This is what has happened to the word “liberalism.” In the nineteenth century, this word referred to an ideal of maximum individual liberty and minimum state interference, to put it generally. Today, it is being used to refer to something like the ideal of the welfare state, which involves many restrictions upon liberty. Now if those who use the word thus could be brought into a semantic disputation, I think they would argue that the new meaning is justified because the old meaning is no longer possible. And if we pushed them to explain why it is no longer possible, I think they would answer that “circumstances have changed.” I would want to ask them next what changed circumstances have to do with an ideal construct. What they have done is to take the old term “liberalism,” whose meaning polarized around a concept of personal liberty, and to use this to mean something like philanthropic activity through the machinery of the state. The two ideas are manifestly discrete, but they have used the word for the second idea because it carries with it some of the value connotations of the old one. The second idea is, according to them, the only context in which a benevolent man can now operate. In fact, however, liberalism in the old sense is still there as a viable ideal if the mind is disposed to receive that ideal. When they say that the old meaning is no longer possible in the circumstances, what they are really indicating is that they prefer the new circumstances. Then they make the substitution, in disregard of the transcendental basis of language. I believe that this is a very general truth. When a person blames a change of meaning upon changed facts, he is yielding to the facts and using them to justify a change that should not be made except by “ideal” consent. He is committing the fallacy of supposing that the reason for such change can lie outside the realm of discourse itself — that meaning must somehow tag along after empirical reality. All of this seems to reflect a purely materialist or “physicalist” view of the world. But if one believes that physical reality is the sole determinant of all things, including meanings, one collapses the relationship between what is physical and what is symbolic of meaning and value. it is another evidence of bow the modem mind is trying to surrender its constitutive powers to the objective physical world.

May one who has devoted a large part of his life to the study of the history and the principles of liberalism point out that a party that keeps a socialist government in power clearly has lost all title to the name “Liberal”. Certainly no liberal can in future vote “Liberal”.

In the late nineteenth century, liberals in Europe and America discovered that they were victims of a linguistic coup. They found that they were no longer regarded as liberals per se but as old liberals – a qualification that had bed foisted upon them by self-proclaimed new liberals.

That Liberalism may be a tendency towards something very different from itself, is a possibility in its nature. For it is something which tends to release energy rather than accumulate it, to relax, rather than to fortify. It is a movement not so much defined by its end, as by its starting point; away from, rather than towards, something definite. Our point of departure is more real to us than our destination; and the destination is likely to present a very different picture when arrived at, from the vaguer image formed in imagination. By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos.

Liberalism, for all its virtues, has begun to develop a sense of entitlement, and needs time to rediscover its soul.

Now the argument that I make in my book is that part of the current disaffection with liberalism is not from any of its basic principles, but... is the result of certain deformations of liberal principles that were carried to extremes that led... to bad outcomes... [T]here's a move in this direction on the right and... on the left.

Liberalism itself has failed, and for a pretty good reason. It has been too often compromised by the people who represented it.

War has always been fatal to Liberalism. "Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform" have no meaning in war. Moreover, a nation, to make war effectively, must be prepared to surrender individual right and freedom for the time being. If the war is prolonged, that submission becomes a habit. Victory is the triumph of force and not of reason. After every great war there is a period during which belligerent nations incline to divide into two extreme camps—roughly known as revolutionary and reactionary. In that temper Liberalism is at a disadvantage. That is why it is today at a discount throughout Europe. Even in America its doctrines assume the form of a dictatorship. The temporary collapse of the Liberal Party in this country was inevitable from the moment it became responsible for the initiation and conduct of a great war. The instinct of the ordinary Liberal in that respect was sound. The War therefore made him uneasy.

Canada is sinking deeper and deeper into illiberalism--in the name of liberal values

Privately owned industry and production for individual profit are no longer compatible with social progress and have ceased to work out to humane and civilized ends.

Liberalism, as we have known it, is dead beyond resurrection.

The really notable thing about the elections is the political "cleavage" they denote. It will be an ill day when, as in France, our political lines of division coincide with our social and religious lines. Yet that is what this election points to. Liberalism is becoming more and more coincident with Nonconformity; it is becoming less and less common among men of the higher social class. The bulk of the nobles and the gentry, almost all the parsons, the bulk of the lawyers, I fear an increasing number of doctors, are all Conservative. I see that Liberals have an intellectual work to do as well as a directly political. I mean that they must convert the upper classes as well as organise the lower. And this perhaps may force on us soon a higher and a more intelligent Liberalism than we have now.

Liberals, largely comprised of the professional managerial-class that dutifully recycles and shops for organic produce and is concentrated on the two coasts, have profited from the ravages of neoliberalism. They seek to endow it with a patina of civility. But their routine and public humiliation has ominous consequences. It not only exposes the liberal class as hollow and empty, it discredits the liberal democratic values they claim to uphold. Liberals should have abandoned the Democratic Party when Bill Clinton and political hacks such as Biden transformed the Democratic Party into the Republican Party and launched a war on traditional liberal values and left-wing populism. They should have defected by the millions to support Ralph Nader and other Green Party candidates.

Take the term ‘liberal’ away from the political left. ‘Liberal’ (like ‘progressive’), implies a reasoned, forward-thinking approach to life. It comes from the same root as ‘liberty’ and doesn’t reflect political leftism. The term liberal should never be applied to an advocate of statism.