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September 18th, 2015 
Awake Goy [EXCERPTS] . . . Political philosophers and intellectual historians have their own take on “liberalism.”
For them, “liberalism” is a political ideology that took shape in Western Europe and on the British Isles in the early modern period, and that came into its own there and in North America by the late eighteenth century. . .
. . . Liberals think that there are principled limitations to the rightful use of state power; or, what comes to the same thing, that there are areas of individuals’ lives and behaviors that ought to be immune from (coercive) state interference.
In time, influential liberal thinkers extended this principle to societal interferences as well.
Because, of all the political values they uphold, liberals accord pride of place to individual liberty, freedom from coercive restraint, they seek to protect individuals not only from the state, but also from what the great nineteenth century liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill called “the moral coercion of public opinion.”
Another way to say more or less the same thing, that takes account of liberalism’s rise as a philosophy of tolerance that emerged in reaction to the wars of religion that devastated early modern Europe after the Protestant Reformation, would be to say that, in the liberal view, the political regime and the social order it superintends should be neutral with respect to competing “conceptions of the good,” or at least between conceptions that are in any way controversial. Religious convictions are conceptions of the good in this sense, though hardly the only kind.
The first liberals were at least as interested in economic liberties – in what the libertarian philosopher Robert Nozick called “freedom to engage in capitalist acts among consenting adults” — as in tolerance and the social and political liberties that sustain it.
Libertarians, “classical liberals,” still are. They also still think that economic and political liberties comprise a seamless whole. Mainstream liberals nowadays disentangle economic liberties from the rest.
The realization that capitalist acts can, and normally do, make most people less, not more, socially and politically free is an important reason why.
In recent decades, liberals have held various views about the moral and political virtues and shortcomings of free markets and private property. But the debates they have engaged in are almost entirely academic; hardly anyone in public life cares. When politicians make philosophical arguments, nine times out of ten it is only to advance the pecuniary and political interests of the capitalists they serve. . .
. . . Neoliberalism is classical liberalism adapted to the needs of late twentieth and early twenty-first century capitalists.
In our time and place, those capitalists are on the offensive, while everyone else is quiescent or in retreat. One consequence is that many of the social and political advances of earlier decades are in jeopardy or are already becoming undone.
Although neoliberalism came to the fore in the United States, the UK and former white dominions of the British Empire, and although the United States has been its global enforcer from Day One, people in the English-speaking world – especially in the United States — have only lately taken to using the word.
Perhaps this is because in political, not philosophical, contexts, “liberal” has a different meaning in America than nearly everywhere else.
This gives rise to certain ironies. What people at the left end of the mainstream spectrum, liberals in the American sense, want to preserve and expand is what neoliberal public policies work against.
Welfare state institutions are at the top of the list.
Those institutions are defensible from genuinely conservative points of view; indeed, they have a long and complicated, but generally supportive relation, with conservative political philosophy, as I will go on to explain. Nevertheless, the people we Americans call “conservatives,” the people on the right end of the spectrum, want to do them in.
This strangeness of this situation – which is plainly more than just linguistic – was easily overlooked when Americans didn’t yet acknowledge the deep affinities joining self-described conservative policies to liberal philosophical objectives.
But now that “neoliberal” has entered into the American vocabulary, the strangeness can no longer be ignored.
There are many reasons why “liberal” has come to mean what it does in the United States.
Part of the explanation has to do with the situation that got people talking about “American exceptionalism” in the first place – the comparative weakness, already evident a century ago, of the socialist movement in the United States.
Unlike elsewhere, progressive politics in America never broke free from a party system that took shape before industrialization set in; and it never quite accommodated to the rise of a self-conscious working class.
To be sure, socialism was finally on the rise in the United States in the years immediately preceding America’s entry into World War I; but it was too late. By then, progressives, even full-fledged socialists, were used to calling themselves “liberals,” and to having others think of them in those terms too.
The comparative weakness or tardiness of American socialism is not the main reason why. The exceptional nomenclature has more to do, instead, with the nature of liberal theory and practice in nineteenth and early twentieth century America.
Liberalism in America has always been about more than just free markets and private property. Securing political and social rights had been its main focus from the beginning, and from very early on, there were strains of liberal theory and practice that underwrote the movement to abolish slavery.
When the North’s victory in the Civil War finally settled the slavery question, the connections continued – politically, culturally and philosophically. By the second half of the nineteenth century, nearly all strains of American philosophical thought were profoundly liberal in both spirit and substance.
This exceptional situation went on for a long time; long enough for American liberal theory and practice to change enough to be able to accommodate political currents and popular aspirations very different from the ones that had given rise to liberalism centuries before.
It was different elsewhere, especially in continental Europe. There, progressive politics took shape in ways that earlier liberal traditions could not absorb.
This is why what took a socialist or social democratic form elsewhere took a liberal form here. The differences are not insignificant, but the affinities are plain. . .
Source Article from http://mondoweiss.net/2015/09/republicans-donors-coulters
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