Liberalism vs. Liberty

At the blog for the American Enterprise Institute, Steven Hayward notes that for well over a century, liberalism at different times has been at odds with and lovers of democracy.  This pivots upon how closely the public will is oriented toward the ends of liberalism itself.  Hayward explains that even when progressives have championed democracy and greater expression of the public will, it is at the cost of liberty of everyone.

At the core of “Progressivism,” as it was called then and is again today, was the view that more and more of the business of individuals and society was best supervised by expert administrators sealed off from the transient pressures of popular politics. So at the same time that Progressives championed “more democracy” in the form of populist initiatives, referendum, and recalls, they also developed a theory deeply anti-democratic in its implications.

So even with the introduction of more democratic elements to supposedly hear more clearly the voice of the people, progressive politics is actually at odds with individual liberty and the principle of consent of the governed.  It's important to remember that for progressives, the scope of politics is both lowered and reduced.  Politics is no longer about open deliberation and statesmanship; instead it is mainly focused on the rule of experts ensconced in a far-away capital.  The administrative state would soon take over things once thought to be in the realm of politics, and as Hayward points out, thus began the rise of the bureaucracy and the slow drift away from the republican form of government created by the Founders:

As the famous phrase from Saint-Simon had it, “the government of men is to be replaced by the administration of things.” But this undermines the very basis of democratic self-rule. No one better typifies the incoherence of Progressivism on this point than Woodrow Wilson, an enthusiastic theorist of the modern administrative state who couldn’t clearly express why we would still need to have elections in the future. In Wilson’s mind, elections would become an expression of some kind of watery, Rousseauian general will, but certainly not change specific policies or the nature of administrative government.