The First Liberals

Posted on January 20, 2004 in Liberals & Progressives Reading Words

Mark Kurlansky, author of The Basque History of the World is constantly throwing surprises into his illuminating peregrinations into the the Euskaldun past. “The term liberal,” he writes,

is an Old French Word meaning ‘a completely free man,’ which was to say, a nobleman. The Spanish Liberals in C�diz were the first to use the word to refer to those who believed in greater liberty.

But to the Liberals, greater liberty did not mean autonomy for the Basques. The preamble to their 1812 constitution paid tribute to the Fueros [the Basque governing councils], but the body of the document dismantled them. Francisco Epoz y Mina, the former commander of the Divisi�n de Navarra, one of the great heros of the war, took a copy of the constitution, placed it on a chair, and ordered it shot.

This secular idea of the freedom of the nobility being available to every man did not sit well with the country folk, the clergy, and the aristocrats who backed Carlos. The rival for the thone pressed for absolute monarchy. The Basques found themselves opposing ideas such as the universal male suffrage upon which their governing councils were based, freedom of religion, and the abolition of the Inquisition — even though Inquisitors had long made a profession of burning Basque women as witches while their men were off on the Grand Banks fishing for cod.

When Karl Marx looked at early nineteenth century Spain’s Carlist Wars, he took the side of the Carlists over that of the more progressive Liberals:

The traditional Carlist has the genuinely mass national base of peasants, lower aristocracy, and clergy, while the so-called Liberals derived their base from the military, the capitalists, latifundist aristocracy, and secular interests.

Marx detested the Liberals because of their hypocrisy. Like Senator Lieberman, the darling of the DLC, many Liberals simply weren’t liberal in their views. They stood for the kind of “freedom” that allowed capitalist oppression. Subsequent Marxists adopted the red beret of the Carlists as their mark of solidarity with the underdogs fighting the capitalist establishment:

The Carlists brought the beret into fashion in Europe, and it has never since gone out of style. Although the first known use of the word beret dates to a 1461 text in Landes, and though Gascognes and others in the region had worn this hat of unknown origin, there has been a long-standing association between Basques and berets….The Carlists wore it in red, the color traditionally worn on Basque holidays, and made it their own. La Boina, “the beret” was the name of a Carlist newspaper, and it was during the First Carlist War that the French began referring to the hat as they still do, as le beret Basque. Since the First Carlist War, the hat not only has become a central symbol of Basqueness, but has also gained international popularity and is generally associated with the political left. Argentine revolutionary Ernesto Che Guevara saw no contradiction in using the image of the beret….

This bizarre history helps to explain the strange events of the Twentieth and early Twenty First centuries. First, it demonstrates how the Soviet Union — a land pledged to be one for the people — came to be an authoritarian state in imitation of the Conservative Carlists. Likewise, Nazis followed the classic “liberal” pattern as they established their Capitalist sponsored, largely urban movement.

Second, it explains the rise of Franklin Delano Roosevelt as a sort of Carlist aristocrat put into power by a coalition of Dust Bowl farmers devastated by the Great Depression, urban workers, and people of principle — the clergy of our time.

Third, it leads directly to the confusion of our present American age where our so-called “Conservatives” — who are actually more like the original Liberals than they are like the the grass roots Carlists — have made the term “Liberal” into a bad word, associating it with nobility wannabes. Even the DLC — which represents in our time the quintessential Liberal organization if we apply the original definition — attacks supporters of Howard Dean and other progressive members of the Leftist wing of the Democratic Party as “activist elites“.

The lesson that I am getting from this history is that it is high time for we Socialist-Libertarians of the Left to stop calling ourselves “Liberals” or else seize the word without shame, transforming it — as many other words have been transformed through time — into something that speaks to the causes of human rights and the treasuring of people that we stand for, that we have stood for all along. The trouble is that by going by the Carlist Wars-era definition, there are two classic Liberal factions: neither of them is really interested in promoting anything other than the interests of the Capitalist class, which can sometimes be a cruel and sometimes a benevolent despot.

What do I propose we call ourselves? I have concluded that I am neither a Carlist/Marxist or a Liberal. It’s time to cherish and mark a third stream of thought, one that stands against the authoritarianism common to both Communism and Fascism as well as Capitalism’s dogma of Greed. I call myself a Progressive.