This is the concluding section on an earier entry about the misuse and abuse of the word “liberal,” both in upper-case and lower-case usage.
I will be accused of being a Pollyanna here, but wouldn’t it be nice if we, everybody, could stop using simplistic name tags? Just for the sake of discussion, let’s say that I am a Liberal, which no doubt many folks would be quick to suggest, no matter how much I might protest about the unfairness or incompleteness of the designation.
So I am a Liberal, meaning I subscribe to all that good stuff about civil liberties, democratic reform, social progress, freedom of expression, tolerance of ideas and behavior of others, and broad-minded and generous. Come to think of it, if I hadn’t already formally put in some paperwork opting for cremation (when the time comes), that kind of verbiage would be just fine for a tombstone.
And I have a boatload of friends who don’t even blink when they refer to themselves as conservative, but I suspect they wouldn’t mind being remembered for those kinds of traits, either. So what does it mean that you could put the definition of “liberal” on the tombstone of a “Conservative” and no one would raise a hint of objection?
As I’ve moved around the country as an adult, let’s say starting with my service in the U.S. Navy in 1968, I’ve found that my goofily correct perch on the political spectrum would shift mightily based on precisely where I was living at the time. A stretch in San Francisco and Oakland around 1970 would have placed me at a far different spot on that broad band than years later at a number of different locations on the East Coast and in the Midwest. My politics didn’t change all that much, but the prevailing views of my neighbors would often shift a bit.
Not good shift, or bad shift, just shift. We tend to think that wherever we happen to be at the moment is the center of the Universe, but if we are given a gentle metaphorical elbow in the ribs we are quickly disabused of such fantasy.
But as noted above, I am a Liberal, but I don’t own a DVD player, didn’t get a cell phone until my big sister kind of pushed me into it, don’t understand what TIVO is (or Devo, for that matter) and remain convinced that there will never be such a thing as an “oldies rap station” on the radio 25 years from now. Heck, I don’t even have a microwave oven (and if that same sister reads this, I am in big trouble, because she gave me one for Christmas seven years ago. It’s still in the box in the garage.) That all sounds to me like opposing change.
And though the words moderate and cautious may not be directed my way all that often, I favor traditional views like family, hard work, patriotism, decency, public education, replacing your divots, etc.
So I dunno. Am I also conservative? You betcha, especially if we are going to use the word correctly. Not with all the dark stuff that usually gets slung along with it. I don’t really believe in much of that hooey anyway, especially all the hateful, discriminatory side trips, or that it is genuinely reflective of Conservatives. I know that it doesn’t reflect the humanity and decency of my Conservative friends.
With the connotations that either word has nowadays, they may be way too loaded and thus contaminated to be of much use. Ever since a beleaguered president expanded the notion of parsing the definition of a certain, hot-button word more than a decade ago, the game of fuzzying up reality by often crudely fiddling with the dictionary has taken on new life. Bill Clinton, a president the Far Right hated like no other even though he wasn’t really all that far to the left, didn’t invent the gamesmanship surrounding word usage, but he did give the tawdry maneuver an elevated platform like never before.
The sad truth is that those in power more often than not will use words to confuse the rest of us, divide us or simply to get us to look over here when we ought to be looking – very carefully, I might add – over there.
Welfare, Pro-Life (Does that mean the other guy is Pro-Death?), unions (labor or gay), entitlements, you name it, the list of words subject to the distortion of distraction is lengthy.
What good is a word, at least to label somebody or something, if it barely scratches the surface of what it’s trying to define? Every day, people who unthinkingly describe themselves as Liberal or Conservative are doing themselves and political discourse in this country a monumental disservice. (And no quibbling, please, about earlier sentences where I described myself thusly. It was for purposes of the discussion.)
And a disclaimer: If I am not a Liberal, and Rush is not a Conservative, how can I have the audacity to suggest that Jesus should be designated as a Liberal?
It’s artistic license. Employing the word as it is used in 2011, and operating under the premise that if Jesus were forced to settle down at some point along the whole spectrum of social and political debate as we currently envision it, then it says here that he’s a Liberal.
Former President George W. Bush embraced Jesus with a fervor unmatched in recent political history, but it's certainly open to debate whether the Savior he touted would have embraced Bush's policies.