Dan Klein's "10 Reasons You Shouldn't Call Leftists Liberal"

Daniel B. Klein has written an excellent piece in Intercollegiate Review on the 10 reasons why you shouldn't call leftists "liberal."  Klein notes that the word "liberal" has two meanings: (1) that pertaining to generosity and (2) that pertaining to a free man, as in "liberal education."  The first to use the term in its political meaning was Adam Smith, and some scholars, such as Larry Siedentop, have claimed that liberalism was the result of Christianity.*

The ideology of the Progressives was not liberal, for it places state institutions at the center of economic decision making, leaving a sphere to a market that is shaped and dominated by the state.  This approach was the product of the later German historical school led by Gustav von Schmoller, and Bismarck implemented it.

As it turned out, Schmoller and Bismarck's third way turned into Hitler's third way, which adapted aspects of Mussolini's third way: Fascism.   Like Hitler and Mussolini, Franklin D. Roosevelt proposed cartelization and intense state influence on industry.  The Supreme Court scuttled Roosevelt's National Industrial Recovery Act, but elements of it, such as the National Labor Relations Act, were enacted. 

The interest in third way economic policies flowed from the war economy of World War I. Although World War I was on every level a fiasco, the media convinced the public--modern propaganda having been an important innovation during the war--that without a powerful state the Great War could not have been fought and won.

Alas, without its having been fought and won, the world would have been much better off, but that seems to have escaped my grandfather's and parents' generation, as well as my own.

Also during the World War I era, Herbert Croly and Theodore Roosevelt aimed to paint Progressivism, as Mussolini did Fascism, as a third way in between liberalism and socialism.   Hence, Progressivism, Fascism, and Nazism are variations of the same system.  They differ from the overt socialism of the USSR and Red China, and they also differ from liberalism, which is based on natural rights and profit-seeking and which leads to optimal economic performance.  The third way systems and the twentieth century socialist systems evolved from the war economies of World War I, and they are linked to the military state.

Klein is right that the use of the word "liberal" to describe the views of the World War I-derived ideologies--the third way and social democracy--is Orewellian.  Whenever the media calls a leftist liberal, a devil gets his horns.

*I was just listening to Professor William R Cook's Great Courses lectures  The Catholic Church: A History, and it is evident that mainstream Catholicism has not been in favor of liberalism.  In  1864 Pius IX  issued  Syllabus of Errors, which opposes separation of church and state and claims the right of the Catholic Church to use force.   In 1891 the Catholic Church moved to a third way approach under Leo XIII's  Rerum Novarum, which opposes class warfare, opposes socialism,  favors natural rights (grounded in Thomistic philosophy) and favors private property, but opposes free-market wage determination and favors workplace regulation.   Hence, the Bismarckian system, which was, I believe, the product of German Protestants, can also be called Christian.  Liberalism is associated with Calvinism, but Lutheranism and Catholicism may be closer to the third way.