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Peel-and-stick labels

5 comments on Peel-and-stick labels

Peel-and-stick labels
: Roger L. Simon (second plug today; he has hit his limit) writes a hopeful obit for the labels liberal and conservative.

He has a better-educated, historical perspective.

Mine’s quite local to now. I take deserved crap for dropping my liberal label frequently but I do so because people keep assuming I’m not just conservative but right-wing because I supported the war. Americans assume it. Hell, Iranians assume it. They’re wrong. It’s meaningless.

So then we start arguing over what liberal and conservative mean, which is just as much fun as arguing about what weblog means.

But Simon says it more eloquently and truthfully than all that when he urges us to throw away the labels and then reassures us:

I know just where you can find the words liberal and conservative should you need them again. They are lying at the bottom of the rubble under the World Trade Center.

5 responses to “Peel-and-stick labels”

  1. Matt McIrvin Avatar
    Matt McIrvin

    I’m not sure that statement means much. The same political differences that existed before Sept. 11, 2001 by and large still exist. People still disagree about taxation, the role of government in providing social services, various cultural issues, etc. There was a brief era of remarkable national concord in the trauma of late 2001, but if anything, the Iraq war has re-sharpened some of the differences and brought out the ugly divisions in the wake of the 2000 election; it’s just that certain people find themselves on an unusual side of the fence (as will happen with any divisive single issue). We’re hardly in a post-partisan age; everyone seems to expect a particularly vicious and hurtful election season, with (proxy) accusations of treason, murder and tyranny flying around freely.
    But “liberal” and “conservative” haven’t been much more than arbitrary labels for certain clusters of opinions, for quite some time. The problem is that the etymological associations of the words aren’t *quite* dead yet, so people keep trying to figure out how some position or other translates as liberal or conservative.
    The way political systems are organized means that the clusters persist to some degree, though things shift in and out of them. “Left” and “right” are actually better names because they’re so inherently arbitrary. I suppose they have deep symbolic associations, as Sgt. Stryker was just talking about with regard to left-handedness, but in this context they’re pretty arbitrary.
    Or, for that matter, “Democratic” and “Republican,” names that are not inherently arbitrary but from which the literal meaning has completely leached out in this context. I suppose those names may once have had ideological reasons behind them, but hardly anyone any more tries to analyze the party platforms by etymologizing the names; anyone in the American political mainstream is some sort of democratic republican.

  2. Mitch H. Avatar
    Mitch H.

    I rather think that chasing meaning up the etymological tree is a lost cause when it comes to American major party names. Every other party formed in the 19th century was some variant on “Republican”: the Democrats were originally Democratic-Republicans; the precursor party to the Whigs were “National Republicans”; the nativists were the American Republicans. Article IV Section 4 actually requires “republican” state government.
    The names are used because they are generic. You’ll note that third-party, issue-based parties tend to have non-generic, specific names. The Dixiecrats, Reform, Populists, Free Soil, the Greens. The Republican and Democratic parties have such generic names because they’re coalitions, designed for long-term functionality. They can absorb any one issue or movement without invalidating their core principles, because those core principles are deliberately protean. You don’t have successful Christian Democratic or Labour or Social Democratic parties in the US, because those parties are plurality factions, which can only really govern when in a legislative coalition with a sub-set of minority parties. American parties don’t do that sort of thing, because they’re the coalition already pre-formed. Third parties are factions that have not successfully joined one of the coalition parties, or popular movements that have not yet been absorbed into the political system, rather than actual rivals to the existing coalition parties.
    In a sense, people have been waiting for a party breakup since the late 1850s, expecting one of the coalition parties to self-destruct like the Whigs did. This, in fact, did happen during the long death of segregation. The “Dixiecrat” faction broke apart the Democratic coalition, and eventually re-formed into a new Republican party. The only reason that people don’t compare the collapse of the parties in the 1960s with the dissolution of the second party system in the 1850s is that the names all stayed the same – there was still a Republican party, and a Democratic party, and no odd new names appeared to muddy the waters. But the Republican parties of 1972 and 1952 had as much in common as the American Whig party of 1848 had with the Republican party of 1868; the Democratic Parties of 1848 and 1868 had far more in common than did the Democratic Parties of 1952 and 1972.

  3. barney gumble Avatar
    barney gumble

    “…just as being a conservative means you are theoretically in the same group with William Kristol and Anne Coulter. Well, that is silly and it is tired and it is meaningless.”
    He writes that as if there is a lot of daylight between PNAC Kristol and “Kill them all and convert them to Christianity” Coulter. There isn’t.

  4. Eric Scheie Avatar
    Eric Scheie

    Thank you for this righteous post and link. (I am a new blogger and wish I’d stumbled onto this blogsite sooner.) I am repeating what I just posted on Mr. Simon’s site, because I feel quite strongly about this.
    Labels have been plaguing me for many years. What I call “definitionitis” is a major reason I started blogging. If I don’t want a label, people will put one on me. Next step is telling me what to do, lest I not “deserve” the label, then lose it and “earn” another, more opprobrious label — which in turn leads to the same cycle in the new turf.
    I ask, “May I just be allowed to think what I think?” What is so unreasonable about that?
    If I’m not a Marxist because I’m too liberal, but not liberal because I’m too conservative, but not conservative because I’m too libertarian, but not a libertarian because I’m not objectivist, but not objectivist because I’m too “neocon” but not a neocon because I’m too “homocon,” and so on….
    Where does it end?

  5. Richard Meixner Avatar
    Richard Meixner

    Steven Den Beste recently (20030529.1903) posted
    an interesting framework for evaluating one’s political preferences. Rather than a single, linear scale (for example, left-right), he used a “fist-full” of dimensions (more degrees of freedom, as he explains in an update at the end of the post). It’s lengthy, but worth the read.
    (http://denbeste.nu/cd_log_entries/2003/05/LeftandRight.shtml)