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(s)Elections See other (s)Elections Articles Title: Political Labels Dear Perplexed It was wholly a pleasure to get your bewildered reaction to our using the term Reactionary Liberal in a recent editorial. Political labels can indeed be puzzling. A reactionary liberal, as I understand the term, is someone who wishes to resurrect the liberal tendency in American politics going back to the New Deal. (The reactionary liberal is the opposite of the neo-conservative, a cloudy term that a whole column could be devoted to without risking clarity. ) The fabled New Deal itself (whichever New Deal we’re talking about, the early or later one ) would scarcely be considered liberal in the classical sense of John Stuart Mill and the Manchester Liberals of free-trade fame. Besides, there aren’t any liberals left in American politics; they’re now all progressives, a label without some of the unfortunate connotations that liberalism acquired during Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, which led to Jimmy Carter’s malaise. Today’s liberals / progressives are reacting to trends that have dominated American politics since the Reagan Revolution. Hence the term Reactionary Liberals. Got all that ? Whew. Unraveling political terms can be tiring. But the need for shorthand in political discussions being what it is, there’s no getting away from handy labels like Liberal and Conservative, Left and Right, Radical and Reactionary... Labels may be indispensable in political discussions, but they may do more to obscure meaning than reveal it. Political labels are overgeneralizations squeezed down to only a word or two, gaining in brevity what they lose in meaning, which is a lot. Political labels aren’t nearly as satisfying as examples when it comes to understanding the American political tradition. Whatever political philosophy Burke, Tocqueville, John Marshall, and the incomparable Lincoln represented, that’s the political persuasion I want to join. Maybe the name for it is Whig. Trying to explain a political label, like trying to explain a joke, tends to destroy the point of it. ’Cause if a label ain’t got that swing—like David Brooks’ Bobos or Brian Anderson’s South Park Conservatives—it don’t mean a thing. Just what are, or were, Bobos? The term is short for bourgeois bohemians. They’re really less a political tendency than a fashion trend. Think of someone who’ll take a jetliner halfway across the world to attend a conference on how to reduce carbon in the environment, or pay a premium for new jeans that look ragged. Or who’ll demonstrate for the poor and oppressed before returning home to his McMansion. In short, think John Edwards. As for South Park conservatives, the closest I can come to defining them is: comically semiobscene libertarian absurdist rebels given to ridiculing the political correctnesses of both left and right. Thorstein Veblen, he of The Theory of the Leisure Class, did this sort of thing better a century ago, and he, too, was accused of practicing satire rather than social analysis. (Granted, the two are not always easy to distinguish. ) I like the term Reactionary Liberal largely because of its obvious irony rather than any fleeting meaning it might have. You describe yourself as a Revolutionary Centrist since, you say, it’s going to take a revolution to bring today’s polarized politics back to where you want it: the center. It may be heading there even now. But I feel I must warn you: The center, like left and right, shifts with the times, too. It, too, is relative. It’ll be interesting to see how the punditry describes Hillary Clinton as she struggles to make it (back ) to the White House: Reactionary liberal? Pseudocentrist? Whateverit-takes pol? That last is another way of saying opportunist. Her core beliefs, if any, aren’t easy to pin down. In place of conviction, she’s got ambition. Instead of principle, policies. Power she understands, people maybe not. Misleading as labels can be, one can scarcely think about politics or anything else without using generalizations, which is what labels are. Start peering behind the label, the generalization, and exceptions multiply till they swallow the rule. Even simple words like reactionary and liberal grow foggy. Trusting that I have sufficiently confused this entire subject Inky Wretch Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is taking some time off. An earlier version of this column ran October 5, 2005.
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