In an interview following Barack Obama’s momentous presidential victory, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman was asked what he’d like to hear in the new president’s Inaugural Address. “I want him to call for something like a new New Deal,” he offered. “Look, we’ve gone off the rails. Not everything’s been bad these past couple of decades, but we lost sight of having a society that works for everybody, we lost sight of a society that provides basic security. We need to recapture some of those values that have made us successful.”

Krugman was talking about liberalism – a recaptured kind. We as Canadians tend to view politics south of the border as alternate swinging between Republicans and Democrats, but it is, in fact, longer in scope. American politics alternates between thirty-year periods of the ideas of your on your own and the idea that we’re all in this together.

The strange thing about classical liberalism is that it embraced both these concepts. Understood in its historical context, liberalism is all about individual freedom. But at the same time it’s about how a free and personally enlightened people come together to build societies that are both innovative and collective. Regardless, the absolute epicenter of liberal thought is the individual – everything else plays out from there. The institution of government, then, is seen as both a safeguard and an empowerer of the individual citizen.

I realize that this might be boring to some, but it’s a necessary base for us to build if we are to conceive of why liberalism in Canada, especially in its political emanation – the Liberal Party of Canada – has lost its way.

Liberalism’s arrival on the heels of the Enlightenment turned prevailing wisdom on its head. Almost from humanity’s beginning it was assumed that people lived for the sake of the State and its rulers. Suddenly Liberals were saying that the opposite was true. People possessed rights by natural law and governments received their sanction from those individuals. Put another way: government is not the giver of rights to the people because, in reality, the people are the source of legitimacy and authority of the government. It was a novel concept, and with the steady rise in economies it became the prevailing view in Western democracies.

Coming into our present age, liberalism still challenges us to apply our rational minds to our respective environments. Life requires freedom if it is to be progressive, and that freedom gives humans the rights to property and to the retention of their income. It is for this reason that governments are created – to protect these inalienable rights of the individual.

So much for this first history lesson. Putting it in today’s context, it would logically mean that the essential meaning of liberalism today would be found in the empowerment of the individual. Yet following a history as Canada’s “natural governing party,” today’s Liberal Party spends an inordinate amount of time talking about institutional politics and policy as opposed to the key role of the citizen as an agent of progress. One of our key weaknesses as a national party at present is our distance – physical, emotional, empathetic – from the average lives of citizens. Gone are the days when the Liberal Party could attract candidates from unions, social agencies, environmental groups, anti-poverty advocates, and even small business associations. This hurts, but it’s true.

Like it or not, today’s Liberal Party is often viewed as elitist, out of touch with daily pressures of average people and groups. Perhaps its having power that does this, because the Conservative Party itself has put increasing distance between itself and its grassroots base, much to the chagrin of many in the party.

Liberals must confront this peril of distance if they are again to achieve relevance. If the power of the individual is the true basis of Liberal philosophy, then just defending policy won’t cut it – we have to once again reach out and touch the individual citizen. American humourist Henry Mencken once observed, “The Liberals have many tails, and chase them all.”

And that indeed is our present predicament. We have a multitude of policies but no one philosophy; a plethora of concerns but no cause; an army of advisors but few advocates. We are at present a corporate idea with no citizens. It’s either back to the individual citizen or recurring years in the wildnerness.