Labels, particularly political labels, can be quite misleading, especially when they’re applied by someone eager to trash someone else. Sadly, the corporate right-wing slime machine has quite successfully used the human tendency to label ourselves against us. Check out the damage from toxic assaults on “liberal,” for instance. Or “far leftist,” a term broadly applied as a smear to people whom actual far leftists don’t think come close to what that label supposedly describes.
Some people think the whole concept of political labeling is ridiculous, and would never apply one to themselves, much less permit one to be applied to them by their enemies. I understand and sympathize. Our labels aren't ourselves.
But while labels shouldn’t matter, shouldn’t be needed, our species seems determined to apply them, no matter how accurate, on others and ourselves. But what is really gained from descriptions like “centrist,” “liberal,” “progressive” or “radical”? Shouldn’t I'm not a fascist nutcase be enough?
Apparently not in most minds.
Trouble is that sussing out the appropriate label to identify where people stand on the political spectrum is slippery business. When you dig down into the roots, my personal political philosophy stems from my belief every living thing is sacred in a secular way. And one-word labels, like "moderate" or “liberal,” or "leftist," just don't cut it to describe that. Most people I know who willingly label themselves politically are hyphenates, usually multiple hyphenates, and even those qualifiers don't fully explain where they stand even when they constitute a mouthful like "tree-hugging-anti-imperialist liberal-feminist."
A serious obstacle to anything close to effective political labeling is the changed meaning of the words being chosen. "Liberal," "progressive," "radical," and "conservative" all have different meanings than they had 100, 50, or even 40 years ago. For instance, many 1960s activists felt "liberal" was tainted, and not a good label to choose to describe ourselves, as partially explained by this 52-year-old ballad written by Phil Ochs (sadly including a slur against lesbians). The fact that “Cold War liberals” were some of the most prominent supporters of the Vietnam War tainted the word even more.
Some of us picked "progressive" to describe ourselves after the social reformers of the 1890s-1920s, without remembering that many past progressives had been eugenicists with an agenda that sought to keep women out of the workplace. And they were white supremacists as well. The 1960s version of “progressive” doesn’t mesh all that well with the meaning of “progressive” today. Others of us in that era picked “radical” to describe themselves, a word that has its own taint—turned into a synonym for “extremist”—even though it’s a perfectly respectable term used by historians to describe the revolutionaries of 1776 and by the anti-slavery, anti-secessionist faction of Republicans to describe themselves during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
Forced to choose something with nuance, I’d choose a “fighting pragmatic radical.”
Some people argue that it's the big idea, not specific policy stances that determine one's political label. There's logic in that. Thus, "liberals" could be defined as forward-looking, tolerant of differences and intolerant of intolerance, open to new ideas and willing to act to make life better for society's hindmost, advocates of equality and fairness. You can add your own descriptors, perhaps some not so positive as these. Plug yourself into a search engine and you can find umpty-ump essays on "why I'm a liberal."
However, one big trouble with this big-idea approach to labeling is that individual policies—the laundry list—often spur members of one subgroup to challenge whether members of a subgroup which disagrees with them can fairly be included under the same label. Warmongering Richard Perle and Jeane Kirkpatrick, two of the founders of the so-called neo-conservative movement, were quite socially "liberal" on domestic issues in the 1970s, Kirkpatrick not switching to the Republican Party until 1985. Can someone who supports universal health care but favors pre-emptively bombing Iran back into the Stone Age be called a liberal? What about someone who supports raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour but opposes abortion?
So with political labels, as with everything else, the devil is in the details. Take my own case. I believe in vigorous regulation of business, a deep overhaul not just of how we finance medicine but also how it is practiced, nationalization of natural resources, laws that encourage the formation of economic entities like cooperatives that operate very differently from corporations, enforcement of anti-trust laws, reinstituting 1950s marginal tax rates for the upper 10 percent, an end to dark money in politics. I object to most industrial farming. I support what Tom Hayden and other California-based activists called “economic democracy” in the 1970s.
There should be an option of same-sex classes for junior high children, and a ban on charter schools. Learning a second language should be mandatory, starting in kindergarten. The Pentagon should spend waaaaay less and the government should invest far more in advanced R&D and science. I'm for comprehensive changes in the way human beings interact with the environment, particularly in the realm of global warming. I'm tough on violent crime but I oppose the death penalty in all cases, even Hitler's. I take a dim view of authorities' efforts to undermine the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Fourteenth Amendments.
I'm adamantly and fiercely pro-choice. The legalization of same-sex marriage represents about 10 percent of the needed protection of LGBTQ rights. People who think we've pretty much solved racism and sexism and homophobia make me ill. It's appalling that we haven't yet ended poverty in America. I support real sovereignty for indigenous tribes. Unions performed wonders for the working classes decades ago, and I still support them, but now they sometimes stand in the way of needed reform, giving a sour taste to "solidarity." I believe in the right to a fair trial, that our nation shouldn't jail people indefinitely without representation, shouldn't torture prisoners, shouldn't spy and gather tons of personal data on millions of people, and should have a free press.
Since 2001, everyone with the desire has been able to fill out the
flawed but interesting online questionnaire at The Political Compass and get a reading of where a person stands in relation to famous and notorious world leaders. The questionnaire pinpoints you on an X and Y axis, which in my case turns out to be on the lower, outer edge of the left-hand quadrant (-6.75; -8.46)—making my label in the creators’ perspective “libertarian-leftist.” But that isn’t really accurate since my “libertarianness” does not extend to economics.
Your turn. If you answered the questionnaire, how’d it turn out? Were you surprised? How do you label yourself politically? Or do you think labels are a snare and a delusion?