How Did “Liberal” Become A Bad Word?

HISTORIAN JOHN LUCAKS ANSWERS THIS QUESTION.

As to why it happened, the nut of his answer is this:

Beneath these political and ideological sentiments there was the sense,
more or less apparent, of a general disappointment with liberal ideals.
There was the inclination, sometimes fatal, of liberals to take the
ideas of the Enlightenment to extremes: to propagate a public morality
devoid of, if not altogether opposed to, religion; to insist more and
more on institutionalizing the promotion of justice, at times even at
the expense of truth; to emphasize freedom of speech, often at the
expense of thought; to make abortion legal; to approve same-sex
marriages and affirmative action.

To an increasing mass of Americans, "liberal" began to mean — rightly
or wrongly — a toleration, if not a promotion, of what many considered
to be immoralities.

That’s why it happened, but the context of when and how it happened is most interesting.

CHECK IT OUT.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

7 thoughts on “How Did “Liberal” Become A Bad Word?”

  1. Yes, most interesting indeed. Of course, from an orthodox Catholic standpoint, to be a “liberal” either in politics or in religion has always been a bad word, as we have seen in, say, past papal condemnations of liberalism. For example, see the old Catholic pamphlet Liberalismo es Pecado, which is available on the internet. One can also look up Thomas Storck on the three assaults of liberalism to get a good understanding of the total incompatibility of liberalism and Catholic social doctrine.

  2. One thing that I found interesting in the last two Presidential campaigns was the Democrats’ attempt to recapture some of the old positive feeling by replacing the term “liberal” with “progressive.” The Republicans’ response was to reassert the L-word in both cases, but I wonder if it wouldn’t be more effective for the conservative pundits to try to turn “progessive” into a curse word like “liberal” is. It seems dangerous as a campaign tactic to leave that little sidestep open, like letting the wolf continue to wear sheep’s clothing. If I were a Republican pundit, I would spend the next four years absolutely trashing the term “progressive. Otherwise, they’ll have to put up with “I’m not liberal; I’m progressive” from Hillary in ’08.

  3. Making progressive a curse word won’t be necessary at this point. Democrats are assumed liberals and have to defend themselves against this. This is similar to how Christians are considered anti-intellectual. Each are barriers that individuals can overcome, but the stereotypes will persist for at least a generation.

  4. If we take a working definition of ‘liberalism’ as the promotion of individual liberty, the autonomy of the self, and self-determination, then, provided this ‘self-autonomy’ is appropriately circumscribed by natural law and eternal law, ‘liberalism’ is acceptable and even admirable.
    But the modern ‘self’ has exceeded all bounds of appropriate restraint. Divine law, as a constraint on the self, is widely rejected, and science has even made physical laws elastic to the demands of the ‘self’ (sex change operations, in vitro fertilization, cloning, etc.). Natural law, too, is falling by the wayside and is increasingly incomprehensible to many people.
    Virtually every movement or cause marked by serious moral degeneracy in the last 30-40 years has come out of liberalism, or has liberals’ stamp of approval. It’s not that liberalism has changed, it’s that modern man is increasingly devoid of grace and can no longer restrain his ‘self.’ Bound to respect self-autonomy, liberals have little choice but to defend every new, perverse aspiration of this modern ‘self.’ They can’t help it. Not to do so would be to compromise a fundamental tenet of liberalism itself.
    Liberals are in the same quandry now that ‘conservatives’ in the former Soviet Union are. Wedded to a principle of conserving the past, Russian ‘conservatives’ are invariably old-line Communists, seeking to restore the power of the defunct USSR by a return to ideological purity and a crushing of the modest liberties Russians now have. Such ‘conservatives’ are the victims of their own defining principle.
    Likewise, modern liberals are the victims of their own historical veneration of individual autonomy. Liberalism hasn’t changed; people are just much, much worse.

  6. I already assume in advance that anyone described as “progressive” is bad. Because by describing himself as supporting “progress” he is asserting that the ideal society is so clear, and the means to it so obvious, that any opposition to him is opposing progress.
    One reason I assume it is that I have never had to revise this assumption on encounter.

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