Liberal Education
"Liberal" is still a dirty word in America politics. When given the choice of conservative, moderate or liberal, only one in five Americans identify themselves as the last. The term is still tainted with associations--tax and spend, abortion on demand, revolving-door justice, whatever. If you're a politician, calling yourself a liberal is announcing to most voters you're too far left.
The irony is it wasn't that long ago--the 60s--when being a "liberal" was considered too wishy-washy. It meant you were a leftist but didn't have the guts to go all the way.
Because of the taint, liberals try to rebrand themselves. A popular term used today is "progressive." I guess it conjures up positive images (who doesn't like progress?) or at least isn't associated with so much negative stuff. The irony is, I remember first hearng the term regularly when I was in college. And I asked a friend what does "progressive" actually mean, and he explained it meant far to the left of liberal--practically a communist.
PS I'm pretty sure I've put up a post very similar to this one before. I guess the issue is still relevant, but my apologies for the repetition.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:23 AM
4 Comments:
These things go in cycles. "Conservative" is getting back to being correlated with knuckle-dragging cavemen.
maybe we can come up with new monikers
This is true. "Center Right" is the preferred term of nitwits who support socialized medicine or discriminatorily enforced borders and elections laws, so long as it's John McCain proposing it instead of Barack Obama.
In 2008, I found that twenty-something idealistic Obama fans always called themselves "progressive" rather than "liberal". I often asked them questions to figure out what they understood the difference to be, and finally concluded that the differences were not really about policy. To them, a "liberal" is a Democratic machine politician while a "progressive" was an idealist who rejected Government As Usual. Obama was progressive and the Clintons were liberal. Even when they agreed on the issues.
The use of these labels is sometimes bizarre. The traditional European scale has five positions: reactionary, conservative, centrist, liberal, radical. On that scale, the Nazi Party always identified itself as "conservative" -- never as "reactionary". In Germany, "reactionary" was the term for upper-class monarchists, and the middle-class fascists who made up the Nazi party hated those folks too. (Not as much as they hated other groups, but then they had plenty of hate to go around.)
"Conservative" is still a term with proudly flying colors. Republicans fight go be called conservative. They're not looking for a new term, liberals are.
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