When I first starting thinking about the idea that became Symposium, I was pretty insistent that I wanted to think of it as a journal of “liberalism,” reclaiming the word from its usual usage in American politics, where it basically means “anything on the left,” and using it to mean only advocacy of a free society.
This has long been something of a quixotic crusade among those of us who call ourselves “classical liberals,” so what made me think the time was ripe for it now?
Well, partly it’s because in the current moment, I sensed that the old “liberal versus conservative” terminology is already beginning to fall apart, that it is already widely acknowledged as inadequate to describe our real political alternatives—and perhaps more important, our real intellectual and cultural alternatives.
This was partially confirmed by a perceptive comment made a few years ago by National Review’s Jay Nordlinger.
I am aware—keenly so—that liberals lost their word, long ago. I'm talking about the word "liberal." And I'm talking about people such as Friedrich Hayek. They lost the word to progressives, statists, leftists....
Could conservatives lose their word, too? I mean, conservatives of the classical-liberal or Reagan stripe? Could they lose it to the nationalists, populists, and—I have just learned this word (I have to keep up)—integralists? I don't know.
But I know that ideas and principles and values are more important than labels
Nordlinger ends up, as many conservatives of his generation do, giving up on the fight as a largely symbolic and meaningless one.
Back in the 1990s, when I was making some fuss over words, Bill Kristol told me, “You have to use words as they are understood in your time and place.” This is true (whether we like it or not). In Australia, the right-leaning party is the Liberal Party. In 1932, President Hoover and his men were aghast that FDR and his men were calling themselves “liberals,” because they themselves were liberals, in their own minds!...
In the language game, or labeling game, majority rules (fairly or not).
Yes, words are used in a certain way because the majority decides to use them that way. And yet they still change, and they change because there are people who don't accept the majority usage and are determined to change it. Sometimes they push for the changes because they want to obfuscate the basic issues. That's the case for the "progressives" who opposed the whole idea of individual rights but who also observed that "freedom" and "liberalism" were words that (like "progress") commanded the public's moral and political loyalty. So they stole the label to cash in on the prestige of the word.
Why can't this be done by people who want to change the usage of a word for the purpose of clarifying the basic issues?
That is precisely what people are beginning to do, though we're still at the point of giving liberalism descriptors, such as “classical liberal” (though this denotes only a specific kind of liberal, those who emphasize advocacy of the free market).
In a new column, David Brooks gives us another descriptor: “philosophic liberals.” I love this because it combines broadness with precision. It casts a wide net while pointing us in the direction of the basic principles involved.
Here is how Brooks describes the need of the current moment.
Over the last decade or so, as illiberalism, cancel culture, and all the rest have arisen within the universities and elite institutions on the left, dozens of publications and organizations have sprung up. They have drawn a sharp line between progressives who believe in liberal free speech norms, and those who don’t….
This is exactly the line-drawing that now confronts the right, which faces a more radical threat. Republicans and conservatives who believe in the liberal project need to organize and draw a bright line between themselves and the illiberals on their own side.
Well, here we are, seeking (in part) to do precisely that.
This is more than just arguing over words or "semantics." Words stand for concepts. When we debate which words we use, we are really debating the ideas they stand for, and that often includes fighting to maintain the coherence of a concept's meaning by preventing its word from being used for disparate and incompatible things.
For example, is advocacy of freedom compatible with a philosophy that urges us to define ourselves by our racial or ethnic identity? That's the question tackled by Cathy Young this week in Symposium.
Is individual freedom compatible with a welfare state? Does the welfare state even contribute to individual freedom—or is this an illusion? Stay tuned, because we'll be debating that in the near future.
This sort of thing is what we're really talking about when we debate how we use the word "liberal." Not only is it a discussion worth having; it may be the only discussion really worth having right now.
One last note: I will occasionally use this space to reply to comments from readers. Last week, I got a note from someone who wishes Symposium well but complained that “the two profiles in the logo are both male and caucasian.”
I can’t say I was surprised by that reaction; in fact, I expected it. Yet it’s curious, because I know that the main models Sherri used for the mirrored profile in the logo were Katherine Hepburn and Frederick Douglass. She settled on them after searching through images of people with strong and interesting profiles to use as visual references for a freehand sketch. The result draws on this image of Hepburn for the chin and mouth, then from this image of Douglass for the nose and brow, shading back more to Hepburn by the time it reaches the hairline. She looked at a lot of other people, too—there just might be a touch in there of Houdon’s bust of Jefferson—while also keeping an eye on the shape of the chalice in the logo’s negative space.
But the wide net of visual references does reflect the fact that I deliberately gave Sherri a mandate that the profile be non-specific when it comes to race and gender. I already had some idea of the roster of authors I wanted to recruit. I knew it was going to be a diverse group, and I wanted any one of them to be able to see something of themselves in our logo profile.
Yet I suppose this ambiguity can cut both ways. It’s hard to judge gender or race from a mere silhouette, so it can be a bit of a Rorschach test, reflecting our own obsessions back at us. That just might be a metaphor for our times, about how easy it is for a society of diverse individuals to see themselves as separate and different from each other—or as sharing a universal ground of common humanity.