Liberalism

Liberalism, as it relates to American politics, has transformed drastically since it was first applied to the government of the United States by the Founding Fathers in the late eighteenth century. Drawing mainly from the ideas of Enlightenment philosopher John Locke, these men defined liberalism as freedom from government tyranny and the right of all people to hold individual liberties. But after a lengthy development period that encompassed the nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth century, liberalism transitioned from a conservative, small-government ideology to a dynamic Democratic platform of government-sponsored social programs and progressivism, exhibited in the policies of such leaders as President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In the twenty-first century, this kind of liberalism forms the core of Democratic political thought.

Overview: The Original Liberalism

American liberalism’s beginnings lie in the political writings of various Enlightenment philosophers such as Baron de Montesquieu, David Hume, and especially Englishman John Locke. In the last decades of the seventeenth century, Locke argued that the welfare of individuals should be the primary concerns of their states; indeed, Locke wrote, governments were created by and for the people themselves to provide for their citizens’ God-given rights to life, liberty, and personal property. Locke opposed the generally accepted role of government at the time—that of an educator, moral guide, or tyrant that interfered in the lives of its subjects. Rather, Locke believed that the state’s only task was to ensure the continued protection of its citizens’ natural right to life. Because of their revolutionary nature in this time of absolute monarchical authority, Locke’s views on this subject came to be called liberal.

Locke’s writings proved enormously influential to Enlightenment readers, who began acquiring more courage to protest the god-like power of their statesmen and kings. In revolutionary America in the 1770s, this liberalism found an especially receptive audience in the men who would soon become the Founding Fathers of the United States. After enduring years of dictatorship at the hands of Great Britain, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and other American leaders interpreted liberalism to mean specifically that all people deserved freedoms of the mind—freedom of speech, religion, thought, and personal choices—without fear of criticism or abuse either from the state or society. Jefferson eventually infused these Lockean ideas into his Declaration of Independence, which proclaimed the United States a free nation of people who enjoyed uninhibited natural rights to liberty and happiness. This is what early American liberalism meant.

Liberalism Redefined

Throughout the 1800s, Americans retained the core definition of liberalism as the freedom to lead lives of happiness and personal choices without government intervention. Soon new waves of political philosophers began building upon the original idea of liberalism, taking a more antigovernment stance and becoming more accommodating of individual liberty. The English philosopher Jeremy Bentham, for example, argued that governments, in addition to keeping out of the lives of its people, should also practice utilitarianism, or the provision of the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. In 1851 Englishman Herbert Spencer added his law of equal freedom to the classical definition of liberalism. This dictated that all men and women were free to do anything they liked as long as it did not infringe on the liberty of others.

Even as it underwent these advancements throughout the nineteenth century, liberalism began drifting toward the American political right. Conservatives adopted the ideology as a response to the increasingly industrial nature of the United States; by 1900, Americans who felt oppressed and controlled by the dictatorial working conditions and overbearing economic power of factories and large corporations had latched onto classical liberalism as a defense against these types of authoritarianism. These Republicans identified their political persuasions as liberal in the sense that they supported a small and mostly uninvolved government that protected individual liberties. But when Democrat Franklin Roosevelt became president in 1933, all of this changed.

The Great Depression had begun with the great Wall Street stock market crash of 1929, and when Roosevelt came into office, he was faced with widespread American unemployment and poverty. To combat this, he enlarged the role of government to create a series of new social programs collectively called the New Deal. These programs included farm aid, public-works projects, and a social welfare system.

But Roosevelt outraged Republicans when he began applying the term liberal to these New Deal policies. To conservatives, being liberal meant supporting personal freedoms and a minimalist government; therefore, they believed themselves to be the undiluted liberals. Roosevelt, however, was working under a definition of liberalism espoused by Alexander Hamilton and revised by philosopher John Dewey. This definition proved appropriate in light of the growing influence of industry: citizens should be not only free from oppression, but also free to be happy and educated, have access to medical care, and own a home, job, and property. These were the goals that Roosevelt’s New Deal eventually achieved, and it was with Roosevelt’s administration that Democrats in the United States thereby assumed the moniker liberal.

Some Republicans still identified themselves as being liberal even into the 1950s and 1960s. They were referring to liberalism in its classical, Jeffersonian sense, but the term had assumed an entirely new meaning. Republicans eventually abandoned the term, and for the rest of the twentieth century, they criticized Democratic policies that they now dubbed too liberal, such as catering to the socialistic demands of the hippie culture and fighting for the civil rights of criminals. In the twenty-first century, American liberalism applies to the Democratic form of governance that supports large-scale welfare programs, same-sex marriage, and legal abortions. The traditional style of liberalism, as espoused by the Founding Fathers, survives today in the form of libertarianism, a conservative political movement that calls for small government and nearly unrestrained personal liberties.

Bibliography

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Beinart, Peter. “‘Liberal’ Is Good.” The Atlantic, 5 Feb. 2014, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/02/liberal-is-good/283617/. Accessed 7 Jan. 2025.

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