I find it funny how the term Liberal turn into a negative term for the right and conservatives like socialism did.
When someone calls me or someone else a liberal, I'm like "Which one?" Cause there's modern liberalism, classical liberalism, and neoliberalism, making liberalism in general an umbrella term like socialism.
Liberalism in general is freedom of speech, press and religion, equality under the law, separation of religion and state, divided government and political parties(along with being voted by the people) and free markets. Neoliberalism for example focuses on the freedom of trade, strengthening of private sector with limited government, and globalization.
The problem of liberalism are its limits implanted in its core values.
While liberalism as a progressist ideology was a necessity to overcome the challenges that faced people a few centuries ago, it has become completely irrelevant, worse, sometimes dangerous to resolve contemporary challenges.
This is due to the values that liberalism represent : individualism / Freedom / Equality, values that rose during the age of enlightenment. Those value, good in theory are actually traps that we created for ourselves as they open the door for corruption and recuperation by the upper classes.
Because the reality is that despite the age of enlightenment and the changes in the human rights, those who have the power didn't change magically, they just adapted to those new values. The French revolution was recuperated by the upper classes and with it,
the age of meritocracy was born. An age of universalism were all human are supposed to be equal from birth, a paradise were all people have the same chances. But as Bourdieu explains in really well through concept like the Habitus and the social/economic/instituional capital (cf the two videos I shared a few post ago)....
.. this meritocratic society.. actually never worked and never will. The universalism that was supposed to be created has trapped us into the thinking in a world where we all have equal chances when reality is completely different. Which means that the values of Freedom and equality in front of the law.. are actually becoming prisons and traps for people who don't have the same chances in life as others.
- Women
- People of Color
- People with non Heteronormative gender and sexual identities
- And mostly.. people of the lower classes
Are now all in jeopardy because of the liberalism values that the elite are still pushing forward
Liberalism, that was meant to free us all, has become the conservative prison that is preventing us from evolving toward social progress.
Liberalism, that was a progressive (yet elitist) ideology in the past, is now a conservative vision from a dying world. This is why you can see liberalism being praised by the elite, by the rich and even by conservative through economic liberalism and neoliberalism.
Don't be fooled by the rethoric of the far right that want to prevent the left from evolving by calling it what it is not anymore in labelling it "liberals", the left is not liberal anymore, hasn't been for at least a century. Some liberals entry rightist are still leaning toward progressive ideas (the biden administration is an example of that, even if they still support far right gov on the international) but they are still adopting the economic side of liberalism, a side that has become (was always ?) quite problematic for lower classes.
Liberalism is not relevant anymore, we need something better, something smarter and more in line with reality.
We need to stop thinking in term of individualities and start thinking in term of systems.
