Which didn’t last long. Caesar was assassinated the next month. Nevertheless Cicero was correct in his analysis (and also dead in 43 B.C. by order of Augustus, the next Caesar). After almost five hundred years that was the end of the world for the Roman Republic.
And this is the end of the world for Classical Liberalism.
Civil liberties. Free speech. Property rights. Rule of law. Representative democracy. Free enterprise. Free trade. These are the ideas of Classical Liberalism. Since 1776 the fortunate among us have been living in places where those ideas were embraced.
Sometimes it’s been an awkward embrace. We’ve watched Classical Liberalism get a clumsy “Joe Biden hug” from advocates for greater political interference in private life. In the matter of Classical Liberalism, “populists” want the “classical” to be more Pop, and “liberals” want the “liberal” to dispense largess with greater liberality.
But the core ideas persisted. And they produced excellent results. In the middle of the twentieth century fascism was defeated and its totalitarian sister ideology communism was contained by Classical Liberalism.
Classical liberals caused “imperialism” to be booed off the world stage—reduced to making guest appearances in the prattle of poly-sci-class academic phonies.
Classical liberals changed “colonialism” from an international villainy into an international tourist destination like the British Virgin Islands.
In the 1980s the tower of human misery constructed by the communists fell on its architects. Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot joined Hitler, Mussolini, and Tojo in the collapsed basement of hell.
The personal freedoms embodied in Classical Liberalism went a long way toward destroying other theoretical justifications for oppression such as antidisestablishmentarian theocracy, Plessy v. Ferguson segregation, and apartheid in its various forms around the world.
Given a chance, Classical Liberalism could even banish—or at least mitigate—prejudice and bigotry. Liberty means free and responsible individuals. Free and responsible individuals have a lot to do, exercising their freedoms and shouldering their responsibilities. No set of principles, however noble, can prevent people from detesting each other, but Classical Liberalism can keep people otherwise occupied and busy.
An example from the 1960s. During the height of the civil rights struggle Atlanta’s sort of but not really pro-integration mayor Ivan Allen came up with a weasel-phrase slogan to indicate that the local white establishment, although not fully reconciled to civil liberties and equality before the law, was willing to—as we’d call it these days—move on. “Atlanta, a City Too Busy to Hate.”
We would hate but we’re just so busy!
Under the aegis of Classical Liberalism earth thrived. Global per capita GDP went, in inflation-adjusted dollars, from $3,900 in 1950 to $17,300 in 2017. Thank you, civil liberties, free speech, property rights, rule of law, representative democracy, free enterprise, and free trade.
As the tenets of Classical Liberalism spread, the governmental practice of oppression seemed to be fading.
In 1945 only the lucky few could be called citizens of a free country. Today, 39 percent of the world’s population has political freedom, another 24 percent has partial freedom, and 74 percent of the world’s 195 nations are at least free enough to give Classical Liberalism a try.
So says Freedom House, the nonpartisan advocacy organization for democracy, which is so nonpartisan that it was founded in 1941 by defeated presidential candidate Wendell Willkie and Eleanor Roosevelt. (Such, at one time, were the powers of faith in Classical Liberalism. Imagine, today, an advocacy organization founded by Hillary Clinton and Melania Trump.)
Classical Liberalism has had a good run. Now it’s about to get run over by a bus full of stupid “post-capitalist” political trends—the new socialism, the new nationalism, the new trade war mercantilism, and the new social media platforms that drive this bus.
Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, and the numerous candidates who ran for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination are all onboard. So are the Brexiteers and so, for that matter, are the maniacally microregulating bureaucrats of the EU that the Brexiteers want to leave.
Wave goodbye to Classical Liberalism. Or you could just wave at the camera you’re facing on your phone or computer. Too late to put a sticky note over it. Your civil liberties are already gone. Not a click falls on a keypad nor a finger taps a touch screen without the Internet seeing.
You are a fly caught in the World Wide Web. Email is blackmail with a .com on the end. Civil liberties—and the free will needed to exercise them—are impossible when someone knows everything about you. And someone does. Probably it’s just that twerp Mark Zuckerberg who’s got your every word, worry, action, attraction, emotion, motion, and notion stored in the Cloud. But how long before a more serious person or thing hacks in and starts running your life? (Jared Kushner, Greta Thunberg, George Soros, NSA, the UN, Proud Boys, IRS, NRA—you can bet that the person or thing that keeps you up at night will be what hacks you.)
And how do you know they haven’t done it already? How hard can it be? The Internet treats user privacy with the same respect that snakes get in a cage at a carnival sideshow. And Zuckerberg is a thirty-five-year-old still wearing his underwear in public. His mother no doubt writes his password on the waistband of his Y-fronts with a laundry pen.
Plus the average cost of an Internet connection in the United States is $67.17 a month, so free speech isn’t free anymore anyway.
Property rights will be next to go. Here too the Internet aids and abets, particularly in the destruction of intellectual property rights. Take it from me, a print journalist. “Content Is Free”—that’s the founding concept of the Internet. I spent forty years as a print journalist. Now I’m a “content provider.” And . . . Content Is Free.
Our remaining property rights, our rights to physical property, will be sacrificed either to the campaign for income equality or to the campaign against climate change (or, should these hysterias fail, to the campaign against something
