Illiberalism and Permissivism
Aug 28, 2009 History, Topical
Posted by
G Miller
One of the greatest fallacies of the modern era is to use the term of Liberalism to label those whom we call liberal today. I think that we do this, because they themselves claim the appellation of liberal and we simply concede the use. Those on the other side of issues from “liberals” often convert the term to a pejorative to diminish its positive impact. The loss of this term in its original and historic use within the American tradition has been a loss of understanding of the American Ideal of true classical liberalism.
In the classical sense, Liberalism is the rejection of sovereignty in the state in favor of the concept of individual sovereignty in the people. Up until the liberal period in western society, sovereignty was usually vested in a monarch, parliament, or some other state entity. All individuals within the dominion of the sovereign were nothing more than subjects of the sovereign. Their own natural sovereignty was not recognized or granted to them by the sovereign of the state.
Many philosophers and political thinkers began prior to the liberal era to theorize and later declare that all people were born sovereign and that their sovereignty had been commandeered by those in whom state power was then vested. This radical idea was treasonous in many nations and was only theoretical until a state would arise that would challenge the old notions of vested power. The moment that allowed the theory of liberalism to become practice arrived in an attempt of colonists subject to a distant power to retain liberty that had only been obtained by accident on the part of the host state.
The British crown at the time of the American revolution may have been under the authority of a liberal constitution established in the Cromwell rebellion, but it never gave the people living in the homeland of the empire the kind of individual sovereignty that the colonists enjoyed only through the inability of the crown to restrict them across the Atlantic. When the restrictive power of the crown increased through the expansive influence and power of the growing British empire, the American colonists would not concede the liberty they came to appreciate was theirs.
The declaration of independence and later the constitution named a liberty that had already been part of the American tradition. Subsequent movements of abolitionism of slavery and reconciliation with the native populations with time bore fruit. The journey had been hard and bloody.
Growing along side the expansion of true classical liberalism, modern “liberalism” also grew. It has always been mislabeled, because it has nothing to do with the liberation of individual sovereignty. In fact, the liberal acceptance and experimentation of anything counter to normative culture often pursues expansion of the state in its favor. One can see that liberals so called are neither liberal nor open-minded. They are only counter-cultural and permissive of anything counter-cultural. They are illiberal.
Illiberalism, if further named could be called permissivism. Permissivism is a term that must be used, because it explains it all. If you would like to permit abortion, the left is your ally. Want to have gay marriage, the left is your ally. Activist courts, Czars instead constitutionally reviewed cabinet members, money confiscated from one citizen to give to another, expansive administrative bureaucracies bound by no one and no constitution, indoctrination in schools, state-sponsered healthcare, and on and on. The ideology of permitting anything as long as it is new, expansive, and will solidify your life statement of not being like your parents is the leftist’s ideology.
When Mussolini first became an international political figure, he was celebrated for his new ideas. Socialism was stale and unworkable to many leftists. After all, the government must take over all industry for it to work. The political and logistical implications of such an implementation were seen by many un-constrained permissives as impossible or at least improbably executable. Mussolini’s idea of simply regulating businesses into large corporate entities that would be easier to infiltrate, influence, or bully was so much more practical.
Mussolini himself was a died-in-wool socialist from birth getting even his given name, Benito, from the mexican socialist revolutionary Benito Juarez. Benito Mussolini was lionized in American and western culture for brief time as his ideas were fresh and had not yet been carried to their only conclusions. It was the permissives that called themselves progressives that simply loved these new and unusual ideas.
Tags: Classical Liberalism, Consitution, History, Liberty