I realize that people will continue to use the terms "liberal" and "conservative", because they are familiar and support a satisfyingly dichotomous world. However, as I've listened to the general principles of each "side", I've started to see different elements along the political spectrum that seem to reflect reality better than those two outdated terms. This country seems to have four main themes that people work from:
- Humanistic Optimalists
- Anti-Government Libertarians
- Corporatists
- Christian Fundamentalists
Follow me below the fold...
Humanistic Optimalists
Many people that might be called Liberals or Progressives are really Humanistic Optimalists. The first term reflects the general principle of humanism which says that all people have instrinsic worth and that the political process should be primarily concerned with making life better for the entire human population (via education, technology, availability of basic resources, healthcare, etc). They want to reduce or eliminate things such as poverty, discrimination, and violent crime.
At the same time, they are realists and know that there are finite resources and that various interests must be balanced. Therefore, instead of seeking absolutes, they seek optimal solutions. For example, within economics, they recognize two valuable but often competing values: freedom and protection. It is good to let people create, sell, and buy products with as little interference as possible. It is also good to protect people from dangerous, defective, or dishonest products, services, and processes, while also protecting our natural resources from pollution and waste. Humanistic Optimalists do not see these competing values as either/or, but as both/and. Therefore, they seek to optimally balance freedom of the market and protection of consumers and the planet so that the economy runs as well as it can with as little harm to people as possible—not an easy task. This same perspective is applied to many issues, such as immigration, crime enforcement, homeland security, taxes, etc.
Because Optimalists are seeking the best possible solutions and not just the most extreme, they have a hard time making clear what it is they are trying to accomplish (because the world is a complex place). Moreover, since the world continues to change, their policy proposals continue to change, making them seem uncommitted or wishy washy. But at the core, Humanistic Optimalists seek to govern by optimally balancing all the various elements for the purpose of making life better for as many people as possible.
Anti-Government Libertarians
Although Humanistic Optimalists value personal freedom, they recognize that government is often necessary to protect and extend that freedom. Anti-Government Libertarians do not often believe this. To them, any law is a restriction on freedom, and even when government is acknowledged as a necessary evil, it must limit its concerns to protection (i.e. military, police) and perhaps certain civic services (e.g. roads, waste management). They often share the interests of the Humanistic Optimalists in regards to limiting government interference of lifestyle issues and wanting to reduce unnecessary governmental financial waste. Unlike Humanistic Optimalists, they also believe that maximizing freedom (i.e. reducing government interference) will increase social well-being and efficiency.
The essential problem with this belief, as idealistic as it sounds, is that it ignores the long history of human nature. Said another way, freedom to act is another way of saying freedom from consequences. While maximizing freedom would certainly make society work more efficiently, it would not make it work more fairly, since the price of efficiency would be paid by those without the resources or ability to protect themselves (c.f. Antebellum South).
Corporatists
Ultimately, Corporatists are "Greed Is Good"ers. They are enamored of the economic power embedded within modern corporations, either because they are beneficiaries of it or have been fooled into thinking that concentrating wealth serves the public good. Either way, the underlying goal with Corporatists is maximizing profit; everything else is secondary. This doesn't mean that some of those secondary things don't include a desire to protect the environment or increase human well-being, and certainly some corporatists will try to seek solutions to these goals, as long as they do not interfere with profit. They are also often similar to the Christian Fundamentalists in that their belief in "profit=social good" is based on unshakable evidence-free faith.
Christian Fundamentalists
As we are all familiar with, there is the Christian Fundamentalist group, which is perhaps the single most powerful, driven, aligned political coalition in America. Like the Corporatists, their goals are largely grounded in evidence-free faith. To be more precise, their goals are determined by the Biblical interpretations of a small cadre of pseudo-religious demagogs, often based on themes of hatred, fear, and moral self-righteousness.
Conclusion
Again, I am not trying to support dropping terms like liberal and progressive. However, neither does a very good job of describing what makes us different. True, Humanistic Optimalists isn't a very catchy name...but I think it does illustrate what we stand for and what we're trying to accomplish.