Name: Liberalism's abandonment of individual freedom and scepticism of authority is now complete
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Liberalism's abandonment of individual freedom and scepticism of authority is now complete

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Where did the liberals go? I don’t mean the remnant of a party with the name in it. It is many years since the Liberal Democrats have been either liberals or democrats. But like other parties across the globe, the term 'liberal'&nbsp;lingers like a memory of a nobler instinct.In some countries it is attached to a party of the Left, sometimes to one of the Right. In America this shape-shifter of a term long-ago became a synonym for 'leftie' and something not dissimilar has happened in Britain. Some years back the broadcaster .He must have known that he meant something quite different: 'Labour voting', or 'metropolitan', or even 'statist'&nbsp;would be more accurate. If the BBC was stuffed with true liberals, the corporation wouldn’t be in the mess that it is.&nbsp;Because before it became the most abused word in politics, the true liberal was a deeply recognisable type. The liberal mind – the liberal person – was discernible across party political boundaries. The tradition of David Hume and John Stuart Mill went deeper than day-to-day politics.It was informed by a belief in individual freedom and a scepticism of authority. It also produced an ideal: a certain type of inquiring, . It had confidence in the notion that open debate was necessary to establish the truth, a truth that might be quite different to contemporary orthodoxy, and that in a fair battle between ideas that were bad and ideas which were good, the bad ideas could not hope to win out.How dead that instinct and the type of mind that had confidence in it now seems.Anyone doubting that should spend five minutes on any social media platform. Look at the glee with which users are willing to advocate toleration for me but not for thee. When one of their friends or heroes is barred from a platform like Twitter they howl and scream. When one of their foes is barred from the same platform they crow and cluck with glee and satisfaction. How eager these people are to .Meanwhile, the overlords of these platforms are either crusading Left-wingers with a tenuous understanding of liberal thought or they are hopeless inepts like Jack Dorsey of Twitter. His tortured handwringing over the epitomised the corruption of contemporary liberalism: an open internet and a "global public conversation” are our best way of achieving greater common human understanding, he conceded, except of course if you stray from the orthodoxy.Yet there is no greater example of the disappearance of true liberalism, and the transformation of its supposed proponents into something else entirely, as in the area of our lives that has been most radically changed this past year: our enforced isolation in our own homes.At any previous stage in British history such a move would have been almost unthinkable. Certainly, the almost wholesale obedience to it would have been almost unimaginable. As Lord Sumption among others has noted, in the past year the nation has undergone an invasion into our personal freedoms of a kind unprecedented throughout our long history.You might be persuaded that this is necessary. But given the and life-stifling efforts, a liberal mind would inquire whether they are proportionate to the problem they are meant to solve – whether the medicine might be worse than the cure. It would not slavishly follow established authority, however well-credentialed, and it would certainly not just do what it is told.It would balance the justice of losing freedoms against the necessity of controlling a virus that can kill certain groups. It would question whether it is right that our supposedly liberty-loving Government does not trust the law-abiding majority to act in the interest of themselves and others, instead denouncing them as irresponsible and relying on heavy-handed police enforcement and fines.A liberal would ask whether history will judge what we have done since the pandemic began as the right course of action, or whether we might have made a mistake.&nbsp;That so few have asked these questions is indicative of how far our society has moved away from the philosophy of Mill and Hume. On both the Left and Right, many now evidently prize security, or safety, or fairness above anything else. Once the emergency is over and we discover how much of our old lives we are permitted to resume, we will also discover how much our society really cares about freedom.That our national broadcasters have failed to ask any of these questions, however, is a scandal that explodes the myth that they are in any way 'liberal'. Instead, the BBC’s reporting has filled that narrow gap between what the proponents of lockdowns are demanding and what fresh restrictions the Government is prepared to accept.The broadcasters have joined in the denunciations of the public as irresponsible. They report on the scale of the health crisis, but almost never on the scale of the sacrifices in liberties lost, educations trashed, businesses driven to bankruptcy, and futures ruined by the corresponding lockdown measures.Worse, the so-called liberals are complicit in another pernicious trend surrounding this debate. For an extra layer of authoritarianism is now being laced over the top of these already deeply arduous demands: the demand for complete and total uniformity of opinion on lockdown.For many people in Britain today it is enough that the government says something and tells us what to do as a result. For others, a degree of scepticism exists. Such people should be cultivated, even defended. Instead, they are abused and discouraged with every tool to hand. Their questions about proportionality are mischaracterised as Covid denial or conspiracy-thinking.&nbsp;Why do those who ardently defend the policies of the Government so fear the tiny number of figures who question the settled orthodoxy of the day? Why do they heap abuse, and put every death at the door of the few people who question any aspect of what we are doing? Why can they not see that there are deep questions that need asking about the balance between our nation’s health and its economy (to mention just two) for years to come?Of course, the claim is that these are unusual times, that we are in the midst of a pandemic and that extraordinary times call for unusual measures. But we will always live in extraordinary times. What matters is the response you have to the times you find yourselves in and the principles you trust in to guide you.&nbsp;So why has this age become so censorious? So unwilling to believe that a contest of ideas needs to be risked if we are going to arrive at any truth? You could say that it is because of the technology we all now have at our fingertips – devices that have transformed the world and given each individual the opportunity to make themselves infamous at the press of a thumb. Or you could say that it is because we have never seen anything like the pandemic that we are going through today. The truth is that it is these things plus one major, underlying shift.Not just the turning of the very idea of truth into a relative concept, but the loss of that guiding, liberal spirit that believed that there was a way to get to that truth. And that open-minded, sceptical and brave disagreement was that way. Our age seems to think that belief was wrong.Another thing historians might chalk up to its list of errors.Related TopicsAdvertisementRelated TopicsWe rely on advertising to help fund our award-winning journalism.We urge you to turn off your ad blocker for The Telegraph website so that you can continue to access our quality content in the future.Thank you for your support.Need help?Visit ourpage.Close

Where did the liberals go? I don’t mean the remnant of a party with the name in it. It is many years since the Liberal Democrats have been either liberals or democrats. But like other parties across the globe, the term 'liberal'&nbsp;lingers like a memory of a nobler instinct.In some countries it is attached to a party of the Left, sometimes to one of the Right. In America this shape-shifter of a term long-ago became a synonym for 'leftie' and something not dissimilar has happened in Britain. Some years back the broadcaster .He must have known that he meant something quite different:...

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Douglas Murray

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Liberalism's abandonment of individual freedom and scepticism of authority is now complete

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