Good Liberalism. Bad Liberalism.

This is a fun game. I will describe a type of liberalism. You, dear reader, will say either "Good Liberalism" or "Bad Liberalism." You will like this game. As a regular reader of Fleckinstein, you will be very, very good at it.

Liberalism as the flowering of Christianity and the fierce acclamation of the infinite worth of every person, large and small, competent and incompetent, born and unborn, regardless of ethnicity or race, as created by an almighty and all-loving God.

Liberalism as liberation of the individual from all bonds of tradition, family, obligation, gender, community and faith.

Liberalism as pursuit of the Liberal Arts, the interior freedom received from scrutiny of the Good, the True and the Beautiful.

Liberalism as a disconnect with the past as superstitious and ignorant and a boundless confidence in future progress through science and technology.

Liberalism as rooted in the moral order, "natural law," the mysterious Logos that indwells all of Creation.

Liberalism as individualistic autonomy, independence, and unrestrained choice.

Liberalism as personal communion...in the Good, the True and the Beautiful...in a rich symphony of communities from family, through Church, neighborhood, city, state, nation and humankind.

See how much fun that game is? Well, by now you detect an underlying theme: good liberalism is a personalism flowing out of communion, with a range of communities, with Creation as Good-True-Beautiful, and with God and heaven. Bad liberalism is loneliness, isolation, individualism. Bad liberalism promises a false liberty by way of a Disconnect: from others, from the past, from God. Bad liberalism leads to despair, ennui, sterility and sadness.

Now lets consider three prevaling liberalisms: political liberalism, economic liberalism and cultural liberalism. The first two have problems. The last is a catastrophe. The first, political, is vulnerable to the last. The second, economic, also lacks a healthy immunity to the toxicity of the last.

Political liberalism is that of the Democratic Party. It has a strong sense of solidarity with the weak, the poor, the marginalized; it identifies with the victim; it uses government to correct injustice and assist the suffering. Its heyday coincides with my childhood: 1945-70...FDR, Truman, MLK,JFK, LBJ. Its two weaknesses manifested after the Cultural Revolution. First, a weak sense of subsidiarity in an unbalanced trust in big government and an inattention to mediating institutions. The earlier positive achievements (relief from the Great Depression, victory in the war, Civil Rights, the American Peace and triumph in the Cold War) left a blindness to the dysfunction of dependency on the Mother State, deterioration of other levels of community, and the culture of entitlement.

Economic liberalism is libertarian in its fierce defense of the individual's rights in the face of state tyranny, as in communism or the expansive progressive state. This is Milton Freedman, Ronald Reagan and the pre-Trump Republican establishment. In face of the Cultural Revolution it embraced moral conservatism in its concerns for Life, marriage and family, and religious liberty. It also had two weak spots: an individualism that obscured solidarity, including with the poor, and a similarly weakened sense of subsidiarity that allowed the expansion of mega-global-corporate capitalism and neglected to protect family, local community, the working and poor classes. Unlike political liberalism, it embraced moral conservatism; but its immunity was weak due to individualism, avarice, tolerance for gigantism in the private sector and indifference to the needs of the worker and the poor.

Cultural liberalism is sexual license: the severing of eros from chastity, fidelity, marriage, family and the religious vows. It is the ultimate liberation of the monadic Self as a god-unto-her-or-himself, unrooted and undirected in a vast, empty, meaninless void of a universe. It is futility, sterility, disenfranchisement, and despair. But it is powerful. It completely devoured political liberalism in a hostile takeover about which the Catholic Great Generation (apparently exhausted by Depression, wars with Japan and the Nazis and the Communists, and ensuring world peace) had very little clue.

Liberalism, as we know today, in its various expressions is LONELINESS Nevertheless, I for one, as son of a union organizer, cannot give up the pure, good meaning of the word. Rather, I crave a genuine liberalism as freedom, a freedom that breathes from the riches of our past, that rests in a "catholic" {i.e. universal) communion with all that is good and true and beautiful, that values all the freedoms and cherishes especially the little ones and the poor ones. This is the liberalism of John Paul II, Pope Emeritus Benedict, Edith Stein, Jacques Maritain, Dietrich von Hildebrand and many more. May we emulate them! May they pray for us!