Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,
I’ve never liked the word liberal applied in the way it is today.
The word itself has a noble heritage.
It meant being for freedom generally and opposed to despotism and dictatorship by church or state.
Our Founding Fathers were considered liberals in a classical sense.
They wanted free speech, free elections, free enterprise, free formation of community, and so on, and wanted government restricted in its power.
That meaning of the word—which has translations in every language—lasted mostly until the Great War.
Many of the most liberal intellectuals and venues threw themselves into that conflagration with great enthusiasm. Matters got worse during the New Deal when even more “liberals” threw their weight behind industrial planning and corporatism.
Emerging out of World War II, there was nothing much remaining to the term. It had been completely co-opted by its enemies.
That presented genuine liberals with a problem. They needed a new term. Russell Kirk suggested conservative, which was odd because that term recalls monarchies of old, Tory traditionalists, and blood-and-soil revanchism.
Source: ZeroHedge News
