Which party would Humpty Dumpty join?
Posted on Sep 04 2007 | Tagged as: Words, Politics
“When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more, nor less.”
– Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s Through The Looking Glass.
There’s a lot of that going on in the argument over Andrew Anthony’s book, one of many questioning what’s happened to “liberal values”.
This post of Gary’s (synopsis: “What the hell is a liberal anyway?”) pretty much speaks for me too, and has attracted a monumentally stupid comment, which I’ve just spotted is exactly the same as a comment on the blog to which Gary links.
“Liberals are socialists”, it says, and instantly pushes my rage button.
What the commenter presumably means is that in the US people say “liberal” when they largely mean “socialist”. But calling one thing another thing doesn’t make it so, no matter what Humpty Dumpty might say. It’s like Newspeak, only dimmer.
Sunny Hundal — despite being one of Comment Is Free’s best contributors — seems to be having similar difficulty. In this latest piece, he writes:
“To be socially liberal, in my view, is to be more mindful of compassion and empathy for others. On the basis of that compassion we choose to make lifestyle choices (taking public transport, boycotting Nestle, going vegetarian, donating to charity for example) and do our bit.”
That’s what I’d label “crustyism” rather than liberalism.
For instance, of the examples that Hundal gives I only take public transport, and then only when I have to. Yet on the Politcal Compass test I come in at around (-1.5, -6):
(Click to make image bigger. The dot’s in the bottom-let quadrant.)
“Liberal values”, if we must define them, boil down to: (a) not telling people what to do, and (b) not accepting being told what to do. Or as Tim puts it: “Being liberal is to agree with JS Mill: freedom and liberty are the things policy should encourage, to the point that people should have as much of both as they can manage without actually popping.”
The rest — the generally Being Nice espooused by Hundal, etc — might be associated with certain expressions of liberalism in Left-ish circles, but to claim that they’re the same thing is doubleplusungood.