a definition of what liberalism is

[paulkienitz]

I think I've managed to put into one sentence the principle that I think is the core of liberalism. It is:

We the people have the right and the responsibility to manage our social institutions so that they work to our benefit.

What all the different kinds of conservatism -- from warlordism to feudal lordship to theocracy to corporatism to anarcho-libertarianism -- all have in common, is the attempt to deny you a voice in choosing how society should work. They all tell us that we need to accept and embrace the system as it's given to us, whether that's aristocratic class divisions or sink-or-swim capitalist darwinism. They all tell us that if the system works poorly for us, that's a problem with us, not the system. The liberal answer is that these systems are ours; we made them and their purpose is to serve us, not vice versa.

This also clarifies that a liberal system must be active. There is no way to set the rules once and then just let things coast. You need to engage continually with the details of policy, whenever anything starts going sideways in unintended ways. You have to govern.

One interesting side effect of this way of defining liberalism is how little it has to do with particular ideologies. It doesn't need to take sides on things like whether we should lean capitalist or socialist, or religious or secular. It just says that we get to choose what works for us. And this has interesting results when applied to cases that are otherwise confusing. For instance, it tells us that the Russian Revolution was quite liberal, but the Soviet Union was not liberal at all, even though both used the same ideology and rhetoric.