Liberalism in the United States

Liberalism in the United States is a political and moral philosophy based on concepts of unalienable rights of the individual. The fundamental liberal ideals of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, the separation of church and state, the right to due process and equality under the law are widely accepted as a common foundation of liberalism. It differs from liberalism worldwide because the United States has never had a resident hereditary aristocracy and avoided much of the class warfare that characterized Europe. According to Ian Adams, "all US parties are liberal and always have been. Essentially they espouse classical liberalism, that is a form of democratized Whig constitutionalism plus the free market. The point of difference comes with the influence of social liberalism" and the proper role of government.
Modern liberalism includes issues such as same-sex marriage, reproductive and other women's rights, voting rights for all adult citizens, civil rights, environmental justice and government protection of the right to an adequate standard of living. National social services such as equal educational opportunities, access to health care and transportation infrastructure are intended to meet the responsibility to promote the general welfare of all citizens as established by the United States Constitution. Some liberals, who call themselves "classical liberals", "fiscal conservatives" or "libertarians", endorse fundamental liberal ideals, but they diverge from modern liberal thought, claiming that economic freedom is more important than equality and that providing for general welfare as enumerated in the General Welfare Clause exceeds the legitimate role of government.
Since the 1930s, the term "liberalism" is usually used without a qualifier to refer to social liberalism, a variety of liberalism that endorses a regulated market economy and the expansion of civil and political rights, with the common good considered as compatible with or superior to the freedom of the individual. This political philosophy was exemplified by Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal policies and later Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society. Other accomplishments include the Works Progress Administration and the Social Security Act in 1935 as well as the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. This variety of liberalism is also known as "modern liberalism" to distinguish it from "classical liberalism", from which it sprang out along with "modern conservatism".
History.
18th and 19th century.
The origins of American liberalism are in the political ideals of the Age of Enlightenment. The Constitution of the United States of 1787 established the first modern republic, with sovereignty in the people (not in a monarch) and no hereditary ruling aristocracy. However, the Constitution limited liberty, in particular by accepting slavery. The Founding Fathers recognized the contradiction, but they believed they needed a nation unified enough to survive in the world.
During the late 18th and 19th centuries, the United States extended liberty to ever broader classes of people. The states abolished many restrictions on voting for white males during the early 19th century. The Constitution was amended in 1865 to abolish slavery and in 1870 to extend the vote to black men.
Progressive Era.
As the United States economy began shifting to manufacturing and services during the 19th century, liberals started to consider corruption and concentrations of economic power (called trusts at the time) as threats to liberty. During the Progressive Era of the early 20th century, laws were passed restricting monopolies and regulating railroad rates.
According to James Reichley, the term liberalism took on its current meaning in the United States during the 1920s. In the 19th century and the early 20th century, the term had usually described classical liberalism, which emphasizes limited government, religious freedom, and support for the free market. The term progressivism, meanwhile, had been used to describe individuals like Theodore Roosevelt, who favored a limited amount of government activism. During the 1920s, the term progressive became associated with politicians such as Robert M. La Follette, who called for government ownership of railroads and utilities in his 1924 third-party presidential bid. Progressivism thus gained an association with radicalism that advocates of more moderate reforms sought to avoid. The term was also unattractive to certain groups because of its longstanding association with the Republican Party and the Social Gospel movement. In the late 1920s and 1930s, political figures such as Franklin D. Roosevelt increasingly adopted the term liberal to describe an individual who favored some government activism, but was opposed to more radical reforms.
20th century.
New Deal.
In the 1930s, liberalism came to describe a pragmatic ideology that called for a moderate amount of government regulation of the economy, progressive taxation, and increased exercise of federal government power in relation to the states. It also came to signify support for organized labor and a degree of hostility, or at least suspicion, of big business. Liberalism did retain some aspects of the term's usage prior to the 1930s, including support for civil liberties and secularism. These positions were contrasted with those to their political left, who favored greater changes, and with conservatives, who opposed these changes.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt came to office in 1933, amid the economic calamity of the Great Depression, offering the nation a New Deal intended to alleviate economic want and unemployment, provide greater opportunities and restore prosperity. The presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt (1933–1945), the longest in the United States history, was marked by an increased role for the federal government in addressing the nation's economic and other problems. Work relief programs provided jobs, ambitious projects such as the Tennessee Valley Authority promoted economic development and a social-security system laid the groundwork for the nation's modern welfare system. The Great Depression dragged on through the 1930s despite the New Deal programs, which were met with mixed success in solving the nation's economic problems. Economic progress for minorities was hindered by discrimination, about which the Roosevelt administration did less than subsequent administrations, but more than had been done before. The New Deal provided direct relief for minorities in the 1930s through the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), Public Works Administration (PWA), the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and other agencies and during World War II executive orders and the Fair Employment Practices Commission opened millions of new jobs to minorities and forbade discrimination in companies with government contracts. The 1.5 million black veterans in 1945 were fully entitled to generous veteran benefits from the GI Bill on the same basis as everyone else.
The New Deal consisted of three types of programs designed to produce "Relief, Recovery and Reform". Relief was the immediate effort to help the one-third of the population that was hardest hit by the depression. Roosevelt expanded Herbert Hoover's Emergency Relief and Construction program (ERCA) and added the CCC, the PWA and the WPA, the latter replacing in 1935 the Federal Emergency Relief Administration (FERA). Also in 1935, the Social Security Act and unemployment insurance programs were added. The Social Security Act provided retirement and disability income for Americans unable to work or unable to find jobs. Separate programs were set up for relief in rural areas such as the Resettlement Administration and Farm Security Administration. Recovery programs sought to restore the economy to pre-depression levels. It involved deficit spending, dropping the gold standard, efforts to re-inflate farm prices that were too low and efforts to increase foreign trade. New Deal efforts to help the United States recuperate were in part through a much expanded Hoover program, the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC).
Reform was based on the assumption that the depression was caused by the inherent market instability and that government intervention was necessary to rationalize and stabilize the economy and to balance the interests of farmers, business and labor. Reform measures included the National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA), regulation of Wall Street by the Securities Exchange Act (SEA), the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) for farm programs, Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) insurance for bank deposits enacted through the Glass–Steagall Act of 1933 and the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA), also known as the Wagner Act, dealing with labor-management relations. Despite some New Dealers's urgings, there was no major antitrust program. Roosevelt opposed socialism (in the sense of state ownership of the means of production) and only one major program, the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), involved government ownership of the means of production.
World War II.
Roosevelt was president through most of World War II and, anticipating the post-war period, strongly supported proposals to create a United Nations organization as a means of encouraging mutual cooperation to solve problems on the international stage. His commitment to internationalist ideals was in the tradition of Woodrow Wilson, architect of the failed League of Nations. His support led to the eventual establishment of the United Nations, with the proviso that the United States would have a veto power.
Cold War.
American liberalism in the Cold War-era was the immediate heir to Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal and the slightly more distant heir to the progressives of the early 20th century. Sol Stern wrote that "Cold War liberalism deserves credit for the greatest American achievement since World War II—winning the Cold War".
The essential tenets of Cold War liberalism can be found in Roosevelt's Four Freedoms (1941). Of these, freedom of speech and of religion were classic liberal freedoms as was freedom from fear (freedom from tyrannical government), but freedom from want was another matter. Roosevelt proposed a notion of freedom that went beyond government non-interference in private lives. Freedom from want could justify positive government action to meet economic needs, an idea more associated with the concepts of Abraham Lincoln's Republican Party, Henry Clay's Whig Party and Alexander Hamilton's economic principles of government intervention and subsidy than the more radical socialism and social democracy of European thinkers, or with prior versions of classical liberalism as represented by Thomas Jefferson's Democratic-Republican Party and Andrew Jackson's Democratic Party.
In the 1950s and 1960s, both major American political parties included liberal and conservative factions. The Democratic Party had on one hand Northern and Western liberals and on the other generally conservative Southern whites. Difficult to classify were the Northern urban Democratic political machines. The urban machines had supported New Deal economic policies, but they slowly came apart over racial issues. Some historians have divided the Republican Party into liberal Wall Street and conservative Main Street factions while others have noted that the Republican Party's conservatives came from landlocked states (Robert Taft Jr. of Ohio and Barry Goldwater of Arizona) and the liberals tended to come from California (Earl Warren and Pete McCloskey), New York (Nelson Rockefeller) and other coastal states.
Opposing both Communism and conservatism, Cold War liberalism resembled earlier liberalisms in its views on many social issues and personal liberty, but its economic views were not those of free-market Jeffersonian liberalism nor those of European social democrats. They never endorsed state socialism, but they did call for spending on education, science and infrastructure, notably the expansion of NASA and the construction of the Interstate Highway System. Their progressive ideas continued the legacy of Lincoln, Woodrow Wilson, Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt. Most prominent and constant among the positions of Cold War liberalism included the following:
At first, liberals generally did not see Franklin D. Roosevelt's successor Harry S. Truman as one of their own, viewing him as a Democratic Party hack. However, liberal politicians and liberal organizations such as the Americans for Democratic Action (ADA) sided with Truman in opposing Communism both at home and abroad, sometimes at the sacrifice of civil liberties. For example, Hubert Humphrey put before the Senate in 1950 a bill to establish detention centers where those declared subversive by the President could be held without trial, but it did not pass.
Liberals were united in their opposition to McCarthyism.
Decline of Southern liberals.
Southern liberals were an essential part of the New Deal coalition as without them Roosevelt lacked majorities in Congress. Typical leaders were Lyndon B. Johnson in Texas, Jim Folsom and John Sparkman in Alabama, Claude Pepper in Florida, Earl Long in Louisiana, Luther H. Hodges in North Carolina and Estes Kefauver in Tennessee. They promoted subsidies for small farmers and supported the nascent labor union movement. An essential condition for this North–South coalition was for Northern liberals to ignore Southern racism. After 1945, Northern liberals, led especially by young Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota, increasingly made civil rights a central issue. They convinced Truman to join them in 1948. The conservative Southern Democrats, best known as the Dixiecrats, took control of the state parties there and ran Strom Thurmond for president in 1948. Thurmond carried only the Deep South, but that threat was enough to guarantee the national Democratic Party in 1952 and 1956 would not make civil rights a major issue. In 1956, 101 of the 128 Southern Representatives and Senators signed the Southern Manifesto denouncing forced desegregation in 1956. The labor movement in the South was divided and lost its political influence. Southern liberals were in a quandary as most of them kept quiet or moderated their liberalism whilst others switched sides and the minority remnant continued on the liberal path. One by one, the last group was defeated. According to historian Numan V. Bartley, "the very word 'liberal' gradually disappeared from the southern political lexicon, except as a term of opprobrium".
Liberal consensus.
By 1950, the liberal ideology was so intellectually dominant that the literary critic Lionel Trilling wrote that "liberalism is not only the dominant but even the sole intellectual tradition, [...] there are no conservative or reactionary ideas in circulation".
For almost two decades, Cold War liberalism remained the dominant paradigm in American politics, peaking with the landslide victory of Lyndon B. Johnson over Barry Goldwater in the 1964 presidential election.
The postwar liberal consensus included acceptance of a modest welfare state and anti-communism domestic and foreign policies. Some of its elements were shared with , that aimed to combine benefits of free markets with some interventionist domestic policies.
Civil rights laws.
Cold War liberalism emerged at a time when most African-Americans were politically and economically disenfranchised. Beginning with "To Secure These Rights", an official report issued by the Truman White House in 1947, self-proclaimed liberals increasingly embraced the civil rights movement. In 1948, President Truman desegregated the armed forces and the Democrats inserted a strong civil-rights plank in the party platform even though delegates from the Deep South walked out and nominated a third-party ticket, the Dixiecrats, headed by Strom Thurmond. Truman abolished discrimination in the armed forces, leading to the integration of military units in the early 1950s. However, no civil rights legislation was passed until a weak bill in 1957.
During the 1960s, relations between white liberals and the civil rights movement became increasingly strained as civil-rights leaders accused liberal politicians of temporizing and procrastinating, although they realized they needed the support of liberal Northern Democrats and Republicans for the votes to pass any legislation over Southern obstructionism. Many white liberals believed the grassroots movement for civil rights would only anger many Southern whites and make it even more difficult to pass civil rights laws through Congress. In response to that concern, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. agreed to tone down the March on Washington in 1963. President John F. Kennedy finally endorsed the March on Washington and proposed what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but he could not get it passed during his lifetime. Lyndon B. Johnson had been a New Deal Democrat in the 1930s and by the 1950s had decided that the Democratic Party had to break from its segregationist past and endorse racial liberalism as well as economic liberalism. Johnson rode the enormous wave of sympathy for the assassinated predecessor. With help from conservative Republicans led by Everett Dirksen, the Southern filibuster was broken. Johnson enacted a mass of Great Society legislation, headed by the powerful Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed segregation, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 which reversed state efforts to stop blacks from voting and facilitated their mobilization as millions of new liberal Democratic voters. The result was an immediate end to segregation in most public places (except schools) and an end to restrictions on black voting. Unexpectedly, passage was quickly followed by a wave of black riots in the inner cities which made for the "long hot summers" in every major city from 1964 through 1970. The riots alienated much of the white working-class that had been the base of the labor-union element in the civil-rights coalition.
The civil-rights movement itself was becoming fractured. On March 8, 1964, Malcolm X stated he was going to organize a black-nationalist organization that would try to "heighten the political consciousness" of African-Americans. By 1966, a Black Power movement had emerged. Black Power advocates accused white liberals of trying to control the civil-rights agenda. Proponents of Black Power wanted African-Americans to follow an "ethnic model" for obtaining power, not unlike that of Democratic political machines in large cities. This put them on a collision course with urban machine politicians and on its edges the Black Power movement contained racial separatists who wanted to give up on integration altogether—a program that could not be endorsed by American liberals of any race. The mere existence of such individuals (who always got more media attention than their actual numbers might have warranted) contributed to "white backlash" against liberals and civil rights activists.
Clashes with the New Left on Vietnam.
While the civil rights movement isolated liberals from the white working class and Southern Democrats, the Vietnam War threw another wedge into the liberal ranks, dividing pro-war "hawks" such as Senator Henry M. Jackson from "doves" such as Senator and 1972 presidential candidate George McGovern. As the war became the leading political issue of the day, agreement on domestic matters was not enough to hold the liberal consensus together. Vietnam was part of the strategy of containment of Soviet Communism which began in earnest in 1947 to counter the Soviet threat. In the 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy was more "hawkish" on Southeast Asia than Richard Nixon. Although the war expanded from 16,000 Americans in Vietnam under Kennedy to 500,000 under Johnson, there was much continuity of their policies, until Nixon arrived in 1969. The deep division between liberals and the New Left, especially on foreign policy, troubled the Democratic Party for decades.
A large portion of the growing opposition to the war came from younger activists, with a strong base on elite university campuses. They had become alienated from the establishment and formed the New Left. After Johnson did poorly in the 1968 primaries and decided to focus on peacemaking and not run for reelection, tensions rapidly escalated inside the Democratic Party. Assassinations struck down the two top liberals, Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy. Vice President Hubert Humphrey, by now a cautious moderate who meekly followed Lyndon Johnson in domestic and foreign policy, was the last man standing at the disastrously violent 1968 Democratic National Convention. Much of the party's right-wing, from the South and ethnic white districts in the North, veered off to vote for Alabama Governor George Wallace. The result was a narrow victory for Republican Richard Nixon in a three-way race. Although touted as a conservative, President Nixon, with a Democratic Congress, enacted many liberal policies, including the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency, normalizing relations with Communist China, and starting the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks to reduce the availability of ballistic missiles.
Liberals vehemently disliked Nixon and he reciprocated in kind with an enemies list. Yet as president, Nixon took many policy positions that can only be described as liberal. Before Nixon was elected, the liberal wing of his own party favored politicians such as Nelson Rockefeller and William Scranton. In 1968 Nixon won the nomination by an appeal to a "silent majority" of conservatives, disgusted and frightened by soaring crime rates and widespread race riots. Using executive orders, he single-handedly created the main environmental agency (the Environmental Protection Agency), something that was achieved without a vote in Congress. He expanded funding for liberal favorites like the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities. One of his top advisers was liberal Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who said that "Nixon mostly opted for liberal policies, merely clothing them [...] in conservative rhetoric". In addition to support for such liberal causes as the arts and the environment, he supported liberalization of laws against recreational drugs. To the astonishment of conservatives, he imposed wage and price controls to counteract inflation. Noam Chomsky, who often attacks liberalism from the left, has called Nixon "in many respects the last liberal president". Historians increasingly emphasize the liberalism of his administration's policies while not attributing them to Nixon personally.
The 1965–1974 period was a major liberal activist era in congress, with the Democratic-led congress during the presidency of Richard Nixon continuing to produce liberal domestic policies. They organized themselves internally to round up votes, track legislation, mobilize interests, and produce bills without direct assistance from the White House. A wide range of progressive measures were carried out, such as increases in social security (a 20% benefit increase and linkage to automatic cost-of-living increases in 1972), public welfare (with expansion of unemployment compensation, food stamps and supplemental security income additions to social security), workplace rules (with the passage of the Occupational Safety and Health Act in 1970), urban aid (with the addition of mass transit subsidies to highway construction enactments), environmentalism (with the passage of the National Environmental Protection Act of 1969 and the Clean Air Act of 1970), aid to education (including Title IX in 1972), civil rights (with the extension of the Voting Rights Act in 1970) and nutrition (with the establishment of the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants and Children in 1972).
The political dominance of the liberal consensus even into the Nixon years can best be seen in policies by, for example, the establishment of the Environmental Protection Agency and also in Nixon's failed proposal to replace the welfare system with a guaranteed annual income by way of a negative income tax. Affirmative action in its most quota-oriented form was a Nixon administration policy. Even the Nixon War on Drugs allocated two-thirds of its funds for treatment, a far higher ratio than was to be the case under any subsequent President, Republican or Democrat. Additionally, Nixon's normalization of diplomatic relations with Communist China and his policy of "détente" with the Soviet Union were likely more popular with liberals than with his conservative base. Nixon also successfully supported a cost-of-living adjustment for Social Security recipients.
An opposing view was offered by Cass R. Sunstein in "The Second Bill of Rights". He argues that through his Supreme Court appointments, Nixon effectively ended a decades-long expansion under United States law of economic rights along the lines of those put forward in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the United Nations General Assembly.
Since the 1970s.
During the Nixon years and through the 1970s, the liberal consensus began to come apart. The alliance with white Southern Democrats had been lost in the Civil Rights era. While the steady enfranchisement of African Americans expanded the electorate to include many new voters sympathetic to liberal views, it was not quite enough to make up for the loss of some Southern Democrats. Organized labor, long a bulwark of the liberal consensus, was past the peak of its power in the United States and many unions had remained in favor of the Vietnam War even as liberal politicians increasingly turned against it. Within the Democratic Party leadership, there was a turn toward moderation on racial themes after the defeat of liberal George McGovern in 1972.
Meanwhile, in the Republican ranks, a new wing of the party emerged. The anti-establishment conservatives who had been aroused by Barry Goldwater in 1964 challenged the more liberal leadership in 1976 and took control of the party under Ronald Reagan in 1980. Liberal Republicans faded away even in their Northeastern strongholds. Reagan successfully lowered marginal tax rates, most notably for those at the top of the income distribution while his Social Security reforms raised taxes on the middle and bottom of the income distribution, leaving their total tax burden unchanged.
More centrist groups, like the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), supported Bill Clinton and challenged liberals for control of the Democratic Party. Clinton portrayed himself as a centrist New Democrat. Thus, he distanced himself from New Deal Democrats. With help from the Southern-dominated DLC, Clinton claimed the center of national politics. Clinton worked with conservatives and against strong liberal opposition to end some of the main welfare programs and to implement NAFTA, linking the economies of the United States, Canada and Mexico. Clinton pushed to extend liberal ideals in the areas of health care (where he failed) and environmental protection (where he had more success). On the whole, he came under fierce attack from the left and from many liberals who charged that he betrayed the New Deal traditions of activist government, especially regarding welfare and his collaboration with business.
On January 1, 2013, President Barack Obama succeeded in raising taxes on the rich while keeping them steady on the middle class. On January 21, 2013, Obama delivered his second inaugural address that championed numerous liberal causes.
Varieties.
Early liberalism.
The United States was the first country to be founded on the liberal ideas of John Locke and other philosophers of the Enlightenment, with no monarchy and no hereditary aristocracy, and while individual states had established religions, the federal government was kept from establishing religion by the First Amendment. The United States Bill of Rights guarantees every citizen the freedoms advocated by the liberal philosophers, namely equality under the law, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of the press, the right to gather in peaceful assembly, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances and the right to bear arms, among other freedoms and rights. In this sense, virtually all Americans are liberals.
However, both before and after the country was founded legal questions concerning the scope of these rights and freedoms arose. In the Dred Scott decision of 1856–1857, the Supreme Court ruled that these rights only applied to white men and that blacks had no rights whatsoever that any white man was obliged to respect. Several constitutional amendments after the Dred Scott decision extended the guarantees of the Bill of Rights to larger classes of citizens, to all citizens in 1868, then specifically to blacks in 1870, to women in 1919 and to people unable to afford a poll tax in 1964.
Classical liberalism.
In the United States, classical liberalism, also called "laissez-faire" liberalism, is the belief that a free-market economy is the most productive and government interference favors a few and hurts the many—or as Henry David Thoreau stated, "that government is best which governs least". Classical liberalism is a philosophy of individualism and self-responsibility with little concern for groups or sub-communities. Classical liberals in the United States believe that if the economy is left to the natural forces of supply and demand, free of government intervention, the result is the most abundant satisfaction of human wants. Modern classical liberals oppose the concepts of social democracy and the welfare state.
Modern liberalism.
In 1883, Lester Frank Ward (1841–1913) published "Dynamic Sociology: Or Applied Social Science, as Based Upon Statical Sociology and the Less Complex Sciences" and laid out the basic tenets of modern American liberalism while at the same time attacking the "laissez-faire" policies advocated by Herbert Spencer and William Graham Sumner. Ward was a passionate advocate for a sociology that would intelligently and scientifically direct the development of society.
Another influential thinker in the Progressive Era was Herbert Croly (1869–1930). He effectively combined classical liberal theory with progressive philosophy and founded the periodical "The New Republic" to present his ideas. Croly presented the case for a mixed economy, increased spending on education and the creation of a society based on the "brotherhood of mankind". In 1909, Croly published "The Promise of American Life" in which he proposed raising the general standard of living by means of economic planning, though he opposed aggressive unionization. In "The Techniques of Democracy" (1915), Croly argued against both dogmatic individualism and dogmatic socialism. As editor of "The New Republic", he had the forum to reach the intellectual community.
According to Paul Starr, sociologist at Princeton University:


Mauro Baranzini

Mauro Leo Baranzini (born 31 August 1944 in Bellinzona, Switzerland) is a Swiss economist of the Cambridge Post-Keynesian school of thought. He was a student of Bruno Caizzi at the "Scuola Superiore di Commercio of Bellinzona"; of Pietro Balestra and Bernard Schmitt at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland; of David Soskice, John S. Flemming and Sir James A. Mirrlees at Oxford. Later on, while at the University of Cambridge, U.K., he came under the influence of the two senior post-Keynesian economists: Luigi Lodovico Pasinetti and Geoff Harcourt. He has written extensively with Roberto Scazzieri, of the Universities of Bologna and Cambridge and of the Lincei Academy. His contributions are mainly in the field of income and wealth distribution, both at the macro- and micro-level. In particular he has fruitfully incorporated into the post-Keynesian model of distribution and accumulation the well-known life-cycle theory of Ando-Brumberg&Modigliani, within an overlapping-generations model, and with a strong bequest motive.
Biography.
Mauro Baranzini was born in Bellinzona, Switzerland, 31 August 1944, son of Leo Johann Baranzini-Franki, a railways worker, and of Germana Nonella-Bassi of Sant’Antonino. (His father was born in Lucerne, son of a Swiss German mother.) He first studied at the Swiss Universities of Fribourg and Zurich. In Fribourg he obtained a PhD. in economics with a thesis on economic growth under the supervision of Pietro Balestra, a well-known econometrician. Soon after, in 1971, he was awarded a Florey European fellowship of The Queen's College, Oxford, a grant scheme to bring promising European scholars to Oxford, and subsequently a senior research fellowship of the Swiss National Science Foundation for research to be undertaken, in turn, in Oxford, Cambridge, and Harvard. In Oxford he wrote a DPhil thesis under the supervision of David Soskice, John S. Flemming and Sir James A. Mirrlees From 1975 to 1984 he was lecturer and director of economic studies at The Queen's College, Oxford.
In 1984 he moved back to Switzerland. After a spell at the Faculty of Political Sciences of the Catholic University of Milan, in 1987 he was appointed full professor of macro-economics at the University of Verona. In Switzerland he was for numerous years a member (and then chairman) of Canton Ticino's Research Committee on behalf of the Swiss National Science Foundation, and a co-founder of the Centre for Banking Studies in Lugano-Vezia.
Academic career.
From 1993 to 1997 he was a member (and then chairman) of the Steering Committee that laid the foundations for the State University of Lugano. He served as acting president of that university, and, since 1997, he has been a full professor of economic theory, deputy chairman (1998 to 2005), and chairman of the Faculty of Economics (2005–2009). In 2009 he was awarded the Lincei Prize for economics, jointly with Andreu Mas-Colell.
He has contributed to the Cambridge theory of income, wealth distribution and accumulation, by incorporating into the post-Keynesian theory the well-known micro-economics life-cycle theory of Franco Modigliani the hypothesis of a different rate of return on accumulated savings, and the existence of a class of pure rentiers;
More generally he has focused on the applicability of the Kaldor/Pasinetti (i.e. Cambridge) theorem or equation, according to which the rate of profits (equal to the interest rate) is determined only by the rate of growth of the system and of the re-investment rate of the entrepreneurs' class.
His work was to lay the micro-foundations of the post-Keynesian theory of income distribution and wealth accumulation. By considering the post-Keynesian analysis of the productive sectors, of the composition of demand, and of the price structure as a well-developed research programme, the author focuses particularly on the supply side of savings (both life-cycle and intergenerational), linked to the behaviour of individuals, families and dynasties. The mechanisms are examined which lead families to allocate their disposable income between consumption, savings, and passing on a given amount of their financial resources to the next generation (inclusive of all types of assets). In the case of a stochastic model, characterized by the existence of two-tier investment opportunities, the long-term analysis of the model shows that uncertainty may, under general circumstances, generate a two-class society. Therefore, this approach throws additional light on the mechanisms that lead to a different accumulation of wealth and class differences.
His papers have been published in: Oxford Economic Papers, Economic Journal, Kyklos, Australian Economic Papers, Swiss Journal of Economics and Statistics, Jahrbücher für Nationalökonomie und Statistik, and other learned periodicals. He has published, often jointly with Roberto Scazzieri, volumes with Oxford University Press ("A Theory of Wealth Distribution and Accumulation"), Cambridge University Press ("The Economic Theory of Structure and Change", recently published in paperback), Basil Blackwell, Oxford and New York ("Advances in Economic Theory", and "Foundations of Economics. Structure of Inquiry and Economic Theory"), Macmillan (together with Geoff Harcourt, "Essays in Honour of Luigi L. Pasinetti") as well as with Routledge. In the early 1990s he sparked off a controversy with Paul A. Samuelson and Koiki Miyazaki in the "Oxford Economics Papers" on the validity of the Keynes-Kaldor-Pasinetti theorem of the Cambridge distribution theory.
He spends part of the year in Cambridge (UK), where he is life-member of Darwin College, and in his chalet in the Swiss Alps. He has recently published two volumes on his ancestors going back the 14th century in Canton Ticino, Switzerland, where he has reconstructed the demographic strategies and wealth accumulation processes across six centuries and nearly 20 generations. He is a foreign fellow of the Istituto Lombardo, Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, Milan, of the National Academy of the Lincei, Rome, as well as life-member of The Queen's College, Oxford.
Bibliography.
English language.
1. Mauro Baranzini (ed.) Advances in Economic Theory, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982 (reprinted 1983), in the U.S.: New York: St. Martin's Press, 1983, pp. x + 321.
2. Mauro Baranzini (with R. Scazzieri, eds) Foundations of Economics. Structures of Inquiry and Economic Theory, Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, 1986, pp. xii + 454.
3. Mauro Baranzini (with R. Scazzieri, eds) The Economic Theory of Structure and Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, pp. xiii + 347 (hardback).
4. Mauro Baranzini A Theory of Wealth Distribution and Accumulation, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. xxvi + 262.
5. Mauro Baranzini (with G.C. Harcourt, eds) The Dynamics of the Wealth of Nations. Growth Distribution and Structural Change (Essays in honour of Luigi Pasinetti), London: Macmillan and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993, pp. xiii + 424.
6. Mauro Baranzini (with A. Cencini, eds) Inflation and Unemployment. Contributions to a New Macroeconomic Approach, London and New York: Routledge, 1996, pp. viii + 192.
7. Mauro Baranzini, The Diaspora of the Families Nonella and Bassi of Sant’Antonino, Canton Ticino, Switzerland, from the 15th to the 21st Century, Bellinzona: SalvioniEdizioni, 2010, pp. 261.
8. Mauro Baranzini (with A. Quadrio Curzio) 'From Adam Smith to Structural Dynamics: Luigi Pasinetti's Life-Long Contribution', paper presented at the Conference 'The Economics of Structural Change: Theory, Institutions and Policies, in honour of Luigi L. Pasinetti, 2012, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.
9. Mauro Baranzini (with R. Scazzieri, eds) The Economic Theory of Structure and Change, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. xiii + 347 (paperback).
10. Mauro Baranzini (with A. Mirante) 'The Cambridge Post-Keynesian School of Income and Wealth Distribution', in G. C. Harcourt and P. Kriesler (eds) The Oxford Handbook of Post-Keynesian Economics, 2013, op. cit., Vol. I, 288–361.
11. Mauro Baranzini (with C. Rotondi and R. Scazzieri, eds) Resources, Production and Structural Dynamics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.
12. Mauro Baranzini (with C. Rotondi and R. Scazzieri) 'Resources, Producibility and Economic Dynamics: A Framework', in M. Baranzini, C. Rotondi and R. Scazzieri (eds) Resources, Production and Structural Dynamics, op. cit., 1–32.
13. Mauro Baranzini (with A. Mirante) A Compendium of Italian Economists at Oxbridge: Contributions to the Evolution of Economic Thinking, 2016, London and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
14. Mauro Baranzini (with P. L. Porta) 'Luigi Lodovico Pasinetti', in R. A. Cord (ed.) The Palgrave Companion to Cambridge Economics, 2017, London and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan, 979–1001.
15. Mauro Baranzini (with A. Mirante) Luigi L. Pasinetti: An Intellectual Biography, Leading Scholar and System Builder of the Cambridge School of Economics, 2018, Palgrave Studies in the History of Economic Thought, London and New York: Palgrave-Macmillan.
16. Mauro Baranzini 'Uncertainty and Time in Economics', in AA.VV, Balzan Papers I, 2018, Fondazione Internazionale Balzan, Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 243–57.
17. Mauro Baranzini (with A. Mirante) ) 'At the intersection of "Polity" and "Economics": The Palgrave Handbook of Political Economy, edited by Ivano Cardinale and Roberto Scazzieri', review article, Economia&Lavoro, 53.2, (forthcoming)
Italian language.
18. Mauro Baranzini (with R. Scazzieri) Struttura e evoluzione delle economie industriali: i fatti e le interpretazioni, Lugano: Edizioni Pantarei, 1982, pp. 198.
19. Mauro Baranzini (with A. Cencini, eds) Contributi di analisi economica, Bellinzona: Casagrande, 1987, pp. 298.
20. Mauro Baranzini Corso di economia politica, Milan: CUSL, pp. xvii + 559. (1st ed. 1986; 4th ed. 1988).
21. Mauro Baranzini (with G. Marangoni and S. Rossi) Macro e Microeconomia. Teoria ed applicazioni, Padua: CEDAM, 2001 (I ed.), 2003 (II ed.) pp. XVIII+889.
22. Mauro Baranzini (with G. Tondini) Accumulazione, distribuzione e risparmio, Padua: CEDAM, 2003, pp. 536.
23. Mauro Baranzini, et al. (eds) Analisi Economica e Società Civile, Padua: CEDAM, 2004, pp. 757.
24. Mauro Baranzini (with G. Marangoni, A. Mirante and S. Solari) Economia Macro, Padua: CEDAM, 2006, pp. 497.
25. Mauro Baranzini, Strategie patrimoniali e famigliari nella Svizzera italiana (1400–2000), I Volume: Quadro concettuale e istituzionale (XV+313 pp.); II Volume: Tre microstorie e supplemento iconografico (XL+566 pp.), Rome: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura, 2008.
26. Mauro Baranzini (A. Mirante) Economia Macro, Padua: CEDAM, 2013.
27. Mauro Baranzini 'L’Università della Svizzera italiana: da un sogno del 1588 alla sua realizzazione nel 1996', lectio magistrali, Milano: Istituto Lombardo, Accademia di Scienze e Lettere, 2017, 37–134.


Tuen Mun Community Network

Tuen Mun Community Network () is a local political group based in Tuen Mun founded in 2015. In a historic pro-democracy landslide in 2019 District Council election, the group won a total of four seats in the Tuen Mun District Council.
History.
The group was formed in 2015 as a Tuen Mun-based community group by a group of young people in their 20s to early 30s. It was notable for their involvement in revealing the scandal of the high repairing cost of the elevators in Leung King Estate and a protest caused by hawkers issue in 2016.
It was part of the Community Network Union, a localist political alliance of six community groups led by pro-independence Ventus Lau. Due to its association with independence movement, its convenor Wong Tan-ching was deported from Macau in May 2017. The Tuen Mun Community Network later quit the Union in 2018.
Tuen Mun Community Network was also active in social activism. In 2017, it organised more than 13,000 people signing a petition demanding pro-Beijing legislator Junius Ho who was a member Tuen Mun District Council to resign over his remarks on killing independence advocates. In the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests, the group also arranged coaches to drive residents to Hong Kong Island to join the June 9 protest.
Tuen Mun Community Network filled five candidates in the 2019 District Council election, with Poon Chi-kin in Tsui Hing, Wong Tan-ching in Shan King, Law Cheuk-yung in King Hing, Tsang Chun-hing in Hing Tsak and Wong Tak-yuen in Leung King. Four of the five candidates were elected in the pro-democracy historic landslide victory except for Law Cheuk-yung who lost in King Hing, which saw the pro-democrats gaining control of the Tuen Mun District Council and the group becoming the third largest grouping.
Representatives.
District Councils.
The Tuen Mun Community Network holds four seats in Tuen Mun District Council (2020–2023):


George Forbes, 6th Earl of Granard

George Forbes, 6th Earl of Granard (1760–1837), was an Irish general.
Forbes was the eldest son of George Forbes, 5th Earl of Granard, by his first wife, Dorothy, second daughter of Sir Nicholas Borley, baronet, of the Isle of Anglesea, and great-grandson of Admiral George Forbes, 3rd Earl of Granard. He was born on 14 June 1760, he was educated at Armagh. He married, 10 May 1779, Lady Selina Frances Rawdon, youngest daughter of John Rawdon, 1st Earl of Moira, by his third wife, Lady Elizabeth Hastings, eldest daughter of the ninth Earl of Huntingdon. By this lady, who was sister of the first Marquis of Hastings, Granard had nine children. On succeeding to the title, the year after his marriage, he made a lengthened tour on the continent. He was introduced to Cardinal York at Rome, attended one of Frederick the Great's reviews in Silesia, and resided in France and at Vienna. On his return home he devoted himself to politics, and, following the example of Lord and Lady Moira, adopted liberal opinions, and with his votes and interest steadily supported the policy of Charlemont, Grattan, Curran, and other leaders of the liberal party in Ireland. The Marquis of Buckingham referred to him as the most uncompromising opponent of his administration. Granard was appointed a lieutenant-colonel in the army 17 May 1794, and lieutenant-colonel commandant of the 108th foot, an Irish regiment which he raised in November following. The 108th was disbanded at Gibraltar in 1796. Granard also raised the Longford militia, and commanded it at the battle of Castlebar in 1798, where the regiment, which was said to be disaffected, ran away. Lord Cornwallis wrote in highest praise of Granard's gallantry in endeavouring to rally his regiment (Cornwallis Correspondence, ii. 393). He was also present at Ballinamuck, where the French, under Humbert, surrendered to Cornwallis.
Granard displayed the greatest aversion to the union, an opinion from which none of the inducements then so lavishly offered by the government made him swerve, and he was one of the twenty-one Irish peers who recorded their protest against the measure (see ‘Protest of the Irish House of Lords,’ Ann. Reg. 1800, p. 196). Having been deprived of his seat in the House of Lords after the union, he took little part in politics, but devoted himself to the management of his estates, and is said to have been a popular landlord. During the brief administration of ‘All the Talents’ in 1806 he was made a peer of the United Kingdom under the title of Baron Granard of Castle Donington, Leicestershire (the seat of his father-in-law), and was also appointed clerk of the crown and hanaper in Ireland, then a most lucrative office. He became a colonel in the army in 1801, major-general in 1808, and lieutenant-general in 1813. He afterwards resided chiefly in France. He came to England to support both the Roman Catholic Emancipation and Reform Bills, and after the passing of the latter was offered a promotion in the peerage, which he declined, as he had previously refused the order of St. Patrick. He was made full general in July 1830. He died at his residence, the Hôtel Marbœuf, Champs-Elysées, Paris, 9 June 1837, at the age of seventy-seven, and was buried in the family resting-place at Newtownforbes, County Longford, Ireland.


The Republic of New Zealand Party

The Republic of New Zealand Party (RONZP or RNZP, or "The Republicans") is an unregistered New Zealand political party which seeks to end monarchy in New Zealand. It was a registered party from 2005 to 2009, contesting two general elections in that time and each time receiving the lowest share of the party vote. After deregistration, some members continued in politics under the party name, though since at least 2011 only one person, Jack Gielen, has contested elections under the name.
Policies.
A 2005 "New Zealand Herald" article said: "The party's aim is simple: to cut all ties with the British monarchy and install a New Zealander as head of state. A president, elected at large by the citizens, would replace the Governor-General as a figurehead, with parliament continuing as normal." The party also sought to strip the Treaty of Waitangi of any constitutional status, replacing it with a new constitution. It also supported binding referendums, wanting to hold one every six months, and wanted to mend relationships with the USA and allow nuclear-propelled ships into New Zealand waters. It identified most strongly with New Zealand First of all the parliamentary parties.
Creation.
The Republic of New Zealand Party was formed in April 2005 through the merger of two republican groups. Its first leader was John Kairau. In August 2005, the party claimed to have 3,000 members.
Time as a registered party.
In the 2005 elections, the party won 344 party votes or 0.02%, the lowest party vote count of any registered party. The party also did not win any electorate seats, so did not meet the threshold required to enter parliament. In the 2008 elections the party polled even worse; it received 313 party votes or 0.01%, which again was the worst party vote result.
The party's registration was cancelled in 2009.
After deregistration.
Despite deregistering, a handful of the party's members remained active under its name, including burning the New Zealand flag at parliament in a protest in March 2010.
The party's former deputy leader Jack Gielen, who had run for Mayor of Hamilton in 2007, did so again in 2010. He placed last with 404 votes. During the campaign doubts were raised over Gielen's claims that he was "New Zealand Republicans Spokesperson for Mental Health and Suicide prevention." Lewis Holden, chair of New Zealand Republic, said Mr Gielen had nothing to do with the Republican Movement and was "trying to piggyback off" the group. Gielen responded that the Republic of New Zealand Party was trying to get its membership together, saying "we have 200 members. Provided we get 500 members we can be re-registered for the next [2011] election. We are the real Republicans because I burnt a flag and told Prince Wills to go home. We look at them [the Republican Movement] as a [sic] poser because they are not the real deal."
In September 2011, just before the election, the party announced it would merge with the OurNZ Party. However, the merger did not go ahead, and the party issued media releases as an independent entity after that. The Republic of New Zealand Party did not register for the 2011 general election and did not run any candidates.
In 2012, media releases indicated the party was working with the Human Rights Party.
In the 2017 election, Jack Gielen ran for the Hamilton East electorate, under the Republic of New Zealand Party banner. He came last, getting 65 votes (0.18%). In the 2020 election, Gielen ran again for Hamilton East under the party banner, again coming last with 28 votes.


Third Ukrainian Republic (party)

Third Ukrainian Republic () is a political party in Ukraine. The party was formally named (from its creation in May 1999 till April 2010) Forward, Ukraine! (; "Vpered, Ukrajino!") and (from April 2010 till July 2014) People's Self-Defense Political Party ().
In December 2011 the party announced it would be merged into All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland". However, in July 2014 the party was re-energised and renamed.
History.
Forward, Ukraine! electoral bloc.
Originally, the party takes its roots from the electoral bloc "Forward, Ukraine!" that was formed on April 3, 1997. Composed out of several political formations such as the parliamentary faction "Reforms", the Christian-Democratic Party of Ukraine (leader V.Stretovych), the Christian Democratic Union, the Ukrainian Christian Democratic Party, Hromada (led by Oleksandr Turchynov), Christian Democratic Youth of Ukraine, the trade union "Our Right", the charity fund "Ukrainian Perspective", Ukrainian fund in support of reforms, and the political association "Young Ukraine". The leading section of that bloc was the parliamentary faction "Reforms" led by Serhiy Sobolyev. In June 1997 the faction changed its name to "Forward, Ukraine!" as well whose unofficial leader became the deputy speaker Viktor Musiyaka.
Right before the 1998 Ukrainian parliamentary elections however the bloc fell apart, out which was created the Reforms and Order Party of Viktor Pynzenyk. The rest of the bloc consisting of the Christian Democratic Union, the Ukrainian Christian Democratic Party and the Young Ukraine went to the elections under its original name and led by the former deputy speaker of the Ukrainian parliament (Verkhovna Rada) Viktor Musiyaka. The bloc "Forward, Ukraine!" proved to be an unsuccessful political project gathering only 1.73% at the elections and receiving no representation. Next year Viktor Musiyaka transformed the bloc into a party with the same name. In 2012 another party with the same name Ukraine - Forward! led by Natalia Korolevska copied the statute of the "Forward, Ukraine!" and also failed to place any representation in parliament in 2012.
Forward, Ukraine!
As a political party "Forward, Ukraine!" was registered by the Justice Ministry on May 13, 1999.
At the 2002 elections, the party was part of the Viktor Yushchenko Bloc Our Ukraine. "Forward, Ukraine!" in parliament was represented only by its leader Viktor Musiyaka.
At the 2006 elections it decided to participate alone gathering only 6,934 votes (0.02%).
At the 2007 elections, the party joined Viktor's Yushchenko Bloc once more within the Yuriy Lutsenko's People's Self-Defense. Being part of the Our Ukraine alliance the party received 6 out of 72 parliamentary seats that were won by the alliance. Parliamentary mandates were received by Oleh Novikov, Kateryna Lukianova, Kyrylo Kulykov, Serhiy Kharovsky, Yuriy Hrymchak, and Serhiy Lutsenko.
In an interview with the Silski Visti (Village News) newspaper on 29 January 2009 interior minister Yuriy Lutsenko declared that Civil Movement "People's Self-Defense" as an insurgent, protesting, and not very structured civil movement has ceased to exist". Lutsenko also said he was planning to direct the organisational changes of Forward, Ukraine!.
The party supported Yulia Tymoshenko as presidential candidate in the 2010 Ukrainian presidential election. The party did not support the dismissal of the second Tymoshenko Government.
People's Self-Defense Political Party.
At the ninth congress of the Forward, Ukraine! Party on February 26, 2010 the decision was taken to rename the party. Justice Minister Oleksandr Lavrynovych signed a relevant decree April 20, 2010.
On August 4, 2010 party leader Yuriy Lutsenko declared that the party would participate in the 2010 local elections in collaboration with All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland" on joined lists. But eventually the party did independently participate in the election. Now with much success, the party won no representatives in Oblast Councils (regional parliaments); its biggest success was winning seats in the city council of several towns in the Lviv Oblast.
The party announced it will be merged into All-Ukrainian Union "Fatherland" in December 2011. This process started late December 2011. As of mid-April 2013 there have been no reports about the party holding a congress to pass a decision on this merge. And the party was still registered at the Ukrainian Ministry of Justice.
The party competed on one single party under "umbrella" party "Fatherland", together with several other parties, during the 2012 parliamentary elections During the election this list won 62 seats (25.55% of the votes) under the proportional party-list system and another 39 by winning 39 simple-majority constituencies; a total of 101 seats in Parliament.
Third Ukrainian Republic.
On 1 July 2014 the party was officially renamed "Third Ukrainian Republic". New party leader Roman Bezsmertnyi (that day) stated to materialise the "ideas of Yuriy Lutsenko" by active citizens who had rallied around Lutsenko". Instead, he also said that Lutsenko was not a member of the party; but he would head the party if Lutsenko would not join the party Solidarity. According to Bezsmertnyi Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko was at the time negotiating with Lutsenko to make him party leader of Solidarity. Bezsmertnyi assured that if Lutsenko would become party leader of Solidarity he and his fellow and Third Ukrainian Republic members would "think whether to go to the polls without our leader". On 27 August 2014 Lutsenko was elected party leader of Solidarity (that party was renamed Bloc of Petro Poroshenko the same day).
The party did not participate in the 2014 Ukrainian parliamentary election.


Patriot Governments (Spanish American independence)

The term "patriot" is used to refer to supporters of Spanish American independence and of their governments that emerged during the revolution between 1808-1825.
Congress and independence declarations.


Progressive Party (Trinidad and Tobago)

The Progressive Party (colloquially known as "The Progressives") is a political party in Trinidad and Tobago. The party was founded on June 16, 2019 by former independent senator Nikoli Edwards to contest the 2020 Trinidad and Tobago general election. The Progressives currently do not hold any seats in the House of Representatives, Regional municipalities, Regional corporations or in the Tobago House of Assembly.
History.
The Progressive Party held its first General Meeting in San Fernando, Trinidad and Tobago on December 15, 2019. At that meeting, the party's constitution was ratified, and six of the seven members of the Board of Directors were appointed. The Board of Directors will serve until the Party General Assembly of 2021. In his keynote address, Party Leader Nikoli Edwards outlined his party's policies and vision for Trinidad and Tobago, stating that Trinidad could not achieve progress under the two leading parties in Trinidad, the United National Congress (UNC) and the ruling People's National Movement (PNM).
At the first General Meeting, Edwards made the declaration that he will be contesting the constituency of San Fernando West which is currently represented by Faris Al-Rawi, Attorney General of Trinidad and Tobago.
List of Political Leaders.
The political leaders of the Progressive Party have been as follows (any acting leaders indicated in italics):
Key:
"PM": Prime Minister
"LO": Leader of the Opposition
Political Positions.
The Progressives identify with progressivism, as well as the centre-left. The party believes in maintaining a small to moderately-sized government that focuses on helping citizens to realise their fullest potential in a reasonably regulated environment.


Liberal Democratic Party of Germany

The Liberal Democratic Party of Germany (, LDPD) was a political party in East Germany. Like the other allied bloc parties of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED) in the National Front, it had 52 representatives in the People's Chamber.
Foundation.
The history of the party dates back to 16 June 1945, when a Berlin-based group led by Waldemar Koch and his father-in-law Eugen Schiffer took the initiative in refounding the Weimar-era "German Democratic Party". Koch was elected chair of the founding committee, with Wilhelm Külz as his deputy; the writer Franz Xaver Kappus joined the board as well. At first there were some conversations about forming a united centre-right democratic party with the Christian Democrats, but the idea was abandoned soon and the name was changed to Liberal Democratic Party ("Liberal-Demokratische Partei", LDP) before the party's official founding on 5 July 1946.
It was first of all aimed at uniting Weimar Republic-era members of the German Democratic Party, German People's Party and German National People's Party. Unlike the East German Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the Liberal Democratic Party was firmly for private ownership and opposed to nationalization of important private enterprises. Among the new anti-fascist parties, Liberal Democratic Party was the most anti-communist at the time.
After internal fighting and under pressure from Soviet authorities, Koch was replaced with the more pliable Wilhelm Külz in November 1945.
In the last free election, of 1946, the Liberal Democrats finished third, behind the SED and the CDU. At the end of 1948, during the culmination of their opposition to the SED seizure of power, the LDP had more than 200,000 members, 23% of whom were younger than 25.
Unification attempts.
In July 1946 the LDP and the liberal parties in the Western Zones founded a joint Coordination committee with the aim of forming an All-Germany liberal party ("Deutsche Demokratische Partei", DPD). The founding of the Democratic Party of Germany began with a conference in Rothenburg ob der Tauber on 17 March 1947. Wilhelm Külz and Theodor Heuss (representing Western liberals) acted as co-chairman. Such undertakings failed quickly, owing to Külz's participation in the SED-sponsored German People's Congress for Unity and Just Peace.
The failure of unification became imminent when at a session of the united leadership of DPD that took part on 18 January 1948 and which Külz refused to attend, Theodor Heuss argued that the Liberal Democrats' unwillingness to take any measures against Külz proved their commitment to 'the Russian conception of German unity'. Arthur Lieutenant, the spokesman of LDP on the matter, declared that under those circumstances and concerning reproaches laid against East German liberals, any co-operation had been made impossible.
A "Blockpartei".
After 1949, it shared the same fate as the other legal East German parties. As a bloc party ("Blockpartei") of the National Front it jettisoned its original ideology, acting as a "helpmeet" to the Communist Socialist Unity Party of Germany (SED). Another bloc party, the National Democratic Party of Germany (NDPD), appealed to almost the same social groups. In October 1951, the LDP was ordered to add the "D" for "Germany" (Deutschland) into its name in order to serve the SED's all-German propaganda of that time.
LDPD member Johannes Dieckmann was the chairman of the Volkskammer from 1949 to 1969, and as such was ex officio vice president of the GDR during that time.
The central newspaper of LDPD used to be the daily "Der Morgen" ("The Morning").
Manfred Gerlach was the Chairman of the Liberal Democratic Party from 1967 to his resignation in 1990. Gerlach had initially been a loyal partner of the SED, but began moving toward a more independent line in the 1980s. At an extraordinary party congress held 9–10 February 1990 in Dresden it returned to genuine liberal policies and dropped "of Germany" from its name. On 12 February 1990 it joined the Association of Free Democrats, which finally merged into the Free Democratic Party (FDP) on 11 August 1990.
Foreign contacts.
The LDPD had contacts with other (nominally) liberal parties in the Communist bloc: Polish Democratic Party (Stronnictwo Demokratyczne, SD), the Czechoslovak Socialist Party (Československá strana socialistická, CSS), the Democratic Party of Vietnam and the Korean Democratic Party (Chõson Sahoeminjudang, CS). The Liberal Democratic Party of GDR also had some contacts with the West German FDP; in the 1960s and 1970s, the relations were cool, but contacts intensified in the 1980s.


Charles W. F. Dumas

Charles William Frédéric Dumas (1721–1796) was a man of letters living in the Dutch Republic who served as an American diplomat during the American Revolution.
He was born in German Ansbach to French parents, apparently lived in Switzerland for a time, and moved to the Netherlands around 1750. He befriended Benjamin Franklin when the latter was in Holland at the beginning of the American Revolution, and when Franklin chaired the Committee of correspondence, they employed Dumas as a secret agent to aid American interests in Europe. When John Adams became minister plenipotentiary to Holland, Dumas acted as his secretary and translator. When Adams went to Paris, Dumas acted as chargé d'affaires ad interim from the United States. Dumas died soon after 1794.
In 1775, Dumas devised the first diplomatic cipher used by the Continental Congress and Benjamin Franklin for secret correspondence with agents in Europe. It was a substitution code based on a prose passage of 682 characters, so that a given character could be replaced by more than one number.
Dumas planted stories favorable to the United States in the Gazette de Leyde (Leiden, Netherlands) with the goal of gaining a good credit rating for the United States in financial markets.
In 1776, Dumas contacted officials in Holland, Spain and France seeking trade in badly needed materials for the United States. This led to beneficial trade during the revolution. He was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1789.


Future and Freedom

Future and Freedom (), whose full name was Future and Freedom for Italy ("Futuro e Libertà per l'Italia", abbreviated to FLI), was a political party in Italy, comprising both liberal and national elements.
FLI was formed by followers of Gianfranco Fini in July 2010 as a split from The People of Freedom (PdL), the major Italian centre-right party of the time, led by Silvio Berlusconi. Fini, former leader of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) and National Alliance (AN) and co-founder of the PdL in 2009, had taken a long journey from post-fascism to become a liberal conservative. Soon after the PdL's foundation, he started to become a critic of Berlusconi's government and leadership style.
The core of FLI was constituted by Generation Italy (GI), led by Italo Bocchino, who was also appointed vice president of the party by Fini. FLI members were mostly former MSI/AN stalwarts, with some notable exceptions.
History.
Background.
Somewhat surprisingly, Gianfranco Fini, former leader of the national-conservative National Alliance (AN) and President of the Chamber of Deputies, became the most influential representative of the socially liberal wing of the party due to his progressive views on stem cell research, end of life issues, advance health care directives and immigration. Fini was also an outspoken supporter of the principle of separation of church and state and became also a vocal critic of Silvio Berlusconi and of his leadership style of the country and the party.
Fini's positions distanced him from most former leading members of AN (including Ignazio La Russa, Maurizio Gasparri, Gianni Alemanno, Altero Matteoli and Giorgia Meloni) who became close allies of Berlusconi instead.
In the meantime, a group of Fini loyalists, known as "Finiani", started to join forces in support of their leader. In April 2010 Italo Bocchino launched an association within the PdL named Generation Italy in order to better represent Fini's views within the party and push for a different party organisation. Fini posed a sort of ultimatum to Berlusconi and hinted the formation of separate groups from the PdL in Parliament. At one point some "Finiani" even proposed the formation of a new party outside the PdL. After some tense days emerged as a possibility that Fini and his group would have remained in the party as a minority faction. On 22 April 2010 the National Committee of the PdL convened in Rome for the first time in a year. The conflict between Fini and Berlusconi was covered live by television. A resolution which denounced Fini's conduct and reaffirmed the party's political line was approved by a landslide margin by the assembly.
Split from the PdL.
Clashes between Fini and Berlusconi became even more frequent and reached their heights in late July 2010, when Fini questioned the morality of some PdL party bigwigs under investigation. On 29 July 2010 the executive of the PdL released a document (voted by 33 members out of 37) in which Fini was described as "incompatible" with the political line of the PdL and unable to perform his job of President of the Chamber of Deputies in a neutral way. Berlusconi asked Fini to step down from his post and the executive proposed the suspension from party membership of three "Finiani" hard-liners (Italo Bocchino, Fabio Granata and Carmelo Briguglio) who had harshly criticised Berlusconi and accused some party members of criminal offences.
On 30 July, Fini held a press conference during which he announced the formation of separate groups from the PdL both in the Chamber and the Senate under the name Future and Freedom for Italy (FLI). He also confirmed the support of his group, which counted a handful of cabinet members, to Berlusconi's government. 33 deputies and 10 senators joined the new parliamentary groups from the beginning. Only a minority of the PdL MPs originating from National Alliance followed their former leader Fini into the new party, but enough to hold the balance in the Chamber of Deputies Moreover, some members of the former Forza Italia, Berlusconi's party before its merger into the PdL, joined too (Benedetto Della Vedova and Barbara Contini).
On 5 July, the Chamber voted on the suspension of Giacomo Caliendo, a PdL senator under investigation, from his post of Under-Secretary of Justice. The FLI group chose to abstain from the vote along with the Union of the Centre, Alliance for Italy and the Movement for the Autonomies, forming the so-called "area of responsibility". The motion was voted down, but it was a blow for the Berlusconi IV Cabinet, which retained its majority only through FLI's support.
During the vote on Caliendo, Chiara Moroni, a social democrat formerly of the New Italian Socialist Party and Forza Italia, announced that she was leaving the PdL group in order to join Fini's outfit. In a touching speech dedicated to her father Sergio Moroni, a Socialist who committed suicide during "Tangentopoli", she explained that she was leaving the PdL in the name of "garantismo" (an Italian word for "protection of civil liberties" used in relation to the right to a fair trial). For this she was vehemently criticised by senior former Socialists in the PdL such as Fabrizio Cicchitto and Margherita Boniver.
On 5 September, after a month of silence, Fini gave a speech to his supporters during the "Festa Tricolore" in Mirabello, a traditional rally of the old MSI and, later, of the AN. During that speech Fini declared that the PdL was dead and that his group would not have returned into the PdL's fold, but he did not speak about the transformation of FLI into an official party. Moreover, despite being very critical of Berlusconi, he offered a "legislative pact" in order for the government to continue until 2013. As a response, Berlusconi and his junior partner in government Umberto Bossi reiterated their call to Fini to resign from his post of President of the Chamber. Subsequently, on 8 September, Fini left the PdL group in the Chamber and joined to all intents and purposes FLI, becoming its 36th member.
Road to the new party.
On 22 September FLI abstained during a secret confidence vote on Nicola Cosentino, an Under-Secretary of Economy under investigation for "camorra"-related crimes. The motion was rejected by a larger majority than expected, meaning than some "Finiani" and possibly some deputies from the opposition.
On 24 September Souad Sbai left FLI and returned into the fold of the PdL parliamentary group. However, on the same day, Giampiero Catone, a former Christian Democrat who had been elected with the PdL on behalf of Gianfranco Rotondi's Christian Democracy for the Autonomies, joined FLI.
On 29 September FLI voted yes in a vote of confidence to the government in the Chamber of Deputies, but two FLI deputies (Mirko Tremaglia and Fabio Granata) voted against. On the same day Fini announced the imminent birth of a new party.
On 2 November the party logo was presented during a press conference. The day after two more deputies joined the party: Roberto Rosso, a former Christian Democrat who had been leader of Forza Italia in Piedmont, and Daniele Toto. In Sicily the party joined forces with the remnants of the PdL–Sicily and formed an eight-strong group in the Regional Assembly in support of President Raffaele Lombardo.
On 7 November, during a crowded convention in Bastia Umbra, Fini asked Berlusconi to step down from his post of Prime Minister and proposed a new government including the Union of the Centre (UdC). Fini declared also that if Berlusconi were not to step down, FLI ministers and under-secretaries would leave the executive. As Berlusconi refused to do so, the four FLI members of the government resigned on 15 November.
On 14 December FLI voted against the government in a vote of confidence in the Chamber of Deputies, a vote won by Berlusconi by 314 to 311. Three FLI deputies (Giampiero Catone, Catia Polidori and Maria Grazia Siliquini) voted in favour (along with Giuseppe Angeli, who had left FLI and returned to the PdL in November), while another, Silvano Moffa, abstained from the vote and chose to leave the party. Subsequently, also Catone, Polidori and Siliquini left FLI.
On 15 December 2010 FLI was a founding member of the New Pole for Italy (NPI), along with the UdC and some minor parties.
New party, new splits.
On 11–13 February 2011 FLI was officially established as a party during a congress in Milan and Gianfranco Fini was elected president of it.
During the congress, no-one questioned the leadership of Fini, but the party was divided between "radicals" (Italo Bocchino, Benedetto Della Vedova, Fabio Granata, Carmelo Briguglio, Flavia Perina, etc.) and "moderates" (Adolfo Urso, Andrea Ronchi, Pasquale Viespoli, Mario Baldassarri and most senators), who strongly opposed the rise of Bocchino to party leadership. Fini finally appointed Bocchino vice president, downgraded Urso to spokesperson, appointed another "radical", Della Vedova, at the head of the party in the Chamber of Deputies, while Viespoli, a "moderate", was confirmed as leader in the Senate. This caused outrage among the "moderates", and Urso and Viespoli were especially critical of Fini's choices.
On 15 February Viespoli resigned from the position of Senate floor leader, but was immediately re-elected by the 10 FLI senators with a new mandate: ensuring the centre-right credentials of the group. On 16 February senator Giuseppe Menardi quit the party. On 17 February he was followed by senator Francesco Pontone and deputy Roberto Rosso, who both returned to the PdL. On 19 February also deputy Luca Bellotti left to re-join the PdL. On 20 February it was the turn of deputy Luca Barbareschi, formerly a "radical". On 22 February Pasquale Viespoli and Maurizio Saia, both senators, left the party too and the senatorial group was dissolved. Viespoli, Menardi and Saia, along with other like-minded senators like Adriana Poli Bortone (I the South), formed a new centre-right group called National Cohesion and returned into the fold of the majority. On 16 February one more deputy, Giulia Cosenza, walked out and returned to the PdL.
The party experienced more internal troubles in April 2011, in the run-up to local elections. Some leading members of the party disagreed with some candidatures decided by the party's national leadership, notably in Latina and Naples. This finally led MEP Enzo Rivellini to step down from the regional leadership in Campania and leave the party. Another MEP, Potito Salatto, and one senator, Candido De Angelis, left their leadership posts too. In the meantime the party's "moderates", led Urso and Ronchi, launched their own faction, "FareItalia", open to members of all the centre-right parties, from the PdL to UDC. In May Ronchi resigned from president of the party's national assembly. In June Ronchi, along with Urso and Giuseppe Scalia (Sicilian leader of FLI), left the party.
On 30 December 2011 Mirko Tremaglia, a veteran of the Italian Social Republic and a historic figure in the history of MSI/AN/FLI, died.
Dissolution.
In the 2013 general election, held in February 2013, the party ran as part of the With Monti for Italy alliance with the UdC and Civic Choice and obtained a mere 0.4% of the vote, returning no seats in the Chamber and one in the Senate, plus two elects by Italians abroad. Subsequently, Fini resigned from party president. It was also decided that, under the leadership of Roberto Menia, FLI would reconnect with the other wings of the former AN in order to recompose the Italian right. As a result, the party decided to support Gianni Alemanno, a former AN bigwig, as mayor in the run-off of Rome municipal election.
In the following months, several FLI members left the party. Benedetto Della Vedova, Aldo Di Biagio and Maria Ida Germontani joined SC (Della Vedova was appointed spokesperson), Fabio Granata and Flavia Perina joined Green Italy, Carmelo Briguglio re-joined Alemanno in Italy First, Francesco Divella launched Protagonist Apulia, Potito Salatto joined forces with the UdC aiming at forming a joint party on the European People's Party's model, etc. What remained of the party started to cooperate with The Right, Tricolour Flame, I the South and other right-wing parties and people in order to form a "new National Alliance". In the meantime, most members of the former AN had either returned into the PdL's fold or joined Brothers of Italy, a party led by Giorgia Meloni and Ignazio La Russa which was granted by the "National Alliance Foundation" of the permission to use AN's name and symbol in December 2013.
In the 2014 Piedmontese regional election FLI ran with The Right and the Social Right into United Right, but the joint list obtained no seats.
FLI was officially disbanded sometime between 2013 and 2014. Fini, who was not a member of the Chamber of Deputies for the first time in thirty years and was one of the few incumbent Presidents not to be returned to Parliament, continued his political activity through an association named FreeRight.
Ideology and factions.
The ideology of Future and Freedom stretched from national conservatism to liberal conservatism, but some of its leading members had a strong taste for social liberalism. Its core issues include the defense of national unity, suspicion of federal reform and the development of Southern Italy.
The core of FLI was constituted by Generation Italy (GI), to which a majority of FLI deputies and senators are affiliated, but also the other two factions of the "arcipelago finiano" (National Area and Open Space) are represented. On the cultural side, the "FareFuturo" foundation and "Secolo d'Italia" newspaper are very influential.
Most FLI members come from the post-fascist tradition of the Italian Social Movement (MSI) and National Alliance (AN) with some notable exceptions: Benedetto Della Vedova (a former Radical, who was elected deputy for Forza Italia, FI, and was later the leader of the "Libertiamo" faction), Barbara Contini (a former Governor of Nasiriyah, Iraq elected for FI), Chiara Moroni (a former Socialist, later member of FI), Giuseppe Valditara (a former "Leghista"), Giulia Bongiorno, Alessandro Ruben and a handful of former Christian Democrats. However most FLI members are Southern conservatives or MSI nostalgics worried by the growing influence of Lega Nord over the centre-right, federal reform and economic liberalism. The party was actually very heterogeneous, and it was possible to identify some divisions either over politics or policies.
First, on the relations with the PdL, at the beginning there was a clear divide between a "radical" wing (Italo Bocchino, Fabio Granata, Carmelo Briguglio, Flavia Perina, Luca Barbareschi and most deputies) and a "moderate" one (Andrea Ronchi, Pasquale Viespoli, Roberto Menia and most senators). Some (the "moderates" and Adolfo Urso) long continued to consider themselves as part of the PdL, while others (the "radicals" and Menia) wanted FLI to be autonomous from the PdL. Shortly before launching the new party, Fini sided with the "radicals" and criticized the "moderates". Many "moderates", most of the former Christian Democrats and even "radical" Barbareschi left the party along the way. Some "moderates" led by Urso and Ronchi launched "FareItalia", others directly re-joined the PdL.
Second, while some "Finiani" (Bocchino, Granata, etc.) see FLI as the embryo of a modern and innovative right-wing, others (Menia, Urso, etc.) have joined FLI in order to re-create the political community of the late MSI. In this sense the word "future" in the party's name was a reference to futurism, which was a cultural inspiration for Italian Fascism.
Both progressive and reactionary forces thus hail from FLI, but almost none identifies with the political centre.
Third, on the economy, the predominant strain in FLI was highly influenced by dirigisme, statism, corporatism and centralism (all well represented in the ideology of the former MSI). Salvatore Merlo writes that "though Fini would never admit it [...] many of the positions adopted by him today derive from a certain thread in fascist culture" and "The Economist" remarks that "many of Mr Fini's fellow-rebels originated in the social wing of neo-fascism, whose anti-capitalist adherents embraced such ideas as feminism and environmentalism as long ago as the 1970s", that was why FLI "has perhaps the oddest pedigree of any progressive group on the European right". However FLI includes also some uncompromising libertarians such as Benedetto Della Vedova, his fellow former Radicals and the "Libertiamo" faction and foundation. Moreover, some "Finiani", notably including Mario Baldassarri, propose to lower taxes and to slow down the introduction of fiscal federalism instead.
Fourth, on ethical issues, which caused some of the main strifes between Fini and the majority of the PdL and of the former AN, some FLI members such as Della Vedova are pushing for a progressive commitment aimed at the introduction of civil unions and the liberalisation of artificial insemination, while others do not consider those issues a priority or oppose any departure from the traditional social conservatism of MSI/AN.


Newfoundland Reform Liberal Party

The Newfoundland Reform Liberal Party was a leader-centred political party in Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada from 1975 to 1979. It backed the return to power of Joey Smallwood after the former premier failed to regain the leadership of the Liberal Party of Newfoundland and Labrador in 1974.
1975 election.
The Newfoundland Reform Liberal Party ran 28 candidates in the 1975 provincial election. With the Newfoundland and Labrador House of Assembly having been expanded to 51 seats for the election Smallwood did not expect to win an outright mandate, rather, he hoped his presence would result in a hung parliament (with no party holding a majority of seats) in which the former premier could use the resulting bargaining power to return to office.
Although Smallwood succeeded in winning four seats for his new party in the House of Assembly (including his own), his overall plan backfired as the resulting vote splitting with the established Liberal Party ultimately contributed to success Progressive Conservatives under Frank Moores, who won a second consecutive majority government despite losing a considerable share of their popular vote.
Dissolution.
Publicly, Smallwood claimed the result to be a success - in his view, he had succeeded in preventing the established Liberal Party from returning to power. Smallwood spent the next two years unsuccessfully trying to negotiate a merger of the breakaway party with his old party, always with the stipulation that he would be leader of the merged party. Finally, in 1977, Smallwood resigned his seat in the House of Assembly and left politics for good.
The Newfoundland Reform Liberal Party never elected a new leader to replace Smallwood and disappeared as an effective political force following its founding leader's departure, although it continued to exist on paper until the 1979 Newfoundland general election was called. The party was subsequently dissolved by the provincial chief electoral officer after it failed to nominate any candidates for the election.


Anglo-American Peace Centenary

Anglo-American Peace Centenary (1814–1914) was in 1914 to celebrate the lasting peace between Britain and the United States. They last fought in the War of 1812, and those hostilities were ended formally on December 24, 1814, with the signing of the Treaty of Ghent.
History.
Planning for the centenary began in 1913 when the delegates from Great Britain and the British Colonies came to the United States to arrange with the American committee for the celebration. They planned to establish a series of scholarships for women based on the Rhodes Scholarship, at Girton College and Newnham College (both part of Cambridge University) and Bedford College, London. There was an exposition at Shepherd's Bush to celebrate "progress in arts, sciences and industries".


Energies for Italy

Energies for Italy (, EpI) is a centre-right political party in Italy, launched in November 2016 and officially established on 1 April 2017. Its leader is Stefano Parisi, a former director-general of Confindustria and CEO of Fastweb, who was an unsuccessful candidate for mayor in the 2016 Milan municipal election.
History.
In the run-up of the 2016 Milan municipal election, Stefano Parisi was selected by Silvio Berlusconi as the candidate for mayor for Forza Italia (FI). In the election, Parisi pulled the party to 20.2%, but however narrowly lost to his Democratic opponent, Giuseppe Sala, in the run-off. After asking Parisi to reform the party, in November Berlusconi disowned him, due to his difficult political relationship with the party's major ally, Lega Nord (LN). Parisi thus launched his own party, EpI, and soon came to terms again with LN, aiming at being part of the same centre-right coalition.
In March 2017 Maurizio Sacconi, senator and former minister, who had been a member of the Italian Socialist Party (like Parisi), the old Forza Italia (FI) and the New Centre-Right (NCD), joined EpI, after stepping down from NCD Senate leader in February 2015 and later refusing to join the NCD-sponsored Popular Alternative (AP).
Later on, the party was joined by another senator (Gabriele Albertini) and five deputies (Domenico Menorello, Giovanni Monchiero, Dino Secco, Gugliemo Vaccaro and Gianluigi Gigli), mostly splinters of FI, NCD/AP and Civic Choice (SC). In September 2017 EpI joined forces with "The Marianne", a liberal political association led by Giovanni Negri (a former secretary of the Radical Party). In November 2017, the Civics and Innovators sub-group in the Chamber, led by Monchiero, was renamed "Civics and Innovators – Energies for Italy".
On 13 January 2018, EpI and CI launched a joint list named "Energies for Italy – for the Centre-right", allied with Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia.


River Raisin Massacre