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This article discusses liberalism as that term is used in the United States in the 20th and 21st centuries. For the history and development of American liberalism, see Liberalism in the United States. For the origin and worldwide use of the term liberalism, see Liberalism.

Modern American liberalism is the dominant version of liberalism in the United States. It combines social liberalism with support for social justice and a mixed economy. American liberal causes include voting rights for minorities, legalized abortion on demand, support for same-sex marriage, and government programs such as education and health care.[1] It has its roots in Theodore Roosevelt's New Nationalism, Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Conservatives oppose liberals on most (but not all) issues; the relationship between liberal and progressive is debated.[2][3][4][5][6][7]

Keynesian economic theory has played a central role in the economic philosophy of modern American liberals.[8] The argument has been that national prosperity requires government management of the macroeconomy, to keep unemployment low, inflation in check, and growth high.[8]

John F. Kennedy defined a liberal as follows:[9][10]

"...someone who looks ahead and not behind, someone who welcomes new ideas without rigid reactions, someone who cares about the welfare of the peopletheir health, their housing, their schools, their jobs, their civil rights, and their civil libertiessomeone who believes we can break through the stalemate and suspicions that grip us in our policies abroad, if that is what they mean by a 'Liberal', then I'm proud to say I'm a 'Liberal'."

Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1941 defined a liberal party as one

"which believes that, as new conditions and problems arise beyond the power of men and women to meet as individuals, it becomes the duty of Government itself to find new remedies with which to meet them. The liberal party insists that the Government has the definite duty to use all its power and resources to meet new social problems with new social controlsto ensure to the average person the right to his own economic and political life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."[11]

Modern American liberals value institutions that defend against economic inequality. In The Conscience of a Liberal Paul Krugman writes: "I believe in a relatively equal society, supported by institutions that limit extremes of wealth and poverty. I believe in democracy, civil liberties, and the rule of law. That makes me a liberal, and I'm proud of it."[12] Liberals often point to the widespread prosperity enjoyed under a mixed economy in the years since World WarII.[13][14] They believe liberty exists when access to necessities like health care and economic opportunity are available to all,[15] and they champion the protection of the environment.[16][17] Modern American liberalism is typically associated with the Democratic Party, as modern American conservatism is typically associated with the Republican Party.[18]

Liberalism is one of the dominant ideologies of the United States, but remains well behind conservatism in popularity among voters. In the 2012 election, 25% of voters who went to the polls identified themselves as liberals.[19][20] In the November 2014 House elections liberals comprised 23% of the voters, and conservatives 37%.[21] A January 2015 poll by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found that 26% of all adults considered themselves either very liberal or somewhat liberal compared with 34% who considered themselves either very conservative or somewhat conservative.[22] Also in the same month, Gallup recorded that liberal self-identification reached a record high of 24% in their poll.[23]

In early 21st century political discourse in the United States, liberalism has come to include support for reproductive rights for women, including abortion,[24] affirmative action for minority groups historically discriminated against,[25]multilateralism and support for international institutions,[26] support for individual rights over corporate interests,[27] support for universal health care for Americans (with a "single payer" option), support for gay rights and marriage equality, and opposition to tax cuts for the rich.[28]

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Neoliberalism[1] is a term whose usage and definition have changed over time.[2]

Since the 1980s, the term has been used by scholars[3] and critics[4] primarily in reference to the resurgence of 19th century ideas associated with laissez-faire economic liberalism beginning in the 1970s and 1980s, whose advocates support extensive economic liberalization policies such as privatization, fiscal austerity, deregulation, free trade, and reductions in government spending in order to enhance the role of the private sector in the economy.[2][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12] Neoliberalism is famously associated with the economic policies introduced by Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom and Ronald Reagan in the United States.[5] The transition of consensus towards neoliberal policies and the acceptance of neoliberal economic theories in the 1970s are seen by some academics as the root of financialization, with the financial crisis of 200708 one of the ultimate results.[13][14][15][16][17]

Neoliberalism was originally an economic philosophy that emerged among European liberal scholars in the 1930s in an attempt to trace a so-called Third or Middle Way between the conflicting philosophies of classical liberalism and socialist planning.[18] The impetus for this development arose from a desire to avoid repeating the economic failures of the early 1930s, which were mostly blamed on the economic policy of classical liberalism. In the decades that followed, the use of the term neoliberal tended to refer to theories at variance with the more laissez-faire doctrine of classical liberalism, and promoted instead a market economy under the guidance and rules of a strong state, a model which came to be known as the social market economy.

In the 1960s, usage of the term "neoliberal" heavily declined. When the term was reintroduced in the 1980s in connection with Augusto Pinochets economic reforms in Chile, the usage of the term had shifted. It had not only become a term with negative connotations employed principally by critics of market reform, but it also had shifted in meaning from a moderate form of liberalism to a more radical and laissez-faire capitalist set of ideas. Scholars now tended to associate it with the theories of economists Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman.[2] Once the new meaning of neoliberalism was established as a common usage among Spanish-speaking scholars, it diffused directly into the English-language study of political economy.[2] Scholarship on the phenomenon of neoliberalism has been growing.[19] The impact of the global 2008-09 crisis has also given rise to new scholarship that critiques neoliberalism and seeks developmental alternatives.[20]

The German scholar Alexander Rstow coined the term "neoliberalism" in 1938 at the Colloque Walter Lippmann.[21][22][23] The colloquium defined the concept of neoliberalism as involving "the priority of the price mechanism, the free enterprise, the system of competition and a strong and impartial state".[24] To be "neoliberal" meant advocating a modern economic policy with State intervention.[25] Neoliberal State interventionism brought a clash with the opposite laissez-faire camp of classical liberals, like Ludwig von Mises.[26] While present-day scholars tend to identify Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, and Ayn Rand as the most important theorists of neoliberalism, most scholars in the 1950s and 1960s understood neoliberalism as referring to the social market economy and its principal economic theorists such as Eucken, Rpke, Rstow, and Mller-Armack. Although Hayek had intellectual ties to the German neoliberals, his name was only occasionally mentioned in conjunction with neoliberalism during this period due to his more pro-free market stance. Friedman's name essentially never appeared in connection with neoliberalism until the 1980s.[2] In the sixties, use of the term "neoliberal" heavily declined.[2]

Another movement from the American left that used the term "Neoliberalism" to describe its ideology formed in the United States in the 1970s. Prominent neoliberal politicians supposedly included Al Gore and Bill Clinton of the Democratic Party of the United States.[27] The neoliberals coalesced around two magazines, The New Republic and the Washington Monthly. The "godfather" of this version of neoliberalism was the journalist Charles Peters[28] who in 1983 published "A Neoliberal's Manifesto."[29]

Elizabeth Tandy Shermer argues that, "Academics (largely left-wing) started using neoliberalism in the 1970s to describe and decry a late twentieth-century effort by policy makers, think-tank experts, and industrialists to condemn social-democratic reforms and unapologetically implement free-market policies."[30] Other academics note that neoliberalism has critics from across the political spectrum.[31]

During the military rule under Augusto Pinochet (19731990) in Chile, opposition scholars took up the expression to describe the economic reforms implemented in Chile after 1973 and its proponents (the "Chicago Boys").[2] Once the new meaning of neoliberalism was established as a common usage among Spanish-speaking scholars, it diffused directly into the English-language study of political economy.[2] In the last two decades, according to the Boas and Gans-Morse study of 148 journal articles, neoliberalism is almost never defined but used in several senses to describe ideology, economic theory, development theory, or economic reform policy. It has largely become a term of condemnation employed by critics. And it now suggests a market fundamentalism closer to the laissez-faire principles of the "paleoliberals" than to the ideas of the original neoliberals who attended the colloquium. This leaves some controversy as to the precise meaning of the term and its usefulness as a descriptor in the social sciences, especially as the number of different kinds of market economies have proliferated in recent years.[2] In the book Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction, published by Oxford University Press (2010), the authors argue that neoliberalism is "anchored in the principles of the free-market economics."[15]

According to Boas and Gans-Morse, neoliberalism is nowadays an academic catchphrase used mainly by critics as a pejorative term, and has outpaced the use of similar terms such as monetarism, neoconservatism, the Washington Consensus and "market reform" in much scholarly writing.[2] Daniel Stedman Jones, a historian of the concept, says the term "is too often used as a catch-all shorthand for the horrors associated with globalization and recurring financial crises"[32] Nowadays the most common use of the term neoliberalism refers to market-oriented reform policies such as "eliminating price controls, deregulating capital markets, lowering trade barriers", and reducing state influence on the economy especially by privatization and fiscal austerity.[2] The term is used in several senses: as a development model it refers to the rejection of structuralist economics in favor of the Washington Consensus; as an ideology the term is used to denote a conception of freedom as an overarching social value associated with reducing state functions to those of a minimal state; and finally as an academic paradigm the term is closely related to neoclassical economic theory.[2] The sociologists Fred L. Block and Margaret R. Somers claim there is a dispute over what to call the influence of free market ideas which have been used to justify the retrenchment of New Deal programs and policies over the last thirty years: neoliberalism, laissez-faire or just "free market ideology."[33]

Other academics, such as Susan Braedley and Meg Luxton, assert that neoliberalism is a political philosophy which seeks to "liberate" the processes of capital accumulation.[14] American professor of political science and Democratic socialist Frances Fox Piven sees neoliberalism as essentially hyper-capitalism.[34]Robert W. McChesney, American professor at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign and co-editor of the independent socialist magazine Monthly Review, claims that the term neoliberalism, which he defines as "capitalism with the gloves off," is largely unknown by the general public, particularly in the United States.[35]

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How research in political psychology explains the fierce clashes between Republican and Democrats in our polarized system.

In October, 2010, Thomas B. Edsall wrote a story for The New Republic -- "Limited War: How the age of austerity will remake American politics" -- that took a look at the resource war that animates so much of contemporary politics. That article is now a book, The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics, published by Doubleday. In an excerpt, below, Edsall explores the research into the characteristics of the partisans increasingly squabbling over government funding in America.

* * *

The contest for power between Democrats and Republicans pits two antithetical value systems against each other; two conflicting concepts of freedom, liberty, fairness, right, and wrong; two mutually exclusive notions of the state, the individual, and the collective good.

A wide range of academic scholarship exploring political belief-formation reveals that those who identify themselves as politically conservative, for example, exhibit distinctive values underpinning their world view and their orientation towards political competition.

Conservatives, argues researcher Philip Tetlock of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, are less tolerant of compromise; see the world in "us" versus "them" terms; are more willing to use force to gain an advantage; are "more prone to rely on simple (good vs. bad) evaluative rules in interpreting policy issues;" 1 are "motivated to punish violators of social norms (e.g., deviations from traditional norms of sexuality or responsible behavior) and to deter free riders." 2

Some of these conservative values can be discerned in public opinion data.

In one September 2010 survey question, The Pew Research Center asked voters, "If you had to choose, would you rather have a smaller government providing fewer services, or a bigger government providing more services?" White Republican men chose a smaller government by a 92-7 margin and white Republican women made the same choice by an 82-12 margin. Conversely, white Democratic men chose bigger government by a 53-35 margin and white Democratic women by 56-33. This is an ideological gap between Republicans and Democrats of 57 points among white men and 49 points among white women. 3

Along similar lines, Pew asked voters to choose between "Most people who want to get ahead can make it if they're willing to work hard" and "Hard work and determination are no guarantee of success for most people." White Republican men and women both picked "hard work" by decisive margins of 78-21 and 73-24, respectively. White Democratic men and women, in contrast, were far more equivocal, supporting hard work by modest margins of 52-44 and 53-43. 4

These Pew findings demonstrate that the differences of opinion between liberals and conservatives are far greater than the differences in opinion between men and women commonly referred to as the gender gap.

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Studies: Conservatives Are From Mars, Liberals Are From ...

Classical liberalism is a political ideology, a branch of liberalism which advocates civil liberties and political freedom with representative democracy under the rule of law and emphasizes economic freedom.[1][2]

Classical liberalism developed in the 19th century in Europe and the United States. Although classical liberalism built on ideas that had already developed by the end of the 18th century, it advocated a specific kind of society, government and public policy as a response to the Industrial Revolution and urbanization.[3] Notable individuals whose ideas have contributed to classical liberalism include John Locke,[4]Jean-Baptiste Say, Thomas Malthus, and David Ricardo. It drew on the economics of Adam Smith and on a belief in natural law,[5]utilitarianism,[6] and progress.[7]

In the late 19th century, classical liberalism developed into neo-classical liberalism, which argued for government to be as small as possible to allow the exercise of individual freedom. In its most extreme form, neo-classical liberalism advocated Social Darwinism.[8]Right-libertarianism is a modern form of neo-classical liberalism.[8]

The term classical liberalism was applied in retrospect to distinguish earlier 19th-century liberalism from the newer social liberalism.[9] The phrase classical liberalism is also sometimes used to refer to all forms of liberalism before the 20th century, and some conservatives and libertarians use the term classical liberalism to describe their belief in the primacy of individual freedom and minimal government. It is not always clear which meaning is intended.[10][11][12]

Core beliefs of classical liberals included new ideaswhich departed from both the older conservative idea of society as a family and from later sociological concept of society as complex set of social networksthat individuals were "egoistic, coldly calculating, essentially inert and atomistic"[13] and that society was no more than the sum of its individual members.[14]

Classical liberals agreed with Thomas Hobbes that government had been created by individuals to protect themselves from one another, and that the purpose of government should be to minimize conflict between individuals that would otherwise arise in a state of nature.

These beliefs were complemented by a belief that labourers could be best motivated by financial incentive.[citation needed] This led classical liberal politicians at the time to pass the Poor Law Amendment Act 1834, which limited the provision of social assistance, because classical liberals believed in markets as the mechanism that would most efficiently lead to wealth. Adopting Thomas Malthus's population theory, they saw poor urban conditions as inevitable; they believed population growth would outstrip food production, and they regarded that consequence desirable, because starvation would help limit population growth. They opposed any income or wealth redistribution, which they believed would be dissipated by the lowest orders.[15]

Drawing on selected ideas of Adam Smith, classical liberals believed that it is in the common interest that all individuals must be able to secure their own economic self-interest, without government direction.[16] They were critical of the welfare state[17] as interfering in a free market. They criticised labour's group rights being pursued at the expense of individual rights,[18] while they accepted big corporations' rights being pursued at the expense of inequality of bargaining power noted by Adam Smith:[19]

A landlord, a farmer, a master manufacturer, a merchant, though they did not employ a single workman, could generally live a year or two upon the stocks which they have already acquired. Many workmen could not subsist a week, few could subsist a month, and scarce any a year without employment. In the long run the workman may be as necessary to his master as his master is to him; but the necessity is not so immediate.

Classical liberals believed that individuals should be free to obtain work from the highest-paying employers, while the profit motive would ensure that products that people desired were produced at prices they would pay. In a free market, both labour and capital would receive the greatest possible reward, while production would be organised efficiently to meet consumer demand.[20]

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Classical liberalism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Fox News co-host and contributor Bob Beckel has called for the assassination of WikiLeaks spokesperson Julian Assange (A dead man cant leak stuffFollow the Money, 12/6/10), for furnishing guns to school children (If you give your kid a gun, no bullyingFive, 1/5/12) and for militant opposition to the War on Christmas, which is completely out of hand (Five, 12/9/11).

These views are anything but out of place on Fox News, where hosts and commentators are known for fantasizing about murdering progressives (FAIR Blog, 11/10/10), deifying gun ownership (Beck, 6/29/11) and courageously confronting those who would wish them happy holidays (OReilly Factor, 11/17/11).

Bob BeckelPhoto Credit: Wikimedia Commons

But Beckel is presented as a left-leaning voice on Fox, a counterweight to the networks army of right-leaning talkers. And hes far from an atypical specimen there.

As one of five co-hosts on Foxs new program the Five, Beckel is supposed to serve as foil to four conservative co-hosts. Thats the theory. In reality, Beckel more than occasionally joins his conservative counterparts. (Typically, Five panelists include former George W. Bush aide Dana Perino, Fox News Red Eye anchor Greg Gutfield, Fox legal commentator Kimberly Guilfoyle and Fox Business Network host Eric Bolling.)

For instance, when Beckels colleague Bolling (Five, 12/14/11) recounted how hed kicked a representative from the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) off his Fox Business show (Follow the Money,12/12/11) for opposing the display of a nativity scene at a Texas courthouse, Beckel bluntly approved: Good. When Five co-host Greg Gutfield (12/9/11) compared FFRF to a woman whod once demanded that he put out his cigarette, Beckels only response was, Did you deck her?

Discussing charges that GOP Rep. Mark Foley (Fla.) had exchanged inappropriate messages with male congressional pages (Hannity & Colmes, 10/2/06), Beckel suggested that Foley, because hes gay, should have been kept away from pages to begin with, likening him to a notorious bank robber: If Willie Sutton is around some place where a bank is robbed, then youre probably going to say, Willie, stay away from the robbery.

In the USA Today column in which Beckel likewise plays the left, regularly exchanging views with former Moral Majority executive and fellow Fox commentator Cal Thomas, Beckel (3/24/11) agreed with his right-wing counterpart that nuclear power is a necessary component of our quest for energy independence, and it should not be abandoned no matter how horrific the scenes are coming out of Japan.

Fox knew what it was getting with Beckel, whose reputation for faking left and going right goes back years. In July 1998, Extra! described Beckel as

a corporate lobbyist whose firm represents phone companies, the insurance industry and other corporate clients. Beckel frequently urges the Democratic Party to move to the right; he supported Clintons push for government downsizing, noting that the unions will grumble, the left will scream (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 9/14/93). During the Gulf War, he denounced protesters as punks (Foxs Off the Record, 1/26/91).

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With Fox News Liberals, Who Needs Conservatives? FAIR