Liberalism vs Liberalism

There is classical liberalism and then there is contemporary, modern liberalism. I have tried to understand the distinction between the two. I have also wondered why conservatives admire and quote classic liberalism but detest modern liberalism. Now I think I have the answers.

Classical liberalism, in many respects, is the foundation of modern conservatism. It started off with the idea that people should be liberated and free from the tyranny of government and that governments should exist for the purpose of helping people purse their own self-interest. Classical liberalism was about "natural rights" as defined by John Locke. Those natural rights are the rights to life, liberty and property. Locke's idea was that government should ensure those rights. Conservatives today whole heartily agree that those rights are sacrosanct, that no government should stand in the way of them.

I suspect that the conservatives of John Locke's day were quite against his liberal ideas because they believed those ideas would challenge the status quo and bring about social upheaval. Conservative in all eras have generally been against social change because it disrupts the existing order they've grown accustom to. Locke's liberalism greatly changed the social and political order of 17th century England. His brand of thinking forced the King of England, Charles I, to relinquish a lot of his authority to Parliament. Because of this, conservatives and liberals battled each other in England's Great Civil War. The conservatives lost. However, in time conservatives adopted the reforms brought about by the civil war and embraced them as sacred conservative values, the rights of life, liberty and property. Today, American conservatives point to the inclusion of those values in their Declaration of Independence as sacred conservative value. However, it was classical liberalism that revealed them and brought them to life.

I wrote about this before, that liberalism is the wedge behind which social change occurs and conservatives are the ones that conserve, hence the label conservative, and consolidate the best of what liberalism produces. Liberalism also play a much needed and vital role. If it didn't instigate social change, and social change didn't occur periodically, there would be more civil wars like the one which took place in England between Parliamentarians and Royalists from 1642 until 1651. If social change had occurred in Czarist Russian, and the Czar had relinquished some of his authority to the people, the Russian Revolution probably would not have occurred. Similarly, had the Shah of Iran been liberal minded and brought about social reform in his country he probably would have remained in power.

Classical liberalism and modern liberalism aren't that different. The latter is an extension of the former. However, liberalism today has taken on a derogatory connotation and conservatives have become very expert at painting it that way, especially neoconservatives (new born conservatives). Both have felt that liberalism had become too extreme and socialistic. Yet liberalism's mission is still the same, to fight for and entrench peoples natural rights, those of life, liberty and property. Today's conservatives point to the 1960s as a time when liberalism went extreme.

In the 1960s there was sort of a civil war, a revolution between conservative and liberals. Again, such a social revolution occurred because conservative wanted to keep the status quo, which included the continuance of racial and sexual inequalities and a stubborn support for a ruling class that was proofing illegitimate. Why liberalism went extreme in their demands for sexual and racial equality is because it had to if it wanted to permanently move and over come the conservative mindset that stubbornly refused to budge and implement changes. Conservatives were as determined to keep the status quo of racial segregation and social differences as liberals were determined to change things and create a more open and flexible society.

Classical liberalism as espoused by Locke encompassed something that sounded natural and logical, and is something that was assumed enlightened future generations would naturally bring to reality. Moreover. this Reason was enshrined in one of the most salient and revered documents in history, the American Declaration of Independence, which later became the foundation for the UN Charter. However, though the Declaration and the Charter said life, liberty and property were unalienable and self-evident rights, those rights were not logically or naturally recognized or bestowed to all. In American, many citizens, blacks, women and minorities, were denied them. Those self-evident, unalienable rights were not naturally bestowed to all as the Declaration and the Charter pronounced. It is this state of affairs that gave birth to the modern, more radical liberalism of today. In the case of America, if conservatives had not blocked some of the social changes society was due in the 60s, liberalism would not have taken some of the extreme measures it did, such as affirmative action, busing and sexual promiscuity, extremes that were necessary to ensure that true social change did occur so that people would get what was naturally due them, the rights of life liberty, and property.