Mislabelling liberals

Liberals: the bogeymen of US politics. It's tempting, but condescending, to say that Americans don't fully understand what "liberal" means, but there is a better explanation for their 'misuse' of the word. In the US "liberal" means socially liberal, which conservative America can't handle. Economic and political liberalism, at least, is what that country is founded on, but for various reasons a large part of that nation has chosen to despise those among them who see abortion and religion as matters of choice.

BarryNYC's comment on this discussion of Belarus is an illuminating, though maybe not entirely representative, example. Notice that Barry isn't using liberal as an adjective, but a noun: He doesn't call Timothy Garton Ash "liberal", but "a liberal". This might seem like a petty distinction put in those terms, but what it reveals is a combatative attitude where 'liberals' can be pitted against... well, "conservatives" (it seems to be a positive word over the Atlantic), "patriots", and the like. "Liberal" doesn't appear as an adjective, as a property that could change, or one that might be 'in the eye of the beholder', but instead is seen as an essential category that Garton Ash belongs to, just as we might say he is a man.

This is the kind of language that George W. Bush, "The President of Good and Evil", is both a cause and a sympton of. It's the black and white world of "Us against Them", leaving little room for shades of grey — that is, serious debate. Demonising your opponents and making generalisations like that is dangerously divisive, and injects hostility into politics, as well as leading to ridiculous misunderstandings — according to Barry, liberals were fond of the Soviet Union. No, Barry, that's communists you're thinking of (and it's not even all of them).

But apart from the rhetoric of political battle, the major mistake made in the US in terms of labelling is that 'liberal' is too often equated with 'the left'. That is not what liberalism is. Since I started formally studying politics, I've became acutely aware what a great shame it is that the people of those most liberal countries (Britain and most of the rest of the EU, the US, Canada, etc.) don't even have a clear idea what liberalism is. Maybe I'm biased, but a lack of any political or philosophical education in (at least British) schools is a major and obvious flaw. People don't read or know about the classic arguments for freedom of speech and association, the tenets of liberalism, such as J. S. Mills' On Liberty.

I mentioned previously that Dr Frank Ellis, Leeds Uni's resident racist who's just been suspended, called the BNP "a little too socialist". That makes him seriously right-wing, doesn't it? Well, not necessarily. It puts Ellis to the right of the BNP, but the BNP aren't actually very right-wing. What they are is authoritarian and xenophobic — but I need not make arguments against the BNP here. The point is that this is another over-simplification: there is right and there is left, the two are mutually exclusive, and if you're on one side, the other is your enemy.

Politics is not simple. You can't see every party or politician as simply either left-wing or right-wing. That's not to say those distinctions aren't useful — they are, as long as you recognise at least one other dichotomy: libertarianism and authoritarianism, as politicalcompass.org shows. Even their grid isn't ideal in some cases, but every model is a simplification, and we use each of them as far as they are useful. We need to remember this, because the labels we derive from those models are always simplifications too, and sometimes they go terribly wrong.