Now’s the time for liberals to prepare to fight for civil liberties and freedom

Covid-19 forced people to tolerate infringements of basic liberties, and re-establishing them could take years

The poet Robert Frost once defined a liberal as a man too broadminded to take his own side in an argument. Well, now’s the time for liberals to ditch that habitual tolerance and get ready for a fight.

The post-coronavirus world is unlikely to be a hospitable environment for liberalism. Traditional liberal concerns — protecting privacy, limiting the state’s power and guarding the rights of individuals — could be pushed aside as unnecessary luxuries while countries struggle to recover economic and physical health.

The pandemic has forced people to tolerate huge infringements on basic liberties, such as the right to work and to associate freely. Re-establishing those rights fully may take years, but new forms of surveillance enable governments to track and control their citizens’ movements. Measures introduced in the name of disease control may prove too “useful” to be withdrawn after the pandemic. The Covid-19 economic disaster also caused a huge expansion of the state that will not be reversed easily.

Had the liberal creed entered this crisis with broad popular support and understanding, it would be easier to ensure that all these infringements on freedom are temporary. But the opposite is the case. Liberalism had a miserable decade, with the financial crisis and its aftermath turning “liberal” into a term of abuse for the nationalist Right and the radical Left.

There is much confusion about the term liberalism, which means different things in different places. In the US, the Trump-supporting Right crow about “owning the libs”, by which they mean taunting the Left. In continental Europe, liberal is likely to be used as a synonym for Right-wing. The European Left likes to denounce liberals — or, as they prefer, “neoliberals ”— as champions of heartless capitalism and inequality. Denunciation of neoliberalism is now standard on the Left in the US.

There are common themes to the indictments of liberalism by the populist Right and the radical Left. Both say that for 30 years liberals created a rigged system that favours the elite. The Right is angry about globalisation and immigration. The Left focuses on inequality and insecurity.

The liberal willingness to see the other side of the argument, mocked by Frost, means I am happy to accept that the critiques of both Left and Right have some merit. The liberal urge to roll back the frontiers of the state contributed to increased economic insecurity in the West. And the Right is correct in saying many liberals were too relaxed about the consequences of globalisation.

Where the antiliberal backlash goes wrong is in saying that these policy errors are inherent to liberalism. Even more important, the critics usually ignore the costs, for freedom and prosperity, of an assault on liberal principles.

Liberalism is a slippery term, but for me the starting point remains the harm principle stated by John Stuart Mill in On Liberty in 1859: “The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others.”

That principle is compatible with a temporary, pandemicdriven lockdown and more routine aspects of the modern state, such as health and safety laws and competition policy. There is no inherent reason that kind of classical liberalism should lead to a bonfire of regulations and a financial crisis. Most liberals are not libertarians. They accept the need for an active state to allow markets to function.

The “neoliberalism” of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher was wary of state intervention, for political and economic reasons. But Tony Blair — also often accused of “neoliberalism ”— supported higher public spending and redistributive taxation.

Many Blairites would now accept that the former UK prime minister made a mistake when Britain became the only big EU country to immediately allow unfettered immigration from new EU member states in 2004. But adopting a more cautious approach to immigration is compatible with liberalism and remains a long way from the nativist politics of US President Donald Trump and Nigel Farage, leader of the UK’s Brexit Party.

Sensible liberals understand that for democratic nationstates to function, the rights of citizens must always rank higher than those of noncitizens. But real liberals differ from the communitarians of the far-Right and far-Left in their emphasis on the rights of the individual, rather than group identities and rights.

That means liberals also know international relations are not just about the management of the relationship between states; they must recognise the rights of the individuals who live in those states. That belief in the universal rights of man goes back to the enlightenment and was most brilliantly expressed in the American Declaration of Independence, with its insistence that all men are created equal.

As the extremes of the Left and the Right limber up for their struggle to control the postcoronavirus world, they seem to be united only by their joint contempt for liberals. But both sides might one day feel wistful for one important aspect of liberalism. As Frost pointed out, liberals do not believe in destroying their enemies.

LIBERALS DO NOT BELIEVE IN DESTROYING THEIR ENEMIES ... THE FAR LEFT AND RIGHT MAY ONE DAY FEEL WISTFUL FOR THAT