A few years back the conservative movement had succeeded in making the word “liberal” something that no one in the middle (which really is the vast majority of voters) would want to identify with, protraying “liberal” as synomous with being extreme with some success. Politician ran away from that label.
I put forth that the TP is doing that to the word “conservative” - creating an association between the word and the concept of extremist position … and in the process rehabilitating the “word” liberal as an acceptabe identification for many of the middle, not as extreme of a concept.
So, as someone just left of center, thank you Tea Party.
liberal used to mean something akin to libertarian. that is why you hear people nowadays distinguishing “classical liberals” from liberals. What today qualifies as a liberal is very UNliberal if by liberal you mean classical liberalism.
Now? Gallups numbers from Spring demonstrate signifcant drops in “conservative” ID for both economic and social matters and an increase in those willing to call themselves “liberal.”
Numbers of course from before the implosion of GOP approval rating this last month.
Which matters no more than the British saying lift and boot and lorry.
The meaning of the word liberal has been fairly clear in this country for a century. We can do a bit of arguing when progressive was supplanted by liberal, but I don’t think you can push that off later than FDR. I’d say it was earlier, since he appointed several progressive Republicans to his cabinet but their progressive days were far behind them.
It’s instructive to note that the use of liberal to mean classic liberal is restricted to enemies of modern liberalism. Some of us remember when Libertarian changed his name to Liberal, and every liberal on the Dope took that as the direct affront it was.
Language is what users do. If virtually the entire population of literate speakers have a common meaning for liberal, it doesn’t matter one whit what the word used to mean or how it is used as an insult. Using it in those ways marks your speech as deliberately confrontational. That may be a good thing - we’d stop functioning if confrontational speech were eliminated from the Dope. But you cannot ever pretend that your use is the “correct” one that everybody else should be using.
That bit DSeid quoted from The American Conservative is peculiar, to say the least, because a lack of new ideas and adaptation to changing circumstances is precisely what defines conservatism. The whole point of conservatism is to hold onto the tried-and-true traditional solutions to problems, and when conservatives do adopt new (to them) ideas, they’re the ideas pioneered by yesterday’s liberals.
However, color me in as a data point that says “yes.” 2012 was the first time I’d ever voted for any non-Republican candidate. At this point, I’m starting to take the attitude that if a “true conservative” says something, then it’s total bullshit.
Of course, I’m not really any more in favor of the Democrats at this point either.
It’s like the Obamacare debate. One side sells death panels and the collapse of civilization. The other side sells unicorns and rainbows with no downside. All I’m sure of is that I’m being lied to.
True. I lived through the 1980s and that writer appeared to have lived in a different America than the one I remember. I went to the full article to try to find what those new ideas were and - surprise, surprise - he doesn’t name any. Reagan’s America worked precisely because it was ostensibly bringing back the America of the past. It was never the future, nor could it ever possibly be.
Now, when that holding action to glorify the past has reached an obvious end, a direction for the future is crucial. As that writer says, the conservatives can’t provide one because they are still saying the same things as they did in the 80s. More crucially, they are repeating the demonization of Others that Reagan perfected and has become his true legacy. That worked until the Others became a majority and so is failing spectacularly in all places except where “Us” still commands the numbers.
Rod Dreher, you were right when you thought that “I couldn’t stand Reagan and the people who loved him” and you are right now when you have a similar dislike for the conservative warriors of today. It’s just that you were wrong for the time in between. The world hasn’t changed its facts. You were just wrong about them for 30 years. The only difference is that you are “a middle-aged, churchgoing white right-winger” who has never cared about anybody who wasn’t exactly like you. For a long while that allowed you to win. That’s no longer true. Well, boo hoo.
As long as conservatives continue to peddle the self-congratulatory notion that their ideas boosted them rather than their bigotry, they cannot change, even if their behavior has become too distasteful for some to swallow. Now they know how their policies tasted to liberals for the past 30 years.
Chronos,
We are talking about what people associate with the label though, the perception. Conservatives in the Reagan era were successful in presenting their ideas as a change from business as usual, which they managed to define as “tax and spend liberals” and “Big Gubbermint.” Reagan succeeded in fostering a “Big Tent” mindset.
Conservatives now are defined by arguing over who truely belongs, how to exclude those who each subgroup does not think deserves the label, obstructionism for its own sake, and hanging on to social concepts (I have a hard time using the word “values” in this context) that only a smallish number of mostly White rural conservative voters still hold.
I have no concern about this, I think it is great. They are working hard to restrict their membership to a very small tent and creating a climate in which many who might otherwise lean to conservative concepts are uncomfortable calling themselves that because of what the TP has now made the word mean. Which to some degree is where the label liberal has been for a couple of decades - if given a list of concepts to endorse many who would endorse ideas that would be “liberal” would shy from the label because of some image in their heads of what that word meant.
You say this like it’s a bad thing. Of course when a new idea comes out, liberals are all for it and are the ones who propose it: good, bad, or otherwise. Conservatives oppose it. We have a national debate. If it looks good it passes. As times tests the idea, if it is good it sticks around. If it is good, then everyone likes it, including conservatives.
But of course liberals proposed the idea to begin with. Using our English language, the word by its own definition would mean that a “conservative” wouldn’t propose a new idea. The old ideas are fine, and solutions to problems should be addressed with moderation.
It would be like saying that liberalism is bad because every failed new experiment was proposed by a liberal.
None of this shows anything except that both philosophies are necessary in a society. With conservatism nothing would change to meet new demands, and with liberalism everything would change and then re-change on a dime, and we would all be slapping our stomachs with our own dicks chasing the next fad. Both ideas are sound, even though imperfect.
I didn’t mean to imply that. Both, as you say, are necessary. Which is part of the reason the current crop of Republicans are so troubling: We need sane conservatives, and they’re not it.