How many kinds of "liberals" or "leftists" are there in America?

Great Debates
1

In the U.S., we use the words “liberal” and “conservative” to lump together several very different schools of political thought. This is probably because our two-party systems forces several different kinds of “liberals” or “conservatives” to huddle together under the big tent of one of the major parties. We really should be more precise. We need to develop a clearer picture of the whole range of political opinions.

In my view, the words “liberal” or “leftist” in American political discourse can refer to any of the following ideologies or groupings:

  1. Neoliberals – business liberals, dedicated to free markets and the efficient integration of the “global economy.” Clinton’s grouping. The New Republic is a neoliberal magazine.

  2. Left-liberals – dedicated to the conventionally “leftist” politics of the past 30 years, including “political correctness,” the upper-middle-class form of feminism, race-based affirmative action, and a moderate environmentalism. Led by an upper class that was described by David Brooks in his book Bobos in Paradise.

  3. Labor leaders – still struggling to find political relevance although only a shrinking minority of the modern American labor force is unionized.

  4. Socialists – of various branches and parties, still hanging around and waiting for the working class to finally get behind them, dammit!

  5. Greens – centered on serious environmentalism; also emphasize “social justice” issues that go way beyond what the “left-liberals” want to talk about.

  6. Multiculturalists – black and Latino racial separatist groups, Nation of Islam, La Raza, etc.

  7. New Age liberals – I can’t think of any better label for the grouping represented by the Natural Law Party, which is based on transcendental meditation, among other things.

What do you guys think? Is this a complete picture? Have I drawn any erroneous distinctions, identified any groupings that are not really separate groupings? Are there other kinds of liberals I haven’t listed?

2

Well Liberalism is a distinct part of left-wing politics, usually just left of centre. Trade unionists are certainly not Liberal, neither are Marxists (socialists).

I’m unclear on whether you mean all the Liberal groupings or all the leftist groupings. If you meant leftist then you forgot anarchists and (some of whom could be described as liberal anyway), communists (Maoists and Stalinist [yes, they do still exist]certainly couldn’t be described as liberal tho’).

The Nation of Islam is most defintely not left wing, seperatist and racists are usually described as the extreme right wing.

3

Posted by MC Master of Ceremonies:

I’ve also got a GD thread going, "How many kinds of ‘conservatives’ are there in America? What I’m trying to do is divide the whole American political spectrum into two broad groupings (which is what we generally do anyway when we uses the labels “liberal” and “conservative”), and then dissect those broad groupings into smaller ones. “Multiculturalists” belong in the liberal grouping by default as they clearly do not belong in the conservative grouping.

As for anarchists, I don’t think there are enough in America to be worth mentioning. Libertarians we have, even radical Libertarians, and a very prominent Libertarian Party, and Libertarian magazines, think-tanks, and other organizations. But in America there are very few anarchists or anarcho-syndicalists of the European school or the Wobbly (IWW) tradition. The IWW still exists but it’s so small and unimportant that we lose nothing by lumping it in with the socialists.

4

Actually Brain Glutton I thnik you sevrely underestimate the number of anarchists in the US, for example at the anti-globalization marches in the US you would find a large proportion of anarchists there. AFAIK anarchists are the main grouping in the US radical left.

The nation of Islam aren’t Conservatives, but there not left wing or liberal either.

5

Where does sexual permissiveness, drug legalization, oppositions to religious fundamentalism, etc. come in?

6

I once heard the term (a long time ago) “Atari Liberals,” which was used to refer to left-leaning folks who wanted to protect the environment and preserve individual freedoms via improvements in technology. So they’d be in favor of safer nuclear reactors and personal computers in schools, for instance.

Not sure what happened to them, or where they’d fall in the OP’s pigeonholes.

7

While we’re on the subject, I’ll deliver my standard definitions that distinguish between lberalism and leftism:

Liberalism is resistance to prevailing cultural or political assumptions, i.e. open-mindedness.

Leftism is support for policies designed to rectify percieved past inequities, i.e. playing up ‘victim status’ etc.

For example, color blindless is liberal, and affirmative-action is leftist.

8

Don’t forget that Libertarians are not liberal… they’re really, really conservative. It just winds up that they seem to agree with liberals on many things… from a completely different perspective.

9

“Multiculturalists” as a descriptor for Farrakhan and his ilk also seems wrong somehow ( let alone that the Nation of Islam is not terribly liberal in any American sense ). They’re not multiculturalists, they’re cultural separtists ( which is not the same thing by a long shot - multiculturalism as a liberal dicta is about embracing cultural diversity, not partitioning everything into discrete cultural units ).

  • Tamerlane
10

Your groupings are nonsensensical & many of the views that you ascribe to “liberals” are simply wrong. You clearly know nothing of liberalism in America today, nor its historical roots. You can’t even tell the difference between “liberalism” & “socialism”. (Liberalism in America is and always has been a political ideology based on CAPITALIST economics.)

Your biases render your analysis of the subject irrelevant. Asking you to define liberalism is about as useful & informative as someone asking Osama bin Laden to define the essentials of Judaism. :smiley: If you want to really know about differences among differnt liberal groups, try asking some real liberals rather than making up your own contradictoty categories.

CORRECTING A FEW OF YOUR MISCONCEPTIONS

  1. There is no such thing as a “neo-liberal”. Clinton was simply a liberal. Period. Such a distinction does not exist. Liberals have always been internationalists by nature & strong defenders of int’l human rights standards - as far back as Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations & then founding of the World Bank, the Red Cross, the IMF, UN Gen Asembly & Security Council - ALL by liberals.

  2. Multi-culturalism is in fact the exact opposite of separatism. Contrary to what you imply. (Natural Law party is not a liberal group.) Equal access for all does NOT equal special access for a few. Conservatism is about representing the needs of an elite few, NOT liberalism. Liberalism is about leveling the playing field to enable free competition for all, regardless of social status or wealth, rather than special priviledges & monopoly control by a wealthy few. Liberalism is about upholding the rights of the less powerful in society to freely compete. Neo-conservatism is about unlevel playing fields & rigged markets & special prividges in favor of the wealthy & powerful within society.

  3. The term “political correctness” was coined by the Right, not the Left, as a slight against liberal campaigns AGAINST discrimination & intolerance by rightwingers against the economically/socially disenfranchised in society. Use of the term PC reveals your ignorance & bias against any real understanding of liberal views.

Most Americans support affirmative action for under-represented minorities (particularly with regard to education) & firmly are against all unfair discrimination based on gender, race, handicap, sexual orientation , etc. Rightwingers like to tar all efforts to uphold equal access to opportunity for all as “special rights” - often by claiming that worst case instances of “reverse discrimination” are common rather than rare exceptions and/or anecdotes & right-wing rhetoric not based in reality.

4)Socialists are NOT liberals, nor are they a part of mainstream liberalism in America. Socialism is an ideology based on state-ownership of industry & control of economic production. No liberal anywhere has ever advocated state-ownership & operation of U.S. industry.

5)Your problem is you can’t tell the difference between the government acting as referee between private companies (& enforcing public interest regulations on free markets) AND the gov’t ACTUALLY OWNING industries & EMPLOYING all workers. There is a vast difference between these two ideas.

Like many neo-conservative pundits today, you think that any gov’t program that EVER promotes public interest over private property rights or regulates any industry is somehow proof of some socialist conspiracy that secretly wants to put all business out of business. What you fail to understand is that free markets themselves can’t stay free & open to all WITHOUT regulation. (That’s why liberal economists created the SEC & the Fed & FDIC and other agencies to regulate markets & to help maintain economic growth prevent Enron-type financial scandals among private companies from cheating investors.)

6)Liberalism creates higher standards of living for all. Liberalism has given us: free access to public education for all; high standards for clean air, water, and food; high standards for community health; strong product & worker safety rules; a social safety net for the elderly, poor children & the unemployed; stable markets & more secure investments; gov’t sponsored research into new technologies, etc. Free markets by themselves do not create any of these things. Liberalism is about protecting public standards while promoting economic growth & social progress. (This is somtimes known by economists as “correcting market failures” or “internalizing externalities”. Such measure make markets operate MORE efficiently.) Countries without such protections for citizens, companies, or investors invariably have many more poor, uneducated citizens (who generally live much shorter lives).

Liberalism created all of these public benefits that today many people like you take for granted. None of these programs has anything to do with the gov’t owning anything. Liberalism is about guiding free markets toward serving public needs (not controlling markets) that are in everyone’s interest - such as reducing illiteracy & protecting our food supply - that markets would otherwise neglect.

To you (& nitwits like Rush Limbaugh or Ann Coulter) the term “liberal” or "socialist are used interchageably - even though the two ideologies have little in common. Intentionally ignoring such HUGE differences between the two ideologies is moronic. But I suspect that the reason you see no problem with such distortion is simply because to people like you the word “liberal” is just a catch-all phrase for “bogeyman”. It means whatever negative trend you want it too.

11

The Political Compass is a good start.

12

Posted by Zenmaster Mojo:

Zenmaster, what makes you think I think anything of the kind? I’m a democratic socialist, for Godlessness’ sake! Not a Marxist by any definition, but still a socialist or social democrat by American standards. I don’t want to see all private enterprise nationalized, but I would like our country to be run a whole lot more like the social-democratic countries in Europe. I joined the Democratic Socialists of America not long ago. I would join the Green Party too, if I didn’t have a problem with their Key Value of “decentralization.” (I’m a Hamiltonian, not a Jeffersonian.) In fact, I think I will join them despite that. And I also support anything which tends toward the eventual establishment of a world state. For instance, I think the United States should join the European Union, and pressure Russia and Japan to do the same, and propose a policy of gradual but constant expansion of the Union until it includes every state or nation of humanity. Now, how many conservatives think like that?

Notice that I titled this thread to encompass both “liberals” and “leftists.” Let me say it again. I am trying to formulate a clear picture of all the ideological groupings of the American “political nation” (that large minority who take some active role, beyond voting, in politics and public affairs). A month ago I started a GD thread – “What is the best system for mapping/classifying political ideologies?” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=192457 That kind of petered out, and I got to thinking maybe I didn’t have a clear and accurate enough picture of the territory I propose to map, so I’m breaking the problem down into more manageable components. So I started this thread, and a concurrent thread: “How many kinds of ‘conservatives’ are there in America?” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=198129

So if I seem to be lumping liberals together with socialists, it’s not because I see no important distinction between them. Quite the contrary. I am trying to identify all the important distinctions between these groups – and within them – and this thread is merely a beginning step in that process. One thread for dissecting the “left” side of the political map, one for dissecting the “right” side, and then maybe in later threads we can break it down even further.

Zenmaster, I think you got the impression that I am conservative or anti-liberal because, in my OP, some of the descriptions I gave of the liberal or leftist groupings I (tentatively) identified have a rather dismissive tone. Sorry if I gave you the wrong impression. But you should see the descriptions in my OP on the conservative thread!

Why am I so interested in this? Because I want to live in a politically pluralistic, multipartisan America! That’s why I support such reforms as instant runoff voting, proportional representation, and anything else that gives third parties a leg up, anything that might help to break the back of the two-party system! In a still earlier GD thread I “asked”: “Should the U.S. adopt alternative, pro-multipartisan voting systems?” – http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=170368&highlight=promultipartisan

And, as I support these things, I think it is very important to try to predict exactly what new partisan groupings would emerge in American politics if the system were reformed to make that possible. That is why I started this thread and all the threads mentioned above.

Oh, and yes, SentientMeat, I have looked at the Political Compass and I’m not satisfied with it. It is nothing but the Libertarians’ political map turned 135 degrees, so that the Libertarian quadrant is in the lower right-hand quarter of a square rather than the top quarter of a diamond. I think we can come up with something better that accounts for more axes of variables.

13

Oh, and you might want to look at two other GD threads, which have some relevance to this discussion:

How many social classes are there in the United States?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=190376

and

Do socialist politics have a future in the United States?
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=188652

14

Interesting idea - a political cube, say? I must say, I find it difficult to suggest a “depth axis” which is quite so general as economic right-left or authority/liberty up down. Perhaps “them & us vs. we’re-all-one” (incusivity/exclusivity)? What are your suggestions (given that it can’t be too specific or single issue)?

Or a hypercube, a la Mitchio Kaku, for more than three different axes? Now you’re talking!

15

Posted by SentientMeat:

Not beyond possibility. Of course we could not render that into 2-D or even 3-D form, but we could illustrate it by a series of flat maps with the explanation that they are to read as making up a whole picture – I’ve think I’ve seen that done before in statistical analyse. On the other hand, we could perhaps represent a good conceptual scheme for classifying political ideologies without putting together any kind of “chart” or “map” with “axes”. We could, for instance, simply devise a table with the groupings and subgroupings in columns. Let’s keep our graphic options open. Before we figure out a scheme to present the data, with first have to find the data. That’s what I’m doing with thisthread.

16

Well, there are always folks like me, who are seen as too liberal by mainstream conservatives, but too conservative by mainstream liberals.

Our motto? “Make love AND war!”

17

I doubt that it makes sense to categorize anarchists as “left”. Or “right” for that matter. I mean, you can divide the color crayons in the Crayola box into reds and greens, and argue about where the blues and yellows best fit in the middleground in between and make note of the chartreuse and dill pickle tendencies of many of the yellows while noting the tangerine cast of others that are clearly more closely affiliated with the red side of the spectrum.

But black?

18

Shame is, black’s also the colour of facistic regimes. Mate of mine wearing his black german army shirt which is standard issue amongst angsty anarchist youth in the UK got shouted at in Hungary for being a Nazi.
He had also recently shaved his head and looks slsightly aryan but this is beside the point…

Not many I’ll grant you but a lot of aliens/illuminati/jews/masons do…fnord
damn socialist zionist crypto marxist pinko liberal communists conspirtators, damn em to hell…