What does it even mean to be a ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative’?

 During a political argument, when someone calls you a liberal, they probably mean you are a hypocrite. To be tarred a progressive or leftist is to be declared at best naïve, at worst, a bloody communist.

If the slur is you’re a conservative, they mean you’re heartless. To be slugged right-wing means you’re on the reactionary-fascist continuum.

The premise of these political putdowns is that your interlocutor holds your thinking – maybe you too – to be not just disagreeable but bordering on devilish.

Since many of us are locked into this weltanschauung, the prospect that the camp we disagree with will be ascendant is downright terrifying.

Liberalism and conservatism are ideologies.   

Political scientist James Q. Wilson, who died in 2012, defined ideology as “a coherent and consistent set of beliefs about who ought to rule, what principles rulers ought to obey, and what policies rulers ought to pursue.”

Liberalism and conservatism have been defined and redefined over time and place. The Liberal Party of Australia is conservative by the American definition. In Israel, left and right only approximately mean what it does in the US.

In the contemporary American setting, liberalism meant championing liberty in personal matters, free-market capitalism in economics, and gradualist reform in the social sphere. A liberal would favor decriminalizing abortion and homosexuality, support low tariffs on international trade, and favor welfare and health coverage for the indigent.

Conservatism arose in the face of reforms gone too far (specifically, the 1789 French Revolution which overthrew King Louis XVI but led to the Jacobian Reign of Terror). A conservative would be someone who wanted to safeguard enduring values and the traditional way things were done. Change, more often than not, was to be resisted. Conservatives tend to be skeptical of the government’s ability to be efficient and effective.

Liberals were those who favored government intervention to make things better in the economy and the social sphere. They argued it was the government’s responsibility to ensure that all Americans had access to a socio-economic safety net. While conservatives were worried that if the government became too interventionist, it would become overbearing and interfere with personal liberties.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was a quintessential liberal who instituted Social Security for older Americans. Ronald Reagan was the archetypal conservative who famously said, “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.’”

In a healthy polity there are few pure liberals and conservatives. Most thinking folks calibrate their positions as they grapple with thorny real-life challenges. For example, a social conservative might in principle oppose abortion but not in the case of rape or incest.

Today, it seems to me, ideologues have moved from Wilson’s description of “coherent and consistent” to calcified and fanatical. We seem to have lost the ability to adjust – to determine the Golden Mean.

A realignment of America’s political spectrum is underway. Liberals and conservatives are embracing increasingly extreme positions. Liberals are becoming less tolerant and open-minded. Trumpian conservatives are interested in radically changing the liberal status quo.

Partisan trench warfare predominates. Ideological nonconformists who stick their heads up to utter something that sounds vaguely nondogmatic are liable to get their brains blown out. There is no place for anti-Trump conservatives in the Republican Party. There is less and less safe space for old school liberals in the Democratic Party.

New Conservatism

These days Trumpian conservatism stands broadly for championing protectionist capitalism, neo-isolationism, nationalism, opposition to gun control, partial re-criminalization of abortion, and robust individual rights against an overprotective and intrusive state.

Trumpian conservatism not only holds that the government can’t competently address climate change, but it also denies global warming is even a problem. According to the president, California’s forests are burning because the state has neglected to clean the leaves from the forests’ floors. Remnant conservatives who care about environmental conservation carefully package their concerns so as not to infuriate the Trumpians.

On the porous margins of Trumpian conservatism are the conspiratorial-minded neo-fascist extremists who run the gamut from nazis and klaners to militiamen and white nationalists.

New Liberalism

Over in the liberal camp nowadays, the push has gone way beyond equal opportunity in race matters, beyond affirmative action quotas in hiring and education. Today’s liberals want the government to guarantee economic and social outcomes, use taxes to profoundly redistribute societal resources, robustly regulate the private sector, and take sweeping steps to repair the despoiled environment. The government’s role is to steer citizens toward healthier more just lives.

That the seam from reform-oriented liberalism to change-oriented progressivism has been crossed is nowhere better reflected then in vanguard media outlets like The New York Times. If liberals in the 1960s sought to protect criminal suspects from self-incrimination and to guarantee legal due process, in the 2020s progressives want suspects arrested for nonviolent felonies (subway turnstile jumping, belligerent panhandling, or vandalism) to be released without having to post bail.

The Trump era seems to have accelerated a shift that has delivered many liberals into the progressive bloc. As progressives they are reoriented to be mortified that whites continue to dominate the United States. Support for the amorphous Black Lives Matter movement, whatever its rolling open-ended demands, is axiomatic irrespective of reactionary, supremacist, or anti-Semitic positions voiced by some BLM figures. Jewish liberals once felt sufficiently secure to challenge the excesses of the Black Lives Matter narrative. Now, making BLM engageable is the order of the day.

Taking a page from Maoism, progressives aim to refurbish human nature with an emphasis on those of European white origin. Prejudice regardless if it is subconscious or dormant must be excised through a process of self-criticism and reeducation. Individuals who fall short should be prepared to be publicly humiliated. At the same time, white progressives must take care to avoid cultural appropriation by, for example, relocating into a historically black neighborhood.

Progressives are trained to acknowledge that whatever good fortune birth bestowed upon them is an illicit privilege. This has led some progressives to defend looting by people of color as legitimate. Male progressives have additional obligations to be “woke” or acutely attuned to political and social transgressions and patriarchal tendencies. Men need to abjure interrupting a woman while she is speaking or mansplaining, which is talking to a woman in a way that could be perceived as condescending. Progressive individuals need to unconditionally support LGBTQ+ culturally and politically, though the highest level of woke might also endorse the idea that the endgame should be the abolition of the family.

On the margins of the progressive camp is the hard-left amalgamation known as Antifa. Anarchist, Antifa follows a utopian philosophy aimed at repairing human nature and opposing all forms of hierarchy, including the state. In other words, they do not want a change in government. They want to collapse the state. Adherents, dressed in black, come together to fight the police and their right-wing adversaries.

To further muddle matters, some anarchists belong on the radical right because their goal beyond the downfall of the United States is the rise of whites-only enclaves.

Whatever the terms “liberal” and “conservative” once meant, their definition continues to evolve and not, it seems to me, in a politically healthy direction.

The Trumpian camp commands the GOP and the conservative brand. I assume his followers will continue to do so even if Donald Trump is no longer president.

While tensions between liberals and progressives are rife within the Democratic Party, these have mainly been put on hold to present a united front against Trump. Should the Biden/Harris liberal ticket be victorious, the Sanders/Warren/ Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez progressive wing can be expected to demand their due.

For those Americans who are not at home either among Trumpian conservatives or woke progressives there is – for now at least – only the political wilderness.

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