Last Saturday I was making my way across the road from St Pancras to King’s Cross when I noticed a large bearded man blundering towards me, dodging the traffic, with a look of great urgency on his face. Assuming he was one of the 78 per cent of people in the capital who are mentally ill, I continued on my way with my head down – but he caught me up and said, with some force: ‘Left-wingers are NOT liberal!’ And then repeated it, even louder. It seemed a somewhat random statement to risk getting mown down by a bus for – a bit as if he’d said: ‘Herons are NOT waterfowl.’ But by the same token he didn’t issue his statement with anger – he delivered it with a smile, as if he were lecturing an idiot nephew.
Time has taken their ideology around the back of KFC and given it a right good seeing to
I assume he was a Spectator reader. Over the past 20 years there has been a sizeable tranche of obdurate, older and usually male readers who greatly object to me using the term ‘liberal’ as if it were an insult, to be directed at the people who foist upon us all manner of right-on, reason-defying idiocies. The objectors fall into two broad categories (which are of course linked). There are those who consider themselves the heirs to the Whigs and those who consider themselves the heirs to Margaret Thatcher. Classical Liberals, I suppose, in short. Tolerant, laissez-faire, free market, small state, often Little Englanders, in the nicest possible way. But what these undoubtedly fine people do not realise is firstly that language is transformational and that ‘liberal’ no longer really means what they want it to mean – time has moved on. Time has taken their ideology around the back of KFC and given it a right good seeing to, to the extent that it is no longer recognisable. Meanwhile they are left behind, identifying with an appellation which now means almost the precise opposite of what they wish it to mean. And secondly, that the war they are fighting is pointless, because it is as good as over. Feel the vibe shift, you Libs.
I use the word in its modern American sense and do so in order to distinguish between ‘liberals’ and ‘the left’. The bearded man who upbraided me meant to scold me for using the wrong description when I refer to the awful people – the liberal establishment – as liberal: he thinks I should say ‘left-wing’. And yet if I were to misconstrue his statement a little, he would be very close to being correct – all he needed to add was the word ‘always’. As in ‘Left-wingers are not ALWAYS liberal’. Quite clearly, Josef Stalin was not a liberal, nor the arguably controversial Khmer leader Pol Pot. But then nor are those on the left whom I have admired historically or respect today. Ernest Bevin was not a liberal and nor today is Lord Owen (even if for pragmatic reasons he once clambered beneath their rank and crusty sheets – and look how that turned out), nor Maurice Glasman, nor the late Frank Field or Peter Shore. Still less George Galloway.
But now I am being a Little Englander, because it is in Europe where the left has almost entirely ceased to be liberal. Robert Fico (a Social Democrat) in Slovakia and Sahra Wagenknecht in Germany – to take just two examples – are most definitely of the left, possibly even the far left, but equally definitely not liberal, in its modern or ancient sense. All of the above believe that the rest of the left has betrayed its ideology with a diversion into identity cultural politics, much as do I. I do not think identity politics has anything to do with the left – it is, if anything, libertarian and perhaps liberal. That is why I will not refer to Stonewall and Black Lives Matter and Ed Davey as left-wing. They are not.
The problem, then, is what one calls these people if not ‘liberal’, because I do not wish to give gratuitous offence to loyal readers. Some use the term ‘progressive’ – but that, to me, has the whiff of historical inevitability about it and suggests that they are correct. It is not ‘progressive’, in my book, to disavow proven science, for example. Rather, it is stupid. I have used ‘bien pensant’ quite often but am not happy in doing so because a) it is a French term and this is a British magazine and b) it simply means ‘conventional’ or ‘accepted’ – and that doesn’t quite do it. It implies hegemony, for a start.
I used to like ‘Libtard’, but there is no longer a sub-editor anywhere in the country who will let it through his finely woven mesh of completely banned descriptions. I blame the liberals for that.
I suppose one might argue that we should scrap the whole shebang – left, right and liberal, seeing that none of them quite mean what they originally meant in the late 18th century, either in France or over here. But I stick to liberal because, even in its oldest incarnation, it still has a connection with its meaning today. It is dictionary-definition liberal to be in favour of immigration, even mass immigration, much as it is liberal to allow people to define themselves as whatever they think they are on any specific day of the week. No, Thatcher would not have gone along with that, sure – but in that sense she was not a liberal at all, but a Conservative. It is liberal to oppose economic protectionism and to put faith in the free market.
You might wonder what the point of this digression has been – after all, we’re only talking about nomenclature and in the grand scheme of things it doesn’t really matter what the hell some footling hack calls anything, does it? Except for this – across the world, what I call liberalism is evaporating more quickly than the steam from my piss. And I thought it would be nice to agree on the correct wording for its gravestone.
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