Dead Language

I was thinking the other day of how to describe myself ideologically. Depending on the issue, or how you are framing the question, I suppose you could call me a liberal, moderate or conservative. Yet I am a very partisan Democrat. How can that be?

Let me try to highlight what I mean:

Conservative: fiscal responsibility, pro-small business, foreign policy realism, skepticism about centralized government programs, wariness about institutional change, concerned about illegal immigration.

Liberal: pro-social welfare, pro-labor, pro-environment, anti-corporate, pro-civil liberties, skeptical of free trade.

Moderate: an instinct for pragmatism and compromise. Always try to find a middle ground with reasonable people on the other side of an issue.

So given this laundry list of positions, how in the world could I ever describe myself as a true, aggressive liberal Democrat?

Easy: all of the conservative positions I have can no longer find purchase in today's conservatism, and pragmatism and reasonableness are no longer characteristics of the Republican party. We're talking about a big-deficit, big government, imperialist, radical, pro-monopolist, open borders party here. I fail to see what' conservative about that.

Political discourse in America has been fundamentally corrupted, or at least radically transformed, because the labels we have traditionally used to describe things no longer have any real meaning. It would be like trying decide whether Hammurabi was a liberal or conservative. We're just talking about a completely different intellectual framework here.

The liberal and conservative positions exist as useful terms only in relation to eachother. They are mutually exclusive, binary descriptions, like black/white, rainy/sunny, good/evil. What happened in the generation is that the definition of one of those binary terms has dramatically changed. Conservatism today has virtually nothing in common with the conservatism of Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford. I even wonder how much it has in common with Ronald Reagan.

Liberalism, on the other hand, still has pretty much the same self-understanding it did thirty years ago. This means that there are now millions of voters who were once conservatives who either a) continue to vote Republican out of some sort of confusion, or b) don't know where to turn.

I think the old-style conservatives should follow my lead into the House of Liberalism. If liberalism changes what it means, if it expands its definition of what liberalism is, it can win over many of those disaffected (or soon to be disaffected) voters, without really losing any of its ideological edge. I am now very comfortable with the label of "liberal," because my liberalism means both fiscal restraint AND pro-social welfare; pro-small business AND pro-labor. I think we can square this circle, in part because the new right has taught us how much those positions ultimately have in common.