Liberal = Left?

[James A. Landau]

In a message dated Tue, 19 Mar 2002  3:43:10 PM Eastern Standard Time, David Bergdahl <einstein at FROGNET.NET> writes:

> Remember how after the fall of the Berlin Wall, suddenly, the communists
> were seen as "conservative" and the free-marketeers "progressive," reversing
> historical norms?  At the time I was told that left was future-oriented and
> right past-oriented so the labels were fairly used.  I doubted it, arguing
> that "left" was used for "my favorite position" by journalists.

You pose an interesting chicken-and-egg question.  Assuming for the sake of argument that the media really does have a "left-wing bias", does that mean that most journalists subscribe to a range of political beliefs already known as "left-wing", or does that mean that said range of beliefs is called "left-wing" because journalists already believe in it?

We could propose a new thread: "Conservative = Right?".  Outside politics "conservative" means "in favor of the status quo."  After the Berlin Wall fell, Communists (with capital C, small-c communists form kibbutzim) should not have been called "conservative" because they did not advocate the non-Communist status-quo.  Instead they were "reactionaries" (proposing to return to an earlier situation) or "radicals" or perhaps "radical reactionaries."

In Canada there is the "Progressive Conservative Party."  To a Canadian this is a plausible and  meaningful label, but to someone from the USA it is an oxymoron.

I have a suspicion that in the USA the political term "conservative" changed its meaning with Goldwater's Presidential campaign in 1964.  Goldwater called himself, and was called, a "conservative", and even wrote a book entitled "Conscience of a Conservative", but with all due respect I think it is fair to say that he was NOT an advocate of the status-quo and should be classified as "somewhere to the right of center-right."

Following Goldwater's campaign, "conservative" came to mean "definitely to the right of center" and also came to be used as a derogatory term by, shall we say, a wide spectrum of the American center-left and left.

(My apologies for the preceeding two paragraphs, but this time I was unable to express my linguistic opinion without citing my political opinions.)

> If the <snips> quoted here are to be trusted,

You mean the portions between the <snips>

> it's not entirely
> clear that in the context center-left governments being replaced by liberal
> ones is an example of liberal = left.

On the contrary, the writer being quoted was, I think, saying that liberal = center-right, although she used "liberal" only in reference to economic policies.

> Even in England, liberals were
> free-traders in the 19th-century; thus a liberal replacing a social-democrat
> is a move to the right, since liberal parties in Europe are typically
> center-right.  A left to right continuum would be:
>
> Communists *    Socialists    *    Social-Democrats     *    Labor      *
> Liberals    *    Christian-Democrats    *    Monarchists
>
> Europeans typically say American parties are neither right nor left but
> variants on a center party,

Interesting that Ralph Nader says something similar.
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In a message dated Tue, 19 Mar 2002  3:28:45 PM Eastern Standard Time, Scott Sadowsky <lists at SPANISHTRANSLATOR.ORG> writes:

> FWIW, this meaning has existed in Spanish for some time now.

Your comments are quite interesting but not on-topic, unless you wish to claim that the usage of "liberal" I was quoting comes from the usage in Spanish.
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From: "Thom Harrison" <THarriso at MAIL.MACONSTATE.EDU>
To: <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
Sent: Tuesday, March 19, 2002 2:22 PM
Subject: Re: Liberal = Left?

> Somewhere--perhaps in one of Norman F. Cantor's books--I picked up the
> notion that "liberal" meant "in favor of a free-market economy" in the
early
> nineteenth century.  And I thought that was why Milton Friedman went about
> proclaiming himself a liberal for awhile, years ago.

Back when Jefferson was President and the Democratic Party was still called the "Republican Party", "liberal" meant "laissez-faire" and "conservative" (e.g. Alexander Hamilton) meant "in favor of a strong government because such was necessary for business to prosper."

However, in the 20th Century, in the First World at least, a strong government such as Hamilton preferred was a given, and business organizations such as Hamilton never dreamed of considered themselves hampered by government regulation such as again Hamilton never dreamed of.  Hence pro-business activists advocated laissez-faire.  Their political opponents claimed that government needed to protect the people against big business.  In the United States the labels "conservative" and "liberal" were attached to these two sides, but pro-business politicians are not always in favor of the status-quo and their opponents have a variety on opinions on the proper amount of government regulation.

Consider a "right-to-work" activist.  Is s/he a conservative?  No, opposes the status quo on labor unions.  A liberal?  Yes, supports stronger government regulation of labor unions.  Hence liberals are anti-union and conservatives (protecting the labor union status quo) are pro-union.  Duh??

To end with a partisan play on words, liberal = tax-and-spend = liberal with the taxpayers' money.

    - Jim Landau