What is American liberalism?

I. Liberalism in the United States

Liberalism began in the 17th century as an ideological weapon of the rising class against the church and feudal privileges, where the word "liberal" originally meant generous and implied opposition to oppression and persecution. Since the United States was founded as a nation with such a dominant political tradition, liberalism is relatively pure and can be said to be typical. Liberalism must contain these components:

Political freedom.

Because liberalism arose out of the struggle against feudal despotism, it is first and foremost concerned with limiting the power of the king and limiting the power of the government. Its theoretical basis is the natural human rights, that every person is born with basic human rights, and that these powers are not given by the government, so the government cannot take them away. The people, in order to preserve these rights of theirs, combine to form the government, so the government is there to protect the people. Therefore libertarianism is very, very wary of the power of government - keeping a firm eye on its legal rights from being violated.

Economic freedom.

Economic freedom includes property rights, free enterprise, free trade, free markets, and so on. So libertarianism proposes to reduce the control of the economy by the monarch or the government, and then allow individuals to utilize their talents to the fullest under guaranteed conditions, that is, guaranteed by law, so libertarianism has a slogan, "Make way for talent".

Individual freedom.

Individual freedom includes the right of expression, the right of belief, the right of privacy and so on. In short libertarianism is a set of ideology, political philosophy, political system, and even lifestyle centered on freedom, it is a package, and this freedom is centered on individual freedom, which is the essence of libertarianism in a very simple way.

II. The three main stages in the evolution of American liberalism.

The first is the establishment stage, which is subdivided into the colonial period, the founding period, and the civil war period. The middle stage is the revisionary stage, and the third stage is contemporary.

The establishment stage:

On the establishment of American liberalism we must first talk about his pre-preparation, that is, the colonial period, the colonial period, of course, certainly not liberal, but it contains the genes of liberalism. Talking about the colonial period we must briefly talk about Puritanism - we all know that after the Reformation, Protestantism was separated from Catholicism, and the Church of England became independent of the Roman Curia, and called itself the Anglican Church, and soon there were people in the Anglican Church who revolted, and (demanded) to be known as "Puritanism Soon there was a revolt within the Church of England (demanding) to be called "Puritans", and these people were called Puritans, which was the mainstay of the English Revolution. But before the revolution, there was a faction within the Puritans who were totally despondent about England, and believing that England was corrupted, they crossed the Atlantic Ocean to North America to build their City of God according to their own ideals. They arrived on the East Coast and established a theocracy of church and state which was compulsively religious and based everything on the Bible. Puritanism was certainly not liberal, freedom in the eyes of the Puritans was only sectarian freedom, they believed in the order of honor and inferiority, and someone who wanted to preach another religion in his territory would be driven out, they were truly obedient to God, so if there was a heresy it was blasphemy, and they would not tolerate it.?

Corrective Stage:

The first stage was more laissez-faire liberalism, because at that time the US had not yet developed industry and the economy was underdeveloped, so the ills of liberalism had not yet manifested themselves. However, after the United States got rid of the tumor of slavery in the last 40 years of the 19th century after the Civil War, the economy grew rapidly. Industrialization solved the problem of wealth production, but at the same time created the problem of wealth distribution. This is not to say that wealth was evenly distributed before industrialization, but rather that society did not have that much wealth before industrialization, and industrialization intensified the problem of wealth distribution. Because it is impossible for wealth to fall evenly on everyone's head: due to industrialization and the law of economic development, the scale of production must be enlarged, and capital becomes more and more concentrated, and finally a small number of plutocrats are formed, and their capital is enormous, which no one in the world has ever seen before, and so the Americans are very much afraid of this. To give an example, we all know the financier Morgan, with the strength of his company will be able to put the country into economic panic, in the 19th century and the 20th century in the handover of just 15 years, the U.S. President three times to help Morgan to help save the country: 1893 President Cleveland asked Morgan to help maintain the country's gold reserves, the old Roosevelt in 1902, President of the solution to the general strike in the coal mines is not to look for the owner of the mines, but the Morgan! In 1907, when the U.S. was facing an economic crisis, Morgan sent someone to the White House to say, "Let me save the country." By this point in time the average person was panicking. So there was a disparity between rich and poor after wealth was created, and that was a serious problem, but what Americans were more worried about wasn't that yet, it was the fear that these economic trolls would move from manipulating the economy into manipulating the government, and thus change the American democratic system.

Contemporary:

The 1960s were a time of political turmoil all over the world. The political turmoil of the 1960s in the United States contained a variety of movements, one was the civil rights movement from the 1950s, one was the movement against the Vietnam War, there was also the youth counterculture movement, there was also the New Left, the feminist movement, the Campus Confrontation, the Black Panther Party, etc., the whole society at that time was in turmoil, full of the smell of smoke and nitrous of confrontation, and it was not until the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. in 1968, that society's capacity to withstand the situation finally came to the limits. What was the result? It is a rebound. Society is bound to be like this, the tolerance of society is limited, and if it goes too far, it is bound to rebound. The election of Nixon, an obvious conservative, to the presidency, who gained the support of the silent majority with his slogan of law and order, showed that Americans were becoming more and more impatient with social unrest and were resorting to political movements. By Nixon, after 30 years of movement to the left, the pendulum had begun to swing back by the late 1960s, so without the stormy 1960s there would not have been the conservative backlash of the 1980s.?