Quote:
Originally Posted by Pete F.
Liberalism, as it developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and flowered in the nineteenth, puts major emphasis on the freedom of individuals to control their own destinies. Individualism is its creed, collectivism and tyranny its enemy….In politics, liberalism expressed itself as a reaction against authoritarian regimes. Liberals favored limiting the rights of hereditary rulers, establishing democratic parliamentary institutions, extending the franchise, and guaranteeing civil rights. They favored such measures both for their own sake, as a direct expression of essential political freedoms, and as a means of facilitating the adoption of liberal economic measures.
Though that would be antithetical to Trumplicans, who are authoritarians at best and Monarchists at heart.
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The liberalism to which you are referring here is called classical liberalism which distinguishes it from what are referred to today as liberals. Those who are now called liberals are more correctly labeled Progressives. Progressives are not liberal in the sense of the classic definition.
The classical liberals who founded this country would be astonished at the power that Progressive government has succeeded in establishing over the individual in this country. They would not be able to conceive of how this form of government could be called liberal--other than how it liberally gives itself the power to excessively spend the people's money and to massively regulate the people's freedoms.
Progressivism, by its American founders, defines government as it has evolved in our time as the machine for creating society's good, and as such should not be inhibited or limited in its power to define and deliver that good. It is, by its own political philosophy, authoritarian, even to the ultimate degree, but in such a way that it would be akin to benevolent dictatorship rather than mere despotism.
The political debate and conflict in this country should not be portrayed as liberals vs. conservatives. Rather it more correctly should be portrayed as Progressives vs. Conservatives. Neither party today is liberal in the classical sense, but Conservatives are closer to the classical liberals than are the Progressives.