'Conservative' and 'liberal'
are more than mere labels
By Geoffrey Nunberg | Los Angeles Times | April 17, 2005
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at Stanford University, is the author
of ``Going Nucular.''
There has never been an age as wary as ours of the tricks words can play, obscuring
distinctions and smoothing over the corrugations of the actual world. That wariness
is implicit in the way we describe words as labels.
People tend to reserve ``label'' for social classifications such as ``fascist,''
``depressive'' or ``delinquent,'' always with the implication that the word is
either misleading and reductive (the labels we describe as ``mere'') or, at best,
a convenience (the ones we describe as ``handy''). One way or the other, though,
calling a word a label leaves us free to reject it. People say, ``I don't believe
in labels,'' but nobody ever says that ``duck'' is a label for a kind of waterfowl
or that ``I don't believe in names.''
Yet as advertisers know, our mistrust of words doesn't inoculate us against them.
We may think of language as an arbitrary system of classification, sewing its
seams helter-skelter across the kapok of experience. But we can't help reifying
the categories language carves out.
It's hard to think of any words that justify the ``label'' label more than ``liberal''
and ``conservative.'' No one would deny their usefulness as approximate handles:
``Liberals have been critical of the Patriot Act.'' ``Conservatives are going
to bat for DeLay.'' But it often seems as if they serve more to pigeonhole than
to explain.
The categories are anything but eternal. It was only during Franklin Roosevelt's
second term that ``liberal'' and ``conservative'' emerged out of a welter of competing
terms to become the defining opposition of American politics. To Roosevelt, liberals
and conservatives represented ``two schools of political belief'' about how active
a role government should take in fixing problems ``beyond the power of men and
women to meet as individuals.''
A lot of people still see that as the core distinction. But the implications of
both terms are different from what they were in Roosevelt's day. In light of recent
headlines, it's quaint to recall that conservatism used to be associated with
isolationism and states' rights. Nowadays, both words imply positions on a range
of cultural issues that don't seem ``political'' in Roosevelt's sense of the term
- few people justify their views on abortion, evolution or gay marriage by appealing
to their philosophy of government.
More important still, we no longer think of liberals and conservatives merely
as adherents of different ``schools of political belief,'' in the way we might
talk about devotees of supply-side and demand-side as disciples of two economic
schools. Now the categories go much deeper - to lifestyle, values and even traits
of character.
The shift in perceptions began with the onset of the culture wars in the 1970s,
when the right began to depict liberals as elitists out of touch with ``mainstream
values.'' That was also when consumer preferences started standing in for ideological
characterizations. Liberals were tarred in a kind of guilt by brand association,
as Volvo-driving, brie-eating, Chardon- nay-sipping snobs.
Those stereotypes may not be accurate (as it happens, Republicans buy more brie
than Democrats), but they succeed in turning ``liberal'' into shorthand for a
self-indulgent yuppie attitude. Nowadays, the media almost never use phrases such
as ``working-class liberal'' - working-class Americans are disqualified from being
liberals not because of their political views but because they can't afford the
lifestyle.
By now, people talk about liberals and conservatives almost as if they were distinct
genders. ``You liberals!'' a talk-show host will say, in the tone of winking exasperation
that recalls ``You gals!''
Liberals have responded with their stereotypes of the right, as ill-dressed ignorant
yahoos from the boonies. ``Red state'' and ``blue state'' have been turned into
the names of market segments: A few months ago, Hardee's CEO defended the restaurants'
1,400-calorie Monster Thickburger as ``not a burger for tree-huggers.''
For some, the difference goes even deeper than that. In his recent bestseller
``Don't Think of an Elephant,'' Berkeley linguist George Lakoff argues that liberals
and conservatives are divided by two different models of the family, the ``strict
father'' family and the ``nurturant parent'' family. That basic distinction, he
says, shapes the differences in opinion on everything from tort reform to same-sex
marriage to school vouchers.
Lakoff is an astute observer, but in locating the roots of the liberal-conservative
distinction in people's basic conceptions of the family, he too is turning the
words into something much deeper than ``mere labels.'' As he tells it, ``liberal''
and ``conservative'' go clear to the bone.
Objectively speaking, that picture is hard to defend in light of the way people
think about ideological differences in other nations. You can identify groups
in British politics that correspond to lower-case liberals and conservatives in
Roosevelt's sense of the terms, even if the British don't use the words that way.
But the differences don't spill over to cultural issues.
And the neat dualisms of U.S. politics seem simply irrelevant to nations with
no history of a two-party system. For them it makes more sense to identify people
in terms of the old spectrum of left and right, which nobody takes as anything
more than a seating plan.
But reifications have a way of being self-fulfilling. Nowadays, we can't identify
ourselves as liberals or conservatives without making a social identification
in the bargain - we imply something about what we drive, whom we're willing to
date and whether we believe in spanking our children. Yet most of us are also
aware of just how contingent and historically determined all those connections
are.
That's a chronic modern dilemma. No one can live in a state of detachment from
language. The trick, as the philosopher Richard Rorty has said, is to strive for
ironic self-awareness - to talk about labels without prefacing the word with the
self-deluding ``mere.''