In today’s politics, there is a growing sense that liberalism has been tried and failed. Anti-liberal ideas we had thought long buried – the belief that inconvenient constitutional guardrails can be ignored and that democracy doesn’t matter unless our side wins – are now commonly accepted. This is true of both sides, but it’s especially true of the Left, which has come to dominate our culture and finds that liberalism gets in its way. Free-speech rights were all very well when the Left was the dissenter, but not after it ascended to power.
That is why conservatives in Britain and America should recognise that they’re the true liberal party. Disraeli thought that the Tory Party should stand for the common good of all Britons, and that’s precisely what liberalism seeks. Whatever else it might be, liberalism is an egalitarian creed that rejects special privileges for one race or group. Policies that abandon the criterion of universalisability don’t even count as moral theories.
In America, the GOP of Lincoln and Eisenhower was a proudly liberal party, and shorn of the candidate’s crudities that is what attracts voters to Trump. They recognise that a woke Democratic Party represents a betrayal of American liberalism, as found in the principles of the Founders and as restated by Lincoln.
But what then is liberalism? It’s not a grand philosophic theory but rather a set of virtues embedded in Western culture, in traditions such as kindness, magnanimity and individualism. We recognise their requirements, to the extent we share in that culture. Liberalism before Locke is a humble creed that thrills to the tales of chivalrous knights and sorrows with stories about little Match Girls.
‘Oh, no man knows,/ Through what wild centuries,/ Roves back the rose.’ Like Walter de la Mare’s rose, liberalism asks us to reach back to scarcely-remembered stories we read as children. Forget the philosophes and savants, and recall the Black Prince at Poitiers, serving King John II at table and praising his courage. (Historians doubt the story about the siege of Limoges, by the way). However fantastic the story in Froissart, the knightly virtue of magnanimity informs today’s understanding of the law of war, as found in the Geneva Convention and the jurisprudence of the American Supreme Court.
Philosophers might try to tell us what we owe other people if they count, but can’t tell us why they count. They might note that lying and cheating are not in our self-interest, but that’s just the morality of clever sociopaths. Instead, a proper moral understanding requires a sense of empathy for others, as awakened through the novels of Charles Dickens and the stories of Hans Christian Andersen. As liberals, then, conservatives will believe that the state should concern itself with questions of social welfare.
Liberals are on the side of individualism and have an instinctive aversion for those who would employ the heavy hand of the state to shape their preferences, particularly when this runs counter to common sense morality. Sir Larry Siedentop (who died in June) noted that individualism was a creation of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It replaced the family-based Roman religion and elevated the principle of free choice in marriage. It made each of us responsible for our sins and our salvation.
Some right-wingers are nevertheless troubled by individualism because they associate it with amoral creeds that refuse to second-guess personal preferences. They’re on the side of virtue, they say, and liberalism is not. As though there were no difference between Dwight Eisenhower and Hugh Hefner. They’re wrong, because liberalism arose from within the virtues and thus does not threaten them. By rubbing shoulders with our neighbours at the market, we cultivated a sense of republican virtue. From nationalists, we were shown the requirements of fraternity and the duty to attend to the worst-off of our fellow citizens. From the self-effacing virtues of modesty and diffidence, we learned to mistrust the morally arrogant and to respect the individuality of others. Through our admiration for virtuous people, we were taught liberalism.
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