Spare a thought for poor old ‘liberal’ caught up in the DA crisis
It’s been quite a week for insults. Shade has been thrown at Gwen Ngwenya and others who valiantly insist that the Democratic Alliance, despite its glaring expanse of pale naked flesh exposed to the elements, is still fully clothed.
But snide comments aimed at die-hard DA supporters are as nothing compared to the abuse flung at “liberal”.
If ever a word was tossed around far too liberally, with no thought as to its welfare or dignity, that word is “liberal”.
Despite its noble pedigree, poor old liberal seems to have degenerated into a dismissive label slapped on anyone who disagrees with the dominant ideology.
In the 1970s, the insulting phrase “women’s libbers” was applied by the upholders of right-wing patriarchy to those who sought political, social and economic equality for women. A couple of decades later this insult grew, in both scope and offensiveness, into the portmanteau word “libtard” — a combination of “liberal” and “retard” — which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “a contemptuous term for a person with left-wing political views”.
Lately, particularly in SA, liberal became associated with those who oppose traditionally left-wing ideas of equality, which is strange if you recall that — linguistically speaking at least — liberalism is the blood brother of liberation.
The word liberal was not born with any sort of political consciousness. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it entered English from Old French sometime in the 1300s, and for the first 100 years of its life was a synonym for generous, selfless, magnanimous and admirable.
In its adolescence, liberal became a bit of a rebel. In the 15th century it mostly meant “extravagant” or “unrestrained”, as in “liberal spending habits”.
In the 16th and 17th centuries it matured and took on the meaning most closely related to its Latin roots: the idea of being able to live and act freely, without artificial restraint. At the same time, liberal also came to mean tolerant, free from prejudice or bigotry.
This definition makes it easier to understand why people whose world views and political leanings are shaped by intolerance — plenty of whom live in “the land of the free” — would put liberals in the same camp as satanists.
Some might say that the American short-back-and-siders of the 1970s, who despised hippies and “libbers” and the equal rights they demanded, are no different from today’s Republican extremists who abhor “liberal” notions such as legal abortion for rape victims.
The use of “liberal” as an insult in SA is based on a different phase of the word’s history. Many blame Adam Smith for this. In The Wealth of Nations, published in 1776, Smith praised “the liberal system of free exportation and free importation”.
Smith’s belief in free trade (one wonders what he might have thought of Brexit) was aligned with what he called “natural liberty”, founded on the principle that: “Every man, as long as he does not violate the laws of justice, is left perfectly free to pursue his own interest his own way.”
On the surface that might sound like a pretty innocuous statement, but over the years it caused a split in the fundament of liberalism (sort of like what happened to the DA this week — although one would not call that a split so much as a shattering).
To ridiculously oversimplify things, the ensuing tug of war pitted proponents of economic freedom against advocates of social freedom. Both could conceivably be called liberals and there is certainly overlap between the two, just as there are liberals, in the original sense of the word, in every political party.
In The Devil’s Dictionary, written in 1911 by political and social commentator Ambrose Bierce, “conservative” is defined as “a statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the liberal, who wishes to replace them with others”.
This week, “DA” has appeared in the same sentence as “liberal” multiple times, mostly in a negative sense. There are plenty of words that have more than one meaning, or even opposite meanings, and it is in some ways apt that liberal has become an equal-opportunity insult, but it does not seem right that a word born to describe the best state to which humans can aspire has become yet another weapon used to divide and discriminate.
US professor of economics Daniel Klein, in a 2014 article for The Atlantic, agreed that the semantics of politics are confusing. “The principal presumption of today’s ‘liberalism’ often lies with the status quo, or even with the idea that the government should ‘do something’ to solve perceived problems,” wrote Klein. “Today, many of those who admire Adam Smith call themselves ‘classical liberals’. Maybe someday they will again be able to say simply ‘liberal’.” De Groot is deputy features editor