Liberalism – Lexical Ambiguity

This article appeared in Lakbima News on December 4 2011.

Liberalism has got itself a bad name in many and different quarters. Suren Raghavan, writing in the Colombo Telegraph, was one of the many criticising NORAD’s analysis of Norway’s contribution to Sri Lanka’s “peace process”. “The Peace Process was hegemonised by a naive liberal peace discourse. It gravitated around the liberalism II model of minority rights, right to self-determination and ethnic federalism etc. By which it pre-constructed solutions at the cost of analysing the depth of the actual problem.”

So then, it was “liberalism” as much as the LTTE terror or Sinhalese or Norwegian politicians to blame?

Recently Rajpal Abeynayake had a look at liberal democracy as it is preached by  the West and practised by the West – not always the same thing. : “Look at how the man who was touted as one of the most liberal and left wing members of the US senate turned out to be! Once he became president, he turned out to be a fine old Republican, in an articulate liberal’s clothing. Liberal democratic values never had so much premium however, because they are supposed to be what the Arab Spring and all that is all about. But then they go and kill Gaddafi, and people are wondering what the hell that was all about — that baying democratic pack of people ushering this new brand of tolerance?”

So here, liberal and left-wing are conflated.

In North Carolina, a rich man called Art Hope, CEO and owner of Variety Wholesalers, a discount store conglomerate – that means he makes his fortune by selling to the very poor in North Carolina, products made by the very poor in China and elsewhere – has worked very hard to make sure the governance of the state suits his own extreme right-wing agenda. John Snow, (not the Channel 4 chappie with the silly socks, or the cricketer, or the man who discovered how cholera spread) a retired judge who had represented the Democrats in the state senate for three terms, found himself under vicious attack from the right. Snow’s deep-seated conservatism suited his constituents. He often voted with the Republicans – hardly a dangerous radical. ”My opponents used fear tactics. I’m a moderate, but they tried to make me look liberal”.

In the USA, it seems, liberal means radical, immoderate.

According to the right-wing think tank Freedom Center: “Liberalism just isn’t very popular in America”. The semi-annual Gallup political identification poll found a declining percentage of Americans, just 21%, adopting the ‘liberal’ label in 2020. By way of comparison, 42% of respondents called themselves ‘conservative’. Gallup noted in June that if the trend continued for the remainder of 2010, conservatives would boast their largest annual share of the American public since the survey started in 1992.

The word “liberal” has become a code word in certain circles in the USA for all the kind of things that right-wing conservatives detest. Right-wing Americans see ‘liberalism” as an obscenity and basically alien to the American Way. Left-wing Americans are afraid of “the L-Word”.

What we have here is a good example of “Humpty-Dumptyism”.”When I use a word, it means just what I want it to mean- neither more nor less”, said Humpty Dumpty. The posh term for this ploy is “stipulative definition”. Some philosophers call it lexical ambiguity.

Some definitions would be helpful.

According to Raymond Williams in Keywords: “Liberal has, at first sight, so clear a political meaning that some of its further associations are puzzling. Yet the political meaning is comparatively modern, and much of the interesting history of the word is earlier”. Williams was writing in 1976 and the situation has become more confused since.

One standard dictionary definition is “generous, noble-minded” which is clearly not apt for any context involving politicians. “Liberal democracy” is defined as “a state or system which combines the right to individual freedom with the right to representative government”. Surely, not even the Tea Partiers and Christian fundamentalists could object to that!

According to Professor Will Kimlicka in the Oxford Companion to Philosophy: “A liberal state does not seek to resolve these conflicts (different beliefs about the meaning of life), but rather provides a ‘neutral’ framework within which citizens can pursue their diverse conceptions of the good life. Liberalism, on this view, is the only human response to the inevitable pluralism and diversity of modern societies”.

Who could possibly object to this benign philosophy?

Raymond Williams notes that there is a long history of ‘liberal’ being used as a pejorative from all sides. Marxists in particular have used liberal as a bad word with connotations of weakness and sentimentality and lack of intellectual rigour. Because liberalism is based on individualist theories of man and society, it is in fundamental conflict with strictly social theories. Liberalism is anathema to strict socialists because it is the highest form of thought within bourgeois society and is the philosophy of capitalism.

Yes, that’s right capitalism.

Douglas Massey argues in Return of the “L” Word that sometime in the 1970s, liberals in the United States lost their way. After successes like the New Deal, they became arrogant. Faced with the difficult politics of race and class, liberals used the heavy hand of government to impose policies on a resentful public. Conservatives capitalized on this with a staunch ideology of free markets, limited government, and conservative social values.

In an interview with Mother Jones magazine, Massey argued that markets are essentially human constructions, and liberals should not seek to oppose markets with big government, but rather, ensure that these markets are working in the public interest. “The time has come,” he writes, “for liberals to tell the public that markets are not ‘free,’ but human-created institutions that citizens have a right to supervise and manage for their own benefit. Liberals need to abandon their lingering hostility toward market mechanisms, embrace them, and substitute a new rhetoric of ‘democratic markets’ for the false metaphor of the ‘free market’.”

Hang on! Didn’t ”liberal” used to mean laissez faire? Today, the dominant religion is liberal economics, which the Financial Times defines as “Another term for the classical theories of economics emphasising the concept of the free market and laissez-faire policies, with the government’s role limited to providing support services.” Neoliberalism, John Williamson’s Washington Consensus, which seeks to transfer control of the economy from public to the private sector and deregulate markets, has been the dominant religion of globalisation.

What Massey seems to be talking about is Keynesianism rather than liberalism as it is generally understood. Keynesianism is defined by the FT as: “optimum economic performance could be achieved by influencing aggregate demand through government fiscal (public spending and taxation) policy, not through the free market philosophy characterised by the classical and neo-classical schools.” FDR’s New Deal was Keynesianism in practice.

What the American right wing, as typified by such great intellects as Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter, mean by “liberal”, does not have to mean anyone as dangerous as a real communist or socialist of any kind. Let the unfortunate John Kerry stand as an emblem of liberalism. The right hated him because he spoke French, liked fine wines and had an extremely rich wife. He represented the hated élite, unlike GW Bush, who was also rich and privileged but affected folksy ways and was of limited accomplishment or intellect. Perhaps more important for these rightniks is cultural issues such as abortion and gay marriage.

Conclusion

Let Professor Kimlicka have the last word:

“Dire warnings about liberalism’s inability to contain the centrifugal tendencies of individual freedom can be found in every generation for the last three centuries, yet it appears that liberal societies have managed to endure while various forms of monarchy, theocracy, authoritarianism, and communism have come and gone… the basic language of liberalism – individual rights, liberty, equality of opportunity – has become the dominant language of public discourse in most modern democracies.”

It’s all Greek to me!

This article was published in The Nation on December 25 2011

 

 

Beware of Greeks bearing gifts. Democracy is often thought of as a gift from ancient Greece. Athens is one of the first known democracies – functioning around 508 BC. Other Greek city states set up democracies, and most followed an Athenian model – an experiment in direct democracy, where the people do not elect representatives to vote on their behalf but vote in their own right on legislation and executive bills. This did not mean universal suffrage, but participation did not depend on economic status.

 
There is little connection between the democratic city-states of classical times and the Greece of 2011. The nation as it is today is very different and its geography makes it somewhat difficult to administer. Modern Greece has a population of nearly eleven million and the nation is spread over many distant islands as well as the mainland. The main ethnic groups are Greeks 93.76%, Albanians 4.32%, Bulgarians 0.39%, Romanians 0.23%, Ukrainians 0.18%, Pakistani 0.14%, Russians 0.12%, Georgians 0.12%, Indians 0.09% and others 0.65%.Two-thirds of the population live in urban areas, with Athens having four million residents.

 
Greece is linguistically homogeneous, with most people using Greek as their first or only language. However, former PM Papandreou was not comfortable with the language, having spent much of his life in exile. Gia tis kalpes! he was supposed to say.”To the ballot boxes” ! What he said was Gia tis kaltses! “To the socks!”

 

 
Greece became independent in 1830, but foreign interference kept the fragile fledgling nation in a servile condition, bullying it into joining the global capitalist economy. Before the modern Greek state assumed its present form after the First World War, communities in the trading cities already had a long history of running their own school systems, hospitals, and orphanages. Through local and communal organisation, by the mid to late nineteenth century, the Greeks were one of the most prosperous and dynamic groups in Southeast Europe.

 

 
As the Greek state expanded, it undermined that spirit of local autonomy and self-sufficiency but did not replace it with centralised competence. In the 1920s, autonomous local elites were replaced by a new group of people skilled at forging a relationship with the state. The new local leaders built up party machines by channelling funds from central government, which was heavily complicit in the patronage culture.

 
After the Second World War, the nation-state continued to be weak and failed to build a resilient system of social protection. The Greek political system has always been authoritarian and centralised, artificially imposed on a fragmented society traditionally centred on local loyalties, the extended family and community values. This has been the recipe, as in Ireland and Sri Lanka, for a politics of clientelism, cronyism, nepotism and corruption. Greece has its mudalalis and Gombeen men. The Greeks have resigned themselves to the lack of a responsive bureaucracy able to shape economic and social development.

 
EU funding only exacerbated patronage politics. According to Eurostat, public payroll expenses rose in Greece from 38% of state revenue in 2000 to 55% in 2009. Local elites became hostile to coherent national reform. In the mid-2000s, a local alliance in Salonika successfully resisted the granting of a concession to a major international port operator, to retain management of it themselves.

 
Writing in Foreign Affairs, Antonis Kamaras has hope for a return to tradition: “A majority of Greeks today cannot see a way out of the pit their country is in. But they need only look to their grandparents to find a way out… By decentralising, the Athens government will both revive the nation’s distinguished legacy of local autonomy and move the country closer to the European norm in terms of delegation of power and authority.” He also recommends marshalling resources and know-how from the extensive Greek diaspora.

 
Kamaras may be deluding himself when he calls for local institutions to be “pushed into the non-profit sector”. Although the Washington Consensus has clearly been a disaster, its acolytes are now taking over power from elected politicians and demanding austerity measures which punish the victims and reward the culprits. Traditionally strong family ties are collapsing and the Greek state is unable to help. Before the financial crisis, Greece had the lowest suicide rate in Europe at 2.8 per 100,000 inhabitants. Statistics released by the Greek Ministry of Health show a 40% rise in suicides between January and May compared to the same period last year.

 

 
Robert Reich asked on Huffington Post: “Which do you trust more: democracy or financial markets? Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou decided in favour of democracy …when he announced a national referendum on the draconian budget cuts Europe and the IMF are demanding from Greece in return for bailing it out.” Reich believed that, “without the austerity measures the rest of Europe and the IMF are demanding, the Greek economy has a better chance of growing and more Greeks are likely to find jobs.” He asked: “Shouldn’t Greeks be able to make this decision for themselves?… So which is it? Rule by democracy or by financial markets? Based on what’s happened in America, I’d choose the former.”

 
Reich was too optimistic. Merkel and Sarkozy quickly stamped on this exercise of democracy. Papandreou was replaced by Lucas Papademos, a former vice-president of the European Central Bank, who promptly installed in the government a far-right group banned since the military government lost power in 1974. Nevertheless, opinion polls showed voters were resigned to the new arrangement. This might be a weary acceptance that a technocratic administration might be preferable to scoundrel politicians. Greek politicians rarely venture out in public, and when they do, even the most obscure MP has a bodyguard. Even foreign interference might guarantee an honest and competent government acting in the interests of the country.