Helena Rosenblatt

People are even embarrassed sometimes.

That's a great question.

As a historian, I always apologize for saying history is complicated.

So usually there's not just one answer to that terrific question.

Definitely it happened during the Cold War, let's say.

It's pretty recent in the history that I describe in my book, right?

But this idea of disciplining the self, we're talking about the collectivity, about your duties, about any government or state getting involved in forming citizens, a public education system that forms citizens, started to have a

scary kind of ring to it when you've seen fascism and communism.

And liberals wanted to show like, oh, we're not that.

We're not going in that direction.

We are not about the state forming citizens.

We are about individual rights, about property rights in particular.

And I think that really gave probably the impetus to something that was probably happening already.

Right at the beginning, it's been shown that liberalism, the actual word was first a pejorative, a term of insult.

It was coined, as I said, in 1811, but by the enemies of the liberals.

Because of what had happened in the French Revolution,

And the word liberal, when it refers to something political, is often written with an accent on the E to show its kind of foreignness.

It's something dangerous.

Liberal.

Yeah, liberal.