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The Liberal Manifesto
Written between 2003-04-21 and 2003-05-22

It is perhaps the worst problem of political discourse that the terms it needs to use the most are almost indefinable. Defining terms such as liberalism, conservatism, and freedom is a daunting task, given the generality and the abuse each term is prone to, for there are as many definitions of liberalism as there are liberals. Nonetheless, it is important not to proceed and defend liberalism against the common attacks on it without defining it first, although it may seem difficult; a scientist should never proceed without knowing that his paradigms and assumptions are true, and similarly, a political theorist should never proceed without knowing that his basic political philosophy holds merit.

In order to understand liberalism, one must understand the circumstances in which it was developed in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Any attempt to construct a viable political philosophy from the myriad definitions it has today is bound to fail, since more often than not, people first choose the name of their political philosophy and then define it to fit their own beliefs. Thus, for instance, although libertarianism is generally understood to mean unfettered capitalism combined with civil rights, leftists such as Noam Chomsky regard themselves as libertarian socialists, a contradiction in terms that is best understood when one sees the obvious association of libertarianism with liberty and freedom and the word’s potential for abuse.

Therefore, my first definition of liberalism will rely on history, and more precisely, on the context of the Enlightenment. Although there were many liberal periods in history—for example, the two decades following the Spring of Nations—liberalism was developed about three hundred years ago. Although the Enlightenment, characterized by the philosophical thrive of empiricism and the congruent rise of science, had many facets, liberalism concentrates on its ethical and political one for obvious reasons. While liberal theory certainly supports the idea that knowledge comes from experience, its fundamentals lie with the secular humanism the Enlightenment promoted. Taking secular humanism as a first approximation for liberalism, then, we see that the two are in fact almost identical.

Secular humanism, in many respects the diametric opposite of religious fanaticism and its superstitious methods, believes firstly in people and in their advancement, which primarily means progress, prosperity, and knowledge. All major liberal stances in the last ten years and probably three hundred years as well can trace to this paradigm; welfare is based on the idea that the poor deserve prosperity, equal rights are based on the fact that human beings are equal, abortion is based on freeing women from bondages of tradition, and so on. One by one, the current meanings of liberalism map back to secular humanism, as do its peaceful and compassionate ethics. We see that liberalism is not almost identical or even identical to secular humanism; liberalism is secular humanism.

We have now identified liberalism’s goal—to advance humanity. However, this goal is somewhat tautological; almost everyone would agree that political or ethical systems exist to serve humanity. Fortunately, secular humanists believe in more than just the advancement of humanity; they believe in a specific definition for advancement, as well as a specific way to achieve advancement. This definition—given vaguely above as “progress, prosperity, and knowledge”—is what distinguishes secular humanism and liberalism from other philosophies that purport to do what is in humanity’s best interest. Generally speaking, as we will see below, the definition boils down to three concepts that outline liberalism: liberty, meaning that people are better when they can exercise free speech, can freely associate, and so on with concepts that appear on most bills of rights; intellectualism, meaning that pure knowledge has unexpected positive effects on humanity, so that it best be both advanced as an end in itself and used as a means for advancing humanity; and social change, meaning that bad social traditions should be replaced.

Before continuing further, I would like to make a distinction in terms. Although liberalism is secular humanism, the terms actually refer to two different spheres of philosophy; liberalism refers to political philosophy, whereas secular humanism refers to ethics and values. Now, liberalism is based on the three pillars of liberty, intellectualism, and social change, commonly viewed as progressivism as they all boil down to one additional paradigm. This additional paradigm is as vital as secular humanism, for the latter is akin to noting that the paradigm of science is to give humanity greater insight of the world; the progressive paradigm is more similar to those that state sound assumptions, such as the one that Quantum Theory is true, the one that human traits are determined by genes, and so on. Liberty serves humanity because the more things a human being can do, the better off he is; intellectualism serves humanity because historical examples of academic knowledge put into practice prove again and again the old mantra, “Knowledge is power”; and social change serves humanity because, to quote Heraclitis, “You cannot step into the same river twice.” Thus, out of three different aspects of progress—personal, academic, and social—a crucial philosophy, progressivism, rises.

Understanding secular humanism is fairly easy. Some of its moral tenets (moral meaning positions on a person’s values and behavior, with ethical meaning more philosophical concerns) are, ironically enough, found in a few of Jesus Christ’s sayings; “do unto others as you would rather have them do to you” is a central idea, which modern game theory justifies mathematically. Others are more modern; for instance, the idea that systems should aim to serve all human beings rather than ideals or philosophies is still in its infancy, as the classical liberals of the Enlightenment tied liberty to property rights, and Karl Marx and other materialists tend to view society as a whole, somewhat like a single organism, rather than as a group, similar to a collection of organisms. However, since such tenets are all moral and ethical applications of the secular humanistic paradigm to real life and to politics, it is not very hard to list all of them, or at least the most important of them.

On the other hand, progressivism, which is based on a very general concept embedded in its name, is not so easily definable. The idea of abandoning old traditions, social or otherwise, while keeping progressing humanity toward some direction or goal (in this case humanism), is just too specific to apply directly to real life rather than to ethics, and just too general to be viewed as a unified concept. Therefore, when analyzing specific tenets, propositions that one can deduce from them and from the paradigm, and applications to the real world, one must break down progressivism into its parts. It is unavoidable to have such fragmentation; if progressivism is allowed to remain a unified philosophy, then intellectualism must be excluded from it, and liberty must be somehow absorbed into the secular humanistic paradigm. At least this particular view of progressivism as an umbrella of a multitude of philosophies permits a more orderly analysis of liberalism and also gives some insights about conservatism as the combination of secular humanism and the opposite of progressivism.

Liberty

Personal progressivism, or liberty, is essential to liberalism in more than its name (both come from the Latin word liber, which means free). We know from history that people are better off when they are given civil rights such as freedom over their bodies, freedom of speech, and so on. The historical argument for such liberties is that countries do better when they give people such rights, because, for example, the Soviet Union could have had a lower crime rate if it had given the impression that people could complain without the fear of being imprisoned. The ethical argument is that liberty is part of human quality of life; just like wealth allows a person to have more free time, so does liberty allow him to have more things to do in a given time.

While many use the word liberty in a very generic sense, I am using the word here in the sole sense of rights that may seen as extending the standard of living, including free speech, privacy, freedom from religion, access to information, freedom of thought, and so on. This is my definition as well as justification for liberty; such a definition excludes the common usage for liberty, as in “I am at liberty to do that…” This definition also excludes the frequent abuse the word has suffered throughout history, for example when fanatic Jerry Falwell renamed his equally fanatical organization Liberty Foundation; the only liberty Falwell and his ilk seem to promote is the apolitical term, as explained above, in this specific case their freedom to oppress people who disagree with them and to force their false views on the world.

The idea of liberty has many important implications, both on society and on the progressive paradigm. First, such liberties are vital if society is to use its full potential for progress and advancement. Second, liberties always evolve with humanity; the better technology and society are, the more liberties can people have without endangering themselves and other people. There are also several key propositions one can deduce from the ideas of liberty and of personal progressivism, namely some points about government action, a fundamental litmus test pertaining laws, rights, and duties, and a crucial proposition regarding ends and means, which partly relates to the original secular humanistic paradigm.

There are many ways to view government action. Cultural conservatives view it as a guard of morality, libertarians view it as a necessary evil meant to protect people from each other and nothing more, and so on. The liberal concept of liberty combines the conservative ideal with the libertarian one. The Gilded Age in the United States and the whole nineteenth century in Britain teach us that liberty can be denied not only through government, but also through powerful individuals. A cartel owning the means of production can dictate the exact way of life to everyone, by virtue of its ability to control people’s incomes. Therefore, government must not only limit itself so that the people will enjoy the rights to free speech, privacy, information, and so on, but also extend its power not enough to deny the people those rights, but just enough so that large corporations will not be able to do so, either. The government is thus a guard of liberty as well as an arbiter and a regulator.

The subsequent litmus test for laws is whether they promote the people’s rights to life, liberty, and prosperity. Life is the underlying assumption of secular humanism, as humans need to be alive to enjoy the fruit of a good society; liberty is, needless to say, a subtype of progressivism; and prosperity is both, tapping into social change and social progressivism and also to the prosperity portion of the definition of secular humanism. Laws have costs, whether monetary or temporal, and so, laws that do not advance individuals violate the central tenet that systems exist to advance humanity; and since a government is a system, it, too, must advance humanity rather than itself. Laws may advance humanity either directly, for example by distributing more money in welfare when fiscally possible, or indirectly, for example by giving the government more powers to regulate the economy by levying taxes and handing out welfare payments.

The last major point about personal liberty is the importance of ends and means. Those sections of liberty that concern the freedoms of thought, conscience, and speech, are critical to the idea that ends do not justify the means and disastrous to the idea that they do, for the main thing that can be taken from people in the name of some greater good is their liberty, and primarily their right to dissent from that greater good. Since secular humanism already presupposes that life is an end in itself and therefore no end can justify murder, and impoverishing people has never worked for any good, unless one considers the workers of the industrial revolution as worse off than both their ancestors and their children, which they cannot be (depending on one’s point of view, either there is constant progress or there is constant regress). Liberty, by becoming exactly one step below this of a goal, namely this of an end that is also a means to another end, thus hurts the idea that the ends justify the means. Moreover, ends change more rapidly than means; and since liberty means that society cannot stifle debate, overlooking means will turn society into a nest of extremism in temper and chaos and impotence in target. Means are important moderating factors that allow society to take more rational forms of action.

Intellectualism

Academic progressivism, or intellectualism, is based on a paradigm that some might see as actually composed of two different propositions; that paradigm is that knowledge is both an end in itself and a means to an end, in this case the secular humanistic one. Knowledge is an end in itself because it is one of the lusts of humanity; therefore, just like free sex should be allowed whenever possible because of our lust for sex, so should knowledge be supplied because of the natural human instinct for curiosity. Further, knowledge is also a means to an end, since it gives us greater insights about the world, which in turn allow us to improve our quality of life because of discoveries such as the mapping of the human genome or to choose our course of action more rationally. There is no such thing as redundant knowledge; even the parts of the huge body of knowledge that universities currently investigate that are considered completely useless can be applied to unusual situation, for example the use of number theory in encryption or the use of Boolean logic in computer programming.

Intellectualism stands out among the three components of progressivism in that it can also be an independent philosophy, although it still works best when combined with secular humanism, liberty, and social change. The most important proposition it produces alone is that we should search truth rather than declare it; by declaring truth, we block ourselves from any criticism of ideas that may well be wrong. Most areas of science have yet to produce an unchallengeable paradigm, whereas the humanities are so closely intertwined with critical thought and analysis that regarding any part of them as unchallengeable is bound to limit knowledge or, even worse, give us false insights. I am not saying that nothing is certain; there are some facts of science, such as the fact that if we drop something then it will fall, as well as the whole branch of mathematics, which are certain (the probability that the fact of gravity is wrong is about ten to the power of minus forty-one). However, we should never assume that something is true because it is true; rather, there we should be ready to supply facts and evidence in its defense, instead of using circular logic.

Intellectualism is also closely linked to epistemology, although it does not take sides in the debates between philosophy and science or between rationalism and empiricism. Knowledge is crucial according to intellectualism, but not sufficient. To quote Poincaré, science is built with facts just like a house is built with stones, but facts alone do not constitute science just like stones themselves do not constitute a house. We need something more than knowledge; that something is the structure that binds facts together like a spiral binds pages into a book—namely, the paradigms and the goals of the sciences and the various syntheses of historical and literary analysis in the humanities. It seems rather ironic that the intellectualistic paradigm says indirectly that paradigms are critical to science; however, on a deeper level, it is not, as in the academia, intellectualism is the goal just like in politics, secular humanism is the goal. The end of the academia is knowledge; therefore, once one looks inside it, intellectualism is no longer a paradigm, rather than a goal that paradigms aim to fulfill. It seems that the structure of such paradigms best be kept reduced rather than holistically unified; paradigms give more insight when retained for as long as possible without jeopardizing the search for knowledge. Yet, intellectualism does not take a particular position on the debate between reductionism and holism; it tends toward reductionism in epistemology, but is neutral in metaphysics.

One of the important ideas of liberalism comes from a combination of intellectualism with pure secular humanism, namely the concept of subsets, obviously borrowed from set theory and thoroughly supported by historical examples. The concept of subsets is based on borrowing the term set from mathematics and stipulating it to refer to the set of all human beings, and therefore, subsets are those sets that are contained inside humanity, meaning groups of human beings or even individuals. To avoid confusion, I will not use the word subset to refer to the set itself; therefore, every subset in this context has at least one human being, nothing apart from human beings, and at least one human being excluded. Subsets typically view themselves as groups when they can easily identify themselves based on some easily definable traits; thus, men view themselves as men, women do as women, blacks do as blacks, French do as French, and so on. This in itself does not construe sexism, classism, racism, or nationalism; however, when subsets which view themselves as groups (for example, non-black men aged eighteen and a half to thirty-one do not) focus on advancing their own members even at the expense of non-members, we have a conflict of interest. What is worse, such conflicts of interest abound when such subsets, which put their own interests before those of everyone else, start wars against each other, with World War One, fought for nationalism, and the Thirty Years War, fought for religion, being just two bloody examples. Whenever a conflict of interest arises, a war follows; therefore, since killing and so war is wrong, and since the interest that we should follow is the interest of humanity, society as well as the optimal political system should seek to make subset interest the same as the interest of humanity.

We can also extend the concept of subsets, and argue that individuals view themselves as individuals and therefore the subset theory outline above applies as well. There is one important drawback to this extension, namely that individuals are what society should care about in the first place. Therefore, changing individual interests to fit with everyone’s interest will not work. However, there is a weaker version of the idea, namely that since almost every individual is hostile to a society that inhibits his own progress, society must secure those interests of every individual except when they are mutually exclusive with those of other individuals. The government thus becomes the arbiter of conflicts of interests and must produce a system of priorities exemplified by laws; those priorities must be as nondiscriminatory as possible because discrimination causes strife, and conventionally life is first, then liberty, then prosperity, then property rights, and finally ideology.

Social Change

Social progressivism, or social change, is very important in specifying the meaning of the ambiguous word advancement in my definition of secular humanism. The paradigm of social change is fairly straightforward, and holds that social, technological, and cultural progress and change are needed for society to do its best to help humanity. Such a paradigm is vital to the definition of secular humanism, as liberty and intellectualism describe applications of progressivism that are not so direct as the social one; intellectualism applies to social issues less than liberty does, and liberty does far less than social change.

The paradigm of social change is justified, as social stagnation highlights society’s persisting problems but trivializes its advantages, and therefore leads to discontent and strife. Further, the history of monarchies and of totalitarian states teaches us that the slogan power corrupts has much substance behind it; social change helps take care of such problems, because while it empowers the government with the task of helping culture and society progress, it also changes the system enough to prevent those in power from abusing it until several years have passed. There are plenty of historical examples that justify the above statement, such as the Weimar Republic, Soviet Russia, and liberal Italy. It took considerable time for each of those countries to be transformed into dictatorship, despite the weakness of their systems and the lack of any democratic tradition. The only example of social change causing setbacks is the French Revolution, which quickly led to terror and to the Napoleonic wars, but even so, France after the Revolution was more progressive than it had been before it.

Since laws are part of a political system, and political system should be changed, laws should be eventually changed as well. Not only do legal and constitutional stagnation necessitate social stagnation, but also they cause anachronisms and outdated systems, such as the American notions of rugged individualism and states’ rights. If society is to exploit its fullest potential of advancing humanity, then it must update its laws when the circumstances require so. Laws, in that sense, are similar to programs for a limited time, such as Stalin’s infamous five-year plans, which need to be amended, extended, or repealed after they have fulfilled their original goal, with the specific change depending on the new circumstances and on the success of the particular law. In conclusion, constitutionalism and legalism, defined as reverence of the constitution and the law respectively, are incompatible with social progressivism and therefore with liberalism.

Social change applies not only to laws but also to work and welfare. In the United States, there occurred a process of transvaluation of labor slightly less than two hundred years ago, and since then, Americans have regarded work as something to be proud of, rather than a necessary evil. The idea that work is an end rather than a means to a functioning society is dangerous, for it robs people of a necessary commodity, namely leisure. Economic studies show that people work less as their income rises beyond a certain point, because leisure is a good that is consumed more as income rises. Why, then, does American psyche, currently rooted in the wealth and abundance in the United States, hold that people should strive to work more? Here, I believe, I need to introduce a new concept, namely that of redistribution of labor, meaning reducing the amount of time each person works so that more people can find work. Sometimes, an affluent society has a surplus of labor, not because the workers are lazy or because there is a recession, but because all of society’s needs are fulfilled even without full employment. Socialists view that as an attempt to divide the working class between the employed and the unemployed, and Keynesians and other supporters of demand-side economics view that as an evil that needs to be cured. As a matter of fact, it is neither; rather, it is a sign of a golden age, where people can enjoy more leisure and welfare for less work. Here, an active government is crucial, as the unemployed are normally poor regardless of whether there is growth or recession, and as the government is the only agency that can redistribute labor, for example by reducing the workweek from forty to thirty-eight hours.

The final concept pertaining social change at this stage is of inclusiveness and international cooperation, and is closely linked to the intellectualist idea of subsets. Neanderthals became extinct not because of any biological inferiority to modern humans, but because of the socially inferior position they were at, considering that they lived in small groups of ten to thirty individuals, which were too small for them to learn to adapt to new situations. Thirty thousand years ago, groups of fifty to one hundred individuals, such as those of modern humans, were sufficient; since then, we have increased that bottom limit for learning by virtue of society being more specialized and more complex. By the birth of Christ, the limit was already in the millions, as Rome had about one million citizens in the city and many more in the surrounding lands of Italy. Now, the number is in the tens or perhaps even hundreds of millions, with specialization reaching a point that the number of breakthroughs in American and European universities is constant although the population is constantly rising. It is indeed possible that in fifty years, the number will surpass one billion, making international cooperation imperative for the survival and advancement of humanity. Even now, when nationalism is still possible in large countries or blocs of countries such as China or the United States, international cooperation is an asset that allows resources and talents to be shared, thus giving us even more progress than before. Adam Smith and David Ricardo have shown that by specializing each country or region in its most efficient product, it is possible for all parties to an international trade agreement to gain; therefore, such agreements should be used whenever possible, for they comply with the goal of progress. For the same reason, segregation, even if both sides are indeed separate but equal, hurts everybody. To reiterate, international trade and cooperation make sense because they enlarge society and thus allow it to specialize its human and natural resources better.

As shown above, progressivism easily evolves into three distinct branches, each of which produces its own theories and views of society. Most of the time, liberty, intellectualism, and social change concur, but at times, they do not; to use an example illustrated above, liberty views laws as protectors of the people’s rights to life, liberty, and prosperity, whereas social change views them as programs for a limited time meant to advance the people by increasing their quality of life. There is a fundamental difference between the idea that laws should merely protect the people’s liberty and the idea that they should be more extensive and promote their general well being, and yet it is easy to view such philosophies as extensions of one another into different realms of political theory. The question that a critical reader should ask now is, how so? The answer is that while the three branches of progressivism disagree from different perspectives, so from the perspective of the people’s liberty, the law should protect their rights, whereas from the perspective of the people’s quality of life, the law should actively promote their welfare.

From the Back-End to the Front-End

We now know the back-end of liberalism, the paradigms around which it revolves. However, this definition of liberalism has barely any meaning except on the most abstract level, unless we also attempt to describe the front-end, meaning the liberal positions on some of the more controversial issues today. However, the fact that liberals agree on most issues today does not mean that liberalism is a unified or single philosophy in any way. On the contrary, there are many kinds of liberalism, from Locke’s triad of life, liberty, and property, to the Spring of Nation’s nationalistic liberalism, to modern, pacifistic liberalism that cherishes a person’s right to be immoral or otherwise decadent. The problem here is that explaining the different strands of liberalism requires explaining their positions on issues, which in turn requires a single form of liberalism to be explained first, and so on, whereas explaining positions first requires a fair amount of overhaul immediately afterward. I will explain the front-end of liberalism before the different kinds that exist, but that decision is largely one of arbitrary choice and convenience rather than logical structure; I will thus list the positions of modern liberalism, the one that I believe is best for the third millennium, as general positions and proceed from there to differentiate the other kinds of liberalism.

The liberty strand of liberalism dictates that the government must grant the people certain civil rights since liberty contributes to quality of life along with prosperity. Freedom of thought is critical, as denying it is a classic case of declaring the truth instead of searching it; similarly, the freedom of expression is a natural extension of the freedom of thought, as it is the only way to allow reviewing of ideas by others, somewhat like the peer-reviewed articles scientists write in their magazines. Hurting innocent civilians is something that no one must ever do, as it is the height of making ends justify the means, and therefore every person charged of a crime should have a free, public trial so that innocent defendants are not imprisoned. Such rights must be guaranteed by a bill of rights and should never be revoked or violated, because neither politicians nor the people can be trusted to guard them. Civil liberties are far from universal, however, and have highly debatable topics, for example regarding the extent to which the freedom of conscience and of morality overrides freedom of information, or the order of priorities of such liberties. Yet, general protection of them is still a liberal cornerstone.

The liberals’ political system of choice is a democracy, defined as the rule of the majority and giving rights as described above to the minorities. Representative democracies have several unique characteristics that make them particularly favorable among liberals, and have historically given their people a higher quality of life than other forms of government. Firstly, representative democracies mostly depend on the will of the people and therefore adjust their targets according to the people’s wishes. Secondly, representative democracies guarantee rights to the minorities that other forms of government do not; bills of rights are inherently democratic in character, and in fact the only undemocratic nations since the seventeenth century to give their people rights, pre-civil war Britain and the United States in its early years, already had some limited form of democracy. Thirdly, all democracies respect the separation of powers, which since the middle ages has meant the separation of the judiciary from the elected government and of the legislative branch from the executive, thus having three different defense mechanisms against unwanted change. Fourthly, democracies have a moderately efficient rule of law, not too inefficient to degrade into anarchy but not too efficient to degrade into rigidity, based on the idea that the people act via the government rather than on their own. Given those advantages of democracies, liberalism since John Locke has preferred it to all other forms of government.

Religious freedom is important in liberalism. A secular philosophy, liberalism views state religions suspiciously and with reason, as they have historically denied others the freedoms of thought and speech. The Puritan government of Massachusetts has executed numerous people for doing nothing at all, with the most notorious case being the Salem witch trials; The Catholic Church denies people control of their own bodies by prohibiting contraception and abortion (see below); and over the last twenty years, Islam has been a major force behind terrorism, repression, and warfare. Even so, the principle of searching for the truth demands that practicing religion be permitted, except when it hurts children or non-adherents, for example when people are sacrificed or when children are prevented from learning. Yet, religion endangers humanity the most when it is allowed to be in power; therefore, not only do liberals support complete separation of religion and state, but also would rather see a secular society, such as one of those of Western Europe, than a religious one, such as the United States. However, secularization should be the result of education and information, the best antidotes for fundamentalism, rather than of coercion, which often only exacerbates the situation, as we see in Israel where the state religion drives people into secularism and atheism. Liberals, hence, advocate freedom of religion, but even more so advocate freedom from religion.

While legal conventions—achieved either by a constitution or by a legal tradition such as Britain’s—and the rule of law are important in liberalism, they are means rather than ends. Keeping the law during normal times is important, as the best way to avoid a civil war or a state of anarchy is to appeal to the government when there are problems that the government itself did not create; the courts, therefore, should be respected, at least in cases of civil and criminal suits as opposed to political or legal battles where they obvious can and sometimes do rule wrongly. However, when the law becomes outdated, it should be replaced, preferably by the normal method of repealing or replacing it in parliament or amending the constitution, but by petition, convention, or referendum when required. Furthermore, all laws and conventions become outdated at some point; the British monarchy could have been done away with in the eighteenth century, Germany’s federal system should have been abolished in its post-World War Two constitution, and so on. There are times when even that cannot be done, however, and the law protects itself from modernization, either by making amendment impossible or by restricting amendment sufficiently so that it never happens. During such times, it is the right of the people, or for a group of the people, to demand change, and when such change is denied, to mount a peaceful revolution, which can be as unnoticed as the replacement of the constitution with another document, or as shaking as the dissolution of the nation, presumably into states or regions.

Liberalism abhors warfare, violence, or any course of action that involves indiscriminate killing, and even so, there are many liberals who are complete pacifists and who abjure all killing, including focused assassination and self-defense, such as Gandhi. Wars by definition hurt innocent civilians, and one need look no further than the war on Iraq, hailed as a war of liberation fought for the Iraqi people although thousands of Iraqis have died since the bombing started. When there needs to be a revolution, it should always be peaceful or, in the most extreme cases, directed against the nation’s leaders rather than against its people. This boils down not only to the purely rational notion that the ends do not justify the means, but also to the more emotional and ethical aspects of compassion and of care. George Orwell considers pacifism to be a form of nationalism, as bad as anti-Semitism or British imperialism, but his argument against pacifism is considerably weaker than all others, as it is based on the idea that those who abjure violence can only do so because others use it, which is spurious. Moreover, his argument against pacifism is rooted in World War Two, perhaps the only war since the Spring of Nations to be fought between something that resembles good and evil, whereas pacifism since the Vietnam War is rooted in the notion that there is no just war and that all wars are evil, something that is understandable considering the many ways the United States, the self-proclaimed good side of all wars, can defeat other nations without massacring or impoverishing their people.

The military, being the machine that drives wars, is not quite an anachronism, but I can at least hope it is becoming one. Should a war arrive, the military is a country’s almost sole defense, and yet, it is far better to concentrate on averting war by diplomacy than on a strong military that will naturally lobby for offensives, as it has in the United States since the end of World War Two. Most defense can be done away with, especially in Europe, protected by friendly borders, the Atlantic, and the Mediterranean Sea, the United States, protected by friendly borders and oceans even after September Eleventh, which was an act of terrorism rather than of war (and besides, twenty months have passed since the attack and the United States still has not captured Bin Laden or destroyed Al Qaida), and arguably India, protected by a huge population and a state in its northwest, Punjab, with a tradition of each family sending at least one boy to the army. However, that does not mean either liberals in general or I in particular support complete disarmament; some defense is needed, if only for maintaining order in times of insurrection, but there is no justification for amounts of money the United States, despite facing an amorphous, unconventional enemy and a rocketing deficit, pours on its military and conventional defense. Eisenhower might have been an unsuccessful president, but he was right to warn the American people and the world of the military-industrial complex in nineteen sixty-one, if only sixteen years too late. Modern warfare and technology dictate a small army based on Special Forces equipped with technological enhancements such as night vision and satellite reconnaissance, rather than a huge military machine fit for the multi-power, pre-nuclear reality of the first half of the twentieth century.

The strand of social change implies that not only social structures but also cultural constructs need to be changed frequently. Such cultural constructs, to which demagogues of the right often refer as “our way of life,” must be changed whenever they obstruct progress or humanism. European xenophobes cheer when leaders who oppose immigration are elected, often forgetting the fact that their conformist and ethnocentric way of life is largely responsible to the plight of the Arab immigrants. Similarly, Arab and Islamic demagogues talk of liberalism as if it is a threat to the life of the Arab; while liberalism is definitely anti-Muslim because it is anti-religious, it seeks to destroy the Muslims’ harmful traditions in order to make their social conditions better. Ways of life are results of what works best, and therefore, when what works best changes, so should the way of life. The right throughout the world needs to realize that before the oppression of tradition reaches a point that there is a violent revolution.

Liberalism supports the preservation of the environment for two reasons, namely compassion and preservation of human life. Compassion is mostly an emotional issue, and involves caring about the destruction of bears’ habitat in Alaska for the sake of drilling oil or about the horrendous living conditions of animals grown for meat for the sake of lowering costs of production. The argument here is that the way we treat animals reflects the way we treat other human beings, and that as a consequence, we should treat animals better for the sake of being better people to other people. The argument for preservation of human life is more compelling, and is based on the sad fact that we are destroying the world that nurtures us. We are depleting the oil reserves but not trying to develop alternative energy; we are overpopulating the planet while barely thinking about massive birth control measures or increasing the planet’s capacity, currently capped somewhere between seven point seven billion and twelve billion whereas our population is six point three billion and doubling once per thirty years; we are cutting down trees and causing desertification; and we are polluting the air and water at an alarming rate. Unless we start acting to end this treatment of the environment, which is essentially chopping down the tree we live on, we will become the first species in the planet’s history to make itself go extinct. Not only must we clean the pollution we have created so far, but also we must regulate industry to ensure that we prevent disasters before they happen instead of react only after they have done their worst and pretend that we are doing something.

Education is important in liberalism from at least three different perspectives. The intellectualistic perspective supports education because it gives us knowledge, as societies where people have access to education from elementary school to high school are more prone to find prodigies than societies that do not. Since wasting a genius on menial labor harms society, at least in the long run, and subtracts from the body of people who search for the truth, and further, since it is often impossible to find such geniuses before they receive their doctorate degree (as only after receiving a Ph.D. can a person truly demonstrate his creative genius), we should pursue better education. The capitalistic perspective has two major points for it, namely that in skilled and specialized labor, it is one of the best supply-side policies, and that it equalizes the playing field and thus gives substance to the libertarian slogan of equal opportunity; the libertarian argument that unskilled workers do not need education is invalid because we cannot know a person cannot be a skilled worker until after his general and vocational educations both fail. Finally, the socially progressive perspective is that education is needed for the general welfare of society, and that access to common knowledge is a right all people deserve, especially in a democracy that expects them to cast ballots for office holders and in referenda. Regardless of one’s viewpoint, therefore, education is an important enterprise that deserves the protection of the state, since most people cannot afford private schools. Any attempts to cut education spending or to privatize schooling should raise an alarm in the mind of every liberal concerned about society’s intellectual, entrepreneurial, and social future.

While many liberals today oppose the academia and the ivory tower, the ivory tower is in fact one of the most important institutions in a complex society. Most of the inventions and discoveries that have made quality of life almost throughout the world soar over the last hundred years are the result of academic work, and moreover, even the most abstract of academic fields might prove to be useful. Further, critical thinking helps not only in abstract field, but also in everyday issues; it helps voters assess politicians more rationally and thus reinforces democracy, it allows people to make more thought-out choices regarding their lives and thus increases efficiency, it allows the oppressed to understand that they are oppressed and subsequently demand an end to oppression, and so on. There are many opponents of critical thinking, among them fundamentalists who correctly view it as a threat to their anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism, anti-elitists who mistake critical thinking for a tool of the elites, and corporatists whose short term interests are better served when the poor are uneducated. However, those opponents rarely use rational or even emotional arguments to support their points of view; rather, they make completely unsupported assertions or see conspiracy theories that do not exist.

Among the rights people should have to ensure their physical well being is health care, without which society soon breaks apart under the weight of disease. The government must provide such health care, as corporations that work for profit will never subsidize health care for the poorer sections of society, who need it more than anybody else. The libertarian argument that health care should not be funded from tax money is unsound, as it assumes that property rights are more important than life, which they are not, and further, sometimes it is in the interests of the rich to care for the health of their workers, just like it is in the interests of factory owner to maintain their machinery properly. However, poor people are not machines, and the government should ensure life as well as a decent quality of life to them because they are ends rather than means to an end. A human being is a human being, regardless of income or ability to pay, and so the government should safeguard health care for everyone. Moreover, the mere existence of public health care is not a solution to many problems that permeate government programs, among them bureaucracy and the general slowness of public health care. Therefore, the government needs not only to secure the right to free health care to every person in its jurisdiction, but also to ensure that such health care aids and nurtures the people who need it rather than the bureaucracy that runs it.

While some types of liberalism, most notably the liberalism of the Spring of Nations and liberalism throughout American history, are patriotic and show strong support for individual love of country, it is hard to reconcile patriotism with humanism. People should not love a country more than they do a car, because the country is an instrument designed to serve the people, and therefore the moment it fails this task, it should be replaced. On the individual level, it means that a person should leave the country he lives in if he can be better off in another country, for the crass reason that the country exists to serve the people rather than the other way around; since the secular humanistic paradigm asserts that people are ends and everything else is relegated to the position of means, the country is bound to benefit the people, or else it does not fulfill its goal. On the more macro level, it means that people should replace not only the government of a country when needed, but also the country itself. It happens now in Europe, with the erosion of national sovereignty in favor of European sovereignty; it should happen in the Middle East with border changes, as many of the current national borders there are nothing more than the result of British and French imperialists drawing straight lines on maps with little knowledge of or care about the population’s needs; and it probably should happen in the United States, with the dissolution of a single, dysfunctional union into several regional nations. However, even when nation-states, as opposed to city-states or a global government, exist, they should always be the servants of their people. A person willing to sacrifice himself for a country is no wiser than a person willing to sacrifice himself for a car, because the country is no more than an instrument that happens to be shared by millions of people. Moreover, the idea of sacrifice is rooted in a darker concept that holds that individuals do not matter, and therefore should sacrifice themselves or be sacrificed for an idea, whether it is a nation, an ideology, or an economic structure. However, individuals do matter, and in fact are the only things that matter, with humanity in this context being simply a blanket term for all human beings, and so the idea of sacrifice is based a premise that contradicts the very basis of liberalism and secular humanism.

The idea of the government as a servant relates to another point that conservatives often attack, namely welfare and the welfare state. The source of life for those who are unable to work and the guarantor of an acceptable quality of life for those who are unable to find work, welfare payments are an important aspect of a liberal state, and are largely based on the evils of both laissez-faire capitalism and the Great Depression. Laissez-faire capitalism harms the people because as stated above in the discussion about health care, human beings are not machines, and yet laissez-faire capitalism regards them as just another type of resource, by dividing resources into land and natural resources, labor, capital and machinery, and enterprise, without minding the fact that while rules of demand and supply do and to a degree should determine the fate of labor as a resource, they should never determine the fate of workers as human beings. The Great Depression, a natural result of laissez-faire economics and the government allowing market forces to sink to indefinitely long recession, destroyed the quality of life across the United States and the nations dependent on it, which meant all of Europe except Italy and most of Latin America, as well as let Hitler into power in Germany. Granted, the Depression eventually solved itself in some way, as World War Two, where high government expenditure and full employment resulting from shortage of labor on the home fronts cured the problem of contracting economy and high unemployment, can be said to have been the consequence of the Depression, as the latter is partly responsible to the rise of the Third Reich, which started the war. However, since war has already been shown to be anti-liberal, there must be another way to end depressions; this way is what both the communist nations and the West have used since the Depression and war, namely the support of the unemployed via welfare. While reducing unemployment is important in combating the scourge of recession, the ultimate safety net is welfare payments for an indefinite period, allowing people to live with a reasonable quality of life although the system cannot find work for them. Needless to say, those people who are able and willing to find work but choose not to need not receive welfare payments; yet, welfare not only is impossible to deny on the basis of mere willingness to find work, but also should not be denied on the basis of anything else that might reduce the standard of living for those for whom the system cannot find work. The welfare reforms of the United States and Britain, limited a person’s eligibility for welfare to two years over a lifetime and six months over a lifetime respectively, are thus unacceptable under the liberal system whereby the government is responsible to ensuring that every person has a decent quality of life.

While liberalism is an inclusive philosophy, inclusiveness alone may not be strong enough an argument to counter the historical and contemporary evil of racism. It exists across many parts of the world; white supremacy is ingrained into American psyche, Europe is experiencing a rise in anti-Arab and anti-immigrant political parties, Hindus in India have been discriminating against Muslims for almost a hundred years, and so on. Such racism was a favorable evolutionary trait a few millennia ago, when some system was needed to keep tribes and nations unified because if they became much smaller, they would not survive. However, now it is an irrational xenophobia that serves no purpose except starting wars and allowing oppressive elites to employ divide-and-conquer methods effectively and is based on a premise that is not only completely unsubstantiated but also outright refuted. In fact, for decades anthropologists have held that races are so similar that the term race does not even exist in a biological sense, and while very recently this position has become more debatable, there is still much evidence that the various races and ethnicities are only different from each other culturally. Such differences have nothing to do with biology or reason, and everything to do with conformity and demagogy.

If one observes European, Arabic, Chinese, and African culture, one can find numerous examples in each of terrifying and benighted traditions as well as of enlightened and progressive ones. Moreover, while many ethnicities are based on race, with Jews, Scandinavians, and Native Americans being only three general examples, the actual customs and social practices have more to do with geography and climate than with race. For instance, the customs of honor killing and vendetta in the Arab world, whereby men kill family members and particularly female ones for casting shame on the family by having premarital sex, are not the result of the Arabs being an inferior ethnicity, but of the desert conditions that forced the Arab tribes in the first millennium to institute a system where family members protected each other in absence of government. Not only is racism completely unjustified and divisive, but also the idea that some cultures are inherently better than others is false. There are superior and inferior customs, but all societies have a composition of superior customs and inferior ones. Cultures, like races, can and should mix, and eliminating illiberal customs such as blind obedience, patriarchy, and vendetta is one of the greatest challenged of a liberal, globalized society.

In multiracial societies, and particularly the United States, racism is less emphasized than homophobia and general hatred of all lifestyles that are considered deviant. The fact that deviance as a term is indefinable and the utter lack of any rational basis to believe that free sex is bad never stand in the way of homophobes, fundamentalists, and other staunch social reactionaries. This is more than an issue of liberty or of a person’s freedom to have sex with any consenting person he wants to have sex with, in whatever position agreed, with whatever fetishes agreed; it is an issue of homosexuality and sex life in general not being immoral at all. In order to say that something is immoral, immorality needs to be both defined and proven bad, and while the current liberal definition of something that harms other people certainly means that immorality is bad, it under no way views sexual choices such as positions or sexual nature such as homo- or bisexuality as immoral. Needless to say, this does not mean that homosexuality is necessarily good, only that it is amoral, and amorality is very far from immorality. Not only should all laws banning or restricting free, consensual sex be repealed, but also the institution of marriage as defined today must be changed, for gay and lesbian couples are often unable to marry, or enter into civil unions, whereas at the same time marriage is often required for certain inheritance rights. To paraphrase the known saying, gays and lesbians cannot be both deprived of their cake and forbidden to eat anything else.

The last common form of discrimination is also the one that is the most commonplace and global and discriminates against the largest number of people. Women, after all, constitute half of the world’s population, whereas homosexuals do about one ninth and minorities vary between a few percents and a few tens of percents in each country, have no homeland of their own, unlike, for example, Jews, and have to confront patriarchal traditions throughout the world. In Europe, women are still underrepresented in the various parliaments; in the United States, their income is three-fourths this of men; in China and India, people still practice sex-selective abortions and infanticides; and under the Muslim Shari’a law, women are second-class citizens if they are citizens at all. Such misogyny must be removed from the world, for women are the equal of men in all forms of mental labor, and are usually as qualified as men in menial labor. While the female brain operates slightly differently than the male brain—for example, women have better functioning right brains, responsible for both dissonance and creativity, whereas men have better functioning left brains, responsible for both reason and rationalization—there is no justification for inferiority or segregation. On the contrary, a society that embraces liberal feminism will surely find itself enriched by its opening to all of its members as opposed to only half of them.

One main and divisive issue pertaining women’s rights is whether the practice of abortion should be accepted in society, or, more precisely, on what conditions it is acceptable to deny a woman the right to terminate a pregnancy. The most obvious illiberal position is the pro-life position, which views the fetus as a viable human being to be protected at all or most stages of development while neglecting to engage in the philosophical issues of ethics that make the exact definition of secular humanism so blurry at times: is a fetus considered a rational being in the Kantian sense? If the fetus is within the woman’s body and is dependent on it, then does that not mean it is a part of her body? Given the way a fetus gets its nutrients—siphoning them from the woman’s body—does that not mean that it is a parasite until birth? Since the position that a fetus is a viable, living human being is blurry, iffy, and raises several key questions, does that not make the fetus’s life so questionable that the woman’s right over her own body should supersede it even though life normally supersedes liberty? Those who are pro-life have generally not answered such questions; and thus, the most logical and liberal position on abortion would be to support giving the woman the right to choose, up until birth. The compromise of banning only late-term abortions fixes a completely arbitrary boundary line that may be useful in law but not in politics or ethics, and moreover, does not address the second and third questions raised here.

The principles of inclusiveness and integration mean that liberalism supports uninhibited immigration and emigration. A country must not close itself to the world, whether the rationale is the employment of its own people first, protecting its culture, or letting other countries deal with their own citizens. The first such argument, the employment of a country’s own people, is inherently divisive, anti-humanistic, and ultimately promotes protectionism which leads to economic inefficiency and to unnecessary bureaucracy that can be reduced in per capita size if there are more free trade and free movement of people. The second argument, protecting the community’s culture, is the height of xenophobia and cultural conservatism and should thus be forgone. The third argument, letting other countries deal with their citizens, is based on false thinking that leads to strife and conflict, namely the idea that each group is responsible only to its members and vice versa. That argument is as valid as the case of a person shooting another in some desolate place and then leaving, and a bystander refusing the shot person help on the grounds that it is the shooter’s fault and therefore the shooter must remedy the crisis. An additional liberal principle, freedom of movement, supports unrestricted immigration further, by establishing that national borders should not limit people’s movement from place to place according to their self interest, and thus that countries should restrict neither immigration nor emigration. Should problems arise because a country’s labor force produces substantial shortages of one kind of labor but surpluses of another, the presumption is that the government can start programs to eliminate such disequilibria in demand and supply and let welfare help workers in distress from their demand-side perspective and market forces help employers’ supply-side perspective. While some of these ideas can only be implemented if the world’s nations decide to cooperate in everyone’s best interest, a handful of countries are sufficient to start them by creating blocs of free flow of money, people, and information.

While few liberals object to the free flow of people and information, there are many who object to the free flow of money. There is certainly some merit to Joseph Stiglitz’s claim that modern capitalism has destroyed the economies of several countries, such as Brazil and Argentina; however, the fact that the World Trade Organization and the International Monetary Fund are capable of destroying a developing nation’s economy does not necessarily mean that they should be disbanded, as some liberals believe. However, there is little rational justification under the secular humanistic paradigm to the keeping of wealth in developed nations as opposed to distributing some of it to developing ones, and there is not enough evidence that the IMF’s very existence threatens poorer nations with default and bankruptcy. That does not mean I support the current structure of the IMF, whereby nations have to pay interest on the loans from the moment they receive them and whereby nations must use deflationary fiscal policies and specifically cut welfare payments in order to be eligible for credit. The most sensible and liberal position to take would be to replace the loans with giveaways, which neither the IMF nor the developed nations should expect to see returned; since several wealthy nations, among them the United States, already have sufficiently low tax rates, it is possible to give up the interest on the loans without fear of default. The issue of globalization is definitely debatable, but it is clear that neither anti-globalization extremism, meaning the opposition to the development of poor nations from outside, nor pro-globalization extremism, meaning implied support for the corporations’ plunder of poor nations, can be called liberal.

The last point, corporations, deserves special attention, for not only does liberalism have a definite position on it, but also it has become of utmost importance over the last twenty years or so. The growth in corporate power serves but one purpose, namely the enrichment of the owners of the said corporations at the expense of everyone else, and particularly the workers and the poor. The increasing inequality in wealth in the world and particularly in the United States, where most corporations are based and given asylum from sensible taxation, since the seventies is the result of a reversal in policy, which now subordinates human beings to corporations instead of subordinating corporations to human beings. Many liberals and libertarians attack the notion of corporate personhood, whereby a corporation rather than its shareholders or executives can sue as well as be sued; however, such corporate personhood prevents corporations from escaping lawsuit by replacing the problematic people, and, if done properly, can vastly increase the liability of the corporation and its owners to the rest of the world, for corporations can always pay far higher fines than individuals. The main problem with the current situation is that American corporations pay the ridiculous corporate tax, whose marginal rate is a mere four percent, and that free trade in its current form allows corporations to avoid paying taxes using loopholes in international trade agreements. The solution to that is to declare a global corporate tax paid to the IMF, which then distributes some of the revenues to the governments of the corporations’ base proportionally to the amount of money paid in each country, and uses the rest of the revenue for international aid. Furthermore, individual governments must restrict the corporations’ ability to influence elections, by declaring such a cap on campaign contributions that will only affect the richest of individuals—for example, a hundred thousand dollars or euros per person—but will severely curtail a corporation’s ability to bribe its way into politics. The corporation is not the root of all economic evil, but if left unregulated and untaxed, it can become a major problem in society, creating inequality and subordinating the workers to an economic system, which, in return, crassly exploits them.

The single issue that is perhaps the most important political issue in most elections, taxation, fiercely competes with economic globalization for the dubious title of the point liberals are most divided about. Again, as with economic globalization, the key here is moderation; liberals generally do not support the abolition of the income tax or raising the marginal rate to one hundred percent, just like they generally do not support complete isolation or letting corporations do as they please with the world. In economics, there is a curve known as the Laffer curve, which plots the marginal income tax against the total tax revenue, with the assumption being that as the tax rate rises, people invest and work less and so the curve is not a straight line; it turns out that in normal times, the curve is straight up to forty percent, and thereafter, it curves convexly to the tax axis, reaching a maximum point about sixty percent and continuing on till an inflection point, after which the curve straightens out and hits the tax axis at one hundred percent. In other words, there is no disincentive to work when the marginal tax rate is below forty percent, and there is no gain in tax revenues when the marginal rate is above sixty percent; hence, a government dependent on taxation for its revenue must fix a bar somewhere between forty and sixty. Now, assuming corporate tax, as I suggest above, is paid indirectly through the IMF, we can see that while in high-investment countries such as Japan and the United States, the corporate tax will dominate the revenue, in other countries the income tax will dominate. There is little problem with that, as long as the tax is progressive and thus also serves the purpose of redistribution of wealth downwards; progressive tax here is defined not as a tax that conforms to progressive values, but rather as a tax where the richer one is, the more he pays in proportion to his income, as opposed to a proportional tax where everyone pays the same proportion and a regressive tax where the richer one is, the less he pays in proportion to his income. Granted, income tax is not the only tax; there are sales taxes, which should be eliminated or reduced at least for basic products such as bread, milk, and water, as they are in Europe; there are social security taxes, which can and should be merged with the income tax since they are paid only up to a certain point beyond which they become regressive; there are property taxes, which usually do a disservice to the middle class that owns a lot of property relative to wealth and should consequently be either restructured to have a high tax exemption or abolished; and there are inheritance taxes, which give substance to the libertarian mantra of equal opportunity and therefore should be encouraged at a high rate of fifty to seventy percent above an exemption of a few millions as to maximize equalization without giving too rewarding an incentive to use loopholes to avoid the tax.

Types of Liberalism

Although modern liberalism more or less supports the same issues, it still allows for a high amount of diversity even inside its system. Apart from a few areas of disagreement, modern liberalism is unified in its support of left-wing positions on issues such as abortion, rule of law, and so on, and yet, there are many kinds of modern liberals, for the same reason there are many kinds of mathematicians. A social liberal and an economic liberals do not necessarily disagree, like a physicist who supports relativity and a physicist who supports quantum mechanics do; rather, they are as different from each other as a set theorist and a geometrician are, in the sense that they focus on different areas of political theory. Such types of modern liberalism mostly concur; the only real disagreement is between internationalist liberals who support globalization and economic liberals who are more cautious with it.

Social liberals are probably the most hardline and left-wing liberals, for liberalism never compromises on such issues as women’s rights, racism, or abortion, while it usually does on interventionism, taxes, and so on. The term should not be confused with socialistic liberals, for it is also used to distinguish those from left-wing libertarians. Social liberals concentrate mainly on issues that are between different people, or between people and society, while refraining from touching economics or relations between different societies; therefore, they concern themselves with xenophobia, patriotism, education, and health care more than with the budget, war, taxation, and corporate power. A broader definition of social liberals also includes personal issues such as moralism, civil liberties, and religion; however, it is better to separate social liberalism from personal liberalism on the grounds that a merger creates a monster that reins over sixteen out of twenty-two issues given above.

Xenophobia, being the preference of one group to another based on gender, race, ethnicity, culture, or sexual orientation, is of utmost concern to social liberals. It divides society often below the minimal number of people needed in today’s world, creates completely unnecessary conflicts, and runs counter to social subset theory. Moreover, it is based on irrational principles such as social Darwinism and race theories, which force people to spend time on protecting themselves from others instead of on improving their quality of life, and run counter to intellectualism. Similarly, social liberals abhor patriotism, since it reverses the social contract, by which the people help the state only insofar as it fulfills its role as the people’s servant, as they do conscription of people either to the military or to a general war effort, for it makes people work for the sake of killing others. The general rule of thumb in social liberalism is this of inclusiveness; anything that pits man against man is wrong, as are anything that divides society into factions or into different societies and anything that subordinates man to society; xenophobia, patriotism, and war on the home front are thus illiberal, as are opposition to immigration, public health care, welfare, education, and abortion. Social liberals encourage immigration on the grounds that it gives people greater choices regarding which society and culture they want to live in, and support governmental programs such as public health care, education, and welfare on the grounds that they are needed if the poor are to have a decent standard of living. Abortion is a borderline issue between social and personal liberalism, as it is debatable whether the fetus is part of the woman’s body. Here, education is not restricted to the teaching of science, critical thinking, and the humanities, but also to research and other academic issues that anti-intellectualists often decry as the ivory tower. Finally, social liberals are committed to democracy, being the known system that combats social coercion the best, and to the preservation of the environment, which supports people and societies by ensuring that the planet that nurtures them is not made uninhabitable.

Personal liberals primarily support personal liberty, and concentrate on issues that affect the individual without relation to other people, including civil liberties, sex laws, abortion, and religion. They are second in their refusal to compromise only to social liberals, and even so that is only because the issues they deal with are very philosophical and have a fine line between acceptable behavior and unacceptable behavior. Personal liberals support civil liberties, but know that there are obvious cases when they should be restricted, most notably the freedom of movement of imprisoned convicts. Similarly, they oppose sodomy laws and banning pornography, but they still refrain from supporting the legalization of sex between an adult and a child or of child pornography. They support abortion rights and secularization of society, but should realize that those issues are not completely resolved, philosophically speaking, and thus no one should take them as one and only truth, even under the paradigms of liberalism.

Cultural liberals, as their name implies, support cultural and personal change, and therefore are the first group of liberals to support changing an unnecessary law or custom. They are diametrically opposed to all forms of traditionalism, including legalism, constitutionalism, and cultural conservatism, and realize that for human beings to progress, society and its institutions should change as they become obsolete. Cultural liberals concern themselves with the rule of law, where there is a very fine line between liberals and revolutionaries and hence one needs to tread carefully, as well as with cultural globalization and change. Of the groups of modern liberals, cultural liberals are the least patient to demagogic statements such as “we must protect our way or life.”

Internationalist liberals have a fairly moderate stance on all issues they focus on, except for war. They are generally committed to pacifism, practical or principled, since war is the source of most evil concerning international relations, and also because like personal and social liberals, they care about human life. As for other issues, they tread carefully between extremes that are either harmful or outdated; thus, they are opposed to imperialism and to domination of other nations through installation of puppet regimes, as well as to isolationism and to foreign policy laissez-faire. They support globalization on the grounds that it merges societies into a global community, but are not so enthusiastic about it as neo-liberals, whose position on it leads to corporations exploiting the people of the third world; in other words, the globalization they support is more of free flow of information and people than of money and jobs. For the same reason, they support free immigration, but for a reason different from this of social liberals. The compassionate and pacifistic tendencies of internationalist liberals also bring them to support the preservation of the environment for the same reason social liberals do: the protection of human life through the protection of the planet.

The most common type of liberalism is economic liberalism, and for a good reason: poor people and particularly welfare recipients and the unemployed generally support those measures that help them out of poverty. Economic liberals are the most moderate on their issues of choice of all types, as they need to avoid the danger of either socialism or libertarianism. Socialism curbs inventions and encourages mediocrity, as one can observe in the late Soviet Union and Communist China, and its insistence on full employment both ignores the fact that there exists frictional unemployment, defined as unemployment occurring from people quitting or being fired from work and taking time to find a new and hopefully better job, as well as the fact that full employment is often inefficient. Libertarianism hurts the poor and the middle class, for its insistence on letting the market forces run the economy ignores the fact that doing so leads to depressions, as seen in the period from the beginning of the nineteenth century up to the Great Depression. Economic liberals lean slightly toward the socialist end of the scale, but are best characterized as economic centrists; they support demand-side economics during recessions but realize that growth is the result of sensible and progressive supply-side economics; they prefer fiscal policy to monetary policy, as well as lax monetary policy to restrictive monetary policy and controlling unemployment to controlling inflation; and they understand that economics is a means rather than an end and therefore ideology in economics is futile. In short, economic liberalism is economic pragmatism, combined with an understanding of liberal principles. As for the issues listed above, economic liberalism supports moderate taxation, as I lay above, and aims at controlling corporate power, which is almost always abused with the result being that the poor and the middle class suffer while corporations profit. Welfare, being partly social and partly economic, is important to social liberals, who view it as the best way to ensure that those for whom the system cannot find work do not suffer because of something that is entirely not their fault. Since the IMF is responsible to running the economies of several countries and has some role in the exploitation of third-world workers by corporations, economic liberals are relatively opposed to globalization, although they are mostly cautious and realize that changing the system may work better than destroying it.

While there are many more such types of liberalism and liberals, those five are the most common and form the most basic division. It is possible to delve deeper, by, for example, distinguishing compassionate and pacifistic liberals from true, pro-globalization internationalists, or by dividing social liberalism into inclusiveness and individual supremacy over nations. However, doing so will not only complicate the matter beyond necessity, but will also miss an important point, namely that those divisions are purely superficial and concern only the front-end—meaning positions on issues—of liberalism, as opposed to its back-end—meaning that paradigms and form of reasoning behind it—where the division is into civil libertarians, intellectualists, and social progressives. Therefore, I willfully do not go as deeply in that part, which I consider less important than the others, as I could.

A Divided Philosophy

Despite the apparent unity of modern liberalism, it allows for diversity on several issues, among them taxation, economic globalization, and the threshold beyond which the law must be changed. Moreover, modern liberalism, which I consider the best application of the liberal back end for the next twenty or thirty years, is only the latest way to apply liberalism to the modern world. Liberalism originates from the Second Treatise on Government, written in sixteen-ninety, and not from the emergence of the Internet as a mass media ten years ago; in other words, there are three hundred years to be covered from the emergence of liberalism till the emergence of modern liberalism. Moreover, while modern liberalism is mostly a global philosophy, liberalism in general can be fit into various cultures and nations, so that American liberalism, European liberalism, and Arab liberalism are quite different from one another.

Therefore, there are clear differences between different forms of liberalism in history and across the globe, and so no single list of issues can cover all of them; some of them actually disagree with most of the positions I articulate. As a matter of fact, many people who call themselves liberals disagree with the paradigms themselves, most notably left-wing Christians who do what is in humanity’s best interest only because god says so and left-wing traditionalists who do not want to change their way of life. Those who disagree on paradigms that are essential to liberalism cannot be called liberals; while they may well define it in other terms, as I did when I took the secular humanistic idea for granted and postulated that ends not justifying means was an assumption, and still be liberal, they cannot oppose a paradigm outright and then claim to support a political philosophy based on those paradigms. Given the lack of a better term, those who agree with the positions on the issues above are leftists; leftists who also support secular humanism and progressivism are left-wing liberals, whereas leftists who do not are something else, such as left-wing Christians.

This back-end definition of liberalism requires at least giving credit to the front-end diversity that ensues. Of the nine kinds of liberalism I will discuss, three are quite inconsistent with modern liberalism: Lockian liberalism, which is libertarian in nature and is very capitalistic, and is evident in the American revolution; the moralistic forms of liberalism advocated by Rousseau and employed by many today who want to ban pornography; the revolutionary and militant liberalism of the French Revolution, which manifested itself in the Spring of Nations fifty-nine years later. Three more are fairly consistent with it: the reformist liberalism of the American abolition of slavery and of the European-American battles for votes for women around the turn of the nineteenth century; the big government liberalism of the Depression, Keynes, and the New Deal; and the cultural progressivism and permissiveness of the sixties. Finally, three further kinds—modern American liberalism, Jewish liberalism, and Arab liberalism—are more or less incorporated into modern liberalism, the first showing primarily in the opposition to xenophobia, sex laws, and infringements upon civil liberties, the second showing mainly in economic moderation, moderately proactive foreign policy, and opposition to racism, and the third showing mostly in the support of a moderately proactive foreign policy and cultural change.

On the surface, there seems to be a contradiction between the fact that Locke is the forefather of liberalism and the fact that his views are currently considered libertarian to reactionary. However, the progressive paradigm shows that on a deeper level, there is no contradiction, for society in the late seventeenth century was so different from today’s society that it was natural for the views that were considered liberal and progressive then to be very different from the views that are considered liberal and progressive today. While much of modern liberalism agrees with Locke’s assertion that all people have the rights to “life, liberty, and property,” it disagrees with his view that rights are natural. The very Lockian American declaration of independence mentions that the rights to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” are “imbued by the Creator.” Moreover, Locke’s liberalism not only embraces property rights, but views them as inseparable from other rights, so that the constitutions of North and South Carolina that he wrote were aristocratic in nature and forbade people without property from voting. Since Locke also began the liberal tradition of government not by divine right but by the people, meaning democracy, it is obvious that he linked political rights with property rights very closely. The rationale is that a person without property depends on another and therefore never makes his own choices but rather executes those of the person or people he is dependent on. Furthermore, Locke, like the subsequent founders of the United States, shows very libertarian attitudes in his writings; the idea that rights are natural, and thus that the government may never infringe on them, is almost religious in its mystic attempts to make social structures absolute; the emphasis placed on property rights as opposed to political rights or civil liberties is more libertarian than liberal on the front-end, although the back-end is still firmly liberal; and the American ideas of small government, rugged individualism, the frontier society, and so on that still echo today in the United States’ foreign and domestic policy were definitely progressive two hundred years ago, but have since long become reactionary.

Moralistic liberalism is based on the idea that the government not only may but also must preserve the people’s freedoms. It is more modern than Lockian liberalism in the sense that it concedes that rights are based on a social contract and can therefore be granted and revoked at the government’s will, which means the people’s will, but it still does not recognize a person’s right to be morally decadent. Rousseau, for example, supports banning alcohol on the grounds that it deprives people of the ability to make free, rational choices, and hence supports the idea that people can be forced by law to be free. Moralistic liberalism can be arguably related to the Marxian idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat, with the government’s force-feeding of freedom being analogous to the forced equality under the socialistic stage of history. Moralistic liberalism differs from Lockian liberalism not only in its disbelief in natural rights and in small government, but also in its cultural roots; whereas the latter is primarily Anglo-Saxon, with liberty having been originally viewed as something that only Englishmen deserved, the former is French in roots and is more populist, with Voltaire having popularized the Enlightenment that began with Newton and Locke.

The liberalism evident in the Spring of Nations is very interesting as a topic of research. It began in the French Revolution, was partly evident during the Napoleonic Wars, became dormant during the Restoration, emerged in full in eighteen forty-eight in the Spring of Nations, and withered away at the beginning of the eighteen seventies. Socially, the Spring of Nations and the two decades following it were a liberal heaven: Jews got their emancipation in Europe, war became not a tool of foreign policy but a necessary evil, racism was in decline, and democracy and rule by the people were rising. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the end of the Spring of Nations’ liberalism was the resurgence of pan-ethnic movements, most notably the Pan-German movement that would later lead to Nazism and the Pan-Slavic movement that would later form a significant portion of the Triple Entente leading to World War One, as well as of Anti-Semitism, particularly in Austria and France. Economically, the Spring of Nation supported solidarity among the people of a nation, which, as contrary as it is to modern social and personal liberalism, agrees with economic liberalism to a very high degree. However, the patriotism and nationalism it promoted, as seen in the militancy of the French Revolution, the Napoleonic Wars, and the uprisings of the Spring of Nations, run counter to the modern liberal notion of individual supremacy and of people being more important than groups thereof. Moreover, some of its legacies are not very liberal in the modern sense: the fact that Switzerland still conscripts males into its army even in times of peace derives directly from what was liberal a hundred and fifty-five years ago, and the slow cultural progress is still evident in Europe today.

While those who fought against slavery in the United States and for votes for women in the United States and across most of Europe are now hailed as heroes, a hundred and fifty or a hundred years ago they were considered a revolutionary fringe group. While the ideas that women are the equals of men and that blacks are the equals of whites are certainly revolutionary for a society where large segments of the population are repressed by virtue of their race or sex, they in fact are little more than basic humanism and are therefore usual cases of liberalism. Reformist liberalism is consistent with modern liberalism, but I consider it different on the grounds that its historical roots are much different, for modern liberalism is rooted is the prosperity of the nineties whereas reformist liberalism is rooted in the injustice done to groups such as blacks or women. The reformist liberal idea that a group of activists can eventually become a mass movement and start change from below, even when the system is solid and conservative enough so that no change can proceed from within it, is extremely important to social progressivism and opposition to xenophobia, as people rarely agree to give up power or privilege without a long fight. Like Spring of Nations liberalism, reformist liberalism is mostly socially liberal; unlike it, however, the change in it comes from below and not from above, and further, there is little nationalism involved, if at all. Reformist liberalism is also important because it supports reform rather than a revolution; the French Revolution, for example, is a case where the people got what they wanted, more or less, by using force and terror, whereas votes for women were achieved without bloodshed (abolition of slavery is debatable, because while the struggle of the eighteen fifties that led to Lincoln’s election was peaceful, the Civil War that ensued was clearly not).

Whereas the four previous kinds of liberalism discussed are primarily personal or social, New Deal liberalism is mostly economic. The United States is the third country in the world ever to employ Keynesian economics, one of the cornerstones of liberalism in times of hardship and recession, after Fascist Italy and the Soviet Union, and even the Soviet Union was arguably not Keynesian because Keynes supports a regulated market rather than no market at all; hence, this fifth kind of liberalism is named after it. The New Deal was a break from the spurious ideas that the market always worked and that the government should not do anything in times of stagnation, and was thus the birth of economic liberalism and moderation. New Deal liberalism, therefore, places emphasis on big government working toward a relatively egalitarian society, and on social programs meant to aid the poor and, more generally, those whom the market cannot help. Not only is it economically liberal, but also it is socially liberal, for it values welfare, health care, and public education, all of which the New Deal partly supported. New Deal liberalism, like reformist liberalism, is consistent with modern liberalism both as a general socioeconomic plan and as a way to cure economic depressions, but is based on completely different circumstances, this time of economic stagnation and depression.

The liberalism of the sixties is the first instance of cultural liberalism thus far, and one of the two that exist, modern liberalism aside, with the other being Arab liberalism. Andrea Dworkin can criticize the sexual revolution as an excuse for letting men rape women without conservative restraints, with rape including heterosexual sex according to Dworkin, but until she actually offers proof that the motive of the sixties’ revolution was so cynical, we must dismiss her statement as baseless. The social and cultural backlash following World War Two was the height of social reaction, for not only was the reinforcement of patriarchy at home and in the workplace a backlash against the partial emancipation of women during the War, but also it was the height of cultural stagnation. The sixties’ “drugs, sex, rock ‘n roll” slogan was a change in culture, from conservatism to liberalism, and also a radical change of political goals from obscure, abstract ideas such as justice, freedom, and equality, to more concrete and personalized benefits such as free sex, moral but not ethical leniency, pacifism, and questioning of authority. The sixties, one should notice, were more than an era of extreme cultural and personal liberalism; they were also an era of political participation and activism, as well as one of pacifism, at least among the people, and one of connection between the people and the academia through partly shared goals. Therefore, the liberalism of the sixties is primarily cultural and secondarily personal, with the most obvious and important legacy being the idea that the personal is the political, and that therefore people should never sacrifice their own needs—equal rights in the cases of women, homosexuals, and minorities, educational and academic reform in the case of students, and so on—for some abstract greater good.

The United States is special enough a case to warrant its own kind of liberalism, even though the positions of modern liberalism presented above are true from the American point of view. By American liberalism I refer not to the forces behind the American Revolution and the subsequent constitution, which were mostly based on Lockian liberalism and, to a lesser extent, Spring of Nations liberalism; rather, I refer to modern liberalism as practiced in the context of the conservative culture of the United States. American liberals, further, do not include the patriotic apologists, the left-wing Christian fanatics, and the constitutional fundamentalists who like to call themselves progressive of liberal, but rather, are modern liberals whose views are based on the context of American culture. Most of those views are reactions against American conservatism: separation of church and state is a very liberal position that the population of the United States, which is more religious than all other first- and second-world nations as well as than many third-world nations, shuns; legal and constitutional progressivism is liberal and also runs counter to American legalism; support of science is against American fundamentalism; and so on. The two most hotly debated positions among modern American liberals are gun control, where American psyche tends toward viewing the right to keep and bears arms as a fundamental liberty while liberals are bitterly divided, and free trade, which industrialists support as a way to increase profits, which nationalists oppose as a way to redistribute money from the rich United States to poor third-world nations, and which liberals are cautious on regardless of where they tend. Generally speaking, American liberalism is economic, by virtue of its support of at least some welfare, which conservatives relentlessly and unfortunately successfully attack, but it also taps onto the other four types of liberalism, although they are less marked: it is social in the sense that it supports reverse discrimination in favor of women and minorities, it is personal in the sense that it opposes state surveillance an eavesdropping even after September Eleventh, it is cultural in the sense that it runs counter to American psyche, and it is internationalist in the sense that it is mostly pacifistic. The best easily accessible example of American liberalism is Liberalism Resurgent, which goes not only against American mainstream but also against left-wing American mainstream.

Jewish interests and Israeli actions should never be confused with each other. Jewish interests combine those of minorities, for in no country in the world do Jews constitute a majority except in Israel where there are five million Jews to almost a hundred million Arabs in the surrounding countries, with those of the middle, upper-middle, and upper classes, for Jews are richer and more educated than every other group in the world (twenty-five percent of Nobel Prize winners, for example, are Jewish, but only a fifth of a percent of the world’s people are). Jewish liberalism, partly because of that and partly because of history, is wary of racism, fundamentalism, and autocracy, all of which have very Anti-Semitic histories. Israel’s anti-intellectual, warmongering, racist policies are an entirely different matter; Israel ironically oppresses the Arab minority under its jurisdiction as well as the Palestinians in the occupied territories, but that does not even promote Israeli or Jewish interests, for the permanent state of war in Israel does not help its citizens, and for the Arab-Israeli conflict promotes Anti-Semitism among Arabs. Although Jews tend to support Israel’s actions quite fanatically and with nationalism, they are very liberal nonetheless, primarily on social, internationalist, and economic issues, whereby anti-racism and intellectualism comprise Jewish social liberalism, the moderately proactive foreign interests caused mostly by the memories of the Holocaust comprise Jewish internationalism, and care for all classes and implied support of class peace comprise Jewish economic moderation.

Like American liberalism, Arab liberalism is rooted in the context of reaction against a prevalent conservative culture. However, whereas American psyche is at least prone to some left-wing populist positions such as health care, education, and to some extent progressive taxation, Arab psyche is not, and therefore Arab liberalism is much more confined to the academia. As such, Arab liberalism is probably the most intellectualistic of the nine kinds of liberalism, surpassing even Lockian liberalism. Arab liberalism, moreover, is very progressive in terms of culture, aiming mostly at personal liberty; the Islamic and otherwise totalitarian states in the Middle East stifle growth and prosperity as well as individual liberty and try to paint their progressive rivals as imperialistic or Anti-Muslim, thus creating an atmosphere where almost every single left-wing position must be backed by cultural progressivism and hence by liberalism. Ironically enough, the best chance of success for Arab liberals comes from the attacks of September Eleventh, which, as Thomas Friedman points out in “Signs of Progress in the Muslim World,” have caused deep introspection in the Middle East, as he quotes Egyptian playwright Ali Salem: “You have become more suspicious, and we will become more progressive.” Arab liberalism is naturally the kind most alarmed when Arab nations are bombed needlessly, as in the case of Iraq, where thousands of Iraqis have been killed although it was quite possible to assassinate Saddam Hussein; however, it is also the most alarmed by isolationism, except for Jewish liberalism with which it ties, because much of the future of Arab youth and Arab progressivism lies in the hands of the West, which must pursue a sensible and moderately proactive foreign policy.

Some people might say that there is a tenth kind of liberalism that needs to be covered, namely neo-liberalism, whose roots are the same as those of modern liberalism but which is far more capitalistic and hawkish. In reality, neo-liberalism is a patchwork of modern liberalism, libertarianism, and neo-conservatism. Neo-liberalism, at least on social and personal issues, is liberal, however, on economic and international issues it tends to bend the secular humanistic paradigm by submitting to excessive corporate power. Therefore, there are still only nine kinds of liberalism, apart from the modern kind I am advocating, which need to be discussed and analyzed. The first three clearly do not stand the test of time; Lockian liberalism presumes that rights are natural and that a libertarian society is feasible, which it is not given the current context of the new millennium; moralistic liberalism ignores the fact that freedom includes the freedom to be decadent and to forfeit freedom; and Spring of Nations liberalism is based on the concept of nation-states, which, given current trends in the Middle East and, more importantly, the European Union, are quickly becoming obsolete. The next three are consistent with modern liberalism, with modern circumstances, and with historical facts, but are nonetheless based on different contexts and reactions to various problems, whereas modern liberalism is rooted in success and prosperity. Finally, the last three are cultural adaptations of modern liberalism, which is a universal rather than local philosophy, and are also reactions to negative cultural trends: American liberalism reacts to American conservative psyche, Jewish liberalism reacts to historical and modern Anti-Semitism, and Arab liberalism reacts to Muslim fundamentalism and partly to the West’s misguided policies in the Arab world.

When I first raised the issue of a liberal manifesto in left-wing circles, some of the replies to the idea were negative, based on the concept of inclusiveness and on the idea that a liberal manifesto would be exclusionary. There certainly is some truth to the point that a universal, compassionate, inclusive philosophy should not exclude people based on race, gender, age, nationality, and so on; however, all philosophies more or less by definition exclude people who do not believe they are true. While given the fact that this essay defines liberalism, the last sentence may seem tautological, it is in fact not; liberalism, as an idea based on rigidly defined paradigms, is qualitatively different from left-wing politics, which are simply a collection of positions on issues that sometimes contradict themselves, and therefore a definition of one must differentiate it from the others. Moreover, those people who disagree with the paradigms but call themselves liberal nonetheless either misuse the word by equating it with left-wing politics or try to hold on to buzzwords that they change to fit their own views in the same way ideologues of all stripes change the meaning of the word freedom as they see fit. Fascists and communists who call themselves liberal only because they happen to be on the economic left and libertarians who call themselves liberal only because they happen to be on the personal left are not liberal because they do not agree with the paradigms. As a clarifying note, while my attacks on religion and fundamentalism may make it look as if no on can be a monotheist and a liberal at the same time, this is definitely not true; a person can be both, as long as he does not defer to god on ethical issues but rather thinks for himself; a person who embraces the liberal parts of Christianity following the realization that do unto others is a good concept may well be liberal, but a person who is left-wing because he thinks Jesus or Mohammed said so is not.

Liberal Solutions

To say that the back-end of liberalism necessarily implies the front-end of modern liberalism in all cases is dishonest, because there is much room for debate between the obvious back-end concepts I derive at the beginning of this essay and the front-end positions outlined immediately afterward. However, given history and modern society, embracing modern liberalism is the rational thing to do; it has been for the last ten years, and it will probably be for the next twenty or so. Furthermore, it is possible to counter conservative and other right-wing slurs of liberalism by tapping onto its true definition and using it to debate in the liberals’ arena rather than in the conservatives’. The battle of ideas, fought in writing, in interpretation of facts, and in rational debate, need not degenerate into a total war, where the first two casualties are truth and objectivity; even if those people who oppose liberalism insist on using demagogy and appeals to emotion, liberals can and should keep their calm and remember that reason and the search for the truth are supreme.

There is but one question that remains to be answered, albeit a fundamental one: what is the ultimate liberal state in the current international reality? In other words, if liberals were allowed to rewrite the constitution and the laws of a state, what would they produce? The question has three answer groups, the first being the answers for super-states, meaning the European Union, the second being the answers for large nation-states such as the United States and Russia, and the third being the answers for small or medium nation-states such as Israel and Switzerland. All liberal states, regardless of size, guarantee the people rights such as freedom of thought and expression, freedom of association, freedom from religion, and so on, and all are based on democratic values of the rule of the majority, guaranteed rights for the minority, and separation of the executive, legislature, and judiciary. Beyond that, there is a huge variance between the three groups. Super-states need smaller divisions with varying degrees of autonomy, with a clear purpose to shift power from the individual divisions to the federal government; the European Union is engaging in this process right now, whereas the United States finished it and became a nation-state at the end of its Civil War. Large nation-states need divisions, too, in order to be governable, but whereas super-states have little to no federal identity—few Europeans regard themselves as Europeans rather than Frenchmen, Germans, and so on—nation-states do; therefore, large nation-states need divisions, but do not need a marked concept of divisions’ rights. Small nation-states, like large nation-states, have clear national identities, and are generally small and homogenous enough to be governable with no divisions at all.

The classic case of a super-state in making, the European Union, is also the one where liberals can have the most influence, since it is now in the process of a constitutional convention. Apart from the fact that liberals, or at least the more internationalist liberals, support the European Union as the next stage of political development (city-states, then nation-states, then super-states), there are many important points European liberals need to stress during the convention. First, Europe must strive to create a European identity, for example by encouraging international cooperation inside the Union as well as a united working class and a united capitalist class. Second, Europe must, at least for now, respect some nations’ rights inside the Union, but not to the ludicrous extent the concept of states’ rights in the United States actively exploits large states; therefore, the European parliament best be kept bicameral, with the lower house being elected Europe-wide, in conjunction with the previous point, and with the upper house being elected according to nations, but not as disproportionately to population as the American Senate. Third, Europe must take the active role of promoting civil and human rights throughout the world, since the United States is actually regressing to a more authoritarian system; inside its borders, it needs to continue in its unwavering social progressivism, exemplified by its requirement that all member nations abolish the death penalty. Fourth, Europe must transcend the common European arrogance and nationalism, and thus ensure that there are few to no restrictions on immigration into its land, that excess money from the national treasuries is given to third-world nations, and that Europe actively contribute to the colonies Britain and France exploited and especially to India and the Middle East.

While the United States is a nation-state, it still has some characteristics of super-states, among them size, the idea of states’ rights, and the regionalism evident in both politics and culture. The most important issue in the United States does not concern its borderline position between a nation-state and a super-state, but rather American conservatism and constitutionalism. To say that all liberals in the United States oppose the constitution, let alone support rewriting it, is dishonest; however, given the numerous loopholes, ambiguities, and antiquated notions it contains, I believe that even with the current ultraconservative climate in the United States, rewriting it will benefit everyone, Americans and non-Americans alike. A new American constitution needs to eliminate states’ rights by allowing Congress to override state laws except those that are by their nature local, such as the use of a state’s resources, as well as to allow states to split, merge, secede, and change borders by referendum rather than by vote in the legislature. Moreover, it needs to strengthen civil liberties and human rights by extending the bill of rights to areas such as education and health care and rewriting it so that such concepts as privacy and separation of religion and state are made unambiguous. Finally, it must change the political system to slightly more direct than representative; direct election of the president, currently elected by a statewide winner-take-all system that overrepresents small states, is important in making the United States a true nation-state rather than a federation as well as increases voter turnout; changing Congress from its current bicameral structure to a unicameral one, and having it elected by proportional representation might make elections more about political issues than about individual candidates; and federal motions for initiative, meaning allowing citizens to force Congress to vote on a bill by petition, and referendum, will give citizens more power and voice.

The main points on the agenda of a liberal in Israel are less social than military, as a consequence of the Arab-Israeli conflict breeding militarism. Israel is bitterly divided between Jews and Muslims and between secularists and fundamentalists, but at least among the Jewish majority, the Jewish identity is cohesive enough a force to prevent the small nation from dissolving, perhaps too cohesive so that it creates virulent nationalism. While it is understandable that Israel needs to undermine Palestinian terrorism, there is no permanent military solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and moreover, the settlements in Gaza Strip and the West Bank only exacerbate an already explosive situation. Furthermore, Israel should at least start to demilitarize, by aiming to eliminate conscription as soon as possible and at the same time concentrate on breaking the militant attitude and tradition that is evident in its psyche and, worse, in its education system; while many conservatives argue that demilitarization will force Israel to fight with one hand tied behind its back, this is not as precise a metaphor as my idea of completely chopping off the hand of the military, in order to force it to use the other hand of diplomacy. Finally, Israel also needs to continue the process of secularization, with no laws establishing Judaism as a state religion or enforcing its tenet on the population, and, more symbolically, with a Saturday-Sunday weekend, as opposed to the current, Saturday-only weekend.

Iraq, and by extension most other Arab countries, has so many problems that it is hard to address all in so small a space. The most pressing problem in Iraq right now is the chaos that erupted when Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled several weeks ago, and the Islamic theocracy that may well ensue, unless the United States acts quickly to democratize the country, which I fear it will not. If, however, Iraq is lucky enough to have a liberal government, then it will need to urgently address not only the issue of growing fundamentalism and lawlessness, but also the ethnic problems inside Iraq. In the long run, fundamentalism is the worst of Iraq’s evils, as even Saddam Hussein was a secular dictator, whose country prospered in the eighties, before the United Nations’ sanctions; moreover, all Arab countries will need to undermine theocratic elements of society and government if they are to become liberal, as fundamentalism has been arguably the single most dangerous force to humanity for the last two thousand years. In the short run, a liberal Iraq must divert resources to instating an effective but not tyrannical rule of law, lest middle-class Sunnis who will be a crucial element in rebuilding the country and who had to join the Ba‘ath Party in order to be allowed to work in their professions be slaughtered by Shiite masses. The actual political system must not only make civil liberties and human rights inviolable but also weaken the ethnic tensions among Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites, by granting both some form of autonomy, perhaps in the form of regional rights, and by ensuring that no group can dominate the others (subset theory comes to mind here).

The task liberals face is immense. They need not only to win the battle of ideas against conservatism without starting a war of equally fanatical ideologies, but also to ensure that the world does not degenerate into global mire akin to the dystopia presented in Nineteen Eighty-Four. As I have shown in eighteen thousand words, even a rigid definition of liberalism allows for flexibility in positions on political issues, and even so, truth is on the liberals’ side. Whether they will succeed in the quest to transform first world and Arab societies from breeding grounds for reaction and xenophobia into havens of progressivism and third world societies from communities of exploited paupers into beacons of modernity and prosperity, only time will tell.

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