Liberalism's dirty little secret

Liberals don’t get much love these days.  They are called many things by their self-appointed enemies.  They are called progressives, radicals, socialists, even communists.  These are the preferred terms from the right.  But their detractors from the left are equally contemptuous, dismissing them as elitists, establishment types, secret conservatives, sellouts, defenders of the status quo.  All these opponents, though they agree on little else, will agree to label liberal positions as extreme positions.  And all of them will defend political opinions that they claim are far removed from supposedly liberal ones.  So the self-appointed enemies of liberalism, though all considerably to the left or to the right of the offending liberals, will agree that liberals must be extremists, without needing to agree on exactly how they are so.

But consider: anything that is considerably removed from your own familiar point of view will seem extreme, perhaps even radical.  Never mind that, by the same measure, you would have to consider yourself equally extreme, since you’re exactly as far from them as they are from you.  And indeed the liberal position seems so very far from those who occupy the far right of the political spectrum, and equally so from those who occupy the far left.  And so they can conspire to agree that liberalism is extreme, since from each perspective liberalism is equally distant.  They can then dismiss it without further consideration.  Yet someone looking in from outside of this broad political spectrum might well scratch their head and observe that it is lonely in the middle.

This is liberalism’s embarrassing secret.  In the context of contemporary politics, liberalism merely occupies the region nearest the center of the broad political spectrum—otherwise known as the land of moderation and compromise.  Indeed, liberals by their nature tend to land between strong positions, perhaps because they find it difficult to justify any sort of extreme opinion.  Liberals tend to recognize that people-at-large subscribe to a wide range of values, and that even honest and intelligent people will inevitably disagree on what is true and what is worth pursuing.  So they recognize that if people-at-large take part in politics, they will have to find ways to compromise.  No one faction will get everything they want, at least not most of the time.  Such a situation would be the dictatorship of a minority, a minority bent on compelling the majority to surrender the things that mattered most to them, just to please the uncompromising few.  And so liberals recognize that everyone who takes part in politics will have to give up a few of the things that matter to them so that most participants will get at least some of the things that matter to them.  (Anyone who volunteers for an office party-planning committee understands that compromise is an inevitable part of the job.)

This means that a liberal cannot declare on principle that they will never compromise on any of their values.  A political society that refuses to compromise is a dictatorship.  It could hardly be otherwise, unless each and every individual in that society already happened to hold all of the same values to the same degree.  It is perhaps no surprise that the idea of dictatorship is better tolerated on both the right and the left extremes of the political spectrum.

Compromise requires respect for differences.  Respect for differences is called toleration.  Toleration of others requires self-control, that is, moderation of one’s own behavior.  Moderation is another word for staying in the middle of things—a place most likely to overlap with the views and values of most other people.  It means moving away from extreme positions, which, by definition, are occupied by the non-representative few, those least likely to hold widely-shared opinions.  It would seem, then, that whatever liberals actually stand for, it cannot be radical.

In fact, if one steps back and looks at the broad spectrum of political beliefs, liberals are inevitably found near the middle.  Of all political positions, theirs is least liable to charges of extremism or radicalism.  And that’s where functional government tends to happen, in the broad territory between extreme views.  That’s where administrations acceptable to the widest range of public opinion will eventually end up.  And since what is acceptable to the widest spectrum of political participants is likely to be compatible with broadly-accepted values and community practices, there is no obvious reason to think that liberal positions are incompatible with conservative ones.  Anyone who called themself a conservative would also have to fall within the broadly-acceptable center of public opinion, if the concept were to have any meaning.