Filibuster CartoonsTitle: Keeping up with political labels (click to view)
Date: January 25, 2012
One reason why advertisements today are so much uglier, louder, and crasser than the classy advertisements of the
Mad Men era is because ugly, loud, crass ads sell products better. In other words, advertising tried the high road and the low road, and ultimately concluded that the low road was better for the bottom line.
The same seems to be holding true for democratic politics, particularly in the realm of political terminology. In more mature times, terms like liberal, conservative, socialist, and communist actually had fairly finite, neutral definitions, meaning there was a right and a wrong way to use them just as there was a right and a wrong way to use adjectives like "new" and "improved." When President Eisenhower described himself as a "liberal" in the 1950s, for instance, he was evoking the definition most commonly used by historians and economists, that is, one who desires a free society and free markets — literally, "one of liberty." Now, of course, the term has been corrupted to mean something else entirely, essentially, "one who is liberal
with things;" liberal with spending money, liberal with drugs, liberal with sex, and so on. "Socialist," in turn, is now simply "more liberal," while "conservative" or "moderate" is "less liberal," or in some cases "liberal more slowly."
All have become weapons of some sort. In these sound-byte times of ours, the only reason to identify another man as a member of some larger ideological pack or movement is to discredit him through association, and in a tight political race the more negative the association the better. So President Obama is called a "socialist" for no other reason than it ties him to a certain stereotype of discredited government in Europe or Cuba or elsewhere, while Governor Romney is a "liberal" because that reminds us of Obama.
Now, there's obviously some modicum of truth in both designations — Obama clearly has some mildly redistributionist tendencies, and Romney's political past was clearly quite permissive and non-judgemental — but the question becomes how far does one have to veer in either direction before you qualify for the worst label imaginable? If we've now decided that "socialist" is an acceptable tag for anything slightly more redistributionist than the alternative, then why not "Marxist" or "communist?" Why not "dictator" or "terrorist," while we're at it? If you abandon the pretence that strict definitions matter in favor of what's "close enough," why not just go all the way all of the time? After all, isn't everyone
a little bit terroristy, on some level?
These are not new complaints, of course. Back in 1946, in one of his most famous essays, George Orwell griped about
politics and the English language noting, among other things that "the word
Fascism has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies 'something not desirable,'" and that terms like "
democracy, socialism, freedom, patriotic, realistic, justice have each of them several different meanings which cannot be reconciled with one another." The end result, then as now, was a political culture in which it was almost impossible for anyone to actually have a concrete idea of what anyone actually stood for, since, as Orwell put it, almost all attempts at political labeling were simply crude partisan attempts "to make lies sound truthful."
Obviously, there is a genuine cleavage of opinion in contemporary western politics that falls into two fairly clean and identifiable camps. In all societies, there is generally a faction of the population who has something to gain from a stronger, larger, and more activist government, and a faction who benefit from being left alone. The former faction, likewise, tends to believe that human culture is constantly being perfected and horned, while the latter generally assumes we've already figured out workable answers to most of the important questions. Within both tribes there are extremists, moderates, and passives.
My question to you guys would be this: what do you think are the most accurate terms we can use to describe the political splits and movements we see today? Are "liberal," "conservative," and "socialist" meaningless slurs discredited beyond salvaging? Or do you think we all just need to get over ourselves a bit and accept that labels will always be a necessary part of making a complicated world easier to comprehend?
We all like to believe we're unique snowflakes that no man can ever classify, I understand, and certainly there's no modern phenomenon more tiresome and predictable than a young person who proudly declares that his opinions "don't really fit into any box." But does that mean every label always has to be an inaccurate insult?
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