What is it about the ‘l’ word that just makes politicians want to attack it? Sixteen summers after George Herbert Walker Bush based his entire campaign for the US presidency on assaulting his ‘liberal’ opponent, Michael Dukakis, up pops Tony Blair – a man probably somewhat more liberal than Dukakis – to launch a broadside against ‘the 1960s liberal, social consensus on law and order’.
In fairness to Blair, his speech was not a wholesale assault on 1960s liberalism per se. The Prime Minister was careful to praise the ‘huge breakthrough in terms of freedom of expression, of lifestyle, of the individual’s right to live their own personal life in the way they choose’. The decade, he went on, ‘was the beginning of a consensus against discrimination, in favour of women’s equality, and the end of any sense of respectability in racism or homophobia’.
It was thus somewhat unfair for the likes of Robin Cook to come running to the defence of anti-discrimination laws, the right to choose and gay rights as if Blair had attacked them. Many newspapers and commentators chose to reduce the Prime Minister’ssoundbite to him burying ‘the 1960s liberal, social consensus’.
But why did Blair feel the need to use the ‘l’ word in the first place? His attack was, in fact, aimed at the ‘freedom without responsibility’ culture which, he noted, came ‘alongside but not necessarily because of’ the wider movements of the 1960s (and which, he might also have added, reached its peak in the ‘no such thing as society’ 1980s).
Of course, the Prime Minister’s use of the term ‘liberal’ was not a slip of the tongue and his aim was not to attack the substance of the social liberal agenda that his government, with its amendments to the race relations act, support for civil partnerships and lowering of the age of consent, continues to push forward on many fronts. Instead, Blair was taking aim at the very same caricature of liberalism that the right has been allowed to propagate on both sides of the Atlantic.
In the US particularly, ‘liberal’ is a term of political abuse designed to portray an opponent as unpatriotic, weak on defence and more concerned with the rights of offenders than the victims of crime. The links between national security and personal security are, furthermore, reinforcing and close in the public mind. Liberals are also caricatured by their opponents as unwilling to set standards and to make judgements about what is ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. Thus, writes that astute observer of the American political scene, EJ Dionne, liberals are ‘seen as unwilling to uphold a set of public values; they were plainly uneasy about using government to promote, encourage, and – where violent crime was at stake – enforce the community’s shared moral commitments.’
In Britain, the weakness of the official opposition has opened the way for the rightwing media, personified by the Daily Mail, to lead the assault on liberalism and the permissive, ‘anything goes’ society. Liberals, we are told by the likes of Melanie Phillips, Anne Atkins and Simon Heffer, won’t defend hardworking families from a tide of asylum-seekers grabbing benefits, gays demanding marriage and child criminals terrorising their neighbourhoods.
So, if we can’t beat the right’s attack on liberalism, should we join them? During the closing days of the 1988 presidential campaign, Michael Dukakis saved the Democrats from total humiliation if not defeat by finally admitting that he was, after all, a ‘liberal’, tacitly conceding that the election was not simply, as he had famously declared, about ‘competence, not ideology’.
However, Dukakis made clear that he was a liberal in the tradition of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman and Jack Kennedy. He had finally cottoned on, as one commentator put it, that ‘tough liberals win and weak liberals lose’, and that real liberals have always believed in defending their country, protecting the innocent against criminals and recognising that, at home and abroad, ‘good’ and ‘bad’ does indeed exist.
The Prime Minister is correct that the left does not have to defend those who actually do prefer liberalism as it is caricatured by the right. But maybe, just as some minorities have empowered themselves by adopting the terms of abuse directed against them, it is time to reclaim and start defending and celebrating a much-maligned, misunderstood word. What’s so great about ‘conservatism’ anyway?