Hating liberals

There seems to be two dominant political persuasions on Facebook.  One is liberal; the other is “very liberal”.  I take liberal to mean liberal, but very liberal, generally followed as it is by an exclamation mark, seems to be more of a sexual innuendo, a saucy seaside postcard rather than political ideology. To each their own.  Last week, David Norris spoke to Waterford City Council in the hope that the august body would support him in his bid to become President; they may or may not but the warmth of the reception he received – despite the heat he’s drawn in the press in the last few weeks – testifies to the elevated place this committed liberal has in Irish public life.  Its political critics labeled Liberalism a dinosaur in the 20^th Century, no longer relevant in the era a mass politics and total state mobilization.  The demise of the ethos in Britain was marked by George Dangerfield’s seminal 1935 work The Strange Death of Liberal England, a book that proved to be almost as a big a gift to sub-editors as the film Sex, Lies and Videotape.  Liberalism’s problem was that it wasn’t tribal.  The Right had the flag and patriotism, the Left class resentment, but Liberals? They just had reasonableness, a belief in education and middle-class guilt. And yet, liberalism (with a small L) is all triumphant in the early 21^st Century. As the Right dropped its interest in things like military dictatorship and corporal punishment for naughty boys, what was the liberal clarion call of Free Trade became the cornerstone of the Right’s economic viewpoint, one increasingly accepted on the Left.  Meanwhile the Left, finding the idea of a centrally directed economy a little bit completely unworkable, and with even the state’s control of public services increasingly eroded found itself turning to liberalism of the individual kind.  It’s a lot easier to decriminalize homosexuality than to nationalize the banks (the banks, sorry, bad example). And indeed the Left’s efforts in areas like gay rights and secularization have helped create this political oxymoron the “liberal-left”.  Socialists of the old school would be horrified by the hybrid, having regarded liberals as dangerous compromisers in the good old days of revolutionary politics.  There it is though, liberalism if not Liberal Parties won in the end.  So why is there so much vitriol directed at liberals?  Why did Matt Stone of South Park once say “I hate conservatives, but I really f**king hate liberals”.  How did the word come to be a term of abuse? Why is it that, if journalistic impartiality allowed me to put a political affiliation on Facebook, liberal is the last one I’d choose even though I probably am, like every one else, a bloody predictable boring bloody liberal?  Dreaded political correctness has an obvious culpability: yes the N-word is wrong, but banning Christmas?!!! That makes me so angry!!! So angry that I haven’t even noticed Christmas hasn’t actually been banned.  I remain convinced that most “Political Correctness gone mad” stories are fabricated but the strictures put on expression by political correctness can be tiresome, the assumption for example that someone who says “non-national” instead of “foreign-national” is in some way a covert racist is just old-fashioned condescension, not liberalism.  There’s more to it than that though.  There’s modern parents.  Child-centred parenting is a sixties liberal innovation.  Before Doctor Spock children knew their place, which was somewhere up a chimney.  I think Doctor Spock’s take on bringing up children is spot on to be honest, but the tendency he created has led to annoyingly self-righteous parents, self-righteous parents who may only exist in our imagination but who in that imagination give us a right going over for letting our kids watch telly, eat chocolate and conform to gender stereotypes. There’s more to it than that too though. Why do we hate liberals? I mentioned that the Liberal parties in the past were stranded without a tribal base.  The tribes of the Left and the Right may have adopted liberal values, but that doesn’t mean they’re happy about it.  Many former socialists feel a sense of shame, or worse, humiliation, that the old policies have been abandoned.  It’s not a coincidence to me that right-wing anti-liberal commentators like Eoghan Harris and Peter Hitchens are former Trotskyites. Conservatives meanwhile know they need to be right-on and tolerant but resent the liberal orthodoxy that commands them to do it, and indignantly interpret that as some form dictatorship.  Much of the prejudice and bile that was once directed from the Right towards racial minorities is now used to describe racially neutral groups like the poor, single mothers and single fathers, who some on the Right like to say act as a drag on the liberal free market.  Tribes always have their prejudices and bigotries, for example I’ve enjoyed a lifelong hatred of modern jazz.  My musical tastes have branched from rock to include country, reggae, classical, electro-pop, folk, hip-hop even world music (only joking, I don't listen to world music).  This of course seems like an expression of liberal open-mindedness but it’s only possible by religious devotion to a disdain for jazz – it’s okay to listen to anything as long as I know it’s not jazz, because I hate jazz. These prejudices, some harmless like hating jazz or loving a football team, some ugly like sectarianism and racism can often be the cornerstone of a person’s self- identity. And an important cornerstone for anyone who doesn’t have much in the way of money, a nice house, and (sophisticated) foreign holidays. Liberalism can be a robust, crusading ideology but it feels too often like the voice of someone who knows better because they’ve never known any worse, the voice of someone who’s a nice person largely because they lead a nice life.  I think that’s why people hate liberals, and why liberals hate liberals.