Giles Fraser reiterates his antipathy to liberalism, but it’s a straw liberalism that he’s antipathetic to. In the reaction to his piece on circumcision he sees
an opportunity to clear the decks and say why I am not a liberal. No, I’m not a conservative either. I’m a communitarian. Blue labour, if you like. But certainly not a liberal. What I take to be the essence of liberalism is a belief that individual freedom and personal autonomy are the fundamental moral goods.
That’s wrong. Individual freedom and personal autonomy are important in liberalism, but they’re not the fundamental moral goods, and in fact they’re not really moral goods either. “Values” would probably be the better word.
Liberalism leaves plenty of room to treat compassion and generosity and kindness as the fundamental moral goods, but it treats individual rights as primary. Human rights do include freedoms of various kinds, but those freedoms don’t exclude concern for others as well as the self, and in fact a concept of rights entails that much better than communitarianism does.
Fraser seems to be unaware of any of this, and to be confusing liberalism with libertarianism. He gets simply vulgar as he goes on.
Choice is the only moral currency they acknowledge. And this is equally true of the neoliberals who want the freedom to make squillions out of the City, as it is of those who believe the freedom to choose is an act of defiance, socking it to the man, so to speak. One of the most insidious effects of Thatcherism is that it co-opted rebellion into its ranks without rebellion even noticing.
From the 80s onwards, popular culture morphed from an angry insistence on a fairer society (the Jam, the Specials etc) into a me-first relativism that is all about sex and shopping. Religion is an affront to liberalism because it dares suggest it’s not all about you. Here atheism lines up with liberalism (at least in their enlightenment varieties). And Christianity lines up with socialism.
That’s not liberalism. The guy is deeply confused. Liberalism doesn’t mean Me First and the hell with everyone else. It does mean you don’t get to treat me (or her or him or them) as a mere instrument for the greater good, which turns out to be the conservative men of the “community.” It means you don’t get to slice a bit off your baby’s penis in order to cement him into The Community.
I wonder if this is related to my teacher’s recent contention that economic liberalism goes with political conservatism, and vice versa.
Frankly, he sounds like he’s just throwing a bunch of words at the wall and hoping some stick and make sense. Not the strategy most likely to succeed in making a sensible point.
It is just word salad. Who knew that someone else’s foreskin could mean so much to a person? It is like he’s planning on making dumplings* out of them in order to achieve eternal youth. He seems to mistake liberalism for libertarianism, then mistakes liberalism for a consumerism/hedonism hybrid, and then at points seems to make the case that he’s all for his own twisted definition of liberalism as long as he gets to be the one who says “Me First”, and it all bounces around a nonsensical center of him being angry that people called him out.
(*there’s a movie reference there…)
As you point out,Ophelia, it’s a major category error. He’s describing libertarianism not liberalism at all. Besides, if we don’t all go shopping don’t the terrorists win?
Yes, Fraser is sticking this whatyoumaycallit together from a Lego box full of catch phrases (I hesitate to call them ‘ideas’)
“Religion is an affront to liberalism because it dares suggest it’s not all about you. Here atheism lines up with liberalism (at least in their enlightenment varieties). And Christianity lines up with socialism.”
And, we might add, blab lines up with waffle.
My understanding is that in non-US politics, his definition is accurate and that the US liberals would be called labor elsewhere…
(That is, I’ve been told that UK liberal is about the same as US libertarian. And libertarian would be more of US anarchist.)
The labels are fucking confusing.
A lot of libertarians call themselves “classical liberals.” In fact, in the U.S. at least, it’s sort of a dog whistle. *
“Neoliberalism” also aligns with libertarianism, and sometimes with conservatism proper. According to the pfffft of All Knowledge:
And Wiki will remind us not to confuse Neoliberalism with Neoliberalism in international affairs, which is another animal altogether. I do not pretend to be knowledgable about all these things and distinctions between things: I just know the labels exist and present them to aid in furthering confusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoliberal
* I once heard Barbara Oakley speak at CFI-Los Angeles (disclaimer, I know Barbara and like her very much. Her politics, not so much, though.) She identified herself to the mostly liberal and leftist audience as a “classical liberal,” which I thought was slippery of her, because she’s a libertarian. I called her on it afterward, and she said something like, well, she supports abortion rights and gay rights and so…in that sense she’s a liberal. Or something. As I say, I thought it was slippery.
What the British Frasier calls liberalism is called libertarianism in the US. He’s not ranting about American liberals but rather another unconnected group with a different socio-economic ideology.
The really stupid thing is that Giles Fraser is a liberal. When it comes to issues such as welfare, healthcare, gay rights, women’s rights and so he is agreement with liberals. In fact on those issues he is a better ally than some atheists I could mention (but won’t, because it would just attract the slimepitters).
Winterseale @ #6
You’ve been told wrong… At least, from my understanding of US libertarians, they have practically nothing in common with UK liberals – who used to be the ‘middle ground’ between Conservative and Labour parties, but who after the Labour party’s rightwards trot that got them into power in the 1990s, became the “left-ish” alternative. They wanted free tertiary education, have a fair bit in common with the Greens, that kind of thing. Of course, now they’re in unholy alliance with the Conservatives so I don’t know what they’re supposed to believe these days… but libertarians, no.
You are talking about UK Liberals, not UK liberals. There is a difference, just as there can been a difference between UK Conservatives and UK conservatives.
But otherwise you are correct. US style libertarians in the UK are to be found on the right-wing of the Conservative Party, and in UKIP.
#6 is right. Liberal and libertarian are used in the US to mean pretty much the opposite of what they mean to the rest of the world.
Chomsky rants about it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wriQGI5NGOM
No its not. UK liberals and Liberals have very little in common with US libertarians. UK Liberals favour big government, with levels of taxation to match.
From the Oxford Manifesto of Liberal International, the world federation of liberal political parties (emphasis mine):
That sounds about right whether talking about US liberals or UK liberals. So, yeah, not all about me, sex, and shopping.
To make matters even worse it is entirely possible that he talks about the German Liberal Party that is indeed more or less libertarian in the US sense of the word. And this party is the only major party besides the communists that is not totally in favor of allowing circumcision, which gives this interpretation some wings. Still, this article is a major case of word salad.
My first reaction to that post was also that he had confused liberalism and libertarianism.
I kind of like the analysis that treats economic liberalism to conservatism as one axis and libertarianism to authoritarianism as the second axis. http://www.politicalcompass.org/ So US libertarians tend to be what the Political Compass guy calls the Libertarian Right. I suspect a lot of the commenters here would fall in the Libertarian Left quadrant. Perhaps individualism v. communitarianism should be a third axis? It seems pretty orthogonal to the other two axes, as this group has defined them.
Well said, and something liberals and libertarians should be able to agree on. Funny isn’t it that the interests of the “community” inevitably reduce to the interests of the person insisting the community is the most important thing?
My reaction to the Fraser’s article isn’t so much to debate whether he’s using the word “liberal” in a perverse way (though he is) but to take issue with his basic contention that the community comes before the individual, that the community’s “rights” trump the individual’s. We might as well tear up the International Declaration of Human Rights in that case, and adopt “community” varieties of the Cairo Declaration, mutatis mutandis, instead.
So yes, at a basic level he’s saying the foreskin means more to the rest of the community than it does to the individual. The parents presenting their child for this procedure must quell the basic desire to protect their child from harm, tell themselves that its cries of pain are only a rite of passage. It’s a way of the community reminding parents that they cannot rely on instinct but must yield to higher authority.
In different countries at different times, Liberal and Conservative were party labels about as meaningful as Democrat and Republican. Sometimes Liberals were the party of the farmers and Conservative that of manufacturers and finance.
That said, Fraser is saying something entirely different. He’s arguing that the rights of communities can and should trump the rights of individuals. This is persuasive to about the extent that libertarian arguments are not: the rights of the individual are not absolute.
However, in our scheme, communities don’t have any rights at all. We the people make agreements regarding what we must and may not do, within the limits of our individual rights. Our communities, whether religious or cultural, have no rights beyond those of their members.
(This is perhaps formally only true in the U.S., since religious establishments elsewhere have official recognition, and only formally true in the U.S., where various institutions are traditionally privileged, but that’s the theory as I understand it.)
Except when religion is all about being God’s special snowflake, of course.
Really? On what planet does he live? On my planet, the strongest push-back against socialism has always been coming from the religious right. In fact, many Christians see socialism as their biggest enemy – in their words, replacing God by the State. My guess is that they know full well that the influence of religion will decrease when people no longer depend on the Church for their social security. And while many atheists are indeed libertarians or neoliberals or what have you, a lot of atheists understand this, and are progressives who support socialist goals in part because of this.
Is there one book that could serve as the textbook on liberal philosophy, as it is understood today? The problem is, the principles and precepts seem to be dispersed among hundreds of books, articles and blog posts.
So basically he’s saying he is slightly to the left but otherwise religious? Let me guess, he hates people when they are on bikes too. More proof the Guardian’s champagne socialist is only skin deep.
Authoritarians and communitarians (who are often basically the same, they just use different rhetoric) always conflate liberalism with libertarianism.
I believe they do it deliberately, since libertarianism is easier to refute and straw-man. In fact you hardly need any straw. Libertarianism is just kind of ridiculous. It’s not even “me first.” Most philosophies, liberalism included, accept “me first.” Libertarianism says “me first, second, third, fourth, fifth, ad infinitum, and it’s oppression to tell me other people should be ANYWHERE on my list of priorities.”
If you can obscure your opponent’s argument to make it sound “libertarian” (I.e., “ME ME ME ME and to hell with anyone else), you can defeat it easily.