What Is a Liberal?

December 5, 1955

We have all been long indebted to Judge Harold R. Medina, now of the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, for the patience, balance, and firmness with which he presided at the trial of eleven top Communists in 1949. A few weeks ago he put us further in his debt by exposing the inverted semantics into which most of us have recently fallen in our political discussion—particularly in the strange use of the word “liberal.” He regards himself as a liberal, Judge Medina declares, and he does not intend “to be frightened away because the Communists and their coadjutors have tried to appropriate the word ‘liberal’ just as they have the names of our great Presidents, Abraham Lincoln and Thomas Jefferson, by the use of Aesopian language, twisting names and personalities to suit their purpose.”

Today Socialists, fellow travelers, and Communists all call themselves liberals. As a result, as Judge Medina points out, the word has taken on “a sinister and evil connotation.” I should like to supplement his own remarks on this strange usage and its results.

Originally (as its Latin root liber implies) the liberal was a man who believed in freedom. The foundations of the liberal tradition were laid in England by such great figures as Milton, Locke, Hume, Burke, Adam Smith, and Mill. Politically, the liberal tradition stood for freedom for the individual, the Rule of Law, strict limitation of the powers of government, and decentralization and diffusion even of these limited powers. Economically, the liberal tradition stood for protection of private property, and for freedom of trade, of prices, of markets, and of enterprise.

But through historical accident and intellectual confusion, the word “liberal,” particularly in this country, altered and finally reversed its meaning. Today, in popular speech, a “liberal” has come to mean a person who wants constantly to expand the powers of government, and to centralize them in Washington at the expense of the states and localities. It has come to mean a person who disparages Congressional restraint on the executive power and who prefers bureaucratic discretion to the Rule of Law. Economically, it has come to mean a person who distrusts freedom of markets and freedom of enterprise; who distrusts private ownership and management and extols government ownership and management; who presses for more government “planning,” and who wants to tax and penalize success in order to subsidize failure.

Most of those in America who are called “liberals” today are, in brief, either Socialists, statists, or state paternalists. Some leading newspapers now use the word “liberal” in their news columns, without quotation marks, to designate precisely such groups. The real liberals—those who believe in personal liberty and limited government—are usually referred to in these same news columns as “ultraconservatives” or “reactionaries.” It is not strange that state paternalists have appropriated the word “liberal” to themselves. It has had a noble meaning. When anything acquires value, it becomes worth stealing. But what is much harder to understand is why many who are libertarian in their own basic philosophy not only fail to challenge the Socialists’ and statists’ title to the word “liberal,” but have themselves begun to use it as a stigma.

This particular perversion of the word’s meaning has not occurred in most of Western Europe. In France, for example, the economists who are opposed to Socialism and state “planning,” and advocate private enterprise and free markets, now call themselves the “neo-liberals.” Their Socialist opponents admit their title to the word, and openly disparage liberalism. In Continental Europe, and even in England, the Socialists know and admit they are Socialists. But those who support Socialist principles here—the zealots for TVA, for example—furiously resent application of the term to themselves.

We need to return to first principles in our political and economic thinking. But we will never do so until after we have reexamined our political and economic vocabulary.