To continue brief considerations of liberalism, if democracy answers the question: who should rule?, liberalism asks the question: how should government be exercised? The term originates with the Spanish. In the early 19th Century, supporters of the Constitution called themselves liberals and opponents labeled themselves serviles. In Britain, Whigs after the parliamentary reforms of 1832 adopted the term as a way to define themselves against the (usually) economically protectionist Tories. This term has undergone many evolutions, but one quandary still with us is this: what limits, and by what means, should the exercise of power be limited? What is compatible with social order and the common good? As the revolutions of 19th Century burned bright, there came to be a gradual synthesis between democracy and liberalism (democracy can be liberal or illiberal…and one could imagine a “liberal monarchy” where there is limited authority to tax, conscript, issue bans, ect.). But since the beginning of interactions with theories of self-rule, this synthesis has suffered from the democratic principle of equality, an antithesis of liberty. Is it the case that we can either be free or equal, since equality (of aptitude, environment, and interest, not fundamental human dignity) is “unnatural” and can be realized only by artificial, even repressive, measures? This democratic-liberal connection tends to create much confusion. If a majority is in favor of banning a book, for example, this might well be denounced as “undemocratic.” The action, however, is actually illiberal: after all, who does not have the “right” to publish? I would suggest that American liberalism in its many forms is optimistic and values equality, which crowds out (hopefully, a purposeful) freedom. It is the opposite of Sarte’s clever pagan existentialism, where life is absurd and personal history is a history of failure. Might a liberal sentiment of an always possible progress toward greater equality in the public sphere ignore the Biblical instruction that “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth?” By what balance of political, social sentiments can we reconcile living our faith as members of a democratic order?
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