Perhaps a bit o/t, but “[t]he first ever comparative surveys of U.S. conservative and progressive (or liberal) religious activists has just been published by the Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron and Public Religion Research.”
A capsule summary can be found at Reuters’ Faith World blog: http://blogs.reuters.com/faithworld/2009/09/15/us-religious-conservatives-and-progressives-profiled/
The entry includes a link to the full report.

Gus gives this definition: “Liberalism rests on a simple proposition with complex implications: the individual is society’s fundamental moral and ethical unit.”
I’m trying to think who is excluded by that definition.
One group is authoritarians, such as fascists, feudalists, and state-socialists, who think the individual should be subordinate to the ruler. Such views are fairly common in Europe, but are they in the USA? I suppose some conservatives are authoritarian in intra-family terms.
An overlapping group is collectivists, such as tribalists, ethnocentrists, and group-socialists, for whom the individual should be subordinate to the group. Again, are such views all that common in the USA? Perhaps deep-greens are a type of collectivist?
A third group is those who exclude certain categories from the position of “individual”. Racists and extreme sexists are the obvious exampls, but blatant expression of such views is now mercifully rare. I would extend the “individual” category to at least some animals and foetuses, but that is a debate for a different day. There was also the issue raised by a commenter about corporations.
My point is that “liberalism” seems to include almost everyone but a few fringe groups, especially in the USA.
I haven’t found your essay all that helpful so far.

Rombald-You are right as to what is excluded by my definition of liberalism, but I think wrong in assuming that what is excluded includes simply small fringe groups. But before going to that second point I want to emphasize just how unusual a society is that conceives of itself in liberal terms. What we often take for granted is not the norm around the world.
What is really new about liberalism is its celebration of the individual as primary. Most European liberal societies have had a difficult time becoming liberal because they originally defined themselves in tribal and religious terms and arose from feudalism. Because we are so much a society of immigrants, people who gave up communal connections in favor of individual and familial success, liberalism comes far more easily to us than to the Swedes or Germans. And many Swedish or German liberals immigrated here. Add the individualized Christianity of Protestantism as the dominant religious influence, and you have a society that is rather blind to community concerns, but that is naturally attracted to liberalism.
So in this essay my major question is – how does a Pagan perspective change this? Or does it? It changes conservatism – and I also think it changes liberalism. Part III is where the rubber hits the road on my claim, so to say, but it depends on parts I and II.
All that warm fuzzy stuff aside, I think American liberalism is not in as strong a position as it used to be. Partly it is because liberalism’s enemies have robbed us of a clear understanding of what the word means- aided in particular by some short sighted classical liberals.
But more deeply still, there are powerful illiberal elements in our country – and by some measures they are getting stronger. On racial and gender issues we are on balance getting more liberal. A person’s individuality matters more than race or sex or sexual orientation. That’s wonderful in my book.
But in many other respects our society is becoming more authoritarian, and a strong collectivist streak has emerged again. Especially under Bush II the liberal principle of equality under the law was explicitly rejected, and Obama has done very little to reverse this. The president and his henchmen are above the law. There was a time when we punished people for torture – which breaks our own as well as international law. Now the government refuses so long as the torturer acted under Presidential authority. Hige numbers of people who think of themselves as patriots support measures designed to get any confession the torturers wanted. This is not equality under the law.
Corporations and the immensely wealthy are now “too big to fail” and so subject to different riles than the rest of us. This is the very definition of aristocracy, the opposite of liberalism. Liberalism depends on a strongly middle class society that is disappearing before our eyes.
The Republican Party is controlled by authoritarians and collectivists. Buchanan, Limbaugh and Palin are various sorts of collectivists from the right. Robertson, Christian Dominionists, The Brotherhood, Neoconservatives – are all authoritarians. They use liberal rhetoric when out of power, but look at what they did when in power. Their base is in the South, which is the only part of the country whose elite explicitly repudiated our founding principles and, since the Civil War, have convinced even many northerners there was something noble about repudiating liberalism for authoritarianism. That element in the South still dominates.
The problem is that certain kinds of sexual and racial equality, while very good in themselves, give no protection at all to the basic legal framework that protects all minorities in a liberal system. One can be an authoritarian woman – Palin, Bachmann, and Coulter for example. One can be an authoritarian gay. One can be an authoritarian Black or Hispanic or Indian. So while we are growing more liberal in those areas, at the foundational level which gives minorities long term protection, we are growing less liberal.
I wish I was as optimistic as you, but I am not.

Do not leave out the confluence of liberal individualism and atomistic consumerism. Many separate consumers making purchases probably benefit profit-seeking corporations more than collectivities making fewer purchases but with greater leverage thanks to scale.
Liberalism transforms poorly into any sort of empowering or liberating mass consumerism within an economy dominated by corporations, not governed by citizens.
As a movement, North American Neo-Paganism did grow under more or less liberal political circumstances. But I don’t think that liberalism as a value system matches up very well with Neo-Pagan values–as I learned them and practice them.