Ideology 101: liberalism

Entire books have been written to define ideology, college courses from freshmen surveys all the way through the graduate level study the idea. What is it? To put this broad and complex idea into a seven second soundbite, ideology is a belief structure to organize one's thoughts and apply to events and label people's personal philosophy.


Liberal is a word that gets thrown about alot in the media and politics but it is rarely used properly. Merriam-Webster has 6 definitions and 3 sub-definitions for the word dealing with generosity, open-mindedness and freedom, as well as a working definition for liberalism: "ideals of [the] individual especially economic freedom, greater individual participation in government, and constitutional, political, and administrative reforms designed to secure these objectives." Sounds pretty good eh? So how did this word become the epitath of choice for Republicans to use against Democrats when they themselves stand for many of the same ideas?


It has a lot to do with the title of this blog. In the 1930s, as we all learned in elementary school, the United States was stuck in the Great Depression and Franklin Roosevelt steered many reforms to make government more concerned with regular people's welfare. Hence the term "welfare liberalism" was born, usually written as "Liberalism" and is concerned with "positive freedom". Classical liberals then became known as Libertarians and maintained the Jeffersonian idea of "negative freedom" and limited government. The difference between positive and negative freedoms is the former seeks to empower people with freedom to do something while the latter is concerned primarily with keeping people free from restrictions such as government interference.

So when Republicans decry "big government" they are acting as Libertarians but many other groups exist within that party as well. Democrats are often Liberal in the sense that they do want government to do more than just maintain a military and police, to various degrees they believe government is responsible for the welfare of people. Under these conditions then, both major parties in America are liberal. Hard to believe? Yeah, me too.