It hit me in a flash last week as I listened to a professor explain why arguments that sound plausible can turn out to be false. The postliberals, the NatCons, the alt-rightists, the integralists, the Groypers — they all base their case on a fallacy. Philosophers call it “equivocation”, and it means using the same word to mean different things as suits your argument.
They do it with two words in particular: “liberal” and “globalist”. It is worth considering them in turn.
The word liberal has a handsome etymology. The Latin word “liber” meant a free citizen, as in someone not enslaved. From a different derivation, it also meant book.
Those two meanings were blended in the early English word. To be a liberal was to favor freedom: freedom of speech, worship, association, and contract. It thus meant, by implication, wanting constrained government, low taxes, and strong property rights. Yet it did not mean anarchy. It also meant — this is where the “book” part came in — the virtuous application of wisdom.
The great 17th-century poet and philosopher John Milton drew a distinction between “license” and “liberty”. License meant being able to do whatever you liked, and was nothing special. A beast in the wilderness had license. Liberty, on the other hand, meant making moral choices in the informed knowledge of what might follow.
When the word entered our political lexicon from the Hispanic world in the early nineteenth century, it still had that high-minded meaning. Liberals were for free trade, property rights, and equality before the law; conservatives were for tradition, aristocracy, and ecclesiastical authority.
In most of Europe, as in Latin America, the word liberal still has this meaning. Javier Milei uses it as his self-descriptor. But in the United States, starting in the 1890s and accelerating during the 1930s, the word began to mean “left-wing.” Sometimes, that elision was deliberate. FDR, in particular, applied the word “liberal” to various interventionist policies in the hope that its positive connotations would rub off on them. In fact, no semantic trick could make the New Deal successful. Instead of the word gilding progressive policies, the progressive policies tarnished the word. By 1988, forlorn Michael Dukakis voters were waving placards asking, “What’s wrong with being a liberal?”
That shift had classical liberals, a retronym they never applied to themselves, scrabbling for a new moniker. In the 1940s, some began to call themselves “libertarians”, until then a word associated with French radicals and anarchists. In a 1960 postscript to The Constitution of Liberty, Friedrich Hayek bemoaned the ugliness of that “manufactured term”.
Postliberals deliberately blur the two meanings, as Roosevelt did, but from the opposite perspective. Liberalism is their all-purpose boo-word, covering both the traditional sense of “individualist” and the modern sense of “left-wing.” The idea that limited government is compatible with conservative values, that less authority for clerks, licensors, and regulators means more authority for school principals, religious leaders, and heads of families, is not considered. Yet, it was the basis of the American order for more than two centuries.
An equivalent semantic shift is now happening over globalization. Until an eyeblink ago, that word meant removing barriers so that people were not penalized for, or prevented from, buying goods or services from outside their country. But, over the past decade or so, it has taken on a new meaning. A “globalist” is now someone who wants the world to be ruled from Davos or Brussels. He wants human rights courts to strike down national governments. He wants to send entitled “gimmegrants” across every border. He wants to destroy the West. Again, that the free flow of goods, services, and ideas is itself part of the Western patrimony is not considered. Two completely contradictory notions — one to do with restricting the state’s power over the individual, the other to do with increasing it — are deliberately conflated.
WHY HAS NO AMERICAN FALLEN OVER THE EPSTEIN FILES?
For a lot of people under the age of 25, the older meanings of these words don’t register at all. Argue that tariffs are making Americans poorer, and they will ask why you want to flood the country with illegal immigrants.
Yet Hayek was right when, in that same postscript, he argued that what was called “conservative” in the Anglo-American world was what Europeans meant by “liberal.” Because the English Whig tradition, particularly the US Constitution, its sublime culmination, was what the rest of the world would call “liberal.” By elevating the individual above the collective, conserving that tradition was, in the old sense of the world, a liberal endeavor. Lose the meaning of those words, and we lose our sense of who we are as a people.