Liberty Alone

the 49 percent of Americans who have been complaining for five years about George W. Bush being a dictator are now vexed to the point of utter incoherence because for the last fortnight he has failed to do a sufficiently convincing impression of a dictator.

Colby Cosh of Canada’s National Post on the aftermath of Katrina quoted in Reason

This sums up the problem with politics, no just today but over the last hundred years or more.
Its not liberals vs Tories, but Tories of one stripe vs Tories of another. On one hand you have the Tories which say the state should interfere to shore up ‘traditional values’, on the other you have the Tories who say the state should intervene to create a new ‘just’ society.

Both sides complain about what the state does under the influence of the other, but are happy for the state to act in their own interests.

Herbert Spencer identified this in his essay The New Toryism which showed many 19th Century Liberals to be Tories in their actions and attitude to the state.
Toryism here being the use of the state to interfere in the individuals actions, liberalism being the stripping away of such restrictions.

Spencer also correctly predicted that some on the right would adopt some liberal ideas, but this was not due to being liberal, but due to reacting against the new Toryism. Just as Thatcher opposed the Toryism of the unions, she supported much Toryism when it came to personal interactions and her conception of the nation.

Today, the only question asked is “How can government solve this problem?”, even when at the root of the problem lies government. Even the Liberal Democrats, the only party which might actually reign in the size of the state, tend to call for government action rather than for government to withdraw from people’s lives.
At a local level, campaigning is dominated by trying to do things for people, or trying to get the council to do things rather than trying to help people organise to get things done themselves.

This is not just the fault of politicians however, despite the corrupting influence power and the seeking of power has, it is also the fault of ordinary people for demanding that government solves their problems and for seeking to abdicate responsibility for themselves and the responsibilities they have to others.

The Tory attitude dominates politics, modern liberals want to force people to help each other and force you to accept their standards. This is no different from Tories who wanted to force you to worship how they wanted, or socialists who wanted to force you to work as the state directed you.

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