By Matthew Parish
In the contemporary era I have found that I have become increasingly irritated by the pejorative use of the terms “conservative” and “liberal”, and I realise how confusing the use of these words must be, almost as terms of abuse, to people for whom English is not their first language. Indeed they are confusing between the British and the Americans, who also use the terms in quite different ways. In America both words can be derogatory; but in Britain neither term is derogatory. So when I hear Americans say “oh no, those conservatives” or “oh no, those liberals” I end up finding myself thoroughly confused. I thought it might help guide the reader through my personal political process of maturity, to understand why I think both words should be abolished because nobody really seems to have clear and unmoving accounts of what they mean.
My first political awakening was as a child under the Prime Ministership in Britain of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980's, whose governmental style might be described as free market and authoritarian. She was a democrat, and she respected the courts; but anyone who crossed her in her free market ambitions would be smashed, including striking miners, Argentine soldiers, Iranian terrorists and Northern Irish terrorists. Her reign remains controversial to this day and she was the leader of the “Conservative Party” (a party which still exists, albeit in greatly diminished parliamentary numbers than in the 1980’s) so I associated being a “conservative” with all these things. If you wanted to be derogatory about a Conservative, you didn't call them Conservative but "Tory" (their nineteenth century name).
Mrs Thatcher was also incidentally an environmentalist, she supported gender equality in public office, she never mentioned religion and she supported women’s reproductive rights. These are all “liberal” causes in today’s language, not conservative ones; but to describe Margaret Thatcher as a “liberal” would have been unthinkable. She was opposed by the Labour Party, today in power under a moderate leader but at the time run by a man called Michael Foot who it is probably fair to describe as a Marxist. And he had lots of Marxists behind him, who have long since been expunged from the party. Remember, this was still the Cold War and there were Marxists afoot. Between these two extremes a small party called the “Liberals” existed that eventually renamed itself the “Liberal Democrats”. So in British politics to be a liberal means what in American politics means to be a moderate: someone with centrist, flexible, floating or independent political views, outside the two mainstream political parties.
When I went to the University of Cambridge I studied philosophy and I discovered John Stuart Mill’s famous book “On Liberty”. This book is basically a free market tract, espousing the principle that the government has no right to encroach on anyone’s liberty save where it may harm others. It was a very influential nineteenth century political text, but now it would probably be called “conservative” in Britain because its views are basically right-wing. I suppose John Stuart Mill might be described as a Reaganite Republican in modern language: the government should stay out of your wallet and out of your bedroom. He was particularly concerned with the latter, and surely were he alive today he would approve of broad women’s reproductive rights. So that was confusing.
The I went to university in the United States and foolishly volunteered, one week in at the University of Chicago, to accept an invitation of the Federalist Society (federalism sounded reasonable to me; what could be wrong with a society that promoted it?) to be a speaker at a debate “Is it worse to be a liberal or a libertarian?” which I thought was a very peculiar title. My audience were glued to their chairs, horrified in silence, as I explained that it was excellent to be both a liberal and a libertarian; it became obvious that my American, mostly conservative audience, had totally different ideas of what the meanings of liberalism and libertarianism are and what their political connotations are, compared to me.
For me, liberalism means economic liberalism - i.e. free markets, albeit tempered by moderation (remember that in Britain, liberalism also connotes moderation); and libertarianism means personal liberalism. i.e. freedom to do with one’s body as one pleases. By contrast in the United States, libertarianism represents an extreme and unusual fringe movement in the Republican Party that I cannot quite succinctly describe. In Britain, religion never enters politics; in the United States, the courts and legislatures frequently legislate on issues of reproductive rights driven by religious movements who consider abortion to be morally wrong. This issue simply does not exist in British politics. I know of no British politician who talks about his or her religious beliefs (British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s principal advisor famously said “we don’t do God” when the Prime Minister was asked a question about his well-known strong religious beliefs) or reproductive rights. These issues are absolutely off-limits.
In the United States, liberalism is a word associated with government interference in the markets in order to fund expenditure programmes of various kinds - i.e. social and industrial policy. So in saying at my ill-fated debate that I was a liberal, to a conservative audience, I was horrifying them. What I meant (in their language) was that I was a (moderate) conservative; but they thought I was an anathema to them. And in saying I was a libertarian, I meant I was in favour of broad reproductive rights, which I hadn't realised was such a hot-button issue of the day in the United States and remains so. I wasn’t invited back to speak the “Federalist Society”, and it took me some time to understand that the Federalist Society were conservatives - very conservative (in the American sense). By their name I had thought they sounded quite liberal - in the English meaning of the word.
The University of Chicago was and remains the best university in the United States for studying and promoting free market economics, so they are partially conservative but they also have a libertarian streak because many of their academics think that free market principles ought to apply to one’s private life. They are more like Reaganite Republicans than many contemporary American conservatives, who tend to be in favour of free market economics and against freedom of reproductive rights. They are certainly not “liberal” in American terms - indeed Chicago is perhaps the pre-eminent non-liberal prominent university in the United States - yet in the language of John Stuart Mill they are certainly liberals and by contemporary British standards they are liberal (i.e. moderate) conservatives. Which probably best describes me; but I voted for Labour Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer in the July 2024 British general election and I doubt he would describe himself as "conservative" at all.
Above all, I like the word “moderate”. I try not to use the words “conservative” and “liberal” at all because they are exceptionally confusing and I have nuanced views on many contemporary political issues, principally in the field of foreign policy where these words don’t mean much at all; and I am always changing my mind. As the the most famous liberal economist (don’t ask which sort of liberal!) of the twentieth century, John Maynard Keynes, famously said, “when the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?” I like his perspective, and in my opinion that makes me a moderate.
Confused? I certainly am. The best lesson of all this is to avoid the words “conservative” and “liberal” altogether in transatlantic dialogues about politics, and simply say what you actually believe about each issue at hand. Using these slapdash labels to describe political positions leads to impossible knots of confusion.