What to Call Liberalism?

I’ve come up with a new label for what I am, and what I want you to become if we are going to succeed in building a good society.

Until recently I called it “true” liberalism. That insults my many good friends who call themselves liberal. It says, “I am true. You, sadly, are false.” “Real liberal” has the same problem. You are not even real. Some sort of ghost!

Now of course I actually believe that these dear “liberal” friends of mine are in a sense false and not real. It’s not that they are insincere in their claim to be liberal, but that they are mistaken in what they call it. And it’s not a matter of “mere” rhetoric. The rhetoric has big effects on politics.

In particular, many of my “liberal” friends believe in the opposite of liberalism. It started just after the brief peak of liberal ideology in the early 19^th century, as in the Spanish constitution of 1812 declaring that the “servile principle” was to be abolished. No more masters. A “New” or” Social” Liberalism was introduced during the 1880s in Britain, the home of liberalism. It is still with us. It says, “Let us bring in the powers of the state to coerce people into helping the poor, and meanwhile coercing the poor themselves.” For example, the clearing of slums was viewed as New Liberal. “I’ll knock down your houses,” it said to poor people, “because it’s good for you.” In the U.S. as late as the 1960s slums were knocked down to run super highways right through the center of cities. Unsurprisingly, the highways were used to segregate Black people from white, as in Chicago. And on and on. “Make it against the law to pay you less than a high minimum wage,” so that if employers don’t think you are worth it, you have no job at all.

So what to call the liberalism of Adam Smith and Mary Wollstonecraft and early J. S, Mill, and then people like Milton Friedman? What is often called “classical” liberalism, or in the U.S. “libertarianism,” both have their own problems. “Classical” makes liberalism sound out of date, which is incorrect. And “libertarianism” has never become clear in the minds of most Americans, even though its policies are in fact what most Americans want. My grandmother, born in the 1890s, had a good classical-libertarian principle: “Do what you want, but don’t scare the horses.” Yet some self-labeled libertarians in the U.S. these days are so coercively against any socialism that they’ve tilted fascist, and support Trump. Amazing. They scare the horses, and certainly me.

What’s my new label? “Sufficient” liberalism. I mean an equality of permission, not equality of income or opportunity—both of which involve coercion, and anyway are unattainable even roughly. But we can start giving people permission, tomorrow, by taking away the millions of regulations that clot the U.S. and the Brazilian economy. A woman can become an airline pilot, a Black can get a job in South Africa, poor people are allowed to live where they can pay the rent, without the state intervening, as it has, to segregate poor people in favelas.

No masters, no coercions. It suffices.

Weekly column in Folha de São Paulo, Brazil
Translated into Portuguese for the newspaper.