed ‘classical American conservative’ issues. I don’t expect to see a movement at the federal level to dump the controls on gun ownership either, for instance, or ammendments forbidding schools to teach evolution, make burning the flag a capital crime ( 😉 )…or myriad other hot button issues that are near and dear to the far righties. You’re oversimplifying. The Republican Party has more than one “right” wing. The religious conservatives get only lip service – but the foreign-policy neocons, who are just as far to the right if not farther (depends on what scale or map you’re using), get to set policy. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 3:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/28 "2005-02-28T15:26:03Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Nor will the level of traditional religious belief in America (i.e., belief in Christianity as the one and only true religion) ever revive above its present level; at most, its steady decline will be arrested. I don’t know if that’s true. There have been religious revivals in American history before (the Great Awakening in the 1740s, the “Come-outer” movement in the 1830s, the Fundamentalist movement in the 1910s and 1920s). There’s no reason to say it can’t happen again. And, I do think it’s happening again. It’s more than just the emergence of the religious right in politics. Evangelical and fundamentalist churches are enjoying major increases in membership. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 3:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/29 "2005-02-28T15:33:58Z")
> [@Captain Amazing](#): > > I don’t know if that’s true. There have been religious revivals in American history before (the Great Awakening in the 1740s, the “Come-outer” movement in the 1830s, the Fundamentalist movement in the 1910s and 1920s). There’s no reason to say it can’t happen again. And, I do think it’s happening again. It’s more than just the emergence of the religious right in politics. Evangelical and fundamentalist churches are enjoying major increases in membership. Nevertheless, although a majority of Americans believe in God in some sense and attend church, traditional Christianity is in a serious long-term decline in America. From The Next American Nation, by Michael Lind (New York: Free Press Paperbacks, 1996), pp. 278-279: > [@](#): > > Conservatives do not recognize how much the nation has changed since the fifties in its religious attitudes. It may be that the religion of nominal Christians in the United States can no longer be described as traditional trinitarian Christian. The scholarly term for their belief is henotheism, the belief that all ethnic groups and cultures have, and should have, their own gods and rites. In Christian theology, this is the heresy of indifferentism. Robert Linder and Richard Pierard have described the evolution of American civil religion: “Its umbrella has changed from evangelical consensus to Protestantism-in-general, to Christianity-in-general, to the Judeo-Christian tradition in general, to deism-in-general.” The decline in belief in Christianity as the only true religion has been extraordinarily rapid in the United States. In a poll taken in 1924 in Muncie, Indiana, 94 percent of high school students agreed that “Christianity is the one true religion and all peoples should be converted to it.” By the late 1970s, merely 38 percent of respondents in a later poll in Muncie agreed that Christianity was the only true faith. Two-thirds of the respondents in a 1991 poll agreed that Christians, Jews, Muslims and Buddhists “pray to the same God.” And this trend is bound to accelerate, I think, as each American generation assimilates more and more immigrants from non-Christian cultures – Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, etc. ---
**Author:** ![Evil\_Captor](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/f17d59/32.png) [@Evil\_Captor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Evil_Captor)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 3:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/30 "2005-02-28T15:38:52Z")
> [@Polerius](#): > > I happen to agree with conservatives on several issues, but stuff like this is disgusting and beneath contempt. > > I hate people like this moron, and hate everyone who thinks like him. Truly, this is one Republican we can all safely hate. ---
**Author:** ![ITR\_champion](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/c67d28/32.png) [@ITR\_champion](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ITR_champion)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 3:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/31 "2005-02-28T15:40:05Z")
> [@Mr. Moto](#): > > **ITR champion** , John Derbyshire incorporates a good bit of humor and hyperbole into his writing. His comments here need to be read with that in mind. > > Assuming, of course, that you want to be fair and equitable about this. Geez, why didn’t anybody tell me that we were playing this game? Folks, Howard Dean incorporates a lot of humor and hyperbole into his speeches. When he said “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for”, he was actually expressing mild displeasure with the Republican stance on pension reform. Don’t you people have any sense of humor at all? Look. When you want to know what you can expect from a certain political philosophy, you look at what the leading opinion makers for that philosophy say, write, and do. John Derbyshire is one of the better-known writers, if not the best known, at the National Review, which is among the top conservative publications. And he has advocated cold-blooded murder. If you’re just going to respond to that by saying, “It’s just a joke. Ha Ha. You’re not being fair and equitable if you take it seriously,” then you’ve essentially wiped out the idea of pundits being responsible for what they say. Read the fucking column. There’s nothing in there that a sane person would interpret as remotely funny. The guy is not trying to be funny. He’s being perfectly serious. If you just wave your hand a dismiss that call for murder of humor and hyperbole, then you can dismiss anything as “humor and hyperbole”. Let me guess what comes next. Ann Coulter was just using hyperbole when she said that terrorist attacks would be good as long as they only kill liberal journalists? Falwell was just joking around when he blamed gays for 9/11? Why the hell not? After all, wouldn’t the world be a better place if none of us ever had to take responsibility for what we said or did? We’ve banned people from this board for far less than that, have we not? But hey, I guess that just means we’re not being “fair and equitable”. Horrors. ---
**Author:** ![Well](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/df788c/32.png) [@Well](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Well)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 4:02pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/32 "2005-02-28T16:02:02Z")
> [@ITR champion](#): > > Geez, why didn’t anybody tell me that we were playing this game? Folks, Howard Dean incorporates a lot of humor and hyperbole into his speeches. When he said “I hate the Republicans and everything they stand for”, he was actually expressing mild displeasure with the Republican stance on pension reform. Don’t you people have any sense of humor at all? It’s kind of telling when you are comparing an obscure right-wing novelist to the upcomming head of the DNC. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 4:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/33 "2005-02-28T16:05:03Z")
> [@Captain Amazing](#): > > I’m pretty sure that classical liberalism took a more positive view of government action than libertarianism. In other words, libertarianism tends to view the government as not having much of a role other than preventing exploitation of one person by another, while classical liberalism holds that it’s ok for the government to act for the common good, even if rights have to be restricted to do it. (So, Locke, for example, was willing to deny the franchise to Catholics, the early US government was willing to enforce taxes on whiskey and use the military to put down riots, the French revolutionaries were willing to execute nobles and/or seize their property, etc). Like anything else, it has been an evolving thing. The link I gave explained the origins of the term, and acknowledged its eventual appropriation by Keneysians and other socialists. The OP asked what the next stage of liberalism would be, and I said that I hoped it would be a return to Misesan classical liberalism. ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 4:06pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/34 "2005-02-28T16:06:04Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > And for Rand’s sake, change your username. What does Rand have to do with libertarianism, other than that she despised it? ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 4:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/35 "2005-02-28T16:09:55Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > You’re oversimplifying. The Republican Party has more than one “right” wing. The religious conservatives get only lip service – but the foreign-policy neocons, who are just as far to the right if not farther (depends on what scale or map you’re using), get to set policy. Its interesting that you perceive the differences, and the fact that the Republicans have successfully been able to compartmentalize their version of ‘conservatism’, emphasizing some and ignoring other, changing with the times and actually trying to cater to what they think the majority of Americans wants out of government. It makes the point I was getting at (admittedly it IS an oversimplification…sorry, it was after midnight and after all this IS just a message board :)). I can think of a Democrat that ALSO took this course…and managed to get himself re-elected president, something pretty rare for Democrats in the past few decades at the presidential level. Ask yourself why this is, why Clinton was and remains so popular…and why he was so successful. And why the Republicans REALLY hated him so much. The liberals are unable to achieve the same level of compartmentalization IMO because they want to cater to every ‘faction’ in their pantheon equally without truely marginalizing any of them…even the more unpopular stances or factions. I would hazard to guess that many on this board see it as their strength in fact. However I think that in the end it will serve only to marginalize the entire movement…they won’t compromise, many of their stances are frankly dated and not in step with the majority of the very citizens they claim they wish to represent and they won’t change them, and they cater to EVERY faction pretty much equally…you think of ‘liberal’ and you think of the whole shootin match, unlike the various flavors of American ‘conservatism’. The ‘liberals’ call it sticking to principals and perhaps it is…but its stubornly sticking to ‘principals’ even in the face of massive change by society in the US in the past few decades. Its not the 60’s anymore…we’ve moved beyond that, we’ve changed, and ironically its the liberal movement in this country that helped with that change…and then didn’t change with society but became totally hidebound and dated. More ironically still, IMHO, is that the ‘conservative’ party managed to repackage itself and change, positioning itself to appeal to the maximum number of American citizens…while the ‘liberal’ party has remained frozen in the 60’s. -XT ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 4:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/36 "2005-02-28T16:17:45Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > What does Rand have to do with libertarianism, other than that she despised it? Maybe she despised the LP as an organized movement. Nevertheless, she seems to have been a major intellectual influence, willy-nilly, on American libertarianism from the 1960s on. Most Libs of my acquaintance have owned a collection of her books, and at SF conventions you’ll sometimes spot fen wearing message-buttons that say “A = A” (a formulaic expression of Rand’s philosophy of objectivism; there’s a strong libertarian presence in SF fandom, for some reason). ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 4:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/37 "2005-02-28T16:44:40Z")
> [@Liberal](#): > > Like anything else, it has been an evolving thing. The link I gave explained the origins of the term, and acknowledged its eventual appropriation by Keneysians and other socialists. The OP asked what the next stage of liberalism would be, and I said that I hoped it would be a return to Misesan classical liberalism. I’ve read your link. It is an evolving thing, but it hasn’t been a straight progression. Classical liberalism is the “father” of libertarianism, but it’s also the “father” of Keynesianism and also of socialism (which, in spite of your implication, are different. Keynes wasn’t a socialist), and also American conservativism. And I don’t see any chance that modern American liberalism is going to go the path of Mises, honestly. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 4:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/38 "2005-02-28T16:48:15Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Maybe she despised the LP as an organized movement. Rand despised everyone who wouldn’t recognize her greatness. But Objectivism is more libertarian than anything else. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/39 "2005-02-28T16:56:14Z")
> [@xtisme](#): > > . . . many of their stances are frankly dated and not in step with the majority of the very citizens they claim they wish to represent . . . Could you be more specific there? What particular “liberal” positions strike you as “dated”? And which are not? ---
**Author:** ![Liberal](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/848f3c/32.png) [@Liberal](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Liberal)\ **Post date:** [February 28, 2005, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174/40 "2005-02-28T16:56:38Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Maybe she despised the LP as an organized movement. Nevertheless, she seems to have been a major intellectual influence, willy-nilly, on American libertarianism from the 1960s on. Most Libs of my acquaintance have owned a collection of her books, and at SF conventions you’ll sometimes spot fen wearing message-buttons that say “A = A” (a formulaic expression of Rand’s philosophy of objectivism; there’s a strong libertarian presence in SF fandom, for some reason). Their buttons should read “A is A”. That was the conclusion that she drew from an argument whose first premise was “Existence exists.” At any rate, it is true that there is some overlap among libertarians and objectivists, just as there is some overlap among libertarians and Christians. I happen to be all three. See this portion of the FAQ from the Objectivist Research Center for Rand’s take on libertarianism: [http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/biofaq.html#Q5.2.7](http://www.noblesoul.com/orc/bio/biofaq.html#Q5.2.7) The short of it is that she felt libertarians had appropriated her philosophy for their own ends. For her, noncoercion was the conclusion of a tableau. She did not like it being an axiomatic ethical principle. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/is-classic-american-liberalism-dead/292174.md?page=3)