An odd phenomenon I have encountered lately is that people who seem to be pressing for an eradication of social justice politics and a dismissal of critical conversations about history, gender, race, and other controversial issues have started self identifying as "liberals" or "classic liberals". Who started this, and what is it actually supposed to mean? Where and when did this classical age of liberalism occur, and is there some reason should we be fighting to reconstruct that age? What would a classically liberal society look like? When and why did "liberal" go from being an implied slur on conservative media to being a label of choice for the PragerU crowd?
It goes back to a now-dated disagreement between the British Liberal Party and the British Labour Party. For a while, there was a literal three-party split, and the ones that identified with the Liberal Party and not the Labour Party were ones that had generally libertarian views but cared neither a jot nor a tiddle for the poor or for downtrodden classes. In fact, John Maynard Keynes went through a period, during his lifetime, where he represented the views of your average 21st Century libertarian, except he also supported eugenics based on the argument, "if you don't want people to be poor, then stop producing more poor people." He was a bisexual guy, and overall, he was not particularly conservative. In fact, he would have supported progressive taxation. However, the conflict between the Liberal Party and the Labour Party probably magnified some of his more offensive views into expressions of pique, and the fact that he came from an upper-class family probably skewed his perceptions of the poor. He was still rather progressive, for the most part.
However, the so-called "classical liberals" are failing to understand that the true classical liberals are the ones that go back to Adam Smith's ideas, and Adam Smith's ideas were really an answer against unfair policies that kept trade in the hands of rich upper-class families. In a way, he was a bit of a libertarian progressive by modern standards. He only believed that you ought to be allowed to build a ship and go buy products directly from Canton without having to buy them from the East India Company, which had a
de jure monopoly. He also favored a progressive tax on land based on the argument that the richest landowners tended to benefit disproportionately from their own government being in power, whereas the poor lived probably the same under English rule as they would have, at the time, under French rule. His argument was only based on the fact that, as a matter of fact, the policies of the government directly worked to give special advantages to the upper-class, which was unsurprising because the upper-class had the most political power. The progressive tax just made sense: if the rich were inevitably going to rig the government in order to keep themselves comfortable, then they could pay for the fucking government, not the poor that did not have as much say in how things were run.
In other words, the people that call themselves "classical liberals" are really not. The real classical liberals were progressive. They are still a little bit off from how I look at things, but the people that call themselves "classical liberals" today have many views that are antithetical to what those individuals really believed. What is called "capitalism" today was, at the time, not really "capitalism as opposed to socialism," but it was "free markets as opposed to
de jure monopolies by companies that were given royal charters based on a corrupted mercantilist economy that deliberately benefited only the richest social elites." The idea that the poor and the middle-class ought to be allowed to participate in open and free trade was actually proto-socialist, and if the so-called "classical liberals" do not recognize that, then that is only demonstrative of their profound ignorance about the politics of that time-period.
I am a classical
philosophical radical because FYIAD, although I disagree with James Mill's Indophobia. Furthermore, you could argue that I am a Ricardian socialist, and Thomas Hodgskin came closer than anyone else alive at the time to representing my current views on both socialism and anarchism. Furthermore, I support Jeremy Bentham's views on animal rights, and I consider him to have been an early pioneer in the area of both LGBT equality and religious skepticism. I do agree with John Stuart Mill's justice-related revisions upon utilitarianism.
