What sort of liberty are you talking about?
A new channel, Notes From The Past, has posted some interesting history videos (and some that seem to be not so much history as social commentary).
The most recent, How Liberalism Failed, attempts to outline what has happened to the concept of ‘liberty’ in America. Seems this one is behind paywall on their Substack, but it’s up for free on YouTube…
I’ll attempt to summarise and add my own thoughts…
For most (including me) the idea of the ‘death of liberty’ is due to a totalitarian group seizing power and enslaving the people. But has this been the case in America (and by extension the West)? The thesis of the video as far as I can tell is that the ‘death of liberty’ has been a shift from one definition of liberty to another - the later definition being more bondage than freedom - and reinforcing that new definition through policy and shifting cultural norms.
[Paraphrasing]: Oftentimes when Americans speak of liberty, it is closely linked with the ideas of liberalism. The problem is often attributed to the difference between the so called ‘Classical’ forms of liberalism (such as American Libertarianism) and the modern, progressive forms of liberalism (such as the ‘New Left’). There indeed are many more problems amongst the progressive forms of liberalism than there are with the classical types, but again this may not be the defining factor.
Much of the modern western worldview has been passed down from the American founding fathers. A controversial lot, with varying opinions and beliefs, they nevertheless attempted to create a nation in which man could not play God. Inheriting characteristics from their British forefathers, the Americans established liberty as a concept entailing the freedom of man from unjust power. This would manifest itself in the freedom of choice for man to pursue greatness; the pursuit of beauty, virtue, and other such beneficial things. These ideas were tied together in the famous phrase ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’, suggesting that all three were indeed interlinked. Vice and virtue were contradictory, and those who wished to pursue destruction were in contradiction to traditional liberty.
The French Revolution, being inspired partly by the American fight for independence, (not sure how accurate that is - I’m no expert on the French Revolution), would be a revolution for a different type of liberty - a radical utopianism of whatever-you-like style of freedom. Of course the French Revolution was a literal bloody mess, yet some Americans like Thomas Jefferson believed the French were pursuing the same type of liberty espoused by the Founding Fathers. But the French were coming at things from an enlightenment/‘age of reason’/atheism that defined their version of liberty. Unlike the theistic stance of the Founding Fathers, the the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, the French described liberty in Article 4 as such:
“Liberty consists of doing anything which does not harm others; thus, the exercise of the natural rights of each man has only those borders which assure other members of the society the fruition of these same rights. These borders can be determined only by the law”.
Sound like freedom right? Do what you want as long as it doesn’t breach the law or the liberty of others. The French spent a lot of their countryman’s blood securing this liberty and it was romanticized abroad - namely in America. But what was probably foundational in this definition of liberty was the assumption that the nature of man was fundamentally good - unlike the concept of original sin in which human nature is fundamentally flawed and in need of a Savior. In the ‘man is fundamentally good’ perspective, society should be on a trajectory of getting better as long as we can throw off the restraints preventing him from expressing his innate goodness. How’s that working out for everyone?
So from the French example liberty had now an expanded definition (for the Americans): No longer about using God-given ability and free will to pursue virtuous things, but rather about securing freedom to do whatever one wished - good or evil - so long as it did not conflict with the ‘law’ (or impeded others from the same do-whatever-you-like). The law, with no moral foundation, was then free also, to drift with whatever was the most influential thing at the time. Over two hundred years later, the Western view of liberty is now akin to the liberty espoused by the French Revolutionaries, not the founding Americans in the 1770s.
With such a liberty, any influential force (Technocrats, Jihadi Islamists, Elite Globalists, Communists, Atheists, Critical Theorists, Post-Humanists, all the extreme ‘isms’ and ‘ists’ of the world) that oppose the Christian moral foundation the Founding Fathers had in mind - could easily subvert the original liberalism into something completely different. And this, it seems, is what has happened.
So we are faced with the questions - What is liberal? What is liberalism? What is freedom?
Are we the most free within the bounds of a moral code? Or are we the most free when there is no restraint?
Why do the nations rage
and the peoples plot in vain?
The kings of the earth set themselves,
and the rulers take counsel together,
against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying,
“Let us burst their bonds apart
and cast away their cords from us.”
(Psalm 2:1-3 English Standard Version)
Sometimes we make an error in judgement, thinking that everybody is capable to handle philosophical and ethical discussions - in this case about freedom - with the same depth and vigour as we do. It is my opinion that the masses are quite comfortable with a set of rules for life that limits freedom extensively. In fact, they volunteer for it.
Most people don't know how to handle a broad definition of freedom like "Do what you want as long as it doesn’t breach the law or the liberty of others". I understand that those who wrote this wanted to cast as broad a net as possible, in order to encompass every human orientation. But for most folk, that's just not good enough.
I dare say, faced with this definition as guidance for their lives, most people will look for a leader (political, religious) to limit their freedoms in exchange for the "safety" of being in a group. Be it out of fear, ignorance or just plain lazyness to deal with the subject themselves. Don't underestimate that feeling. As a colleague of mine once responded to my remark "You know, I was thinking..." with "What on earth did you do that for?" See, in this light, one can understand the acceptance of people having their freedom taken away in the last years, as well as in some major historical occurences.
The Need For Moral Codes:.......One aspect of the post-60s 'revolution' that gets little attention even from conservatives is that it saw a retreat, across the Western world, from the Christian conception of the individual as an intrinsically flawed being – prone to sin and prone to error. Now maximal 'self esteem' is valorised right across the political spectrum. People drunk on their own virtuous self esteem don't like to give 'free speech' to anyone who might challenge them. A culture that acknowledges that most people are ineluctably less than perfect will be less susceptible to the sanctification of particular sub-sets as ‘victims’. And those designated as such would be less likely to feel it as a reason for abrogating any personal responsibility for the condition of their lives. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/invasion-of-the-virtue-signallers Christopher Lasch saw it all coming in the 70s with his book 'The Culture of Narcissism'.