Today, the term “liberal” is interpreted in all directions. (Image: Lelie/Unsplash)
Loriot summed it up many years ago: in the liberal sense, liberal doesn’t just mean liberal. Today, the label “liberal” is available to anyone who wants to wear it, regardless of their political goals.
But people today are not simply liberal. People today are specifically or selectively liberal, i.e. social liberal, green liberal, left liberal, neoliberal, ur-liberal. Or one is socially liberal, which by no means means that one is also economically liberal. What these terms mean, what history of ideas – if any – lies behind them, what political concerns are associated with them, and whether one can be even a little bit liberal is as difficult to answer today as it was in the past. Only one thing is certain: in politics, liberal does not just mean liberal. A firm belief in the welfare state is also considered liberal today.
This is the only way to understand, for example, why state equality offices, which pursue “feminism from above”, see themselves in the liberal tradition. Equality, or rather the economic independence of women, is a “primordial liberal concern”, a long-serving equality commissioner tells the readers of the Tages-Anzeiger. Anyone who is a true liberal, she concludes, must therefore oppose the closure of such offices, even if legal gender equality has long since been achieved. The road to “real” equality is apparently still a long one.
It may seem strange that the head of such an office should be the one to testify to the liberalism of the past. Nevertheless, one has to agree with the head of the office: Women’s economic independence is an ancient liberal cause. But that is only half the story. It is also a liberal idea not to call on the state, open an office or pass new laws for every problem, and certainly not for economic independence. It is also liberal to take your own progress into your own hands.
In the age of full legal equality for women, a woman with originally liberal aspirations does not need a state equality office to achieve economic independence. Today, being a woman is not a disadvantage in education and training, on the labour market, in civil society and certainly not in the state, at university or in the cultural sector – quite the opposite. What a woman needs to achieve economic independence is above all the will to achieve and a liberal labour market.
State equality bodies are no good as liberal think tanks. The concept of “real” equality, with its quotas for lucrative positions, reeks of planned economy and privilege. Liberalism, on the other hand, is nothing more than a fight against such privilege – but only in the truly liberal sense.
This column is an excerpt from the book “Neither Reft Nor Right” and is published here with the kind permission of the author.
