What Is A Liberal?

There is a basic fallacy abroad that liberals are all the same, and it just isn’t true. American liberals are notably different than Europeans of the same political label based on different histories and a different view of economics.

If you want to study American liberalism the course work is not onerous. Read the works of John Locke, Charles de Secondat (Baron de Montesquieu), Jean Jacques Rousseau, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Those were the people who were read by the men pushed the Revolutionary War and founded the United States.

That prepares you to understand the American branch as expressed in the works of Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and James Madison.

The core of the American branch is found in two passages that should be familiar to everyone who has graduated from high school:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
…

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.

Throw in the Bill of Rights and you have the basis for American liberalism.

I would note a difference you will find between the European and American versions. In the Declaration of Independence you see “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”, but John Locke’s version was “Life, Liberty and Property”. The American version of liberalism separates the politics and the economics. Socialism, communism, capitalism are economic terms, not political. There is no real linkage between the two fields. People who think there is a linkage are thinking like Europeans.

Do you believe in the rights of “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness”? Do you believe that the government should “promote the general Welfare”? Congratulations, you’re a liberal.

If you say you believe in those things, but aren’t a liberal, you are lying to someone, probably yourself.