An Evil Doppelganger

The Economist Has Given Up On Liberalism

Even as The Economist drifts further and further into progressivism and away from the liberalism of its founding, it still claims to be liberalism’s true, authentic voice.

Jeremy Lott
The Federalist


The Economist fashions itself a liberal magazine, in the original sense of the word. The weekly was founded in 1843 to argue against the corn laws, which discouraged food imports with tariffs and other restrictions and kept domestic food prices high. It chalked up the repeal of those laws only three years later to “a fearless reliance upon the truth and justice of a great principle”: liberalism.

Today we usually call the intellectual descendants of liberals “classical liberals” for clarity. Liberals like those who founded and supported The Economist in its earlier years believed in property rights, free trade, freedom of speech, religious toleration, and the emancipation of slaves. The original liberals’ idea of government was limited, usually sharply.

Conservatives are broadly in agreement with classical liberal ideas, and so are libertarians. The reason we don’t call ourselves liberals, without the qualifier, is what happened to the term in the intervening years. As we’ll see, it was an unfortunate intellectual trend that The Economist was susceptible to.

Progressives Versus Liberals

Progressivism is a movement that came after liberalism, and had very different ideas about government. Progressives wanted a lot more government with few restrictions of its aims or its size.

To progressives, the growth of the state, and its demands on our purses and our persons, was a good thing. Big business was the enemy of the people.